The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart [62]
It was a hind, white against the winter forest. She scudded through the pines like a ghost, bounded along the top of the hollow where we had lain, stood poised for a moment in view at the edge, then vanished down the steep, boulder-strewn slope, straight into the path of the two outlaws. I heard shouts of triumph from below, the crack of a whip, the sudden thud and flurry of hoofs as the men wrenched their horses back to the path and lashed them to a gallop. They were giving hunting calls. I jumped from the saddle, threw the sorrel's reins to Ralf, and ran back to my place above the rock. I reached it in time to see the two of them going back full tilt the way they had come. Ahead of them, dimly seen for a moment, like a scud of mist through the bare trees, fled the white hind. Then the laughter, the hunting cries, the hammer of hard-driven horses, echoed plunging back through the forest, and was gone.
14
The river which marks the boundary of Hoel's kingdom flows right through the heart of the forest. In places it cuts a deep gorge between overhanging banks of trees, and everywhere in the central part of the forest the land is seamed by small, wild valleys where tributary streams wind or tumble into the main. But there is a place, almost in the center of the forest, where the river valley is wider and more gentle, forming a green basin where men have tilled the fields, and over the years have cut back the forest to make grazing land round the small settlement called Coll, which in Breton means the Hidden Place. Here there had been, in past times, a Roman transit camp on the road from Kerrec to Lanascol. All that remained of this now was the squared outline where the original ditch had been dug beside the tributary. Here lay the village. On two sides of it the stream made a natural defense or moat; for the rest, the Roman ditch had been cleared and widened, and filled with water. Inside this were steep defensive earthworks, crowned with palisades. The bridge had been a stone one in Roman times; the piles still stood and were spanned now with planking. Though the village lay near Gorlan's border, it was accessible from it only through the narrow pass cut by the river, and there the road had crumbled almost back to the original rocky path that wolves and wild men had used before the Romans ever came. Coll was well named.
Brand's tavern lay just inside the gate. The main street of the village was little more than a dirty alley floored unevenly with cobbles. The inn stood a little way back from this, on the right. It was a low building, roughly built of stone, with mortar slapped haphazardly into the gaps. The outbuildings round the yard were no more than wattle huts, daubed with mud. The roof was newly thatched, with good close work of reeds held down by a net of rope weighted with heavy stones. The door was open, as the door of an inn should be, with a heavy curtain of skins hung across the opening to keep the weather out. Through the chimney hole at one end rose a sluggish column of smoke that smelled of peat.
We arrived at dusk when the gates were closing. Everywhere mingled with the peat smoke came the smells of supper cooking. There were few people about; the children had been called in long since, and the men were home at their supper. Only a few hungry-looking dogs skulked here and there; an old woman hurried past with a shawl held over her face and a fowl squawking under her other arm; a man led a yoke of weary oxen along the street. I could hear the clink of a smith's anvil not far away, and smell the sharp fume of burned hoofs.
Ralf eyed the inn dubiously.