Celtic Fire. Alex Archer
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in and drivers allowing one another enough space for safety. It wouldn’t have been like that back home, she thought, letting a black Jaguar XJS slip into the lane ahead of her. It was only when the traffic had eased to a steady fifty-five pushing sixty that she realized how tightly she’d been gripping the wheel. Annja relaxed her grip and eased back on the accelerator, signaling to move into the slower traffic of the left-hand lane.
She glanced across to see that the car beside her was the same guy who had flashed her a smile in the queue at the tollbooth. He slowed down and gave her room to pull across in front of him. This time she smiled back.
The off ramp she needed came upon her sooner than she’d anticipated, and almost disappeared into the rearview mirror before she’d seen it. It took a bit of emergency maneuvering, but she managed to cut across the chevrons painted across the road and up onto the ramp before she ran out of room, half expecting the driver behind to hit his horn in protest. But she saw the smiler was still behind her, still smiling.
It was just her luck he was turning off the motorway, too.
Annja followed the brown signs with the outline of a Roman helmet, indicating a tourist attraction, as the road took her through the outskirts of the city of Newport with its run-down houses and seen-better-days factories, before steering the car out into the countryside proper. The short journey from the motorway to the outskirts of Caerleon only took ten minutes or so, but the change of pace with the speed limit dropping by thirty miles per hour made it feel like so much longer.
The approach offered a spectacular view of the town and castle. An old stone bridge too narrow for two cars to pass side by side spanned the River Usk before the road swept right to a wonderful holly-and-ivy country pub. The place had a thatched roof that made it look like something that had slipped through a crack in time from the 1800s. It stood invitingly on the river’s bank, promising refreshment and a nice warm hearth. Just the sight of it brought on a sudden thirst and gnawing hunger so Annja decided to take care of both, even though she was only a short distance from her hotel.
The gently swaying sign had the gold-painted words Miller’s Arms and a crest. A smaller blue plate on the wall explained that the building was originally a sixteenth century coaching inn and lots of the oldest features seemed to have survived into its new life. It took Annja a few minutes to get used to the landlord’s accent as he offered her his very proud spiel, but after a while she found her mind singing along with the rise and fall of his speech.
“You from America, are you, then, me love?” he asked, pulling a bottle of water from one of the fridges behind the bar. She’d never heard anyone call her “me love” before; “my love” was more northern, but the “me” seemed slightly tortured. She smiled as he offered ice by holding a scoop over a plastic ice bucket but she declined.
“For my sins,” she said, taking a sip of the water, realizing just how thirsty she really was. The label on the bottle was in Welsh and seemingly unpronounceable, which she thought was cute. “Hope you won’t hold it against me.”
“We get quite a few of your sort through here over the summer, people coming to take a look at the ruins and stuff. That why you’re here?”
“That’s me.” She laughed. “Just another tourist.”
He reached to a dispenser on the side of the bar that was stuffed full of slightly faded leaflets about the various attractions and places of interest in the area and plucked a few of them out for her. “Then you might find these useful,” he said.
“You on a commission?” she joked as she glanced through them.
“Well, the museum is free, and so is the amphitheater, so it’s not going to make me rich. There’s a charge to go and look around the old Roman baths, but hard as I’ve tried to convince them, no backhanders have come my way.” He smiled again, showing he was joking, even if it wasn’t a very good one. “There should be one of their leaflets over there.” He pointed to another, larger rack that was perched on a low windowsill on the other side of the room.
Annja picked through the stack of leaflets he’d selected for her.
One was for the local museum, which was at the top of her list of places to visit, another about the work of Cadw, the body that looked after ancient monuments in Wales, and the third was a street map of the town. It was a decent selection; she’d already decided to examine them a little more closely while she sat with her drink.
Annja glanced down the small laminated menu on the bar, thought about asking what was good, then remembered something Roux had said about British cuisine—anything was good as long as it was brown. The Brits seemed to have a penchant for brown food, but she didn’t fancy a pie or battered fish or anything heavy, so she took a chance on a green salad.
“There’s a few tables free down by the river if you’d like to sit outside,” the landlord said as he wrote her order on a tiny pad of paper and tore the top sheet off. “I’ll bring your food out to you.”
“Sounds good,” she said, paying for the food and another bottle of water, then heading out into the sunshine. A haphazard arrangement of picnic tables and benches were set out on the grassy bank. There were a dozen large umbrellas fixed through the centers to provide shelter from the sun. Half of them were occupied; some with couples who were oblivious to anything but each other, others with couples who had clearly been together so long that they had little left to say to each other and others with men intent on filling every inch of space with empty beer glasses.
A mother fussed at a wasp that was buzzing around a small child in a buggy beside her. Annja thought that there was something about the scene that was so English but then corrected herself, remembering that Wales was very definitely not England and saying it was tantamount to a hate crime in some minds.
The water in the river seemed low, with steep mud banks on either side. She was staring at some kind of mud-wallowing bird she couldn’t name when the landlord appeared with her lunch. “Low tide,” he said as if reading her mind. “At high tide the flow slows down and the water level rises as it’s being held back.”
She’d forgotten how close they were to the sea and yet she knew that the Romans had brought boats up here from somewhere beyond the horizon. It was funny how the journey across the country could disorientate you. The landlord had moved on before she could reply. She saw him work with one swift movement, pulling a glass towel from where it had been tucked into the top of his trousers and flicking the troublesome wasp away from the child, earning a grateful smile from the mother in return. He stacked the unwanted glasses from the crowded table into a precarious tower and headed inside with them.
Annja marveled at him, not for his dexterity, but the way he seemed to be aware of all these different things going on around him and just dealt with them with as little fuss as possible. It was a skill. But then to do a job like this you had to be a master of dealing with the mundane as well as the surprises that might turn up.
From where she was sitting she could see the narrow stone bridge that had brought her over the Usk. Cars came and went, though the sound of the small amount of traffic didn’t disturb the tranquility of the pub garden or drown out the burbling of the river. A bird swooped and touched the surface of the water, snatching something up in its beak and taking to the air again. There was something beautiful about the motion. There was no violence, no brutality in the action; it had more in common with plucking fruit from a tree.
The garden was a little slice of paradise.
Annja spread out the street map that the landlord had given her on the table in front of her. The lightest of breezes tugged at the corners so she weighted the farthest one from her down with the water bottle and the half-empty glass. Back in the car she had a number of printouts she’d pulled off the internet when she’d been prepping for the trip, but here, now, this was so much more real.
She saw the river marked on the map in blue and the bridge that crossed it. The Miller’s Arms was also clearly marked on the map. She traced a finger along the road that continued past the pub, picking out the museum, the amphitheater and the Priory Hotel, where she’d booked herself in for a few days.