The Wolves of Savernake

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Savernake Forest trembled in the fading light. A cool breeze came out of nowhere to whistle through its undergrowth, to rustle its leaves, and to make its boughs genuflect fearfully towards the heavens. The sun was falling slowly into the seductive embrace of the horizon and only a few last rays were left to probe through the fretwork of branches and to conjure shapes out of the gathering gloom. When the breeze stiffened, the whole forest shivered with a pale fear. On a warm summer evening with its trees in full leaf, its grass thrusting forth in unchecked profusion, and its shrubs at their most riotous, it stood silhouetted against the watchful quietness of the sky and felt the icy touch of premonition.

The crouching figure who moved quickly and furtively along the riverbank paid no heed when birch and oak and ash came to life to bend and whisper all around him. He was a creature of the forest and knew its whims and wilfulness of old. When a weeping willow dived angrily downwards to sweep the ground then thresh it with violent malice, the man did not even lift his eyes. Alric Longdon was a miller, one of eight in the area, a low, squat, round-shouldered man of forty or more with a compact strength in his hunched frame and a face as big, white, and plain as a sack of his own flour. He was carrying something in his hand and scurried along with a stealth born of long acquaintance with Savernake. Tied to the river for his livelihood, married indissolubly to the swift current of this tributary of the Kennet, he listened to the restless surge and followed water to his destination.

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