Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

and held the narrow end of it to her dry mouth. ‘Suck,’ he ordered.

    ‘Why?’
    ‘Suck, and you will see why.’
    Regina obeyed in a half-hearted way. ‘It’s sweet.’
    ‘Why else do you suppose they call it honeysuckle? Here’s another. Suck again.’
    So squatting beside their little fire as the day faded into twilight, and the twilight deepened to dark, he fed Regina whenever she was awake, on the drops of sweetness at the base of the honeysuckle horns. But often he was not sure whether she was awake or not, for she moaned and muttered and tossed about with her eyes half open and half closed, and once when Dog nosed at her in bewilderment, she cried out in terror and beat at him with her hands, thinking that he was a wolf.
    Once in the night, when the rain had stopped for a while, and there was a dark breathing quietness, Owain thought he heard a dog bark somewhere a long way off. Dog heard it too, and raised his head and listened. But there was nothing more to hear.
    Morning came again, and he knew that Regina could go no further. She was not threshing about now, but it did not seem to him that that was a good sign, for it was as though the quiet came from weakness rather than any slackening of the fever. The wind had shifted its direction, too, and the rain which had not stopped all night (surely it must stop soon—they had had four days of it off and on) had begun to beat into their shelter. Owain sat for a long time shielding Regina as best he could. Then she began to cough again. It was a harsh tearing cough with not enough breath in it, and it hurt him to hear it; and though she was fully awake now, he did not think she knew him. He sat her up and held her tightly against him while she fought for breath, and when the fit passed, and he laid her down again, he knew, remembering the dog he had heard in the night, what he was going to do.
    He pulled the old wet cloak round her, tucking it in as tightly as he could in the hope that she would not be able to push it down again, and whistling up Dog, who was rooting in the undergrowth, made him lie down close against her, between her and the stream. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Keep. On guard, brother,’ and got slowly to his feet, with the quietness of desperation on him.
    Before he was more than a couple of spear-lengths down the streamside, he heard Dog whining piteously, and when he checked in his tracks and looked back, the hound was sitting up and staring after him as though making up his mind to disobey the order and follow. ‘Stay!’ Owain repeated fiercely; and Dog lay down again.
    Owain scrambled on downstream in the direction in which he had heard the dog barking in the night. He was prepared for a long walk, for sound carries far at night when there is rain about, especially up or down a valley; but it seemed even longer than it was, for he was weak with emptiness himself, and stumbled and fell more than once in the rough ground. But at last his nose caught the whisper of wood smoke and stalled oxen, that does not belong to the forest unless man also is there. And as he halted, sniffing, he heard small but unmistakably the sound of a horse walking lame on a track, and again, quite near now, the baying of watch-dogs.
    He pushed on with fresh heart, and in a little, the stream ran out into open air, not gradually as into a natural clearing, but with the abruptness that means felled timber.
    Crouched among the tangle of the woodshore, Owain looked out over the clearing. He saw three fields, the sheen of young barley, the denser green of a bean patch, the brown of spring-ploughed fallow, and beyond a strip of scrubby pasture, the darkness of the forest closing in once more. And close beside a rough track, the bracken-thatched huddle of wattle-and-daub where the Barbarians had made their home. It all looked very settled. Here, deep in the Saxon lands, it had been like this for a hundred years.
    His hatred of the Saxons rose in his throat like vomit, and for