Read Online Gunner Kelly by Anthony Price - Free Book Online Page B

perhaps?”
    “I’m sorry—it’s been covered up again,” the girl apologised. “To protect it from the frost during the winter.”
    “Ah yes!” He transferred the smile to her. “And I’m afraid our Fighting Man isn’t on view, either.” She shook her head sadly. “They’ve taken him away for detailed study—they didn’t want to risk leaving him, once they’d found him. Did your friend in London tell you about him?”
    “Professor Handforth-Jones? Yes … that is, he spoke of a warrior. I did not quite understand … but a warrior, yes.”
    “We call him our Fighting Man.” She pointed to a larger area of excavation. “He was found there, in what may have been a barn. They think he was a Saxon, judging by his equipment.”
    “A burial?” He nodded. “It was the custom sometimes, was it not… of the Saxon invaders … to bury dead persons in such ruins?” That was what Handforth-Jones had said, anyway.
    “No.” She frowned for an instant. “I mean, it may have been their custom—I’m not a historian. But, what I mean is, they don’t think he was buried—deliberately buried.”
    “It was pure luck, really,” said Audley. “They were digging one of their trial trenches, and they hit the remains of this chap straight away, under the fallen debris of the roof—and just the way he’d fallen, too—sword in hand— literally sword in hand.” He paused for a moment, staring not at Benedikt, but across the field towards the area of excavation which the girl had indicated. “Or … what remained of the sword and the hand, anyway … and everything else he died with, so they think— helmet of some sort, and a belt with a dagger, and maybe some sort of crude cuirass even … Right, Becky?”
    The girl nodded. “They’re not sure about that. They said it was much too early to be certain. But they did get very excited about him, and they were tremendously careful about lifting him out—in the end they undercut him, and raised him in one piece … What they think—well, they don’t go as far as saying that they think it, but it’s one theory—is that the barn caught fire, and fell on him … when the villa was sacked. Because they found evidence of fire, both there and in another trench, over on the other side.” She pointed. “And the way they thought it might have happened is that he was killed in the barn here , but in all the confusion no one saw that—or no one lived to tell the tale, anyway … And the barn caught fire, and fell down, but maybe it was empty, so no one picked over the ruins, like they would have done with the main buildings—or, it could have been at night that the villa was sacked … But they didn’t see what happened to him, one way or another, anyway. He just disappeared.”
    “ ‘Missing, presumed killed in action’,” murmured Audley. “Or maybe even ‘AWOL’, as we used to record more uncharitably in some cases.”
    “It’s how he was when they found him, you see,” explained the girl. “He had his arms flung out wide, with all his equipment and his sword still in his hand, like David says. And what Dr Johns says is that if his own side had buried him they might have left his weapons with him, but they’d have laid him out properly at the very least. But if his side had lost, then the other side would have stripped him—they wouldn’t have let perfectly good weapons go to waste.”
    Benedikt looked around him. The gently sloping meadow betrayed no tell-tale signs of what lay beneath it, except where the trial excavations had been dug. It wasjust a field, with trees on three sides of it, the roofs of Duntisbury Royal peeping through them on one side, bounded on the fourth by the churchyard wall and the tree-shaded church itself. And it looked as though it had been just a field since the beginning of time.
    You must rebuild inyour imagination , was what Papa always said about sites such as this. But it required an immense effort of will to raise up