The Sword of Wayland

by Gavin Chappell

  * * * * *

  The wind howled around Edwin and his companions, and the rain lashed down, with hail occasionally showering the drenched figures that struggled steadfastly across the moor. Edwin rubbed his frozen hands and shivered in the bitter wind. Mist whirled and twisted around them, sometimes walling them in on all sides, more often drawing apart like white curtains to reveal the rain-lashed peaks that surrounded them.

  The path across the scree-slope had led them into a shallow valley of heather and rock at the head of the falls. They had marched up this as the clouds massed on either side.

  They had been crossing the first ridge, with a high valley between them and the next peak gaping below them, when the heavens opened. Even Llewellyn had agreed that their best course of action lay in movement, and that it might as well be forward as back.

  The wind was bitter, and so strong that they felt as if they were walking into a wall. The rain lashed them mercilessly, as they trudged doggedly across the moorland, and began the scramble up the rocks on the far side.

  Edwin turned to Llewellyn.

  ‘How far now?’ he yelled. But he had to repeat his question twice as the wind whipped his words away. In the lea of a titanic boulder, Llewellyn caught his words.

  ‘No more than twelve miles,’ he yelled back. ‘Come on, now, we can’t afford to halt.’

  Edwin battled on after the hardy warriors. Twelve miles? How long would that take, under these conditions, and across high mountains? This was the only way now, he knew that. But would they even make it like this?

  It must be close to midnight. They would simply have to forge ahead, and hope that nature would cease its ongoing conspiracy against their progress.

  Then something white fluttered out of the storm to land and melt on Edwin’s red-raw hand. A flurry of more snowflakes followed it almost immediately. Edwin groaned to himself. They were walking into a blizzard.

  Stoically, as the wind howled higher and harsher around the peaks, and the snow whirled down out of the lowering sky to form a chilling blanket across the heather that surrounded them, the warriors continued.