Moon and the Wind, The

The Moon and the Wind

D James Brown
david.brown@iname.com
Words: 16,638

An account of past events must include only those facts which
are pertinent, otherwise the important features are harder to
discern; but an account must include a background of facts to
be set on, otherwise there is no frame of reference from which
to view it. Images and actions are linked by their relevance to
one another, being networks of information, with unrelated
accounts having no common facts. Two separate accounts can
be linked by mentioning a trivial item which is common to
both, what somebody said, perhaps, or who saw whom, and
suddenly the significance of each account to the other can be
seen.
As tributaries of events form accounts, these accounts will
expand and some will coalesce into whole oceans of history.
The essayists who sit at the estuaries where rivers swell the
seas of time, it is they who make the most intriguing
observations and have the most interesting stories to tell.
_

Night had swallowed the valley suddenly, for it had been
dusk only minutes earlier. But even as the sun had cowered
from the sky, the often-times august conflagration of the
firmament had not come, only a mortal discoloration of the
clouds' bellies with a rudimentary yellow. Little did the sun
know that its warmth would be wasted in the oncoming chill
of the night, and that its warmth should be saved for a more
deserving scene.
The wind, having pressed the passing daylight from the
sky's edge, now rasped in the darkness along the sides of the
mountains, causing the millions of leaves without exception to
tremble spasmodically; and yet despite the wind's roguery
there was not the air to fuel even the feeblest spark from the
hidden stars. The previous night, when the valley had never
before been walked by men or women, the dewy stars had
glistened like tears falling from a dark complexion, but on this
night the sky was dry and sore, its horizons marred by cloudy
blotches.
The vast swaying of swarthy black grass ran from the east
to the west, flowing ignorantly over ridges, ditches and rocks,
the mountains themselves coming alive, their muscles flexing
beneath their foliated skins. But this was not the breathtaking
animation of a treasured view, but the sinister summoning of
life in what should be left long dead. The mewing of a grouse
voiced the singular mourning of the valley and of its every
mournful crevice and tract.
Among the frightened palpitations of the bracken, very
close to the riverless bed at the eastern end of the valley, was
another movement, every bit as cold and every quake as
nervous as the valley's, but this was life of a more admirable
quality, albeit a quality belied by the apparent brevity of its
progress when compared to the extent of the valley.
This life, only just extricable from the weave of the
undergrowth, was a desperate ounce of human life, a stranded
family, four britons struggling westward through the night
against the eastward ache of their hearts.
Memories were brought with them of precious instants
from their previous lives. Although their determination to
struggle through the murderous black bracken was strong, it
was possible only through the reliving of previous triumphs.
Every extra twitch of a muscle and every privately whispered
"Come on!" were manifestations of inner activities, every one
borne of the beloved images from days past...
_

"Oh, the heavens are heavenly today", murmured Modlen,
the two aspirates wafting from between his lips like bliss and
lethargy vocalised. As his head languished a little backwards
he let his eyes drift a little upwards as if to follow his words
on their lofty course, swaying on currents of brisk air and
spinning as they passed through the column of warmth rising
from the smouldering ashes from which he had lifted his leg of
mutton an hour earlier. He had been sitting beside the coals
since then, sometimes with somebody sitting beside him,
sometimes on his own, but at all times lazily bestowing
compliments on the surroundings.
Not far above his sidelong view of the coals, but in such a
distant focal field as to be in a different world, the sun lit up
the inside of a channel of cloud with crimson. Clouds lay in
heaps close to the horizon on either side so that where the hills
of earth ended and the hills of mist began was difficult to
make out, and even in the middle where the sky and the land
were in greatest contrast, the fields were so emblazoned that
they looked a part of the sky.
Long shadows ran from Modlen and his stool across the
stubble and stopped, after a sharp upward turn, on the vertical
side of a house, out of which appeared a young woman, one
hand alighting on the door-frame for want of a purpose. Being
downwind of Modlen's barbecue she smelled immediately the
smoke and its carriage of field fragrances borne on the air over
the coals and into the settlement, and since she knew even
before she left the musty interior of her house who would be
sitting beside the fire, she had no need to turn her head
towards the sunset to see the slovenly silhouette pat its belly.
Surely the scene was faultless. What an illustration it was
of a life of summer evenings, when the mind edits out the
intervening winters and sews a time-line back through
summers to long ago. Why then, was she not at ease?
She watched for a moment the dawdling of villagers and
dogs and wondered how representative their apparent
calmness was of their feelings. For a second she thought she
would join her friends, but then she stopped for if they were
lucky enough not to share her fears then she should let them
enjoy their ignorance for a few days longer.
But when her eye was caught by a shadow retreating
suddenly and rapidly across the ground towards Modlen, who
had moved only slightly on his stool to produce the effect in
the low and slanting sunlight, she found her thoughts
following her vision and she left the side of the house to
approach him. On her first steps the arm which she had rested
on the door-frame fell to her side and became a part of the
attractive gait with which she crossed the sun-striped ground
to Modlen.
These two were endeared to each other; they were not
married as such but by common law were known as husband
and wife, and two children had ensured they had remained
together for a long time.
"Hungry are you, Rhonwen?"
Modlen tossed a ravished leg bone into the fireplace.
Rhonwen, settling herself on the stool from which Modlen had
raised himself, said that she was not hungry.
"Fychan was upset this morning", she said. A few
moments were needed for Modlen to make himself a seat in
the dirt beside her, then he replied.
"Has Awstin been telling him stories?"
"Not this time. He has been, but this time it was some of
the other children. Sioned's relatives down south were killed
and she's just told her sons. Now all the children know about
it."
Rhonwen and her husband gazed over the embers as if
they were sat on opposite sides and beheld each other's eyes.
With his tongue, Modlen pulled a strand of meat from
between two teeth, almost as part of his thinking process.
"What was Fychan saying?"
"Well, that the fighting would come farther north and that
we'd all have to cope with it." The last few words had been
hesitant as though they hadn't been her first choice of phrase
and that even as she had said them she had been
experimenting with other phrases. She and her husband said
nothing more for a while, during which time their thoughts
were private again.
Rhonwen and her family had lived immemorially here on
the north-western skirt of Wessex, and contentment was all
they had known until news had come from the east and south
of invasions from the Southern Seas. The word they heard was
'Celt'. Stories had been heard of Celts living almost in peace
with aboriginal britons far to the south-east, but so had stories
of ferocious Celtic warriors. Strongholds were being
established to the south, the Celts forcefully marrying into
British families and marking the land for only their own
farming.
In time, news of atrocities had come from sources closer
to home. Accounts were soon heard of nearby acquaintances
fleeing west, lamenting their bereavements and bewailing the
indelible scenes of pillage which stained their minds, dreams
of alien warriors wielding swords made of strange metals.
Rhonwen had talked to friends, other mothers, about it.
They had told each other how afraid they were, and in
speaking it they had been no longer able to ignore the fear.
Rhonwen had decided to broach the subject with Modlen.
They had never kept secrets habitually but were both reluctant
to share misgivings, problems, anything which they could
possibly keep to themselves to shield the other from any
worry. Rhonwen had approached Modlen when he was alone,
cooking on a fire in the same hearth as he was sat beside
today, while their children and others chased each other with
cold coals with which to mark their faces and arms.
"What do you think?" she had asked. Modlen, who had,
unbeknownst to his wife, been worrying as well, talking to
other fathers, searching for solutions, had been about to put
the same question to her. Once again, Rhonwen found that in
admitting her fear she had furthered it, as though the fear had
pushed her to a new boundary and was therefore a step closer
to its full recognition as a fear to be dealt with. And with this
new expression her tears had come flowing. She had been led,
sobbing, into their house so that the children would not see
her.
Modlen recalled that in calming her he had sat beside her
on a mattress and that on the same mattress the following
night he had comforted Fychan, whose friends had told him
about the spate of murders rising from the south. Modlen and
Rhonwen had collaborated with two other families of four and
five children to move to the Severn, where if necessary they
would enact their plan to cross the river and flee to the
mountainous west before the Celts could reach their homes. In
this final public admission that their timeless homes were
really under threat, the fear was complete.
Consecutive midnights were spent meeting together and
planning an escape route. Modlen had journeyed south
through the forests to see how far the Celts had marched.
When he found a lifeless village, lifeless houses, lifeless
bodies, he made a quick and purposeful survey of the dead
and had needed no more convincing that as farmers they stood
no chance of defending themselves.
On returning home he had spoken to Rhonwen and they
had tenderly unveiled their plans to move to the Severn to
their boys, whose anxieties had increased through their
father's unexplained absence.
Now, when the only remaining detail was the timing of the
escape, Modlen and Rhonwen were still spending each day on
the same chores and leisure which they had practised for
thousands of days before. But now each action was a stop-
gap, just a mimic of a similar action which had used to be
performed in earnest. Life now was just a burning fuse,
receding until the time would come when the Modlen family
were compelled to run. The sun and stars still exchanged
places twice a day, but now they represented only the push of
time ever towards dreadful conclusions. The throb of sunlight
mounting and retreating every day was the slow beating of
nature's heart to Rhonwen, whose own heart beat out the
passing days before she would run with it into the west.
Modlen felt the constriction of the Celtic armies no less
than the constriction of time. Even from the outskirts of the
settlement he could see only a few hundred feet, but the sky
behind the horizon looked blank and ready to have
superimposed on it dark warrior heads as they appeared above
the crest of a bank or hill, followed by torsos and running legs.
