Avilion (Mythago Wood 7) (2 page)

She rode on. The battle was loud now, and she dismounted, crawled stealthily up the bank and through the sparse woodland until she could see the hill, and the swarm of men on that hill, the sky filled with streaming pennants and clouds of fine yellow hair, blowing across the site of battle, glittering elementals engaged in the fray.

She saw the man at the centre of the action. His face-helm was black, his banner green. He was bloodied and raging. He rode with others as a troop, but even as Yssobel watched, so he was struck by a javelin, pushed back on his horse, then struck off it. Ravens rushed towards him and the struggle over his body became fierce. The tone of the conflict had changed. It became static, pressing, urgent.

Yssobel pulled back. She had seen enough. But as she sat, huddled, at the top of the bank, she began to realise just what it was that she had seen. She looked towards the lake, remembering the stories she had been told by her father, remembering the dreams she had inherited from her mother. Quickly, she returned to the fallen rider and stripped the corpse of its armour and face-helm.

Yes - she would stay here tonight, in hiding, and watch events unfurl.

Jack at the Edge

Wood Haunter

The man materialised from the edge of the wood so suddenly that the two boys, fishing from the opposite bank of the brook, almost slipped into the water with shock. He stood midstream in the shadows for a while, the water bubbling around his crude soft leather boots. He was wearing buckskin trousers, had a jacket or cloak slung casually over his right shoulder, and a pack over his left. His filthy shirt was open to the waist, revealing a heavily tattooed torso.

The boys scrambled back onto the bank and stared at the stranger, who met their look with a cool, pale, searching gaze of his own. His face was lean and lightly bearded, scars on the skin visible in places through the black hair. On his left arm a strip of white fabric, bulging with moss that dangled from its edges, was stained with red, suggesting a recent wound. He seemed unbothered by it.

After watching the boys for a while he looked towards the spire of the church in Shadoxhurst, squinting against the sun.

‘Shadokhurze?’ he asked, still staring at the distant village. Though his pronunciation was strange, they recognised his meaning.

‘That’s right, mister,’ said the older of the boys, a gangling, ginger-haired youth who spoke nervously.

‘How far in paces?’

The boys exchanged a confused, wide-eyed look. The younger, much smaller boy, said, ‘A thousand, maybe.’

‘Maybe a million,’ the other added.

The man looked quizzically at each of them before his face broke into a broad grin. ‘Depends on the size of the paces, I suppose.’

The boys smiled as well, one less willingly than the other.

Now the stranger came towards them, tossing his pack onto the bank, bundling up his odd-looking jacket and crouching down between them. He ran his free hand through the water as it flowed beneath him, towards the edge. He inspected the moss patch on his arm briefly, then glanced up quickly. ‘What do you call this stream?’

‘We don’t call it anything.’

‘It’s the sticklebrook. Do you know where it flows to?’

The boys shook their heads. ‘Nobody does,’ said the older one. ‘Can’t follow it in. You try and follow it in and you end up coming back. It twists you about in there. I’ve tried it. It’s scary. When did you go in?’

The man glanced up. ‘I didn’t go in,’ he said softly. ‘I came out.’

‘Came out of where?’

‘Came out of what’s in there. There’s a lot to see in Ryhope Wood. That is its name, isn’t it?’

They nodded agreement. Then the older boy made a sound of surprise, his mouth gaping. ‘You’re one of the wood haunters! You’re speaking English, so I didn’t realise it. But that’s what you are. A wood haunter.’ He hesitated, nervous. ‘Aren’t you?’

The stranger considered the question, then splashed water onto his face and slowly stood up.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. I don’t know what you mean by that. But you’d be amazed,’ he went on, ‘at what this little stream becomes a few thousand paces in. It’s very big, very deep, very rough. There are tributaries that run into it and I used a boat to get here along most of it. From inwards. Hauled it onto a sandbank in a beech forest, maybe four thousand paces from here. Hid it among rocks. The Muurngoth hunt in those places, not far from the edge. The rivers run in all directions; and they know how to trim a sail too. I don’t want to lose my boat.’

