Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (29 page)

And through this silence came the sound of Tallis’s name, called loudly, called by a man, called in a tone that showed not just anxiety but terrible fear.

Scathach glanced up, pale eyes bright. But Tallis was staring up the field to the distant skyline where, the previous evening, strange trees and stones had formed; they had gone now, and the earth showed no sign of the power she had imposed upon it. There was a man’s shape; he was running.

‘Tallis!’ her father called again. His voice signalled panic. It made Tallis shiver and her eyes sting. He was in his dressing gown. It flapped as he ran. He stumbled then picked himself up, a small, dark figure, still indistinct in the half light.

‘Hurry …’ Scathach murmured to the wood. The horses became restless. Gyonval murmured guttural words to them, stroked one piebald face with his mail-clad hand.

‘I must tell him I’m safe,’ Tallis said. ‘I must say goodbye …’

But Scathach tugged her down again as she rose. ‘No time,’ he said. ‘Look. There!’

Broken Boy walked forward, out of the fog, pacing stiffly through the water close to the uneasy horses. The
Jaguthin drew back, letting the great beast pass them. Its antlers brushed the hanging branches of the alders by the stream. Its breath added mist to mist. Its dark eyes gleamed as they watched the girl. Its smell preceded it, drifting towards Ryhope Wood.

Scathach tugged the blanket from Tallis’s shoulders, then nudged her forward.

‘Quickly. Tie the rag. Mark it. The animal is your master, now. It will lead the way.’

Tallis stumbled through the undergrowth, then splashed down into the stream. Her father was still calling to her. Crows rose from the trees around Bird Spirit Land and bird song began to chorus across the farmland.

Standing before the stag, Tallis felt overwhelmed again. She stared up at its huge form, then reached out and ran her fingers over the coarse hair of its muzzle. Slowly, Broken Boy lowered his head. In his eyes Tallis could see her face. It looked strangely dark, the eyes wide open, the mouth oddly formed, but her face without a doubt, and behind that image: winter snows, and dark shapes moving – three of them, then one, walking out of the beast into Tallis’s consciousness.

Its smell encapsulated her. Its warmth spread around her. She could feel its breath on her neck, the weight of its body against hers. Her skin tingled, her body became excited in an unexpected and disconcerting way. It was so close to her. She looked beyond it, as if at blue sky. She felt the pressure of its movements, on and in her flesh …

The moment passed. Tallis, breathless, flushing, stretched up and tied the christening rag around the beam of the broken antler, knotted it twice, securing it well. As she did so, her fingers brushed three deep notches in the horn: Owen’s mark, perhaps.

At once Broken Boy raised its head and roared, then pushed past the girl, brushing her so hard with its body
that she sat heavily down in the water. As she grabbed at the necklet of heavy masks, the string broke. The masks scattered in the stream and she gathered them together, but one of them slipped from her hand again and she had no time to grasp it. Scathach was behind her, pushing her after the broad haunches of the stag, towards Bird Spirit Land and Ryhope Wood beyond. The Jaguthin were already mounted. Gwyllos was struggling to control his horse, which had reared up in panic and was pacing restlessly in a circle. He shouted at the animal and calmed it. Beyond him, on the land, Tallis’s father had stopped for breath and was resting his hands on his knees, his face flushed, wet with tears.

‘Daddy!’ the girl shouted.

‘Tallis!’ he cried back. ‘Don’t go! Don’t go, child. Don’t leave us.’

‘Daddy, I won’t be gone long. Just one week!’

But her voice was lost against Scathach’s angry cry. ‘Come
on
. No time … you’ve opened the best gate yet. Look!’

He reached for her and pulled her by one arm across the narrow back of the smallest horse. Around her the Jaguthin splashed quickly along the river, in pursuit of the stag. Tallis struggled into the saddle, clinging on to her masks with one arm, clutching for the reins with her free hand. Scathach whooped with excitement, a pagan cry, of delight, of triumph, and then cantered forward, slapping the animal on its hind-quarters so that Tallis was bucked in the saddle, then dragged through the drapery of branches.

Ahead of her she saw what Scathach meant by the ‘gate’; she saw the hollowing that she had at last created with the help of her animal master. Here, in the world of her father, there was a hedge of tall trees and tight thorn. But in Tallis’s world, now, the land dipped between high,
overgrown banks, a real hollow, mysterious and woody, drooping down into the earth it seemed, though sunlight gleamed ahead of her, breaking through the dense roof of the overhanging foliage.

And in the far distance, a gleam of white, a shifting swirl that made her shiver as she watched it; the first sign of the winter that had haunted her from her birth …

The cold place. The Forbidden Place. Where Harry was wandering. Where Mr Williams’s lost song might have been a gentle melody on ice-chilled winds.

The borderlands of Lavondyss …

Scathach kicked his horse forward and galloped on into the hollow, down into the underworld. The Jaguthin followed; only Gyonval turned and beckoned to Tallis, his face creased in a smile, a friend’s smile. He shouted a word in his own language, unmistakably:
come on!

