hen coedwig
A terrible field of winter stretched between Caer Gwaun and her wilderness, white and sparse as a canvas robbed of substance. Slow dunes of powder fell upon the heather patches and the hinter grass that rolled solemnly toward Estershire. Not a single animal, beast or man, had lain his foot upon this country, for her embrace was a barren, frigid death. There were no footprints this morning to mar her perfect empty qualities. The snow stretched to boundaries of conifers, separated by miles in every direction, and fog bred between these like a bowl of steaming froth. Along the eastern edge of the moor, a figure struggled up the bank of climbing cedar. His stirring was amplified by evidence that he was the only living thing in that plain.
The traveler was a strong height and width, though bent from the weight of his various parcels, which were, strapped in leather and tugging like bundled corpses, provisions for a journey. He had prepared for pitfalls with a set of wooden planks that fastened at his ankles and extended from beneath his broken boots. These left curious serpentine trails along the edge of the wood, swept by a whip of horse hairs to keep his stead free of dogs and wild men. In the England of 1140 AD, neither pursuer was unlikely.
While the clearings of the forest were covered in snow, little had carried through the canopy of pine trees to dust its wooded floor. The man now found his skis unnecessary and spent a hurried moment unfastening their ropes. His fingers, bitten pink by frost, were still of a young man's hand.
Estershire, a budding Marcher town, was six miles east through a twiggy maze called Hen Coedwig that spun its way among the mist like entangled spiders. To scare children, tales were passed of the wood's ability to pull those of weak footing through the earth where they became food for lice. An educated traveler knew that this was not unfounded, as many injuries resulted of tangled roots that wrought the tiny paths. For this reason, Lords and Barons were encouraged to pilot in the company of an entourage. Due to an increasing instance of missing persons, commonfolk were keen to follow this same practice.
The burdened man passed steadily among the decidious limbs and bramble. He wore a draping of fur on his shoulders that, when he leapt from bank to bank, had him looking intensely wild. King Stephen of Normandy was in custody of his country's rebellion—captured and crownless. His absense forgave looters, villains, and highwaymen their untamed professions.
It became clear as he moved that the man had traveled this way before. He knew each wand-like strand of ash that reached for his boots on the path. It would be an hour at his pace before the palisade of the distant shire and, for the danger of oncoming darkness that accompanied 6 o'clock, he stopped only twice to take hot uisce* (whiskey) from a canteen.
Hen Coedwig, at its center, was an ancient dome of wiry oak. The decay of frost had crumpled any foliage left by autumn. An occasional farmland bird, hungry in this season without corn, would shriek overhead and call starving to the heavens for amnesty. The haunted sound turned the head of the journeyman. He had brown unshorn hair and in his eyes was reflected a quivering fear—addressing the tranquil behavior of the wilderness with such paranoia that an icy salt swelled at his tear ducts. His terror was not unfounded; there, standing at an intersection of twisted maple, a beast was watching.
The creature was a monster of tremulous proportion. It had a thick, long neck of shag that shimmered with dew and a slat of teeth, like a whale's, that shone as a bar of drooling ivory keys. Its rubbery lips were spread to release a cautionary growl.
"Wairwulf." Cried the man: the saxon term for a victim of lycanthropy. The creature was such a size that it could be nothing other. The Caer Gwaun moor hounds, hulking as they were—a cunning invasion upon the countryside—were five hands smaller than this beast.
These smaller had not arrived suddenly. Assembling as strays and pressed by famine, they developed into packs and gathered their confidence. In the years before 1140 they were inconvenient scavengers. Since the anarchy of King Stephen's capture, they had taken to the nation's liking for murder.
In the frigid horrors of that scene, the Wairwulf advanced upon its prey. It moved on taloned pads that aided its hunter's instinct for silence. It possessed the withered shoulders of a horse and prepared to leap, drawing its head low in a stance from which it would tear the piping of the jugular vein and nestle its cold, wet nose in free-flowing blood.
