‘My horse swims lakes.’
‘Ah. That could be useful indeed.’
‘She’s yours. Treat her kindly.’
‘Look after my son. Look for my daughter. Don’t grieve.’
‘If I can work events right, I shall rescue Harry and save Scathach. I shall have it all ways.’
‘I like your determination,’ Wynne-Jones said with an affectionate squeeze of her arm. ‘I was pessimistic before. I thought you were doomed to fail. Now I’m not so sure. You are creating faster than the realm is destroying. You created stories. You caused change. Perhaps you do have the magic in your winter songs and odd chants to achieve a satisfactory end to your journey.’
Tallis kissed his cold, thin lips, stroked a finger over the savage mementos of Tig’s attack upon him.
‘Ride well, old man.’
‘I will. And you – don’t forget. Let the child ride with you.’
‘I shall.’
In her heart, Tallis had known that Scathach would not wait for her, but it still came as a shock to find that he had betrayed his word to her. The fire had been dead for more than a day. She kicked the ashes and howled her anger and her grief. ‘You should have waited! I could have saved you!’
Through Skogen she could see nothing but shadows of a summer that had once flourished in this gorge. Through Morndun she saw writhing spirits and running ghosts that drifted back into the trees as her haunting gaze fell upon them and they became aware of being watched. The dead were everywhere around, bleeding into the cold water, waiting to begin their own journeys.
She could see no sign of the man she loved.
He had hunted the woods on her behalf, though. The quarters of a small animal were wrapped in a leather sack and tied to a tree’s branch. She snatched the food down, threw it across the river shore, but on second thoughts rescued the precious meat and tied it to the slim horse that was now her steed.
The animal, restless, cold and hungry, responded to her sudden soothing. It stamped a foot and snorted briskly. Tallis fed it a meagre handful of the oats she carried. It was thin, fading fast like all horses in this bitter land. She might get a few days riding from it, but it could not survive for long.
On the steep path to the fortress the fires still burned. Tallis watched them, then let her gaze wander along the stark crags and jutting masonry walls. Holly-jack had fled there, and perhaps still hid, terrified, in the cold and draughty rooms. Harry’s ghost called to her from the stone skull of the castle. Images of that winter, and of the summer wood, taunted her … called her … The way to Lavondyss was a short climb away, and all she needed was to resign herself to the journey, to abandon Scathach.
But she couldn’t. She had seen a woman ride from the dark woods, screaming her grief, her clay-streaked hair streaming; the woman had ridden around the pyre. And then – and the memory was fleeting, but it had grown over the years – then she had reached to the boy …
What had she been about to do? Rescue Scathach from the fire?
A woman who loved him … a woman who had followed him … long hair and face coloured with white clay. Tallis had not made Moondream at that time – the mask to allow her to see the woman in the land – but she intuitively knew who she had seen, how she had reached through her vision to this very day, perhaps, in her own future. She had haunted herself all her life. If she had had her Moondream mask she might have seen it more, she might have distinguished between Harry’s presence in her childhood life, and her own …
Let the child ride with you. Watch and hear with a child’s senses.
She reached into her saddlebag and drew out a small cloth containing white clay which she had taken from Wynne-Jones’s lodge and which she had used in the making of Moondream. It had hardened slightly and she moistened it with icy water, kneading it until it shed a film of white liquid. This clay exudate she smeared across her face and streaked into her hair.
Just a little, now. She would add to the clay as she journeyed. In the act of decoration there was both a love ritual and a death ritual. She climbed into the saddle of her restless horse and kicked it up the path, towards the fortress and beyond.
(iii)
Soon the forest closed around her, so dense and dark in places that even as the new day broke she imagined herself still to be in a midnight realm. The character and nature of the wood changed with every furlong’s riding, and the traces and butchery of battle with it. In the woods of oak she passed glades where cowled men chanted over carved wooden heads or walked about the piled armour of dead warriors. She saw oval shields, with boars and stags brilliantly gilded upon the slashed leather, broken swords, highly coloured cloaks and small chariots of wicker, broken or burned, in each of which crouched the naked form of its dead rider. There were heads hanging from branches in these places, which gleamed as if oiled. The chanting of the priests seemed to summon wings, though as Tallis skirted these Celtic shrines she could see nothing; and only heard the raucous pleasure of the crow goddess.
