Chapter 16

She woke up at the very crack of dawn on the day she was due to start her return journey. The Sun's rim had just started to show itself in all its enormous early morning red circumference above the horizon, far away over the blue sea.

The white horse had been awake even before the Princess and was pawing the ground, snorting impatiently through his thoroughbred equine nostrils in his eagerness for the great adventure to come. He was bored after months of comparative inactivity. Soon, perhaps, he would be bearing on his willing back the weight of his beloved rescuer, mistress and friend on the final stage of her return journey.

It was the work of a few minutes to saddle the noble beast and fill the saddle bags with enough food and water to last for a couple of weeks. Princess Sara gave one last look at the cave where lived her unlikely friend, the dragon, seeing that there were no signs of life from him. He would not be up and about for hours, yet!

She noted with relief that the plump and greasy skinned village maiden had been released from her uncomfortable captivity. She led her faithful horse down to the plain, not looking back once at the scene of her hibernal resting place. It would only have made her sad.

The ground was still soft underfoot after the winter rains; easy for the still barefoot Princess to walk over. It was covered as far as she could see by a profusion of wild flowers, of a myriad different varieties - a breathtaking kaleidoscope of blues, reds, pinks, yellows, ultramarine and every other colour of the rainbow. She still found it hard to comprehend that a landscape that was so barren and parched in the long summer months could yield such an amazing fecundity of floral richness in the Southern Spring.

The little girl in her longed to make a chain of daisies and other flowers, draping them around her delicate, fragile neck, framing her small, firm and exquisitely formed breasts with their colours, but the proscription on any kind of adornment or covering, save the fairy ring, made this quite impossible. She contented herself with making a garland for her beloved white four-legged friend. He knew that this was a special gift from the adorable Princess and successfully resisted the temptation to eat it - for an hour or two at least!

When she came to the site of the healing lake, there was no sign of those warm and gentle waters, whose touch had restored her torn and tortured body to normal. However she was sure that it was not imagination on her part that the carpet of flowers was even richer here than elsewhere. It was still a place of magic.

She was not without her misgivings when her route led her through that town where the now deceased mob had bayed for her blood on that terrible day. She need not have feared. The dead had been buried and the survivors, the little children and those peaceable decent souls who had not been carried away by the puritanical zeal of the majority, locking themselves into their homes and praying that the poor girl might be spared, flocked out to greet her. They assured her that they bore her no ill will for what had befallen the rest of the townsfolk.

"After all" said the new mayor, "They were going to kill you in the most degrading and painful manner, bringing everlasting shame on themselves and also upon the rest of us. They only reaped what they had sown."

She accepted their offer to replenish her supplies of food and drink, continuing on her way, thankful that her earlier adventure had not been repeated.

For whatever reason, the horse then diverged from the route she had followed earlier in the year and she found herself in unfamiliar territory. The homes and farmsteads seemed meaner and poorer than those she had passed earlier. She came to a town and was saddened at the decrepitude of the buildings and the shabbiness of the people. Everyone seemed mean and shrivelled - in some way oppressed, as if by some ever present fear, which the Princess, herself could sense in the very air of the place.

"There is a purpose in my coming this way" she told herself. "I wonder what, exactly?"

Her question seemed part way to being answered soon enough. A group of people were walking across to her, breaking away from what looked like some kind of meeting in the town square. They were a sorry looking lot, shabbily dressed and downcast, with the very notable exception of one tall and faired haired young man, extremely young, but sufficiently far removed from boyhood as to have grown a full red beard, which accentuated the stern and decisive manliness of his features.