He felt at those times that he stood on the shores of an island,
and that the sea was rising ever closer to their homes. He
never walked over the hills' brows, not since coming back
from his reconnaissance; he just waited there to smell the first
sweet whiffs of the bloody sea rising from the lowlands until,
like a flood aswim with dead wildlife, the tide of the Celts'
advance brought death to these shores.
"When should we go, do you think?" Rhonwen's voice
sounded purposeful through its feebleness. Modlen was
brought quietly out of his thoughts, back to his barbecue, back
to the warmth of sunlight on his right cheek and the touch of
Rhonwen on his left. With her question had come the time for
them to start preparations, that was clear. Gone was
procrastination, gone was impunity.
"Maybe we should talk to Sioned and Gwilym. It's
pointless waiting until it's too late."
Huddled in the powerful sunlight, their faces lit from one
side, mauve on the hidden side, but lit gently from beneath by
the embers, they sat at the vanishing point of a picture which,
viewed from an aspect at the other side of the line of stone
huts on this side of the settlement, captured the intrinsic peace
of the lifestyle, a state which was manifest also in the faces of
the people roaming between houses. The moment was without
time, as though the sun's glow was suddenly a coy blush rather
than ferocity, as though nature suddenly felt guilty, and time
relented from its interminable push specially for this view, for
it knew that this was the last view of the world for many of the
britons within it.
For when Modlen and Rhonwen stood up it was not to
retire to bed, but was in awakening to Celtic cries of war and
the smell of burning thatch.
Despite the weeks which had been spent mentally
practising this moment, it was as much as the Modlens could
do to keep the four family members in each other's sight
amidst the turmoil. They were, as far as they could see, the
only four to leave the village alive. Their perceptions of the
tragedy, mercifully, were vague, only collages of traumatic
images. Possessions were dragged from fires, Scandinavian
amber and Irish gold. Hands grabbed young wrists, a gentle
man walked out silently towards an armed assailant, leaving
his shrieks in the mouth of his wife looking on.
Then came their westward journey. Memory of the
Modlen family's escape was difficult to separate from that of
their journey. By the time they were able to reconstruct events,
and their concept of time as linear was no longer distorted by
their continual involuntary remembrance of the escape, the
family found themselves to have been travelling for five days.
They had with them, besides the few items of paraphernalia
they had salvaged, some vases which they had taken
reluctantly but necessarily from the bluestone graves of
Beaker Folk in a decrepit graveyard they had encountered
beside the Severn. These were used to collect rainwater while
travelling - the rain was a godsend - but it was only because
they could not regain their appetites for food that they did not
suffer from hunger.
It is at this point in the family's inexorable journey that
they are found struggling along the black hillside against their
homeward instincts. So small they look, even under the
storyteller's glass, so small all things look when lost in that
monstrous vale that all life appears demoted - the britons to
insects, the ash trees to scrub, and the moon and the wind
themselves from heavenly powers to mere persons are
degraded.
The wind has been the travellers' foeman since they
crossed the Severn, and its malice is immutable. When they
walk in daylight it spits rain into their ruddy faces and when
they shelter in cavities it punches its turgid hands in and
fingers them between their clothes. Even now that they have
the landscape and the darkness to fight, the wind still barges
them without mercy.
The moon, however, is the family's only inspiration. When
their difficulties are most severe she can see paths which from
the frosty thickets are invisible, and her lantern leads them
gently along the valley's hideous contours.
_

Tanycoed Street is a long Welsh street on the side of a
valley which doesn't need a name for none but its occupants
can distinguish it from the other valleys of the Rhondda. It's
men-folk are customarily miners, so were their fathers, and
their wives are all mothers. To get to Tanycoed Street you
must climb up to it from the valley floor, either a short and
fiercely steep walk or a trek from the valley's end which with
every step jacks you slowly up the mountainside. The terraced
houses lie on a lower level to the south of the street and a
higher to the north, where the mountain looms up behind the
rubbishy back yards.
The houses are built of great, rough, stone blocks, the
steps of worn slates, and the eight-year-old boys who run in
and out of ever-open front doors will stand glaring at a
stranger to the district to see where his business is at.
Adolescents dot the street corners and shops: swearing, crass
adolescents who have the warmest souls once you know them.
Two of the boys from Tanycoed Street were, however,
often absent from it. It was common for them to walk to the
Cwm and spend the day bathing in the streams and on the
sunny grass, until the heightening shadows of the pine trees
pointed the way home again in the dusky evenings.
The Cwm was a sizeable hike along the bore of the
neighbouring valley and the boys would take packed lunches
in paper bags to tide them over the days they spent there. Each
night, on arriving back to the Street from over the Mount, they
would each scan dolefully along the row of sheds, runner-bean
frames, coal piles of the gardens, and the long embankment of
illegally tipped junk Mount-side of the continuous garden
wall. Their thoughts of the Cwm often turned into dreams of
the Cwm and they would will the night to pass quickly.
The Cwm was where the boys' hearts were while their
backsides sat in classrooms, which is where they were at one
o'clock one Friday, one Summer.
"And how do we know that?" asked the teacher.
One or two of the children mumbled something beginning
with "squ-", but were inaudible in their lack of confidence and
enthusiasm.
"Right", continued the teacher, "Square both sides and
what do we get?"
Nobody answered him because he showed that the
question was rhetorical by writing the answer on the board. "P
equals four", he announced when he had finished.
Tristan awoke from his reverie. He always day-dreamed
while the teacher was talking but only once he knew what the
teacher was talking about. Whenever it sounded as though the
teacher was finishing one topic and was about to move on to
something else, something in Tristan's mind always shook him
to pay attention. Once the new topic was well underway, then
Tristan could stop listening again.
Tristan, through observation of this habit of his, had
decided long ago that it was so that if he were suddenly asked
a question, at least he would know what the question was
about. He could always give a good answer to a teacher's
questions, not always the right one but always a good one.
The only question he dreaded was the one he didn't hear.
When he had been even younger, he had been frequently
humiliated by unexpected questions which had brought the
class to a riot of laughter.
"Can you show us all on the map where that is?" she had
said.
"Is it a horse?" he had said.
To Tristan's satisfaction the teacher, on steadying his
mortar board which had become slightly dislodged after his
enthusiastic spin towards the class on the completion of quad
erat demonstratum, told the class that he would go through
one more example like that one to make sure that everybody
understood.
"Good", thought Tristan, knowing that he was happy that
he did understand and so could relax until he was alerted to
the next change of topic. As he fell back into his day-dream,
the word "good" went dreamily with him, still echoing in his
head, and he wondered for a moment who had said it, before
his thoughts blurred.
Lewis, Tristan's twin brother, was also thinking thoughts a
long way from 'p equals four'. He was scrutinising lines much
higher up on the blackboard, scouring for some
comprehensible fragment, hoping that he could grasp it before
the teacher rubbed the whole board clean and started on more
indecipherable equations.
Lewis was not academic, but he didn't mind. Lots of boys
in the class were worse than he was. How Tristan was able to
do so well in his tests, Lewis never knew, but he didn't mind
that either. There was no maths in the Cwm. When Tristan
came with him to -
"Roberts! I asked you a question."
Lewis heard his surname but had not heard the question.
He didn't even mind that. He knew that every silent boy sitting
in the classroom was staring at him. Even the boys in front of
him who did not dare turn around were staring at him in the
heads, but he could tolerate that so long as it gave him time to
listen out for the barely audible whispers of loyal friends
nearby who could give him the answer.
He heard a hissed answer: "Two n minus one."
Another: "Two n plus one."
The third answer, "Two n minus one", clinched it.
Just as the teacher was about to speak, Lewis called out
the answer. The teacher paused, squinted, nodded, and then
continued writing on the board. Lewis paid attention for a
minute, just in case the teacher tried to catch him out with two
questions in a row, then he drifted off to join his brother on
the banks of the stream which flowed through the Cwm.
While the classroom clock ticked and the teacher tutted
and the schoolboys winced and shuffled and scratched and
loosened their buttons and pushed their socks down, the
Roberts brothers played gaily with each other. They rolled
down grassy slopes until they were dizzy. They threw stones
at tree stumps. They chased each other across stepping stones
and even tried to chase rabbits.
When the bell went, they were last out of the classroom
for they had been the only boys not to have spent the last few
minutes of the lesson staring at the clock trying to heave the
minute hand up to the top.
Outside the school gates they found a familiar dog, a
collie, which they patted before looking around for its owner.
"Hiya", came the expected call.
"Hiya Pilky. How was PT?"
"You know." The shrug described exactly Pilky's
nonchalance towards sport. "Let's go."
"Aye."
"Aye."
The dog fell in at Pilky's side, panting and jogging with
excitement at their reunion but keeping out from in front of its
master's feet.
Tristan and Lewis Roberts lived on the north side of
Tanycoed street. They were nine and ten years old, similar
ages to their favourite friend, Pilky. Pilky was really named
Gerrard but was called Pilky by his friends. He lived opposite
the Roberts' boys, a few houses removed.
"You coming out after", the boys asked each other.
"Aye. I'll bring a football if you like" they said, and with
those brief words they parted. Tristan and Lewis disappeared
into their house first, leaving Pilky to walk and talk his dog
along the road to his own front door.
"Dash! Come on, boy. Come on!" he urged in the most
loving of voices which mothers reserve for babies.
Pilky was still telling Dash where to sit and when not to
bark when his mother pushed him down into his seat at the
table and put a plate in front of him.
"Dash! Come and sit by me, boy!"
