The Midsummer Crown Read Free Page B

movement, stealthy as it was, had attracted the attention of the dog who came bounding across, snuffling excitedly at the other side of the brake. I held my breath, certain of discovery, and found that the hand holding my cudgel was slimy with sweat.
    â€˜Heel!’ his master snapped. And then again, more viciously, ‘ Heel! ’
    I was sure the dog could smell me by the way he whined and scrabbled at the earth, but to my astonishment, he backed away and lay down, whimpering. The man kicked him into silence. This was no friendly master and dog relationship, just fear on one side and brute force on the other. In some dim corner of his brain, the dog knew that I was there, just a few feet from them, but in the long run his mother-wit was only as great as his master’s, and I had no very high opinion of the homesteader’s.
    After more agonizing seconds had ticked by, my pursuer – for I felt sure he was that – suddenly swung on his heel and grunted, ‘Back!’ He continued, talking more to himself than the dog, ‘I’m damned if I’m going any further. He’s gone. I said it was a fool’s errand at the start. Women! They get these crotchets in their stupid heads. That oaf was no robber.’ He stamped one foot, obviously in a rage. ‘Got a fucking blister on my big toe now, God damn her!’
    He stomped out of the clearing, returning the way he had come. I stayed where I was until all sounds of his departure had ceased and blessed silence once more enfolded me, and until cramp in both my legs forced me to my feet. I extricated myself from my hiding place, not without some difficulty and further damage to my clothes, and resumed my journey with more speed than dignity. Just before sundown, I found the alehouse, clean and welcoming, and breathed a sigh of relief.

TWO
    There are people who maintain that the thirty-three Daughters of Albion were the children of that scourge of the Christian Church, the Emperor Diocletian. But that’s arrant nonsense, of course. The story is obviously set in the dawn of history, long, long before the rise of the Roman Empire. And surely even legends must have their logic. So I favour the version that the sisters were the offspring of some ancient Grecian king who, when his daughters rose as one woman and slaughtered their husbands, was so appalled by the deed that he was unable to tolerate their presence at his court. But neither could he bring himself to kill his own flesh and blood. Instead, he provisioned a ship with six months’ supply of food and water and set the women afloat upon the open sea, at the mercy of wind and tide.
    When half a year had passed and the provisions were about to run out, the ship fetched up on the shores of an island rising out of the mists on the edge of the world; an island without a name. Albia, the eldest of the thirty-three sisters therefore decreed that it should be called after her: Albion. The island was peopled only by demons, horned and tailed, with whom the sisters mated to produce a race of giants, and these giants ruled Albion for the next seven hundred years. (The great gorge, just outside Bristol, is said to have been hewn from the rock by two of the giants, two brothers, Vincent and Goram, and you can still see the latter’s chair carved into the rock face, rising sheer from the bed of the River Avon to the heights above.)
    But then came Brutus – son of Silvius, grandson of Ascanius, great-grandson of Aeneas – and his band of Trojans, landing, so it is said, at Totnes in south Devon. He renamed the island Britain and finally, after many hard-fought battles, overcame the giants, carrying their leaders, Gog and Magog, in chains to the Trojans’ new settlement on the banks of the River Thames. There the pair were forced to serve as doorkeepers until they were too old to be of any further use, when they were turned, by magic, into two painted effigies of themselves, and