A ragged legion passed by her as she huddled in a thicket of thorn and holly, her hand gently covering the muzzle of her horse. She watched amazed as the broken ranks filed past in utter silence, silence save for the dull rattle of equipment. She recognized the warriors as Roman, but had no knowledge of the arms they bore, nor of the type of uniform which would distinguish one legion from another. Their dull helmets seemed to be fashioned from iron; their cloaks were long and red; some carried shields, huge ovals with prominent bosses and the shape of an eagle painted upon them. Horsemen rode among the infantry, and waggons clattered through the forest, butting against trees, being forced through marshy ground and over fallen trunks. What mind had created this mythago, she wondered in astonishment.
As she rode further into the changing forest, she found the remnants of their defeat …
The woods were almost black; sheer trunks of pine and fir, some of huge dimension, crowded on the land, towered high above and blocked out light; they reduced the world to silence, and the depths of fallen needles below her feet made every movement quiet; even the snorting of her horse sounded dull, sucked into the black wood. Tallis became frightened. She could see fires occasionally, but when she approached them she found men strapped to stakes, burning. There was movement around her. Horses galloped too fast for sense through the black forest; she caught glimpses of their riders, tall men, yellow haired, their helmets crested with crescent moons, or spikes, or down-curved horns. Their speech, when they cried out, was guttural.
The forest opened into a large clearing and she gagged as she saw the slaughter within. Heads were piled in the centre of the place. Around them, in a sun’s corona, severed legs and arms. The torsos of the dead were impaled on trees, a circle of greying flesh, mockingly decorated with tattered cloaks and kirtles. Shields were propped against the boles of the pines; broken spears rested by them and helmets, the dull iron helms of the lost legion, had been nailed to the bark.
Four thin, wooden gods watched the rotting dead, each made of twisted lengths of birch-branch, no thicker than an arm but twice Tallis’s height. Roman hair had been plaited to make hair for these gods. A skull topped each pole. Pairs of hands had been nailed down their lengths; and in the centre of each watching wood were the shrivelled greying sorrows of severed sex. Blood, blackening now, was the paint on the birchwood gods.
Huge carrion birds gorged on the flesh. They rose in panic as Tallis blundered into the shrine, but settled again, crying loudly, too bloated to fly far.
Tallis moved swiftly through this place of forest shrines, and after a while the nature of the wood changed again. She struggled through holly thickets, forced through dense stands of winter blackthorn, still shrouded in dead leaf. Towering mossy oaks led her to the edge of the wood, and soon she could smell the smoke of a fire, and sense the open field ahead. There was none of the clashing of iron, or stamping of horse that she had come to associate with both skirmish and battle, only an odd silence, save for the distant and fam
iliar sound of a storm wind, and the voice of a flock of birds, coming closer …
She led her horse to the very edge of the woodland, and peered out through the scrub at the rise of land before her. Oh yes, she knew this place, she remembered it, she could recognize all the details. She knew just where she stood, as seen from the twisted, ancient oak on the skyline. The tree was in silhouette, but there seemed to be flames in one of its branches; flames that licked high, then guttered and were gone, only to flare again … as if a fire was coming and going … as if the fire was not of this time, but spent brief minutes in the tree, then flared in another world, before revisiting the winter branches.
There was no one below the tree. The field ahead of her, across the small stream which flowed here, was darkening below the storm. It was strewn with corpses. This was the end of the battle that she had seen. These were the dead whose stink had touched her when a child. Those were the broken spears and spinning, shattered wheels of chariots whose mournful death had so affected her as she had tried to protect Scathach from the Scald-crows.
