She passed the knife to me with a solemn nod. I did not take it: the occasion required a grander gesture. I drew my short sword and held it horizontally. Savory’s eyes widened. Hastening to reassure her, I grasped the blade in front of me and slid my hand along it. I felt it bite. My signet ring zipped on the surface; my hand became warm and slick. A trail of blood shrank on the oiled metal into a thin line of crimson beads. I did not let the pain show on my face. I curled up my hand as she had done and let the drops fall into the cup until our blood, mixed together, breached the level, ran down the conduit and began dripping on the ground.

Quickly we held our wounded hands under the flow and felt drops patter on our cut palms.

Still separate, still without speaking, I yearned to hold her. The strength of my desire was close to desperation: I couldn’t go without touching her for any longer. She produced some cloth and bandaged my hand tenderly, and I bound hers.

She nodded. ‘Now we may speak.’

‘I love you,’ I said simply. I spread my wings completely around her. In our feathered sanctuary we found ourselves looking into each other’s eyes, and were trapped there. I whispered, ‘What would you have me do for you?’

She found it hard to say anything at all.

‘Kiss me.’

She tilted her head upward and touched my lips with hers. I smiled and returned the gesture. She took two handfuls of my cloak and pulled me down to the bloodstained grass. We consummated our marriage there.

Savory stepped happily, leading me along the meagre track. Hatchet nicks on tree trunks marked the way. Among the scuffed fallen needles, the forest’s myriad little white flowers had their petals closed.

We went through the gate and into the village. A huge bonfire was blazing in the middle of its clearing. The villagers rushed hand in hand in a boisterous, whirling dance around the fire, in and out of the houses in a long, crazed chain, wherever the maiden at the front chose to lead them. Their uncouth music flickered like a flame up and down an insensible scale; it seemed to have no timing, no beginning, no middle; it ended abruptly and started again. Seeing me staring, the guitarist grinned and plucked with his dirty fingers a most ideal arpeggio.

Some men were digging out a pit in which they’d roasted a wild boar. Five hours ago they had built a fire in a cobble-lined pit, let it burn to heat the stones, then put out the fire. They had laid in the carcass and buried it to cook. Now their spades scraped on hot cobbles, they thrust them underneath and lifted up the boar. They cheered and shovelled it out onto a trestle table. I caught a glimpse of golden crackling and flesh as brown and shining as mahogany. Whole branches of rosemary had been wrapped around it which had cooked onto the skin like fragile and blackened embroidery.

A delicious aroma drifted over. A shout went up, the chain of dancers broke and ran towards the roast pig. They crowded and shoved around the table.

Firelight pulsed and merged, making yellow and hollow beasts of their faces. They tore at the crunchy skin and ripped it away to the hot meat. Juices ran between their clawed fingers. They shoved it into their mouths-round black holes-and while they chewed, they flailed both hands to grab more. Boys and women turned away with fistfuls of stringy meat. Still more villagers arrived to join the frenzy. More and more came running and pressed themselves close around the table. Outside the circle of firelight the village lay empty. As the meat stripped away it became pinker, the white fat was bubbling. They dug their fingers into it, split the carcass apart. They dragged it up and down the table, opened it up. With a warm rip they detached a leg and they jostled into two clusters, a smaller group around the leg wiping it this way and that on the table top as they pulled off the shreds of flesh, holding them preciously until they had enough for a mouthful.

I felt awkward. I was ravenously hungry but was I expected to shoulder between them? I couldn’t bring myself to. I didn’t want to touch them.

The villagers drew back. They regarded the table: the bones lay stripped clean. Women shrugged and walked away, licking grease from their fingers. Such a show made me feel sick-they had taken less than five minutes to demolish the boar.

One man was so drunk he staggered towards the pit without seeing it in the darkness, a blacker rectangle on the shifting grey ground. He fell straight in. Then, finding the ashes still warm, he turned on his back looking satisfied up at the overcast sky and went to sleep.

A woodcutter at the table unbuckled his axe. He cracked open the bones with a few deft blows, and the villagers set to again on the marrow.

Savory jigged up to me, a succulent earthy smell of roast boar on her breath and an oily shine at the corners of her mouth. She had torn mouthfuls of it with her teeth. She looked surprised, then annoyed: ‘Didn’t you have any?’

‘I couldn’t get close.’

‘Ay! What will they think, that you haven’t tasted your own marriage feast?’

She lead me to the edge of the clearing, in front of their log cabins that all face inward. Some bear skins were spread on the damp grass in front of the reeve’s cabin.

‘Sit down there, my love; I’ll go and bring you some. Smoked pig, baked spuds and pine beer! Isn’t that a feast for an Awian lord?’ She kissed my cheek and ran lightly towards the smokehouse.

I watched the party. A travelling troupe were enacting a raucous play. The villagers still paid me little heed and took it to be as much for their benefit as for the bride and groom’s honour. That was of no consequence; I sat and watched happily. I couldn’t understand a word, but I recognised it as a familiar play based on an incident I remembered well. Some five hundred years ago, the Castle’s Master of Horse was beaten in a Challenge. He lost his place in the Circle but in the following years his devoted wife practised so much that she was able to beat the new incumbent and win immortality again for them both. Such is the strength of love.

In amongst the mummers, children kicked the embers for baked potatoes. I looked around at the few windowless log cabins, thatched with pine branches held down by netting. Big stone weights dangled from them, all carved in the shapes of animals: beavers, cockerels and squirrels. Every doorway had a beaming white plaster face mounted above it.

The reeve’s house was behind me and, on either side of its door, bas-relief sculptures of naked women adjoined the wall. They were life-sized in smooth plaster, so white they seemed to glow.

By the woodpile a big cooking pot hung on a thick chain from a tripod. It was smeared with the remains of hide glue, in which boar nets had been dipped to make them stickier. The enormous twine nets were draped on A-frames. All Cathee villages trap wild boar and carry them to Vertigo to be salted, barrelled, and sold as salt pork to the caravels.

The play was ending and, as usual with dramas of that nature, my character turned up to sort everything out. I was smiling at the actor playing Lightning, when from the corner of my eye I saw two men at the far end of the clearing. They caught my attention because they were skulking at the edge of the firelight. They had a similarity; maybe a father and his grown son.

They began to walk purposefully towards the smokehouse. Was this part of the play? Their faces were masked with determination. As people noticed them, they fell silent and it stirred a sense of menace. I felt the crowd’s expectation. Should I be doing something?

The men walked behind the bonfire; its rising heat rippled their figures, and where they passed, people turned aside and the party fell silent. The villagers near me watched, fearful eyes most white and nostrils flared. The two men reached the smokehouse, and axes appeared in their hands! They were wearing cuirasses!