He had rounded the hollowing, caught the strong breeze, shifted his stance, and now built up speed again, coming in on a hard tack, prow cutting the water—
clop—swish, clop—swish, clop—
The voice of the lake urged him on, waters parting, breaking, and the mast creaking with the strain, the canvas flapping when he let the tension drop, but strong again when the wind took it, tugging him forward, off balance, until he braced and the boat surged beneath his feet, listing on the water, then righting, and closing on the fisherman and his weakening attacker—
Another boy called to him, a voice from another time. “I’m going fishing, Daddy. Will you come? Will you come with me?”
He had had so many other things to do in his lifelong pursuit of doing nothing. “Have a good catch. A trout for each of us, please. I’ll help gut the fish. Your mother would run screaming—”
“I’m fishing for perch. We can’t really eat them. It’s just to see them, really. It’s fun…”
There was a cricket match to watch. He had waved the boys goodbye, Alex, Simon, a third lad with ginger hair. Their catch had been spectacular. Alex had hooked a pike. The greatest struggle had not been the bringing-in of the catch—who would ever want to eat pike?—but the release of the two-foot-long fish, which had given the boys a look with its piscine eyes that had haunted Alex for months.
“It was angry! It looked like you do, when you have nothing to say, because it’s all been said before, and we ought to know better. Very cold.”
“I do not give you a cold look. Do I?”
“Sometimes…”
“Like a pike’s? Really?”
“Not so … fishy … not quite, anyway.”
He had grabbed the boy, laughing, and they roughed and tumbled, but still he had only heard about the expedition and adventure, and that the pike was this long, and one of Simon’s perches had had two heads—honest!
The water was thrashed, the longship rocked. Richard dropped one end of the sail which billowed and flapped uselessly, but momentum carried the vessel towards the struggling serpent, and Taaj allowed himself a quick, grim glance at the old man, bearing down on him.
“Don’t come close!”
“I’ll help. Hold on!”
“Let me go down. This was in the dream. Don’t come close!”
In the dream? Had Taaj told him about the dream? If so, he’d forgotten …
Richard could smell the serpent now, a rank stench of weed. The huge body rippled below the scales, air puffed from its feathery gills. It was like a salamander, but its head alone was the size of a bullock. Eyes that were prominent swivelled and glared at the coming man, and the skiff rocked, the coil around the boy slid more loosely, and Taaj grunted loudly as he thrust the stone harpoon more deeply into flesh.
The longship slid by the rising neck and Richard flung the harpoon, finding the creature’s watery eye, flinching as liquid spurted as the point struck. The cameo dissolved, the beast flexed, the tail shattered the skiff and Taaj was flung into the lake, still holding the spear which had been wrenched loose. The longship rocked to its side and Richard clung to the rail, wondering what he had done. The water around him foamed white and red, the air resounding to the serpent’s screeching cry of pain and anger.
Its coils slid through the water, breaking the surface, then descending. Richard held the rail, stared out over the suddenly placid lake, shouting for the boy.
Taaj’s face watched him from the crystal pool. He still held the spear. His arms were stretched out, his eyes wide as he slowly sank towards the deeper structure of the castle below.
“Oh no you don’t. You don’t escape me this easily!”
That he felt sick with fear did not register on Richard, as he stripped naked and leapt from the longship, aware of its dark shape moving past him, away towards the shore. The lake was icy. He dived down, wriggling like a fish, turning to try to find the boy, and saw him as he descended, like a statue, arms out, hair streaming, face a mask of fear. Richard swam towards him and the dark eyes watched him with what might have been urgency—
Help me …
I’m coming. For Christ’s sake why don’t you swim? Alex! Reach up for me. Swim! It’s too far … my strength …
The air burst from him.
Why doesn’t he swim?
His ears jarred. He panicked suddenly and swivelled in the water, ascending to the reviving day.
Then down again, and swimming hard, directly down to the frozen face, the white face, the guileless features of the descending boy. He came close again, fighting the water like a thrashing catch on the line, urging himself deeper, refusing to let the lake float him up again, fighting down, reaching down, fingers in the drifting hair, trying to get a grip, to pull the boy up. Taaj smiled, his eyes wide with hope, although his arms were stiff and his right fist clenched the stone-tipped harpoon.
