From Across the Ancient Waters

by Michael Phillips

  Percy had seen no sheep or cattle for an hour, though plentiful deer and rabbits were hiding among the trees.

  They began to cross the flat grassland.

  Suddenly with a shout, Florilyn leaned forward in the saddle and burst into a gallop. Hair streaming behind her, within seconds she was fifty yards away.

  Red Rhud required no encouragement. With a tremendous burst, she shot after Grey Tide.

  A cry of terror escaped Percy’s lips as he lurched back in the saddle. Frantically grabbing at the saddle edge, he held on for dear life. Tearing up clods of the soft turf with her hooves and throwing them up behind, his mount flew across the ground.

  Florilyn persisted in the reckless sprint toward the far end of the grassy flat then reined in, laughing gaily as she threw her head around.

  Percy rode up out of breath, white-faced and angry. His mare slowed, though still pranced with spirit. The brief gallop, far from expending the great creature’s energy, had only excited it the more. “I nearly fell!” he exclaimed.

  Florilyn did not reply, only smiled. Her coy expression gave away nothing. She turned in her saddle and rode on at a slow walk.

  Percy pulled alongside about to speak again then judged it best for now to say nothing. Maybe she hadn’t done it intentionally. It certainly wouldn’t do to anger her when he was at her mercy and so far from the manor.

  Percy’s respite from the precarious gallop, however, was short-lived.

  Even more rashly than before, again Florilyn shouted to her horse and burst with astonishing acceleration into another madcap gallop. “Race you to the ridge!” she shouted over her shoulder.

  “I don’t think—” began Percy.

  It was no use. His words gave way to a piercing wail of terrified surprise. His own steed had again bolted, exactly as Florilyn knew she would. The two mares, so different in temperament, were actually twins. A great rivalry existed between them, a fact the viscount’s daughter had decided to exploit on this day.

  Looking behind her, Florilyn saw the response she had expected. She dug her heels into Grey Tide’s sides and urged the mare to the full measure of her speed. For the gentle horse Radnor said she was, with her mistress on her back, few horses in all the region of Llanfryniog could equal her for raw speed.

  Clutching reins and saddle as he was wildly tossed about on Red Rhud’s back, Percy made a gallant effort to keep his seat. He might have succeeded, too, had their way continued on level ground.

  But Florilyn had other designs. Unlike Percy, she was not a bit lost. She knew exactly where she was, knew the precipitous terrain that lay up the steep slope ahead. She knew, too, what must be the inevitable result with Red Rhud straining every muscle of her great flanks to overtake her twin.

  Florilyn kept on, therefore, as fast as she dared, flew into the trees at the far end of the flat and up the incline that began almost immediately. Over fallen logs Grey Tide leaped without breaking stride, across a stream eight feet wide, and through another level of about fifty yards. There she swung the mare sharply left. If Percy behind her managed to keep in the saddle over the trees and stream, the steep path she followed for the next two hundred yards would surely prove too much for his novitiate equestrian skill.

  She dared not look back. She would have to be able to profess innocence to her father that she did not know when she might have lost him. Therefore, she leaned forward, hugging her chest to Grey Tide’s long neck to keep in the saddle herself and scurried the rest of the way up the near vertical ascent. Reaching the crest, she straightened again in the saddle and galloped along the top of the ridge for some distance.

  Soon she heard Red Rhud behind her and gaining. She suspected the cause well enough—that the burden on the red mare’s back had been reduced at some point along the way by exactly the weight of a sixteen-year-old Glaswegian.

  Finally Florilyn glanced back over her shoulder. It was as she thought. Red Rhud was flying toward her riderless.

  She laughed, thoroughly delighted with herself, and eased back on Grey Tide’s reins. Red Rhud came alongside. Keeping up a swift canter, Florilyn now led the two horses on a slant down the opposite side of the ridge, thinking herself well out of sight of any human eyes, and then in a westerly direction that would take them back to the manor.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Heaven-Sent Guide

  The final steep ascent had not been necessary to achieve Florilyn’s end.

  Percy had barely managed to cling to his seat as Red Rhud leaped the first fallen tree across her path. But repeating the feat when the mare went airborne a few seconds later, landing on the opposite side of the wide stream with a great jolting earthquake of a bounce, proved impossible.

  Luckily the water flowed through a grassy section of wood or he might have been seriously hurt. As it was, when Percy looked up from the soft grass where he found himself after his inglorious tumble to see Red Rhud disappearing through the trees in the distance, though his back would feel it tomorrow, the chief injury he had suffered was to his pride—actually not a bad injury to sustain. As humility is its opposite, for a humble spirit to emerge within the human character usually requires that pride be dealt a series of painful blows by the hammer of circumstance, and Percy had just had one to his.

  He took stock of himself, realized nothing was broken, then drew in a deep breath and climbed to his feet. He knew the general direction his mount had gone. He could still hear her hooves thudding in the distance as she made for the ridge. He had no doubt Florilyn would be waiting for him at the top with an insufferably obnoxious grin.

  He set off trudging up the hill. It took Percy some fifteen or twenty minutes, after a much steeper climb than he had expected, to emerge into the clearing along one of the two ridges he had seen from the field below.

