The Summer of the Danes by Ellis Peters Page B

blue of the sky. The river was a winding silver thread, twining a tortuous
course through and over shoals of tidal mud and sand on its way northward to
the sea, its waters at this hour so spread and diminished that it could be
forded without difficulty. And after the crossing, as Cadfael had warned, they
climbed.
    The
first few green and sunny miles gave way to a rising track that kept company
with a little tributary river, mounting steeply until the trees fell behind,
and they emerged gradually into a lofty world of moorland, furze and heather,
open and naked as the sky. No plough had ever broken the soil here, there was
no visible movement but the ruffling of the sudden wind among the gorse and low
bushes, no inhabitants but the birds that shot up from before the foremost
riders, and the hawks that hung almost motionless, high in air. And yet across
this desolate but beautiful wilderness marched a perceptible causeway laid with
stones and cushioned with rough grass, raised clear of the occasional marshy
places, straddling the shallow pools of peat-brown water, making straight for
the lofty wall of honed rock that seemed to Brother Mark utterly impenetrable.
In places where the firm rock broke through the soil and gave solid footing,
the raised sarn remained visible as a trodden pathway needing no ramp of
stones, but always maintained its undeviating line ahead.
    “Giants
made this,” said Brother Mark in awe.
    “Men
made it,” said Cadfael. It was wide where it was clearly to be seen, wide
enough for a column of men marching six abreast, though horsemen had to ride no
more than three in line, and Owain’s archers, who knew this territory well,
drew off on either flank and left the paved way to the company they guarded. A
road, Cadfael thought, made not for pleasure, not for hawking or hunting, but
as a means of moving a great number of men from one stronghold to another as
quickly as possible. It took small count of gradients, but set its sights
straight ahead, deviating only where that headlong line was rankly impossible
to maintain, and then only until the obstacle was passed.
    “But
through that sheer wall,” Mark marvelled, staring ahead at the barrier of the
mountains, “surely we cannot go.”
    “Yes,
you will find there’s a gate through, narrow but wide enough, at the pass of
Bwlch y Ddeufaen. We thread through those hills, keep this high level three or
four more miles, and after that we begin to descend.”
    “Towards
the sea?”
    “Towards
the sea,” said Cadfael.
    They
came to the first decline, the first sheltered valley of bushes and trees, and
in the heart of it bubbled a spring that became a lively brook, and accompanied
them downhill gradually towards the coast. They had long left behind the
rivulets that flowed eastward towards the Conwy; here the streams sprang
sparkling into short, precipitous lives, and made headlong for the sea. And
down with this most diminutive of its kind went the track, raised to a firm
level above the water, at the edge of the cleft of trees. The descent became
more gradual, the brook turned somewhat away from the path, and suddenly the
view opened wide before them, and there indeed was the sea.
    Immediately
below them a village lay in its patterned fields, beyond it narrow meadowland
melting into salt flats and shingle, and then the wide expanse of sea, and
beyond that again, distant but clear in the late afternoon light, the coast of Anglesey
stretched out northward, to end in the tiny island of Ynys Lanog. From the
shore towards which they moved the shallow water shimmered pale gold overlaid
with aquamarine, almost as far as the eye could distinguish colour, for Lavan
Sands extended the greater part of the way to the island shore, and only there
in the distance did the sea darken into the pure, greenish blue of the deep
channel. At the sight of this wonder about which he had dreamed and speculated
all day long,