Free Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

and here and there
the pale discs of the threshing floors caught the heat-drained sunlight and shone like silver coins. Strange to be in a land where one could be so sure of the weather that one threshed in the
open.
    But of all the scene before me, the thing that claimed and held my gaze was the pale checkered smudge of a town on the far-distant coast. Narbo Martius; and somewhere among its horse guards and
in fields, the stallions and brood mares that I had come to buy; the horses of my dream.

chapter five
Bedwyr
    A T SUNSET, WITH THE DUST HAZE THAT ROSE FROM THE hooves of the pack beasts turned to red-gold clouds in the westering rays, we clattered under the gate
arch into Narbo Martius, and found the place thrumming like a bee swarm with the crowds pouring in to the horse fair. It must have been a fine place once, one could see that even now; the walls of
the forum and basilica still stood up proudly above the huddle of reed thatch and timber, with the sunset warm on peeling plaster and old honey-colored stone; and above the heads of the crowds the
air was full of the darting of swallows who had their mud nests under the eaves of every hut and along every ledge and acanthus-carved cranny of the half-ruined colonnades. The smell of the evening
cooking fires was the arid reek of burning horse dung, such as the herdsmen burn in the valleys of Arfon.
    The two or three inns which the place still possessed were already full and spilling over with merchants and their beasts, but the open spaces within the city walls had been roughly fenced off
with hurdles and rope and dead thornbushes, to serve as camps for the lesser folk and latecomers, and when the trading band broke up, we found a place in one of these, where a couple of score of
mules and their drivers were already encamped among their newly unloaded bales, and an ancient merchant sat under a striped canopy, scratching himself contentedly beneath his earth-colored blanket
robes, while his servants made camp about him. There was of course no service of any kind, no one in charge of anything, save for an immensely fat man with green glass earrings in his hairy ears,
who lolled under the awning of a wine booth – it was good wine, though; we tried it later – nor was there any food for the men, though we found that fodder for the beasts could be got
close by. So while Fulvius and Owain, who were our best foragers, went off to buy cooked food, the rest of us watered and tended the horses and made camp as best we could in the corner of the
corral not already occupied with kicking and snarling mules.
    When the other two returned, we supped off loaves with little aromatic seeds sprinkled over the crust and cold boiled meat with garlic and green olives whose strange taste I was by this time
getting used to; and washed it down with a couple of jars of drink from the wine booth. Then we lay down to sleep save for Bericus and Alun Dryfed, who took the first watch.
    For a long while I lay awake also, listening to the nighttime stirrings and tramplings of the camp and the city, and looking up at the familiar stars that had guided and companioned me so often
on the hunting trail, every fiber of me quivering with a strange expectancy that concerned something more than the horses that I should buy tomorrow. It had been growing in me all evening, that
mood of intense waiting, the certainty that something, someone, was waiting for me in Narbo Martius – or that I was waiting for them. So might a man feel, waiting for the woman he loved. I
even wondered if it might be death. But I fell asleep at last, and slept quietly and lightly, as a man sleeps on the hunting trail.
    The midsummer horse fair, held on the level ground above the shore, lasted for seven days, and so I should be able to make my choice with care and maybe time for second thoughts, but by evening
on the second day I had bought well over half the horses I wanted, by dint of much vehement bargaining – duns