The swirl of carrion birds would be behind her, above the forest, out of sight. Perhaps even now they were beginning to circle, to weave around the field, stretching out into a thin and malevolent line as they spiralled in to gorge …
Only to be thrown back by the magic of the fire in the tree, the tree spirit, herself, flickering through time, watching, watching for the clay-haired rider.
The pyre would be to her right. She was too late to save him. She knew this with a sickness and sadness that could manifest only as a cold feeling, a dead feeling inside her. She knew she had ridden from the woods, screaming her grief … but she felt no grief, only a terrible inevitability, only cold acceptance. Where was the passion she had witnessed, as a child, in her angry figure? Where was the sorrow? Where the determination to honour her lover’s death, as he burned in Bird Spirit Land?
Only ice. Only knowledge. Only acceptance …
Then to her right, a woman screamed. Tallis was shocked for a moment, and remained quite still. A terrible thought had flashed through her mind. There was a fast and furious movement in the woods, the sound of a horse stretched to exhaustion, the slap of leather against flank and the dull sound of hooves on blood-soaked turf. Tallis ran from the treeline. Her steed trotted after her.
Smoke from Scathach’s pyre was black, rising high into the dusk. The flames licked around the wood, around the corpse. The arms of the dead warrior seemed to flex, moved by heat, twisted by the consuming flame. A figure in black was just disappearing into the wood. Tallis thought she could hear the creak of a cart …
Then a woman on horseback burst from the wood, stumbled through the shallow stream-waters and struggled on to the field. She rode around the blazing pyre. Her black cloak streamed behind her. Her clay-stiffened hair took the yellow of the flames. Her body glistened, red streaked arms, white-and-black streaked face. Her cries of sorrow and anger were like the fleeting cries of dawn birds, banished from this forbidden place of battle, this Bird Spirit Land …
Morthen reached for the foot of the corpse and dragged Scathach’s body from the funeral mound. She flung herself from her horse and smothered the burning body with her black cloak. She shrieked his name. She cradled him in her arms. She kissed his lips, brushed at the burned flesh, slapped his face to try to wake him … but her brother from the wood was dead, and she leaned down, sobbing silently, furling him into her body like a dark bird gathering in its chick.
The girl was now a woman; she was years older. Tallis could recognize this fact even beyond the mask of clay. For a few minutes she stood in shocked silence; she had been so sure that the rider from the woods had been herself … but now, realizing that the lover she had seen had been Morthen, she felt angry and upset. And yet, she could not apply that anger to jealousy, she could not storm out across the field and challenge Wynne-Jones’s daughter for the body of the man they both, in their own ways, loved.
Suddenly Morthen seemed to sense the watcher. She turned slowly to look towards Tallis, her eyes fierce, her mouth twisted with fury. She was like a witch, a hag, all youthful beauty banished below the lines and hatred in her face. She stood, reached for the clumsy metal blade she now carried, flung back her cloak to expose patterned nakedness, threw back her head, howled Tallis’s name, then Scathach’s, then her own, then looked again, silent, furious, to where Tallis hovered in the shadows at the edge of the wood.
Tallis was prompted by this insult into an action that she knew she would regret. She walked out into the open, drew her dagger, shouted, ‘Leave him, now. He’s mine. I’ll take your brother to a proper place of burial.’
‘He’s mine,’ Morthen growled, her voice more feral than human. It rose in pitch. ‘He’s my brother from the wood. I’ve aged for him! I’ve sought him for years. I’ve found him, and you have put a magic on him. You have done this …’
‘Don’t be stupid. I’ve been with him since you left. He rode away from me a day ago. I’ve done nothing. I didn’t desert him …’
Morthen turned and ran for her horse, swinging across its bare back and violently twisting its head to face Tallis. She rode forward, kicking the beast’s flanks to make it gallop. Tallis stood her ground, and then was shocked as Morthen’s blade slammed against her jaw, almost completely following the line of the old scar. Tallis fell, feeling no pain, only a sense of numbness and unreality. The blade had been used flat. There was no cut.
