Crossroads in Time by Sarah Woodbury

Author:Sarah Woodbury
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

27 August 1288

Near Clifford Castle

David

The Dyke was comprised of mounded earth, but the turf was thick, and even what had looked from the top like a sharp drop to the bottom, didn’t turn out to be quite as severe a decline as all that. David had told William to trust his horse, because he knew it was the right answer, not because it came naturally to David either. He’d had to learn it, as he’d learned so many things since he’d arrived in Wales six years ago.

The base of the Dyke on the Welsh side was fronted by a deep ditch, mostly filled in after several hundred years of wind and weather, and they scrambled up it without too much trouble. That they were in Wales would normally have given David every confidence, but the English soldiers would follow. What did they have to lose? The Treaty was dead, stamped into the mud at their feet.

David hadn’t realized how angry that made him until just now. He and his father had known that the Normans would violate the Treaty eventually—of course they would. Every single Norman had heard a lifetime of slander and mockery towards the Welsh, ridiculing them as a people and condemning them for their barbaric ways. His mother’s academic colleagues would have called it treating them as the other.

For all that, however, David hadn’t been prepared for the Normans to come at them with such force and under these circumstances. And David had to admit that what maybe bothered him the most about the events of the last few days was that he hadn’t predicted any of them. It was painful to acknowledge his arrogance in thinking that he could.

They crossed two fields, and headed into the woods on the other side, with still no sign of the English riders behind them. Maybe they had stopped at the Dyke?

“Do you know how much farther?” Clare spoke these words in Welsh, revealing a proficiency that equaled that of Humphrey de Bohun. David resigned himself to not being able to keep his communications with Lili a secret, not if all four of them could converse interchangeably in Welsh, French, and English. It was just his luck that he was associating with the only two Normans who’d bothered to learn the language of their subjects.

“No,” David said. “Do you know, Lili?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “But there’s nothing but farms and fields between here and Painscastle.”

“Then we ride as hard and as fast as we can until we reach it,” David said.

Lili sniffed the air and pointed to the southwest. “We’ll have more rain soon. Tomorrow or the next day, I think.”

David smiled, but didn’t say what he was thinking—that he didn’t have to be in tune with the weather to know that in Wales, rain always came eventually.

It was only five miles from Clifford to Painscastle. They’d come half that distance already, and the remainder were the longest miles of David’s life. The moon shone brightly down, illuminating every tree and hillock, but leaving too much in shadow.

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