Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (2 page)

The child would be safe
….

He glanced round, guiltily. The house was in silence.

The child would be safe for a few minutes … just a few minutes … he would be back at the house long before Tallis’s parents returned from the Christmas service
.

Stretley Stones beckoned him. He pulled his coat more tightly around him, opened the gate and waded out into the deep snow of the field. He followed White Mask’s tracks, and soon he was running to see what they would do in the meadow where the marked stones lay …

(i)

‘So you still don’t know the
secret
name of this place?’ Mr Williams asked again.

‘No,’ Tallis agreed. ‘Not yet. Perhaps not ever. Secret names are very hard to find out. They’re in a part of the mind that is very closed off from the “thinking” part.’

‘Are they, indeed?’

They had reached the bottom of Rough Field, walking slowly in the intense summer heat, and Tallis clambered over the stile. Mr Williams, who was an old man and very heavily built, manoeuvred himself across the rickety wooden structure with greater care. Half-way across the stile he paused and smiled almost apologetically.
Sorry to keep you waiting
.

Tallis Keeton was tall for her thirteen years of age, but very thin. She felt helpless, watching the man; she felt certain that any steadying hand which she might offer
would be useless. So she thrust her hands into the pockets of her summer dress and kicked at the ground, scuffing up the turf.

When he had crossed into the field Mr Williams smiled again, this time contentedly. He pushed a hand through his thick, white hair and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He was carrying a jacket over his arm. They began to walk on, then, towards the small stream which Tallis called Fox Water.

‘But you don’t even know the
common
name of the place?’ he said, continuing the conversation.

‘Not even that,’ Tallis said. ‘Common names can be difficult too. I need to find someone who has been there, or heard of it.’

‘So … if I understand correctly … what you are left with to describe this strange world which only you can see is your
own
name for it.’

‘Only my
private
name,’ Tallis agreed.

‘Old Forbidden Place,’ Mr Williams. ‘It has a good sound to it …’

He broke off, about to say more, because Tallis had rounded on him, a finger to her lips, dark eyes wide and concerned.

‘What have I done now?’ he asked, prodding the ground as he walked beside the child. It was high summer. The animal droppings in the fields buzzed with flies. The animals themselves were gathered in the shade beneath the trees which were grouped about the field. Everything was very still. The human voices seemed thin as old man and girl walked and talked.

‘I told you yesterday, you can only say a private name three times between dawn and dusk. You’ve said it three times already, now. You’ve used it up.’

Mr Williams pulled a face. ‘Terribly sorry …’

Tallis just sighed.

‘This business of names,’ Mr Williams persisted after a while. They could hear the stream, now, tumbling over the stepping stones which Tallis had placed there. ‘
Everything
has three names?’

‘Not everything.’

‘This field, for example. How many names?’

‘Just two,’ Tallis said. ‘Its common name – the Hollows – and my private name.’

‘Which is?’

Tallis grinned, glancing up at her companion. They stopped walking. Tallis said, ‘This is Windy Cave Meadow.’

Mr Williams looked around, frowning. ‘Yes. You mentioned this place yesterday. But …’ He raised a hand to his forehead and shaded his eyes as he looked carefully from right to left. After a moment he said dramatically, ‘I see no caves.’

Tallis laughed and raised her arms to indicate the very spot where Mr Williams stood. ‘You’re standing in it!’

Mr Williams looked up, looked round, then cupped his ear. He shook his head. ‘I’m not convinced.’

‘You
are!
’ Tallis assured him loudly. ‘It’s a big cave and goes into the hill, only you can’t see the hill either.’

‘Can you?’ Mr Williams asked from the scorched meadow, in the middle of a farm.

Tallis shrugged mysteriously. ‘No,’ she confessed. ‘Well, sometimes.’

Mr Williams regarded her suspiciously. ‘Hmm,’ he murmured after a moment. ‘Well, let’s get on. I’d like to dip my feet in cold water.’

