Silver Pennies of King John 

The Cellar

...and after a defiant pause Father led him inside and together they ducked through the low doorway into the warmth.

I walked Gryffyd's horse to the stable and the other three men followed me with their horses and the two pack horses. The stable wasn't much more than a windbreak, two plank walls joined at a right angle, covered with a thin, triangle-shaped roof of thatch, but it was something. Our own two horses complained of the invasion but remembered from the last time Gryffyd's massive gelding came to visit that they had little choice but to be hospitable. These guests got their own way.

I wrestled the saddled off Gryffyd's gelding while Tail-Beard and his companions unsaddled theirs, then I helped them with the pack horses. Tail Beard did not acknowledge me or speak at all to the other two men, who seemed perfectly content talking between themselves in a language I had never heard before, a language full of strange sounds. They were very different from Gryffyd and Tail Beard in the way they looked and the way they acted. They were clean-shaven and I saw mail hauberks under their cloaks, and caught a glimpse of a very fine sword hilt.

True to Father's suspicions, except for four casks of ale, they had not brought much -- blankets, three sacks of flour, a single cask of smoked meat -- certainly not enough for four men for a week. But they had brought the small chests, four of them this time, which I knew must be filled with silver bars. They would not let me touch the chests, so I carried in the food and blankets, and when everything was safe inside and Tail-Beard and his companions were settled with Gryffyd and Father and my sister around the fire, I slipped away to conceal our food..
Knowing the snows would come soon, Father and I had been out hunting for three days before the storm and had nine rabbits and the hind quarter of a deer hanging behind the hovel. It was enough to last the three of us for weeks, if need be, but wouldn't last more than a few days with these men around. The rack was mounted high on the wall, out of the reach of wolves, and to reach it myself I had to climb the ladder we used for thatching. The deer hind and the rabbits were as solid as rocks from the cold, and one by one I dropped them onto the snowy ground. Then I climbed down and carried the first armload of carcasses to the cellar in the woods.

The cellar was a pit Father had dug about fifty paces from the clearing, just over a small ridge. It was just deep and wide and long enough for the three of us to hide in, huddled tight to each other, if we needed to. The walls and floor were lined with rock, and under two of the rocks in one corner was a pit no bigger than my two fists pressed together, where Father hid our earnings -- our own small stash of silver coins -- and a copper ring that was my mother's and a piece of amber, about as big as a fingertip, that Father had once received in payment from an English earl.

In three trips back and forth between the hovel and the woods, I half-filled the cellar with the deer and all but two of the frozen rabbits. I slid into place the heavy wooden cover with its camouflage of moss and half a hollow tree stump, spread snow over it, and then dragged across the spot and along my tracks to the hovel a tree bough to make it appear as though I'd been out gathering wood.

Prologue continued

I recognized two of the men. The one in the lead was a huge man, a head taller than Father and half again broader, and huge of belly as well. In his mail and his heavy cloak he seemed to me, a boy, like a [WELSH TERM] giant. His horse, too, was the biggest I'd ever seen -- bigger than all but a few I've seen since, even in the great English and Frankish cavalries. The giant's name was Gryffyd and he'd been bringing us silver bars and leaving with satchels and chests full of silver coins for as long as I could remember. The other man had come only once before and I didn't know his name, but I knew his beard. It was braided into two tails, and those tails, each with a brown glass bead at its end, had been a curiosity to me that past summer, as had the man's strange way of speaking. Now they were a full hand longer and caked with snow and the ice from his breath and seemed more strange still, like tusks.

"You chose the devil's own time to come, Gryffyd," Father said.

"You think I chose it?" the giant said. He tugged the reins and his great horse slumped to a stop and shook the snow from its mein.

"Chose it or not, you've left a clear track all the way here," Father said.

"We're not fools, Cynwrig," Gryffd shot back. "We covered our track where the path leaves the road. And with all the drifting--"

"You shouldn't have come."