"Leave the dog alone", scolded his mother, Mrs Tidy,
while she slopped some plates into a bowl of suds. "Just eat
your dinner. Your father'll be home soon and he's going to
want some peace and quite, so you just eat up and get off out
to play, right?"
"Right", said Pilky. "Later Dash. We'll play later."
Mrs Tidy washed dishes while Pilky ate his food and Dash
washed himself.
"Mam", said Pilky when his initial hunger had subsided.
"Can I go to the Cwm tomorrow. It's Saturday."
"Of course you can. Why are you asking me? You don't
normally bother asking your mother where you can go."
"I thought I'd take Dash."
"Oh, I see. You've been thinking again. You know I don't
like you taking him across that main road." She pressed her
chin into her neck and pursed her lips. She was standing
behind Pilky's back, but it affected her tone of voice such that
Pilky knew what she looked like while she spoke.
"But he could do with a good run, couldn't you Dash?"
"Next week maybe. You know why I don't like you taking
him with you, don't you?"
"I suppose." The last syllable took a long time to say.
"Why don't you like me taking him?"
"Because he runs off without any idea where he's going
and you follow him, don't you? You can't watch yourself on
that main road if the dog's with you, can you? And who knows
where he leads you when you're in the woods. Hmm?"
Pilky suddenly could only play with his food and let his
mouth sag.
"Maybe Dad can come with us next week and we can take
Dash?"
"If he doesn't mind, we'll all go. How's that?"
She smiled from behind him with the sort of smile that
Pilky reserved for Dash.
"Yes! Did you hear that, Dash? We'll go to the Cwm next
week with Mam and Dad. Okay?"
_

Modlen spent some time building the family a hut to live
in. It faced south from under a bushy overhang, which was
small and far from ideal but was the most protection he could
find in the first few days. Once the beginnings of a hut had
been built, it was not worth the father's while to move to a
better site and start again. Four stout branches were fixed
upright in the ground, and together with a beech sapling which
was already in place they formed the props for a pyramidal
roof. Ferns were plentiful on the valley floor and while their
defoliated stems were woven tightly to form the walls, their
fronds were hung across the roof, pointing away from the
apex so that the rain was led away.
Knowing that the boys Awstin and Fychan, who at first
did little to help, could be made better use of, not only to
boost the family's combined efforts but also to lift the boys'
morale, the parents showed them how to set animal traps and
between setting and emptying the traps the boys spent much
time gathering and drying firewood so that the valley was
filled on successful days with the invigorating smell of
roasting meat.
The mother, perhaps the more thoughtful of the two
parents, sometimes found herself admiring the form of one or
other of the vases they had taken from the graveyard. Her
knowledge of history informed her that it must have belonged
to a farmer, someone with a partner and children, someone
who, on one grey afternoon, had straightened his sore back
and dropped his mattock at the sight of armed thugs making
through his crops towards his house, brandishing their clubs
as they went. The vase which he would once have used to
guzzle mead at the birth of his first daughter would later have
been used to supply water to her lips in the futile minutes
before her death in the wake of the intruders, and on his own
death the vase would have been laid in the grave with his
body.
And now, thought the mother, the descendant of those
thugs, she had taken the vase from his grave for her own use.
Had she really wronged him any less cruelly than the Celts had
wronged her?
Remarkably, the valley might have been a marvellous
home. It gave them sanctuary from invasion, since no-one
would come there without being forced to, and despite the
hostility of the surrounding peaks there was room for
agriculture between them. The father reinforced the lower
portions of the walls with stone, and the house served very
well, despite needing repairs each time the wind took to it in a
temper.
Nevertheless, the family were alone. Since they had left
the dying calls of their neighbours they had seen no-one, and
the parents began to worry that if they were hurt their children
would have no choice but to migrate eastward again to their
old district and pray that the Celts had left by then. Far better
would be the opportunity to cultivate a new community here in
the mountains, but that would require other families to join
them, and those families, if they existed at all, would be very
few and very difficult to contact.
It was clear to Modlen that his primary objective was to
search the surrounding tracts for any signs of other refugees.
At first he took to the task with ambition, borne from the
relief he had felt at bringing his family to safety. He spent
many months scouting up and down the length of the valley
and its adjacent regions, calling aloud to anybody who might
have heard. He took a knapped flint with him everywhere to
scratch signs on rocks, and was always watchful for any
evidence of human life, clues, anything which would add hope
to his ambition.
Modlen had found that not far to the north of the shelter
there was a small chasm which ran East West along the floor
of a valley. On discovering it he had known that it would
block all of his sorties in that direction unless he could find a
way to cross it, but after spending part of the day searching
along its sides for a path down which he could possibly
scramble, he concluded that in future he would be better to
search only to the south of the shelter. As he walked back to
the shelter that evening he felt heavy disappointment, for he
knew that beyond the chasm lay land which was well within a
day's walk of the shelter but out of his reach. As he was
approaching the shelter, Rhonwen was waking to the rustling
of rain on the fern roof, rain which Modlen had not even
noticed since he had enough gloom of his own without the
weather's adding to it.
Rhonwen was aware that it had not been the rain itself
which had woken her. Still drowsy and without moving
herself, she reconnoitred her limbs. Yes, her legs were
straight, as they had been when she was last conscious, and
were crossed so that her left Achilles' tendon rested over her
right instep. One arm was cocked behind her head so that the
hand was squeezed between the pillow and her head, palm up,
and her other arm... She snatched her arm away from the floor
where it had been lying, and wiped it in disgust along the side
of the bed.
A young wolf was standing beside her, now licking and
slapping its jowls after having licked Rhonwen's hand. As she
looked at it, the animal's hind legs retreated, stretching its
body, and it lowered itself to the ground as if in waiting.
Rhonwen was not afraid, in fact she was relieved after the
shock of such a strange sensation on her hand, which had been
inexplicable from the dreamy realms from where she had
sensed it. Turning onto her side, she brought her knees to her
chest and lowered her feet to the floor, causing the wolf to
spring to its feet again. It really was a handsome thing, very
strong and yet not the least bit intimidating.
In fact, the wolf's presence evoked a new feeling inside
Rhonwen, new at least in that she had not felt this tender
inquisitiveness since several weeks before they left home.
Here was a member of a pack, a consciousness which was
content to stay in the valley. The Modlens had come to this
valley, though great effort, only to see it as inhospitable,
barren despite its flora. How could this support a family? they
had thought, and yet human or otherwise, here was a son,
perhaps also a father, who was at ease with the valley.
But why was it so at ease with Rhonwen? The explanation
seemed too marvellous to believe to be true, but before any
other options could be considered a scrape of dirt caused both
heads, human and lupine, to jerk towards the doorway as if
from the pull of ropes.
Fychan appeared momentarily at the door but, seeing the
wolf and his mother and mistaking her surprise for fright, he
darted from the doorway with shrill cries. When, after a few
moments, composure had returned to her, Rhonwen decided
that prudence ought to override her curiosity, and she cast her
eyes around for a weapon in case the need arose for her to use
it. Behind her bed, close at hand, was a machete, and she
gently took it by its bone handle and let it rest in her right
hand on the bed while with her left she reached forward to test
the wolf's nervousness.
Nothing could be communicated between them before the
doorway darkened and Modlen entered the room clutching a
weighty staff. The wolf, in its sudden panic, lost not a moment
in curving past the man's legs and flying off down the
mountainside. Rhonwen had raised a hand to her mouth, at
first as a gesture to Modlen that there was no need for
aggression, and then clasping her palm across her mouth in
dreary disappointment.
"Are you alright?" Modlen had turned his head to see the
wolf career in flexible bounds into the undergrowth, but
brought it about now to look inquisitively at his wife.
Rhonwen nodded and smiled.
Fychan now came running in from behind the protection
of his father and knelt on the bed beside his mother. Wanting
to embrace her but relenting since it had been years since he
had last showed emotions so readily, he swayed erratically in
his indecision. With a single touch on his leg, Rhonwen
calmed him.
"The wolf wasn't trying to hurt me. He was just being
friendly. He was welcoming us to the valley." Surely, she
thought as for the first time she sensed a tiny but potent
affinity with the wolf, and therefore with the valley, surely
this
place could never keep them happy, could it? But she would
not have asked herself the question had the notion not
presented itself to her.
"Listen". She spoke to Modlen as much as to her son. "If
the wolf liked me so much, perhaps it is used to being around
people. Do you think?" Her head was lowered and tilted aside,
trying to look into Fychan's down-turned face.
Then it was Modlen who grasped her idea. No lone wolf
he had ever encountered had been anything but aggressive, or
at best had kept its distance. He knelt down, his face taut with
excitement, and shuffled forward on his knees so that he,
Rhonwen, and the boys (for Awstin had entered behind his
father and joined the group) were close together, and said,
"Here's what we should do, and it involves you boys."
The sun was still low enough to edge between the she-
oaks, but looked warm as though it shone into the clearing
through droplets of sap. The light was amber, and it gave to
the vegetation an autumnal aspect, though the freshness was
one of Spring truly established, tasting as it did so redolently
of pollen. Even beneath ground, from the musty tubes
tunnelled by moles beneath the humus, Spring's fragrance had
instilled an excitement into the very substance of the forest.
And even from the moles' retreats, a whispering like that of
magic words sustained itself behind every individual scrape of
soil.
High above, even higher than the sunbeams, the clouds of
leaves stretched and shook themselves, and the green pigment
swelled on their surfaces. With every languish of every bough
and every subdividing stalk, a thousand leaves stroked each
other and rubbed momentarily on cousin shoots, and it was
this gentle noise upon which Awstin was laying his words, at
the edge of the clearing a hundred feet below.
