Pushing myself into a crouch, I ran as quickly as I could towards the trees. Years of torture and captivity had taken its toll on my body and I could not move as quickly as I once could, instead I moved in a clumsy, limping lumber across the open ground towards the trees. I had not gone far into the woods when I heard a hiss close by and turning towards the source I saw a dark figure a short distance away with two snorting horses tethered to a tree.

The figure was short and wide of shoulder. “Parviz?” I asked apprehensively.

“Over here, quickly,” came the response.

Parviz deftly untied the two horses and handed me the crude rope reins of one of them. Both animals looked like us, half starved, the outlines of their ribs showing clearly through their skin.

“They were the best I could get,” Parviz said apologetically, as though sensing my criticism.

“They’re fine,” I replied, patting one of the beasts on the side of its neck. “They’re the finest steeds I have ever seen.”

Parviz laughed and slapped me on the shoulder, but his expression quickly changed when he saw torches in the distance and heard the faint barking of hunting hounds.

“They’re looking for us. We must go now.”

I mounted my horse with difficulty, having not ridden for such a long time and the fact that the mount had no saddle did not help. It took me a couple of attempts with Parviz’s help before I was steady, but as soon as I was, I kicked my heels into the horse’s bony flanks and steered it northwards through the woods and towards freedom. We rode swiftly until we came to open moorland, using the stars and the moonlight to guide us.

“Do you know where we are going?” Parviz asked when we paused on the brow of a hill that overlooked a wide valley with a vast forest on the other side.

“North,” I replied, nodding towards the tree line. “That is where the Coedwig dyn Bannog should be.”

Parviz gave me a puzzled look. “The what?”

“The Forest of the Horned One,” I explained. “It should be directly north of where we were. It is vast and hard to miss.”

Parviz pointed towards a distant sea of trees. “Is that it?”

I spurred my exhausted mount into motion. “I’m hoping so.”

We descended into the valley, splashing through a fast flowing river and emerging on the other bank cold and wet. The moon was high and bright and the stars were crystal clear, but once we entered the forest, they were invisible to us. I breathed deeply, luxuriating in the scent of pine, wild garlic and disturbed leaf mulch, smells that brought memories flooding back to me. We continued for a short while into the forest before I called a halt in a small clearing.

“We need to rest. I think we’ll be safe enough here.”

I dismounted and tied my horse to a nearby oak sapling.

“What if we are being followed?” Parviz asked, glancing back the way we had come.

“If they are following, they won’t enter these woods,” I replied, gathering some moss and soft bracken to lie on. “Besides, if we carry on in the dark we’ll get completely lost. Better to rest here until morning. You sleep, I’ll keep first watch.”

“That is of course assuming these are the right woods,” Parviz pointed out with a wry smile. “There are many forests in this land, my friend. We could be anywhere and I hate forests.”

I shook my head slowly. Although it looked like any other forest, there was something, a sense that we were in the right place. “No, this is the Coedwig dyn Bannog, I can feel it.”

We sat for a while upon our beds of bracken and talked freely and openly for the first time, not having to worry about guards overhearing us. It was a balmy summer’s evening, but I regretted the fact that we had no fire to warm us or food to fill our wasted bellies.

Parviz, although initially wary of the unfamiliar surroundings began to relax and started telling me of his homeland, a place of hot deserts, green mountains and blue skies, far to the east of the Roman Empire and how he missed the spiced food and bustle of the ports.

“You must visit my home city of Persepolis or Istakhr some time. You will see then how civilised people live.”

“How come you left your homeland?” I asked.

Parviz turned his gaze towards the small segment of night sky visible directly above us where a smattering of stars shone.

