It ate and then faded into the trees, leaving some of the hunter behind. The golden beetle reemerged from the ground. It and its brethren, the low crawling things, ate what was left until there was nothing but bleached chips of bone. The beetle returned to the fire, crawled from coal to coal, and disappeared into the heat and the ash.
“Billy.”
Someone shook me, and I opened my eyes. The sun was up. The fire was cold.
I had been dreaming.
My father gripped my shoulder. “Do you feel better?”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“Here.” He handed me a charred bit of meat on a skewer. “We caught three squirrels in our snares and a frog in the river. Eat up, and then it is time to go.”
Before I took a bite, I asked, “Did everyone get a share?”
“Yes,” he said.
I ate, and in a few mouthfuls it was gone. I was still ravenous but felt better. More clear in my thoughts. But the dream I’d had lingered. It felt important, somehow.
Jane came up to me. “Are you sure you’re feeling better?”
“Yes, much.”
“Good. I was worried.”
Mr. Faries came trotting out of the trees. “There’s a shallow spot to the north where we can ford the stream.”
“Excellent.” My father looked at the group. “Is everyone ready? Let’s be off.”
A distant roar sounded through the trees. I recognized it, and it raised the hair on my neck.
“No,” Jane whispered.
Mr. Kinnersley clutched his Leyden jar tighter. “How could the beast have found us?”
My father snatched up his coat and shook it. “It must have been drawn to the scent of the incognitum kill. If we are lucky, it will pursue the Osage, but it may have picked up our trail. We must hurry.”
“Hurry?” Phineas asked. “What is the use?”
My father spun on him. “If the bear-wolf is hunting us, our only chance for safety now is to find the people of Madoc!”
The bear-wolf roared again, an echo of my dream. I remembered the beast galloping toward us, and down here on the ground, I felt completely exposed and vulnerable. I looked around for something, anything to use as a weapon. All I saw were rocks and sticks.
Andrew appeared to be doing the same thing. He found a large, dead branch, planted his boot against it, and snapped off a piece. It broke away with a natural, sharp point. He did the same thing again, and again, handing out his makeshift spears.
He gave one to me. “It is something, at least.”
Effective or not, I felt better having that something in my hands.
We set off. The place Mr. Faries had found to cross was shallow most of the way, just below our waists at the deepest. But the current was slow, and soon we were all on the other side. I looked back once across the river.
“Isanthus brachiatus!” my father said.
Was he collecting specimens? Now?
“Pardon, John?” Phineas asked.
“False pennyroyal.” My father rushed to a plant with small blue flowers, growing along the riverbank. “This may help disguise our scent.” He ripped off a handful of small leaves and shoved them into my hands. “Take some and rub them on your clothes.”
The leaves were hairy and sticky, and they smelled strongly of mint. But I did as he asked me, and so did the others. Then we continued on.
The forest changed little: dense, humid, and hilly. But we moved quickly, no longer called by what lay ahead of us but driven by what stalked us from behind. We heard the roar several more times, and with each, it sounded nearer.
“I don’t think it followed the Osage,” Mr. Faries said.
“Keep moving,” my father said.
We traveled another mile. Perhaps two. The strength I’d felt upon waking soon drained away, and my legs threatened to buckle. Each time we started up a hill, I doubted if I could make it to the top. But hope fueled me. Each time, I imagined that when we reached the summit and looked down the other side, we’d see Madoc’s valley below. A land of fields and farms and a fortress. But each time, I saw nothing but another wooded ravine. I started to doubt what I’d said about Louis. Maybe he had lied to me. Maybe there was no valley, and we were just pushing deeper and deeper into an endless wilderness.
If that were true, the bear-wolf would eventually catch us, and I couldn’t let myself think about what would happen then.
We started up another hill. The roar behind us was so loud, so close. The sound of it iced my skin.
“Perhaps —” Andrew said. “Perhaps we should look for a place to make a stand.”