He was knelt beside a sprung trap and was, in fact, alone.
His words came only because he too felt an excitement and
could not help but express it. He was holding a small fox
between his knees, with much of his weight on it to keep it as
still as he could, and he was tying a strip of cloth around its
neck. The fox was struggling frantically and when Awstin
finally stood up, making sure to release the head and jaws last,
he was quite fatigued. The fox ran into the undergrowth and
Awstin saw it for a few yards before the only signs of it were
the trample of its paws and the movements of disturbed ferns
tracing a line away into the depths of the forest.
On his return to the Modlens' house, which was not a long
walk away, he felt in his shirt for more strips of cloth, but
there were none. That meant that he had tagged four animals
that morning. Two of them had been hares and one had been a
very young boar, although the piglet had struggled so much
that the strip of cloth around its thick neck had not been very
secure, and taking into account the fervour with which the
animal had tried to escape it, Awstin did not think it would
stay on for very long.
This had been Modlen's plan, to set free some of the
animals they trapped and use them to transport evidence of the
family's existence as far afield as possible. Anyone finding an
animal with a scarf of burgundy-dyed cloth tied around it
would received just the sort of signal that the Modlens
themselves would celebrate. If the animals really were found
by others who were in a similar position to the Modlens then
... Awstin was lost in the plethora of possible outcomes.
_

The three boys, Tristan, Lewis and Pilky, had a favourite
site within the Cwm's many square miles. They called it the
Ledge - a shelf of jagged slate thrust almost horizontally over
a very deep chasm, almost bridging it completely, along which
the boys would dare each other to balance nearer and nearer
the edge. As you walked up the slate half-bridge and the grass
turned to lichen you could feel the warm, smooth rock on the
heels and balls of your feet.
"Pilky man, you can go farther than that, go on!" called
Tristan from his ferns.
"Look you, leave me alone. It's windy today so I just want
to look over the edge for a while and then I'm coming back."
Tristan and Lewis jeered him to a flush. They had each
stood right at the Ledge's lip and Lewis had swung his arms in
great uncontrolled sweeps pretending to fall, before stepping
back down to the grass patting his heart and sighing
comically.
Pilky walked onto the ledge, but spun around again as he
heard the rapid patter of feet.
"Who let Dash out?" he groaned as his dog bound over the
grass towards him.
"Not me. I went nowhere near your house this morning."
"It wasn't me."
Pilky patted his dog's sides while the terrier's tongue
flapped and slurped. Then Pilky pushed the dog away, saying
"Stay there a minute else you'll fall off."
Pilky neared the edge and knelt down with his back to his
friends. He dropped onto his hands, one of which was
clutching his jumper, and wriggled forward until he lay with
his fingertips curling firmly over the edge of the slate and his
chin resting on the edge. Tristan and Lewis closed their eyes
and relaxed again, very unimpressed with Pilky's cowardice.
Pilky could see a deep ravine, the sheer sides of which
were damp near the bottom, and plants looking like seaweed
clung to their skirts. The stream that had in its boredom cut
the chasm for the boys, wriggled through piles of rounded
boulders and over silty beds, bubbling in the places where it
fell over a tree-root. The rocks, roots and pebbles were all
covered in a wonderful green moss that was as thick as Pilky's
hair, and as unruly too. The breeze smacked Pilky's forelock
from his eyes for him and smoothed over the little boy's
creased eyes and nose. He seemed mesmerised by the brook.
Pilky was every bit as familiar with the paths of the Cwm
than the Roberts boys were. He often took Dash there for long
walks without telling the others, when he felt free and happy
to be alone. He knew every inch of the Ledge, and of the
chasm beneath it, but whereas he had touched the ledge,
scraped at its lichen, picked at its pores and cracks, he had
never felt the chasm with more than a stretching of his eyes. It
was always out of reach, so far down and so deep. What
would the moss on the rocks at the bottom feel like if he were
to lay his cheek against it? How cold would the water be?
This was, to Pilky, Pilky's World, and even if he were to
dive onto the rocks below he felt sure the moss would cushion
him and the gentle water carry him away to some idyllic
hideaway deep within the forest.
Without knowing it, he lay for some time gazing into the
ravine, so long that by the time he finally wriggled back from
the edge, Tristan and Lewis were asleep behind him. Dash still
stood on the ledge a little way behind Pilky, who now tied his
jumper around his waste and picked the dog up. He was quite
unafraid now and couldn't suppress the romance in him that
made him turn his face up to the gold-glittered sky, and while
his mauve silhouette watched over his World, the sinuous
stream thirty yards beneath his bare feet whispered its ageless
rote and cackled to itself.
As Pilky turned to walk off the ledge his face met with a
bellow of wind and, staggering backwards, found his feet
scraping for a hold on the very lip of the ledge. Dash struggled
to leap out of his arms. With renewed hope, the wind buffeted
him once more and sent them both floundering over the edge
and into the ravine with a small cry and a yelp.
As Pilky fell he felt branches jab into his back as he
tumbled through the trees. Each blow bruised him and sent
him spinning in a new direction, but each blow slowed his fall
so that by the time he fell on his side into the stream his fall
was broken completely by the shallow water. His head was
plunged beneath the bubbles and as he flailed for a grip on
something, he felt water fill his nostrils and mouth.
One foot found the bed of the stream, but slipped as it
tried to get a grip, and Pilky's face was still submerged. He
coughed, and the sudden breath he tried to take after it sucked
in lung-fulls of water.
Again one foot found the bed of the stream, and this time
it stuck fast. Pilky thrust his head above water and found,
when he stood up, that the water came up to his ribs. His chest
clenched and he spewed out water as he lunged for the rocks
and dragged himself onto them. There he lay, coughing and
shaking, for a few minutes until the involuntary fits subsided
and he crawled on all fours onto the grass beside the stream.
It was from his resting point that he saw Dash lying on the
rocks a few feet away. The body was battered and broken and
lay in a pool of blood. Pilky heaved himself to his feet again
and rushed to the body. His face broke into a wail. He tried to
find a way to gather the dog up in an embrace, but he could
find nowhere to put his hands which didn't look mutilated
externally or internally, so he resigned himself to touching the
dog's snout for a few seconds before sitting up on his knees
and wailing out loud. As the tears flowed he looked
desperately around for someone who would see him and make
things alright, but not even the two boys lying asleep far
above his head heard him.
When Tristan woke up he felt a cold wind sliding over his
naked front and he sat up. He looked around and saw Lewis
pulling his shirt on over his goose-bumps. The slate was chilly
and the sky's blue was choked with low, grey clouds. Tristan
stood up and his limbs felt stiff.
"Where's Pilky to?" he asked as he too dressed himself.
"Don' know. He wouldn't have gone home would he? Not
without us. Would he?"
"I doubt it. Not him". Tristan called, "Pilky! Where you
to? We're going home!"
Lewis called more loudly, "Pilky, come here!" But nothing
was heard save for the passion of the Wind. "It's getting dark
and your Mam will be fretting!"
It was indeed getting dark and the vivid green baize they
had met that morning was now an ocean-bottom gloom that
made the boys feel cold.
Tristan walked down the rock shelf onto the grass saying,
"He'll have pushed off. I'll have a word to put his way when I
see him tonight". Lewis followed, taking their empty paper
bags with them, and the two boys started back to Tanycoed
Street over the mountain.
Tristan and Lewis arrived back at Tanycoed Street when it
was dark enough to be called night-time and, before taking to
their warm home and their warm beds, they called by Pilky's
house. Lewis knocked on the door and called, "Pilky man,
come down!"
When the door was pulled open it was at the hand of Mrs
Tidy in a turquoise quilted dressing-gown and curler-ed hair.
"He's not with you then, boys?" she asked.
"No, Mrs Tidy", replied Tristan, "Not with you then
either?"
Mrs Tidy sounded perturbed when she said, "No, where is
he?"
"Don' know, Mrs Tidy, he came home from the Cwm
before us. We thought he'd be here". Mrs Tidy clenched her
dressing-gown together around her neck.
"Never mind," continued Tristan, "we'll see him in the
morning". They both turned, calling, "Go'night Mrs Tidy",
behind them as the front door closed.
The sky darkened to charcoal. Pilky's World turned to
dusty grey and the twisted stream, now icy cold, trickled slyly
between the rocks. Young Pilky Tidy was cold too and there
was not a sole thing that could have happened that night to
stop the numbness, nor the sleepless sleep of his mother.
_

The rigours of constant toil, and the pain of returning
from patrol night after anguished night with less hope than the
previous, took its toll on the parents, on the father more than
the mother, his charisma becoming only an impression of what
it had been to bring his children over the Severn.
Nothing came of the burgundy-died rags of cloth which
the family had been attaching to animals. Nothing came of
bonfires lit at night, nor of trees felled, carved, and left as
messages. Nothing came of the interminable wandering and
shouting.
Rhonwen fretted that if her husband were to be hurt, she
and her two sons might be too few to maintain themselves, but
she knew also that it was surely too early to risk their return
home. She too aged a year for every month she worked in the
valley, but she remained forever convinced that other families
must have run into the mountains shortly after they had.
It was one windy night, when the moonlight itself seemed
to have difficulty riding the turbulent air, that Rhonwen first
saw a malaise in her beloved husband's expression. Scoured as
his cheeks were by the wind's pique, yet was his face loose
and insensitive. Framed by the doorway before which he was
sitting, he looked like the icon of imprisonment. Taken on its
own, his head seemed weary, not because it lolled, because it
was motionless, but in its stillness was a surrendering retreat
of his character away from the skin, beneath the skull, inwards
to deeper recesses. In her own mind, Rhonwen called out.