“Our beneficent ruler, the great Yazdegerd decided that he no longer wanted Christians in his country. My parents were Christian and myself and my sisters were also brought up as Christians, but Yazdegerd hated Christians. His soldiers drove us from our homes and so we wandered north, only to find another more deadly foe. The Huns overran the borders of the Empire and attacked our settlement and I was the only survivor. I wandered south again and I made my way to the port of Tiz and offered my services on board a merchant vessel bound for India. However, not far into the journey, we were attacked by Yemeni pirates and taken to the slave markets of Egyptus, where I was sold to a Roman merchant. I proved myself useful as the ship’s cook and the merchant granted me my freedom in Constantinople,” Parviz propped himself on an elbow and looked at me. “Have you ever been to Constantinople?”

I shook my head and Parviz grinned and sighed. “Ah, what a city. Great statues on every corner, the roofs are tiled with gold and every street is filled with the wares of merchants from all corners of the Empire and beyond. Anything a man could ever want he will find in the streets of Constantinople. That is where I eventually found employment with another vessel, a ship bound for Britannia, an island far to the north of which I had heard whispered tales in the taverns and Inns. Being young and curious, I could not wait for my journey to begin and wondered what strange delights this mysterious island would hold.

We sailed for many days, the fine weather gradually turning to rain and mist until we spied the coast of Britannia; barren, grey cliffs against a grey sky and tumultuous grey sea. We docked at Din Tagel to sell our wares, mainly slaves and I was ordered by my captain to cook a meal for the Duke. I cooked him Kale Pacha, boiled sheep’s head soup from my homeland and he was so impressed that he begged me to stay in Din Tagel as his chief cook. He promised me unlimited gold, wine and women and so, despite the damp and the grey skies, I decided to stay.”

“Until you tried to poison him?” I added.

Parviz glared at me, his mood suddenly changing. “I did not try to poison him. Some fool used rancid meat in one of the dishes and the Duke became sick. Naturally, as head cook, I was blamed.”

“It’s a shame you didn’t kill him.” I said bitterly.

Parviz nodded in agreement. “Maybe, but vengeance eats at one’s soul. I wish now only to return to Constantinople and get away from this place for good.”

We took turns sleeping while the other kept watch, but as I sat hunched with my arms wrapped around my knees, the chill of the wolf hour, that strange twilight time just before dawn began to seep into my bones and I longed for the warmth of a fire. Dorbalos had once told me that this time was when the barriers between the worlds became fragile and it was a time when spirits, both benevolent and malign, could wander into our world to haunt our dreams or take the souls of the living. It was the time when the very young and the very old tended to cross over, a time when the dead could speak to the living.

I offered a prayer to Carnun, the Horned One, asking him to give me some kind of sign that we were on the right path and to guide us through his realm safely. It had been a long time since I had prayed to any god, having given up after years of my prayers not being heard whilst I languished in the Duke’s hellish pit.

Shortly after I began to nod with exhaustion and despite my best efforts, my eyelids became heavy and began to droop shut. How long I sat in that state, I did not know and whether what I saw subsequently was nothing more than a dream was irrelevant, as I have come to learn that dreams offer us a glimpse into worlds beyond and are ignored at our peril.

It started as a distant shriek, like the prolonged screech of a vixen and startled, I turned towards the sound. As I did so, something large came crashing into the clearing and leapt over Parviz and I in a single bound. It appeared to be a great white stag that continued its headlong flight through the forest to the north of us. Before I could recover from this sudden intrusion, more bodies hurtled past, enormous white hounds slavering and baying in pursuit of their prey and terrified, I curled upon the ground in a ball as the animals bounded past me. There was another blood chilling shriek as a hooded rider, clad in black upon a black stallion galloped into the clearing and, like the stag moments before, leapt over Parviz and I to quickly vanish amongst the trees. As he thundered past, I caught a glimpse of his billowing cloak and the antlers that sprouted from the side of his head and I knew then that Carnun, the Lord of the Wild had heard my prayers.

A rolling peal of thunder and a great gust of wind followed in their wake, kicking up leaves and debris which swirled all around me before dying down as quickly as it had started. I looked over at Parviz, my heart thumping, fully expecting him to be awake and as startled as I was, but he was sleeping soundly upon his bed of bracken as though nothing had happened.

