Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

and there he was. I want to go out of here.’
    ‘We can’t go out, not until those men are away,’ Owain told her. ‘We’ll get back towards the stoke-hole, but we can’t go further. There—isn’t any harm in him, not now.’
    ‘I wish I hadn’t brayed after him in the street,’ Regina said.
    The flame burned his fingers and he dropped the twig. The darkness rushed in again as the tiny flame twisted and turned blue on the beaten earth floor, and guttered out. He reached out to where he knew Regina was, found her hand and pulled her towards him.
    It seemed a very long way back to the stoke-hole, but they reached it at last and felt the wind clearly cold on their faces. The rain had stopped and the clouds parted, and one small white star looked down at them through the charred beams and the bramble sprays, which was somehow comforting. Owain put his arms round Regina and pulled her hard against him to stop her shaking. He wished he had his cloak to wrap round both of them. Dog lay warm and heavy across their feet, starting and twitching from time to time. There was no sound from the Forum.
    The night took a long time to pass. Sometimes they dozed a little, huddled together, but never for more than a few moments at a time, and never deeply enough to forget where they were, nor what was in the darkness behind them. The rain came back, and then cleared again, and at last the chinks of sky overhead began to pale a little and turn ash-coloured. A willow wren twittered in the wild thickets of the garden. From the direction of the Forum a steer lowed, and then another. Dog pricked his ears.
    ‘They’re moving,’ Owain said. It was the first time either of them had spoken in all the long night that lay behind them. Regina raised her head to listen. At any rate she had stopped shaking.
    Presently they heard the confused sounds of a cattle drove coming nearer, nearer yet. To the lowing of the cattle was added the pelter of hooves and the shouting of men. They were heading down the broad main street towards the West Gate. To Owain and Regina, crouching tense in their hiding place, the sounds seemed to leap upon them in a burst, as the raiders swept past the narrow entrance of the alley-way; and Dog growled deep in his throat. Then it was growing fainter again, fainter, dying away into the gusty morning. And at last it was gone altogether. The light was growing fast, and thrush and robin were answering the willow wren in the tangled gardens, as though all that had happened had been nothing but an evil dream.
    Owain waited a while longer, to be quite sure; then he straightened his arms from round Regina. They were so stiff and numb that for a few moments they did not seem to belong to him at all, and nor did his legs when he drew them under him. ‘We can go now,’ he said. ‘Oh, but I’m stiff!’ It was queer how ordinary his voice sounded.
    They crawled out from under the debris, and without anything said between them, Regina and Dog looking on, Owain set to pulling and heaving at the fallen tangle of charred wood, until with a slithering crash, it came down over the beam, closing the little dark entrance behind them. That would at least keep out wolf and wild dog from the poor bones inside. Then they went back through the morning emptiness of Viroconium, through the Forum, where horse droppings and cattle dung and the great black scar of a fire was left to tell of the night that had passed, to the little store-room at the back of Kyndylan’s Palace.
    As they came nearer along the broken colonnade, Owain felt Regina begin to hang back a little; he was walking slower himself, wondering what they would find when they got there. But when they reached the low doorway, and he ducked down the two steps after Regina, with Dog bounding ahead, they found everything just as it had been yesterday. Clearly the raiders had not chanced on their hideout at all. Owain stood looking round him, seeing his ragged cloak spread over the dry