Read Dawn Wind for Free Online Page B

something … somehow life would go on again. But there was nothing. Viroconium was dead. All the world he knew was dead and cold, and he understood for the first time—he had never quite believed that either, even though he had found their bodies—that he would never see his father and Ossian again.
    Dog sat beside him, watching with ears pricked and head a little on one side, as though he wondered why his Lord made these distressful muffled noises, and why his shoulders jerked.
    Later, when Owain had cried himself into stillness, Dog lay down beside him and licked his face; and the boy put his arm round the hound’s neck, feeling some kind of dim comfort in the warmth and living strength of it under the harsh hide. And sleep came for them both together.
    Once in the night Dog roused, and Owain, woken by his movement, felt the hair lift on the hound’s neck as he raised his head growling softly, and looked towards the entrance of the shop. For a moment his own hair prickled on his nape, and his heart began to race. But nothing happened, and there was no sound save the rain on the roof.
    Next time he woke it was full daylight; the rain had stopped and there were smeared gleams of light on the wet herring-bone bricks of the pavement. Dog was afoot already, and sniffing about the doorway and the Forum Gate, as though after whatever had been there in the night. Owain sat up, and drew his legs under him, and got slowly to his feet. He was so stiff and weary, that he felt as though he had been beaten, and for the first few moments he could hardly stand. He lurched across to the shop entrance, and stood propped weakly against the fire-scorched doorpost, looking out across the Forum. He did not know what he was going to do now, he had not thought beyond getting back to Viroconium. But meanwhile, his body knew that it must have food, and even before food, water. Dog was lapping the puddles that last night’s rain had left in the roadway, but it wasn’t easy for a human to do that, Owain knew, for he had tried. There was a fountain in the centre of the Forum; it was dead like everything else, but when he went to look, the drain was choked with leaves, and there was a little rain water in the green-stained bowl. He managed to scoop some up in his cupped hands and drink before it all ran back between his fingers. ‘Food now,’ said his body, and he felt inside the breast of his tunic for the snares of springy plaited horsehair that Priscus had given him. Evening was the time to set a snare, but if he waited until then he could get nothing until tomorrow; if he set the snares now, there was a chance, though only a slim one, that there might be something in one of them by night, and if not, he had lost nothing. Anyway, he had nothing else to do.
    It seemed a long way back to the South Gate, and he had not realized until now how footsore he was. Once he thought he heard footsteps behind him, very light and pattering, but when he looked round, there was no one there. The burial ground outside the walls had fallen into decay like the rest of Viroconium, long ago; saplings had sprung up between the graves, and here and there arched sprays of bramble and grey-bearded traveller’s-joy laced the tombstones together, and looking about him, Owain thought that it would be as good a place as any for his snares. It was not long before he found what he wanted, the hollow line of a hare’s run among the grass and brambles. While Dog stood by watching, he set his first snare at the foot of a stone to one Marcus Petronius of Vicenza, Standard Bearer to the 14th Legion, aged 39 years; and wondered, as he drew the crimson-leaved bramble sprays down to conceal his handiwork, if Marcus Petronius would have been angry or pleased, or cared at all, to know that one day somebody was going to set a snare for Lord Longears on his grave.
    He set the two remaining snares in different runs, ate a couple of handfuls of blackberries, not more, hungry though he