Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [419]
They did not bother him.
But still he had not solved his problem: which way should he go? He had been watching carefully but there had been no sign.
The sun, shining through the thickening veils of brownish cloud, was filling the huge landscape with a threatening orange glow. The atmosphere was growing close and heavy, building up the trembling, almost tangible tension that presages the great electric release of a thunderstorm.
In front of him, as far as the eye could see, lay the bare rolling ridges of Salisbury Plain. The scene was varied: from where he stood, into the middle distance, cleared ground was interspersed with fields of growing corn. Further away, however, there was no corn, only a bare grey-green expanse like a sea, on which he could see the myriad tiny white dots of the distant sheep.
The sky itself seemed to be growing closer to the land, as though it was about to envelop it, take the whole rolling plateau in vast unseen hands and shake it to and fro.
He stood in front of the ancient dune, a pathetic, diminutive figure, homeless, orphaned, friendless, with two shillings and the gold coin to his name in the whole world. His long thin fingers grasped a stick he had broken from a tree on the way up to the high ground; his thin face with its small, narrow-set eyes, stared over the huge, threatening landscape ahead. He might indeed have been a wandering figure from an earlier age, when men still hunted for their food; and still he had no idea where to go.
And then he grinned.
The storm that was about to break did not bother him. The weather was not too cold. If he got wet, his clothes would dry on him. Empty and uninviting though the landscape looked, he knew that, if one searched carefully, there were always ways to survive. There were shelters built for sheep; there were farms, villages, hamlets where a boy could usually scrounge a meal. Better yet, there were religious houses – monasteries, priories, small granges – where the monks, for all the jokes people made about their easy life, never refused food and shelter to a stranger.
He had asked St Osmund for guidance. It had yet to come. But even so, though he could not say why, some ancient instinct deep inside him knew, with an infallible certainty, that he was a survivor.
In the absence of any sign, he must make a choice: there were several alternatives. He could head towards the north western settlements of Bradford or Trowbridge – both thriving cloth towns. Beyond, a few days’ journey further, lay the Severn river and the mighty port of Bristol. Or he could turn south east instead and make for Winchester or the port of Southampton. Further still, to the east, lay London itself. That was too far, he thought, though its unknown possibilities tempted him. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he had turned his back on Sarum.
“I’ll try Bristol,” he finally decided; and began to walk.
The roadway, like most of England’s roads, was in reality no more than a recognised route over which people travelled. It had no surface, it was not marked out in any way: it was simply a broad path stretching across the high ground, trodden down by foot and scored with the marks of hoof prints and cartwheels which had passed that way over the centuries. In some places, where the ground was soft and travellers had fanned out to find a firmer surface, the trackways might spread hundreds of yards across; in others, a hard ridge between escarpments might narrow the road naturally to only a few. Ancient, as primitive as it had been in prehistoric times, this was the road.
He had gone a mile and was beside the last of the cornfields before the storm broke; when it did, it was not what he expected.
Will knew two kinds of storm at Sarum. The first, the more usual, was when the sky cracked and split open – with thunder and lightning, sheet or forked, that might seem like crashes and flashes of fury but which carried with them also a sense of relief. “The ground’s waiting for it,” he would say, to express the feeling that between sky and earth there was a complicity, as if the