‘The Oldest Animals!’ Gwyr gasped beside me, his face a mask of astonishment and admiration. ‘By the Cauldron’s Depths, the man has done it!’
‘Slathan! Gwyr! Show now!’
Kylhuk was storming towards the forest’s edge, great cloak flowing. He stopped when he saw us emerge from cover, waved us to him angrily. Someone and Issabeau were arm in arm, mutually enveloped in the faint phosphorescence that outlined the uneasy giant boar, Mabon’s ghostly presence at the events now unfolding.
The jarag was walking backwards in a circle, eyes wide, mouth gaping, his beard and breast wet with the saliva that seemed to pour from his mouth. Suddenly he wiped his chin, stopped the retrograde movement and grabbed for a torch, holding it above his head and peering at the river.
Beyond him, the vast, over leaning tree glowed more brightly, and the movement and action of creatures seemed to be drawn towards us, as if we were the focus of that great stampede.
Kylhuk smacked me around the back of the head, impelled me before him, dragging Gwyr by the arm until we were within scenting-distance of the overripe shaman.
‘They are rising around us,’ Kylhuk said. ‘The Oldest Animals. Jarag has performed his task better than I could have hoped. When they turn and run – the creatures – we must follow them. They will take us into the land beyond these roots, and Mabon won’t have time to flee.’
His grip on my shoulder tightened suddenly. ‘There!’ he whispered, pointing to where the surface of the whirlpool was bulging as a silvery shape rose through the water, a man-fish, a leering salmon!
‘Clinclaw!’ Gwyr muttered, then urged, ‘And there!’
The turf close to the forest had swollen into the shape of a giant manlike figure, resting on his back.
In the greenwood itself, the trees were arching and twisting, as if being pushed apart by an unseen force. Feathers began to swirl and rise on the breeze. An owl’s face watched us from the darkness.
‘Cawloyd …’ Gwyr whispered. ‘That’s how the owl is known in my country, but it will have an older name which Jarag has used.’
The swelling turf opened and the man stood, as tall as Elidyr, if not taller. His face was a hound’s muzzle below the broken, jagged stubs of antlers. His body was clothed in the limp forms of pine-martens, rats, weasels and stoats, all the vermin of the forest, attached to his body by their teeth, clothing him in corpses.
This one was called Rhedinfayre, oldest stag, according to Gwyr.
From the river, the fish-headed man stepped to the shore, pike and perch and carp and eels thrashing from his skin, where they hung by their tiny, bony teeth.
And the owl too was clothed in the fluttering bodies of birds: ravens, robins, iridescent kingfishers and the single, massive shape of an eagle, its beak hooked through the ligaments of the man’s neck, hanging across his belly, wings stretched, like a living golden breastplate.
I was so enthralled by these monstrous visions that I failed to see what was happening to the Mesolithic hunter-shaman, the naked jarag whose forgotten talents had summoned these ancient echoes. He was crouched on the ground between his three remaining torches, incontinent, terrified, shuddering with a fever of fear.
Kylhuk leaned over him quickly and ran a powerful hand down his back, then touched his neck and lank hair. Jarag looked up. I was shocked to see the skull leering from his face. Corpse-like, emptied, he lay quietly down on his side and Kylhuk spread his cloak across him, covering the ghoulish features.
‘That is that, then,’ said Gwyr.
‘Slathan! Stay close!’ Kylhuk bellowed. Good God, was that a sob in his voice? For all that the jarag had kept his own, strange counsel, was this inheritor of quests distressed at the dying of the primitive man?
‘Slathan, he stay close,’ I muttered archly. The Tree of Faces flared, the flow of movement represented by the glowing shapes in the bark quickening slightly, and the sudden light made the Oldest Animals seem starker as they stood in wood, on earth, by water.
Then the boar stalked past me, glaring at me, and when I met its gaze I saw my friend Someone. He stared at me inquisitively, head cocked, mouth working strangely. I turned away from him and the black pig was there around him, Mabon surveying the events from his attachment to the unfathomable Celt.
Someone stared at me, but his eyes were not his own. And those eyes were curious about me.
