Here Be Dragons (22 page)

Unlike in
Gate of Ivory
, the first three books have labyrinthine structures that emphasize how traveling in the mythago wood is to travel literally into the
selva oscura
, the dark, impenetrable forest where any hope of a straightforward path is lost. Steven, Tallis, and Richard are all at the mercy of their respective labyrinths. In
Gate of Ivory
, Christian is similarly at the mercy of the forest, but not because of its complex structure. Instead, he is brought into the Legion mythotope. So although his tale is arduously labyrinthine, Christian's path takes him and his companions straight to the center along a route that suggests nothing of the circuitous inevitability of
Mythago Wood
. Rather, Kylhuk and Legion become an irresistible force that steadily moves toward its goal. Christian is swept along in their wake—and then sent out again.

In
Avilion
, a change in perspective results in radically different journeys through the mythotopic landscape. Where the first four books all have some aspect of portal–quest narrative to them, in which the reader discovers the forest together with an outsider in the forest,
Avilion
is immersive. The protagonists belong in the wood, leaving the readers to figure out the place without a guide. Jack's visit to Shadoxhurst demonstrates this shift in perspective when, as Paul Kincaid points out in his review of the book, the ordinary is made to seem alien.
⁸⁸
Thus, the spatial complexity of the mythotopical landscape is treated as commonplace, almost banal, and rather than stressing the arduousness of traveling through the forest, the characters' various paths are emphatically simple: Jack journeys along the Amurngoth trails that cut through the forest mythotopes (e.g., 74 ff.); dreams and supernatural guides lead Yssobel into Avilion; and Guiwenneth joins the Legion as it passes on its march straight through the mythotopic structure.

Rather than emphasizing the arduous journey through the labyrinthine landscape, the text focuses on the liminal regions surrounding Ryhope Wood as a whole as well as those surrounding Avilion at its center.
Avilion
is not a story about traversing a limitless land in search of its heart. It is a story of entering and leaving, of crossing boundaries: of entering but mainly of leaving Ryhope Wood and of leaving but mainly of entering Avilion.

The interior of the polder becomes both anywhere and anywhen, a place where time is as important as space. Its most striking aspects, to the reader as well as to the characters who venture into the woods, resemble the temporal nature of Lothlórien. As one travels inward, mythotopes keep opening up, mythotopes of ever older myths, and at the center is Lavondyss, the First Forest, the first myth and the forest's origin at the last Ice Age. The deeper one ventures, “the deeper the time abysses that open before the traveler: because to travel into the Wood is also to travel back in time.”
⁸⁹
Except, of course, in Ryhope Wood, each mythago opens a time abyss, leaving the human outsider teetering on its edge; to travel inward is to descend into that abyss. In Lothlórien, Frodo suddenly finds himself at the bottom of a time abyss, in a corner of the Elder Days. Steven, Christian, and Tallis find themselves journeying, step by step and myth by myth, to reach the oldest myth of all at the center of the forest. Just as space is distended during this journey inward and backward, so is time. The further one moves toward the heartwood, the faster subjective time passes in comparison to time outside—a trek of weeks might correspond to mere days outside (see, e.g.,
Mythago Wood
53;
Hollowing
⁹⁰
;
Gate of Ivory
51). Kincaid sees this as part of a nonlinear, “riverine” concept of time that he argues provides a spine for the Ryhope Wood stories as well as for
The Merlin Codex
, also by Holdstock.
90
Time in the mythotopic forest does more than meander through the story, however; just as space in the forest is protean, so is time, which ultimately suggests that even the time that passes in the woodlands is part of the mythotopes. This idea evolves over the novels, and in both
Lavondyss
and
The Hollowing
the relative passage of time is of central importance. Wynne-Jones's daughter, Morthen, rides off to find a place where she can age faster, and the few hours Tallis spends away from her companions correspond to two days for them (
Lavondyss
338, 330). In
The Hollowing
, the time differentials work both ways, keeping Alex and James Keeton virtually unchanged in the forest while years pass outside. Richard's brief hesitation before going through a hollowing results in a delay of a
day and a half for those on the other side (
Hollowing
129–30). In
Avilion
, with its polder-internal perspective, the fluctuating time is taken as much for granted as the shifting space. In an ever-changing environment, only Steven, born outside the forest, senses “the steady passage of time” (
Avilion
98). The passage of time in the polder is specific to each mythotope, as mutable as the spatial aspects of the forest setting, and always unpredictable.

