"Chapter 1.1 The Glass Isle" by Steve Bowen

Chapter One

 The Glass Isle - Part One

It was winter.  The heathland still wore its snowy mantle and would do so for many weeks to come.  To the west the sea glowered, sullenly reflecting the heavy clouds that obscured the pristine blue of the Northland sky.  There was no wind, and the viscous swell on the waters gave the ocean a queasy appearance.  Below the level of the clouds the heavy golden orb of the sun dropped almost imperceptibly towards the horizon.

There was a sense of barely suppressed excitement in the air.  The myriad raucous seabirds that usually wheeled and dove over the cliffs were silent.  Even the slow surf that broke against the shingle beach made no sound.  For most people this was the last day of the year, the winter solstice.  From today the days would get longer as life began to struggle from the frozen earth.  New crops were being planned and sacrifices made for an early spring and a bounteous year.  Throughout the small group of islands that made up this most northerly of kingdoms, and throughout the whole of Ynys Prydein, the people gathered in celebration.  Precious stores of firewood were thrown onto blazing hearths smoky with the melting fat of the carcasses that turned slowly above them.  Garlands of holly and ivy bedecked even the rudest dwelling, the waxy leaves and crimson berries giving back the leaping flames a hundredfold.  Every door was closed against the cold, every face turned toward the fire.

But on this narrow stretch of shingle, twelve young boys wrapped their cloaks around themselves and stood silent, contemplating not the end of the year but the beginning of a new life.  For myself, the youngest of the group at ten summers, this day marked the beginning of my destiny.  Had I realised then the pain and sorrow I would encounter through my being here, I doubt I should have been so calm.  It is the arrogance of youth to see ourselves as heroes without imagining the consequences our actions may have.  Since that day I have loved three people and lost every one.  I, who should have been beholden no man, have given my allegiance to another and followed a dream, only to see it perish on a day much like this one.  I have turned my back on my duty, my family, my honour.  If I could play this act again, would I do it differently?  Perhaps.

Still, I am ahead of myself already. Call it the privilege of the old, if you will, for I am old beyond reckoning.  Do not be misled by looks.  I was ancient when your grandsire’s grandsire was young, and I will outlive you and yours to the tenth generation and beyond.  Yet of all the years I have lived, the first forty are as clear in my mind as the reflection in a new mirror.  It is those forty years that make the tale I am about to tell, and if you have heard it differently, as I know you have, then I make no apologies.  The truth is a subtle beast and appears in many guises.  This is my truth, coarsely told and wanting a fairer hand than mine.  My fist was made to wield a blade, not a pen, and my voice to sing a battle chant or a lover’s ditty, not a dirge.  Yet who else could tell this tale?  I saw it.  I lived it.  And I live it still, every day of my life though the years run on unabated and the memories of other men fade.  In truth, I could wish for less authority if it were mine to wish for.

I was born at the crown of the year, on the day of the summer solstice.  My first outraged howls greeted the sun as it rose over the horizon.  My father was not present for the birth.  In those days the birthing chamber was no place for a man, particularly one such as my father.  Men were not meant to see the advent of new life; it was a mystery preserved for the women.  My father hunted on the day that I was born, coursing deer in the great forest of Celadon.  It is said that he brought down a white stag at the very moment that I screamed the first breath out of my infant lungs, but I doubt it.  People were desperate for omens then, as now.

The Romans were leaving.  Although the envoys denied it, everyone knew that the legions would not be in the Islands for much longer.  For my father, far to the north of the Roman lands, this was not a concern save for the fact that his vassals in the South were surrounded by enemies who harboured a deep desire for the lush fields and plentiful forests of Ynys Prydein.  In Orcady we depended on trade with the South and the gold cups and silver plates that adorned my father’s table were ample proof of the profits to be made.  A South without Rome to defend it was vulnerable from inside and out.  The kingdoms were divided, the leaders old and weak.  Around them were arrayed the forces of the Sæcsen, the Ængle and the Jute, but the petty kings were too busy quarrelling between themselves to pay much heed.  Since the fall of Maximus a few years previously, no one had united the kingdoms and now, beset on all sides by barbarian tribes, Rome was leaving the Islands of the Mighty to defend themselves.  For the petty kings it was a perfect opportunity to expand their kingdoms.  Never was the Empire so poorly served as by those who, having accepted the protection of Rome for four hundred years, wasted no time in carving gobbets from her flesh as she withdrew.

