The boy stumbled, his toe catching on a root that loomed black out of the darkness. He gasped, outstretched fingers brushing the icy snow. His breath was ragged and rasping in his throat. He had been running for so long, and Lord, he was so tired. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. But the hounds bayed again behind him, and there was nowhere to rest. He saw their red eyes flash in the gloom, like wolves. 

A horn rang out, long and low and awful, and the dogs howled in response. One foot before the other, the boy thought, his mind reeling. One foot before the other. He should have listened, oh, he should have listened to his mother. Don’t go into the forest anymore, she said, over and over again. Not ever again, do you understand? And when she looked at him that way, with her merry green eyes so dark and serious, there was nothing he could do but nod his head and promise to obey.

But the forest had called to him, the sweet summer-night scent of pine-nuts and loam. He had remembered his father, remembered the exhilaration of a mushroom or a hoofprint revealed to him like a treasure. And one foot had gone before the other, and the shadow of the trees had swallowed him up.

The monks spoke long and lyrically on the God of Rome, the one God who brought learning and truth, banishing the old superstitions to the dark recesses where they belonged. And the boy had believed them. But now he was here, beneath the boughs that stretched so thickly overhead the sky was a mere suggestion — he was back in the land of the old gods, the faith of his father and grandfather, and they were angry he had forgotten them.

Cwn Annwyn, the hounds. He could hear the beat of their paws on every side, hear the horrible panting of their breath. Giant hounds straight out of legends, and their master could not be far behind. Herne the Horned, Herne the Hunter. And now the boy was their quarry. 

Fangs flashed out of the shadows to his right, and he sobbed in fear, lurching away. “Please,” he cried out, to the night. “Please, Lord Jesus! Save me!”

Only the call of the Hunter’s horn answered him, and he saw too late now that the monks had been wrong. The Roman God might hold sway in Rome, in the land of sunshine and civilisation, but here in Brittania there was no true god, no one god – there were many and they were all as real and as his father had told him. And mortals were nothing but playthings and prey.

“Herne!” he wept now, his breath sawing in his lungs. He could hardly get the words out. “Herne, Green God, spare me! I didn’t know, I didn’t know you were real! Please, I’ll never stray again! I’ll make sacrifices, sheep and deer and whatever you want—”

A dog, a great white wolf ravening with bloodied fangs and foaming breath, sprang from the shadows, and the boy realised that there was no sacrifice he could offer. He had turned from his ancestors’ gods, and now he was the sacrifice they demanded. 

The dreams he had nurtured in that rich sunshine beyond the forest were gone now. Blowing away from him like ashes in the wind. There had been a fleeting future when he would seek out learning from the brothers at the abbey. Or another where he had raced in the meadows with Marianna the miller’s daughter, with her long bright hair and her infectious laugh. All dreams, and all swallowed up in this darkness that reeked of fear. All that remained was the forest and the hunt.

The horn sounded again. Close, too close. Hoofbeats were audible now. A wolf’s fangs snapped shut on air, almost snagging his sleeve. What could he do? Where could he run? What was left?

The answer came with a cold clarity that startled him. Nothing. There was nothing to do now, nothing but wait, and die. To meet the fate that the gods, whichever ones they were, had ordained for him.

He stopped. It was so easy. He stopped running, and for a moment, he thought oh, it is good to be still. The cessation of movement was almost enough to soothe the burning in his feet.

Then hot animal breathing sounded just behind him, and a wolf’s jaws closed on his neck as a wolf’s weight toppled him to the ground.

He lay with his face pressed into the pine needles, breathing in the familiar scent of pine needles gently rotting, and strangely, he smiled. It reminded him of home, that smell. Before the monks, before Marianna, before the early-morning flight from their crofter’s cottage, his mother dragging him by one hand. It was home, in this forest. Where his father had swung him high on his shoulders, stooped to show him the tracks of deer, fox, elk; moss-green eyes laughing down at him. Before the whispers of witchcraft and warlock had driven his father away into the depths of the forest. Before the boy had left the shaded glens had been exchanged for the open pastures and sunlit meadows of the abbey. Before all of that, in the boy’s first memories, loomed the great black trees and the carpet of pine needles. This was home, this forest. And home was a good place to die.

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More wolves latched onto his arm, his bicep, his leg, but he felt no pain, and he was grateful. Thank you, Herne, for your small mercies. It was easier than he had expected, to exchange one god for another. But he supposed that it was not the first time he had done it. 

The hoofbeats were closer, now, and the ground quaked a little with each one. 

“Do not thank me, boy,” a voice said, and that voice almost made the boy’s heart stop. That voice was the forest, the growing of the leaves in spring, new life bursting forth, and the falling in the autumn, the long slow mouldering on the ground, ponderous with worms and woodlice, the bare dead winter, only the faintest pulse of life within each tree, and the summer, most of all the summer, the long glorious summer where every tree in the forest, in the world, stretched up its leaves to the sun, drinking in the light, singing a silent tree song of praise to the wind and the world. That voice was everything.

“I am Herne, Anwynn, Woden, and Ing,” the voice replied to his unspoken words, rich with laughter that drifted like leaves on the breeze. “I am the forest and the wild places. I am the growth in the trees, in the stars, in the sky. I was the beginning and I shall be the end.”

