They hadn’t approached the dry-stone shepherd’s hut at dusk.
When Yseld’s ash staff had locked in the purple twilight of Day 55. It pointed toward that open doorway beneath the overhang of the ridge wall, the four of them had backed the two-wheeled handcart down the bench with slow, silent care. Two hundred yards to the rear, tucked into a dry limestone hollow where the cliff formed a natural roof against the bitter ridge gale, they had spent the freezing night.
They had built no fire. They hadn’t even unpacked the small tin camp stove. Instead, they had unrolled their sheepskin blankets directly on the dry frost-scree, chewing their cold ration of dry soup beans and very thirsty barley in the pitch dark. Throughout the long, freezing hours, Yseld and Kezra had alternated watches, sitting with their backs wedged into the limestone fissures, observing the dark rectangle of the hut’s entrance through the brass sighting tube whenever the high moon cleared the cloud bank.
No smoke had risen from the rotting turf roof. No spark of an iron strike had flared against the stone. No horses had whinnied in the lee of the tumbled sheep hurdles. When the freezing dawn of Day 56 broke across the high terraces—turning the grey limestone bluffs to the pale lavender of cold iron—the hut sat as solitary, silent. Then he abandoned as it had appeared the evening before.