Make a stand? Against the bear-wolf? With toothpicks for weapons? I didn’t know if I had the strength to climb the slope before us, let alone fight the beast.
My father twisted his spear in his hands. “Let’s get to the top of this hill.”
I steeled myself, and some moments later, we reached a clearing at the summit. This had to be it. I rushed to the far side and peered through the trees, down into the valley.
I saw nothing.
It was over. Our last hope was gone.
Andrew scanned our surroundings. He pointed at a formation of weathered stone perhaps fifteen feet high. “We could use those boulders.”
“The beast can climb that.” Mr. Kinnersley tapped his chin with an index finger. “We could use my Leyden jar as a weapon.”
Phineas snorted. “What are you going to do? Throw it at the bear-wolf?”
“It is charged with lightning!” Mr. Kinnersley said.
“Then what is your plan, old man?” Phineas asked. “One of us holds the bear-wolf still, while you walk up and shock it?”
“Do not mock me!” Mr. Kinnersley stamped his foot. “Electrical fire is —”
“Now is not the time, Ebenezer!” my father said.
While they argued, I looked again at the valley. It was beautiful. Mountains rimmed three of its sides, a wide, shallow bowl filled with trees.
Wait. What was that?
There, in the distance, I spotted a gray smudge hanging just above the trees.
Smoke.
And near it, I saw more smudges. Several more. It had to be a settlement.
“Father, look!” I pointed. “It’s Madoc!”
He squinted. “It can’t be.”
“It could be,” Mr. Faries said.
“But that’s nothing more than an Indian village,” my father said. “Where are the fields? Where are the people?”
“I see a few breaks in the trees,” Mr. Godfrey said. “There, and there. They could be small fields.”
My father readjusted his stance. “What do you think, Phineas?”
“Hard to know,” Phineas said. “But the bear-wolf is getting closer. We should try for it.”
“We won’t make it,” Andrew said. “Listen. The forest has gone quiet.”
It had.
An eerie silence enveloped us. No insects. No birds. Nothing.
“It’s here,” Mr. Faries whispered.
“To the boulders, quickly.” My father pushed Jane and me toward the formation Andrew had spotted. “You two, up there.”
Jane and I scurried to the top. My father, Andrew, and the Society members formed a defensive perimeter below us. Even Mr. Faries held a spear in his one good hand.
Fear filled the space left by my exhaustion. My own electrical fire. I trembled and looked at my feet. Around us were several rocks the size of apples and plums. I set my spear down and gathered up a handful. To my right, Jane watched me and did the same.
“When we throw these,” I said, “make as much noise as you can.”
She nodded.
We waited.
Every movement, every wind-tossed branch and snapped twig caught my breath. The beast was out there, somewhere, perhaps circling us, out of sight in the trees.
“Come on,” Phineas said. “Come on, you devil.”
Some buzzing insect sounds returned, but I didn’t know what that meant.<
br />
“Where is it?” Mr. Faries asked.
“It’s out there,” my father said. “Billy, when the bear-wolf attacks, I want you to —”
The beast exploded from the trees. Its paws tore the ground. Its maw opened wide. Its speed and ferocity stunned me. I watched it charge us for a moment, and then remembered the rocks in my hand. I threw the first, shouting as loud as I could. So did Jane. We missed and kept throwing. It was almost upon us.
The Society members shouted and held up their spears.
Over them, I heard my father’s voice boom. “STAY BACK!”
The bear-wolf skidded to a halt a few yards off. It stood up on its hind legs, at its full height, towering almost as tall as the rocks I stood upon.
“Steady, all!” my father shouted.
I threw another rock, and it bounced hard off the monster’s muzzle. It blinked and roared. I kept throwing and shouting, “Back! Stay back!” while the men below brandished their spears and whooped.
The bear-wolf dropped back on all four paws, and circled around to the left side of the rock formation, then to the right, sniffing and huffing. It seemed to be sizing us up, looking for weaknesses or dangers.