They crossed Fox Water by the stepping stones, found a suitable, grassy piece of bank and slipped off shoes and socks. Mr Williams rolled up the legs of his trousers. They flexed their toes in the cool water. For a while they sat in silence, staring back up across the pasture, Windy
Cave Meadow, to the distant dark shape of the house that was Tallis’s home.

‘Have you named all the fields?’ Mr Williams asked eventually.

‘Not all. The names for some of them just won’t come. I must be doing something wrong, but I’m too young to work it out.’

‘Are you indeed?’ Mr Williams murmured with a smile.

Ignoring the comment (but aware of its wry nature) Tallis said, ‘I’m trying to get to Ryhope Wood on my own, but I can’t cross the last field. It must be very well defended …’

‘The field?’

‘The wood. It’s on the Ryhope estate. It’s a very old wood. It has survived for thousands of years according to Gaunt – ’

‘Your gardener.’

‘Yes. He calls it
primal
. He says everyone knows about the wood, but nobody ever talks about it. People are frightened of the place.’

‘You’re not, though.’

Tallis shook her head. ‘But I can’t cross the last field. I’m trying to find another way to get there, but it’s hard.’ She stared up at the old man, who was watching the water, lost in thought. ‘Do you think woods can be aware of people, and keep them at a distance?’

He pulled a face. ‘That’s a funny thought,’ he said, adding, ‘Why not use its secret name? Do you know its secret name?’

Tallis shrugged. ‘No. Only its common names, and it has hundreds of those, some of them thousands of years old. Shadox Wood, Ryhope Wood, Grey Wood, Rider’s Wood, Hood Trees, Deep Dell Copses, Howling Wood, Hell’s Trees, The Graymes … the list is endless. Gaunt knows them all.’

Mr Williams was impressed. ‘And of course, you can’t just
walk
across the field to this name-thronged forest …’

‘Of course not. Not alone.’

‘No. Of course you can’t. I understand. From what you told me yesterday, I understand very well.’ He turned round, where he sat, to peer into the distance, but there were too many fields, too many slopes, too many trees between himself and Ryhope Wood for him to have a view of it. When he looked back, Tallis was pointing beyond the trees.

‘You can see all my camps from here. In the last few months I’ve heard a lot of movement in them. Other visitors. But they’re not like us. My grandfather called them
mythagos
.’

‘An odd word.’

‘They’re ghosts. They come from
here
,’ she tapped her head. ‘And here,’ she tapped Mr Williams’s. ‘I don’t understand completely.’

‘Your grandfather sounds like an interesting man.’

Tallis pointed to Stretley Stones meadow. ‘He died over there, one Christmas. I was only a baby. I never knew him.’ She pointed in the opposite direction, towards Barrow Hill. ‘That’s my favourite camp.’

‘I can see earthworks.’

‘It’s an old castle. Centuries old.’ She pointed elsewhere. ‘And that’s Sad Song Meadow. There, on the other side of the hedge.’

‘Sad Song Meadow,’ Mr Williams repeated. ‘Why did that name come to you?’

‘Because I can hear music sometimes. Nice music, but sad.’

Intrigued, Mr Williams asked, ‘Singing? Or instruments?’

‘Like – like wind. In trees. But with a tune. Several tunes.’

‘Can you remember any of them?’

Tallis smiled. ‘There’s one I like …’

She ‘tra-la-laad’ the melody, beating time with her feet in the water. When she’d finished, Mr Williams laughed. In his own gravelly voice he ‘da-da-daad’ a similar tune. ‘It’s called “Dives and Lazarus”,’ he said. ‘It’s an exquisite folk song. Your version, though …’ he frowned, then asked Tallis to hum the theme again. She did. He said, ‘It sounds old, doesn’t it? It’s more primitive. It’s lovely. But it’s still “Dives and Lazarus”.’ He beamed down at her. He had a twinkle in his eye, a way of raising his eyebrows that had made Tallis laugh since the first time she had met this man, two days before.

‘I don’t want to boast,’ he whispered, ‘But I once composed a piece of music based on that folk song.’

‘Not
another
one,’ Tallis whispered back.

