Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online

was, because he had learned by now the unwisdom of too many blackberries on an empty belly, and then turned drearily back to the town.
    All that day, with Dog padding at his heels or turning off to investigate odd corners, he wandered about Viroconium, up and down the silent streets and in and out of the shops and houses, like an unquiet ghost.
    He had not seen or heard anything more since that odd fancy of steps pattering behind him on the road to the South Gate, and yet all the time he had the feeling that he was being watched. It was just the loneliness, of course—though once or twice Dog had looked round quickly, or raised his muzzle to sniff the wind …
    By and by they found a breach in a high wall and scrambled over into some gardens, which he judged were those of Kyndylan’s Palace. There were apple trees close to the wall; some of their branches had been scorched, but not badly, and the apples lay in the grass around their feet. Owain picked one up and bit into it, but the sourness of it dried his mouth like a quince, and he threw it away, saying to Dog who was nosing at another, ‘No, you fool, come away. It is better to have an empty belly than the bellyache.’
    He was not much in the habit of talking to Dog; for the most part they lived together in companionable silence; and the sound of his own voice, which he had not heard for days, made him jump. It was like a pebble dropped into a pool, the ripples of it spreading out and out through the silence, and without knowing why, he glanced behind him.
    As he did so, there was a small fluttering in the heart of some overgrown bushes beside the gap in the wall. His heart lurched unpleasantly, and then steadied as a chiff-chaff darted out, and the fluttering was explained. He hunched his shoulders and turned away. ‘Stop jumping at shadows,’ he told himself. ‘It is because you want food, that is all.’ But before he was out of sight of the bushes, he glanced back once more. Nothing stirred among them now; the chiff-chaff was darting and hovering after flies under the apple trees.
    Owain prowled on, his feet carrying him now towards the fire-stained walls and colonnades of Kyndylan’s Palace. On the way, he came on a little grotto down three steps, with a grey stone roof under an overarching tangle of hazel bushes; and below the eaves, water still trickling from the mouth of a bronze lion’s mask. He had found water in other places in Viroconium, but it was mostly foul and stagnant; this was fresh and sweet, and he and Dog drank their fill from the ferny basin, and remembered it for the next time they were thirsty.
    Kyndylan’s Palace was a shell; the walls stood up, empty and fire-stained, roofed with the drifting blue and grey of the autumn sky, the great chambers choked up with charred beams and all the debris of the fallen roof. But at the end of the slaves’ wing he came on a small store-room two steps below ground level, which still had most of its roof, though the tiles were broken and he could see the sky through a jagged gap in one corner. And the part of himself that was concerned with such things recognized it for a good place to camp. He could even have a fire here to cook his hare if he caught one. That was as well, for the shop where he had slept last night was darkened in his mind as though the misery that had overwhelmed him there had filled it with a black cloud, and he knew that whether or not he found other shelter, he could not go back to it.
    There was plenty of wood lying about in the ruins, and not all of it wet. He collected a good supply, and made ready his fire in the middle of the beaten earth floor; he even brought in a few armfuls of long grass and weeds from the nearest part of the garden, and flung them down in the corner furthest from the hole in the roof, to make a bed. Then he sat on it, and scratched the scar on his arm, and waited for dusk to come. It seemed the longest day that he had ever known.

    Evening came at last,