He asked, ‘What do you seek?’
Gwyr nudged me meaningfully and I answered, ‘My mother. I seek my mother.’
‘How did she die?’ Mabon asked through the lips of my companion.
‘She took her own life. On a tree.’
‘What is served by finding her?’
What was served by finding her? What did that mean? I stood and stared blankly.
Gwyr nudged me again and I pushed him away angrily. I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how to answer.
Someone stalked away.
But then a vague memory of a story came back to me, of Arthur and his knights and their Grail quest. I remembered my mother leaning down towards me as I snuggled below the blankets, my mind alive with those castles and gleaming knights.
‘The truth,’ I called to him. ‘The truth is served by finding her.’
That was when the cat leapt from the river!
Sleek, lean, a blur of movement, the grey-furred feline snatched at one of the fish hanging from the body of Clinclaw, then crossed the bank to tear and snarl at the dangling form of an otter on Rhedinfayre’s chest. But it was the eagle that was her target. As the owl-faced Cawloyd raised its arms defensively, the cat was on the eagle, chewing at the great bird’s feathered neck.
The eagle released the owl and bird and beast rolled in a blur of feathers and angry movement, their harsh, hoarse cries and wails deafening as they struggled for supremacy.
Then the eagle took flight, a slow beat of massive wings, a slow rise, the cat held in its claws, still screeching and twisting. The eagle seemed to have doubled in size, the cat to have shrunk. It flew across the root of the tree, across the river and to the far shore. The salmon-faced man had returned to the river and his silver form could be seen swimming the edge of the whirlpool. The owl, and the dog-stag were running away from us, following the eagle.
‘Come on!’ Kylhuk cried. In his kilt and breastplate, with little else to cover him, he was in close pursuit of these oddities from the past.
Gwyr was running, Someone too – free of Mabon now, I imagined – and I could see Guiwenneth, spears in hand, head low, red hair streaming behind her as she faced towards the tree, having established with a quick glance that I was behind her.
Where was Issabeau?
I passed the covered body of the jarag in his half-circle of torches. I looked back along the river. And then I realised that she was the cat who had attacked the eagle.
We were running along the root of a tree that loomed immense and alive with fire above us, its branches reaching out to cover the sky. The trunk leaned away into the heavens, but the roots were formed from the broken stones of a city, and soon, as the river dropped further below us, I saw we were passing through a place of broken, petrified wood, and crumbling wood-cracked stone. Twisted iron gates, crushed wooden doors, echoing shafts and tunnels besieged the senses as Kylhuk led us in the heated pursuit of the eagle and the flowing, ghostly animal forms of the fish, the dog, the stag and the owl. Like spectres, their shapes shifting between the myriad forms of the creatures they comprised, they flowed ahead of us, returning to the security of the stronghold.
Kylhuk was a barking, baying hound at their heels, his laughter and his anger sounding in equal measure, and time and again I heard him demand that his slathan keep close to him.
In all of this, I would never have known which passage into the tree to take. The entrance was disguised not by subtlety but by quantity. We had crossed the river. Our world was the world of grey stone, fractured pillar and twisted wood, a labyrinth of alleys, paths and shafts that boomed with sound as we
traversed them.
The eagle dropped the cat!
The cat snarled, arched up into human form, Issabeau naked and slick with sweat, padding quickly in pursuit of the giant bird of prey, then standing and pointing to the arch of marble, ivory and horn through which the bird had flown and into which the writhing shapes of the Owl of Cawloyd and the Stag of Rhedinfayre were passing.
The salmon, Clinclaw, was in the river, finding its own way home, no doubt through the maelstrom.
‘Quickly! Quickly!’ Guiwenneth called to me as she followed Kylhuk and the wary Someone through the entrance. I exchanged a nervous glance with Gwyr.
‘You don’t have to come,’ I suggested.
‘He hasn’t told me to go back. And with Jarag dead … if these Oldest Animals need to be understood … who else is there but me?’
‘You are too noble, Gwyr.’
‘No, Christian,’ he retorted with a grin. ‘I am long lost!’
