Alex Archer - Celtic Fire

Anything was possible, of course, but she was experienced enough to put flights of fantasy out of her head. One thing Annja Creed prided herself on was that she dealt in facts. What the rest of the world didn’t know was that there were some facts that it was best they never learned.

“Orange juice?” the flight attendant asked, disturbing her thoughts.

Annja smiled and nodded, then happily let her imagination run away with her while she waited for the captain to turn on the fasten seat belts sign, indicating their descent had begun. She knew that she could spend a month over here and not see a fraction of the places she wanted to visit; the British Isles were a wealth of ruins and history waiting to be explored, of cultures to be rediscovered and ingenuity unparalleled. Her first stop on the itinerary was a place in Wales that had been getting some press on the archaeology discussion boards on the internet.

She’d first heard about the Roman ruins in the small town of Caerleon many years before, but had never had the opportunity to visit. This time she was determined to put that right. Then it was only maybe twenty or thirty miles to Caerphilly, where a wonderfully preserved medieval castle still watched over the town and a number of faithfully re-created siege engines were on display and demonstrated regularly for the benefit of tourists.

What was doubly interesting about Caerleon, though, was that it was also one of the possible sites of Camelot, the fabled court of King Arthur, according to the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. There was also a reference to Arthur fighting a battle against the Romans in the “City of the Legion” according to Nennius in his Historia Brittonum; this could easily have been Caerleon, home of the Second Augustan legion. This was why she loved archaeology; it was more than just digging things out of the ground. It was all about sifting through the clues buried in early writings and using them to locate important lost sites. It was more than just history. It was akin to lore and legend in the absolute nerdiest sense.

Annja hadn’t even realized her breakfast had been placed in front of her as she had been so caught up in her thoughts. She wouldn’t reach the small Welsh town until tomorrow, but she had given herself a few days to stay. She wanted to make sure she saw everything there was to see in case the chance to return didn’t come around again.

She picked at the food without any real appetite and drained the orange juice. There would be plenty of time to grab something else to eat later; she’d promised herself a traditional English breakfast of sausage, bacon, eggs, potatoes, beans and fried tomatoes. She knew a great little greasy spoon just around the corner from the station. The locals called the specialty “the heart attack on a plate,” but it was nothing compared to some of the stuff they served back home.

She looked through her papers one last time before packing them away for landing, studying the photographs and maps of the area around Caerleon. She skipped past the pages on Caerphilly, slipping those back into her folder. There were another half a dozen folios like this in her case—the other places she planned on visiting on her trip—but they could wait.

When the plane finally touched down she was ready for the shuffle-race to the exit with everyone standing up and crowding the aisles long before the cabin doors were open.

By the time she’d collected her luggage from the baggage carousel, and gotten through customs and passport control, the clouds had begun to break up. It wasn’t exactly glorious out, but it was a good morning and it looked like it was going to be a better day, which meant the drive into Wales should be easy, as long as tiredness didn’t mean sleeping in a lay-by somewhere near the River Severn.

Annja claimed a hire car from the desk, then went on an expedition to find it. She scoured parking bays that went on forever in a recursive loop of identical hire cars until a click of the key fob resulted in a flicker of lights identifying her ride.

She sat inside the car for a few minutes, trying to familiarize herself with the right-hand-drive position before pulling away. She repeated, “They drive on the left” like a holy mantra as if she really needed any reminding from the minute she hit the open road of the M25.

It felt good to be driving once she got to the motorway rather than crawling through the airport’s one-way system. She rolled one shoulder after the other to free it from the kinks that still lay in her muscles from the flight.

The sun was behind her and the steady flow of traffic away from London moved at an even pace with vehicles peeling off and others joining at every junction.

In an ideal world she would have made the journey a little more slowly, but her speed was dictated by the cars and lorries around her. Annja was caught in a stream where each vehicle moved at the same speed as the one in front so she cranked the radio up, choosing volume over taste, and wound the window down. It was summer, after all.

Eventually the discomfort of sitting still for so long after the flight left her with no choice but to pull off at a motorway services area and go in search of coffee and the chance to stretch her legs. The decor was bad, the coffee was worse. She wound up getting back in the car and heading toward the motorway less than fifteen minutes after she’d pulled into the rest stop. The next signpost promised that Cardiff was less than fifty miles away. The turnoff for Caerleon would come some time before that.

Chapter 4

An engine fired up beside her, gunned quickly into life and was followed by the crunch of tires on gravel as the car pulled away. Awena knew that it was safe to move at last. She’d lain still and silent, listening to the wail of the museum alarm as it carried on into the night air, and then drifted off after it fell silent, one hand on the stone artifact she had liberated from the glass case. She liked to think that she’d saved it from being transferred to some dusty old vault somewhere where it would have been hidden away until doomsday, completely forgotten about. That would have been a bigger crime than anything she’d done.

She hadn’t realized what she’d been looking at the first time she’d laid eyes on the exhibit—why would she have?—but there was something about it that had brought her back to it again and again, until she was finally convinced that it was mislabeled. The card had described it as a quern—a hand-grinding stone for grain—but it clearly wasn’t; it was too large and too heavy to be one of those. Once upon a time she might have pointed the mistake out to one of the staff to let them know how clever she was and basically how stupid they were for screwing it up. She’d grown up a lot since the days wasted in museums with her easily embarrassed twin, Geraint, who frequently turned a darker shade of red than their flame-red hair while he tried to pretend he had no idea who she was. It never worked. Now, thankfully, she was comfortable with the idea that she was the sharpest person in any given room she walked into. It wasn’t arrogance; it was just a fact. It didn’t matter who else was there, Awena was ferociously intelligent.

Once the sounds of the car had faded into the distance she eased herself up a little to scope out the lane. A glance through the rear window revealed a blanket of mist across the rugby field, shrouding it with a soft white in the early-morning sun. There was no sign of anyone else around. She’d reached the point of no return. If she waited too much longer to make her move, traffic to the heritage site would increase and it’d be difficult to slip out of the car to stretch the kinks out before getting back into the driver’s seat without anyone noticing.