It was a time of fear, of confusion, of anxiety.  Rumours of a Southern warlord who would unite the tribes drifted North, but each seemed more concerned with suppressing his rivals than defending the shoreline.  The most recent pretender to the crown of Maximus had shown some promise, said my father, but the Pændragon had been controlled at the end by his lusts.  Having united the Great Kings against the Sæcsen, he betrayed his comrades to rut in the arms of another man’s wife.  The scandal of Ygraine did not die down even after he married the widow he had made.  There were rumours of a child but the Pændragon died without leaving an heir.  The Great Kings went back to their usual quarrels and the Sæcsen came from across the sea and settled in the very heart of Ynys Prydein.

This is told only to show that, at that time, people needed omens and, when none were apparent, they invented them.  A white stag here, a falling star there was all it took to convince people that their world was not collapsing.  What is an omen if not an attempt to impose order on chaos?

I could tell you of my childhood, I suppose, but I will not.  My early years were much the same as any other child’s.  My real life started that day on the beach, standing alone among my comrades with my cloak wrapped around me to keep out the cold.  Thirty years later it would end in the same way, the same place, but no cloak could protect me from the cold inside.

On this day, the twelve of us stood uneasily, not sure whether to move closer together for protection from the wind or farther apart to preserve our identity.  There was an unconscious battle of wills playing as we each tried to assert our own leadership over this motley group.  Rank meant nothing here.  No one knew why he had been chosen or by whom.  Our clothing was identical, grey homespun with a cloak of unbleached wool.  The boy standing next to me could have been a shepherd or a prince.  Each of us, though, had in common the knock on the door, the silent messenger and the seal of Avalon pressed into a shrinking palm.  There were stories of the young men who had refused the summons.  None of them were pleasant.  My father had been unable to offer me advice.  He had not been chosen – a fact for which he seemed profoundly grateful.  It was my mother who had whispered as we parted,

“The Island will train your body, my son, but the cost may be greater than you imagine.  Remember who you are.  They will try to take everything from you, but you must never forget who you are.”

At ten years old, it is difficult to imagine ever not knowing who you are, but as I looked at the eleven pale, pinched faces around me, all showing an identical mix of excitement and thrilling terror, I tried to concentrate on the differences between them.

Although the youngest, a fact I only discovered later, I was not the smallest of the group.  That honour went to a dark-haired boy about a hand shorter than me.  He was slim and wiry and gazed about him with a fierce intensity in his near-black eyes.  The largest boy looked a little like a bear; a full head taller than anyone else with a shaggy mass of fair hair and a slightly stupid look in his cloudy-grey eyes.  Those eyes rarely looked away from a smaller boy, who was pacing around the beach chattering to himself under his breath.  The two resembled nothing so much as a large bear watching a squirrel.  Next to them was a rangy boy who affected a resigned insouciance while seeming always on the edge of movement.  Closest to me was a thin lad, sharp faced and inquisitive with a restless energy that translated into uncomfortable fidgeting.  On the edge of the group was a narrow eyed badger of boy, glaring about him belligerently.  The others were ranged around the beach, either sitting quietly standing, staring out to sea.

No one attempted conversation, cowed into silence, perhaps, by the thirteenth member of the group who sat apart from us, dark cloaked and cowled.  We could discern nothing of his features and he communicated only with gestures.  He had been waiting on the beach when we arrived, looking for all the world as though the cold had no effect on him at all.  The cloak was worn for concealment, not warmth and his position, atop a spur of rock exposed on all sides, made no allowance for the biting wind.  He hardly moved and it was a shock when he suddenly rose to his feet, towering over us, and pointed out over the water.

