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Page 200
Chapter Twelve
Simon wiped the wet from his face and wriggled his shoulders gently to try to unstick his wet, clammy undergarments from his equally wet and clammy skin. The gestures were totally unconscious as were the blasphemies that trickled from his lips as he listened to the report his forerider was making. There was no one and nothing in the village ahead of them, if one could dignify the twenty or so mud-and-wattle huts with the name village.
Nonetheless there was a hopeful aspect to the report. There had been horses there, and not too long since. Such a village would not have horses; the people were too poor to need riding animals, and the agricultural work would be better done by oxen. So, some fighting force had been there. Mortimer, Simon knew, was ranging out from Wigmore, and Braose should be even farther south, somewhere west of Montgomery. The force here must be Welsh.
The sky above the dripping trees was the same uniform gray at all angles. The cloud cover was so heavy that there was not even a brighter area from which one might judge the position of the sun. Nor could Simon guess at the time by the state of his appetite. His stomach was clapping against his spine, relaying an urgent message that it required to be filled; but it had been doing that for days regardless of the hour of day or night. The weeks of campaigning had eaten up the supplies Simon had carried even though they had been carefully husbanded, and the Welsh, true to form, left nothing behind. Parties went out to hunt, of course, but

 
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