The Savage Knight

The old man ignored him. “It’s easy going once you get to the top. The descent into the valley is nowhere near as challenging.”

“You’ve been there?” Dodinal asked.

“Me? Don’t you listen? I told you, I haven’t been even this far up since what happened to my sister. But the men who took Crow and Arwel and the young ones there, they talked about it for months. You’d swear they’d been on some brave quest rather than off to dump an old woman, a simpleton and a bunch of squawking infants in the middle of nowhere to fend for themselves.”

“You sound as if you almost regret it,” Dodinal observed.

“I regret what we did that night, nothing else. We did a great wrong and we tried to find a way to atone. We tried and we failed.” He hawked and spat, then turned away. “You’d best be off. If you hurry, you should reach the valley this afternoon. A word of advice. Be well away from there by sunset, with or without the children you seek. Now go, and travel safely.”

He turned and set off down the hill towards what remained of his village, raising an arm in farewell as he disappeared from view.

“Well, then,” Gerwyn said after a moment. “You heard him. We need to be there and on our way back by sunset. Best to get moving.”

He shrugged the pack until it hung comfortably from his shoulders and then took off towards the mountain without waiting for a response. The others hesitated, eyebrows raised. Dodinal gave them the nod and they set after him, with Dodinal following a short distance behind.

He could hear the murmur of their voices as they walked, but he was in no mood for idle talk, not when they were heading towards an uncertain fate. For all he knew they would be dead by nightfall. Now he almost regretted his decision to travel in their company. He had grown to like them, to see them as friends, even the near-silent Gwythyr. While death held no fear for him, he would prefer to die alone than take his companions with him.

The path the old man had indicated took them through the forest along the lake’s western bank. The men became silent as they passed beneath the green-budded branches, perhaps remembering what had happened here that day all those years ago. Tramping along a woodland path, Dodinal found himself looking out for a tall cluster of ferns, but saw none. It had happened a long time ago. The boy had grown into a half-mad old man and the sister was far from here, perhaps dead. Only the spectre of unwanted memories remained. Dodinal realised none of them had thought to ask the old man his name.

The forest felt suddenly oppressive and gloomy, bright wildflowers doing nothing to dispel a sense of foreboding that made his skin prickle. Again he had to remind himself why he was here. If it had not been for his feelings for Rhiannon and the boy, he would have gladly given up and gone home.

Home? Yes, home. Home to where she was waiting for him, for him and the boy and the others, not yet knowing that two of them would never come back and another was little better than blind.

He would get there yet, he told himself. Owain too. No matter what awaited them up in the mountains, he would find a way home.

It took them the best part of an hour to reach the head of the lake. When they emerged from the trees, the mountain suddenly reared up before them, impossibly high. Craning his neck to look up, Dodinal felt a tug of disquiet. He did not like heights; up in the high places, he would be a stranger in an unknown and dangerous realm. A man who fell in the forest could pick himself up, dust himself down and be on his way. A man who fell in the mountains would fall a very long way. And all they had to guide them were directions from someone who had not even walked this way before. It did not augur well.

The path petered out, and the ground became steeper and uneven. Some of the boulders were as tall as Dodinal, reminding him of a story his mother had once told him, about how warring giants had created the mountains, long ago in the time before memory, by hurling rocks at each other to settle their differences.

Soon they found the track, as the old man had said they would. It was overgrown and had not been walked on for many years, but the ground beneath the ankle-high grass was firm. It carved a crooked route up the face of the mountain, and they walked at a steady pace. When Gerwyn eventually called for a rest halt they turned back to face the valley, which spread out before them in miniature. They sat on the grass banks that edged the path on both sides, massaging cramping muscles and wiping the sweat from their brows. The sun, though strong, was still some way from its zenith. Dodinal nodded, satisfied with their progress.

They pushed on, their voices stilled. They needed all their breath for the ascent. The track became steeper the higher it took them: their lungs ached, their faces glowed, and their thighs and calves burned with the strain. When they reached the plateau the old man had spoken of, they dropped their weapons and packs where they stood and lay on their backs on the hard ground, chests heaving, until they could talk without gasping for air between words.

The first to recover, Dodinal sat up and looked down the path. It fell away from the plateau until it appeared no wider than the laces that tied his boots. It had taken them an hour to walk the length of the lake, but from here it looked to be about as long and as wide as his thumb. Instinctively he drew back from the plateau’s edge. While there was no danger of falling, his stomach still gave an unpleasant lurch as he realised just how far up they had climbed. And the worst of it was, they still had a long way to go.

Reluctantly, he turned to look up at the tall peak ahead. This close it was no longer featureless: directly before him was a deep cleft in the rock, forming a ravine with cliffs rising up on either side. If there was a path, it was buried beneath a layer of stones and slabs that brought to mind the old man’s talk of rock falls. Dodinal studied the cliffs. They were not sheer, but bellied out before curving up and levelling off far above his head. They appeared stable and, besides, the route between them was wide enough that they should be safe as long as they kept to the middle of the path.

He was so intent on studying the terrain ahead of them that he did not hear Gerwyn approach. “Have you considered what we’ll do when we get there?”

“Not yet. When we get there, that’s when I’ll decide.”

“Isn’t that leaving it a little late?”

Dodinal sighed and looked at the younger man. “We have no idea of the lie of the land. It could be open ground, it could be forest. Why try to second guess? Better to wait until we’re close enough to know what we’re up against. Then we decide how to approach it.”

“Fair enough. You know best, I’m sure.” Gerwyn was silent for a moment. “You still don’t trust me.”

It was not a question.

Dodinal glanced across at the rest of their party. The men were still sprawled on their backs in the sunshine, knees drawn up, making the most of every moment of rest they had. They were talking in low voices as though afraid they might bring the mountain down on top of them if they spoke too loudly.

“You are here, that’s all I care about,” he answered. “Your motives for being here aren’t important to me.”

“I mean, trust me to be of use when we finally catch up with them.” Gerwyn had taken off his sword belt before collapsing; now he reached out to pick it up and held it lightly in both hands, gazing down at it rather than at Dodinal. “I know what you think of me. What everyone thinks of me. I’m half the man my father was, lazy and feckless, more interested in going off hunting than helping when there’s work to be done.”

He broke off. Dodinal waited in silence for him to continue.

“I won’t deny it. Can’t deny it. But that was then. When he was still alive. My father, I mean. When I was growing up, there was never any point in trying to impress him. I knew all along he wanted my brother Elwyn to follow him as brehyrion. The way I saw it, I was never going to amount to anything, so why bother trying?”

“And after your brother died? You could have tried to impress your father then. He never spoke of it, but I think that was what he was waiting for. Hoping for, maybe.”

Gerwyn put the sword back down and pinched his chin with one hand, the dark stubble rasping against his fingers. “It was too late for me by then. Some habits are hard to break. I was so used to being the second son, my father’s second choice to succeed him, that when the chance finally came for me to prove myself I no longer cared.”

“Until Idris died,” Dodinal said.

“Yes, until he died. That woke me up more than Rhiannon’s slap that night.” Gerwyn smiled to himself, his fingers slipping from his chin to idly rub his cheek. “I deserved that. Deserved a lot more than that. I meant what I