Fight, damn you. Alex! Swim! Don’t give up now. Let the spear go. It’s no use. Swim for your life. Why do you look at me like that? I’m doing my best. Help yourself too! I can only do so much.
He grasped the boy’s hair. Got you. He reversed his swim, tugged at the youth, felt the small, tough body rise with him.
A shadow passed across the face of innocence. The immense length of the serpent flowed around Richard and descended distantly, towards the ruins. Richard’s lungs began to burst. Air bubbled from him and he turned in fear and the fight for life, let go of the boy’s hair and stretched for water and the light until he broke the surface and gasped for breath.
He went down for the third time to fetch his friend.
Now the boy was in the gloom above the ruins of the castle, far deeper than Richard had been able to go that time when he had swum with Helen. He glanced around, looked for the serpent, but saw only the movement of weed and eels, the occasional flash of deep light on the silver scales of fish. The boy’s air was still inside him. There was still a chance. He swam vigorously, dropping vertically, pushing back the water and meeting Taaj’s dying gaze. The boy’s eyes watched him with great sadness. That look was so familiar! The faces were the same. He had always known it, always seen it, from the first moment the boy had appeared by the gate. There seemed to be such hopelessness there, now, and the sort of sad smile that might have been goodbye.
Lungs straining, Richard strove, kicked, flung himself through the chill and was triumphant when he felt the brush of hair on his fingers, and he spread his hand and grasped, tugged hard, tugged up, found a better grip and held the boy.
Taaj smiled and let the harpoon go. (Alex reached for him—)
We’re going home. I’ve got you now.
Richard turned in the water and kicked, tugging at the boy’s hair, feeling the body come with him.
Then the water swirled and twisted him. He looked down, saw the huge eye, the open mouth, felt the tug, the hair in his hand snatched, then torn away. Taaj’s face had contorted into a mask of shock and pain. The serpent had come up from the dark of the castle and taken him round the waist. It dropped down again, fish-eye cold and expressionless. The half-boy reached from its jaws until it jerked and gulped and Taaj was gone, and only the closed maw, with its terrible grin, could be seen among the battlements, soon lost in the weeds, though light sparkled on a watching, silver orb.
The boy’s air had left him. Richard swam with it, embraced it, twisted in the bubbles, scrabbling at them, consuming them, tasting the sour breath, the last of his friend. Man and boy reached the surface together, and the cry that sounded over the water was as much the pain of the drowned, released at last, as the despair of the living, who then struck for the shore and the empty camp at Old Stone Hollow.
To the Forgotten Shore
(i) Ship of Sorrows
All night Richard sat by the lake, hunched inside his clothes, staring out at the moonlit water and the haze of Wide Water Hollowing, thinking of the dead boy, and of Alex, indeed, of everything that was lost, like a life, like a story. He kept remembering La
can’s words of so many weeks ago: harden your heart. These creatures are dying, but remember—they are alive, elsewhere in the wood.
So somewhere else Taaj was still alive, perhaps the companion to an old man who this time might not reject the boy’s plea for help on the fishing trip, and the serpent would be subdued and brought home in triumph. But that other Taaj did not belong to him. It would not have the same face, Alex’s face. It would not watch him with sadness, would not need him in the same way, in Alex’s way. He had watched a mythago drown, and he had been watching an aspect of his own son, consumed by a creature from the icy hell of a legendary deep, bitten in half, two gulps, a brief life savagely ended. He was not unaware of the irony of the situation. During the long night he thought hard about Alex, perhaps still alive in the wood and waiting. Had Alex sent Taaj as a test for his father? Or had Taaj formed from the Old Man’s guilt, a conscience in need of a kick-start, creating an echo of that time of agony when Alex had been taken from him and he had done so little to resist?
