Excerpt: The Wolf of Saxon

On the last days of his world, the boy would curse his second sight.
But there was no initial warning. No lightning from the heavens, or horse hooves biting frenzied, trampling upon a trail of blood, through the mists of his mind now. There was only his father, his mother, and their cohort of some two dozen men on their long ride to the coasts of East Anglia to see his father’s brother, Uncle Rwod-hagen.
Gwyr missed the coast, and the boy could see the growing excitement in his father’s features, even if he remained stoic as the horses found their way through the warn roman road. It had been some time since the great Empire had contracted. Gwyr still loved the sea, though he vowed to move from its expanse when Honorius- with actions betraying his name, left the men of Briton to their own course with the strike of his pen. He was not alone. Many of his finest men who rode with him, had left this land so many years past.
Gwyr’s father was a roman who had remained on the isle, even as the invaders began pummelling the shores, like jackals, sneaking upon the jewel of the northern sea. And now with grizzled beard, and all but his daughter, they trekked eastward to reunite the clan. Gwyr hoped it would not be the last time.

His son watched Gwyr’s face from the yawning gate of his own horse. He watched all things with cold eyes like a frosted meadow. His lip set in a frown of concentration, taking in the weary form of his mother just behind him and the jostling of the armed soldiers behind her. Cadhla bundled herself in a blanket. The chill that had gripped her daughter now leaving her bones. Although pleased to see her husband’s brother, she did not relish the time away from Brangwen who seemed to languish in a fever. She had left this land some time ago. Let her husband have dreams of conquest carried from his roman heritage. Let the men in their huts toast to old days and scheme of the return of their father’s ideal that Briton remain in the House of Aeneas. For her, she would pray to Tamesis, the river goddess, to bathe her daughter in her healing embrace and wait until the talk of war led busied the men from her household.

The boy’s gaze shifted as the acrid smell of a marsh filled the air. He could see the smoke from a pit fire and a knot of mud-ridden men drew forth bog-ore to be carried to the nearby furnaces and melted into iron. Their haunted weary faces could only be that of slaves acquired from last season.
But last season was past. Only fools and old men would spend their days dreaming about the shadows of what was, when what was to become drew like a readied bow before them.

Gwyr’s mount slowed at the loosening of its reins. Ahead they could see clearly above the trees, and silhouetted against the smoky coast, the hilltop fort. The roman battlements, high and squared seemed worn by the salt air and bitter winds of winter, yet the vine-veined ramparts drew the only true smile from his lips. His father might be proud that it still stood, for he had seen its rise like a wedge into the tree of Albu. Liberius had taken two celtic brides in his life in Briton, and had liked their enchanting ways, even if he could only truly convert the second to that of the ways of the Christ.

Gwyr, on the other hand, had not his father’s gift of transformation, and try as he might he could not get his beautiful wife to give up the pagan paths of her family. He gave up some time ago, and instead played as kind of game with the boy and his daughter in trying to convert and keep them from the dark and strange gods of the Celts. Rwod would hear nothing of the sort, of course. He was a man who was concerned far more with the evils of today, than the meanderings of the soul in eternity. He cared as little for Heaven as he did for the druid’s view that all seasons were renewable and so were all souls. Cadhla claimed that her sister was the reincarnated form of Boadicea, to which, Gwyr always maintained that the woman had best send for the remnants of the Iceni to protect their village. Such a jest retained little but cold stares and silence from Cadhla in return. But those were the only quarrels the two had. Their love for the land, their family, and both the Celts and the retired Romans had long since dulled the spars of religious discourse.

“So!” a voice called from the closest embankment, still a stone’s throw away. “This is the kind of weather that sends a man to visit his brother?! Or have you forgotten what family looks like?”
Gwyr squinted against the bitter ocean wind. He lifted his hand both in greeting and as a gesture that his party stop. He waited until the final hoof rested in the stony mud, and his men held upon his command. He felt the caltrop bite of ice in the air, threatening a deluge. One of the great dangers of traveling just a month before Beltane, there would be little respite in the weather. But he had little choice in the matter. This would not wait.