  He stopped, breathing heavily, and gazed about. There was no sign of Florilyn. The entire world was still and quiet.

  He turned around, looking back and forth and in every direction a second time. His initial bewilderment slowly turned to anger. The vixen had deserted him in the middle of nowhere!

  Nor did he have the slightest notion in which direction lay the sea, the village, or the manor. Beyond the two ridges, which seemed more or less to join a quarter or half mile away, lay an endless series of forested hills, broken here and there in the distance by a few higher peaks. Had he known the the region better, he would have been able to identify these hills as sitting in a near straight line between Mount Snowdon in the north and Calder Idris farther south. From their relation to one another, it would have been an easy matter to tell whether he was looking north, south, east, or west. But as he was not familiar with the northern Cambrians, he had no idea. Nor, for the present as it beamed down from overhead, did the sun accurately suggest to Percy his bearings.

  In every direction he looked, the outlook was identical. He was not high enough to see the sea beyond any of the ridges or ranges. He might walk for hours and only succeed in getting farther from home and more deeply into what could be dangerous mountains. He did not relish the thought of spending a night out here alone. Snow was not unheard of in June. And no doubt more wild animals came out after dark than he cared to meet.

  An evil oath began to rise to his lips. But it never reached them.

  A sound interrupted it, as if sent from heaven to answer the cry for help it did not occur to him to lift to the One who knew where everyone was.

  “She’s g–g–gone, M–M–Mr. Drummond,” a voice said simply.

  Percy spun around in terror, as if the preternatural silence had been broken by the roar of a lion rather than the gentle timbre of one of God’s angels. But the stupendous relief of finding himself not alone rushed in to banish his fear.

  There stood his stuttering young friend who gave bouquets of wildflowers to strangers!

  “Gwyneth!” he exclaimed. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”

  Percy spoke more truth than he realized.

  “I have been w–w
–watching you and Lady F–Florilyn as you rode,” she said, coming toward him with a smile.

  “Where is she now?” asked Percy.

  “She is gone, M–M–Mr. Drummond. She kept riding b–back down there.” Gwyneth pointed down the hill.

  Percy followed her arm but could see nothing.

  “I knew you had b–been thrown, so I w—w–waited for you. Are you hurt, M–M–Mr. Drummond?”

  He answered her with a smile. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Did Florilyn see you?”

  “I would not have let her see me.”

  “Why not?”

  “She would have said cruel things.”

  “Well,” said Percy, his self-deprecating humor rising to the surface as he began to feel better about his predicament, “it would appear I am not much of a horseman.”

  “Y–y–you were riding my lord’s w–w–wildest m–mare.”

  “You don’t say,” said Percy with significant tone. “His wildest mare?”

  “R–R–Red Rhud throws everyone except L–Lady Florilyn.”

  Percy chuckled at the revealing information. Though calming under the mesmerizing girl’s peculiar power, he was still irritated enough to find little humor in Florilyn’s deception.

  “How do you come to be so far from home?” he asked.

  “It is not so very far. B–b–besides, I know every inch of these hills.”

  “Are you not afraid to wander them alone?”

  “No, Mr. Drummond.”

  “Can you lead me back to the manor?”

  “Of course. Come, Mr. Drummond,” she said, walking to his side and taking his hand. “I will show you.” She led the way down the hill, Percy followed as if he were a compliant child, laughing at the incongruity of it. She treated him as if he were a full-grown adult, yet she carried herself with the maturity and self-confidence of a fifty-year-old.

  Who could not be charmed by such a one!

  Before they had gone far, Gwyneth let go of Percy’s hand, paused, shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand, and looked down in the opposite direction. An expression of question crossed her usually placid countenance.

  “What is it?” asked Percy.

  “Nothing,” she replied thoughtfully. “I saw some men off there a few weeks ago. They weren’t from around here. I did not like them.”

  “Were they so close you could see their faces so well as to know whether you liked them or not?”

  “I was not close. But I could tell they were not good men.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I could tell.”

  Intrigued, Percy did not press the matter. In another minute Gwyneth was scampering down the hillside with Percy beside her.

  They descended the ridge and within minutes were surrounded by overspreading boughs of pine and fir. Percy saw no hint of a trail anywhere. “How do you know where to go?” he asked.

  “Because I know where we are. I know the sea is this way,” she answered, pointing in front of her. “I walk everywhere here. I cannot get lost.”

  “You have been in this exact place before?”

  “Of course. This is near one of my special places.”

  “Your … ‘special places’?”

  “Yes. I have many special places where I go to visit animals and visit God and visit my mother.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Percy.

  “My mother is dead, Mr. Drummond.”

  “I am sorry, Gwyneth. I didn’t know that.”

  “She is with God. So at my special places, I go to be alone and visit them and talk to them.”

  “And one of them is near here?”

  “Yes, would you like to see it?”

  “I would, yes … very much. But isn’t it a private special place?”

  “It is my special place. So I can bring anyone to it. Remember, Mr. Drummond, you are my friend now, not a stranger. The flowers made us friends. So I can show it to you.”