"Don't leave! Stay with us!" for it seemed that Modlen had
retired, leaving his body in charge of lifelong conditioned
responses.
"Mother?" Rhonwen turned to Awstin.
"I can't see from here. Is the moon full?"
Rhonwen had to lean forward only a little to see through
gaps in the wattle that the moon was full and white.
"Yes. Why do you ask?"
"Last time it was full the wind was like this. I remember
because I took advantage of the light to stay out longer than
usual. I could hardly walk in the wind."
Turning her memory to the matter, Rhonwen found she
agreed, but the memory she had of a full moon shining
through heavy winds had been even the month before last.
"It just happens that way", said Modlen unexpectedly,
nothing else coming to mind.
Britain was in a state of change. An influx of Celts had
disrupted all known life. Fields were now cordoned off into
rectangular areas and their ownership divided amongst the
Celtic landlords. British villages were pulled down, but only
sometimes were their inhabitants killed or repressed.
Sometimes they were simply ignored. With their land,
previously communal and unmarked, adopted by the
overpowering Celts and their livestock herded and partitioned,
the farmers could no longer support themselves. Families
migrated Northwards, trying to keep their mouths above the
rising flood of invaders, and were continually having to re-
establish their grounds.
With each movement northwards, and each new
settlement, families were only inviting the progression of
Celts to reach them again, and families who had survived the
first onslaught were often befallen by less merciful tyrants
during the second or third.
With climates and geography changing from month to
month for the overpowered britons, they found great support
from those aspects of the Wessex culture which could be
sustained. They could no longer bury their dead in their
customary communal chambers, for there was not the time to
prepare and fill them, so now the dead had to be left alone in
solitary bunkers, if buried at all. But however far they moved,
the land itself seemed to have been already treated in British
culture. It was as though it had been prepared for their arrival
and was ready to have the farmers' culture built upon it. And
so the art endured, and the folklore, and the farmers' resilience
to hardship remained a matter of pride.
West of the Severn was a different land. It bore no
resemblance to the homeland, having been rent from it by the
powerful Severn. This land had been separated, and with
reason. The land was shaped different, and so, therefore, were
the boundaries of the sky. It seemed right that, until then, the
hills had been uninhabited, but it also seemed right that they
remained so. It was as if the hills were as reluctant to be
infested as the Modlens were to enter between them.
In this foreign region, the elements were received in a
different way and were unpredictable. The wind was dextrous
and nimbleness was its greatest asset when it wheeled and
yawed about the heads of the mountains. Since the family had
first appeared in the valley the wind had behaved as though it
were waiting for an opportunity to harm the britons in
whatever way it could. It might have taken only a single deft
blow to the family's morale to send the four britons back out
of the valley's eastern mouth forever and the wind would once
more have the privacy it craved, away from the race of
ingrates it so detested. The wind had visited the villages of
humans and had found no justice in any of them. Did they not
know who blew the seeds onto new land? Did they not see
who pulled down the dead branches from the trees so that new
growth could come? Did they never smell the fragrant herbs
wafted over the embers of their evening fires? And yet were
the sun and the rain not praised when they visited the fields,
and was their absence not endured solely through the hope
that they would return again to their usual welcome? Ingrates
they all were.
It was not long before the father fell ill. Although he was
suffering from nothing more serious than mild pneumonia he
was without proper care and the disease was soon to cause his
death in the drizzle of one evening. When the two boys
returned home with firewood as dry as they could find in the
wet weather, they saw the faces of their parents equally pale,
both parents massed as one shaking mound in the rain a few
yards from the shelter, the father's face stained with muddy
streaks where his face had landed in the clotted mud as he had
fallen in a fit of asphyxia, and the mother's streaked with
tears, muddy on one side where she had pressed herself
against the unresponsive cheek of her husband.
The family had to struggle to recover from their loss,
difficulty pervading every part of their lives from the
fundamental to the trivial. Rhonwen's nights became filled
with dreams of violence and sadness, as vivid as the
continuing problems facing the family's stay in the valley. The
days seemed always dark and she found herself in dazes of
melancholia. The days and the nights exchanged
characteristics and the passing of weeks seemed confused. A
stark moment would appear from time to time, when suddenly
she found that she had not conceived of time for weeks, and
that the sight of a dock leaf was so startlingly real and the
instant was so tangible that she couldn't believe that the
moment could ever move on. But without her even sensing it
another painful night would come and once more she would be
drowned in confusion.
Awstin and Fychan buried the father a short walk from the
shelter so that the ring of tall stones which enclosed the
mound would always be visible to their mother, something
which she had begged for.
Simply sitting together to mould their plans for the future
necessitated of the family firstly their painful admission that
the father was truly dead, but also required feats of
concentration from the three, especially the mother, to control
the therapeutic swaying and murmuring which broke her
conversion, and to keep from falling into memorial trances.
_

In Tanycoed Street, the night passed as ever it did and the
warm morning peering in through the windows of the Roberts'
house watched the two boys finish their toast and milk and
pull on their plimsolls. Their mother was also watching them
from the kitchen.
"Where are you pair off to?"
"Pilky's 'ouse, then the Cwm."
"What again? What do you do over there?"
"Nothing much. See you". The front door creaked to as the
boys left.
Mrs Tidy looked tired as she opened the front door. "Oh
boys, have you found him yet?"
"No, sorry. He's not come home then?"
"No", she confessed, then, "Right", she decided as she
stepped back into the hall and shouted, "Bill, come here a
minute, will you?" to her husband upstairs. Lewis and Tristan
didn't wait to see what Mr Tidy would say. They were already
feeling responsible for Pilky's disappearance and Mr Tidy
might not want to put their minds at ease.
"We should go over to the Cwm and have a proper look
about", advised Lewis. "We didn't look properly last night so
we'll do it today". And so the two brothers crossed the road
and slipped back through their house, over the garden wall and
set off at a pace up and out of sight over the Mount.
They walked down onto the neighbouring valley floor.
They crossed the Heads Of The Valley road and they walked
and talked and watched as the scenery grew foliage and the
undergrowth thickened while the trees heightened. They soon
heard the babble of waterfalls and across the widening
meadow before them they saw the Ledge reaching nearly all
the way to the other side of the chasm.
They crossed the meadow and slowed to a standstill on the
slate and kicked disconsolately at the rocky floor, gazing
around at the woods. Tristan called for Pilky, but he was self-
conscious of his voice at first, so Lewis took up the call with,
"Pilky! Where you to, boy?" There was no answer.
"Pilky! It's time you went home!"
The wind sniffed suspiciously around them, then flew up
to a high tree-top and draped itself like a cloth over its boughs
while it watched the boys.
"When did you last see him?" asked Tristan of Lewis.
"I went to sleep here yesterday, and he was gone before I
woke up."
The wind slipped from the tree into a dive, flying over the
meadow and yawing upwards into a high climb, pushing high
over the leafy canopy of the surroundings.
"Where was he when you fell asleep?"
The wind climbed and climbed until it reached a flaccid
cumulus cloud.
"He was lying on the edge over there". Lewis pointed to
the Ledge's lip. "He was peering over the edge, lying down."
Tristan wasn't worried but he ventured to say, "You don't
think he fell at all, do you?"
The wind wrapped hands about the cloud and squeezed,
wringing fresh rain-water from it. Lewis looked at the floor to
see black growths splashing into life beside the yellow-green
ones on the slate. The wind reached out and drew like drapes
heavy clouds from either side across the scene, leaving only
enough of a gap to trickle down through and take watch again.
Tristan and Lewis stepped towards the Ledge's lip and the
wind, seeing its chance, swooped down behind them ready to
push...
The boys knelt, as Pilky had done, and lay down flat as the
wind's fist swiped aimlessly over their heads. The boys
elbowed their way to the edge and peered down into the drop
at Pilky's jumper lying in a pile beside the stream, part of it
apparently wet. The two boys saw the clues - the jumper, the
broken branches hanging from trees, and the blood dried
mauve on the rocks.
Tristan lay silent, his first response being to the sudden
whimper of Lewis beside him.
Through the threatening green the brothers fled, flying
over steps and stones and roots and steering raggedly between
riotous thickets and fiery brambles. Twigs smashed under the
fall of their feet and delicate saplings were snatched back by
frantic hands. Across the desolate main road they sped, their
throats aching and their chests sobbing, until in time they
scraped down the scree at the Mount's foot and leapt onto
their home's street.
They were alarmed to see Mr Tidy leaving his house
looking stern, so the boys pulled each other along the
pavement and into the alcove created by the steps to their
house. They heard Mr Tidy start a car engine which revved
along the street, diminishing to a hum, then nothing.
"Tristan", whispered Lewis hoarsely, his breath still
coming raggedly, "We must tell Mam". Lewis nodded and the
two boys walked as calm as they might be up the slate steps
and in through their front door.
"Mam!" called Tristan, "We're home."
"That was quick", replied Mrs Roberts from somewhere,
"Have you found Pilky yet? Somebody told me he was
missing."
"No", Lewis answered and Tristan added, "No we
haven't". The two looked at each other guiltily. In their
bedroom they could talk so they jumped up the stairs and
locked the door behind them.
"Why didn't you tell?" hissed Lewis, eyes open wide in
accusation.
"Why didn't I nothing! Why didn't you?"
"But we agreed!"
"I know, but - " Tristan sat down heavily on the end of the
bed, "It would upset Mrs Tidy dreadfully."
