Time Enough To Die Read Online Free Page A

about-face, Ashley thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket and headed toward the narrow steps between the churchyard fence and some nondescript stone buildings. She plunged suddenly into shadow. Her steps echoed from the surrounding walls, faster and faster, until she popped back out into the sunlight at the foot of the hill. Beyond a battered wall built of brick-sized Roman stones stood the Green Dragon hotel. Its nucleus was an old black-and-white building only marginally more perpendicular than the ones opposite the church. Around that were cobbled together structures from various eras, Jacobean brick, Georgian stone, even a hideous modern annex that Ashley could only describe as bastard Swiss chalet.
    A signboard above the door showed a kelly-green lizard gazing quizzically at a knight in armor, as though trying to decide whether to eat him or ask him to tea. Below the board gathered Ashley's classmates, all American students except for three Germans, a Swede, and an Italian.
    "Where were you?” asked a tall boy with the brush cut and predatory white teeth of an American jock.
    "Mailing a letter."
    "The weekly chronicle to Mom? I bet you were asking for money."
    "Like I'm going to ask for money when she's on a strict...."
    Jason turned back to Caterina Rossi's overstuffed sweater.
    Sorry mine aren't big enough for you, Ashley told him silently. Not that she wanted to get anything going with Jason. If she'd ever met a use-her-and-lose-her sort of guy, it was him.
    The heavy glass and brass doors of the hotel groaned open, emitting Howard Sweeney, his cell phone pressed to his ear. “Later,” he said into it, turned it off, and tucked it into his pocket. “Very good then, shall we be off?” Without waiting for a reply, he led the group of twenty or so students across the street almost under the grille of a delivery van.
    They passed a recreation center where shirt-sleeved men were lawn-bowling, and skirted a couple of houses whose gardens were sprinkled with daffodils and early tulips. Once across another road and through a gate in a stone fence, Sweeney stopped and gesticulated. “Behold, ancient Cornovium. Mind your step. Cows."
    To Ashley, ancient Cornovium looked like a lumpy pasture that sloped down to the trees edging the river Thane. She squinted, trying to see the settlement she'd studied.
    The thick grass of the pasture lay like a quilt over the banks and ditches defining the military fort. The four gateways, north, south, east, west, were gaps in the embankment. The occasional masonry angle jutting from the sod looked promising, but the rubbish dump beside the road didn't. And yet the civilian settlement outside the fort had extended beyond the road, toward the hillside where an amphitheater had once nestled and that was now crowned by the church.
    Ashley turned to look back at the town, imagining the ancient equivalent of fish and chips shops thronged with legionaries.... Jason was feeling up Caterina. She was simpering up at him.
    Sweeney marched off through the knee-high grass. Rolling her eyes—really, she'd thought Caterina had better taste—Ashley hurried after him. She liked Dr. Sweeney. He was in his fifties, probably, with gray crisp-crinkled hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and the hunched shoulders of the scholar. An impudent grin revealed a gap between his front teeth. He wore ascot ties tucked in the necks of his shirts and sweaters. She'd never known anyone who actually wore ascot ties. Her father, when he'd been around, had worn giveaway T-shirts and watched “Hogan's Heroes” reruns.
    "Supposedly this was once the site of a Celtic temple, Eponemeton,” Sweeney proclaimed. “Epona being the goddess of horses. T.J. Miller found a tessellated pavement, a double row of post holes, and some stone heads back in the 1930s, beneath the Roman layers. That, however, was only a quick and dirty test dig.” He indicated a ditch clogged with weeds and mud that cut across one quadrant of the