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.
