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.