• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 508 0

in the high tracts of the forest where living was scarce and no better men would dispute it with them. Here and there they had fortified a hilltop and held it, but in most cases any hill that could be so fortified was desirable to conquerors, so was eventually stormed or starved out and taken. So, hilltop by hilltop, the remnants of the unconquered had retreated, till there was left to them only the crags and caves and the bare land which the snow locked in winter. There they lived, seen by none except by chance, or when they wished it. It was they, I guessed, who crept down by night to take the offerings from the country shrines. My waking dream had been true enough. These, perhaps, were all who could be seen by living eyes, of the dwellers in the hollow hills.

They were talking freely -- as freely as such folk ever do -- not knowing I could understand them. I kept my eyelids lowered, and listened.

"I tell you, it must be. Who else would be travelling in the forest on a night like this? And with a strawberry mare?"

"That's right. Alone, they said, with a red roan mare."

"Maybe he killed the other, and stole the mare. He's hiding, that's certain. Why else lie out here in winter without a fire, and the wolves coming down this low?"

"It's not the wolves he's afraid of. Depend on it, this is the man they were wanting."

"And paying for."

"They said he was dangerous. He didn't look it to me."

"He had a sword drawn ready."

"But he never picked it up."

"We were too quick for him."

"He had seen us. He had time. You shouldn't have taken him like that, Cwyll. They didn't say take him. They said find him and follow him."

"Well, it's too late now. We've taken him. What do we do? Kill him?"

"Llyd will know."

"Yes. Llyd will know."

They did not speak as I have reported it, but in snatches one across the other, brief phrases bandied to and fro in that strange, sparse language. Presently they left me where I lay between my two guards, and withdrew a short distance. To wait, I supposed, for Llyd.

Some twenty minutes later he came, with two companions; three more shadows suddenly no longer part of the forest's blackness. The others crowded round him, talking and pointing, and presently he seized the torch -- which was now little more than a singed rag smelling of pitch -- and strode towards me. The others crowded after,

They stood in a half circle round me as they had stood before. Llyd held the torch high, and it showed me my captors, not clearly, but enough to know them again. They were small men, dark-haired, with surly lined faces beaten by weather and hard living to a texture like gnarled wood. They were dressed in roughly tanned skins, and breeches of thick, coarse-woven cloth dyed the browns and greens and murreys that you can make with the mountain plants. They were variously armed, with clubs, knives, stone axes chipped to a sheen, and -- the one who had given the orders until Llyd came -- with my sword.

Llyd said: "They have gone north. There is no one in the forest to hear or see. Take the gag out."

"What's the use?" It was the fellow holding my sword who spoke. "He doesn't know the Old Tongue. Look at him. He does not understand. When we spoke just now of killing him he did not look afraid."

"What does that tell us except that he is brave, which we know already? A man attacked and tied as he is might well be expecting death, but there is no fear in his eyes. Do as I say. I know enough to ask him his name and where he is bound for. Take out the gag. And you, Pwul, and Areth, see if you can find dry stuff to burn. Let us have good light to see him by."

One of the two beside me reached for the knot, and got the gag loosened. It had cut my mouth at the corner, and was foul with blood and spittle, but he thrust it into his pouch. Theirs was a degree of poverty that wasted nothing. I wondered how much "they" had offered to pay for me. If Crinas and his followers had tracked me this far and set the hill-dwellers to watch me and discover where I was bound, Cwyll's hasty action had spoiled that plan. But it had also