‘Look after yourself.’
His sudden look at me was full of pain. ‘I tried. But you should have found me sooner.’
‘SLATHAN!’
Kylhuk was framed in the arch, bronze-bladed sword in hand and thrusting towards me, then used to wave to me, to summon me to him and, as if ropes were attached to the point of that sword and to my legs, I ran to where he waited. I entered the gate, Gwyr on my heels, Guiwenneth a sudden presence in my arms, her face radiant with the glow of this inner realm, a light that emanated from the ten towering statues that stood in a semi-circle about us, watching us with strange, stone faces.
‘I have heard of these ten,’ Kylhuk whispered in my ear. His blade was bright as he wove a pattern between the watching figures. ‘You can see the fish, the hound, the bird of prey … their names come back to me: Silvering! Cunhaval! Falkenna! That is the child in the land, Sinisalo. That one is the shadow of forgotten forests. Skogen. Beware of it! And that’s the shape of memory, the storyteller: Gaberlungi. And that one’s old mother, and young mother … I can’t remember what they’re called. And the face of death, Morndun. And of grief … look at them … Look at them, Christian!’
I looked without understanding at these crude stone carvings, blank-faced masks hacked out of the hard grey stone.
I listened without understanding as Gwyr whispered the strange names himself, the names of these stone guardians:
‘Skogen, Gaberlungi, Sinisalo, Morndun …’
‘What are they, Gwyr?’
‘The Oldest Animals. The oldest memories … I’ve heard of them all my life. They mark the way to the realm of Lavondyss, the unknown land, the beginning of the Labyrinth. It’s a place of mystery. The unknowable, forgotten past. These are one way inwards. They have often been sought. Never found!’
He was almost breathless with awe.
But we were here, we had followed them to where Mabon was imprisoned, and we had found them. Some reckless impulse in me made me smile and think aloud that they could not hurt us now.
‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ was Gwyr’s wise and whispered counsel.
Kylhuk turned to me. ‘Look more closely. What do you see?’
Between the stone pillars he had called Cunhaval, the hound, and Morndun, death, and between Gaberlungi and Sinisalo, memory and the child in the land, I could see a cornfield, summer trees on the ridge, blue sky. I suddenly realised I was looking at the field behind Oak Lodge, the place of my mother’s death!
‘It’s my home,’ I whispered.
‘One of them only,’ Kylhuk said thoughtfully. ‘One is the true dream of that place, one a false dream. Look carefully, slathan. Everything now depends on your making the right choice. These are those gates, those Ivory and Horn gates, that test and torment us all. Which one seems to speak most honestly to you?’
I was looking at the place of my mother’s passing. Morndun, then? Death? But I was looking too at a memory of that passing. So should I choose the gate by Gaberlungi? For a moment I couldn’t decide. I felt like a child, confused and dismayed in the shadow of these towering effigies.
And as I experienced that instant of fear, so Sinisalo – the child in the land – drew my gaze, and the crude though gentle features calmed me.
And at once – I’m not certain whether by intuition or instruction – I opted for the passage to the Underworld which passed between this child and the etched stone face of ‘memory’.
Kylhuk grunted when I told him of my decision, then turned to Gwyr and prodded him in the chest.
‘Go back if you wish. You’ve done enough.’
‘I’ll stay, if it’s all the same to you,’ replied the Interpreter nervously.
‘Don’t move from this place, then. I’ll make you my marker. You’ll mark the way out when this business is done!’
‘Take my cloak,’ said Gwyr. ‘You look cold.’
He removed his short woollen cloak and passed it to Kylhuk, whose flesh was pale with the chill in the air. Kylhuk accepted gladly and covered his shoulders and arms with the garment.
‘When you pass this ring of totems, through the gate which we hope is Truth,’ he said to Guiwenneth, ‘you must remember that childhood ride you made, out of the wood, when you reached the end of the world, with the slathan, here. When he was a boy. Mabon will remember too. That’s how we draw him out.’
‘I remember the ride,’ Guiwenneth said. ‘Manandoun was my guardian at the time.’
