This protecting warrior talked angrily at the boy, his free hand waving, punctuating his points, emphasizing the sibilant, fluid words that flowed through Christian’s head like a smooth, welcoming dream. He recognised something about this man, but couldn’t place it. The lesson was stern, but somehow forgiving. Whatever had angered the red face, it had more to do with the foolishness of youth.
Eventually the man slapped his heart and said, ‘Manandoun.’
Christian said his own name. Manandoun nodded, puffed out his cheeks, and exhaled in exasperation, then pulled the horse round, mounted up, and rode quickly back to the wood, while Chris ran in pursuit, through the deep path left by the wild rider.
There was silence at the edge of Ryhope, where the sticklebrook flowed into the gloom.
But a moment later he heard the girl’s whistle. Ducking below branches, she came quickly out of the trees on the grey pony, shrugging off the angry cries from behind her, and flung something towards the watching boy before vanishing again. He ran to fetch her gift, and held the feathered stick, her skull-cracker, her pony-whipper, and felt a sudden sense of wonder and joy.
He wanted to show the crop to his father. He wanted to stand in the light from the desk, watching as his father turned the piece of decorated wood in his hands and nodded with satisfaction.
This is much more than just a riding crop, Chris; it’s a talisman capable of calling for power, a magic stick, something I’ve never seen before … Priceless, wonderful … I’ll analyse it and display it in the cabinet … A real treasure …
But his father was in the wood, called by his own obsessions.
In the evening, while his mother stared silently at the fire she had laid, sweat beading on her skin as the unnecessary heat in this scorching summer made the room like a furnace, Chris prowled round his father’s study, circling round the desk that occupied the middle of the room and staring at the glass-fronted cabinets, where the labelled, numbered exhibits were displayed in quantity. George Huxley was a man of application and orderliness, but his museum was cluttered.
Chris had always been fascinated by the weapons and crossed the room to his favourite display. Five longbows were arranged side by side; the first, with crude carvings of antelope and bison, was labelled Cro-Magnon, ca. 50,000 BC; next to it was a smaller, simpler piece of wood, with gut string, marked Hittite. The tallest of the bows, blackened with charcoal and decorated with simple bands of red paint on either side of the arrow-nock, was labelled intriguingly: An Agincourt Bowman called Alan Leanback (note pun in name): cannot find story attached to him.
In another cabinet, figurines in clay and bone, bronze and wood were arranged by subject, rather than period: Snake Goddesses, Lords of Animals, Power Figures (made of wood, their bodies wounded with shards of bone or metal to release their anger), Keepers of the Hearth, grotesquely obese icons For Fertility and Fecundity, Battlefield Guardians with hawk or owl attributes, Animal Totems, Spirit Houses, and others. Chris stared at the range of horned faces, fat-bellied women, crouching ghouls, terracotta statues with their arms raised and snakes, or ropes, draped around them, and distorted animal faces that peered malignly at him from dulled ivory, or greened bronze, or the battered, ragged grey of flint, and something reached out to tug his heart, drawing him closer to the cabinet until he found his nose against the cold glass and his breath misting to obscure these grim and gruesome tokens of so many lost and forgotten peoples.
It took a moment for him to realise what it was that had attracted his attention. Then his mind focused where his eyes were staring: at the dead face, blind eyes, gaping mouth, identical to that which had adorned the grip of Manandoun’s sword. The effigy was clearly part of a similar weapon, Chris now realised; it was not the same face; it was akin to the Manandoun face; brothers in death, perhaps.
For reasons he couldn’t understand, he felt unwell, disturbed. He started to leave the study, but became weary and sat down behind the heavy oak door, staring across the room, across the wide mahogany desk at the garden windows, at the gathering dusk.
He fell asleep and woke when the desk lamp was switched on. His mother was sitting there, hair awry, head shaking, her hands moving over one of his father’s journals like scurrying, frightened animals. She was flicking through the pages, whispering words, hissing sounds, scanning the tight and tidy writing. She hadn’t seen her son, although she was facing him. He remained curled up, half hidden by the open door, listening to the stream of words.
