Heroes of the Valley Read Online Free PDF

meantime, he had some sheep to tend to.
    Halli had nothing against the sheep, a hardy mountain breed with black faces and wiry wool. Most of the time they took care of themselves. Once a yearling lamb fell into a crack between two boulders and had to be pulled free. On another occasion a ewe broke a foreleg in a tumble from a crag – Halli fashioned a crude splint from a wood stave and the fabric of his tunic, and sent her hobbling on her way. But as the weeks went by, their company began to pall and Halli grew tired of his duties. He spent more and more time staring uphill – towards the cairns.
    No one he knew had ever seen a Trow. No one could tell him anything about them. How many of them were there? What did they eat, with humans out of reach? What would the moor look like, over the brow of the hill? Would he see their burrow holes, the bones of their past victims?
    Halli had many questions, but he never thought to approach the cairns.
    At one end of the pasture, perhaps in the gales of the previous winter, a section of the guard wall had fallen down. Its stones littered the long grass over a wide area. On his arrival Halli had realized that he should attempt to rebuild it, and had in fact made an attempt to do so, but had discovered the job to be arduous and backbreaking. He soon gave up, and since the sheep never ventured to that end of the meadow anyway, he quickly forgot about the matter.
    The weeks passed. One afternoon, when the first tints of brown and amber were showing in the trees of the valley far below, Halli woke from a doze to discover that the flock, with ovine caprice, had for the first time migrated to the far end of the field. No fewer than eight sheep had strayed across the scattered stones of the fallen wall and were cropping the grass on the far side.
    Uttering an exclamation of dismay, Halli seized his stick and hurried across the field. Shouting, waving, gesticulating, he drove the main flock away from the tumbled stretch; one of the stray sheep jumped back over the stones to join them, but the other seven made no move.
    Halli returned to the hole in the wall and, making a protective gesture – much as he had seen Eyjolf do – scrambled over the stones onto the forbidden slope.
    The seven sheep regarded him narrowly from various positions near and far.
    Halli employed all his shepherd's wiles. He moved slowly so as not to frighten the strays; he made a series of soothing chirrups in his throat; he kept the stick low, motioning gently in the direction of the wall as he circled round to drive them steadily, subtly, inexorably towards the hole.
    As one, the sheep bolted in seven different directions across the hill.
    Halli cursed and swore; he charged after the nearest sheep and succeeded only in driving it another few yards up the slope. Scampering at another, he slipped, lost his balance and tumbled head over heels to land upside-down upon a muddy tussock. Such was the pattern of the afternoon.
    After a long time and much exertion Halli had managed to coerce six of the sheep back through the hole. He was mud-stained, sweating and out of breath; his stick had snapped in two.
    One sheep only remained.
    She was a young ewe, skittish and swift, and she had climbed higher up the slope than any of the others. She was almost at the cairns.
    Halli took a deep breath, moistened his lips and began to climb, angling his path so as to approach the ewe tail-on. He kept a weather eye on the nearest cairns – tumbledown columns of mossy rock showing stark against the sky. Luck was with him in one sense: it was a cloudy day and the cairns projected no shadows. But the ewe was wary, turning and starting at every gust of wind. She saw him when he was still six feet from her.
    Halli stopped dead. The sheep gazed at him. She was in the lee of a cairn, right on the boundary of the valley, cropping the long grass that grew around the ancient stones. Behind her he glimpsed a green expanse – the high moors, where the