(2/3) The Teeth of the Gale by Joan Aiken Read Free Book Online

perfectly harmless, innocent wayfarers!"
    "Not they!" he said with satisfaction. "Did you not see their black cloaks? They were friars for sure."
    "But others besides friars wear black cloaks!"
    "If they were
not
friars, what were they doing, sneaking about in the middle of the night like brigands?"
    "Well, but
we
were traveling at night, and we are not brigands."
    "I know you are honest folk," he said, "for you are going to the house of the Conde de Cabezada at Villaverde; everybody knows that the Conde is a good and just administrator. My niece works in his dairy and says the old ladies are holy angels. Here I will bid you good-bye, señores; you cannot go wrong now the sun has risen. Keep southeast, with the sun on your left, cross two ridges, and you will see Villaverde straight ahead."
    So, picking his way carefully past us, he took himself off homeward.
    We too continued, tiptoeing along the track as if we were walking on razor blades. Our beasts snorted and shivered, no happier than ourselves. However, another half-hour's inching, cautious advance brought us to the end of this frightfully dangerous portion of the path, and we were able to stop, wipe our sweat-soaked brows, and fondle our mules, likewise sweat-soaked and trembling.
    "Well," said Pedro in a devil-may-care voice—though I could see from his pallor that he was as shaken as myself—"I daresay we shall never know who those two men were. But—as the farmer said—they were probably up to no good. And they may very well have been on our trail. If they had found out that we traveled with the grand post, they must have guessed that we'd take the road from Becerrea."
    "I suppose so."
    I could say no more. Already, in my short life, I had witnessed a number of deaths—these were wild and heartless times—but the calm, callous way in which the farmer had tossed that rock and dispatched those two into the next world, neither knowing nor caring if they deserved such an end, had left me shaken to the marrow.
    For a long way we rode in silence. Now the risen sun warmed us and dried' the shaggy coats of our beasts; birds began to sing, mountain larks, and I smelled a hint of smoke from a homestead in the valley below. A great eagle floated past us, on nine-foot wings.
    Another two ridges crossed and, as the man had promised, we could see, ahead on the farthest height, the town wall of Villaverde, like a scroll of rock, gilded with morning light, encircling the houses within.
    Pedro gave a great yawn.
    "Your grandpa will have been up for hours," said he. "Looking for us all over the landscape with his spyglass. And I can eat every crumb of the breakfast my aunt Prudencia will have prepared."

2. I return home and hear heartwarming news from a convent in Bilbao; Pedro and I prepare for another journey; strange tidings of Sancho the Spy
    It was a great joy to be with my grandfather again. Every time I left him, I had a secret dread that it might be for the last time, that I might never see him again, for he was very frail these days, thin, wrinkled, and veined as a withered leaf, and his hair, which during my childhood had been iron gray, thick and burnished, had since turned to frosty white and was growing very scanty. At each of our partings I put up a silent prayer to God that we would be permitted to meet again; and so far God had been indulgent to me. But, this morning, I noticed with grief the thinness and pallor of the Conde's face, seamed now with many new wrinkles, and the tremor in his hands as he held them up to embrace me.
    His dark eyes were fiery as ever, though, and his voice had its accustomed dryness.
    "Good heavens, my dear grandson! Here have I been praying for the last three years that you might be returned to me safe, and the Almighty has listened so favorably to my petitions that He has granted them twice over. You have doubled in size!"
    "Why, yes, Grandfather—I—I suppose I
have
grown. I never gave it any thought."
    "The air of Salamanca must