I shook him into wakefulness and he glared up at me, confused and irate.

“Carnun has given me a sign,” I explained breathlessly. “We must go now.”

It was not difficult to follow the trail of broken saplings and hoof prints left by the mysterious rider and his entourage of otherwordly hounds. The stag, which had evidently been wounded had also left a trail of blood confirming my suspicion that what I had witnessed had been far more than a mere dream.

“How come I heard nothing?” Parviz asked, brushing his fingers against a smear of blood on the trunk of a large beech tree.

“Several times I have hovered between this world and another unseen realm,” I explained. “Some people can go their whole lives without even so much of a glimpse of this realm. Others seem to be able to go to and fro at will, crossing between the worlds as one crosses a bridge over a river. I seem to have no control over when I come or go, it just happens to me.”

“Tell me of this unseen realm,” Parviz asked, his face intent and serious.

 I shook my head as though to clear it. “Sometimes it is nothing more than a fleeting moment, so subtle that you are almost unaware of it. Usually it happens in dreams or between sleep and wakefulness or between life and death. The gods send us messages in our dreams and they send us portents in nature; the way a bird flies, the movement of clouds, the sudden appearance of an animal. It is their way of communicating with us and they communicate with us in many ways, but sometimes we are blind to them.”

“How do you know what you see are not demons trying to misguide you?”

“Good and evil, angels and demons, these are Christian concepts,” I replied. “Carnun is neither good nor evil, just as a wolf or a stag are neither good nor evil. He just is.”

Parviz frowned. “Does this not make this Carnun dangerous to deal with?”

I shrugged. “He is the lord of all things wild. If you do not afford him the proper respect within his realm, then yes.”

Parviz swallowed hard, his dark eyes darting nervously towards the spaces between the trees. “I do not like forests.”

The sun crept over the horizon, bathing the forest in a green light and throwing a dappled pattern upon the soft ground. We rode steadily for most of the day, following the trail left by the mysterious rider, a trail that took us ever deeper into the wilds, where the trees were huge, twisted and ancient, with great beards of moss hanging from the branches and gnarled roots that curled into the ground like thick tentacles.

Parviz started at every sound and seemed to grow more nervous the further we travelled, but I felt an unparalleled joy at being back amongst nature and several times I laughed aloud with sheer exuberance. I had no clothes, no food and an uncertain future, but I was free once again.

Towards the end of the day we made camp near a small pool of crystal clear water fed by a fast flowing stream which tumbled into the pool from above. After drinking our fill of water, I managed to make a fire from a hastily constructed bow drill and we roasted beechmast and acorns, which although they tasted bitter and unripe, helped to fill our shrunken bellies a little.

“We have been riding all day my friend.” Parviz grimaced as he sat hunched near the fire nibbling on beechmast. “Do you even know where we are?”

I shook my head and waved away the fire smoke that was wafting into my face. “The Coedwig dyn Bannog is vast. We could be wandering for days before we find anyone.”

“And yet I have the uncomfortable feeling of being watched,” Parviz replied, looking warily towards the ancient trees.

“That is because we are being watched. And we have been ever since we set foot within this forest,” I said, idly poking at the fire with a pine branch. “The Coedwig Gwerin have been following us and watching us closely.”

“Who?” Parviz whispered, his face growing pale with fear.

“The Forest Folk,” I explained. “The First Men, those who were driven into the forests when the Romans came. They were ancient when our ancestors first arrived from across the seas. They have always been here and the magic of this land flows strongly within their veins, for they were the ones who raised the Great Stones and taught the druids the secrets of the world,” I held out a forearm, showing him the vine-like markings that crept up my arms which seemed to twist and dance with a life of their own in the flickering light of the fire. “They have marked me as one of their own. They are my friends.”

“If that is the case, why then do your friends not help you?” Parviz asked, his temper beginning to fray. “Why do they hide and watch while we wander aimlessly and slowly starve to death?”

“They will reveal themselves when the time is right,” I responded calmly.

