Dawn Wind Read Online Free PDF Page A

lap.
    And Owain knew that he would go to Service tomorrow.
    He washed, and allowed Priscilla to clip off the strong dark hair that had grown long about his neck. And next morning, wearing Priscus’s second best tunic, which was about the right length for him but roughly three times too wide, he set off up the green drove track, walking at Priscilla’s left hand while Priscus trotted at her right, and Dog, as usual, came padding along behind.
    It was a good distance, following the winding drove-way that linked outland farm with outland farm among the hills, and Owain, whose legs were still apt to tire quickly, was not sorry when they came down through a tangle of low-growing woods into a shallow upland valley, and saw the village half-way up the slope on the far side, and higher up, where the field plots ran out into rough pasture, a little barn-like building with the tall grey finger of a preaching cross raised in front of it.
    They were late, for Priscus had broken his shoe-thong on the way, and they had had to stop and mend it, and when they came up through the apple trees and kale plots of the village to the preaching cross, the rest of the little congregation were already assembled; maybe thirty or forty men, women, and children from the village and the outlying farms, gathered close about the grey stone shaft of the cross and the little figure in the long tunic of undyed sheep’s wool who stood at its foot.
    They looked round as the three latecomers slipped in among them, and many eyes were fixed upon the thin dark boy who had come with Priscus and Priscilla, and who wore—though he did not know it—an odd stillness on his face as though it were a mask, or a shield; but they had the courtesy of people who live very far into the wilds, and after the one look they did not stare any more, but made room for him close to the preaching cross, as though he had been one of themselves.
    The priest had already begun the service, and Owain fixed his eyes on him, trying to take in his words. The man was worth looking at, small, fierce, and fiery, with the head of a warrior prince on the body of an under-fed clerk; worth listening to also, for the fire that flashed from his dark eyes was in his voice, kindling the words of his mouth to a new aliveness. And yet Owain, listening to the familiar prayers, murmuring the familiar responses with Priscus and Priscilla, could not make them mean anything at all. The ground all round the cross and the priest’s cell was hummocky, for the dead lay buried there, but there were few stones, and the little grey hill sheep cropped the rough grass to the very walls of the cell; and Owain heard their cropping and the deep contented drone of bees among the opening bell heather more clearly than prayer or psalm or litany; and remembered it longer.
    But when the man began to preach, then it was a different matter. The preachers of the Cymru were mostly gifted with silver tongues, but it seemed that this man’s tongue was of flame. But indeed, Owain found that it was not a sermon he was listening to at all, but an exhortation, a cry that seemed to be for him personally, as for every soul gathered there. ‘Brothers, the Light goes out and the Dark flows in. It is for us to keep some Lamp burning until the time that we can give it back to light the world once more; the Lamp, not of our Faith alone, but of all those beauties of the spirit that are kindled from our Faith, the Lamps of the love of wisdom in men’s hearts and the freedom of men’s minds, of all that we mean when we claim that we are civilized men and women and not barbarians.’
    That was the message as Owain received it; it might have come differently to the hill shepherd, differently again to Priscilla.
    And listening to him, to the blazing urgency that could only have flamed up from the need of the immediate moment, and never been planned beforehand, the boy thought, ‘This man has heard something—some news that has only just