Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (30 page)

Between these brooding, monolithic trunks he could glimpse the structure they guarded. The mortuary house.
Cruig-morn
in the language of the Tuthanach: the skin-cold-earth-place. He always thought of it as the bone lodge.

As far as he had been able to determine, the Tuthanach were a late Neolithic clan from western Europe: they built mortuary houses; carved shapes in stone and wood; hunted more than farmed; were not violent; and had a sophisticated underworld belief which involved taking
small boats to great whirlpools, and riding spirally into the earth, to the ‘sea-of-light’. He had worked out the legend which imbued this particular clan with mythological status. They were certainly the legendary first builders of the giant megalithic tombs that were scattered through Ireland, Britain and France. Their ruling deity was the spirit of the river.

The Tuthanach were mythagos, of course, although not of his own creation. Someone had passed this way before him, scattering the brooding forest with the living debris of his dreams. But there was certainly one child among them who had come from his own ‘primal echo,’ the exhausted neuro-mythological zones of his primitive unconscious. And that one child fascinated him. Fascinated him utterly. Terrified him.

Ten giant trees watched him, their faces patterned not so much with the representations of totem ancestors but with the weird symbology of the unconscious. Something hound-like, something moon-like, fish-like, owl-like, ghost-like … but these were only the totem manifestations of the deeper image, the powerful images which could combine to create
vision
.

How much he longed for the world of his birth – just to
discuss
the ideas with people. He had seen so much. He had found lost legend. He had understood the way of inheritance from the past. And there was no one, not one soul, to talk to. He wrote it all down, on sheets of parchment either gleaned from the travelling forms of mythagos from future ages, or made by his own hand from clay and the fibre from the clothing which littered the wood: the tangible remains of mythagos which had faded and been resorbed by the forest.

‘Wyn!’

The girl scrambled into view, coming over the earth bank between the thorns. She looked puzzled by the
change, alarmed by it. She was holding a small, black object, a doll; her crudely-made bone necklace rattled about her chest as she slid down into the enclosure.

‘What have you got there?’ Wyn asked his daughter.

She stood before him, a chubby child, well wrapped in grey and brown furs, with deer-hide leggings and shoes. Her face was bright, the eyes deep brown and almost almond in shape. Moisture beaded her upper lip. Her black hair had been tied in tight plaits a few days before, and greased with animal fat to make them shine. They were coming undone now and bits of leaf littered the tangles.

‘It’s my first rajathuk,’ Morthen said, holding the doll up to her father. ‘I made it this morning.’

Wyn took the doll and turned it in his fingers. She had blackened it in the fire. There was no recognizable face, but the circles she had scratched were representative enough. An instinct, born of years of experience, told him that the wood was blackthorn.

‘How can it be a rajathuk?’ he asked pointedly. Morthen looked blank. He said, ‘What part of the tree did you make it from?’

Sudden enlightenment! She grinned. ‘A branch –’

‘So it’s an …?’

‘
Injathuk!
’ she said loudly. ‘Voice on the wind!’

‘Exactly! The trunk brings the voice from the bones which live among the rocks of the earth; the branch spreads the voice on seeds, insects and the wings of birds. A very different function.’

Morthen looked darkly up at the rajathuks, the ten enormous idols.

‘Skogen is changing,’ she said with a frown. ‘He’s different.’

‘Quite right …’

Wyn felt pleased with himself. He had predicted that
Morthen – half human, half woodland creature, like her lost brother, poor adventuring Scathach – that she would have a human awareness of the change. The Tuthanach, mythagos, could not of course sense such things.

‘Skogen is changing. What does that tell you?’

She fingered the bone necklace, finding reassurance in its cold, ivory smoothness. Her eyes engaged him totally; they shone; they were so beautiful; her mother had been beautiful too. Now that beauty had been reduced to bones, browning in the stale air of the mortuary house.

Morthen said, ‘A new voice is in the land.’

‘That’s right. A voice from outside, from the ghost world which I’ve often told you about.’

‘England,’ she said, pronouncing the name perfectly.

‘Yes. Someone from England. He is approaching us. He is causing change.’

