The Savage Knight

Madoc’s lips tightened into an angry line but he gave way.

Dodinal drove the point of his spear into the hard ground and unsheathed his sword. He made his way slowly to the point where the trail abruptly ended, next to a small, snow-covered rock.

His eyes scanned the forest for movement, but the woodland was populated only by the long swaying shadows of the trees. Sweat broke out on his forehead and he impatiently wiped it away. He did not believe in devils. Even so, there was something unarguably wrong here, something out of kilter with the natural order. He could try to deny it for as long as he drew breath, but he had learned years ago never to deny his instincts.

He drew close to the rock. The tracks did not peter out. They simply stopped. Beyond the last print, the snow, while thinner on the ground than it had been, was unbroken. The forest stretched away before him. Nothing had passed beyond here. If Dodinal had been religious he might have fallen to his knees and prayed for guidance. But he was not, and so could rely only on intuition and his senses.

While he contemplated the tracks, his eyes were drawn to the rock, streaked dark beneath its melting white coat. For a moment he had no idea why it captured his attention. Then it was as though his eyes had suddenly opened. His heart drummed and his breathing turned ragged. He put the sword away and reached out until he could place his hand on the rock. It was soft to the touch.

There was a sick feeling in his stomach, for he already knew what he would find. Sure enough, when he gently pushed, the rock shifted and tumbled over, sending up a cloud of snow as it collapsed. An arm unfurled to show a child’s hand, clenched into a fist. More snow skittered away to reveal an unruly mop of dark hair.

Footsteps hurried towards him and he waved them back, wanting to spare Madoc and his men. The boy was a stranger to Dodinal, yet even so the sight of his frozen body, curled up as though he had fallen asleep, was almost unbearably sad.

His eyes burned and his vision blurred. Dodinal reached down and lifted Wyn in his arms. The boy felt as light as the snow covering him, as if his departed soul had taken with it the weight of all he had been.

Madoc, face distraught, took the child from him. The chieftain set off, taking great striding steps back towards his village, his men falling in around him. Dodinal followed at a respectful distance, Idris and the others behind him. Not a word was spoken.

When they reached the village, Madoc was immediately surrounded by people, the women keening their grief and men surrounding him, wanting to take the boy. He refused their help and disappeared inside his hut, his people hurrying in after him.

“We’d best wait here,” Idris said. “This is a private moment.”

They loitered outside the hut for an age, while the shadows thickened around them. Dodinal, still shaken from the shock of finding the child’s body, wandered from the clearing to the edge of the forest, where he prowled restlessly. Through the trees he could see fires being lit in pits dotted here and there around the village. A sentry stood guard outside the main hut, but otherwise the place appeared deserted. No defences other than the fence, one man and a few desultory fires. Little good they would do against something that could appear and vanish at will, that could take a child, snuff out its life and discard it like a broken plaything.

Nothing could bring the boy back. But there were questions Dodinal would have answered before they left this place, which they must do, despite the tragedy in which they had become unwitting players. Soon, though, there would come a time of reckoning. If that meant his quest for peace had to wait, then wait it must. Whether he liked it or not, Dodinal was a knight. He had sworn to protect the innocent. He would not allow such cruel deeds to go unpunished.

⁸Arthur’s questionable chivalry is a recurring theme in both the Morte and the Second Book. From giving orders to have every newborn baby in the kingdom drowned, to his brutal conquest of Rome, to his pragmatic refusal to confront Lancelot over his conduct with Guinevere, Arthur strongly demonstrates Malory’s anxieties about the impossibility of a truly chivalrous life.

TEN

Madoc’s hut was so crowded that there was barely enough room for Dodinal. But when people saw him enter with a look as dark as the encroaching night on his already fearsome face, they moved aside to let him pass. He made his way to the table in the centre of the hut on which the child’s body had been placed, wearing the clothes he had been found in, arms folded across his chest.

He looked to be asleep, at peace.

A woman sat on a chair beside him, elbows on the table and hands clasped together, lips moving as she whispered a prayer. Her eyes were closed. Tears had left trails like glistening scars down both cheeks. A man stood trembling behind her, a hand on each of her shoulders, either to comfort her or to prevent himself from collapsing. He looked up at Dodinal with swollen red eyes.

“It was you who found him?”

Dodinal nodded.

“Then my wife and I thank you.” The man’s voice quivered with barely suppressed emotion. “To have lost him forever …”

He broke off, unable to continue.

Dodinal said nothing. There were no words in the world that had meaning at a time like this. He could not begin to imagine the torment Wyn’s parents had suffered when their boy had gone missing. Even then, they could have at least held out hope that he would be found alive, however unlikely that was. Now, that hope had been dashed; there was nothing left to shield them from the unbearable burden of grief. When Dodinal had lost his parents, and for many years after, he had been certain there could be no worse feeling. How wrong he had been. A child’s pain at the death of a parent was nothing compared to a parent’s suffering at the death of a child.

He looked around. The villagers were standing two and three deep around the table, Madoc prominent at the front. Idris, Gerwyn and the three hunters were at the back, looking uncomfortable. All were there to honour the dead, as was Dodinal, but he had other reasons for intruding. “May I look at him?” he said softly.

The woman ceased praying and raised her head, seeing Dodinal for the first time. In the hut’s shadowy interior, her eyes were black pits. “Who did this?” she hissed. “Who did this to my boy?”

“I don’t know,” Dodinal answered. “I’m sorry.”

Without asking her consent a second time, the knight leaned over to take a closer look at the boy. He was around the same age as Owain, maybe a year or so older. Dark brown hair framed a pale, thin face. The child’s eyes were closed, his mouth partly open. There were no rips or tears in his clothes and no visible wounds on his body. No trace of blood either.

Dodinal turned away. He had seen all he needed and had no desire to see any more. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, feeling the emptiness of the words even as he uttered them. Then he gestured towards Madoc and made his way to the door. Idris and his men quickly fell in behind. looking glad to escape.

Once outside, Dodinal breathed in deeply. The last time he had seen a dead child was after the Saxons had destroyed his village, and there had been many dead children then. In life they had shunned him for being different, but in death they were just victims. They had not deserved their fate, no matter how cruel they had been to him, just as Wyn had not deserved his. “Whoever took the boy was careful not to harm him,” he said, as much to himself as the others. “There were no signs of violence. Not so much as a scratch that I could see.”

Madoc nodded tersely. He looked on the verge of tears. In a community this small, any death would be hard felt, let alone the death of one so young. “They wanted him alive. They could not have known the child was sick. He has… had… always been frail. His chest was weak. Sometimes he struggled for breath. The shock…”

“The shock of it would have stopped his heart.” Dodinal spoke the words that Madoc could not. “And then, once they realised he had died, they abandoned him and left him where he lay.”

“Whoever they were,” Idris said. “We still have no idea.”

“Neither does it explain the tracks,” Hywel added.

Dodinal stared into the forest. They were in there. Far away by now, no doubt, but those who had taken Wyn and the others before him were in there somewhere. And who was to say they were done?