I sent my boats west: to Erin, from which my father had sailed years before and beyond Erin, to that strange island or islands which druids and poets say lie west of the sunset, invisible to all but a few mortals, where the Sidhe live in eternal happiness. But my favorite game was to build boats and to set them sailing out of the dark pool into the wild grey sea that pounded at every shore of the world at once. I would picture myself as a great warrior, good at every art of war and sung of in every king's hall in the western world, admired by Agravain and my father.

Sometimes I would build fortresses of gravel and mud, and plan battles by the stream as though it were a great river, the boundary between mighty kingdoms. Sometimes I took my harp there, and sang to the waves that came pounding at the beach, flowing into the pool at high tide and hissing in the gravel at low tide. I gave the place a name-Llyn Gwalch, 'Hawk's Stream' in British-and considered it to be a world apart from and better than the Orcades and Dun Fionn.

As it was also very beautiful, this made it mine. Overhanging cliff walls make it invisible from the cliff-top, so no one but myself ever discovered its existence. At the bottom, trapped by a ledge of harder stone, the stream forms a deep pool behind a gravelly beach before it escapes into the ocean.

A small stream falls down the cliff that edges our island on the west, carving a gully into the rock. It is about an hour's ride south of my father's fortress of Dun Fionn. To escape from the insistent world of warriors and warriors-to-be, I went sometimes to my younger brother, but more often to a secret place I had by the sea. Since I also was a very poor hunter, I had little in common with the other boys, the sons of the noble clans of our island, with whom I lived and trained in the Boys' House and I had still less in common with my elder brother, Agravain, who led the others in making my life difficult, almost as difficult as my father's plans for me did. I was then eleven years old, and as poor a warrior as any boy in my father's realm of the Innsi Erc, the Orcades Islands. When my father received the news of the Pendragon's death, I was playing boats by the sea.

Hawk of May by Gillian Bradshaw