The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [42]
Well before midday we had climbed clear of the forest and onto heathland. It was a fine day, with mist drawing back from the sparkling sedges, and the song of water bubbling from every crevice in the rock, where the rills tumbled down to fill the young river. Rippling, too, with sound was the morning sky, where curlews slanted down on ringing streams of song toward their nests in the grass. We saw a she-wolf, heavy with milk, slink across the road ahead, with a hare in her mouth. She gave us a brief, indifferent glance, then slipped into the shelter of the mist.
It was a wild way, a Wolf Road such as the Old Ones love. I kept my eye on the rocks that crowned the screes, but saw no sign that I could recognize of their remote and comfortless eyries. I had no doubt, though, that we were watched every step of the way. No doubt, either, that news had gone north on the winds that Merlin the enchanter was on the road, and secretly. It did not trouble me. It is not possible to keep secrets from the Old Ones; they know all that comes or goes in forest and hill. They and I had come to an understanding long since, and Arthur had their trust.
We halted on the summit of the moor. I looked around me. The mist had lifted now, dispersing under the steadily strengthening sun. All around us stretched the moor, broken with grey rock and bracken, with, in the distance, the still-misty heights of fell and mountain. To the left of the road the ground fell away into the wide Isara valley, where water glinted among crowding trees.
It could not have looked more unlike the rain-dimmed vision of Nodens' shrine, but there was the milestone with its legend, OLICANA; and there, to the left, the track plunging steeply down toward the valley trees. Among them, only just visible through the leafage, showed the walls of a considerable house.
Ulfin, ranging his mule alongside mine, was pointing.
"If only we had known, we might have found better lodging there."
I said slowly: "I doubt it. I think we were better under the sky."
He shot me a curious glance. "I thought you had never been this way, sir: Do you know the place?"
"Shall we say that I know of it? And would like to know more. Next time we pass a village, or if we see a shepherd on the hill, find out who owns that villa, will you?"
He threw me another look, but said no more, and we rode on.
Olicana, the second of Arthur's two forts, lay only ten miles or so to the east. To my surprise the road, heading steeply downward, then crossing a considerable stretch of boggy moorland, was in first-class condition. Ditches and embankments alike looked to have been recently repaired. There was a good timber bridge across the Isara itself, and the ford of the next tributary was cleared and paved. We made good speed in consequence, and came in the early evening into settled country. At Olicana there is a sizable township. We found lodgings in a tavern that stood near the fortress walls, to serve the men of the garrison.
From what I had seen of the road, and the orderly appointments of the town's streets and square, it came as no surprise that the walls of the fortress itself were in the same good order. Gates and bridges were sound and stout, and the ironwork looked fire-new. By carefully idle questions, and by listening to the talk in the tavern at supper-time, I was able to gather that a skeleton garrison had been placed here in Uther's time, to watch the road into the Gap and to keep an eye on the signal towers to the east. It had been an emergency measure, taken hastily during the worst years of the Saxon Terror, but the same men were still here, despairing of recall, bored to distraction, but kept to a tingling pitch of efficiency by a garrison commander who deserved something better (one gathered) than this dismal outpost of inaction.
The simplest way to gather the information I needed was to make myself known to this officer, who could then see that my report