Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [12]
“But first we must camp,” she reminded him. “The children cannot go on.”
“Soon,” he replied, but he could see that she was right. Vata no longer even opened her eyes as she walked. The little boy had fallen three times that morning.
Now Hwll picked him up and put him on his shoulders.
“Soon,” he promised once again.
Still with their faces west towards the setting sun, the little family turned inland, and Hwll began to look for a suitable place.
The next day he discovered the lake.
It was a small, low hill about five miles inland that first attracted his attention. It looked like a place from which he could spy out the land and where they could camp at least for the night. When he reached the place, however, he was surprised and delighted to find that hidden below it and in his path lay a shallow lake about half a mile across. At its eastern end, a small outlet carried its waters away towards the sea. Tracking round the lake he found that it was fed from the north and the west by two small rivers. On its northern side was a flat, empty marsh.
The water, sheltered by the hill, was very still; there was a sweet smell of fern, mud and water reed. Over the surface of the lake, a heron rose and seagulls cried. Protected from the wind it was warm. It did not take him long to make a small raft and cross the little stretch of water.
From the top of the hill he looked inland; all the way to the horizon now, he could see low wooded ridges succeeding each other. He turned to Akun and pointed.
“That is the way that we must go.”
There were two months of summer left. This was clearly the place to rest and recoup their strength.
“We shall stay here for ten days,” he said. “Then we go inland.” And with a sigh of relief, Akun and the two children made their way down the hill to the shallow water’s edge.
The lake turned out to be a magical place, and Hwll was delighted to find that it abounded in game. The hill embraced the water like a protective arm, and animals that he had never seen before paraded themselves there: swans, a pair of herons, even a flock of pelicans waded by the water’s edge. On the open ground beyond the marsh, the soil was peaty and covered with heather, and a troupe of wild horses galloped across it one morning before vanishing towards the low wooded ridges to the north. In the rivers he found trout and salmon; one day he even crossed the Solent on a raft and reached the rock pools by the sea, returning with crabs and mussels which they cooked over the fire that night.
The children were beginning to recover their strength. Hwll smiled one morning to see Vata being chased by her little brother along the shallow waters by the lake’s edge.
“We could stay here for the winter,” Akun said. “There is plenty of food.” It was true; they could build their winter quarters in the shelter of the hill. But he shook his head.
“We must go on,” he said. “We must find high ground.”
Nothing would shake his fear of the terrible force of the sea.
“You will kill us,” said Akun angrily. But she prepared to move on.
The end of Hwll’s remarkable journey was in fact closer than he thought. But it was not to be accomplished alone.
Before leaving the lake, Hwll had decided to reconnoitre the land immediately to the north, and so one morning he began to work his way up the river, towards the first of the low ridges he had seen from the hill. The banks were lightly wooded and the river, which was only thirty feet across, glided by at a gentle pace. River fowl ducked in and out of the rushes; long green river weeds waved their tendrils in the stream and he could see the large brown fish that paused silently just beneath