by Paul Lewis
On a cloudless summer day in Dodinal’s sixteenth year, he heard a distant commotion. With nothing else to occupy him, he went to investigate, moving through the forest until he was close enough to recognise the sounds of fighting.
As yet he could see nothing, as the battle was being fought on the other side of a wooded ridge ahead of him. His movements became more stealthy as he made his way closer; this was not his fight, and he had no desire to get involved.
Upon reaching the crest of the rise he pressed up against a tree for cover and peered around it. The ground before him fell away steeply, providing an uninterrupted view of the combat in the narrow valley below. Dodinal watched for a while, squinting against the flashes of light glinting off weapons and armour.
The melee was furious. There was no telling which side was winning. Bodies were strewn across the forest floor. Around them dozens of men, too many to count, hacked at each other with swords and axes, some blows blocked by shields or armour, others getting through to crush heads or tear through flesh and bone.
Dodinal grimaced as a man staggered away, mouth open wide in a scream that could not be heard above the clamour. His hand was pressed against the ragged stump at his shoulder in a futile attempt to staunch the blood pumping from it.
His suffering was mercifully short-lived, for a moment later an axe blade sunk deep into his throat. His head snapped back, attached to the neck only by a flap of skin, and he took a few staggering steps forward before collapsing.
Another man, almost immediately below Dodinal, was holding off three aggressors, using his sword expertly to divert their blows and jab at them. He drew blood with every swing, yet failed to hurt them enough to bring them down. He was tall and wore fine armour. Dodinal could see, even from his vantage point, that his blade was of the highest quality. It glittered in the sunlight as he wielded it.
The tall man backed away from the three and they followed, circling him warily, prodding and testing with their swords, looking for a way through his stubborn defences but finding none.
Dodinal could not help but nod in admiration. He was no fighter, but he recognised skill when he saw it. What a shame this man would surely die, for the odds were not in his favour.
The stranger edged away until he had backed up into the steep slope. He came to a halt, unable to go any further. “Come on, then, you sons of Saxon whores!” he roared.
Saxons!
Dodinal had heard the name spoken many times on his travels, always with hatred and fear. It was the name given to the people who had attacked his village, who had slaughtered every man, woman and child there… who had killed his father and condemned his mother to an unknowable but doubtless terrible fate.
Fury boiled up inside him. He had been wrong to think this was not his battle. He had sworn vengeance after he found his father dead, and vengeance he would have.
With that, the same red mist that had engulfed him all those years ago descended on him again like a blood-soaked veil. With a bellow of unrestrained rage, he drew his sword and charged headlong down the slope, somehow keeping his footing as earth and stones shifted and tumbled down beneath him. The Saxons looked up, shock clear in their faces at the sight of the wild man bearing down on them at such a speed he could have been flying.
When it was over he rested on his haunches, heaving for breath. His hands were drenched with blood; his clothes were heavy with it. Everywhere he looked were bodies. Men moved around the fallen, checking for life. They slit the throats of their enemies8 and delivered mercy blows to any of their own so badly injured as to be beyond hope. Those that could be saved, they lifted up and carried away.
Other men searched the bodies, gathering weapons which they piled up to be removed later. Clothing and valuables too; the former prized by an army on the move, the latter the spoils of victory.
Birds already feasted on the dead, plucking out eyes and thrusting their beaks into rent flesh to reach the soft organs within. The forest reeked of slaughter, the air ripe with the charnel stench of blood, and of faeces and urine where bowels and bladders had emptied in death. Dodinal rubbed at his eyes. It was almost as if he had been somehow sent back in time to his village, the day after the Saxon attack, although there were no huts to be seen and the slain were all men, there were no women and children.
Dodinal had not been injured, at least not seriously. Most if not all of the blood that soaked him had spilled from the veins of others. He looked down at his sword. With a soft cry of regret he saw that it was broken, the blade snapped off halfway along its length. In avenging his father’s death, he had destroyed his last physical tie to him.
Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to find the tall man smiling down at him. “Are you hurt?” he asked as he helped Dodinal to his feet.
Dodinal shook his head. He was still trembling from exertion and did not trust himself to speak.
“Good. And what is your name?” Dodinal told him, and he took his hand and shook it vigorously. “I am Arthur. And I owe you my life. I will never forget what you did here today.”
Dodinal smiled with grim irony. Neither would he. Again it had felt as though someone else had taken control of his body, a stranger who was far stronger and more tireless than he, who could part heads from necks and limbs from torsos with little effort. Dodinal had no idea how many Saxons he had killed, but it was not enough, not now he had the scent of their blood in his nostrils.
There were men standing close by, tired and stained, but not involved in the gory salvage. Arthur called them to him. Once they had gathered around, he stood behind Dodinal with both hands on the young man’s shoulders. “Remember this man’s face. Remember his name. Were it not for Dodinal here, you would be drinking to your King’s memory tonight.
“For one so young that he has not yet grown a beard, he wields a sword with a savagery I have never witnessed until this day. Truly, what he lacks in finesse he makes up for with brute strength!”
This provoked laughter, which sounded oddly out of place in the midst of so much carnage.
