"A sword?" I was astonished. "It is a man's weapon."
She looked at me coldly. "I can use it as well as any man. I've five tall brothers, Sackett, and we fenced with swords upon many an hour. Give it to me, and if trouble comes, stand aside and watch what a woman can do!"
"Welcome!" I said cheerfully. "I did not doubt that you could do it, but only that you wished to."
"I do not wish. I do what becomes the moment. If it be a cookpot, I cook. If it be a needle, I'll sew, but if it be a blade that is needed, I shall cut a swath.
To mow arms and legs and heads, I think, is no harder than the cutting of thatch."
In the Cotswolds and the valley of the Severan there were Roman ruins all about, nor was I a complete stranger to them for I'd been led their way by Leland's manuscript, and remembered much of what I'd read.
We camped one night in the ruins of a Roman villa, and drew water from a mossy fountain where Roman patricians must once have drunk. Where we lay our heads that night, Roman heads had lain, though in better fare than we. But now they were gone, and who knew their names, or cared? And who should know ours, ours who had but the green grass for carpet, and the ruined walls of a once noble house for shelter?
Lila was a quiet woman. She spoke little and complained none at all, yet she was woman-too much woman to go off to America with no man of her own. I said as much, and she looked at me and said, "A man will come. Where I am, he will come."
"You'll see few white men in America, or any other but Indians. Good folk some of them, but they do not think like we do."
"I shall not marry an Indian. I shall marry an Englishman or perhaps a Welshman."
Then we forded a stream and rode up a narrow pass between rocks, and when night came we were in a wild and mysterious land, a place of long shadows and great rocky battlements and rushing cold streams and rich green grass around hard black rocks that shone like ice in the dim light of the after-sunset. It was a primeval landscape. Suddenly, they came upon us, a dozen or more of them. Wild, uncouth creatures, some clad in skins, some in rags, wild, mad things wielding all manner of weapons.
They came up from the rocks where they had lain in wait. Screaming wildly, they came down upon us. Lila drew her sword and wheeled her horse to meet them. I tried to yell that flight was our best chance, but she was beyond hearing. She did not scream, but yelled some wild Welsh shout, and light caught the flashing blade of her sword as she swept on toward them.
I barely had time to draw and fire a pistol, and then she was among them.
But what had happened? After her wild Welsh yell they had suddenly frozen, mouths wide to scream, staring at her. Then as one man, or woman, for their were women among them, they fled.
Her sword reached one, I think, before they were gone into the rocks from which they came. Then Lila wheeled her horse, towering in her stirrups, and shouted after them, a hoarse, challenging cry.
Her sword was bloody and she leaned from her saddle and thrust it into a hummock of earth and moss, once ... twice. Then she sheathed it.
Awed, I led us away up the trail to where it went through a pass in the mountains, and she followed quietly.
Later, when the road widened, we rode side by side. "What did you say that frightened them when you called out?" I asked.
"It does not matter."
"It was a curious thing. They stopped as if struck, then they fled as if all the terrors were upon them."
"Indeed, they would have been. They well knew when to fly. That lot! I have heard stories of them! Poor, misbegotten, inbred creatures that live in caves and murder innocent travelers. The soldiers have come for them a dozen times, but they disappear. Nobody finds them ... at least no Englishman."
She was silent then, and I as well. More than two hours had passed since we had seen even the slightest sign of life, and nothing at all but the wild mountains and the rushing cold streams and the rocks that lay like chunks of iron on every hand.
"There's a cottage yon," she said, pointing ahead.
"You have been this way before?"
"No."
"You are from Anglesey, Lila, and you spoke of Druids."
"Did I now?"
"It is said there are people on Anglesey who have the gift."
She rode on, offering no reply. We were ascending a pass through wild, heavily forested hills. Suddenly it came to me.
"This is the pass from Bettws-y-Coed!"
She turned her head. "You know it? You have not been to Wales before?"
"I have not. Is this the pass?"
"It is." Now it was her turn to be curious. "How did you know?"
I was not exactly sure, only somehow it had come upon me. "I was told of it once ... long ago."
"And so you know it in the dark?" For night had fallen.
"I was told of how it looked in the dark, and how it ... felt."
She looked at me again, but now we were approaching a high place in the pass, and down the far slope we saw something white against the blackness, and then a dog barked.
"The cottage," she said. "We will stop there, I think."
"As you will. It is better than the damp hills and the rocks."
"They are Welsh hills," she said sternly, "and Welsh rocks."
Our horses had been growing more and more weary as we moved on, and now as they saw the faint glow of light from a window, they moved forward eagerly. At the door I dismounted while a huge dog barked viciously, his hair on end, teeth bared.
Lila spoke sharply to him in Welsh and he cringed and moved back, but snarled still. We heard the sound of a bar being removed, then a voice spoke from a crack. "Go away! The place is closed!"
Lila spoke sharply and the door crack widened and a girl thrust her head out.
"Who is it that speaks thus?" she demanded, in English, then added a word in Welsh.
"We have traveled far, and have far yet to go," I said quietly. "It is myself and a woman."
"Are you wed, then?"
"We are not," I said. "She is a friend to my betrothed."
"Hah!" The door opened wider. "Then the more of a fool is your betrothed to let you out upon the Welsh hills with another woman. De'il would I be so generous!"
Lila had stepped down from the horse and she towered above the girl in the door.
"We would eat and sleep here," she said, "and have our horses fed."
It was spacious enough inside, a wide room with a low ceiling and a stone-flagged floor, washed clean enough to eat from, which was not all that common.
There was good furniture about and a fire on the hearth, and beside the hearth an old man smoking a pipe. A churn stood in a comer near a sideboard with several rows of dishes.
The girl, seen in the light inside, was dark and pretty, with quick black eyes and lovely lips. "Come," she said, "sit and be rested. My brother will see to your horses."
She looked again at Lila. "You look Welsh," she said.
"I am from Angelsey," Lila replied.
They eyed each other, taking a measure, respectful but wary.
"He speaks of me as a friend," Lila said. "I am in service to the one who will be his bride. She is on her way to America. We go to her now."
The girl looked at me, hands on hips. Then she said, "We've eaten, but there's a bit of bread and cheese and I'll scrape about and see what else."
The old man looked at me thoughtfully. "You are also Welsh?"
"English," I said.
"Ah? I would have said you were Welsh."
Lila turned and looked directly at me. "Who was your mother?"
"I know little of her, only that she was gentle, very beautiful, and that my father rescued her from some pirates in the western isles, and that she had told him she was not frightened because she knew he was coming for her."
"She knew?" Lila looked at the old man, and the girl, who had come back into the room, had stopped also, listening.