One by one, the wolves — or were they just dogs, after all? — released their hold and slipped away. The boy lay still. The final blow would fall soon, he was sure.

“Look, boy!” Herne commanded in that terrible voice, and the boy slowly raised his head. 

He saw the wolves first. They were huge white wolves, shaggy and thick-furred, the snowy colour of their pelts darkening to a rusty blood-red on their ears. They had huge fangs and wicked curving claws, and they snarled and snapped as he looked at them, so many of them – each as tall as the boy’s shoulder. There was an elk in their midst, a white elk larger and more powerfully built than any stag he had ever seen, huge muscles bunching beneath its bushy coat. Its hooves and wide curving antlers were a rich mossy green, but its eyes were a deep brown, almost exactly the colour of the hidden pools that the boy’s father had shown him once upon a time, deep within the forest. As the boy stared, steam poured from the elk’s cavernous nostrils and it stamped one great hoof, a blow that could have broken the boy’s spine or crushed his skull into splinters. 

Only then did the boy look up. He saw a man astride the elk – but was it a man? It was taller and broader than any man, and its skin was the colour of oak in the wintertime, and oddly ridged. The boy looked closer and saw that it was not skin at all – the man-thing was made of twisted branches and twigs, living leafless branches intertwined. His fingers and toes ended in spindly roots, and on his head were two huge spreading antlers rising like a crown. The boy caught his breath in wonder, and as he did so the Green Man changed – a shiver ran over his body, and then all his branches were pushing out little shoots which turned into leaves before the boy’s wondering eyes, then blossomed and bloomed, green as summer.

The boy bowed his head again. “I’m sorry.” For as surely as the Green Man was the vengeful Hunter, he was the loving Father too, the boy saw that now. Summer followed winter, and surely forgiveness would follow punishment.

“For eight summers and winters and autumns and springs I let you walk in my forest,” the Green Man said, and the forest shivered as he spoke. “But then you left.” 

The leaves on the Green Man shrivelled and died, falling like little glittering meteors to the ground where the wolves paced and snarled and the boy lay, amazed. 

“You left my forest, and went into the domain of Men, who no longer worship or want me,” the Hunter said, the branches that formed his brows lowering and lengthening, casting long shadows over his face. 

The boy trembled, and did not know what to say.

“You were one of my faithful!” the Hunter boomed. “One of my chosen! You left my boughs and I could not guard you when you did not want me.” his voice softened, and the little shoots of spring once more quivered about his face. “Why did you leave, my son?”

“I was…” the boy hesitated. 

He had been confused, angry, afraid – his father had left him, and without him the forest had seemed cold and alien, as though when he left the old gods had gone too. And then the monks had come rom Rome, preaching the message of God and offering in exchange wonderful, mind-blowing knowledge. The boy had wanted it, had followed their lights and their songs. And then he had seen Marianna, heard her laugh, and then he was torn between the choice of two new lives, the old one in the forest forgotten altogether.

“But you came back,” the Green Man said, the little shoots becoming leaves and small white flowers that wavered in a wind the boy could not feel. “You came back to the forest.”

One of the wolves snarled, and another snapped its teeth together, its bloody ears pressed back against its skull. The Hunter spoke a word, and all of them lay down abruptly, resting heavy heads on crossed paws, placid as lambs. 

“I came back,” the boy said uncertainly. Why had he come back? Why had he wandered into the forest at night?

Because of that smell, he thought. The smell of pinewoods and home that drifted out on the evening breeze. He had wandered until he could not remember the way home, and dusk had turned to night, bringing with it the fear and the hunt. 

“This is home,” the boy said, the words making sense. Suddenly the monks and their knowledge, and even Marianna and her smile seemed very distant. What was knowledge, what was love, compared to home?

The Green Man rose on his elk, seeming to grow and spread his branches. “This is home,” he boomed. “This is your home!”

The elk bellowed, rearing, and the wolves sprang to their feet and howled. The trees all around rocked on their roots, creaking, groaning, shrieking, and the boy pressed his face into the ground again, shielding his face with his arms.

Suddenly, all was silence. The boy kept his eyes hidden, fearing some trick. The old gods were capricious and cunning as foxes, everyone knew that. But then a hand rested on his shoulder, warm and soft and human. “Son,” a voice said, and the boy’s breath caught in his throat. That voice – that voice had whispered to him a hundred secrets, taught him the call of woodpecker, pigeon and eagle. That voice had raised him when he had fallen, had praised him when he did well, chastised him when his arrow missed its target, had spoken his name first of any voice in the world. 

The boy looked up, into moss-green eyes, a smile as achingly familiar as his own. He saw the white horse with grass-stained hooves behind the man dressed in green, a bow slung across its saddle, the white hunting-dog with rusty-brown ears that wagged its tail close by. He saw the man who had been there in the forest, always, forever, from the beginning to the end of time. 

He almost wept as he whispered the word, the word he had not spoken, not like this, since he was eight years old. “Father.”

His father smiled and said his name, and in his voice was summer, winter, spring and autumn, seasons and forests and changes, but always the love, the unchanging, beautiful love. His father spoke his name, and handed him his bow. “Robin. My son.”