Gerald Seymour - Rat Run

It no longer rained and the wind had slackened.

Frederick Gaunt knelt in the pit and the high lights glistened the mud and he scraped with his trowel at the edge of the small patch of uncovered mosaic. He did not know the man beside him, had not dug with him before. In a few minutes they would break for tea from an urn and that would be welcome for warmth and would be respite from the monologue in his ear

… The man was young, lean-faced and lean-bodied, and scraped and talked with matching intensity.

'I suppose he knew it was coming – yes, he'd have realized that his time was up. Must have wounded him to think that civilization, all of the comforts of a building like this, was going to be tossed over, and that the day of the hordes – Goths, Visigoths, Picts, you name them – had come, and the start of a Dark Age with them. He wouldn't have known it, but I think it's a law of history that new forces will inevitably overwhelm an old order.'

The site was in Wiltshire, south of Keysley Down and to the west of Berwick St Leonard. It was approached by a rutted farm track, and was lit – at fifteen minutes to midnight – by a row of generator-powered arc-lights. Negotiations with the landowner had given the diggers a clear seven days and seven nights to work on the villa, and after that the excavated ground would be covered with thick plastic sheeting, which would in turn be covered with the moved soil and sods of the field. It was the third night

… Until that afternoon, before his meeting and his butchery at VBX, Gaunt had not thought he had the vaguest chance of joining these enthusiasts. They were mostly students, recruited from a south-coast university, but he had been allocated to the team leader, who talked.

'Inevitable that it'll all come crashing down once the decadence sets in. Our chap, who stood here in his sandals, he'd become too comfortable – had too much wealth and too much privilege – and he'd lost the hardness to fight. That's it, isn't it? His civilization, morally corrupt, could not compete with the simple brutality of the barbarian – so he ran and left his home to sixteen hundred years of ruin and pillage, then the stones of the walls were taken, soil was washed by the rain over what was left, then it was buried and eventually we pitched up. Comfort and decadence, they're killers for any society confronted by an enemy that's hungry, ruthless.'

At the extremity of the mosaic there were stone slabs and then the first signs of the praefurnium, the stoke nole, and in the mud that he lifted on his trowel Gaunt found a small piece of compressed black material. With near reverence he placed it in the bucket by his elbow. When they took tea he would show it to the site surveyor: a piece of charcoal that could be radio-carbon-dated, that could tell them when, to the year, a fire had been lit before the arrival of the forces of that day's axis of evil. He found the man's thesis not irritating but marginally amusing.

'What I believe frightening is that corruption is at our gates now and tonight… Trust me, I'm a general practitioner – know what I mean? You should see what crosses my surgery five days a week, nine hours a day… I promise you, I'm not a doom merchant, but we're busy losing our way. Drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, child abuse and paedophilia, debt entrapment, obesity, alcoholism, benefit dependency, ignorance and illiteracy, and every symptom of yobbery.

I see it, and I practise in a little backwater, in Devizes.

It's the drugs culture that's the worst – and so few seem to care… What seems to me to be so wretchedly stupid is that we are preaching for our failing lifestyle to be adopted by Islamic states. Such conceit.'

He stiffened. The trowel slipped from his hand.

Gaunt, working at the dig site with the voices – and sometimes the laughter – of young people around him, had felt rare tranquillity. He no longer scraped for charcoal pieces or for bone scraps that had been thrown away, centuries before, on to the cut wood and open-cast coal in the praefurnium… He had believed he had escaped, and had not. What now was relevant?

As if a nerve in him was pinched, he saw himself as an old warrior too tired for combat when the barbarians swarmed at the gates. A man who spoke of a society, decadent and doomed, in the corridors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross, would – Gaunt thought – be taken to the stake and burned alive as a heretic. Did a doctor from Devizes tell a truth that none dared name? It was a mandatory-death-sentence offence, in the offices of VBX, to suggest that victory was not assured.

'I hope you don't mind me prattling on… Do you think our time's up, like this chap's was? I wonder about it. Is all this we hear of the new fundamentalist enemy just modern-speak for barbarians at the gates?

Are we now as decadent as our chap, standing here for the last time? Quite a rum thought: in sixteen hundred years, folk will be scratching at the foundations of my home and getting all excited when they've found the sewer pipe and can tell what I ate, and have a chuckle and say, "Yes, he'd have known his time was up." Sorry… sorry, talking too much, my wife says I always do… What's this?'

Bare fingers wiped mud smears off a length of bone, and the arc-lights pierced sufficiently into the hole to show the minute working of the decoration at the head of what had been a hairpin – consigned to the fire rather than be an ornament in the tresses of a barbarian's woman. Gaunt, with all the warmth he could muster, congratulated the doctor on his significant find. They were called for tea. He levered himself out of the pit and carried his bucket to the tent where the urn was and sandwiches. He had thought, in a Wiltshire field, he would find sanctuary, but his mind was trapped by thoughts of Polly, and the man she had believed in, and the bright but deep eyes in the photograph of an enemy… and the casualties of war, then and now.

It was a supreme effort to drag himself to his feet. He was so nearly there, so close to his Grail. Oskar Netzer pulled himself up, off his stomach, off his knees and elbows, and the gate rocked on his weight and his fingers clutched at the catch holding it shut. Weakness consumed him, but the pain was long gone. When the gate swung open, a little more of his feeble strength left him and he lost his hold on the ironwork. He fell forward on to the cemetery path. He staggered over the loose gravel towards the stone and his wife's grave. He saw nothing ahead of him in the blackness but knew where he must go… and he believed he had made expiation for the wrong done by his uncle.

After a few short steps, he collapsed on to the sharp stones – but he hoped to reach her resting-place and to sleep there and be with her, to tell her of his ducks, and of the men who had intruded on his paradise, and that he had loosed the evil's hold on him… He crawled off the path and over sodden grass, reached out and found the glass jar, the stems of flowers that had been stripped by the wind.

He clasped the stone and did not know what he had achieved – did not know who would bury him – and sleep took him.

A clock chimed. A car, with lights flashing, and with an escort in front and behind, brought Timo Rahman to the prison in the north of Hamburg at Fuhlsbuttel.

He was led from it to a desk where the details of his life, and the charges he faced, would be processed.

The gaol's landings awoke. Word had passed. Spoons beat against metal mugs. Plates rattled against doors.

His name was shouted and echoed down the block's iron staircases. He was ordered to strip for medical inspection.

He was in hurtful ignorance of the reason for the collapse of his rule, and of who was responsible.

'I can't go in any further.'

'It's bloody dangerous out there, Dad.'