“Three Saxons felled before I had time to move,” Arthur continued. “But was that enough? Far from it! A dozen or more have not lived to regret the day they encountered our savage young friend.”
He introduced him to them: Sir Kay, Sir Bors, Sir Hector and others, names that meant nothing to him then, but would soon become as familiar to him as his own. They clapped him on the shoulder and praised him for his bravery. A shiver ran down Dodinal’s spine.
Arthur took him aside and said, “Fight by my side.”
For a moment Dodinal could not speak. He was still in shock from discovering he had saved a king’s life. Perhaps he should have guessed? There was something about Arthur that commanded a man’s attention; a presence about him that could not be denied.
“Fight?” he said. “Why, are you not done here?”
“Here, yes. But this is just one battle. I have fought many others before and I suspect I will fight many more to come. What I could do with an army of men such as you! Brave and ferocious and fearless. And this is no idle flattery. You fight like no other. What say you? Will you join me? Will you help me rid our land of the Saxons?”
Later Dodinal would come to suspect there had been a hint of idle flattery in Arthur’s words after all. But, on hearing them, he did not hesitate. He had no one to care for and there was no one left alive who cared for him. While he would happily wander the forest for the rest of his life, there was no denying the exultant feeling that had surged through him when he realised what he was capable of. The sadness and anger that had festered inside him since that long-ago night had gone. Instead there was a fierce determination to finish what he had started; to vanquish the foreign invaders or die trying.
“I will fight with you.” Dodinal raised the broken sword. “This belonged to my father. He died at a Saxon’s hand. A thousand Saxons will die at mine before I am done.”
Arthur clapped him on the shoulder. “Good. I will
find you a sword your father would have been proud to see you wield. Clothes and armour too. Tonight we feast in your honour. My camp is not far from here; we have both seen more than enough death for one day.”
As they walked away from the scene of slaughter, Dodinal let the sword fall from his fingers. It had served its purpose. He had no further need of it. One part of his life was over.
Another was about to begin.
Thereafter he had followed the King into battle after battle, using the old Roman roads to race from skirmish to skirmish on horseback, driving back the Saxons until that day on Mount Badon, when Arthur had masterminded a resounding victory that had finally brought peace to the kingdom. Dodinal, for his part in the rout of the invaders, had been knighted, an elevation he had neither asked for nor welcomed, but which he had found impossible to refuse.
He had been feted. Women had wanted him and he had taken more than his fair share of them, but his conquests had been empty, devoid of warmth or feeling. He made but a few friends, none of them close, their conversations bawdy, wine-fuelled reminiscences of the glory days when they had put the Saxons to the sword.
What he had been unable to bring himself to talk of, other than in the vaguest of terms, was the lives he had taken. Sometimes, when he slept, all he saw was the ravaged bodies of those who had fallen beneath the implacable ferocity of his vengeance.
So much blood, so much death; far too much death. Hundreds, some said thousands, had fallen before him. There were days when he could not get the stink of it out of his nostrils. Days when he tasted it in the food he ate and in the ale he quaffed.
Knights sought him out for single combat, to test their skills against his strength. He quickly learned to control his rage, and in doing so, he inevitably lost. At the same time he became a better swordsman, though he would never be the equal of his peers.
After Mount Badon, he had escaped to the forest and wept with relief, knowing that no man need die at his hand again for as long as peace prevailed. Yet even while Arthur ruled his kingdom with benevolent majesty, Dodinal became restless. Camelot, for all its glories, soon began to feel like a prison.
And so it was that he set out to wander the land in search of an end to his anguish. If it took his own death, then so be it. Dodinal was not afraid to die, as long as he died well. He left his armour in his chambers. A man travelled faster when he travelled lighter, and furs kept him warmer than cold metal.
Now he was starting to question whether salvation lay in life and not death. In Rhiannon he thought he had found it. Then had come Ellis with his stories of children being taken. It seemed like the contentment Dodinal longed for had been snatched from him just as it came within reach.
Fate, it seemed, was not done with him yet.
Dodinal looked over his shoulder. Idris, Emlyn, Hywel and Elfed walked together a dozen or so paces behind him. He nodded at them and they returned the gesture solemnly. As for Gerwyn, the chieftain’s son was making no effort to keep up. Dodinal watched him closely. The younger man was no stranger to the forest and moved with the confidence of a seasoned hunter. It was a shame he could not control the anger that festered within him.
Dodinal understood how that felt.
Gerwyn had lived in the shadow of an older brother who had been loved and respected by all, a man who would one day have followed in their father’s footsteps, had it not been for the cruel whim of fate. Perhaps he knew, or suspected, that his father wanted Dodinal to become his successor. Were that the case, he need not bear a grudge. Dodinal had no desire to be anyone’s leader; if he stayed it would be as a man without status. He’d had more than his fill of that.
They stopped to eat the nuts and berries they had brought with them. Idris sat with Dodinal on a fallen tree, while the other four men ate a short distance away. Gerwyn conspicuously sat on his own.
“You mentioned you knew the chieftain, Madoc, from the ‘gatherings’,” Dodinal said to Idris. “What did you mean by that?”