Ryhope Wood is not just a setting—to visit en route elsewhere or to have an adventure in—it is an engine that drives the stories. Holdstock's polder is protean and evolving, an anachronism that constantly redefines its own anachronistic properties. It does not seek to protect a specific old time—it offers access to all old times. Regardless of the intentions of the people who manage to venture into the woods, the woods use the people to create the settings and adventures that they meet. In Ryhope Wood, the mythagos and mythotopes created from the protagonists' minds provide a center for the stories, and the heart of the forest labyrinth is a place that must be reached. The plots are driven by the search for that place, rather than by the actions to be performed there. Places in the forest polder are what they are in myths: the right location for a story to end, not a convenient location for carrying out a particular action.

Time and Time Again: Pratchett's Djelibeybi
⁹¹

Djelibeybi is a small but ancient kingdom in the valley of the river Djel. This parody of ancient Egypt is the central setting of
Pyramids (The Book of Going Forth)
, the seventh of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, and is, as Andrew M. Butler puts it in his book on the author, “stuffed full of all the Egyptological details you thought you'd remembered from school.”
⁹²
It is a country bound by tradition, where national resources are spent primarily on building pyramids for the dead, religion has a tight grip on both rulers and commoners, and nothing ever seems to change. The novel tells the story of prince Teppic, who returns from his training abroad to accede to the throne only to find himself unable to accept the hidebound traditions and the ubiquitous rituals. Teppic's rebellion eventually results in the deposing of the undying high priest Dios and the modernization of Djelibeybi.

Although most polders include some conscious opposition to the time outside, that opposition rarely takes center stage to the extent that it does in Djelibeybi. Rather than creating an anachronism understandable
mainly in terms of history, as in Lothlórien and Ryhope Wood, Pratchett uses the very nature of time to create the opposition between the polder and the surrounding world, making time an exceptionally important part of the setting. That time is of great concern in
Pyramids
becomes clear from the beginning of the novel, when the first description of Djelibeybi is devoted to the flaring pyramids, and the destruction of time caused by these flares drives much of the plot. The pyramids' destructive effect on time is, in the Discworld, a natural phenomenon. “Correctly shaped and oriented, with the proper paracosmic measurements correctly plumbed in” (139), pyramids soak up time during the day and burn it at night in so-called flarelights (plumes of light emitted from the tip of the pyramid, not unlike St. Elmo's fire). Rather than being invisible and abstract, time is given a concrete, visible form, and its destruction has immediate effects for the polder. Instead of living through constantly new time, people in Djelibeybi “use up past time, over and over again” because all new time is turned into flarelights (203). The pyramids act like batteries, turning temporal potential into light and heat just as electric potential is turned into light and heat in an electric discharge. The potential, in both cases, is nullified. Its similarity to electricity (emphasized by the flarelights' resemblance to a coronal discharge) strongly suggests that time is some kind of energy potential.