He smiled then, and stepped onto the bank. ‘This is where the stream goes in. My father’s directions were right. I’m on the right side of the wood.’

He looked around, inspecting the landscape. ‘Do you know the house here? Oak Lodge?’

The boys watched him blankly, then shook their heads. Again, it was the older one who spoke. ‘There’s no house near this wood. Just fields and pastures and sheep. And old fencing. And some earthworks. The Manor House is over the hill.’

‘Oak Lodge? You’ve never heard of it?’

‘There’s no house anywhere near here, mister. That’s the truth.’

‘Oh, but there is.’

‘What makes you think so?’ the other boy asked, with a frown.

‘What makes me think so? Because my father lived there for a lot of his life. And so did my grandfather, who was a scientist and an explorer. His name was George Huxley. My father’s name was Steven. And I’m John Huxley. Jack, if you like. And I’ve come a long way to find my home. What are you two called?’

‘Eddie,’ said the fair-haired older boy.

‘Won’t tell,’ said the younger, with a glare.

‘I understand. More than you might know.’ He smiled. ‘ “Won’t Tell.” ’

He gave the boys a friendly look and turned away to pick up his heavy pack, then thought of something and came back. He reached into the pack and pulled out two odd circular objects, bits of twig and small thorny briars, interwoven intricately, with two longer twigs curling out and down like inverted tusks. He tossed one of the objects to each of the boys, who caught them and studied them curiously. They looked up and the older one, Eddie, asked, ‘What is it?’

‘It’s what we call a daurbrak.’

‘What’s it for?’

‘It’s a shield. It keeps a Green Man away if he comes at you. You put it in your mouth with the twigs pointing down. It confuses him. They’re called daurog. He doesn’t have very good eyesight, you see?’

With a wave and a twinkle in his eye, Jack Huxley turned away and began walking briskly round the edge of Ryhope Wood. Looking back after a few seconds he called out, ‘There is a house here, you know. It’s just that you boys can’t see it.’

Oak Lodge

The two boys had been right. No house stood outside the dense edge of trees. But Jack was an insider. He had lived all his life in the heart of Ryhope Wood, very far indeed from the sight and understanding of the people who lived outside. Now he searched the shadows of this forgotten forest, peering with expert eyes into the gloom, seeking form that was alien to the tangle of trunk and branch. Soon he saw it: a perpendicular wall of brick, forty paces or so in.

Jack noticed something else. Where he stood, the earth was recently healed. He stabbed at the grass with his toe, drew his foot along the ground. There had been roots here - he could feel their echo. Until recently this had been on the line of the edge, twenty paces from where it brooded now.

The wood was shrinking, drawing in her skirts.

It was a strange thought, an unexpected one. Oak Lodge had once been even more thoroughly consumed, it seemed, but was now being given back to the land.

He would have to ponder this later. Now he merged with the undergrowth, the part of him that was human giving way again to that part of him that had been generated in the womb of the forest. The part of him that was mythago: born of the wood. Wood haunter, as the boys had referred to it. The reference had startled him. Haunter was how he himself thought of the mythago side of his life - the green side, as his sister Yssobel called it, not the red-blood side.

From the overgrown garden, in the embrace of oak and ash, through the tangle of briar and creeper, Jack peered at the tall house, with her three ivy-shrouded chimneys, her shattered windows, her grey brick walls. For a moment he thought he could hear the echoes of children running and laughing, the shouts of a mother to slow down and do something constructive, the grumble of a father’s voice complaining about the noise when he was trying to work.

The house, in silence, was vibrant with imagined life. The echo passed away.

Jack picked his way to the back door, which now leaned heavily off its hinges and was rotten. Pushing into the building through the kitchen, he was surprised to find that far from the musty, tree-invaded rooms that he had expected, the interior of the house was almost as if it had only just been locked up and left empty. The air was fresh and warm. There was nothing faded here, though the light was gloomy.

How long had it been like this, he wondered? How long since the last occupant had crossed the garden towards the wood and disappeared inwards for all of time?