"Maybe we were mistaken" suggested Lewis, but he didn't
convince himself or his brother. They both lay on the double
bed on their backs and stared upwards through closed eyelids.
While Mrs Roberts did her housework and Mister Roberts
was away down the pit, and Mister and Missus Tidy were on
the verge of phoning the police, the two boys' hearts wailed
silently inside them. For the whole afternoon they lay there
reflecting on what they had seen, occasionally shifting to try to
ease the weight on their shoulders.
Pilky found his world almost intolerably dense. Every
square yard was itself a jungle of plant life. Saplings were
plentiful, as were shrubs which were bedecked with ripping
brambles, poised like knotted garrottes to attack Pilky's legs
as he struggled forwards with his dog in his arms. Although
the ground might have been flat, the mass of vegetation
heaped into mountains belied the shape beneath. In fact there
was little to be seen which was not swamped in the greenery
bred from thousands of years of being undisturbed. From
between the rotten splinters of fallen wood, from every stone
surface, from the holes in the trunks of trees, plants spewed in
rich cascades. Leaves stalked across every face, every broad
and muscular branch was abow with the weight of Lincoln-
green tresses. Beneath the nets of ochre and fawn could be
seen tiny polygonal patches of earth, but something else was
hidden beneath the living mask, and Pilky noticed this only a
moment before his foot landed on the mound.
The ground rose into a plateau. Pilky kicked through the
growth to plot its contours, and found it to spread sideways to
the left and right. Looking behind him he found a moss bed on
which to lay the dog so that his hands could be free. He
carefully pulled the ivy pall from its surface and drew aside
the weeds from along the plateau's walls. It appeared to be a
mound the height of Pilky's knees, about eight feet long and
elliptical in shape, too geometrical to be of natural origin,
surely. What kept its ovoid shape, Pilky found as for the first
time he bent and laid his palms upon it, was that it was lined
with stones, each one the height of the mound and a foot or
more wide. Their vertical sides descended into the ground to
an unknown depth. The stones had become soiled, and
underneath the dirt was a colourful patina of lichen.
Despite the incongruity of finding the obelisk amidst the
chaos of nature, it still seemed to fit in. It was something
without which this obscure region of the forest would be
incomplete. Pilky laid the body of his dog on the top of the
mound and fetched ferns to cover the body, leaving only the
head visible as though Dash were asleep under a blanket.
Pilky cleared a small space at the foot of the grave in
which he could kneel. He was not crying for he had too much
to sort out. He had to pray, then to bury Dash in the middle of
the mound, then to mark the grave and find his way home
again. Then he had to tell his parents that Dash was dead.
He clasped his hands and once again, after a wait of
thousands of years, the oldest oaks heard the whisper of
prayer beneath their canopy. Pilky said goodbye to someone
without whom his world would not have been the same and
without whom, therefore, he would not have been the same.
Beneath the ledge the wind stroked misty hands over the
stream's figure, twirling idly at tiny whirlpools, and the stream
lay on her back letting him waft her cool. The blood-stains
still marked the rocks. As the light drained from the sky the
moon took her taper to every star and drew night's shroud over
Pilky's Graveyard.
_

The Modlens knew that their life would be even harder
from then on. There was still no evidence that any other
families were in the district and there were now only three of
them to continue the search. Nothing more than the passing of
time was needed for another to become ill and without the
recuperation which their way of life denied them, an illness,
once established, could only worsen. One death in three would
be more significant than one in four, and if another of them
died the remaining two would find it almost as difficult to
return home as to persevere in the mountains.
For all their planning and rationalising, the family were
influenced more by grief than by reason. Between them, in
their different roles as members of the family, they had
regarded the father in different lights, but none had been able
to watch him in his tireless work without the greatest
admiration. Although it was a sad thing to admit, there had
also been traces of pity in their admiration. What they could
not bring themselves to do so soon after his death was to head
back towards the Severn and leave his grave untended on the
mountainside. Although they created more conscious reasons
to remain, they needed to stay so that the father could be
properly mourned.
It was decided, then, that another month would be spent in
the valley before any remaining hope would be abandoned and
the family would head east again. The boys had taken over
their father's task of scouring the countryside in an effort to
make contact with other britons who had fled from their
homesteads.
Sometimes the boys sacrificed each other's company for
efficiency by travelling separately. Sure that they had
exhausted their luck everywhere within a day's walk of the
shelter, the boys journeyed every few days in straight lines
radically away from the shelter, camping overnight until they
had reached new districts, but always they avoided journeying
to the north where, so their father had once told them, a chasm
would block their progress. Each boy had privately considered
suggesting that the shelter be moved to a neighbouring valley,
but neither boy had enough motivation to ask the mother to
leave the site of the makeshift headstone.
In the absence of their father, the boys matured quickly to
fill his place, becoming less dependant on each other and on
the mother. Whereas they had once been a close couple, one
personality split between their two infant bodies, and living in
the valley only because their parents had led them there, they
now became individuals able to make their own decisions and
able to steer their own courses.
The older boy, Awstin, soon became as adept as his father
had been at hunting and tracking, and in his brother Fychan
could be seen the aplomb to cultivate crops, a chore which had
been neglected by the family until his initiative to farm a small
region on the floor of the valley.
Despite their perseverance in their continual search for
human contact, the boys came to mourn their sallies along
their neighbouring valleys for the results were always the
same. They grew up years in the weeks they spent with their
mother, but as their strength waxed with the demands placed
on their resilience, their enthusiasm waned as it became
increasingly clear that they would soon have to begin a
journey back out of the mountains, a journey on which their
only hopes could be that their home village was still standing
and that the Celts were not still there ready to kill them on
sight.
Fortunately, their spirits were to be refreshed. The boys
were now walking for three or four days on end to reach new
areas where they had not searched. Knowing that their mother
was on the verge of insisting that the three of them started
their journey east again out of the mountains, the boys decided
that it was not efficient enough to go travelling so far for just
a day's searching, and that they should go north to where their
father had told them the chasm lay, in an effort to find a way
to cross it and to start searching uncharted land.
It was a sweet reward to the boys' determination that after
a few hours' walk north from the shelter, on a day on which
their hopes where high, they saw a small, shivering figure
huddled beneath a tree. They immediately made towards it.
As they neared it, though, they saw a narrow fissure
between them and the child, the chasm which had always
marked the boundary of their father's reconnaissance to the
north, and which had epitomised the family's lonely separation
from all others since their exodus.
Approaching the fissure the boys could see that although
it was narrow it was impassable, certainly at this point. One
edge was lined with slate, but the opposite side was loose with
dirt and would not afford the boys a foothold even if they
could jump the chasm between.
The boys' thoughts turned to the child, who had perhaps
seen them by now, but who had not moved as if for fear of
attracting the cold. The wind was incisive and perhaps might
not find it if it kept still enough. Whom did the child belong
to? If its family were not nearby then it must be lost. If its
parents had been in this district and were not natives, and
surely these mountains had no natives, then where had the
family come from? Could it be that here was evidence of other
families which had run into the mountains?
As the boys pondered on all the questions which now
begged attention, the child stood to its feet. After a few
moments' hesitation it hobbled forward, hampered by the thick
furs it was wrapped in and also, it appeared, by being
footsore. It was a boy, about five or six years old, all of its
body and most of its face hidden by its clothes.
Between the older boys it was decided that Fychan should
follow the fissure to find somewhere where it might be
crossed, while Awstin stayed with the child, or as close as he
could safely get to it without endangering himself at the
chasm's edge.
With his feet drumming beneath him as fast as his heart
was knocking in his ears, Fychan sped alongside the chasm.
He did not know how far he would have to run, and the
thought had come to him that he should pace himself in
anticipation for a long journey, but the bundled up child might
not stay where he was for long. Those were his conscious
thoughts, but had he not been concentrating so hard on
keeping his mind calm and clear, he would have been aware of
baser reasons to run.
Since leaving Wessex his life had not been the life of a
child. He had been forced to behave like an adult, to suffer
hardships like an adult. He had left his broken childhood in
Wessex, but it was not yet over. His early years had not been
completed before he had been prematurely dragged into a
world of responsibility and anxiety. Here was an opportunity
to run from that world. He could dig his heels into the ground
and run wildly like a infant again, recapturing some of the
abandon of childhood. With every stride he took he was racing
a yard farther from the uncomfortable house and the
saddening sight of his mother staring at the grave, her eyes
unfocused as though she were trying to see the body through
the soil. Without the conscious realisation that he could not
possibly escape his unfortunate new life, his exhilaration at
simply running so fast in the opposite direction made him feel
invulnerable to fatigue.
At a higher level in his mind, farther from his inane
desires and aspirations but still not at the level of reason, was
another urge to run. If the enigmatic child they had seen across
the chasm really did have a family nearby then that family
could be standing as little as fifty yards away, hidden by a
knoll, perhaps deaf to his running because of the rising wind.
Looking around at the undulating ground surrounding him,
Fychan could only fantasise which of the secretive mounds
could be hiding real people from him. Wouldn't it be
wonderful if he suddenly veered away from the line of the
chasm and ran to the top of a hillock and saw ... who knew
how many britons?
For an hour the lithe figure of Fychan ran alongside the
chasm. At times the noise of his feet beating on the ground
seemed very alone in the otherwise silent afternoon, but
sometimes the roar of white-water far below in the chasm's
gullet sounded as though a whole ocean had forced its way
along it. But then he saw the chasm close. Its sides all but met
for a stretch of two or three yards. He slowed to a walk, then
stopped and leaned on his knees for minute near to the closing
jaws of the ground. He could still hear the turbulence far
beneath the shelf of slate which formed the southern lip of the
gap, but nearer to his ears was the turbulence of the air, as
thick as the water below and as dizzying as the view which he
saw when he crawled to the edge and looked down. The face
of the southern cliff was so flat and stretched so far away from
him that it looked like at was level ground, and that the face of
the northern cliff, only a yard away, resembled a low ceiling.