After a while he drifted into sleep again, huddling into his body, feeling chilled, aware of a flickering but persistent light beyond the glass door opening onto the garden.
He awoke again, this time to the sound of breaking glass. The study was alive with shadows, cast by torches held by figures which emerged slowly into the room from the garden. He could see his mother, but only in silhouette. She was standing by the desk, facing the intruders, her arms limp, her body quite still. A tall man walked about the room; a sharp, unpleasant odour followed him. He leaned down to Christian, bringing an acrid flame close to the boy’s face. Chris saw grey eyes, black beard, scars across a high brow, glittering rings in the man’s ears, the sharply stylised face of a horse on the bulbous pommel of a sword that was slung across his belly.
‘Slathan!’ the man breathed, and then repeated the word, as if questioning, ‘Slathan?’
A woman’s voice answered from behind him, the words like a low growl.
‘Slathan …’ the man said again, menacingly, then reached out and used a tiny knife, a green metal blade, to nick the edge of Christian’s brow, at the same time touching the healed scar by his own right eye. The boy sucked in a breath and touched a finger to the gash, but he remained quiet, watching as the shadowy figures smashed the cabinets, rifled the exhibits, laughed and shouted at the things they were finding, and all the while his mother stood in frozen silence, staring through the open garden doors at the flame lit wood.
A cry of triumph, and the scarred man turned away from where the boy crouched. There was a moment’s laughter and the invaders left the study, all save a strangely long man, a figure so tall that he had to stoop below the high ceiling of the room. He smashed the cabinet containing the bows and drew out the one which had been labelled An Agincourt Bowman called Alan Leanback. He flexed the yew and listened to it, then nodded with satisfaction and followed the others to the wood, cracking his skull on the lintel and complaining loudly to the amusement of his comrades.
A cowled woman came back into Huxley’s den and faced Jennifer’s motionless figure. Chris thought it might have been his friend from the horse ride, but he briefly glimpsed a face below the cowl that was gaunt and moon-silvered; and old. While outside, horses were led away from the house, men shouted, and torchlight flickered and streamed into the night sky, this matron whispered something in Jennifer’s ear, then moved quickly around the room, marking each wall with ash symbols, shapes that Chris couldn’t fathom. Finally, she used a knife to spend several minutes hacking a criss-cross of lines along the vertical edge of the door frame, before backing away from the study. Outside, she stuck a carved pole into the lawn a yard from the house, then turned and ran after her fellows.
By the desk, his mother had started to wail, and when Chris went to her, touching her gently on the arm, she turned, shrieked, and ran. She fled to her bedroom, locking the door behind her and refusing to respond to her son’s urgent and frightened questions from the landing outside.
What had the old woman whispered? What could she have said that could have so terrified his mother?
It was the longest night he had ever spent, though in years to come he would know greater fear and a greater need to see the light of a new day, to banish shadows. He kicked through the glass of the smashed cabinets, picked up the artefacts that had been scattered, trying to place them back where they had once been displayed, and studied the smeared symbols and the cuts on the door. He shuddered as his finger felt the vertical line of tiny scars, a premon
ition of the meaning that would come some days later, when his father interpreted them:
Kylhuk turned away from the Ivory Gate and broke this place. He took what he had been seeking. He marked the boy as slathan. The burden of quest is now lighter for the ever-searching, fearless man, Kylhuk.
The journals, six volumes of his father’s obsession, were still on their shelf and he reached to take one down, but got no further than this before the sound of running upstairs made him push the volume back again and call to his mother. In fact, she came into the study, furious and frightening, chasing him out.