‘I’m afraid so. I’ve had a go at most things in my time …’

(ii)

They stood among the alders by the wide stream which Tallis called Hunter’s Brook. It flowed from Ryhope Wood itself, then followed the shallow valleys between the fields and woods, coursing towards Shadoxhurst, where it disappeared into the ground.

Ryhope Wood was a dense tangle of summer green, rising distantly from the yellow and red of the brushwood that bordered it. The trees seemed huge. The canopy was unbroken. It stretched over the hill in one direction, and in the other was lost in the lines of hedges that extended from it like limbs. It looked impenetrable.

Mr Williams rested a hand on Tallis’s shoulder. ‘Shall I take you across?’

Tallis shook her head. Then she led the way further
along Hunter’s Brook, past the place where she had first met Mr Williams and to a tall, lightning blasted oak that stood a little way out into the field from the dense tree hedge behind. The tree was almost dead, and the split in its trunk formed a narrow seat.

‘This is Old Friend,’ Tallis said matter-of-factly. ‘I often come here to think.’

‘A nice name,’ Mr Williams said. ‘But not very imaginative.’

‘Names are names,’ Tallis pointed out. ‘They exist. People find them out. But they don’t change them. They can’t.’

‘In that,’ Mr Williams said gently, ‘I disagree with you.’

‘Once a name is found, it’s fixed,’ Tallis protested.

‘No it isn’t.’

She looked at him. ‘Can you change a tune?’

‘If I want to.’

Slightly confused, she said, ‘But then it isn’t … it isn’t the
tune
. It’s not the first inspiration!’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘I’m not trying to be argumentative,’ Tallis said awkwardly. ‘I’m just saying … if you don’t first accept the gift as it is – if you change what you hear, or change what you learn – doesn’t that make it weak somehow?’

‘Why should it?’ Mr Williams asked softly. ‘As I believe I’ve said to you before, the gift is not
what
you hear, or learn … the gift is being
able
to hear and learn. These things are yours from the moment they come and you can shape the tune, or the clay, or the painting, or whatever it is, because it belongs to you. It’s what I’ve always done with my music.’

‘And it’s what I should do with my stories, according to you,’ Tallis said. ‘Only …’ she hesitated, still uncertain. ‘My stories are
real
. If I change them … they
become just …’ She shrugged. ‘Just nothing. Just children’s stories. Don’t they?’

Looking across the summer fields at the tree-covered earthworks on Barrow Hill, Mr Williams shook his head minutely. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Although I would think that there are great truths in what you call children’s stories.’

He looked back at her and smiled, then leaned back against the split trunk of Old Friend and let the intense gleam settle in his eye. ‘Talking of stories,’ he said, ‘and especially of Old Forbidden Place …’

He slapped a hand to his mouth, realizing what he had done as soon as he had spoken the words. ‘I’m terribly sorry!’ he said.

Tallis rolled her eyes, sighing resignedly.

Mr Williams said, ‘But what about it, what about this story? You’ve been promising to tell it to me for two days now –’

‘Only one.’

‘Well, one then. But I’d
like
to hear it before I have to –’

He broke off, glancing at the girl apprehensively. He suspected he would make her sad.

‘Before you have to what?’ Tallis asked, slight concern on her face.

‘Before I have to go,’ he said gently.

She was shocked. ‘You’re going?’

‘I have to,’ he said with an apologetic shrug.

‘Where?’

‘Somewhere very important to me. Somewhere a long way away.’

She didn’t speak for a moment, but her eyes misted slightly. ‘Where
exactly?
’

He said, ‘Home. To where I live. In the fabled land of
Dorking.’ He smiled. ‘To where I work. I have work to do.’

‘Aren’t you retired?’ Tallis asked sadly.

Mr Williams laughed. ‘For goodness’ sake, I’m a composer. Composers don’t retire.’

‘Why not? You’re very old.’

‘I’m a mere twenty-six,’ Mr Williams said, looking up into the tree.

‘You’re eighty-four!’

His gaze reverted to her in an instant, his expression one of suspicion. ‘Someone told you,’ he said. ‘No one could guess that well. But in any case, composers do
not
retire.’