This place would be his base. All his life he had longed to see the outer world, the world of his family’s origins, spreading away from Oak Lodge in a wide arc, over hills and along roads. The excitement he felt was intense, but he suppressed it for the moment.

He would be especially intrigued to see the study. He had tried to imagine, whilst in the heartwood, what this grove of learning and understanding had been like. He had seen many sacred enclosures as he and Yssobel and his father explored the wood around their home: the remnants of ‘enchanter caves’, sanctuaries devoted to certain mysteries, and, in some of the more civilised ruins they had come across, a room where scrolls littered the floors or the walls were a confusion of hieroglyphs and signs. Those were places where long-gone minds had sought answers, with chalk or graphite, to the secrets of whatever aspect of life, the stars or nature had obsessed them.

These were his father’s words, more or less, but they had fired Jack’s young mind. Answers, yes. But what questions to ask?

Finally only two remained: what is the outer world like? How do I get there?

He was here now. He stepped tentatively into the enchanter’s cave and looked around. Cracked and shattered glass-fronted cases of weapons, tools, exquisitely patterned bowls and fired-clay beakers lined one wall. Clusters of spears, rusting swords and wooden weapons were stacked in the corners. Several shields, oval and bright with design, were hanging from hooks on another wall. Skin clothing, cloaks, long colourful tunics and bone armour were piled in a tangled and musty mass in a recess by the chimney breast. Huxley’s office was a cramped museum, filled with the chill of survival, the rage of territory, the warrior, the hunter, the clay-shaper, the little songs of life: a wardrobe of the past.

Jack smiled. He was more than familiar with many of these exhibits, if not these exact ones. For all of his short life he had encountered weapons, domestic items and clothing very similar to these fragments collected by his grandfather. And he had seen them used.

A broad, heavy desk and chair were at the centre of the room and Jack imagined the man working there, bent over his journal, obsessed with the terrors and wonders to be found within the edge of Ryhope Wood.

Jack’s father had suggested that before he do anything else, should he arrive safely at the ‘old family home’ (said with a laugh), he should go to the main bedroom, where he might find, in a drawer or cupboard if the place had not been ransacked, a photograph of the ‘man’ himself.

The stairs were creaky and Jack went up slowly, following a sketched map of the house. The ceiling in the bedroom was dull with time, the bed enormous, covered with bedding that was not rotten, but rank and damp. Wardrobes and chests of drawers lined the walls. They were mostly full of clothes, objects wrapped in paper, boxes of implements, and albums. He had opened several of these out of curiosity, recognising his father from the black and white pictures in one album he found, when he glanced up and saw the brooding face of a lightly bearded man, framed on the wall.

The picture was covered with filthy glass, but the moment he rubbed the dust away he saw an image very like the sketch he carried: broad-chinned, high-browed, eyes narrowed and the skin around them lined, thin lips neither scowling nor smiling.

And the gaze, though straight, was clearly focused elsewhere. This was a portrait of a man who seemed indifferent to everything around him.

‘Hello, George,’ Jack said.

He stared at the face, stared into its eyes, talked to it, engaged with it, memorised it. There was a moment, as he stood there, when something downstairs shuddered. He realised he was standing above the man’s old study.

‘Goodbye, George. Time to try to raise you.’

Jack went downstairs again, out of the house and across the garden. When he was in the gloom, feeling that familiar and welcome tug of the earth at the soles of his feet, reaching a hand between trees for the comfort of the murmuring he could feel there, he shouted, ‘Grandfather! George!’

Comfortable though he was with tracks and rivers and open spaces. Jack was equally at home in the tighter, tangled womb-like copses and spinneys that formed so frequently and so suddenly, even though they were often the forming-places of mythagos.

He repeated his call, perhaps his summons. He waited; and called a third time.

He decided that that would do for a start.

Jack went upstairs again, prowling, searching, memorising for his father, and completed his second task before the dusk began to darken the house.

‘A book,’ his father had said. ‘There’s a book somewhere in my room, probably in a pile with other books. If it’s still there. The whole house has probably been looted, stripped. But if not, I’d like to have it.’