Lavondyss

  He worked on a wooden eye for dying Asha.

  Arak carved the face of Asha in living wood.

  We placed old Asha’s new eye upon her frozen flesh in the snow’s womb.

  The new tree watched over Asha.

  The storm divided us, clan from clan, kin from kin.

  Wherever the earth was open we were as the young.

  We embraced the dark and the safe.

  Our fire was now a dim warmth.

  Bear-savaged wolves ran before the snow.

  Wolf-bitten bears died on their feet.

  The proud elk was frozen.

  In the elk’s eyes were the memories of the herd, and of the hunter.

  The blood was cold in our bodies.

  The water was ice in the black trees.

  The trees were as stone, cold and lifeless.

  The spirit of the sun had no comforting warmth.

  The space in our bellies filled with cold.

  The land was our enemy.

  The creatures of the hunt followed the winter geese, away from the ice rivers.

  The kin were slow in their following.

  The smell of fresh blood on the snow was sweet.

  The coming of the wolf was swift.

  Later the land gave birth to carrion birds.

  A fire burned in Bird Spirit Land.

  The bones of the kin smouldered and they journeyed there.

  All of the kin cried to the wooden smile of Asha.

  All of the kin listened to the voice from the oak.

  Then young Arak journeyed to the unseen places of the earth.

  Arak journeyed to the forbidden places of the earth.

  But after he had been lost he was brought home again.

  Walls of snow guarded him.

  He was at home here.

  There is old memory in snow.

  The land remembers all things.

  This is what I remember.

  Wake up! Tallis! Wake up!

  The beast roared. It towered over her. Its stink enveloped her.

  ‘Tallis! Stop dreaming!’

  She sat up quickly, confused and suddenly frightened by being brought so swiftly back to consciousness. Then the fear dispersed, and the chill too. She was wrapped in Scathach’s horse blanket; the fire was low. She was still in the clearing. The three Jaguthin were standing, staring through the dark trees. Dawn light illuminated their dark faces, shards of gold on weatherworn skin, ragged clothes. The ash from the fire drifted slowly upwards, caught in the gentle breezes of the glade. The horses breathed softly, shaking their heads, tugging gently at the tethers.

  I’ve touched the source. That was a story from the beginning … I’ve touched the source. I’ve come close to Harry. He’s there, I’m certain of it. I’ve touched the source. Harry is the source …

  Scathach was watching her, but his attention was elsewhere. And a moment later the sound came again, the unmistakable roaring of a male deer.

  ‘Broken Boy!’ Tallis said.

  ‘By the stream,’ Scathach agreed. ‘Beyond Bird Spirit Land …’

  Tallis watched the sudden confusion around her, standing by the fire, the grey woollen blanket round her shoulders. The horses were packed and led along the narrow track to the edge of the wood. Scathach kicked over the fire, then slung his leather pack across one shoulder. Tallis shouldered her masks, and fumbled in her pocket to make sure the christening robe was safely there.

  It was suddenly happening all too fast. She thought of her house, her parents, perhaps still asleep. She had not told them she was going, she had not said goodbye to them. They would be worried about her, even if she was only gone for a few days. She should have left a note for them.

  In the new day she realized how misty, how damp the morning was. She ran with the Jaguthin, skirting the wood, crossing the marshy field and entering the thin trees that lined Hunter’s Brook.

  ‘The beast must be here somewhere,’ Scathach whispered. Curundoloc led the horses to the water to let them drink, crouching down by the cool stream, but watching nervously for any sign of the ragged hart. Tallis moved through the damp ferns, tugging at the blanket as it snagged on briar.

  There was no sound, not even bird song. The dewy mist drifted gently through a wood that was as still as an animal catching its breath, watching for the furtive movement of a predator.

  And through this silence came the sound of Tallis’s name, called loudly, called by a man, called in a tone that showed not just anxiety but terrible fear.

  Scathach glanced up, pale eyes bright. But Tallis was staring up the field to the distant skyline where, the previous evening, strange trees and stones had formed; they had gone now, and the earth showed no sign of the power she had imposed upon it. There was a man’s shape; he was running.

