One afternoon he went again to the cleared area beyond the palisade. Reluctantly he cast his mind northwards. There was nothing. He began to make his way back up to the village, feeling relieved.
As he reached the broken palisade, Gerwyn stepped through one of the gaps, one hand on the sword in his belt. Dodinal reached for his own and silently cursed its absence.
“Best you go back the way you came, traveller,” Gerwyn spat. “We have barely enough food to feed ourselves.”
“I thank you for your advice,” Dodinal responded pleasantly. “But I have no intention of going anywhere for now.”
Gerwyn glanced back. Dodinal followed his gaze. Gerwyn’s two friends, the brothers who had sided with him in the Great Hall, waited on the other side of the fence. They, too, were armed, and glared at Dodinal with unconcealed animosity. If it came down to a fight it would be three men against one. But of course he could not allow it to come to that. In the heat of combat he might lose control.
He could disarm them. Yes, they carried swords, but it was unlikely they would have had much cause to use them. Dodinal, though unarmed, was battle-hardened and had brute strength to call upon. He might have to break the odd bone or blacken a few eyes, but at least these three would still be breathing when it was over.
He drew himself up to his full height. A flicker of unease crossed Gerwyn’s face when he realised he had to crane his neck to meet Dodinal’s eyes; his head was roughly level with Dodinal’s chest.
“If you want me to leave, then I will leave. But not until I have said farewell to Rhiannon and your father.”
“There’s no need for that. Just go while you still have the chance.” For all the bravado of his words there was uncertainty in the younger man’s tone, the subtlest hint of a tremor.
“Not without my sword. I will fetch it and then leave.”
Dodinal laced his fingers together and, stretching his arms out, flexed them until the joints popped, shockingly loud in the stillness of the late afternoon.
Gerwyn took a step back towards the fence. His friends backed away a little, too, sharing nervous glances.
As they edged away, so Dodinal stepped towards them. Gerwyn’s back came up against the palisade and he looked around until he located the gap and hurried through it. Dodinal continued his slow advance until he was inside the village with them.
“Well, here we are. Now, my friends, if you will kindly step aside, I will fetch my sword and the spear your father so generously gave me and pay my respects to him before leaving.”
Gerwyn looked a little desperately at his friends, and they looked back helplessly at him. They would be torn between anger, frustration and fear; wanting to take Dodinal on yet sensing they were no match for him, as much as their youthful pride was loathe to admit it.
Finally Gerwyn’s shoulders slumped. “Stay, if you want. I no longer care. But remember, each morsel of food that passes your lips is denied the women and children of this village. I trust that rests easy on your conscience… assuming you have one.”
He spat on the ground and stalked off towards the Great Hall, his two friends falling in behind him without a word.
Dodinal relaxed. He had avoided bloodshed, which was good, but now he had given Gerwyn even more of a reason to hate him, by facing him down in front of his friends. Dodinal would have to watch his back. There was no telling what the chieftain’s son might do.
He looked up into the turbulent sky. When all was said and done, Gerwyn had spoken the truth. He was a burden on these people. He could not leave until the thaw came, yet to stay meant depriving them of food that was rightfully theirs.
There was only one answer. He hurried back to Rhiannon’s hut.
He would take to his bed early. Tomorrow he would be up with the dawn.
SEVEN
The sky was dark, but streaked with light to the east. A wind had picked up during the night, driving the clouds away and sending the temperature plummeting. Dodinal hesitated by the broken gates long enough to tighten his cloak and pull the hood over his head. The sword hung in its scabbard from his belt, and he clutched the spear that Idris had gifted him in his right hand. One way or another, he would put it to use before he returned. With one last look at the cluster of huts he headed out of the village.
A sense of belonging swept over him when he entered the forest. He had spent most of his life with branches overhead, heavy with leaves in the summer and starkly bare in the cold months. Yet as he progressed south through the woodland, the snow-white ground dappled with shadows, he was overwhelmed by a strangely terrible feeling. Something was indistinctly wrong in the forest. It was utterly still, and that should not be. There was not so much as the raucous call of a scavenger crow to break the silence.
At least here, the snow was thinner on the ground. Dodinal made swift progress. Soon the sun rose, revealing a brilliant blue sky. It was bitterly cold, but he kept warm by moving steadily, not once stopping to rest. He had no need to, now he was fully recovered. Even if he had, there was no comfort to be found in the frozen wilderness, and he lacked the means to make a fire. And as he pressed on, the ghosts of another forest and another time came back to haunt him.
The boy Dodinal could not bring himself to spend his nights among the dead in the ruins of his village. His hut was among those damaged but still standing, and he returned to it to gather what belongings he could carry. His vision blurred as he stepped inside, and a chasm opened in his chest. Everyone he loved was gone. His life had turned from one of uncaring innocence to one of unbearable misery within a matter of hours. Dodinal bit down on his lip to stop himself crying.
There would be no more tears, not ever again.
He put the sword on the table and collected anything he thought he could use, piling it onto a fur that he tied into a bundle and slung over his shoulder. Then he picked up the sword and went back into the forest, hastening to the hollow tree that had become his home. He dumped the bundle inside it before returning to the hut for more furs and his mattress, which he dragged behind him to the oak.
Not daring to light a fire inside the hollow, he gathered branches and used his father’s flint and steel to start one just outside it. While he was worried the smoke could attract unwanted attention, he had no choice; without the fire’s warmth he would not survive another night.
He filled his stomach with some of the meat and fruit he had salvaged and sat wrapped in his cloak close to the fire until his eyelids grew heavy. Then he crawled inside the tree and slept on his mattress with furs heaped on top of him, just as he always had.
This was how his days and nights passed. Each time he ran out of food he would return to the village and scavenge what he could, returning to the tree to eat by the fire until darkness fell and he slept. He would try not to look at the dead, whose bones the scavengers and carrion birds had by now almost picked clean.
Finally, when there was no more food, Dodinal set a snare the way his father had done. Having searched for and found hare tracks he broke off a sturdy yet flexible branch and sharpened both ends, driving each end deep into the ground on either side of the tracks to form an arch. From it he hung a length of gut whose end he tied into a noose. Once a hare’s head passed through the noose it would tighten around its neck, killing it.
That evening, dozing before the fire, he saw a small light move through the darkness. Through closed eyes he followed the hare’s progress as it loped along the track where he had set the snare, and was then snuffed out.