“They had better reveal themselves soon,” Parviz countered peevishly as he spat a husk of bitter beechmast into the fire. “I cannot live like a squirrel indefinitely.”

The next day we rode on, northward by the best of my reckoning, though in truth I was now as hopelessly lost as Parviz. The forest seemed both familiar and alien to me at the same time and several times I had the dreadful and disheartening feeling that we had looped back on ourselves.

The trail left by the mysterious hunt had now grown too difficult to follow and Parviz began to voice his frustration more and more frequently until by the end of that day we were openly bickering with one another.

“You do not seem to grasp the seriousness of our situation, Irishman,” he yelled after a particularly heated exchange. “We will die soon if we do not find proper food, or else we will become so weak that the wolves will come and eat us alive.”

Parviz was right. A couple of times we had seen the grey shapes of wolves loping alongside us, waiting for us to weaken. We had come to a fast flowing stream and had decided to follow its course, hoping that it would eventually lead us to the coast, but whether we would make it before the wolves attacked was nagging in the backs of our minds.

I began to shout at the top of my lungs. “Myrddin! Where are you? It is I, Fergus.”

Parviz looked on with a sour expression. “Which of your pagan gods are you wailing to now? The one who has got us lost?”

“Myrddin is not a god, he is a druid,” I responded bitterly.

“I thought the druids were all gone from this land?”

I fixed Parviz with a glare and shook my head. “He is the last of his kind.”

The foreigner muttered something under his breath and tugged at his horse’s reins. We rode on aimlessly until nightfall, eventually finding a small, mossy cave where we made our camp.

We lit a fire near the cave’s mouth and tethered the horses to a nearby tree outside. Our mounts were becoming increasingly skittish and nervous, especially when the wolves began to circle again.

We sat by our fire in wary silence and watched the dark shapes with amber eyes slinking through the trees, gradually drawing closer and closer. A couple of times I ran towards them, yelling and swinging a burning stick and they quickly dispersed, only to resume their stalking once I had returned to the fire.

That night the wolves attacked. I was awoken by Parviz shouting and kicking me out of my slumber.

“Quick Fergus, they are attacking the horses!”

There was a terrible, desperate sound just beyond the mouth of the cave, a screeching, whining noise coupled with the vicious snarls of the unseen predators. I sprang to my feet and seized the stave of rowan that I had been carrying as a makeshift weapon and ran towards the horses, yelling and swinging the heavy staff of wood.

There was a yelp as it connected with one of the dark shapes which had brought down my horse, but instead of retreating, the wolf backed off a few steps and then turned towards me, snarling defiantly.

My horse was thrashing around on the forest floor surrounded by half a dozen large grey wolves who took turns at diving forward and sinking their fangs into its flesh. Parviz’s mount was rearing up and pulling at its rope, desperately trying to free itself as a further four wolves snapped at its legs.

Parviz ran from the cave with a brand of burning wood, yelling in his native tongue as he swung the makeshift torch at the wolves. Side by side we stood, shouting and brandishing our inadequate weapons, but the wolves knew that we were weak and outnumbered and circled us warily, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Try as we might, we could not get close enough to the horses to save them as several wolves drove us back each time whilst their colleagues tore at the now still body of my mount.

Parviz’s horse fared better however, as it managed to loosen the rope binding it to the tree and galloped off into the forest with three wolves in pursuit. It dawned on me then that the wolves had come for our horses, not for us, at least not on this occasion. I placed a hand on Parviz’s shoulder and he jumped nervously.

“Let them eat their fill. We’ll go back to the cave and wait.”

We crouched by our fire and watched helplessly as the wolves tore at the horse carcass and just as I had predicted, they ignored us, eventually trotting off into the trees when they had ate enough.

Parviz and I remained awake all night, too afraid to sleep. As the sun rose over the horizon, I crept out from our shelter and examined the remains of the slaughtered animal. The wolves had torn the horse’s belly open and had gorged themselves on its insides, but there was a fair amount of flesh still left intact on the bones and I cut off several handfuls of meat from the beast’s hind quarters using a piece of flint that I found nearby.

