“A sword!” A huge man spoke. “I’ll have the sword! A sword!” He shuffled towards me and his followers advanced behind on bare feet. A woman hurled a stone, and suddenly they were all screaming with delight because they had a new soul to plunder.
I drew Hywelbane, but not one man, woman or child was checked by the sight of her long blade. Then I fled. There could be no disgrace in a warrior fleeing the dead. I ran back up the road and a clatter of stones landed at my heels, then a dog leaped to bite at my green cloak. I beat the brute off with the sword, then reached the road’s turning where I plunged to my right, pushing through the brambles and scrub to reach the hillside. A thing reared in front of me, a naked thing with a man’s face and a brute’s body of hair and dirt. One of the thing’s eyes was a running sore, its mouth was a pit of rotting gums and it lunged at me with hands made into claws by hook like nails. Hywelbane sliced bright. I was screaming with terror, certain that I faced one of the Isle’s demons, but my instincts were still as sharp as my blade that cut through the brute’s hairy arm and slashed into his skull. I leaped over him and climbed the hill, aware that a horde of famished souls was clambering behind me. A stone struck my back, another hit the rock beside me, but I was scrambling fast up the pillars and platforms of quarried rock until I found a narrow path that twisted like the paths of Ynys Trebes around the hill’s raw flank.
I turned on the path to face my pursuers. They checked, frightened at last by the sword waiting for them on the narrow path where only one of them could approach me at a time. The big man leered. “Nice man,” he called in a wheedling voice, ‘come down, nice man.” He held up a gull’s egg to tempt me. “Come and eat!”
An old woman lifted her skirts and thrust her loins at me. “Come to me, my lover! Come to me, my darling. I knew you’d come!” She began to piss. A child laughed and flung a stone.
I left them. Some followed me along the path, but after a while they became bored and went back to their ghostly settlement.
The narrow path led between the sky and the sea. Every now and then it would be interrupted by an ancient quarry where the marks of Roman tools scarred baulks of stone, but beyond each quarry the path would wind on again through patches of thyme and spinneys of thorn. I saw no one until, suddenly, a voice hailed me from one of the small quarries. “You don’t look mad,” the voice said dubiously. I turned, sword raised, to see a courtly man in a dark cloak gazing gravely from the mouth of a cave. He raised a hand. “Please! No weapons. My name is Malldynn, and I greet you, stranger, if you come in peace, and if not, then I beg you to pass us by.”
I wiped the blood from Hywelbane and thrust her back into the scabbard. “I come in peace,” I said.
“Are you newly come to the Isle?” he asked as he approached me gingerly. He had a pleasant face, deeply lined and sad, with a manner that reminded me of Bishop Bedwin.
“I arrived this hour,” I answered.
“And you were doubtless pursued by the rabble at the gate. I apologize for them, though the Gods know I have no responsibility for those ghouls. They take the bread each week and make the rest of us pay for it. Fascinating, is it not, how even in a place of lost souls we form our hierarchies? There are rulers here. There are the strong and the weak. Some men dream of making paradises on this earth and the first requirement of such paradises, or so I understand, is that we must be unshackled by laws, but I do suspect, my friend, that any place unshackled by laws will more resemble this Isle than any paradise. I do not have the pleasure of your name.”