  ‘Tallis!’ her father called again. His voice signalled panic. It made Tallis shiver and her eyes sting. He was in his dressing gown. It flapped as he ran. He stumbled then picked himself up, a small, dark figure, still indistinct in the half light.

  ‘Hurry …’ Scathach murmured to the wood. The horses became restless. Gyonval murmured guttural words to them, stroked one piebald face with his mail-clad hand.

  ‘I must tell him I’m safe,’ Tallis said. ‘I must say goodbye …’

  But Scathach tugged her down again as she rose. ‘No time,’ he said. ‘Look. There!’

  Broken Boy walked forward, out of the fog, pacing stiffly through the water close to the uneasy horses. The Jaguthin drew back, letting the great beast pass them. Its antlers brushed the hanging branches of the alders by the stream. Its breath added mist to mist. Its dark eyes gleamed as they watched the girl. Its smell preceded it, drifting towards Ryhope Wood.

  Scathach tugged the blanket from Tallis’s shoulders, then nudged her forward.

  ‘Quickly. Tie the rag. Mark it. The animal is your master, now. It will lead the way.’

  Tallis stumbled through the undergrowth, then splashed down into the stream. Her father was still calling to her. Crows rose from the trees around Bird Spirit Land and bird song began to chorus across the farmland.

  Standing before the stag, Tallis felt overwhelmed again. She stared up at its huge form, then reached out and ran her fingers over the coarse hair of its muzzle. Slowly, Broken Boy lowered his head. In his eyes Tallis could see her face. It looked strangely dark, the eyes wide open, the mouth oddly formed, but her face without a doubt, and behind that image: winter snows, and dark shapes moving – three of them, then one, walking out of the beast into Tallis’s consciousness.

  Its smell encapsulated her. Its warmth spread around her. She could feel its breath on her neck, the weight of its body against hers. Her skin tingled, her body became excited in an unexpected and disconcerting way. It was so close to her. She looked beyond it, as if at blue sky. She felt the pressure of its movements, on and in her flesh …

  The moment passed. Tallis, breathless, flushing, stretched up and tied the christening rag around the beam of the broken antler, knotted it twice, securing it well. As she did so, her fingers brushed three deep notches in the horn: Owen’s mark, perhaps.

  At once Broken Boy raised its head and roared, then pushed past the girl, brushing her so hard with its body that she sat heavily down in the water. As she grabbed at the necklet of heavy masks, the string broke. The masks scattered in the stream and she gathered them together, but one of them slipped from her hand again and she had no time to grasp it. Scathach was behind her, pushing her after the broad haunches of the stag, towards Bird Spirit Land and Ryhope Wood beyond. The Jaguthin were already mounted. Gwyllos was struggling to control his horse, which had reared up in panic and was pacing restlessly in a circle. He shouted at the animal and calmed it. Beyond him, on the land, Tallis’s father had stopped for breath and was resting his hands on his knees, his face flushed, wet with tears.

  ‘Daddy!’ the girl shouted.

  ‘Tallis!’ he cried back. ‘Don’t go! Don’t go, child. Don’t leave us.’ br />
  ‘Daddy, I won’t be gone long. Just one week!’

  But her voice was lost against Scathach’s angry cry. ‘Come on. No time … you’ve opened the best gate yet. Look!’

  He reached for her and pulled her by one arm across the narrow back of the smallest horse. Around her the Jaguthin splashed quickly along the river, in pursuit of the stag. Tallis struggled into the saddle, clinging on to her masks with one arm, clutching for the reins with her free hand. Scathach whooped with excitement, a pagan cry, of delight, of triumph, and then cantered forward, slapping the animal on its hind-quarters so that Tallis was bucked in the saddle, then dragged through the drapery of branches.

  Ahead of her she saw what Scathach meant by the ‘gate’; she saw the hollowing that she had at last created with the help of her animal master. Here, in the world of her father, there was a hedge of tall trees and tight thorn. But in Tallis’s world, now, the land dipped between high, overgrown banks, a real hollow, mysterious and woody, drooping down into the earth it seemed, though sunlight gleamed ahead of her, breaking through the dense roof of the overhanging foliage.

