Dawn Wind Read Free

find them again.
    He propped himself up painfully on his sound arm, his wound stabbing wildly as he moved, and remained a while with hanging head, while the hound sat back on his brindled haunches, his pink frilled tongue drooling from his open jaws, and watched him.
    Presently, when the world had steadied a little, he dragged himself to his knees and then to his feet, and staggered down to the edge of the stream. And there, lying full length among the alder roots, he drank again, lapping like the hound, for his right arm was numb from the shoulder down and so he could not make a drinking cup from his joined hands. He splashed the water into his face, and the cold of it cleared his head a little; and afterwards, sitting back on his heels, he pulled some woollen threads from the skirt of his under-tunic, and contrived with hand and teeth to thread his father’s ring on to them and knot them round his neck. It would be safer so, thrust inside the breast of his tunic, than on his finger where it was so much too loose.
    Then getting unsteadily to his feet once more, he stood looking about him and sniffing, to get some idea of his direction. Viroconium lay to the north, several days’ march beyond Glevum; and the old road from Aquae Sulis to Glevum must run somewhere beyond those low wooded hills. But it would be best to keep clear of all roads this side of the Sabrina.
    He tried to whistle to Dog, who was snuffing among the alder roots, and could not make the sound break through his lips; but the hound looked up as he moved, and came bounding to join him, and they scrambled up the bank and struck out northward together.
    Afterwards, Owain was never very clear as to the details of that long northward trail. Sometimes his thinking was quite clear, and he knew what had happened and where he was going and why; but at others, more and more often as the days went by, his head seemed full of a fiery fog that came in some way from the throbbing of his wounded arm; and nothing seemed real, and he stumbled along in a dream without any clear idea in his head save that he was going north. He could smell the north as a hound scents game. They were making their way through a world that seemed empty of all human life, but that might be only because he was instinctively keeping clear of all the places where men might be. Once, Dog caught a badger cub, and he managed to get some of it away from him before it was all eaten. Once, in some open moorland, they came on a dead lamb part eaten by ravens, and the hound gorged his fill, but the raw stinking flesh made Owain’s stomach rise, and he could eat little of it. They crossed the Glevum road in the dark of the fourth night, and struck down into the fringe of the western marshes, and after that it was a little easier to get food, for the later wild fowl were still nesting, and there were eggs to be found without much trouble. Dog foraged for himself.
    After the emptiness of the woods and marshes it was strange to come at last to Glevum and find it alive and thrumming like an overturned bee-skep. It was one of those times when his head was full of the fiery fog, and everything was shifting and unreal; but something in him remembered where to find the Sabrina crossing, and he turned aside from the Southern Gate and drifted down on to the strand between the city walls and the river. The Water Gate was open, and people were heading in a steady trickle along the causeway over the mudflats, and away by the bridge of boats that spanned the river. Owain wandered into their midst because he, too, wanted the bridge, holding with his sound hand to Dog’s collar, because he knew that if he and the great hound were separated, there would be no more hope in this world or the next for either of them.
    He found himself one of the pathetic trickle of fugitives that he dimly realized was the life-blood of Glevum draining away. Tradesmen with their tools on their backs, whole families pushing their most treasured