The four men dismounted. Gryffd stomped his huge boots to get some warmth flowing in his legs. Even off his horse he towered over us. "Llywelyn burned the English castle on the Ystwyth two months ago," he said. "He's getting ready to move against the English in Powys in the spring. He needs the coins now."

"He won't have any coins at all if the English find this place."

Gryffd shoved his reins toward me with a hand as big as an ax head, and I took them, and he swept past Father and me like a passing storm. "If we're going to argue, Cynwrig," he said, "at least extend me the hospitality of doing it around a warm fire." He stopped outside the door of our hovel, waiting, and after a defiant pause Father led him inside and he ducked through the low doorway into the warmth.

Prologue

As soon as we heard the dogs barking, Father knew there would be trouble. He stopped mid-stitch, set down the boar bristle needle and the boot he was mending, and hobbled to the window on one booted and one bare foot. He lifted the wood bar and opened the shutter just enough to peek out.

"On [Welsh] God's beard!" he growled, "the fool's have come in the snow."

I knew who he meant. I was very young, a boy, maybe seven maybe eight. I had a sister, she was six, and we both knew who he meant. The men who came with the silver. There were sometimes three of them, sometimes a lot more. One day during the last summer, eight of them came, all heavily armed. They had brought a lot of silver, almost two weeks worth.

Father didn't like it when they came. It gave him work, and it paid him well, [hello] , but he didn't like them around. They camped across the clearing, at the edge of the wood, and spent all their time eating and gambling and drinking and ordering my sister around like a servant, while Father and I worked. We all hated it anddreaded their coming. Yet I didn't understand why Father was angry that they'd arrived during a snowstorm.

Father barred the shutter again and limped back to the table for his boot. "Feed the fire, girl," he said, pulling the boot on, and my sister turned from [what she was doing] to drop new kindling on the fire. He tucked the loop of gut down into the boot and jabbed the quill needle into the sheepskin lining.

"Cameron," he said to me, "bring in two rabbits, and leave the rest in the ground."

"How many are there?" I said, meaning how many men.

"Four," he said, "and they better've brought their own food this time, because two rabbits and bread are all they're getting." We took our sheepskin capes from the pegs by the door, wrapped them around us and went outside.

It had been snowing all night and the storm was tapering off. The wind that had gusted until midday was now as still as the snow, a light, dry snow about two hands deep. The four horsemen plodded across the clearing toward us. Our two dogs circled them, barking ominously, but neither men nor horses seemed to notice. They were numb from the cold.

Abrubacca 

Waking in the Grave

You get into your fifties and look over your shoulder and you discover that all the traces of you that you've left in this world are footprints in the snow, already melting away. You look back to the horizon where you started and you don't recognize the self that you see there. You can't believe that at almost every step of the way between there and here you managed to be too lazy, too blind, too drunk, too stupid, too stubborn or too scared to do what you really should have done. You see in that distant figure, staring across the empty years, a disappointment that only you can recognize. What the hell happened to me?

It's like suddenly waking in the grave.

But the casket lid hasn't clamped down on me yet; the crematorium flames aren't rising up around me. There is time. If I can just muster the will, there is time. If I start right now, break my old habits, turn off the too-worn path, there is time.

I have been a writer for almost 40 years. I have written speeches, scripts, screenplays, poems, love letters, and haiku. I have written things I am proud of and things I am ashamed of. But the one thing I have always wanted most to write -- a novel -- I cannot seem to write. I think, looking back, looking at myself even now, I have wanted it too much. I have tried too hard. Dinosaurs who had no sense of time or achievement or art or any intent of leaving traces behind managed without any effort at all to leave their tracks. They just walked forward, one step at a time.

This is my first step forward. I'm going to walk here because here I'm as anonymous as a long-dead dinosaur. If I succeed no might ever know who I was, but if I fail no one will know me either. That seems fair. That seems safe. Yes, I can walk here.