Tallis felt her own horse start to canter, as if it, too, was anxious to return to the world from which it had been barred for so long. As it galloped forward, Tallis saw stones lining the holloway, and she thought of her grandfather, and the way he had been found, seated by grey rock, staring in just this direction; perhaps he had glimpsed the world that had not called him. There had been pleasure in that dying vision.

The last thing she heard as the sound of water began to grow in her ears was her father’s voice, very distant now, the sound of her name more shrill than sad, as if he was already a mile away, a hundred years way.

When she looked back she could see him. He was standing in the stream, his dressing gown a ragged robe hanging on his shoulders, watching her, reaching for her. In the instant before distance and the underworld took her she saw him stoop to the water and pick up the mask she had dropped.

There was new memory coming to the land; there was change. It had been present for weeks. It was affecting everything: the forest, the river, the spirit glades with their giant wooden statues, the mortuary house on the hill … It was even affecting the people, the
Tuthanach
, the Neolithic clan which inhabited this part of the forest realm.

At first, the old man known to the clan as Wyn-rajathuk thought the changes must have been of his own doing, a last ripple of genesis from those primitive areas of his mind still tied to the primeval wood. But this was not possible, he soon realized. He was at peace, now, his unconscious long since emptied of its ancient dreams. He had been at peace for many years.

No; this subtle, eerie change was from another source.

He went into the spirit glades, walked among the giant idols and studied each grim face, listened to the voices. He followed a hunting trail through the choking woodland
and eventually emerged on to the thorn-littered slope of a low hill. Through the dense scrub of red-berried trees he could just see the wall of chalky earth which had been erected about the hill’s summit; a tight hedge of blackthorn had spread to cover this as well. He picked his way through the snagging underbrush, pushing aside the tearing branches, until he faced the crumbling entrance gate, whose wooden columns had slipped, letting down the earth and rubble.

He had to scramble into the grassy space of the enclosure.

Yesterday, the gate had been clear, the path through the thorns wide and easy.

He climbed the earth wall and turned to gaze to the north. The sun was low over the forest, everything in ruddy shadow, misty distance. The canopy was a dark sea, stretching endlessly to every horizon. The wind that blew from the heart-of-the-wood had turned chill; there was a smell of winter in the air, a blurring of the seasons.

Wyn returned to the bottom of the enclosure and walked around the semi-circle of tall, carved statues that guarded the way to the mortuary house itself. There were ten of them, and their faces were disturbing to look at; their ancient eyes followed him as he moved around the circle.

Eventually he stopped and smiled grimly. The face of one of the statues had changed, as had its shape. There were small branches growing from the dead wood. New life in the silent totem, bursting from the black rot of the bark.

He should have known. Of course! He should have realized. After all, he was not just Wyn-rajathuk: Wyn-
voice-from-the-earth
. He was the outsider. He was a scientist. He was the only man to have studied the living
myth images of his own unconscious mind … here: in the wood, in the forest of the mythagos.

He entertained this moment of arrogance with ironic self-dismissal, because of course he had seen only a fragment of the magic that lived and hid and emerged, naked and stinking, from the leaf litter of this strange land.

Nevertheless, he should have understood the source of the change before now.

It was the Shadow-of-an-Unseen-Forest. It was Shaper-of-Hills. There was an ancient name for it, which he had discovered and which contained power when it was allowed to embed itself in the silent part of the mind:
skogen
.

A skogen was moving inwards, inwards to the heart-of-the-wood, and it was coming from
outside
the forest. It was coming from the realm which Wyn-rajathuk remembered only distantly.

Ahead of it, as it journeyed towards the land of the Tuthanach, all of the earth, all of the wood, was being squeezed by its madness.

‘Wyn! Wyn-rajathuk!’

The girl’s voice came to him from a great distance. It disturbed his motionless, silent contemplation of the forest. He ignored her for the moment. He realized that he had been sitting on the cold turf for some hours; his seventy-year-old bones ached. The sun was higher. The forest canopy extended into mist, in the direction of the heartwood, but there was a bright quality to the light, although the land was still haunted by shadows.

Wyn rose awkwardly to a crouch, brushing insects and dirt from the patchy wolf-fur of his trousers, massaging his cramped muscles. He noted the way the shadows of the totems crowded together, one shadow, one voice. He
turned and looked up at the great semi-circle of broken, rotting wood: the rajathuks. They were all different and they had stood here for years before he had come to the land. Someone had passed this way before him, creating the Tuthanach, their totems, their spirit glades. He was living in another man’s dream. But he knew the names of the totems, all of them: Skogen (shadow of the forest), Falkenna (the flight of birds), Oolerinna (the opening of the old track), Morndun (the spirit that walks) … and all the rest, their names familiar, their functions familiar, yet all of them strange, eerie.

And in his time here, among the Tuthanach, he had become Wyn-rajathuk. These totems were his, now, and he had affected them, shaped them in his own way. He controlled them. He listened to the voices and learned what they spoke when they spoke with
one
voice. They were his oracle. This is how they had functioned in myth and because in this world magic
worked
, they seemed to work for him. But the scientist behind the shaman had long since recognized the unconscious
releasing
mechanism of each of the patterned faces, symbols drawing on the primitive regions of his mind; ten symbols, crowding together, effecting a powerful release of insight and farsight.

His oracle.