New Blood From Old Bones by Sheila Radley Page B

there was a long steep way to fall. Glancing up, he saw that he was near the top of the mound where the massive figure of Gilbert waited, a stone gripped in either hand.
    Were he still a boy Will would have acted without thought, swinging up lightly to the top of the mound and using his greater speed to dodge past Gib. But that was no longer feasible. For a man of impaired agility, who had come to pacify his brother rather than to challenge him, prudence was the only course.
    Shielding himself as best he could from the debris that still came down, Will spat out a mouthful of chalk dust and sued for peace.
    â€˜ Pax , Gib!’ he shouted, hoping that his brother would remember that much at least of their schoolday Latin. ‘Have done, I say …’
    The kicking stopped. He looked up again. Gilbert had moved forward to the edge of the mound and stood towering above him, his great hands still gripping the missiles, his hair and beard wild. ‘ Pax ?’ he said venomously. ‘I’ll pledge no peace to a brother who spies on me!’
    Will cursed himself for a fool. Had he a groat’s worth of the prudence he had just prided himself on, he would not have made this climb. His perch was precarious, his leg ached abominably, and their brother was as violent as Meg had warned. He could neither retreat nor stay where he was. The only way to advance was by talking, and that as reassuringly as he knew how.
    â€˜I am not here to spy on you, Gib. Nor yet to do battle with you, for I have no cause. I’ve come merely to see the old keep, and to recall the merry times we had here.’
    â€˜Pah!’ growled Gilbert. There was dark suspicion in his voice, but he turned away and flung his missiles elsewhere.
    Will seized the opportunity to hoist himself up to solid ground. The old defensive walls that had risen straight from the top of the mound had been quarried away completely at this point, making a gaping entrance to what remained of the keep. Gilbert had disappeared, growling, among the ruins, and Will limped about for a few moments until the cramp in his leg had eased. His head was sore, and his left eye was nearly blinded by the blood that was trickling into it. Silently cursing Gib, he wiped away the blood with his sleeve and remembered, with a fleeting satisfaction, that the shirt was not his own but one of his brother’s.
    Gilbert had removed himself to the far side of the upper ward, and was now hurling stones at the jackdaws that made their habitation in the ruins. Will thought it politic to reassure him that it was indeed the old keep he had come to see, and so he made a point of wandering through what little was left of the hall and passageways. Many of the walls were no more than shoulder-high, and since his last visit, years ago, plants had sprouted thickly from crevices between the mossy stones. Pushing past them he sought and found another gap in the wall, opening on to a pathway that led down to the foot of the mound. He was glad to know of it, for he had no intention of returning by way of the precipitous chalk face – nor yet of climbing it again, with or without Gib’s menacing presence.
    His brother was still trying to stone the jackdaws. They circled high, just out of his reach, calling their noisy kyow kyow , and Gilbert shouted curses at them as he missed.
    Before approaching him, Will went to the western side of the keep and looked out over the huddled, smoke-wreathed roofs and gables of the town. Firelight and the sounds of voice and horn and drum rose from the market place, which heaved with evening merry-makers, and the air was larded with the smell from a hundred feast-day cooking pots.
    In the valley beyond the town stood the great grey bulk of the priory, secure in its precinct within its own high walls. It was only from up here, on the old upper ward of the castle, that the massiveness of the priory church and the extent and grandeur of the buildings that