Sword at Sunset Read Online Free PDF Page B

elbow in the same instant, staring about me. Where the mile-wide sweep of
hillside had dropped away to rise again to the crests across the valley was nothing but soft wreathing whiteness, a few paces of tawny hill grass, blurring into the drift. The mist had come rolling
up from the sea while I slept, as such mists do come, without warning, and swiftly as a horse may gallop. Even as I looked, it thickened, smoking across the crest of the rocks above me in swathes
of drifting moisture that tasted salt on the lips.
    I cursed, but cursing was no good; and considered what next, for I was not familiar with this particular stretch of the Arfon mountains. I could wait where I was for the mist to clear, but I
knew these sudden uncanny hill mists; it might be three days before that happened. Or I could find a stream and follow it down. One was never far from running water, among the high hills. The
danger of that was that the stream might lead me over a rock fall or into a bog, instead of safely off the hills; but to a hillman born and bred as I was, that danger was small so long as I kept my
wits about me.
    Cabal was already up, stretching first his front and then his hind legs, and stood watching me expectantly, his tail swinging behind him as I got up and stretched in my turn. I stood for a few
moments to get my bearings. Then I whistled him after me and set off downhill into the mist. I moved slowly, steering by the fall of the land and pausing now and then to listen, until at last I
caught the purl of quick-running water seemingly still very far below me; and three steps farther on, all but stumbled head foremost into a stream coming down in green spate from the melting snows.
It would lead me in the wrong direction for Nant Ffrancon, but that could not be helped; the rest would know, when the mist came down, that I was safe enough among my own glens, and wait for me
until I could make my way back to them.
    Presently, as I followed the water down, the steep fall of the valley leveled somewhat, and the ground underfoot changed from moor grass to a dense aromatic carpet of bog myrtle interlaced with
heather; and I began to feel for the firmness of every step. Then it dropped again, and the stream plunged after it in a long slide of black water smooth as polished glass under the overarching
tangle of hawthorn trees, and rough pasture came up to meet me among the hillside outcrops of black rock, and almost in the same instant I snuffed the faint blue whisper of woodsmoke.
    I whistled Cabal in closer and, with a hand on his bronze-studded collar, checked to listen, then went on again. Below me I heard the lowing of cattle, and through the mist a huddle of squat
buildings loomed into view. There was a soft flurry of hoofbeats and horned shapes shouldering up through the smoking wetness; a knot of cattle being driven in for folding. I had not realized it
was as late as that. One of the little rough-coated milch cows broke away from the rest and headed into the mist, her eyes wild and her heavy udder swinging. I stepped into her path, waving my free
arm and making the noises that came to me from my boyhood and I had not used since; and she wheeled away, lowing, her head down, and cantered back toward the opening in the turf wall. Cabal would
have bounded after her but for my hand on his collar. A sullen-looking boy in a wolfskin came panting up at the heels of this herd, with a great walleyed bitch running low at his knee, and as the
last of the cattle pelted through, we came together in the gateway.
    He looked at me, slantwise a little, under down-drawn brows, while the dogs – seeing that the other was a bitch, I had released Cabal – walked around each other in inquiring circles.
‘She is forever wandering away. My thanks, stranger.’ The boy’s gaze moved over me appraisingly, and fastened upon the heavy gold Medusa-head brooch that clasped my tunic at the
shoulder, then returned to my face. Clearly he wanted