‘Look at this mess!’ she cried, kicking at the broken glass. Her son watched her apprehensively. She had washed her face, combed her hair, changed the juice-stained blouse for a new one. She looked smart. But something was dreadfully wrong.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked her. She hesitated for a moment and he thought he saw tears in her eyes. Then she spoke sharply:
‘Go upstairs, Chris. I’m going to lock the room. Heaven knows what your father will say when he comes home. Go upstairs, now. Go to bed!’
She was speaking as if the lines were learned and familiar, mouthing the words without any real feeling; she was acting, Chris thought; her mind elsewhere as she paced around the study, murmuring her annoyance. And yet she was aware of him, avoiding his gaze.
‘Mummy? What’s the matter?’
She turned on him, her face like stone, stunning him with the hatred in her look. ‘Go to bed, I said!’
He fled from the room.
His mother closed and locked the broken windows to the garden, then locked the study door, pocketing the key as she moved away into the darkness of the house. Chris had watched her from the landing; now he crept into his room, crawled beneath the covers on his bed, and cried with loneliness.
He woke sharply at first light, alert and clear headed, as if someone had shouted at him. He was still dressed in his holiday clothes. He rubbed at his eyes, then went to the window, aware that it rattled, that a stiff late summer wind was blowing from the east. There were rain clouds looming over Ryhope Wood. The gate to the garden was swinging and several chickens were pecking in the hedgerow, their feathers bristling. Somewhere in the house, a door banged.
Then he saw the figure in the distance, and recognised his mother, moving like a shade through the rippling field of barley, her direction towards Shadoxhurst. The awkward way she walked, leaving a dark, snaking line behind her in the field, whispered to Chris that something was terribly wrong.
He followed her, running into the barley, picking up her path across the rise and fall of the land. Was she running too? The faster he went, the more she seemed to be ahead of him. And he noticed, too, as he brushed at the windswept corn, that she was bleeding; she had cut herself, perhaps; there were regular spots of blood on the flattened stalks.
Then the trail divided and he stopped in astonishment, aware that someone had walked at right angles to his mother’s route, heading directly for the wood. Indeed, as he stretched on his toes to see who had made this second trail, he thought he glimpsed a dark shape entering the underbrush. A familiar head, a determined way of walking, his mother certainly. And yet he could see her ahead of him, emerging from the barley onto the low rise of ground that led towards Shadoxhurst, the path running close to the tall, broad oak known locally as ‘Strong Against the Storm’.
The blood trail led towards the tree and, confused though he was, he moved past this second path, noticing that the ghostly figure had vanished now, and soon he was walking over the field towards the sombre spread of the summer oak, where his mother stood facing him, dark against the brightening dawn sky.
She watched him approach. She was still in the stained Sunday suit, and had combed out her long hair, pinning it back only above her ears to reveal pearl earrings, bright like drops of dew. Her mouth was a slash of garish red. A rope was round her neck, slung over the lowest branch and waiting to be tied.
‘What are you doing? Mummy!’
‘Go away!’ she shouted, but Chris began to run towards her. As he moved, so she jumped, reaching up to grab the branch, tugging at the rope to shorten its drop, dangling one-armed as she threaded a securing knot, a wild, mad dance on the lowest bough, then taking her weight with both hands, hanging there, watching him, her fingers digging into the grooves and knots of the umber bark.
He stood a foot away from her, staring up as she stared down, aware of the tears in her eyes and the blood on her shoes.
‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ he wailed.
‘Ending the pain. Starting a new life …’ As she spoke her gaze flickered briefly to Ryhope Wood. The wind gusted strongly and the tree swayed, his mother’s body swinging left to right. Christian went up to her to put his arms round her legs, but she kicked out savagely, her right foot connecting with his face and sending him sprawling.
‘What are you doing?’ he screamed again, adding, ‘What have I done?’
She laughed as she dangled.
‘Nothing. Yet. But it will turn out very badly for you.’
Her strength was giving out, her face strained, her fingers slipping on the branch.
‘What did that old woman say to you?’ the boy wailed.
‘Nothing I hadn’t dreamed of already. Nothing that wasn’t already pain.’
