Dawn Wind Read Free Page A

possessions on hand-carts, or pressing forward simply with what they stood up in; a girl carrying two pigeons in a green willow basket; an old woman on a mule—maybe some rich merchant’s wife—with a face that showed staring grey under the stale rouge and eye-paint that had streaked with tears; a beggar with white blind eyes and bare feet. He saw them like the people of a dream, all with the same stunned masks for faces; and all around him, he heard one word repeated again and again: ‘It is the Saxons—the Saxons—God help us! The Saxons are coming …’
    Somehow he had not thought of that, of the Saxons on his heels.
    People were looking at him now, staring, their mouths foolishly open, asking questions. He heard his own voice answering, but was not sure what he answered. Something about the fighting on the Aquae Sulis road, something about Kyndylan’s death, and Conmail’s. They fell back from him a little, as though he were a ghost; as though he were the Breaking of Britain made visible to their eyes.
    The bridge timbers sounded hollow under his feet, and there was a little gap between him and the people ahead and the people who came after. Then he was on the further shore, and the paved road ran out before him, thrusting westward into the hills.



2
The Hill Farm
    N OT much more than a mile beyond the river, the road forked, the left hand branch running south-westward to Isca Silurium, the City of Legions, and the right striking off through the hill country to join at last with the great military road that ran like a frontier north and south along the wild marches of the Cymru. Once on that road, Owain knew that he would only have to keep walking long enough, to come to Viroconium at last. So leaving the pathetic string of refugees to go straggling off down the southern branch, he turned right, and lurched off north-westward, alone save for the hound padding behind him.
    After that he lost all count of time, so that he did not know whether it was one or two days later, or even three, when he awoke to the certainty that he had gone astray. It did not seem possible, not with the road leading on and on in front of him, but somehow it had happened.
    He stumbled to a halt, and stood looking about him like someone who has just walked out of a rolling smoke-cloud into clear air and found himself not where he expected to be. But he knew that the clear air would not last, that was the trouble. He felt a cold muzzle thrust into the palm of his sound hand; Dog pressed against him, looking up and whining, and he rubbed the hound’s rough head without thought, as he stood staring rather desperately about him. If he held on across country he was bound, somewhere, some time, to strike the frontier road that he was making for. But quite suddenly he knew that he was very nearly at the end of his strength.
    It was growing late, too, the sun low and glaring under brows of angry fire-fringed cloud, and the wind that swept towards him from the high hills of Cymru had the smell of storm in it as well as the smell of the mountains.
    He was on the point of turning down-valley to try to find some sheltered corner of the woods before the storm was upon him, when a very small thing happened. A grey wagtail flew across his path. Caught by the quick movement, his eyes followed it—and he found himself looking at a little irregular corn patch on the hillside above him. It was roughly walled with stones grubbed up from the red earth of the hillside when the land was cleared; the wagtail had alighted on the wall and was flirting its tail up and down.
    Where there was tilled land, the farm steading could not be far away. If he could find it, they would tell him how far he was astray; maybe if the woman was kind she would give him a drink of buttermilk—he was beyond wanting food, sick with the pain of his wound, but the thought of cool buttermilk tugged at him—and let him sleep in the barn until the coming storm was over. Perhaps from the