The Truce of the Bishop
I
A pallid and starved sunlight looked upon the shore-land, and mocked it, because, now, in the fall of the harvest, there was no yield of any kind for the blade, or any reaper to seek it. On all the four fair ploughlands of the lords of Dunbeekin, stretching along the smooth valley of the bay, and pushing inward over gently lifting slopes to the furze-lined granite barrier of Gabriel, no ditch stood unbroken: the fields lay naked and blackened by fire. The tall keep watched the deserted water with sightless eyes, through which the daylight shone from wall across to wall, and at its feet the crouching huts of its people were thatchless. It was the desolation of conquest. The conquered were dead, or in hiding among the hills. The spoilers, their havoc wrought, had turned and gone away, with famine spreading wave-like at their heels.
Far up on the flank of the mountain there fell the distant lowing boom of a bittern. Some cattle, lost in the waste of thicket at a further height, answered this call as if it came from their kind.
Three men, sprawled on their bellies in a grassy crevice between
