Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks

listened politely and eyed the stein on the table. She had been told not to take a sip before four minutes had passed although no one had informed her of the reason for this. She half wondered if they weren’t merely having a bit of fun with the benighted American girl. Still, nobody else had taken a drink either. When in Londinium.
    The beer itself did not look like anything she had seen in the States. The American beer that came in bottles and cans was the color of vanilla soda pop, with the same effervescent bubbles but as far as she was concerned both a smell and a taste landing somewhere between stale sweat socks and pickled eggs. Her father drank Schlitz in a can on very humid summer days, waxing reminiscent the entire time over the ales he had encountered when he was in England. She supposed that’s what this was, with its coffee-like color and great layer of foam at the rim of the glass.
    Audrey Williams went on. “In that part of the country you find all manner of ancient things. Celtic henges, Iron Age burial mounds. Things old enough to make the Roman features downright recent by comparison. Farmers are always turning up some curious object. One giant reliquary, really. Now you may drink.”
    Audrey Williams blew a trough in the foam of her beer and raised her glass by the handle above the table and her excavators raised theirs as well. Catherine scrambled to catch up. She anticipated a toast of some sort but nobody spoke. They lowered their glasses and drank at once, knights-errant with their silent collective pact. Catherine blew her own little trough and drank as well.
    The flavor took a moment to settle but when it did startling hints and intimations surged up and over the simplified experience of a taste upon her tongue. The general, beery bitterness was of course present but beneath it lay a range of other things: mown barley brought from a field, fire smoke and bruised lavender and black soil turned to the air. A chemistry of the painstaking. She drank again.
    The young man in the cap caught her eye. He grinned across the table. “I think our tagalong has a taste for the local product.”
    “I think you’re right,” she said, and though she wasn’t sure this was yet the truth she did know she might eventually enjoy it. She said, “I like it in here,” and this she did mean. Despite its gauze of smoke the pub had a cheer she hadn’t anticipated, with clean glass in the windows and the burnish of oiled wood. In America by contrast the small workaday bars had an almost willful pall—dank, windowless ratholes with sticky floors and dirty bathrooms, venues devised far less for socializing than serious imbibing.
    Audrey Williams quaffed a good bit of her own pint in a steady draw, watching Catherine watch her from the corner of an eye. She said, “I forgot the American mania for temperance.”
    Catherine dipped her chin, as apologetically as she could. She didn’t know what else to do. Audrey Williams had eerie prescience. “We don’t have places like this over there. Not that I know of, anyway. I wish we did. Amazing what a difference an ocean makes.”
    Audrey Williams gave a tight little smile and drank again, this time not so deeply. She set her glass on the table and ran a finger idly around the rim.
    “Anyway. I decided a proper lady must be someone with a high tolerance for boredom and that was enough for me. I was a snake-and-polliwog chaser, a killer of butterflies and general bog dweller. I could birth a lamb or wring a cockbird’s neck with the best of them. My friends were all boys, spelunkers and treasure hunters, and we lived in the right place for such.” She shrugged a strong shoulder. “I suppose you become what you continue to be without even knowing it. Now it’s thirty-five years hence and here I am, still running with the boys. Still pulling things from the ground.”
    The ear in Catherine’s palm had become slick with heat and she set it on the table. “You don’t think