He had not felt this alone for years. When Alice left him there had been a few months when he thought he was going mad with loneliness, missing his son, missing her, despite their relationship having been quite distant. The anxiety had passed, of course; he had adapted to his solitary life and moved to London. Now, however, he felt that same claustrophobia—he was in a vast world, but without voices. He might as well have been in a dungeon, hidden from sight and sound. Night birds chorused, water lapped restlessly, and somewhere, just out of earshot, Arnauld Lacan still roared, bear-like, Helen Silver-lock sang her charms to Trickster, and Alexander Lytton murmured his exhortations to the only hidden entity of the wood that mattered: George Huxley.
The memories of his lost friends were strong in Richard.
Something moved on the lake and his attention was snatched from dreams to the reality of Old Stone Hollow Station. He narrowed his eyes, concentrated on the hollowing, and saw again the grey shape moving in the haze. For a minute or more it was quite still and he thought of a sail, then it faded, although the lake became turbulent, the waves reaching the outcrop of stone where Richard huddled.
There was a presence beyond the hollowing, he felt sure, and it was approaching the lake.
At dawn, a drumbeat pulsed from the hollowing, a steady strike, two beats a second, a determined rhythm that might have come from a war-galley. As if carried on a shifting wind, the drumbeat faded for a while, then came back, and at times there was a deeper, slower rhythm superimposed, a second ship perhaps. The shape in the hollowing darkened to become an indented square, quite definitely a sail, and the lake reacted to whatever was on the other side, the waves coming like billows, drenching the shore.
He went back to the longhouse for a while, but returned at the height of the day to find the lake literally echoing to the double thunder of wardrums. Shapes passed across the hollowing in a tantalising display of shadow movement, suggesting a sea battle. Indeed, at some time in the afternoon the smell of fire came from the lake, partly the fragrance of burning cedar, partly the acrid and choking stink of pitch. As if through a sound-shutter, opening and closing, the drumbeats surged and faded, and with them came frequent sounds of screeching, like tortured gulls.
For a while, then, there was silence, but at dusk and into the early evening the dark sail appeared again. Richard stood at the lake edge, chewing dried fish, waiting for the drums to start.
There was a sudden screech, like metal rending … and the screams of men dying—
A thunder of drums, and a white wave surged from the hollowing, spreading widely across the evening lake, bringing with it the sharp scent of the ocean—
Astonished, Richard stepped quickly back as the water broke over his feet. The black sail deepened in the frame, became sharper as the frantic rhythm of the drum grew louder. It was coming toward him, rising, filling the hollowing, but motionless for the moment, oddly frozen.
When the galley broke through the gate it so surprised Richard that he fell backwards. The ship came onto the lake at terrific speed, oars flashing in the dusk light as they rose and fell into the water, drum loud, sail straining in the last of an ocean wind, then dropping fast. High-prowed, deep-hulled, of classic early Greek design, the galley shot across the water, directly toward the frozen figure of the man on the shore. Richard heard voices scream, the sail was slackened, the oars dipped to skim the lake and slow the headlong approach, but too late, the great vessel struck the shore and with a smashing of wood and beams rode up over the rocks, into the trees, lifted from the ground, oars snapping, the mast breaking in a billow of canvas and rigging. The whole vessel came to a sudden halt, then subsided to the right. Half-armoured, grim-faced men jumped from the deck, yelling; out on the lake, one mariner was swimming awkwardly to the shore; below the deck, animals screeched. The wooden hull began to sing and whine, cracking and snapping as it settled and slipped until it was suddenly and eerily silent.
A shape scampered along the soaking shore and came up to the gully. Richard found himself staring at a creature from his wildest dreams: a man’s scarred body on a black beast’s rump, a striking animal form that urinated copiously with fear before looking round in panic, then leaping over the rocks and into the trees. Richard scrambled into cover just as a brawny man, dressed in gleaming breastplate, greaves, and leather tunic, face half-hidden behind a white, slant-eyed mask, thundered past him, carrying a slim and deadly spear. The man screamed out in anger, patrolled the rocks where the beast had vanished, then turned back to the beach in fury, flinging the javelin, which struck and stuck in the ship’s hull, quivering for long seconds.
