Hadrian's Wall_A Novel by William Dietrich

Author:William Dietrich [Dietrich, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

By late morning they were moving again, riding ever farther from the Wall. Valeria had been unable to sleep and felt increasingly exhausted. Her body was sore from the kick she’d received, the long ride, and the hard ground. Her refusal of food had been a mistake. Yet no one offered her anything more or even bothered to look at her. She wasn’t used to being ignored, and that annoyed her as well.

In the daylight she began to get a better sense of the barbarians’ country. They rode a few fragments of old Roman roads, long abandoned after the retreat from Caledonia and recognizable principally for their straightness. Yet their general direction was more circuitous, as if to confuse both hostages and any pursuers of direction, so for the most part they followed the meandering cattle tracks and game trails that doubled as human pathways. There were no towns and few fences, the farmsteads scattered so widely that livestock grazed free. All the homes were Celtic in style, the squat round huts topped by conical thatched roofs, but they seemed meaner and poorer than the habitations south of the Wall: lower to the ground, stained by the smoke of peat, and with more rubbish in the side yards. Chickens roamed, dogs barked, naked children played in the doorways, and each habitation stank of smoke, cooked meat, hay, manure, and leather. Yet a few paces away were fields of grain, meadows of high green grass, and flocks of sheep and prancing ponies.

Their abductors never stopped. Maybe this Arden was more frightened of pursuit than he pretended. They rode into a snarl of hills, the ridges cutting off distant vision and any sense of progress, their gallop occasionally setting off an avalanche of sheep as they breasted a flock. On and on they cantered, even the Celts beginning to slump, and just as Valeria felt so dizzy, sick, and weak with hunger that she feared she might tumble from her saddle, they finally paused for evening. She was in a daze. Her home and her Marcus already seemed impossibly far away, the Wall lost in a blur of hard riding. The stabbing of Clodius was like an unreal nightmare. The country ahead looked steadily higher and more rugged, its farmsteads degenerating into grubby hovels and its fields giving way to raw moor. She was being swallowed by the wilderness.

Their camping place was by a stream in a grove of pine, brown needles forming a cushioning carpet. The horses were picketed once more, a fire was built, and the smell of cooked meat and porridge made Valeria’s stomach twist with anxious longing. Brisa brought them cheese again, and this time she accepted it eagerly, gobbling like a wolf. A skin of some kind of liquid was offered, and she squeezed it to release her first taste of acrid, foamy beer. It was awful but she drank anyway, sensing the nutrition in its dark grain. Thoughts of escape had been replaced with sheer exhaustion.

Then

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.