As it is natural for even a brave man to do, the traveler stood motionless, parrying his quarry the way a grounded robin does before taking flight. He stumbled into a run that was hampered by the residual frost and by the weight of his pack. Shambling through peeking ferns and over systems of gnarled oak that had given this forest fame, he moved toward Estershire in the east. There was hope in the village's palisades, where was stationed a lord's militia of twenty men who, trained to savagery by this season of chaos, would fell the beast in pursuit.
It was late afternoon and no ritual moon hung in the sky. No sky was seen for the fog that pressed from rivers yet unnamed that split the wood. It would seem for this that the dead branches of Hen Coedwig held a batton canopy of unspun cotton and that the race taking place beneath them came from a gently padded nightmare. The Wairwulf began its chase at a prideful trot that carried no demeanor of hunger. It would likely paw at its prey and, while they were known for their habit of devouring both face and entrails, murder for the cruelty of the affair. This was the intention that it wore as it moved easily behind the burdened man, dripping the remains of its previous victim from a tassel on its noble snout.
Less than a mile of wilted forest remained before the shire. From a bird's eye and beyond that layer of fog, the village was a small fortress of farms and merchant quarters, centering around a barracks lodging and the Lord's own manor. It spread 9 acres north to south and three fourth's that wide—a peaceful and primitive place where in England and in this age there were few. The church was the tallest building in Estershire with its silver image of St. Benedict, scriptures in hand and reaching into clouds, preaching holy unity unto all.
The man continued his stumbling run with the incredible endurance of adrenaline, veering on angles as his feet gave way to numbness and occasional unsteady ground. He had drawn a picket-shaped ski from his saddle of belongings and was bearing it like a stake. The wood was weak and had splintered. In places, wet and rigid needles of its composure had forced their way into his palm and dotted the frost behind him with a cookie trail of blood. The wulf, sniffing viciously at these patches as it moved, was driven to hunger by the steely scent. It broke from the playful trot and snarled at intervals of madness. So near was the growling that the man would turn his head to watch and had not, in his haste, seen the outlying roots of an Oak—a crooked Hen Coedwig patriarch with its fingers set about like tentacles in an assertion of gnarled authority. The journeyman was thrown to his hands and knees, refusing to part with the splintering picket in his right hand and, in the fall, shredding the skin from his palm. He held the ski like a sword in his maimed fingers and pointed it at the pursuing creature, having rolled to his back where he was protected from the Wairwulf's lunge.
Several yards away stood the beast that was chasing him. Its head was broad and regal, belonging to tawny maned cats of Roman myth. Like a headdress, feathers of wet fur stuck at angles that concealed the trim of the creature's neck. A cleft separated the single ridge of its scaly nose where some warlike gesture had left a scar. Below this, and as it moved, all four delicate paws touched the earth beneath.
The man trembled but he made no sound. There are rabbits that, when cornered, can scream like a child. The traveler was so sure in the complete solitude of this locale that he, for his pride, kept a silent resolve. His eyes glazed with terror when they met those of the Wair, that gleamed as the shadow stepped closer like glassy pools of swimming ice. He could see in them the humane and primordial language of a challenge—as all animals, when confronted by a stare, feel somewhere in them the rouse of battle.
An eerie breeze pulled a stream of fog through the clearing behind the man. Beyond it, lamps in Estershire were lighting for the evening in the single window houses of wattle and daub. He was a minute's jog from the palisades, in the border clutches of Hen Coedwig. He would be devoured and slain. It was, in this circling mist, that the Wairwulf halted. It saw something unsavory in its victim's nature that broke the advancing motions of its attack. The creature stopped; it brought its massive snout into the air and howled a long, low wail. When it rounded and withdrew into the haunting woods, the man remained slumped on the floor of the clearing—his parcels dismantled and the picket clenched in his swollen red fist.
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