In the moment that his brain turned the chasm to produce
this effect, Fychan saw the rampage of the water at the far end
of the stone corridor and it looked as though it would rush
toward him. Sensing that he was about to fall he twisted
giddily and rolled away from the chasm with his eyes
struggling for grip on the heaving land and sky. They found
the moon, out early this evening, unique and still, and Fychan
lay on his back for a few moments with the globe in his eyes
while he steadied himself.
When he stood up he lost no more time. He took a few
steps backwards and prepared to jump the gap. It was easily
within his ability to jump the short distance between the two
cliff faces, but the wind was now ripping across the fens and
out from behind the dusky hills, whistling through the jaws of
the chasm with spray as thick as spittle carried up from the
water below.
A few moments' wait was deemed necessary to wait for a
lull in the gale, but when the respites came the gusts were
quick to follow, and Fychan knew that he would have to leap
and be lucky. Using a quick rocking motion backwards and
forwards to initiate some momentum, he broke into a run and
with a backward push he landed well onto the northern cliff-
top. He did not stop in his path, but turned immediately to his
left and was soon well on his way to where he hoped the
huddled child had remained.
Meanwhile, Awstin strained to think of how to ensure the
child stayed where it was until his brother could return. He
called across to it once, but no sooner had his lips closed again
than he cursed himself. The child must not be attracted
towards the chasm. How then could he be kept were he was?
The child showed no signs of moving, not even when Awstin
had called out, but still Awstin wanted to prepare himself, to
know what to do in advance of the moment coming when the
child began to wander away into the distance.
But as Awstin sat and troubled himself over the problem,
it suddenly seemed to his that the chance of the child leaving
its huddled position on the bole of a shrub was really quite
small. On finding itself lost from its parents, any child would
try to find them again, naturally, and it would not sit down in
resignation until it was almost exhausted. This child must
have been lost for some time and was crouched away in the
gloom with a numbness of mind and body. With the joint
relief and concern this caused Awstin, he settled himself on
the ground to keep watch for Fychan.
It was in their state of silent mutual incomprehension that
they were found by Fychan returning breathless from his
search, this time on the child's side of the fissure. The child
was momentarily overjoyed to see him and ran into his
embrace, but suddenly was overcome with coyness when it
saw that this boy was no-one familiar. With some coaxing he
let himself be carried alongside the fissure, with Awstin
following on the other side.
The sky overhead was darkening, the air was becoming
chilly, and the accelerando of the wind's melancholy dirge was
heard and its effect felt by the two boys and the child as they
walked westwards to where they could meet. As they trudged
through the bracken the afternoon trudged onwards with them.
Although the progress of all was slow, the two older boys
knew that the day would soon have plodded over the western
horizon and night, trailing her starry cape behind her, would
follow in its steps.
Fychan talked continually to the little boy but never heard
a response. Whether the child could understand him or
whether it was willing to stay with him only for company, he
did not know. Had fortune scorned the brothers, the child
might not have wanted to leave the point where the boys had
found it, especially if that had been the last place it had seen
its parents, but it seemed to have no qualms about being taken
with the two strange boys along their opposite sides of the
fissure.
What the boys were going to do when the three were
united they were not sure. The child could not have been on its
own for long, judging by its state of health, and there was
hopefully a family not too far away, searching for him. He
needed to be taken back to the boys' mother to be given food
and a bed, but Awstin and Fychan wanted to start searching
north of the fissure as soon as possible and postponement
until dawn might lose them the opportunity of meeting another
family.
The two brothers were still pondering the problem when
they arrived at the crossing point. There was only a short
stretch where the two sides came close enough together to be
spanned. Fychan approached the gap carefully, not wishing
any sudden struggle from the child on his back to upset his
balance, but it was just such a struggle which forced him to
stop and lower the child to the ground, keeping a tight grip on
his hand. It was clear that the child was disconcerted near the
edge of the fissure and both brothers silently hoped that this
wasn't indicative of where his parents had met their end.
The wind had been sullen for a short time, but its strength
grew with its new interest in the boys endeavours. It would be
difficult to carry a small child across from one cliff-top to the
other, especially if the wind were against them. The dusk had
deepened so that the boys struggled for visibility, but solace
was given to them when the moon shone down from above
them. Fychan only watched as Awstin spoke gently to the
child to calm him, but the wind was battering the child's face,
making his eyes moisten.
Tightening his hold on the child's hand, Awstin led him
towards the gap, but as they approached the Wind scraped at
the child's face and tears were brought from its eyes. It
appeared to Awstin that to struggle across the gap with the
child would be more difficult than to let him negotiate the
crevice alone. Although to Fychan the idea seemed
irresponsible at first, he conceded, after watching his brother
fight against the wind twice to carry the child across the gap,
that separate crossings might be safer.
After taking some of the furs from the child to less impair
his balance and to motivate him to follow, Fychan leaped
easily across the gap, and then all the boys could do was to
stand some yards back from the southern edge and entice the
child across. Shivering slightly, the infant approached the
crack, which looked large before the short legs. Awstin,
overcome by helplessness, started forward to assist, but the
wind thumped the stumbling child back from the crack.
Awstin turned back and resigned himself to waiting with his
brother.
Once again the child approached the fissure, from which
craggy depths the wind looked up to see the small figure
balanced precariously beside the crack, with the distant, fresh
moon encircling the silhouette.
It was at this point, with the two older boys having been
deviously separated from the now vulnerable child, that the
wind had engineered its chance to ensure that the two boys
returned home unaccompanied. If they and their mother could
be kept isolated for a short while longer then they would be
compelled to leave the valley. This child was a possible
connection with another family and should therefore be dealt
with.
As the rote rolling of the Earth shed the last particles of
sunlight from the horizon, fear began to tax the child's
confidence. The wretch was standing before the gap, looking
first at Awstin then at Fychan, then down beyond its feet into
the stormy blackness, every awful shadow of which might
have hidden unmentionable ogres. The wind rubbed at the soil
at the edges of the crevice, sending grains wending downward,
engulfed by the night below.
But now that the day had ended and the sun's authority
had passed to the moon, the air began to glint with a clearer
light than the it had an hour before, a night-light formed of
long airborne filaments rolling over each other like waist-
length hair being released from a pleat. Now pale, curved
shafts of moonlight swept across the gorse and, flying across
the child's back, nudged him forward. With only a single stride
to prepare himself, the child launched himself into the wind.
Airborne, with his chin ground in between his clavicles to
help with the pull of his legs forwards and upwards, the child
passed through a pillar of light which had descended as if to
fill the empty yard beneath. As a mote passing through a
lozenge of sunlight, the boys hair and clothes were aglow with
fire, a phosphorescent mass of dandelion down.
Then he landed on his heels and stumbled on the slate,
towards the two boys who caught his hands and wrapped him
in his fur once more.
Although the night had until then been restrained by a
dam of nimbus on the eastern horizon, the torrential darkness
now broke across the firmament. After brief words with his
brother, Fychan took the child and turned south towards the
arms of his mother while Awstin crossed the chasm once
again to search for the child's family, sure that they could not
have travelled very far since losing the child.
Not even the fury of the wind about him could cool the
excitement he felt at the prospect of finding another family, or
of staying in the hills, never needing to face the dangers of
their old homes. But not even the manic cheer on the faces of
Awstin and Fychan could persuade the wind that it should
ever relent from its loathing of men.
_

It was only when a violent shiver of cold shook Pilky that
he opened his eyes. Weary from crying, he had fallen asleep at
the foot of the grave where he had buried his dog. He knew he
had to get home, but he could not guess how long it would
take, if he ever saw home again at all. He stood up and was
suddenly taken by a panic which made him forget about his
dog, and he hurried out back into the unfathomable depths of
the forest without another look at the grave.
Pilky saw before him the net of vegetation through which
he was aiming to walk, and then wondered that he could see it
at all since until then he had been blind in the darkness. The
clouds parted to reveal moonlight, and with that the darkness
lifted a little from the undergrowth.
As the old-man's-beard nodded sagely to itself faerie-light
sparkled within the gorse-beds. The grasses swayed to the
whispers of the soil and the air glistened with excitement.
Pilky's way seemed somehow clearer. As the forest lit up to
the glow of the moon the plants seemed less vicious, to the
extent that they seemed almost to part before the moonbeams
like courtiers bowing.
Pilky battled against the numbness of his hands and his
heart and pushed onwards. With the lighting up of the forest
came a little relief from his dismay, and without the adrenaline
to keep him awake he once again began to feel tired.
Minutes later, when he found himself leaning on his knees
and rubbing his eyes in a sheltered hollow, he decided it was
time to get some rest. Settling down on the floor and curling
himself up as tightly as his discomfort would allow, he let his
eyes droop and waited for the mercy of sleep.
In the Roberts' boys' bedroom the window was raised ajar
and the curtains fanned in the breeze. A shaft of moonlight
suddenly intersected the room and pierced the wall above the
boys' headboard, upon which leaned the pillows that held the
tired boys' oblivious heads. The moonbeam quivered and
widened, shaping its form on the room's wall and focusing its
edges. The light swam hazily down the wall, waving over the
headboard, and came to rest on the boys' faces.
