Dawn Wind Read Online Free PDF Page B

since.’
    Priscilla’s mouth tightened still further. ‘You speak to him; it is for the head of the house.’
    ‘Doubtless, my dove; also it is a task for a woman. I shall go and scratch the pigs’ backs,’ said Priscus, and got quietly to his feet and ambled out, Branwen trotting on her short legs behind him.
    For a few moments Priscilla glared after him with the look of a woman who would dearly like to shake someone until his teeth flew out of his head; then she gave a small exasperated sigh, and turned back to the hearth. Owain could scarcely see her face now, for on these summer evenings the house-place became unbearable if one kept the fire up once the cooking was over, and candles were for special occasions. He waited for what she wanted to say to him, not wondering very much what it was, because his thoughts were turned towards setting out again tomorrow.
    She said: ‘We have never questioned you about yourself in all this while. It seemed both to my old Priscus and to me that if we waited, maybe one day you would tell us of your own choosing. But now it seems that there is no time left.’
    Owain looked up quickly. ‘I am sorry. I will answer anything you like. What did you want to know, Priscilla?’
    ‘That ring you wear round your neck—I hung it on a new thong for you while you were ill; did you notice? Was it perhaps your father’s ring?’
    Owain nodded.
    ‘Were you with your father in that last battle?’
    ‘With my father and my brother,’ Owain said, scratching the scar on his arm as he had got into the habit of doing, and staring into the embers of the sinking fire.
    ‘Don’t do that, you’ll make it sore,’ said Priscilla. ‘They were killed?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You have—’ Her voice, softer than he had ever heard it before, hesitated a moment in a way that was not like her. ‘You have a mother to go back to? She will have been thinking you dead with the other two, all this while, poor woman.’
    ‘My mother died when I was small,’ Owain said, levelly. ‘I should not even know what she looked like, but my father made an outline in charcoal once of her head shadow on the colonnade wall, and kept it safe with a bronze grill over it. She had a very little neck and a lot of hair piled up high.’
    Priscilla had taken up her distaff loaded with lichen-dyed wool, and when she spoke again, her words sounded against the soft background thrumming of the spindle. ‘There’s good land down the valley foot, and Priscus would have enclosed some of it before this, if he had had a son to work it with him. We would have liked a son, he and I, but the Lord never sent us any child at all, and there’s no profit in questioning His ways. But the good land at the valley foot is still there, and there’s a son’s place empty by the hearth. If you have no one to go back to, you might do worse than bide here.’
    Owain jerked up his head and stared at her. If the suggestion had come in a year’s time, he might even have considered it—at least to come back to, by and by—but his father’s death was still too near, so that the bare idea seemed like disloyalty. He shook his head. ‘I might do very much worse, I know that, Priscilla. You have been kind to me—so kind all this while—but I must go on to Viroconium. If any of our men came through the battle and gather again, they will gather there. There’s our own farm, too. I must see if anything is left of it. But first I must go to Viroconium.’
    ‘If any gathered to Viroconium, they will have gathered and gone again before this; you have lain sick a long time.’
    ‘Maybe the people of the city will be able to tell me where they are gone, so that I can follow.’
    Priscilla teased out a few more strands of wool. ‘There will be—there will have been no gathering to Viroconium or anywhere else, you know that. Here in the Western Hills we may remain free, but for the rest of Britain, the thing is finished and the lights are out. What can