‘Tell me what I’ve done,’ Chris said again, fighting tears and struggling to his feet. ‘Please don’t die …’
He couldn’t bear the thought of it. His mother gone; no smile, no laughter, no knowing hug and gentle words after his father had raged and ranted about some madness or other. She couldn’t die. She couldn’t leave him.
His mother shook her head, blood suffusing her cheeks, her eyes watering with effort. ‘My son is gone,’ she whispered. ‘I have seen what you will do! My poor boy. My poor little boy …’
‘No! I’m here! I love you!’
‘He’s gone; they’re both gone. Now it’s my turn …’
She dropped and the rope stopped her fall, making her gasp, making her instinctively scrabble at the hemp around her neck, her face bloating almost at once. Chris sprang to her again, screaming in his panic, throwing himself at the dangling legs to take their weight, his voice an animal howl as he held her, aware that she was limp, now, limp and warmly liquid, her eyes unfocused, everything about her at peace as she swung in his arms.
He let go. Climbed the tree. Crawled up the branches to the heart of the oak, where he and Steven had often made a camp. Here he curled into a warm and huddled ball, listening to the wind and the creak of branch and rope below him.
After a while he heard voices. Several men were coming from Shadoxhurst. They didn’t see Chris in the tree as they lifted down the corpse and carried it on a stretcher back to the village. Two of the men, one a policeman, set off round the cornfield towards Ryhope and Oak Lodge. Chris watched them go, watched them cross the two trails in the barley, the one that had brought the woman to the tree, the other that had taken the image of his mother into the wood.
He wondered if she were watching from the underbrush; or had she followed her husband inwards, to the cauldron of strangeness that Huxley claimed to have found at the heart of the forest?
And he was aware, though distantly as he huddled in the tree, that the seed of a great and terrifying knowledge had been sown – but like a butterfly that flits beyond the net, the precise form of that thought eluded him as he tried to grasp it through his grief.
One
I stayed in ‘Strong Against the Storm’ for a day or more. The manor cooperated in the search for me, and had called out the hounds and the local hunt, scattering widely to search the fields and woods around the heart that was Ryhope. None, of course, entered Ryhope Wood itself, where the paths were known in local lore to turn back on themselves and confuse the senses.
It was my own father who found me, and then only because I think he intuited I would be there. He had come from the wood and discovered the tragedy
. He had walked across the barleyfield at dusk, to stand below the tree and stare at the branch where the body had recently kicked.
Whether or not he saw me, I shall never know. But after an hour, with the light now gloomy, he suddenly called out to me, ‘All right, Chris. Down you come. Your brother Steve’s home. We have to go home, now. We have to face this together.’
He started to walk away and after a minute or so I swung down from my hiding place and followed him back to Oak Lodge.
A silence more oppressive than that in the gloomy study pervaded the house for more than a year. Steven mourned for our mother. I anguished at the loss of a woman who had been a friend. My mother had always stood between me and my father, protecting me from his occasional anger and frustration with me (though he always seemed to have more time for me than for Steven). Her words, her caresses, had reassured me that all was not as bleak and terrible as it seemed. And in this way, and after picnics in the fields, and games and laughter with a woman who seemed to have so much time for me, so the sounds of fury, the gasping cries of pain and indignity as Huxley used her (Yes, Huxley! That is how I often think of my father, now), blindly, callously, and without love, all became as no more than bad dreams.
A hand gently stroking my hair, an ice-cream cone, a walk, hand-in-hand through the meadows as the sun dipped below the trees and the distant spire of the church in Shadoxhurst, these from my mother were enough to banish the shadow of my father’s darker moods. Her violent and angry words to me, as she died, had been shocking and incomprehensible.
When at last Steve began to accept that she had gone, so Jennifer Huxley crept back into my own dreams, crouching by me at night, whispering to me, almost urging me to remember her, to find her. Suddenly, these were frightening encounters with my mother, though I longed for her to come home again and would have welcomed a ghost in any form.