  And in the far distance, a gleam of white, a shifting swirl that made her shiver as she watched it; the first sign of the winter that had haunted her from her birth …

  The cold place. The Forbidden Place. Where Harry was wandering. Where Mr Williams’s lost song might have been a gentle melody on ice-chilled winds.

  The borderlands of Lavondyss …

  Scathach kicked his horse forward and galloped on into the hollow, down into the underworld. The Jaguthin followed; only Gyonval turned and beckoned to Tallis, his face creased in a smile, a friend’s smile. He shouted a word in his own language, unmistakably: come on!

  Tallis felt her own horse start to canter, as if it, too, was anxious to return to the world from which it had been barred for so long. As it galloped forward, Tallis saw stones lining the holloway, and she thought of her grandfather, and the way he had been found, seated by grey rock, staring in just this direction; perhaps he had glimpsed the world that had not called him. There had been pleasure in that dying vision.

  The last thing she heard as the sound of water began to grow in her ears was her father’s voice, very distant now, the sound of her name more shrill than sad, as if he was already a mile away, a hundred years way.

  When she looked back she could see him. He was standing in the stream, his dressing gown a ragged robe hanging on his shoulders, watching her, reaching for her. In the instant before distance and the underworld took her she saw him stoop to the water and pick up the mask she had dropped.

  PART TWO

  In the Unknown Region

  … all is a blank before us,

  All waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.

  Walt Whitman

  [BIRD SPIRIT LAND]

  The Mortuary House

  There was new memory coming to the land; there was change. It had been present for weeks. It was affecting everything: the forest, the river, the spirit glades with their giant wooden statues, the mortuary house on the hill … It was even affecting the people, the Tuthanach, the Neolithic clan which inhabited this part of the forest realm.

  At first, the old man known to the clan as Wyn-rajathuk thought the changes must have been of his own doing, a last ripple of genesis from those primitive areas of his mind still tied to the primeval wood. But this was not possible, he soon realized. He was at peace, now, his unconscious long since emptied of its ancient dreams. He had been at peace for many years.

  No; this subtle, eerie change was from another source.

  He went into the spirit glades, walked among the giant idols and studied each grim face, listened to the voices. He followed a hunting trail through the choking woodland and eventually emerged on to the thorn-littered slope of a low hill. Through the dense scrub of red-berried trees he could just see the wall of chalky earth which had been erected about the hill’s summit; a tight hedge of blackthorn had spread to cover this as well. He picked his way through the snagging underbrush, pushing aside the tearing branches, until he faced the crumbling entrance gate, whose wooden columns had slipped, letting down the earth and rubble.

  He had to scramble into the grassy space of the enclosure.

  Yesterday, the gate had been clear, the path through the thorns wide and easy.

  He climbed the earth wall and turned to gaze to the north. The sun was low over the forest, everything in ruddy shadow, misty distance. The canopy was a dark sea, stretching endlessly to every horizon. The wind that blew from the heart-of-the-wood had turned chill; there was a smell of winter in the air, a blurring of the seasons.

  Wyn returned to the bottom of the enclosure and walked around the semi-circle of tall, carved statues that guarded the way to the mortuary house itself. There were ten of them, and their faces were disturbing to look at; their ancient eyes followed him as he moved around the circle.

  Eventually he stopped and smiled grimly. The face of one of the statues had changed, as had its shape. There were small branches growing from the dead wood. New life in the silent totem, bursting from the black rot of the bark.

  He should have known. Of course! He should have realized. After all, he was not just Wyn-rajathuk: Wyn-voice-from-the-earth. He was the outsider. He was a scientist. He was the only man to have studied the living myth images of his own unconscious mind … here: in the wood, in the forest of the mythagos.

  He entertained this moment of arrogance with ironic self-dismissal, because of course he had seen only a fragment of the magic that lived and hid and emerged, naked and stinking, from the leaf litter of this strange land.