Wyn stood, reached for his daughter’s hand. She took it gladly, holding her doll in the other. They walked slowly around the half circle of statues. There was a movement in the open entrance to the bone lodge.

‘A jackal!’ Morthen hissed, alarmed.

‘Birds,’ her father said. ‘Birds are always allowed in and among the dead. Only birds, though.’

The girl relaxed. They continued their slow walk. A dark cloud was gathering over the forest. There was the smell of snow in the air.

‘Ten masks to see the trees,’ Morthen said, reciting the liturgy of her father’s magic, ‘and ten trees to carry the voice …’

‘And when they speak? What do they speak of?’

She had forgotten the answer. Wyn ruffled her hair and smiled. ‘They tell of what they saw!’

‘Yes! Trees cast longer and older shadows than the Tuthanach. They see further than the people can see.’

‘Well done. We’ll make Morthen-rajathuk of you yet!’

Again, there was movement in the mortuary house. Wyn frowned and held Morthen back. Since she was a child, she was not allowed beyond the guarding circle of wood.

‘That’s not a bird,’ Morthen said, her dark eyes wide. She clutched her doll to her chest, as if protecting it.

‘I believe you’re right.’

Wyn-rajathuk walked unsteadily between the idols, brushing their massive columns with his shoulders. He thought the earth trembled slightly as he passed into the forbidden place. The narrow entrance to the mortuary house was empty, black. The smell of decomposition was strong; of ash, too, mixed with the rotting flesh. The grass on the turf roof was long; the earth had slipped, hiding the tops of the stones which formed the entrance. This sort of change was quite natural; but to have happened overnight meant that it was the work of the skogen. The wind caught the dull rags on the poles that lined the house, the clothes of the dead; they flapped in the wind while the silence of the bone-lodge swallowed the flesh they had once warmed.

Wyn-rajathuk stepped into the darkness that was his domain. The passage inside was long. Two rows of oak trunks supported the roof. Between the trunks were the urns of those who had been burned, and the hollowed stones where the grey stuff from their skulls had been placed for the birds to feast. Elsewhere were the bones of the childless. At the far end of the house crouched the shrivelled, stinking corpses of the two Tuthanach who had been recently drowned. They could not be burned until the water of the spirit had been squeezed from their bodies.

Jackals had certainly been here. Fleshy, chewed bone, littered on the stone floor, told the shaman this simple fact. And the carrion birds too had taken their fill,
entering through the special gaps in the roof. Light penetrated dimly from those grassy windows. Two birds fluttered in the shadows.

And then …

The boy moved into dim light, crouched, apprehensive. He was holding the long bone of one of the child corpses.

‘Put it back,’ Wyn-rajathuk said softly.

‘I need it,’ Tig said.

‘Put it back. You should have asked me first.’

The boy darted behind one of the wooden pillars. Wyn stepped back into the daylight, standing before the entrance. A few minutes later Tig emerged, the child’s femur still held to his chest. He crouched in the entrance to the bone lodge, a wild sight, an animal, ready for flight.

‘Return the bone to cruig-morn, Tig.’

‘I need it. You mustn’t make me.’

‘Why do you need it? What will you do with it?’

Tig shivered, glanced to his right, then looked up at the circle of guarding totems, their faces turned from him. He was afraid, yet defiant, and Wyn had been expecting this moment for some time. Recently, Tig’s appearance had changed. He was still the same elfin-faced lad of eight, his features sharp, his eyes like a cat’s, his hair tied back with a band of otter’s fur; but the boyishness had been fading recently; he had begun to assume the appearance of a corpse; he could be drawn, pinched and deathly white. Wyn knew well enough that when he was in the these states he was ‘journeying,’ flying … experiencing the detachment from his body which was a part of the growing shaman experience. This was a normal change and not the influence of the skogen. But the stress and physical abuse were taking their toll of his looks. He wore the same sort of trousered wolfskin clothing as Morthen, but he had pierced the hide with the bones of birds, sharp
needles, hundreds of them; some of them had entered his flesh. The black blood stained the grey fur. He had scarred his face deliberately (but not deeply). He was becoming shaman, guardian of memory. And he had not even become rajathuk as yet.