It is hard to describe my emotions, seeing the tall prow of the boat emerging from a mist that had sprung up, it seemed, without warning.  A frisson of fear, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach but also the abrupt sense that this was what I had been born for, to be here on this beach at this time.  Something about this felt right, almost familiar, although I had never been here before, never seen a boat such as this.  It was at once comforting and terrifying.

The prow was dragon carved, like the ships of the Sæcsen rievers, but they did not have the fretwork of interlaced carving, nor the glaring carbuncular eyes.  Furthermore, the Sæcsen ships were driven by oars or a large sail; this boat had neither.  With no visible means of moving, it nevertheless carved through the mist so rapidly that everyone on the beach took a sharp step backward, although the boat was some way from the shore.  I realised with a slight shock that the wind had dropped as suddenly as the mist had arisen.  The cold seemed even more severe.  Behind me I could hear someone moaning and I glanced over my shoulder.  The squirrel-like boy was rigid with fear, his eyes huge pools of terror in a face suddenly gaunt.  He was quite inarticulate; though his lips were moving, the only sound that issued from them was a low wail.  A large shape loomed behind him and Bear came out of the dusk to wrap his arms around the smaller boy with a look of compassion in eyes that were no longer stupid but tender.  Of all of us, he was the only one who had moved an inch since the boat appeared.

The cloaked man jumped down from the rock, his feet not raising a whisper of sound from the shingle.  He was, in fact, not as tall as he had seemed and even a little shorter than Bear.  There was danger in his step, though, a delicate violence quivering to be released.  He strode silently to the water’s edge, arriving just as the boat’s keel met the shingle with a rasping crunch to slide almost half its length out of the water.  This last seemed to shake the terrified boy from his stupor; he shrieked, the shrill, high pitched scream of a child mindless with fear.  Wrenching himself free of Bear’s grip he turned and sped down the beach, almost invisible in the gathering dusk.

He was not invisible enough.  The hooded man spun and bore down on him like a greyhound.  I couldn’t believe a man could run so fast.  In less time than it takes to draw breath he had the boy by the scruff of the neck.  The boy did not stop screaming.  For a long second the hooded man looked down at the terrified child.  He reached inside his cloak and, when his arm withdrew, it bore a long, icy blade.  The boy stiffened and the screams stopped as he fainted.  The hooded man let him fall to the ground and raised his sword.  The blade whistled slightly as it swung down with blinding speed, stopping only an inch above the unconscious boy’s mist-damp hair.  The cowled face turned slowly to stare at Bear.  The bigger boy had followed almost as swiftly as the man and reached his side in time to catch the arm that held the blade.  He was a child, no match for a grown man, yet somehow he held the blade from the flesh that it should have split.  The strain had swollen his face, but the man did not seem to be exerting himself at all.  With a negligent swipe he flung the boy aside and stabbed down at the child, only to find the path blocked once more by Bear, who had somehow managed to twist his body over the younger boy, shielding him with his own flesh.  His face was calm, his eyes clear and confident.

“No.”

That one, quiet word seemed to hang over the beach.  Not a trace of fear showed on his face as he stared without flinching into the dark shadow beneath the cowl, ignoring the bitter iron that now pointed at his throat.

“If there’s a price to be paid, let it fall on my head.  There’s no sin in fear.”

The blade didn’t move.  The three bodies seemed frozen but there was a battle of wills between the boy and the man that was as deadly as the sword that divided them.  Then the man turned without a word and strode back up the beach.  Bear picked up the smaller boy and followed.  Without glancing at the rest of us, he was the first to set foot on the narrow gangplank that had been lowered from the silent ship.  The hooded man motioned to the rest of us and, though the sword was once again hidden, we obeyed with alacrity.

The boat was open-decked and crewed by a score of figures cloaked and cowled like the man who had met us on the beach.  The twelve of us sat on narrow wooden planks that crossed the width of the boat, Bear still holding the boy he had saved close to his chest.  The younger boy was awake now and silent, his face buried in Bear’s shoulder.  The boat slid slowly back into the water, though the crew hadn’t moved and, as it turned its prow toward the open sea I took one last look at the land I would not see again for seven years.