  Nevertheless, he should have understood the source of the change before now.

  It was the Shadow-of-an-Unseen-Forest. It was Shaper-of-Hills. There was an ancient name for it, which he had discovered and which contained power when it was allowed to embed itself in the silent part of the mind: skogen.

  A skogen was moving inwards, inwards to the heart-of-the-wood, and it was coming from outside the forest. It was coming from the realm which Wyn-rajathuk remembered only distantly.

  Ahead of it, as it journeyed towards the land of the Tuthanach, all of the earth, all of the wood, was being squeezed by its madness.

  ‘Wyn! Wyn-rajathuk!’

  The girl’s voice came to him from a great distance. It disturbed his motionless, silent contemplation of the forest. He ignored her for the moment. He realized that he had been sitting on the cold turf for some hours; his seventy-year-old bones ached. The sun was higher. The forest canopy extended into mist, in the direction of the heartwood, but there was a bright quality to the light, although the land was still haunted by shadows.

  Wyn rose awkwardly to a crouch, brushing insects and dirt from the patchy wolf-fur of his trousers, massaging his cramped muscles. He noted the way the shadows of the totems crowded together, one shadow, one voice. He turned and looked up at the great semi-circle of broken, rotting wood: the rajathuks. They were all different and they had stood here for years before he had come to the land. Someone had passed this way before him, creating the Tuthanach, their totems, their spirit glades. He was living in another man’s dream. But he knew the names of the totems, all of them: Skogen (shadow of the forest), Falkenna (the flight of birds), Oolerinna (the opening of the old track), Morndun (the spirit that walks) … and all the rest, their names familiar, their functions familiar, yet all of them strange, eerie.

  And in his time here, among the Tuthanach, he had become Wyn-rajathuk. These totems were his, now, and he had affected them, shaped them in his own way. He controlled them. He listened to the voices and learned what they spoke when they spoke with one voice. They were his oracle. This is how they had functioned in myth and because in this world magic worked, they seemed to work for him. But the scientist behind the shaman had long since recognized the unconscious releasing mechanism of each of the patterned faces, symbols drawing on the primitive regions of his mind; te
n symbols, crowding together, effecting a powerful release of insight and farsight.

  His oracle.

  Between these brooding, monolithic trunks he could glimpse the structure they guarded. The mortuary house. Cruig-morn in the language of the Tuthanach: the skin-cold-earth-place. He always thought of it as the bone lodge.

  As far as he had been able to determine, the Tuthanach were a late Neolithic clan from western Europe: they built mortuary houses; carved shapes in stone and wood; hunted more than farmed; were not violent; and had a sophisticated underworld belief which involved taking small boats to great whirlpools, and riding spirally into the earth, to the ‘sea-of-light’. He had worked out the legend which imbued this particular clan with mythological status. They were certainly the legendary first builders of the giant megalithic tombs that were scattered through Ireland, Britain and France. Their ruling deity was the spirit of the river.

  The Tuthanach were mythagos, of course, although not of his own creation. Someone had passed this way before him, scattering the brooding forest with the living debris of his dreams. But there was certainly one child among them who had come from his own ‘primal echo,’ the exhausted neuro-mythological zones of his primitive unconscious. And that one child fascinated him. Fascinated him utterly. Terrified him.

  Ten giant trees watched him, their faces patterned not so much with the representations of totem ancestors but with the weird symbology of the unconscious. Something hound-like, something moon-like, fish-like, owl-like, ghost-like … but these were only the totem manifestations of the deeper image, the powerful images which could combine to create vision.

  How much he longed for the world of his birth – just to discuss the ideas with people. He had seen so much. He had found lost legend. He had understood the way of inheritance from the past. And there was no one, not one soul, to talk to. He wrote it all down, on sheets of parchment either gleaned from the travelling forms of mythagos from future ages, or made by his own hand from clay and the fibre from the clothing which littered the wood: the tangible remains of mythagos which had faded and been resorbed by the forest.