The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart [108]
It was a still clear day of frost. At about noon I saw the smoke of a village, and a few minutes later the gleam of water in the valley below it. I turned the mare's head downhill. We went gently down under the shelter of sparsely set oaks, whose boughs still held a rustle of dead leaves. Soon I could see, below ahead of us through the bare trunks, the grey glitter of the river sliding between its banks.
Just above it I halted the mare at the edge of the oak wood. No movement, no sound, except the noisy river which drowned even the distant sound of barking dogs that marked the village.
I was certain that I was now not far from the course of the road. My best hope for a forge was where road and river met. Such places are generally near a ford or a bridge. Keeping just within the edge of the oak wood, I led Strawberry gently on towards the north.
So we journeyed for another hour or so, when suddenly the valley took a turn to the north-west, and there ahead of me, joining it from a neighbour valley, ran the open belt of green that spoke of a road. And I could hear, clear on the winter's stillness, the metallic clang of a hammer.
There was no sign of the settlement, but where the road met the river the woods were very thick, and I knew that any village in these parts would be built on some hillock or rising ground from which men might defend themselves. The smith, in his solitary forge down by the water, need have no such fears. Such men are too useful, and have nothing worth the taking, and besides, there is still about them some of the old awe that hangs over the places where roads and waters meet.
The smith himself might indeed have been another of the Old Ones. He was a small man, bent by his trade, but immensely broad of shoulder, with arms knotted with muscle and covered with a pelt as thick as a bear's. His hands, broad and cracked, were almost as black as his hair.
He looked up from his work as my shadow fell across the doorway. I greeted him, then tied the mare to a ring by the door and sat down to wait, glad of the heat of the fire which was being blown to a blaze by a boy in a leather apron. The smith answered my greeting, with a sharp stare from under his brows, then without pausing in the rhythm of his work, went back to his hammering. He was making a share. With a hiss of steam and the gradual dulling of the strokes, the share slowly greyed and cooled to its cutting edge. The smith muttered something to the boy at the bellows, who let the air run out, then, picking up the water bucket, left the forge. The smith, setting down his hammer, straightened and stretched. He hooked a wine skin down from the wall and drank, then wiped his mouth. The expert eyes ran over the mare. "Did you bring the shoe?" I had half expected him to speak the Old Tongue, but it was plain Welsh. "Otherwise it'll take more time than you like to spare, I dare say. Or will I just take the other three off?"
I grinned. "And pay me for them?"
"I'd do it for nothing," said the smith, showing a black-toothed grin.
I handed him the cast shoe. "Put this back on and there's a penny in it for you."
He took the thing and examined it, turning it slowly in those horny hands. Then he nodded, and picked up the mare's foot.
"Going far?"
Part of a smith's payment was, of course, whatever news his customers could give him. I had expected this, and had a story ready. He rasped and listened, while the mare stood quietly between us, head down and ears slack. After a while the boy came back with a full bucket and tipped water into the tub. He had taken a long time, and he breathed as if he had been hurrying. If I thought about it at all, I imagined that he had seized, boy-like, the opportunity to spend as long over the errand as he could, and had had to hurry back. The smith made no comment, other