Legacy: Arthurian Saga by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

shepherd
boy, drowsy under a hawthorn bush, with his sheep at hand; he was
simple, and only stared vacantly at me as I trotted past, fingering
the pile of stones with which he herded his sheep. As we passed him
he picked up one of them, a smooth green pebble, and I wondered if
he was going to throw it at me, but he lobbed it instead to turn
some fat grazing lambs which were straying too far, then went back
to his slumbers. There were black cattle further afield, down
nearer the river where the grass was longer, but I could not see
the herdsman. Away at the foot of the hill, tiny beside a tiny hut,
I saw a girl with a flock of geese.
    Presently the path began to climb
again, and my pony slowed to a walk, picking his way through
scattered trees. Hazel-nuts were thick in the coppices, mountain
ash and brier grew from tumbles of mossed rock, and the bracken was
breast-high. Rabbits ran everywhere, scuttering through the fern,
and a pair of jays scolded a fox from the safety of a swinging
hornbeam. The ground was too hard, I supposed, to bear tracks well,
but I could see no sign, either of crushed bracken or broken twigs,
that any other horseman had recently been this way.
    The sun was high. A little breeze
swept through the hawthorns, rattling the green, hard fruit. I
urged the pony on. Now among the oaks and hollies were pine trees,
their stems reddish in the sunlight. The ground grew rougher as the
path climbed, with bare grey stone outcropping through the thin
turf, and a honeycombing of rabbit burrows. I did not know where
the path led, I knew nothing but that I was alone, and free. There
was nothing to tell me what sort of day this was, or what way-star
was leading me up into the hill. This was in the days before the
future became clear to me.
    The pony hesitated, and I came to
myself. There was a fork in the track, with nothing to indicate
which would be the best way to go. To left, to right, it led away
round the two sides of a thicket.
    The pony turned decisively to the
left, this being downhill. I would have let him go, but that at
that moment a bird flew low across the path in front of me, left to
right, and vanished beyond the trees. Sharp wings, a flash of rust
and slate-blue, the fierce dark eye and curved beak of a merlin.
For no reason, except that this was better than no reason, I turned
the pony's head after it, and dug my heels in.
    The path climbed in a shallow curve,
leaving the wood on the left. This was a stand mainly of pines,
thickly clustered and dark, and so heavily grown that you could
only have hacked your way in through the dead stuff with an axe. I
heard the clap of wings as a ring-dove fled from shelter, dropping
invisibly out of the far side of the trees. It had gone to the
left. This time I followed the falcon.
    We were now well out of sight of the
river valley and the town. The pony picked his way along one side
of a shallow valley, at the foot of which ran a narrow, tumbling
stream. On the far side of the stream the long slopes of turf went
bare up to the scree, and above this were the rocks, blue and grey
in the sunlight. The slope where I rode was scattered with hawthorn
brakes throwing pools of slanted shadow, and above them again,
scree, and a cliff hung with ivy where choughs wheeled and called
in the bright air. Apart from their busy sound, the valley held the
most complete and echoless stillness.
    The pony's hoofs sounded loud on the
baked earth. It was hot, and I was thirsty. Now the track ran along
under a low cliff, perhaps twenty feet high, and at its foot a
grove of hawthorns cast a pool of shade across the path. Somewhere,
close above me, I could hear the trickle of water.
    I stopped the pony and slid off. I led
him into the shade of the grove and made him fast, then looked
about me for the source of the water.
    The rock by the path was dry, and
below the path was no sign of any water running down to swell the
stream at the foot of the valley. But the sound of running water
was