Free Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff

tall house had fallen across the way and gave some sort of cover almost up to the side entrance against the wall of the Basilica. And in a short while the boy, with the hound still in leash, was stealing forward through the fallen timbers, into the gateway. On his left rose the wall of the Basilica like a cliff, on his right the blackened ruins of a garland-maker’s shop, and at the end of the narrow cleft between, were sounds of men and beasts and the red flicker of firelight.
    Owain slipped aside, crouching, into the ruins of the shop; and next instant, as he peered out through the charred tangle of the colonnade, the whole scene in the Forum was plain before him. The light was fading fast, though overhead the storm-clouds had caught fire from the sun that was already way down behind the Western Mountains; and the great blaze that was leaping and crackling in the centre of the open space seemed to echo the gold and copper and ice-green of the sky. Upward of a score of men were gathered about the fire, a lean, ragged, wolfish crew, spears in their hands or lying beside them; and dim in the gusty twilight and the fringes of the fire, he saw the shapes of shaggy knee-haltered mountain ponies; further out still, fenced into the lower end of the Forum with a barricade of half-charred timbers, a huddle of cattle, brown flanks and wild eyes and uptossed wide-horned heads. Calves among them too, from the sound of it, and cows in milk.
    ‘I still think we’d have done better to push straight on and get them across the river tonight,’ one of the men was saying discontentedly, and Owain realized with a sense of shock that the words were not spoken in the guttural Saxon, but in his own tongue. Not a Saxon raiding band, but a British one; broken men out of the woods, maybe.
    ‘So near to dark, and with the rain that there’s been in the hills to bring it down in spate?’ growled another, a small lean man with thatch of badger-striped hair, who seemed to be a leader among them. ‘Milch cows with calves among them too? Don’t be a bigger fool than you were born to be, Cunor Bigmouth.’
    ‘Anyway, who is to follow us?’ said a third, in the soft leaping voice of one bred in the mountains. ‘I did not see many Saxons left when we had finished with the farm.’ And there was a general laugh, snarling and ugly with the wolf pack note in it.
    They had killed a half-grown steer out of the herd, and several of them were flaying it beside the fire, the flamelight striking on their fierce intent faces and the blades of the long knives. Owain felt the whimper rise in Dog’s throat, despite his training, at the smell of the warm ox-blood, and strangled it quiet with desperate hands. He had seen all he needed to see; now the thing was to go and find Regina. But even as he drew his knee under him to slip away, he froze once more, as, with scarcely any sound of footsteps in their soft raw-hide shoes, three more men, returning probably from a foraging expedition, loomed in through the Forum arch.
    What happened then was so quick that it was over almost before he realized that anything was happening at all. As the latecomers entered, there was a startled movement among the ruins of the colonnade, right in their path. One of the men pounced on it like a dog on a rat; there was an instant’s scuffle, and a burst of fierce laughing voices, and then a scream. And the man came striding on towards his fellows round the fire, with a small figure fighting like a mountain cat across his shoulder.
    Owain felt sick as from a blow in the stomach; too late to go and find Regina.
    The man swung her down into the midst of the group, holding her fast with her thin arms twisted behind her back. ‘See, lads, here’s something else beside cattle to carry back with us into the mountains.’
    They crowded close around her while in their midst Regina twisted and wrenched at her pinioned arms. Owain caught one glimpse of her, her matted hair falling over her