Sword at Sunset Read Online Free PDF

and drove the great roads straight from city to city through whatever lay between; men who deal in law and order and can argue a question in cold blood – a daylight people. The left side is
the dark side, the women’s side, the side nearest to the heart.’
    ‘A sore thing, you’ll be telling me, to belong to two worlds.’
    ‘At the worst, it might be to be torn between the tree and the stallion. At the least, it is to be always a little in exile.’
    He nodded under his shaggy hat. ‘Sa sa.’ And then, grudgingly, ‘It is in my mind that I will come down into the Deva runs when you are wanting me.’
    The next day I spent for myself. I had done what I came to do, and tomorrow I must take the road down from the mountains; the long road south through Britain and across the Narrow Sea and south
again all the length of Gaul to the horse markets of Septimania; and once I set foot on that road, God knew when I might walk my own hills again. In the cool first light of morning, with a crust of
rye bread in the breast of my tunic, and Cabal, eager for the day, loping ahead, I left the rest of my little band to their own devices, and took to the hills, as I had done when I was a boy,
before ever Ambrosius led his war hosts down to drive out the Saxon hordes and retake his father’s capital; in the days when Arfon was still my world, and the world still whole and
undivided.
    At the head of the valley, the stream came down in steep white water, and the alders gave place to rowan and bird cherry. The day was strengthening; the hillside still in shadow, but the light
suddenly thrilling like birdsong. I struck away from the stream and began to make my way up the open hillside, Cabal leaping on ahead as though the feathers of his heels were wings. Below me, when
I turned to look back, the great valley of Nant Ffrancon fell away, green under the gray and blue and russet of the mountains. I could make out the loop of the stream with its rusty smoke of
spring-flushed alders, and the huddled bothies where we had slept, and all down the valley the darkling speckle of the horse herds at graze. Then I turned my back on the valley and climbed on, up
into the solitude of the high hills, into a world that was very old and very empty, where sound was the crying of the green plover and the siffling of the little wind through the dun grass, and
movement was the cloud shadows racing from hill to hill.
    I walked for a long time, keeping to the high ground, with the white crest of Yr Widdfa rearing always above the shoulders of the mountains northward; and long past noon, came to the crest of a
mountain ridge, where an outcrop of starling-colored rocks, stripped by storms on the seaward side, made a rampart against the wind, so that landward of it there was shelter and a thin warmth. It
was a good halting place, and I settled there to my hunk of bread. Cabal lay down beside me with a sigh, and watched me eat. A small mountain flower, a star of petals royally purple as the amethyst
in my sword hilt, sprang from a cushion of hairy leaves in a cleft of the rocks within reach of my hand, and before me I had the whole mile-wide sweep of the hillside to myself, save for the
carcass of a sheep picked bare by black-backed gulls. I finished the dark nutty bread, tossing the last piece to the expectant Cabal, and did not at once push on, but sat with my arms around my
updrawn knees, letting the high solitude soak into me. I have always dreaded to be lonely, but it was the loneliness of being set apart that I dreaded in those days, not the mere fact of being
alone ... It was warm, surprisingly warm, here in the sun and out of the wind, and it was as though sleep came creeping up through the grasses; little by little I slipped into an easier position, my
head on Cabal’s flank; and sleep gathered us both in the same instant.
    I woke to hear Cabal’s troubled whining, and felt a changed air on my face; and opened my eyes and came to my