She stood and faced Morthen again. How the girl had grown! She was almost as tall as the outsider. Her eyes were as beautiful as ever, even through rage, even through the warpaint. Her hair stood like spines about her head, white, fierce, stiff with clay. Her breasts were naked as she threw back her cloak again and let the winter ice make her flesh shiver. A fully grown woman, the muscles on her arms and legs as thick and obvious as a man’s. Tallis, huddled in her furs, watched this naked apparition as it stalked towards her. She fielded two blows, then felt her left arm cut as Morthen struck swiftly, savagely; then her left leg, so that she collapsed in a heap, struck three times on the left side of her body, bleeding, left to die.
Morthen slashed through the bindings of Tallis’s cloak, stripped the woman as she lay there gasping for breath and life, mind awhirl with confused thoughts, with loss, with fear … with need. She felt the icy wind on her body. Morthen wrapped the furs around her own body, tugged on the wolfskin trousers, brushing at the bloodstain where her blade had slashed.
‘He’s dead’, she taunted. ‘And the earth knows, I regret that. But you will die too, and that I do not regret at all. Now I shall return to my father. From his own first forest I shall find my brother once again. Scathach will come out of the wood … I haven’t lived my life to fail. For you: the cold. Only the cold.’
Her crude blade sheathed, Morthen wrenched back Tallis’s head, then kissed her lips before flinging her down again.
She took me so easily. She could have killed me if she’d wanted to ….
Tallis stared at Scathach’s burned and blistered body. As she began to feel faint she reached for his smouldering cloak, the short red cloak he had taken from the raider. She tugged it off the body. Scathach’s half-opened eyes watched the heavens. His lips were swollen with the heat, ugly to look at; the line of burning began on his jaw and his fair neck was wealed and raw. She tugged off his patterned trousers and the leather jerkin. She eased them on to her body, cutting out a part of the cold. Her horse came close and watched her. She crawled closer to the funeral pyre, rejoicing in its warmth, and slept. When she woke again only a little time had passed. She found a glowing ember and used it to close her wounds, then forced herself to stand.
Morthen had gone. Having dragged the body of her brother-lover from the pyre, she had abandoned him, returning south, Tallis imagined, to find her father again.
She had gone from Tallis’s life, then, and so the final link with Wynne-Jones was severed. Tallis was on her own for the first time in her eight ye
ars or so in this unimaginable land.
The thought disturbed her and brought her to her knees by Scathach’s scarred corpse.
Did you find your friends? Was he there? Gyonval? Were they all here? If I search the field, will I find them all again?
Now she regretted stripping the clothes from his body. She stared at the puckered, shrivelled flesh, its scars closed, all colour gone, save for blood like crude paint, its limbs without energy or force, its face without vitality. She had insulted the proud warrior. He had called to her in his dying moments, and she had thrown him a fragment of her white nightgown, which he had clasped with hope, and kissed, and kept as a precious icon. Now she had rudely stripped the corpse, and at no time during the action had she thought of that strip of white fabric …
She prised open the body’s right fist, and there, charred at the edge, was all that remained of the nightgown. Linen. Roughly made. Cheap to buy, yet how precious it had once been.
In all her time with him she had never told him the details of what she had seen, that day one summer. Had he grasped this shard of hope with any real understanding, she wondered?
She rode to the tree. Scathach lay over the withers of her horse, his arms dangling; there had been no way to arrange his butchered corpse with more dignity.
She rode to the tree. She looked up.
Bare branches, winter-stripped against the fading sky. And yet when she had peered down at Scathach’s body she had looked through leaves, through summer. There was no fire there, now, no sign of life, nor of the spirit that had once shrieked at the local folk who had emerged from the fortress demesne to loot and honour the dead: Four black-robed women and one man, robed in grey, a greybeard: he had understood the mythology of stone. The grey stone lay there now, chipped by his blade, cold on the ground, marking the place of rescue.
They had carried the body away on a rude cart. But they had built a pyre for Scathach, and in so honouring the man they had indicated their recognition of him.