Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd Read Free Book Online

the night, when he buried himself in the warmth of Akun’s still magnificent body he vowed:
    “I’ll find the high ground – and we shall live well too.”
    The very next morning Tep approached Hwll solemnly. It was now time for him to redeem his promise and show them the way inland; Hwll wondered what trickery the wily hunter would try.
    Tep came straight to the point.
    “Your girl. I want her for my boy,” he stated. “If you give her, I will show you the way to the high ground.”
    Hwll considered. Tep had broken his word, but the bargain could be worse. At some stage the girl would have to be given to a man, and Tep’s son was a good hunter.
    “Take me there,” he countered, “and if it is as you say then he may have the girl.”
    After a suitable pause Tep agreed to this, and the next day both families began to follow the river upstream. Tep led them at a leisurely pace.
    It was good land. The fertile alluvial soil had been deposited by retreating waters, during millions of years, over a broad gravel plain. As they went along, Tep excelled himself in catching fish for them: trout, tasty eels, perch, pike and the delicately flavoured grayling. He seemed determined to please his new friends.
    Only one thing worried Hwll – they were moving at such a slow pace, covering only five miles a day. It was now late summer. Would they reach the place before winter set in? Repeatedly he questioned the little man.
    But whenever he heard this, Tep only grinned and shook his head.
    They travelled up river, at a snail’s pace, for five days. On the fifth day, they found themselves in a broad, shallow valley between gently sloping ridges. But these shelving hills were hardly high ground and Hwll was amazed therefore when Tep suddenly said to him:
    “This is the place where the five rivers meet.”
    And then Hwll saw it, directly ahead.
    It was as though a huge bowl, miles across, had been scooped out of the land to form a broad system of wood and marshland surrounded on east, west and north sides by ridges. Even from where they stood, he could see that these ridges were of considerable size, and rose steeply. In one place he could see a sharp escarpment; in another, a daunting slope. Just right of the centre of this arrangement of ridges, a single wooded hill pushed forward from the edge of the high ground into the bowl, and behind it he could see the entrance to one of several valleys that cut through the uplands.
    “There are three valleys,” Tep explained. “West, north and north east.” He pointed to the entrances of each. “That hill,” he indicated the one near the centre, “guards the entrance to the northern valley; that’s the smallest of the three. There’s a river coming out of each valley, except that the western valley has two rivers. They join near the valiey entrance.” He made a sweeping motion with his hand. “Down there, all the rivers run together and then they make a big loop around the south west.”
    Hwll could see the big curve of the flowing waters near the centre of the bowl, before it flowed towards them.
    “The fifth river joins from the west, just upstream from here,” Tep concluded. “See, it’s like this:” and he put his left hand on the ground, palm upwards, with fingers and thumb outstretched. “Like a man’s hand. We’re here.” He indicated his wrist.
    The analogy was perfect.
    “And the high ground?” Hwll asked eagerly.
    “In front of you.” Tep indicated the huge ridges. “Once you climb the ridge to the north, it is all high ground. You can walk across it for days.”
    So it proved, when, two hours later, the two men stood at the top of the northern ridge some hundred and fifty feet above the valley floor. The panorama in every direction was magnificent, but what pleased Hwll was the view to the north. As far as the eye could see, a gigantic plateau of high, lightly wooded ground unfolded itself in ridge after ridge. Only the wind hissed quietly over this vast