Time is repeatedly described in terms of energy or power in the novel. To Teppic, the kingdom is a place where “nothing actually changes, even if it doesn't stay the same” (203); without
new
time, there is no way to bring about change. Thus, time has traits in common with physical energy (or power, which is energy over time); and it is often referred to as—or in terms of—power in the novel. Even metaphorically, time and power have similarities; they are both
flows
, of events and energy respectively. Indeed, time is largely visualized through a water metaphor associating it with physical quantities such as energy and electric current as well as power: the time flow can have whirlpools (e.g., 108), and the pyramids are described as “dams in the stream of time” that affect the time flow, just as “a hydraulic ram can be induced to pump water
against the flow
” (139). When time is burned (just as energy can be transformed into different forms) by the pyramids, the time flow ceases, leaving only old time in the kingdom. The handmaiden Ptraci even employs water imagery when she describes the temporal situation in Djelibeybi as “an old pond where no new water comes in,” so that “everyone goes round and round in the same old puddle. All the ptime [
sic
] you live has been
lived already. It must be like other people's bathwater” (206). The pyramids cause a cessation of the time flow and Djelibeybi is caught in a state in which past and present are conflated, regardless of any attempts to change the kingdom. Having lived through millennia of ever-decreasing change, high priest Dios is, of course, extremely attuned to this temporal conflation, to the point where he even finds the use of the past tense problematic (78)—to him, past and present are the same.

Time is not only a power whose flow can be manipulated, however, it is also one of the four spatiotemporal dimensions. A theoretical discussion on the nature of time is provided by the (inebriated) geometrician Pthagonal, who claims to know why Djelibeybi has disappeared. (This disappearance is discussed later.) He begins by rhetorically asking, “how long did they think they could go on building bigger and bigger pyramids for? I mean, where did they think power comes from?” He then explains how time is “sucked up” and “burned” or “used” up through the flarelights. So far, he indicates that time is a power flow caused by a temporal potential. A few lines further down, though, the geometrician provides an alternative view as he proceeds to tell Teppic that “the power build up” in the Great Pyramid probably moved the dimensions around. “So that length is height and height is breadth and breadth is width and width is […] time. S'nother dimessnon [
sic
], see? Four of the bastards. Time's one of them” (203). From Pthagonal's explanation, it becomes obvious that time in
Pyramids
is not just one of two seemingly mutually exclusive things; it is a duality: a dimension as well as power. Although Pthagonal's exposition is somewhat muddled, the Great Pyramid is the most obvious illustration of the dimension–power duality of time. The buildup of time-as-power in the pyramid creates a pressure on reality that eventually shifts the four dimensions (the spatial three plus time-as-dimension) by ninety degrees. This dimensional shift is lent further emphasis by the fact that the pyramid builder's son, Ptaclusp IIa, does not shift with the rest of the kingdom and is therefore left completely flat, moving along a spatial dimension rather than through time (173–75). To further intertwine aspects of the duality, the Great Pyramid begins to accumulate time before its construction is finished, because sometime in the future, that is, at another point in the time dimension, it will be finished. Because of its size, the finished pyramid has an effect backward in time-as-dimension, causing premature accumulation of time-as-power (108).

The dual nature of time as both power and dimension is linked to
quantum mechanics, a set of scientific principles that is repeatedly invoked in exposition and jokes throughout the novel. Time's paradoxical dual nature echoes a more familiar duality of matter: the seemingly paradoxical, dual nature of subatomic quanta, which exhibit both wave-and particle-like properties. Dios's ability to know how several mutually exclusive things are all true, an ability that “would make even a quantum mechanic give in” (89), alludes to this particle–wave duality: just as Dios knows that the sun is, simultaneously, a celestial orange, a hole into a fiery realm, the eye of a god, and a small ball of fire, quantum mechanics holds that the smallest building blocks of matter are both waves and particles. In fact, quantum mechanics permeates much of the novel. The first use of the word
quantum
(clearly alluding to quantum mechanics) can be found already on the first page (7), foreshadowing the idea of parallel universes (belonging to a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics) that is used to explain the existence of the Discworld universe, the “dimensionette” where Teppic meets the sphinx, and, it is implied, the valley of the Djel itself (219, 233). Most references to quantum mechanics can be found in the discussions of the pyramid builders, especially through their repeated (mis)use of the word
quantum
(e.g., 91, 94, 136, 278), and an explicit reference is even made to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—a concept central to quantum mechanics (178n).