‘Indeed. He was an angry man that day. You rode too far. You did more than you were told.’
Guiwenneth glanced at me awkwardly. Without taking her eyes from me, she said, ‘But I did the deed I was told to do. I obeyed your instructions. And I fell in love with the boy.’
‘I’d noticed,’ Kylhuk said. ‘A little love will help. Everything now depends on Mabon himself. Remember that childhood ride. He will catch on to it. That’s how we will draw him out, though that’s all I can tell you. It was the last third of the tapestry …’ he opened his hand to reveal a crushed piece of embroidered cloth. It fell away to dust as he held it. ‘My life has been informed by a few threads of silk,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘But nothing lasts. Not even a promise. Go and find Mabon! Go!’
Twenty-One
It was that same summer’s day, the fields of barley flowing in the warm breeze, the edge of the wood a dark, brooding wall. I had run here, on my way back from Shadoxhurst. I had used a stick to strike at thistles. I had jumped the brook, then heard something in the wood. For a while I had stood and stared at the trees and just as I turned for home, the girl had come, cantering suddenly towards me.
I was here again, a man in a boy’s body, and I turned where I stood and stared at the sky with its drifting, summer cloud. My hands felt small, my face smooth, my ribs prominent. I laughed and explored this memory of my early youth. The scents of summer were strong.
Distantly, the clock on the church tower was chiming three.
Where was she? Where was the girl? From the wood again …
A flurry of wings drew my attention back to Ryhope. An owl was looping in the bright air, then a hawk, then a blackbird. A tall, red-brown flank moved through the underbrush, a stag edging too close to the open space. I heard a growl and a grunt, then the soft complaint of a horse being kicked forward, and a moment later she rode out of the wood, just as I remembered her.
She cantered towards me, white hair flowing, white mask solemn. The crop she held was trailing by her left leg. Her short tunic seemed simply draped on her, this girl child, coming towards me.
There was that same hint of boyishness, that same tension in limb and posture.
Suddenly she kicked the horse into a gallop, charged down on me, struck me gently with the feathered crop, laughed – a deeper laugh than I remembered – turned and came back, haughty in the saddle, peering down through the uncracked layer of white paint.
‘Is this how it was?’ a boy’s voice asked. ‘Do you remember her like this?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Who do you
think I am?’
‘Mabon?’
‘Of course Mabon! Some people take on the shapes of animals. I take on the shapes of people! Through their memories,’ he added. ‘Climb up behind me, I want to remember the girl rider.’
He reached down, grabbed my arm and hauled me onto the broad back of the grey. He yelled out loud, kicked the animal, and we rode into the barley field, but it was no thin, soft girl that I held onto, now, but a hard-muscled man-boy. His breath was not sweet like Guiwenneth’s, but sour and stale. Aged! His back, below the silly tunic, was covered with greying hair. He was so much older than his white mask made him seem. He laughed boyishly, though, as the grey stumbled and struggled through the tall corn.
‘Was it here?’ he shouted suddenly.
I didn’t know what he meant, but he suddenly reined in, threw the horse to the side, sent me tumbling, went sprawling himself.
He stood and turned in the barley, striking the ripening heads with his hands. ‘Yes, it was here that she fell. I can feel it. Where is the tree? Come on! I want to see the tree.’
Again he mounted the tired horse. Again he hauled me up behind him. He galloped to Strong Against the Storm, staring up at the dark branches, the rich green leaves.
‘What a tree!’ he whispered. ‘Yes! A good place to die. A very good place to die.’
Then with a shout, ‘But she isn’t dead yet! Her death is still days away! Where is she?’
‘My mother?’
‘Of course your mother! Where is she? I want to see her.’
‘In the house, I expect.’
‘Show me!’
I pointed to Oak Lodge and he thrashed the flank of the grey and we galloped round the wood and over the fence, to ride right up to the windows of my father’s study.
I had thought Mabon would stop there and dismount, but he kicked the animal viciously and the horse smashed through the windows. Mabon rode us twice around the empty room, hitting the cabinets with his crop.
‘What’s this?’
‘His specimens. My father’s specimens.’