Читать книгу On the Edge of Darkness - Barbara Erskine - Страница 6

Time, the boy noticed idly, whirled in gigantic lazy spirals like a great vortex in the sky. Lying on his back on the short sweet Welsh grass he stared upwards into the intense blue, his eyes half closed, and let the song of the skylark carry him upwards. Beyond the clouds there was an intensity of experience which drew him on beyond the now, to where past and future were the same.

One day, when he was older, he was going to travel there, beyond time and space, and study the secrets which he knew instinctively in his bones were his hidden inheritance. Then he would fight evil with good and bring light into the dark.

‘Meryn!’

His mother’s voice, calling from the cottage down in the sheltered valley beyond the mountain where he lay, brought him to his feet. He smiled to himself. Later, after he had had his supper, when the long summer dark was descending over the hill, and the only sound was the occasional companionable bleat of a sheep in the distance or the quavering hoot of an owl drifting down the valley on silent wings, he would slip out of the cottage and run up here again to dream his dreams and prepare for the great battle which one day he knew he would fight out there, alone, on the edge of darkness …