Free Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

no profit in such speculating.
    The last comers joined the band, and we set out for Tolosa.
    All the wide valley of the Garumna seemed, as we made our way eastward along what remained of the old road, to be wine country. I had seen a few vineyards, mostly falling into neglect, clinging
to a terraced hillside here and there throughout southern Britain, but never great stretches of vine country such as this. A smaller, darker people than the Goths were at work tying the vines along
the roadside, and from time to time we could see the great river that cast its gray sinuous curves across and across the countryside – but myself I have always loved best a mountain
stream.
    On the fifth evening, our numbers swollen by other, smaller bands that had joined us on the road, we came in sight of Tolosa where the distant mountains began to thrust up into the sky. We spent
a day there to rest the horses and mules before the roughest part of the journey and get in supplies for ourselves. Everything for four camps among the mountains, said the fortune-teller, who had
taken that road many times before, and liked to bestow advice. And next morning, our numbers increased still further by the men who had joined us in the town, we rode out again with our faces to
the hills.
    As the road lifted, and the vast vale of the Garumna fell behind us, the tall crests of the Pyrenaei, deeply blue as thunderclouds, marched in a vast rampart across the southern sky. But by the
second day I saw that we should not touch the mountains; they rose on either hand, maybe twenty miles away, and between them lay a lesser hill country through which the broad paved road ran,
terraced sometimes, or causewayed across a ravine, toward Narbo Martius and the coast. We jogged on at the same slow pace, pausing in what shade we could find during the heat of the day, passing
the nights huddled about our fires, for even in summer it could be chill at night, while the beasts stamped in their picket lines at the distant smell of wolf, and the guard sat huddled in their
cloaks and longed for morning. We – the Companions and I – slept sword in hand, with the precious riding pads for pillows. We did not distrust our fellow travelers; in such bands it is
a law that no man robs his brother, for the sufficient reason that in robber country where there are broken men among the hills, any breach in the traveling band may let in the enemy, and therefore
any man caught in such an act is driven from the band to make his own way, which, lacking the protection of their numbers, is likely to be a short one. None the less, there was always the risk of a
night attack by the hill robbers themselves, and we were running no risks.
    But on the fifth day, without having met any worse trouble than somebody’s mule being overbalanced by its load and slithering into a ravine, we reined aside from the road into the shade of
a long skein of pine trees where a brown hill stream ran quietly over a paved ford, to make our last noontide halt. And sitting in the shade after we had sparingly watered the horses, and washed
the worst of the white dust out of our own eyes and mouths, I looked down over the gently dropping countryside to Narbo Martius and the sea.
    This was a different world from the vine country around Tolosa; the hillside covered with a dense mat of aromatic things – thyme and broom and stone bramble were the only ones I knew
– and the quivering air was full of the hot rising scent of them and the darker scent of the pines. The land turned pale and sunburned below us, growing more and more bleached and barren as
it went seaward, and the sea was a darker blue than any that I have looked down on from the headlands of Dumnonia, though I have known that the color of a kingfisher’s mantle. A little wind
shivered up through the woods that followed the valleys, so that the thin scatter of gray-green trees turned to silver – wild olives, somebody said they were, later –