Other men were spilling from the wreck, light gleaming on the scraps of Greek armour and coloured and grotesque face-masks they wore. They shed this metal to appear either naked or wearing filthy loincloths; all were old, Richard saw now. They were muscular, but heavily lined and paunchy, the flesh hanging on them; thick, dark hair spread over their chests and shoulders. A horse whinnied and was suddenly quiet. Then a woman cried out, a high sobbing sound that responded to a gruff order. A man sang sweetly for a moment, a brief lament, and somewhere below the deck there was a flurry of disturbance and distress that was soon quelled with barked orders and the sound of a lash.
A hand grabbed Richard’s shoulder and he cried out, startled, rising from his crouch and turning, fists flying. The man-beast stood there, terrified. It was a centaur, of course, but like no such creature that Richard had ever seen depicted. The elements of man and horse flowed through the whole body. Richard felt he understood the being’s fear—these new arrivals looked dangerous, and Richard was wary and frightened of them himself. He led the way from the lake into the narrow gully that led to the Station. The centaur followed, crying in a weird fashion. Spittle ran from its black lips and through the wiry hair of its beard. It shivered on the river bank by the Station gates, looking anxiously at the darkening trees, the defences, and particularly at the tall, grotesque effigy that guarded the entrance through the palisade.
“You’ll be safe,” Richard said, although he was aware that mythagos did not survive the electronic defences. “At least, you’ll be safe from me—”
The centaur suddenly cantered through the palisade and into the tall grass, following the path to the longhouse, stooping to peer inside. It dropped dung at the entrance and as if embarrassed stepped back and reached down to gather up the three hard pellets, tossing them into the wood and brushing its hands together. It prowled about the house, then curled up in its entrance. It feigned sleep, though as Richard stared down its eyes opened slightly, like a child’s when sleep is necessary but curiosity remains.
Who were these new arrivals? He could hear shouting and banging, a drumbeat, and a moment later the area was pierced by the shrill tones of a horn, high-pitched, rising in note, repeated ten times while the drum was sounded. The centaur shivered, curled up on its side, its almost-human arms wrapped around its bearded head.
Richard crept back to
the lake, night gathering around him. Torches burned everywhere and there was much activity. He could hear furtive movement around him and kept low in the gully, alert for any sudden attack. All he could make out in the gloom was that a skin tent had been erected, tied to the gunnels of the stranded vessel at one end and to the exposed roots of a willow at the other. A cauldron of water was heating and women’s voices came from that area of activity. Two men were swimming out across the black lake, calling to each other, others were hauling lengths of rigging into the tree branches. The great sail had been dismantled and folded. Three figures, heavily built, long-haired, were lifting down a huge wooden image from the stranded ship. Richard could see a woman’s face and breasts, an expression of fury carved and luridly painted. This image was erected at the water’s edge, facing towards the woodland, and two tall braziers, flaming brightly, placed on each side of it.
Further along the shore, flames that glowed brighter than a cooking fire suggested a primitive forge had been established. A large man fussed over this flame-pit in the high rocks and it was he who saw Richard, as if by far sight, and moved stealthily towards him. As the giant loomed up, Richard saw that he had only one eye. The beard that fringed his broad face was grey-streaked auburn. His arms were huge, each tattooed with a winding snake. Through the white hairs of his chest a brand had marked him, a wheel around a cross, with wings on each side. He stank of sweat and honey, and breathed hard as he stepped closer and closer to the crouching man, dragging one lame leg behind him.
He was just close enough when Richard said, sharply, “Come any further and I’ll kick your other leg away. Do you understand?”
The giant hesitated at the sound of the voice. From the beach he was called and shouted back. The words were guttural, strangely unfamiliar since they were no doubt a form of early Greek. Again he dragged his bad leg towards Richard, who fumbled in his clothes for Lytton’s lighter, which he raised and struck, with the flame set to shoot high. To the other man it would have seemed as if the flame had come from Richard’s clenched hand, and he was satisfyingly startled. Richard flicked the fire on and off twice more, then said menacingly, “Get back to your forge!” indicating the flame in the rocks.