In their dreams the boys saw Pilky lying grotesquely dead
in a stream which ran across the floorboards at the foot of the
bed. His soiled clothes swayed about him in the water, which
formed whirl-pools under the arms and between the legs. The
hideous fronds of ferns dangled over the body and a broken
sapling lay across its buttocks. Willows bent beside the
stream, weeping icy dew onto the earth.
The weight of the water and the body broke the floor-
boards, which dumped the body in the room below, and up
came Mrs Roberts with her finger wagging, demanding to
know why Pilky was dead and why she hadn't been told
straight away. When she stopped bellowing the sound of Mrs
Tidy weeping came from downstairs.
Through the long night the moonlight stroked the boys'
hair and touched their cheeks, before the sun's rays bleached
the room brilliant again and painted out the weakening traces
of moonlight.
Pilky was woken from a fitful sleep by the dawn. He was
shivering and his face hurt where it been lying on the bark at
the edge of a tree-stump. He stood up as soon as he awoke and
continued stumbling through the forest from where he had
fallen from fatigue the night before.
He very quickly remembered the struggle against the cold
and the dark the previous night, and being led to the hollow by
the path of moonlight. As the fears returned to him he began
sobbing. He was lost and tired, cold and afraid. He couldn't
bear the thought of spending another night in the forest. The
idea frightened him more than the worry of not finding food or
water or of ever seeing his parents again.
Tristan and Lewis woke late to hear their parents talking
on the landing.
"Did you hear about the Tidy boy?" asked Mrs Roberts of
her husband.
"No, what?"
"He's been missing since Sunday night and not a trace has
been found."
"Nothing?"
"Hide nor hair. Worried sick Mrs Tidy is, Mr Tidy too."
The voices merged into monotones as they descended the
stairs. Tristan and Lewis faced each other, knowing that they
should tell their minds to somebody as soon as they were able.
Lewis rose first, going to the bathroom while Tristan made the
bed. Once they were both dressed and Lewis was lacing his
shoes, Tristan went to the window and peered out. What he
saw made him call his brother to him.
"Lewis! Look there, over the mountain."
Lewis sprang with the urgency of the other's voice, and the
two gazed out of the window with their palms pressed flat on
the cold sill. The boys' bedroom was at the back of the house
and so their window met the mountainside face to face. By
squinting upwards to the mountain's peak they could see
strange, dark clouds gathering in the sky above the
neighbouring valley.
The breeze in Tanycoed Street had been overcome by a
more vehement force, evidenced by the papers now rushing
along the gutters. Dirt was cast into pedestrians' eyes and a
small child's bicycle propped carefully against the wing of a
car scraped the paint-work as it slid down it and crunched
onto the pavement. This wasn't the welcome wind which on
sunny afternoons cooled the brows of boys playing football
between the cars, and it wasn't the wind which tirelessly dried
the laundry strung along the back yards. This was a very old
and bitter wind which had left the valley an age before when it
had run to other continents. By chance and only through the
chaotic flux of the globe's atmosphere had the wind returned,
having forgotten why the very signature of the hills' outlines
kindled it with rage.
Tristan and Lewis gazed at the clouds over the mountain-
top, dense black front to back and thick and matted; they
formed a bleak canopy over that of the trees below them. At
the centre was a break through which could be seen the moon's
visage, though the sun was now streaming through the boys'
window and wetting their eyes. The edges of the clouds
continuously curled upwards and kneaded themselves into the
centre, intensifying the blackness with every twist the wind
applied to them.
With equal decision as the boys had felt to report Pilky's
death, they now knew they should return to the Cwm once
more. Neglecting to take breakfast the boys had soon skipped
the garden wall and were shortly crossing the Heads Of The
Valley road. The surroundings were dark and even seemed
blurred in places, and the leaves of trees screamed and shook
in the powerful wind. However, the boys' way was clearly lit
by moonlight, though it was still well before noon. The clouds
were thickening and on occasion would suffocate the moon
entirely, in which times the undergrowth's stems and flowers
would fire uncountable tiny torch-beams at the boys' feet
while the hollow tree-trunks echoed a rousing, "Hurry!"
The boys broke into a run and while the doorstep-
scrubbing wives of Tanycoed Street stood up from their knees
and stared in wonderment at the clouds beyond the Mount,
Tristan and Lewis could only rivet their eyes on the path
ahead of them and dive through the thick, black forest faster
and deeper.
From the bottom of the chasm where it had been sniffing
around the blood-stains, which was now a day old, the wind
looked up and saw the silhouette of the ledge against the
moon, depicting a black vacancy where a shard had been
removed from a large opal. The view had been seen before.
Had it been in a distant gorge in a foreign land? The wind had
very many years' memories against which to match this picture
and yet the pure benignity of the moon and the sinisterity of
the outcrop led the wind to the event it had been trying to
recall. As the already smouldering memory ignited, now more
vivid than the scene itself, the wind poured upwards out of the
chasm and surged high into the turbulent air. Instant and
dreadful recognition came to it of the shapes of the mountains
portrayed as ashen heaps against the sandy sky, and of the
precipitous ledge along which it now had twofold memory of
three boys balanced. Had the wind been able to give oral vent
to its fury then the sky would have trembled right to its edges,
but the only expression of which the wind was capable was
through its effects on the atmosphere above the Cwm.
The two boys came at last to the meadow at the edge of
which was the Ledge, out of breath and out of sight of the
policemen who were sitting with tea-cups in Mrs Tidy's front
room. The meadow before the Ledge was very dim and the
grass swayed fiercely inwards and outwards from the centre
like a huge, filthy rain-puddle. The two frightened boys
crouched down on the slate, each with one hand steadying
their balance on the rock, and cricked their necks to the sky.
Broad black blankets swathed the air, some wrapping
mercilessly around the sun, darkening the land still more. The
moon was drowning in the squally cloud-seas, gasping and
throwing her head backwards in violent gasps. From around
the meadow finches cried for help from the thickets and
crickets sang woeful incessants. The wind had huge feet
planted like tree-trunks in the meadow, wide apart, and its
hands thrashed through the clouds in search of the moon,
which bobbed blindly above the clouds. The boys' cries to
each other couldn't be heard above the rising stream far
beneath them.
Finches were still shrieking from the forest and thrushes
and warblers and crows alike were taking up the cry. The
moon was firing uncontrolled beams down to the meadow
before being swallowed up by clouds again, and the wind
pounded its fists into the clouds trying to crush the poor moon
between its great hands.
When rescue came for the moon, Lewis was the first to
see it - a great mass of dark specks spreading over the tree-
tops and into the meadow. Birds from the woods for miles and
miles around now came like a flood out of the black greenery
into the air above the two little boys' heads. The wind swiped
and swatted them, sending birds careering dizzily down to
earth, but hundreds more were ever pouring in from all corners
of the sky. The moon meanwhile was lost among the clouds
and was being pushed back into the obscurity of space,
flailing out with columns of light to try and touch the Earth.
The clouds were squeezing the water from themselves,
sending it streaking down into the meadow.
The moon let loose one desperate bolt of light at the
Ledge and the swarm of birds caught its threads in their beaks
and knitted them together, securing the light to the rock's lip,
only yards from the boys whose faces were starkly lit up.
While the air was bursting with the screeches of a thousand
birds and the black sky cast spears of rain down through the
flying mass, the moon hung on dearly to the lifeline leading
down to the Ledge, though the wind yanked at the beam with
both hands. The birds massed around the moonbeam and as
more shafts came sliding down to Earth, the birds deftly
knitted their strands into the long grass in the meadow, until
the clearing became ablaze with white light. Finally, the moon
struck a beam down past the Ledge, deep into the chasm,
while some of the birds poured over the Ledge and began
weaving the light until it formed a beam so bright it looked
almost tangible, a spotlight which picked out a little boy
looking up and gasping.
Tristan and Lewis lay down flat and covered their heads,
their clothes stuck wetly about them. There they lay, not for
long perhaps, or maybe for a day's length, until they heard the
birds' screeching subside and the rain cease. The wind fled and
they could feel the sun warm their backs once more as the
sinister clouds spread and dissolved into a fresh azure. They
gingerly looked up and climbed to their feet, scanning the
scene around them. The meadow was emerald green again and
the surrounding forest was littered with all breeds of birds of
all colours and forms, all totally silent and all watching the
boys from their perches. The two boys turned behind them to
see Pilky stumbling towards them from the chasm, his path
still somehow lit by moonlight.
_

The rest of the story is mere narrative. Pilky was taken
home and his disappearance was explained to his overjoyed
parents by his getting lost in the Cwm. The policemen left
Tanycoed Street and although newspapers reported the
disquieting weather that had been seen from miles around, no
connection was ever made from it to Pilky's absence.
_

Some of the facts that were not of sufficient relevance to
be joined to the story, the curios of jetsam which the tide of
history deposits at the storyteller's feet as he walks home
along the beach, are these: that the Roberts' boys, Tristan and
Lewis, grew up, as I said at the start, and now live in other
valleys; Pilky, who in his teens retook the name Gerrard, has
remained in Tanycoed Street all these years, during which time
the vague memory of the moon's plight to save him has faded
from him, although not from the branches of the trees where
the birds still sing of their bravery.
Awstin and Fychan are of course long, long dead. They
befriended immigrant Phoenicians who had come to Britain in
search of tin, and the group of them, along with other britons
who had moved from Wessex to Wales, established successful
communities in the mountains. Who knows what other stories
the boys are parts of, whether told by the birds or used to
flavour the Wessex culture itself.