The Green Children of Woolpit by J. Anderson Coats

Author:J. Anderson Coats
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

I dreamed of them again.

The king warned me this would happen when I walked once more the place where I grew up. Where I should have grown up, had the foreigners not come in their red tunics with long, curved shields and big swords. When they marched you could hear them, even far away, because their feet would hit the ground in unison, tromp tromp tromp, like they were one creature with one single will.

You will never be free of them, said the king. Enough of you bled out that the very ground remembers.

They came burning settlements. That’s what we heard, and there was nothing for it but to fight or run, and given the ragged, haunted souls that sought refuge among us, it was more than clear that fighting would gain us very little. But there was nowhere to run. No way to keep ourselves if we did. The smoke rose from all directions. They’d be upon us soon. They were not like us. What they might want, only the gods knew, and our mothers had no wish for us to find out.

So the men and boys armed themselves. They formed up behind our chieftain and off they went to fight. My father went, and my brother, and both fell somewhere far away, along with enough of their fellows that there were not enough of ours left alive to bear their bodies home. They had to be left for the enemy, to do with what they would.

The last time I saw my mother, we’d fled as far as the stream. She hoped the foreigners would find goods enough to plunder in the houses and keep moving. A while back, she’d buried coins and jewelry near the holy well on the other side of the meadow and we would need to buy safety, wherever we tried to go. I was to wait at the edge of the greenwood where there’d be easy hiding if anyone should happen by, but she swore she’d be back before the sun was overhead. We would make our way north. My great-grandmother had married an Iceni blacksmith. Someone might still remember her.

I waited three days.

By sundown on that first day, I knew she wasn’t coming. There was too much stillness, like I was the only living creature in a month’s walk. I stayed the other two days because leaving made it real. Leaving meant I was well and truly on my own.

Leaving meant I might come across her body, wherever it lay lifeless. Whatever the foreigners had done to it.

There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to be where the world didn’t smell like char. Serve me and live, said the king under the mountain, and I knew him from my grandmother’s stories but still I went with him through the greenwood and into the wolf pit ankle-deep with bones.

There are bones because there is sacrifice, said the king, and as I followed, the walls began to whisper, telling me where my mother lay slain, my father and my brother, where their white bones lay bleaching.

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