I clumsily attempted to cut the meat into slices and after a fair amount of effort we roasted it over our fire in the cave. It was tough and difficult to chew, but compared to our diet of acorns and beechmast, it was a feast fit for a king.

With our strength restored we set off once again, walking as best we could in a northerly direction.

“How can a forest be this big?” Parviz grumbled. “I have seen nothing but trees for days. Surely there must be an end to it.”

We were sat by a clear pool in a small clearing chewing on strips of tough horse flesh. We had enough to last us until the following day if we were careful, but after that we would be back to foraging whatever we could.

And then there was the constant fear of the wolves returning. As we grew weaker and more weary, the wolves grew bolder and we both knew that unless we found a settlement soon, the wolves would attack and kill us both.

“We cannot go on just walking aimlessly,” Parviz continued, inspecting a badly blistered foot. “We will weaken and die. We need to think about building some kind of shelter, a place where we can rest and hunt from.”

I gave Parviz a cynical look. I doubted that he had ever hunted anything in his life. “And just what are you going to hunt with?” I asked sarcastically. “Any animal in this forest will smell you a mile off. And even if they didn’t, they’d hear you lumbering along like a one man army. Don’t be a fool, Parviz.”

The foreigner stood suddenly and threw his stave of wood into the pool. “So what is your suggestion, child of the great forest? We wander until we become food for wolves?” His voice was on the verge of hysteria, but I was too fatigued to react. “We must do something, I don’t wish to die here.”

Parviz seemed to crumple back down into a sitting position, his breath coming in unsteady sobs. I sat and stared listlessly at the expanding ripples on the pools surface, listening to a cuckoo’s repetitive cry in the distance.

At that moment I heard something else, something that caused me to stand and hold my breath in concentration.

Parviz, now fighting back tears, began to witter on about our situation, but I silenced him with a hiss and a wave of my hand, for somewhere in the distance I could hear the unmistakable music of a pipe.

Parviz frowned as he strained to hear the melodious notes, but my years spent in the dark confines of my prison had heightened my auditory senses, although my sight had suffered and had grown weaker.

“What is it?” Parviz insisted.

“Distant music,” I replied, trying to locate the general direction.

“You are imagining it. You are losing your mind.”

Ignoring my Sassanid companion, I set off in the direction that I thought the melody was coming from, following the tumbling course of a small stream that emanated from the pool. Parviz shouted for me to wait, but I continued anyway, drawn onwards like a sailor being drawn to his doom by the enchanting song of a siren.

The tune was haunting, with lilting notes that touched my soul and I realised with some emotion that it had been many years since I had heard music of any kind.

Eventually my meandering course brought me to a clearing where a short scree slope led to the foot of a rocky outcrop, several times the height of a house.

At the summit of this cliff I could see several sylph-like figures in diaphanous white dresses whirling and prancing gracefully to the pipe music and for a moment I wondered if they were the Shee of the Otherworld.

Nearby, perched on a boulder near the cliff’s edge was the musician, a hooded figure in a colourful, patchwork cloak and tunic, his shoulders jigging in time with his own tune.

I stood in silence and watched for a while, entranced by the grace and beauty of the female dancers, barely aware of Parviz crashing through the undergrowth behind me.

Suddenly the music stopped and the hooded figure stood and beckoned me forward with a wave of his bone pipe. I shuffled forward as though in a trance and the figure reached up to throw back his hood. Even from the foot of the cliff there was no mistaking the twinkling eyes, pointed beard, ruddy face and quick smile and although the features bore the passage of the years it was a face immediately familiar to me.

Oengus mac Ruadhain smiled down at me while the dancers, now still, looked on impassively.

“Fergus mac Fiontan, as I live and breathe,” Oengus gave a little chuckle of pure joy. “It has been a long time my friend. Come, there are people waiting to see you.”