“Keep at it!” my father said. “We’ve given it pause!”
More yelling. More rocks. They glanced off the animal’s shoulders and sides. I scored a couple more hits to its head. Jane was nearly as good a shot as I was. But though the bear-wolf seemed to be hesitating, it wasn’t retreating.
It moved to the right again. It stayed there. I pulled Jane over to the opposite side, placing myself between her and the beast. Phineas stood below me.
He glanced over his shoulder. “Stay behind me, Billy.”
The other men angled their spears toward the bear-wolf as it swung its head low, back and forth, emitting a rumbling growl.
Someone shouted, “It’s getting ready to charge!”
And then it did.
It came right at Phineas. Somehow, he held his ground.
The bear-wolf’s paw caught him in the side and sent him flying through the air. My father and Andrew both lunged toward it, and my father’s spear caught the bear-wolf in the shoulder. The animal roared and swatted, but both men dove clear. The bear-wolf looked up at me. I held my arms out in front of Jane.
It leaped toward us, halfway up the boulders in a bound. I couldn’t look away from its open mouth. That mouth was going to close on me. And there wasn’t anything I could do.
Something hissed through the air over my shoulder. The bear-wolf cried out and slipped on the rocks, an arrow sticking out of its neck near its shoulder.
Three men advanced toward us out of the trees. Two had bows drawn, while the third pulled an arrow from his quiver. The two men fired, one missed, one found its mark in the bear-wolf’s side. The animal roared, but it sounded different this time. Pained.
It hurtled from the rocks to the ground, facing the bowmen, but backed a few paces away from them. The three men aimed their arrows. The bear-wolf let out a low moan and bolted into the woods from which it had come, disappearing into the trees.
The bowmen watched it go and then turned toward us. They had white skin, thick dark hair cropped short, and wore leather leggings. One had a cotton shirt, but the other two went bare-chested, their torsos and arms covered in intricate, swirling tattoos. Metal coils of bronze and silver twisted around their arms.
The one in the shirt wore a stiff braid of heavy golden wire around his neck. It was open in front, ending in two wolves’ heads that snarled at each other across his collarbones. I couldn’t tell how old he was, nor the other two. They had a few white hairs, and though the skin of their faces was tough, it was not wrinkled, and they moved with strength and speed.
The shirted one stepped toward us. “Pwy wyt ti?”
“Welsh?” Mr. Kinnersley dropped his spear. “Is he speaking Welsh?”
The stranger looked at him. “You are English?” He spoke with an accent I didn’t recognize.
My father approached him, his hand on his chest. “Rydym wedi dod fel eich brodyr, ap Madoc. We come as your brothers, son of Madoc.”
“Your cymraeg is bad,” the stranger said.
“Your English is good,” my father said.
The stranger smiled. “My French is also good.”
“John!” Mr. Faries waved frantically over by the trees. “Phineas is hurt!”
We all rushed to him and found Phineas lying on his back, unconscious.
Mr. Faries knelt beside him. “It looks bad.”
The shirt and coat on Phineas’s left side were rent and soaked in blood where the bear-wolf’s claws had raked him and cast him aside.
“We will take him to our village,” the stranger said. “We have men who can help him there.”
My father nodded, and the stranger’s two companions lifted Phineas by his shoulders and legs. They set off down the hill, toward the smoke I had seen earlier.
“Thank you,” my father said.
“We will do what we can. I am Rhys ap Morfran, and I welcome you.”
“I am John Bartram.” My father bowed. “And we are honored and grateful.”
Rhys turned and led us in the direction his companions had gone. My father motioned to Jane and me, and we followed after him, while Andrew and the Society members came behind.
As we hurried through the trees, Jane took my hand and squeezed it. “We have found it,” she whispered. “The Kingdom of Madoc.”
