Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [10]
Akun stared at him angrily. He knew that she was near revolt. Vata’s eyes were sunken; but the little boy disturbed him more: he was past fatigue; there was a strange apartness about him.
“He is leaving us,” Akun said simply.
He knew it was true. The little fellow’s spirit had almost gone; if they did not recover it soon, he would die. Hwll had seen such things before.
Akun held both children close. They clung to her silently, hardly knowing what was happening to them, taking comfort from their mother’s warmth and the rancid but familiar smell of the pelts she wore. He was sorry for them, but there could be no turning back.
“We go on,” he said. He would not give up now.
The journey seemed endless, and at no point did they see anything to the east except the churning waters. But ten days later, one change was evident which gave him cause for new hope. They had left the tundra.
They encountered marshes, and large woods. Trees appeared that they had never seen before: elm, alder, ash and oak, birch and even pine. They investigated each one in turn. The pine in particular they smelt with interest, and felt the sticky gum that oozed from its soft bark. There were huge luxuriant rushes by the water, and lush green grass in enormous tufts. Signs of game appeared; one morning when he was trapping a fish in a stream, the children came to his side and silently led him a hundred paces upstream. There, ahead of him, were two long brown animals with silky fur playing on the riverbank in the sunlight. They had not seen beavers before and for the first time in months, the travellers smiled with pleasure. That same night, however, they heard another new sound – the eerie, chilling cry of wolves in the woods – and they huddled close together in fear.
For the curious paradox, which Hwll had no means of understanding, was that the very flood which cut him off from the lands to the south was part of a process which was providing him with exactly the warmth that he sought, there, where he already was. As the ice cap melted in the distant north, and the seas rose, the temperature of Britain had risen too, and would continue to do so for another four thousand years. The tundra region from which Hwll had come was itself a belt that was moving north as the ice retreated; and as the generations passed, three hundred miles to the south it was already becoming appreciably warmer. Hwll was entering these warm lands now, without needing to cross the eastern forest at all. They were the warm southern lands of the new island of Britain.
Despite this fact, Hwll was not yet ready to abandon his quest for the fabled lands to the south; there, he still believed, lay safety.
The following day, he made a mistake. After they had walked all morning he found his way south barred by a large stretch of water, on the other side of which he could see land. Obsessed as he was with the lands to the south, he said:
“It’s the southern sea.”
But Akun shook her head.
“I think it’s a river,” she replied. And so it proved to be. For they had come upon the estuary of the river Thames.
They followed the river inland for two days and crossed it easily by making a small raft. Then once again, Hwll headed his little party south east.
“If there is a way across,” he said, “I think it will be here.”
If the land joining Dover to France had not already been washed away, he would have been correct, and six days later he reached the high, chalky cliffs of the south eastern tip of the island.
This time they did see what they had been looking for: jutting over the horizon was the clear outline of the tall, grey shoreline of the European mainland. It was there: but it was unattainable. Hwll and Akun stared across the English Channel and said nothing. At their feet, the chalk cliffs descended in a sheer drop for two hundred feet, and at their base the angry waters of the channel buffeted the coast.
“This time I am sure . . .” he began.
Akun nodded. The distant shores were the path to the warm