Before they could agree their next move, there came a whoop from a ledge behind them. A youth dressed in ragged trousers, bare chest striped with ash, dropped down on Barton and tumbled him into the shallow water with a yell. A second smaller boy, who looked about twelve, ran at Dora but shied at the last moment. He jabbed a homemade spear at her but without making contact.
‘Yah!’ he said, but without the complete conviction of his brother.
‘Leave our lands, foreign invaders!’ growled the older boy. His voice was in that uncertain stage of the newly broken.
‘Hartley!’ said Barton in exasperation, heaving him off and emerging soaked from his unplanned dip.
‘I’m not Hartley. I am Chief Kubla Khan, and this is my warrior, Xanadu.’
Xanadu bared his teeth at Dora, who refrained– with difficulty– from smiling.
‘Let me guess: this is your cavern measureless to man?’ asked Barton. He turned to Dora. ‘It’s taken from a wonderful fragment written by their father, sadly not yet published.’
‘Kubla Khan?’ she wondered. ‘What an odd subject for a poem.’
‘Not at all!In Xanadu did Kubla Khan…’ As Barton began declaiming, Hartley and Derwent joined in. The three boys– for Barton was evidently reverting to his boyish self– formed a little circle and did an impromptu ‘Indian scout’ dance in time to the verse.
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Dora laughed and applauded. ‘Excellent!’
Barton grinned. ‘We are somewhat mixing up our exotic imagery, blending the native inhabitants of America with the Mongolian setting of Mr Coleridge’s poem.’
Hartley lifted his chin defiantly. ‘Father says our imagination fuses what we read and what we see into a unity. This place can be anywhere we wish.’
Barton bowed. ‘I stand corrected. You have found a perfect home for Kubla Khan. In the spirit of which, I offer you a visiting Abyssinian maid, who has a few questions for you.’
Dora raised a brow.
‘It was either that or a woman wailing for her demon lover,’ Barton murmured in an undertone.
‘From the same poem?’
He nodded.
This was the boys’ stage and their make-believe. Dora bowed low in oriental style.
‘O most magnificent Kubla Khan, and most fearsome Xanadu, slayer of his majesty’s enemies, I beg leave to share the hospitality of your campfire.’
‘Oh, she’s good!’ whispered Derwent to his brother, who nudged him to remember his role.
‘Speak, fair damsel, speak and be welcome,’ declared Hartley.
Dora could see Barton was shivering. ‘Might we take our parley to the greensward?’ she suggested, using her hands to gesture as she might on the boards. ‘Brother Sun is riding high in the sky and sharing his bounty of warmth and light with the earth beneath.’
‘We shall share,’ agreed Hartley, then displayed that he wasn’t fully Kubla-ed by offering a hand to steady her as they took the stepping stones back to the outside of the mine.
The two boys led them along the slope in the direction of Grasmere before dropping down into a copse where they had established their camp. Last year’s beech nuts crunched underfoot on a bed of copper leaves. On the very edge of the trees where Rydal Water lapped at the shore, Hartley stopped and gestured for them to take their seats on the logs the boys had dragged either side of their campfire.
Now for her masterstroke. Dora produced the bag of buns. It was as well she had been carrying them because she didn’t think they would’ve survived a dip in the cave pool.
‘I bring an offering as a token of friendship from my people.’ She placed them on a flat stone in the middle.