“At the start of every spring and every autumn, the villages from this region travel to a great clearing far from here.” Idris raised his chin to indicate east. “We trade livestock and crops. We feast and get drunk. It is where young men find wives, and young women find husbands. It is where my son Elwyn met Rhiannon.”
“I thought she was from your village.”
Idris shook his head. “No, our young people find their partners elsewhere; it has always been so. We cannot have kin sleep with kin. Elwyn made the right choice, that is certain. Rhiannon’s mother was a formidable woman too.”
“I know she was a healer. Rhiannon learned from her.”
“They reckon she was more than that. A seer, or so they said.”
Dodinal remembered how Rhiannon had been reluctant to talk of her past. It seemed wrong to be asking about it when he refused to talk about his own. Still, he was curious. “Rhiannon too?”
“No. She is a gifted healer and a good mother. That is enough.”
They continued on their way. It was past midday when Ellis, who had forged ahead of them in his eagerness to be home, stopped and raised his hand. “Not far now,” he said when the others had caught up with him. “An hour, no more.”
Dodinal looked around. Apart from the tracks they had made, the snow was unbroken. “Your people did not come even this far in the search for the missing boy?”
“They had no reason to,” Ellis said sharply. “Remember what I said? There were no tracks anywhere. Whatever took Wyn could have gone in any direction. We only have so many men. We looked but could not search the entire forest, it was hopeless.”
“No tracks.” Gerwyn sneered his contempt. “I don’t believe that. There is no creature walking this earth that does not leave tracks.”
Ellis’s face reddened. He looked ready to lunge at Gerwyn. Dodinal stepped forward and placed a hand gently on his shoulder before the man could do anything rash. Whatever the truth about the tracks, he had no reason to doubt the boy Wyn had been taken. It was understandable that feelings should be running high.
“Take us to your village,” he said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “Once we have talked to your people, we can determine how best we can help.”
Ellis seemed placated. He turned and led the way. Idris and the three hunters followed swiftly after him. Gerwyn gave Dodinal a venomous look, but said nothing. He waited several seconds after the knight had walked off before following.
The trees thinned out. Soon the travellers emerged into a clearing, blinking against the sunlight. Ellis’s village was a scattering of huts. One, noticeably larger than the rest, was presumably the home of the chieftain, Madoc. Nearby was a livestock pen, deserted and forlorn-looking. The village was smaller than Idris’s, with only a waist-high fence to keep out any predators.
Ellis called out and a dozen men emerged from the largest hut, armed with spears and swords. Leading them was a bull of a man whose cropped dark hair and beard were flecked with grey. He stopped long enough to shake Ellis briskly by the hand before turning his attention to Idris.
“You answered my call,” he said, grasping the chieftain by both shoulders. “I cannot thank you enough.”
“You have nothing to thank me for, Madoc. This is a tragic time for sure. When we find the boy, or whatever took him, then I will accept your thanks. Until then, you owe me nothing.”
“I cannot even offer you or your men much in the way of hospitality.” Madoc stared grimly into the forest surrounding them. “No hunting here, not for months. The last of our livestock is gone, and we will struggle come the spring. If the new season ever shows itself.”
“I understand. We have endured the same hardship. I have brought my finest trackers and hunters.” Idris introduced Dodinal and the others in turn. “Whatever is to be found, they will find it.”
Madoc’s men had lined up behind him. There were no women or children to be seen.
“I appreciate your help, Idris. But even the finest tracker will be of little u
se to us; there is nothing to track.”
“There is always something to track,” Dodinal answered, eyes searching the surrounding ground for the merest hint of a trail. “I don’t care whether it walks on four legs or two, it will leave a trace of where it has been. You just have to know where to look.”
“Then look,” Madoc challenged. “You will find nothing.”
“We shall see.”
Dodinal searched the forest floor intensely, Hywel joining him as he swept the area immediately beyond the village, the wiry tracker disappearing into the trees for a short while. When he returned, he shook his head. “Nothing, as far as I can tell,” he said in his soft and lyrical voice. “The only tracks to be found are those we made on our way here. Either they have their story wrong or something very strange has happened.”
“There’s always an explanation,” Dodinal assured him. “It is not always easy to find, but we will find it.”
Madoc had watched their search with a resigned expression. “So, you admit defeat. Maybe now you will believe me. Whatever took Wyn left no tracks. It grieves me to say so, but we must assume the boy is dead. We cannot let whatever took him make off with any other children. Will you help us hunt it down and kill it?”
Idris raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “If we cannot find the boy, how can we hope to find whatever took him?”
“We will split into groups to search a wider area than before. Even with your men, there are not many of us, but it’s all we have.”
Dodinal looked at Ellis. “You told us that other men had been sent to other villages to seek their help. Where are they?”
“They cannot help us,” Madoc said.
“Why not?” Idris demanded. “Surely they know we would help them if ever they had need of it.”
“They have problems of their own.”
“What problems?” The old chieftain was clearly annoyed.
Madoc hesitated. “They too have had children taken. They are too busy looking for them to help us find ours.”