When we reached the bottom of the hill, Rhys directed us to a well-beaten path. It was narrow and winding at first, but as we walked along, it straightened and widened into a road, leading toward the middle of the valley. Trees lined the edges, their canopy of branches reaching overhead. And then the trees backed away from the road, replaced by a kind of wickerwork fence made of long wooden stakes, with thin branches interwoven between them.
“We must hurry,” Rhys said. “For your friend. Can all of you run?”
My body had not yet lost its fire from the bear-wolf attack, and everyone else agreed, too. We trotted down the road at a brisk pace, but had not gone very far when Mr. Kinnersley slowed to a walk.
He bent in the road, hands on his knees, breathing hard. “I’m an old man. I can’t.”
“Neither can I,” Mr. Godfrey said.
Andrew favored his wounded leg, but said nothing, even though I was sure he couldn’t run well, either.
My father gazed down the road. “We’ll walk, then. We stay together.”
Rhys nodded.
A short distance later, my father pointed at the fence. “You keep livestock in these woods?”
“Our pigs forage wild during the summer.”
“I see.”
“It is a better use of this land than pasture.”
That furrowed my father’s brow.
We followed the road for another half mile and then we did see a field. But it wasn’t a cleared field. The trees had died, their leafless skeletons standing a silent vigil over clusters of corn, squash, and pumpkins planted at their feet and in the spaces between them. I noticed a band of bark had been stripped from each tree, all around their trunks near their roots. That was the reason they had died, and without their leaves, sunlight found its way down to the crops. It was also why we hadn’t seen larger fields from the hill.
My father nodded toward the dead trees. “We sometimes use the same method.”
“We learned it from the pobl cyntaf,” Rhys said.
“Who?” my father asked.
“The First People. That is what we call them.”
“Do you mean the Indians?”
“I think that is what you call them, yes.”
My father shook his head. “In what regard are they first?”
“They were here before us.”
The obvious way in which he said it, and the simplicity of thought behind it, almost stopped me in the road. My father had no reply.
We passed many more fields, cultivated in a manner
similar to the first. But as we progressed, the trees dwindled, having dried and fallen down and rotted, giving way to open ground.
Soon, I caught sight of the first farmhouse. It was a small hut built of tight-fitting limestone, with a low door, narrow slits for windows, and a peaked roof shingled with overlapping strips of bark, similar to the longhouses we had seen at Aughwick. A Welsh foundation covered by an Indian roof. A woman dug in a small vegetable garden out front. She wore a simple deerskin dress but also an old-fashioned wimple that covered her hair, neck, and chin.
Mr. Godfrey spoke quietly from the side of his mouth. “The style of her headpiece is centuries old.”
She waved to Rhys, and he waved back. She said something in Welsh while pointing down the road, and Rhys replied. She nodded, and we moved on.
“They brought your man past her cottage, and she was worried for him.”
“I am worried, too,” my father said.
We passed a few more farms, and then rounded a curve in the road. I caught sight of the village up ahead, a cluster of buildings like those we’d already seen but longer and wider. One in the center seemed taller than the rest but built of the same materials. Limestone walls and Indian roof, surrounded by forest and small fields of corn.
“Welcome to Annwyn,” Rhys said.
“Ah, named after your Paradise, correct?” my father said. “It is a modest and pleasant village. How many live here?”
“Three hundred and fifty-four.”
“An exact figure,” my father said. “How far away is the seat of your kingdom?”
“The seat of our kingdom?”
“Yes. Where is your king’s throne from here?”
“Our prince is here. We have no other place.”
My father stopped in the road. “Does that mean … Is this village your only settlement?”
Rhys rolled his shoulders back and straightened his neck, his necklace glinting in the sun. “It is.”
I couldn’t read my father’s expression. Disbelief? Disappointment? I think he was trying not to show it, though I felt that way, too. There were no grand castles here, no vast lands or armies. This was not the ally Mr. Franklin and my father had hoped for, nor the frontier kingdom we had gone in search of.
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