Appleby Plays Chicken Read Online Free PDF Page A

legends had been equally immemorial legends long ago. So he climbed happily, his mind mooning around what he vaguely knew of the Early Iron Age. The sling – a new and deadly weapon – had advanced into Britain across this country. The hill forts, with their multiple ramparts, were a memorial of that sort of warfare – outer defences of the coveted iron in the Forest of Dean. Then as now, battle had the same objectives – and they weren’t romantic. Or almost the same. Iron then; oil or uranium today. And so with the weapons: now the guided missile; yesterday the smooth pebble or the baked clay bullet hurled from the leather loop. A sling would still be an engine to reckon with on bare ground like this. But he wondered if it had ever been any sort of weapon of precision, as the tale of David and Goliath would suggest. Or had it needed organized companies of slingers to be effective? He had an idea he’d read that in the La Tène culture things had been organized that way.
    Mooning along like this, he hadn’t been attending to the map, and presently he had a thoroughly satisfactory sense of having lost himself. Ahead of him, the moor rose to a succession of rock-crowned eminences. Two – a big and a little one – were close together; and he thought he’d now stop and identify them. It wasn’t difficult. The little one was called the Loaf, and the big one was Knack Tor. It was Knack Tor that Faircloth had been burbling about, and that he himself had rather snootily turned down. Well, he’d have a go at it after all.
    David strode on, peopling the next slope with lurking men in skins, in woad; imagining he heard the pebble or the flint sing suddenly past his ear. It was all nonsense – utterly remote from him, and yet quite easily to be conjured up in this way. Its charm lay in that. And he didn’t, as he moved his ghostly warriors over the moor, cast himself for any hero’s role. At least he wasn’t childish enough for that – and anyway it was all too unformed and shadowy for drama. Now there was a lark singing above his head. Its song seemed to set a seal on the absolute silence surrounding him.
    The effect of a great loneliness was remarkable; it was as if he had been in one of the uninhabited places of the earth. A quarter of a mile away two dark ponies were browsing, and nothing else moved. They might have been prehistoric creatures, innocent of human association. No new animal had been domesticated, David told himself inconsequently, since man first learned to leave any record of himself other than his bones. And there was no impress of humanity upon all this landscape except a false one: the piles of slabbed and tumbled rock on the summits of many of the tors. They looked like savage, like Cyclopean altars – so that one expected to see a thin curl of smoke going up from their flat tops. But it was merely the interior economy of the earth that had voided them and set them there; they possessed no meaning save what the fancy cared to lend them.
    Knack Tor was now straight ahead. A tiny stream ran down from a spring on the shoulder linking it to the Loaf, and David followed this. The wind had sunk to nothing and he was still in bright sunshine, although to the south he could see a mist coming up from the sea. So entire was the silence around him that the small trickle of water at his feet seemed to hold all the elaboration of a symphony. It would have been impossible to chant aloud scraps of verse now – an act of presumption, of naked hubris , to be promptly visited with its due penalty by some indwelling spirit of the place. The height above sea level of Knack Tor was nothing tremendous – yet here in this bleakness and in its setting of lesser hills, one could easily endow it with all the magic of a great mountain.
    David looked again at the tumble of stone at the top, and found himself pretending that here was something stiff and ultimate, a grim face of rock challenging the powers of climbers