‘What will you do with the bone?’ Wyn asked again.

‘I will carve it. I will suck out what is left of its ghost.’

Wyn shook his head. ‘The ghost of that child has been returned to the people, now. They have eaten its flesh. There is no ghost in the bone.’

‘There is always a ghost in the bone. When I suck it out I will have been well fed. I will become
white memory of life
. I will become
haunter of caves
. I will become bone itself. Bone always outlasts feather. My magic will be stronger than your bird magic.’

‘You are Tig. You are a boy. You have no magic. You are my son.’

‘
Not
your son …’ Tig hissed angrily, shaking his head. The violence in the words startled Wyn, the anger silencing him. He watched Tig. Tig became uncertain, but there were no tears in his slanted eyes.

The boy had worked it out, then. An astonishing thing for a mythago to do. Wyn had always known that Tig would come to terms with the manner of his own creation. It was part of the myth-story that
was
Tig that he would do just such a thing. He had long since become aware that he had had no natural mother. And the Tuthanach, although they fed him and clothed him, were always wary of him. He lived with his father and his sister Morthen in Wyn’s small, square hut, outside the enclosure of the village, but he was rarely to be found beneath the roof, spending far more time in the forest glades.

The Tuthanach were an embodiment of legend. But Tig was legend too. The two myths – Tuthanach and Tig – were overlapping. This strange accretion of two stories
formed one of the earliest cycle of ‘outsider’ tales: the boy with a strange talent coming among a people who are destined to greatness under his guiding light. In a few thousand years this myth would be replayed in more memorable form! But the story had been the same, in essence, four thousand years earlier. What Tig would do for this Neolithic clan – whose story must have been strange for many centuries because of their life-ritual involving not
one
but
ten
totemic entities – what Tig would do would be to transform them with his magic, to affect their consciousness. Their story had long been lost from England by the time of Wyn’s birth – a realm, a world, a whole past-life away – but it had once been of immense power; and naturally it had lingered in the shadows …

Wyn himself had no real role to play in this story of Tig and the megalith builders. His insight, his wisdom, his understanding of nature, his understanding of people, all of this had meant that it was inevitable he would become the clan’s magic man, their shaman. He was from Oxford, after all! He had been accepted. He was clothed and fed. He had advised them on the matter of hunting tools. He had married into the clan and helped produce a child (he had been astonished at his potency).

Although he had once lived in the enclosure of the people he now kept apart. There was one thing which worried him, however: now that he had become shaman, had he inadvertently set himself up to play a minor, but very brief role in the Tig story?

‘The land is changing,’ Wyn-rajathuk said to the boy. ‘Can you tell?’

Tig sniffed the air. ‘I smell new winter. New snow. I smell new memory. Yes. There is change.’

‘Do you understand the source of that change?’

Tig thought hard for a moment, then seemed to
understand something. ‘A new ghost is in the land,’ he whispered. His voice became loud. ‘I shall fight against it. And for that I shall need the strength of the people!’

He shook the bone defiantly.

Behind Wyn, Morthen was restless, scraping her nails on one of the totems. Tig glanced at her, but ignored her. They were not true brother and sister, though occasionally they shared the same house and they had once both called Wyn ‘father’. But in all the time together they had never spoken to each other. Indeed, Tig never seemed to
see
the girl.

Morthen’s movement behind him distracted Wyn. Worried that his daughter would enter the forbidden ground he turned slightly, and in that moment of release Tig darted away from the mortuary house, scrambling over the earthworks and through the blackthorn.

‘Damn!’

Wyn chased after him, but his bones were old, his flesh weak. By the time he had managed to climb the bank Tig was a long way off among the thorns. Soon he had vanished into the forest. Then Wyn caught the gleam of sun on a pale face as Tig stepped slightly out of his hiding place in the undergrowth; to watch his creator.

Morthen and her father went down the hill and entered the dense wood again, following a clear track between the huge, sprawling oaks. They skirted the cleared land where the village had been built, glancing only briefly at the palisade of stakes and hurdles, topped by the grim skulls of animals. They could hear a child laughing and a drum being roughly beaten.