  She continued to lead Percy through the thick wood. They came a few minutes later to a little brook. It was no more than a foot or two wide and could have been easily stepped across. Instead, Gwyneth turned and led Percy along the edge of it. They were still descending from the same ridge where they had begun.

  The brook was swift and noisy, splashing over rocks and pebbles, creating tiny little waterfalls as it went. Its water was brown and foamy from the mountains and hills of peat through which it came.

  They continued another ten or fifteen minutes. The downward slope grew less steep as they reached the bottom between this ridge and the next one westward. Through a dense growth of pines they went in single file, until it suddenly opened into a clearing.

  In front of him, Percy beheld a secluded meadow in the midst of the wood. It was perhaps twenty yards wide and fifty long, flat and grassy. The brook they had been following flowed through the center of it, where it tumbled into a pond that was deep enough, because the water was brown, that the bottom was not visible.

  Gwyneth stopped and gazed about. The smile of pleasure on her face said clearly enough that her heart was full of delight to share her discovery with a friend.

  “It’s beautiful, Gwyneth!” exclaimed Percy. The sound of his own voice almost startled him. Except for the gentle babbling of the stream, the place was so secluded that utter stillness reigned. “This must be your special place.”

  Gwyneth nodded.

  “How did you find it?”

  “I came upon it when I was exploring in the woods. So I kept coming here and made friends with the animals.”

  “Animals come when you are here?”

  “Only deer and rabbits. I don’t think they will come today because they don’t know you. They will be afraid. It took them a long time before they realized they didn’t need to be afraid of me. Come and sit by the pond. That’s where I sit when I come.”

  Percy followed her across the grass, and they sat down.

  After a minute or two of silence, Gwyneth spoke. “God, this is Mr. Drummond,” she said simply.

  Surprised, Percy looked over at her.

  Gwyneth was staring into the pond. “I’m sure You know him already,” she went on, “but he has not been here before. He is a good man. He is kind to everyone. He is visiting at the manor, but they are not kind to him. Mummy, I want you to know Mr. Drummond, too.”

  Percy listened spellbound. He did not want to intrude upon one of the most unusual one-sided conversations he had ever heard in his life. For one who had always associated prayer with his father’s prayers from the pulpit or at the table, the simplicity of Gwyneth’s conversation with God was almost too much to take in. Especially hearing her speaking to God about him!

  This was, as Percy had said, Gwyneth’s own private place. No one else in the whole world, or so Gwyneth thought, except now for Percy, knew of it. Sitting here, not necessarily thinking or praying about anything in particular, but feeling it, silently moved her with the invisible music of creation. She did not always talk aloud when she came to the pond in the wood. She spoke as she did on this day so that Percy could share in her thoughts.

  When Gwyneth felt the silent mysteries of the world and felt the tunes of God’s music inside her, all creation made her happy. At such times her whole being was at prayer, for she was swallowed up in the expansive presence of God Himself.

  There are those who only associate what they call prayer with formality and words and churches and mealtimes and public worship. But from a young age, Gwyneth had intuitively known, though no one had taught her, that all motions of heart and brain sent heavenward were prayers, for they went into the heart of Him who treasured the uplifted thoughts of His children.

  After some long minutes of silence, Gwyneth stood. “We should leave now, Mr. Drummond,” she said. “We have a long way to go. I want to be home before my papa gets home from the mine.”

  They left the meadow on the opposite side from where they had entered it and started up the next in a series
of several ridges that still lay between them and the sea.

  “Your father works in the mine, does he?” asked Percy as they went. “A coal mine?”

  “No, Mr. Drummond. The slate mine. There is no coal here, only slate. There is a gold mine, too, somewhere not very far away, but my papa works in the slate mine.”

  “There is gold in Snowdonia?” said Percy in surprise.

  “Yes, but not as much as slate.”

  “Gold is more valuable.”

  “My papa says that, too. He says that much of the gold of Snowdonia lies under the hills where no one has yet found it.”

  “Does he know where? Why doesn’t he look for it?”

  “Papa says that dreams of gold cannot buy potatoes. But slate can because it is no dream. Grannie has seen real gold, though I have never seen it.”

  Before Percy could question her further about the remarkable turn the conversation had taken, they entered a dense grove of trees. They were occupied for some time getting through it with a minimum of scratches.

  By the time they came near the crest of the final ridge an hour later, Percy was feeling the effects of the afternoon’s ride and walk. He would definitely sleep well that night!

  They had been climbing steadily through a rocky hillside of pine. Ahead they appeared nearly to have reached the top of the incline.

  Gwyneth stopped. “We have come to another of my special places,” she said.

  Percy glanced about but saw nothing to distinguish the hill they had been climbing. “Where?” he said.

  “Right there,” answered Gwyneth pointing in front of them. “Just ahead, at the top of the hill, there between those trees. We will walk through them, and then it will be downhill the rest of the way.”

  “What makes this a special place?”

  “You will see when we get to the top. Come.”

  Gwyneth had brought Percy along this particular route for the very purpose of the overlook that was suddenly about to present itself when their vision rose over the crest in front of them. She had discovered it years ago and never tired of the stunning revelation as her head came up slowly over the top of the hill.