The Kings in Winter by Cecelia Holland

Author:Cecelia Holland [Holland, Cecelia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction
Published: 1968-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Where he went he hardly cared. The mare carried him west. The clouds blew away in the late afternoon, leaving the sky the color of blue ash. The plain was broken, and the sun was lowering over great headlands: he was near the sea.

He thought, It should matter to me where I’m going.

The mare grazed, walking over the slopes. When the night came, he tethered her and sat down under a tree; if he made a fire it would be seen. His whole body ached from riding. He could feel the long muscles of his back like straps.

What he had said in the King’s hall had been stupid and vicious and he wished that he could unsay it. They would probably count it bravado. They had to know that he didn’t talk that way, usually. It wouldn’t matter to them.

He had mishandled it all. Back there, by the beech grove, he had ruined the one chance he’d ever have to prove that he was right and Cearbhall wrong. The words sounded puny. Nobody was right. He shook his head, trying to settle it; the whole wretchedness of it overcame him.

There were no words for it, no way to talk of it or even think. What could anyone say about it? Cearbhall was dead, not wrong and not right, dead and left for strangers to bury. He, Muirtagh, had killed six other men.

He got up quickly and walked down to the mare. That was all. He could feel, still in his fingers, the way he had drawn back the bow string, the way the bow had flexed; he could see, in his mind, how the men had fallen and how they had looked, dead, but he could say nothing more about it than that he had done it. He mounted the mare and rode on, under the odd, starry sky.

In the first light of dawn he came on a flock of sheep, scattered over a bowl of a glen where nothing but faded heather, gorse and rocks covered the ground. Where there were sheep there might be a stockade; he watched the sky for traces of smoke and saw none. He killed an old ewe and lugged her off into the shelter of a rock outcrop. He made a small fire, using dry wood so that it wouldn’t smoke, and broiled strips of meat over it. The fat dripping into the flames made him suddenly very hungry.

He hadn’t eaten in a long time. No wonder he was thinking wild. He ate all the meat he was cooking and broiled more.

He had to find someplace to stay, someplace to live, far from where other people lived. He had to have water and food within a short distance and the mare needed graze. Now, he thought, this is sensible. This is the sensible thing to do.

Packing up the rest of the ewe in her skin, he started off through the hills, going almost due north to stay out of the rougher ground: a sheep could live there, but the mare couldn’t.

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