Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (36 page)

Was this stinking place, with its rotting statue, the gateway to Lavondyss? Had Harry come this way, found this sad glade, and passed into the ferocious winter from which he had called back to his home, a world away? Tallis placed her own Hollower over her face. Spirits moved in the shadows; human shapes, restless and frightened, drew back into the dark wood. The statue leaned away from her, its bark splitting vertically and parting just enough so that she could sense the fluttering movement inside the trunk.

It startled her. She removed the mask. The glade was as before.

For eight years Tallis had opened hollowings, yet had failed to find the path she wanted. She knew why, well
enough: she was missing the Moondream mask. But even so, her power was limited. After the stag had gone, after her
gurla
had so dramatically transformed itself into a feature of the land, she had never again felt as powerful as on that day when the fields around her house had erupted into a riot of root and stone from other ages.

She was growing old. She was more than twenty, by her reckoning. She was growing old. She carried the relics of a different ageing process. The forest, in its many ways, was sucking out her soul, her spirit. It was sucking out her dreams. It was draining her.

She realized with sudden, silent anger that she was sinking into melancholy again; she drew in a sharp breath, stood and slapped the side of the Hollower. One side of its grinning face seemed dead, she noticed, an odd difference from her own mask.

If the wood
was
draining her, surely something had happened, now, that would give her a charge of energy. She had come close … for only the first time … close to Harry. Outsiders attract outsiders. Now that she had found Wynne-Jones she was certain that she had reached a place where her brother’s anima had caused a brief riot in the woodland before he had passed on, up the river …

She often went to the river during these first few days. She saw Morthen there twice but concealed herself, although she noticed where the girl, too, found security from passing eyes: a high stand of rocks, some yards from the muddy bank, that at first seemed sheer and solid but which on investigation proved to be hollow and a natural shelter. On the night when Wyn-rajathuk began to swim, on his journey, as a silver fish, Tallis came to these protecting rocks and curled up, to sleep through one night on her own.

She was woken at dawn by four dogs, gigantic hounds,
barking and baying as they sniffed and splashed their ways through the shallows. One of them came up to the rocks, braced its forepaws on the high boulders and peered down at the crouching woman. Tallis raised her iron knife menacingly and the hound withdrew, chasing after its fellows. Tallis remained in hiding for a while. A man, cloaked, carrying a staff, walked by on the far side of the water, keeping close to the undergrowth and uttering a short, high-pitched chant every time he circled round one of the feathered spirit poles. His head was cowled, his face bearded. With a shiver Tallis noticed that he carried two wooden masks on his back.

He passed by swiftly, not lingering in this totem-ridden place of the dead. Tallis followed him on foot a long way up the river until the next stretch of water could be seen, a bubbling series of rapids streaming between the crowded, leaning trees. The caped figure stepped across stones at this point, passing from one dense thicket to another, not looking back.

‘Everyone is going up the river …’

Even horses!

One came by her now, a black mare, its trappings and harnessing ragged, old and rotten. Metal had eaten into the creature’s flesh and its hide was stained and stiff with caked blood.

‘I don’t remember you from the story books …’ Tallis murmured as she made her cautious approach to the wary animal. It was not old, but it was weary. There was a great dark stain on the remnants of the saddle blanket which still draped its back, stuck to the horse by the congealed lifeblood of its one-time rider.

Tallis caught the beast and soothed it, then removed what she could of the man-made torment which bound it. When she walked back to the place of the dead, the black mare followed. Tallis’s own horse had been killed by
falling rocks, some weeks before. Scathach – after the loss of his Jaguthin friends – had taken to running through the wood and the wild tracks on foot, an expression of loss the reason for which he was unable to articulate.

‘You could well be a welcome friend,’ Tallis whispered to the animal. ‘If you’re still here tomorrow I shall assume I can ride you. But I won’t name you, so you will always be free. But if I
do
ride you, expect to go into a strange region.’

The next day Morthen made her boldest approach to Tallis, to establish friendship.

Tallis had been aware of the girl’s furtive presence for some minutes before she finally crept into the spirit glade where Tallis was sitting and crouched in the shadows behind the older woman. Tallis remained quite still. She was surrounded by her masks, which she had laid flat and face up in a circle. The wolfskin pack which contained her special relics was placed neatly before her, but still bound. Aware of the girl she nevertheless kept her gaze upon the eyes of the wooden statue, seeking in its bizarre shape for the clue to “Moondream”.

The Moondream totem was made from a willow trunk. The female aspect of the shape was evident, but the true beauty of the rajathuk emerged through the representations of earth and moon in the subtle flow of the carved wood, and the clever conjunction of those symbols with the human features. It had already begun to communicate with the woman from the far realm.

‘Tallis?’

The girl’s voice was quiet. She was nervous. Tallis ignored her for a moment. Her mind was adrift in a nightscape and the shape of the mask was close to her, almost formed. It was not like the previous moondream, the mask she had made after talking with Gaunt. How could it be? That particular expression of her deep
unconscious world had been used and expended. When she had dropped the mask, when she had lost it, she had lost, too, that particular link with the female in the land …

She wondered, sometimes, whether her father, after he had picked it up, had destroyed it, or whether he wore it on moonlit nights; and if he did that … what else did he see? What did he hear?

‘Tallis? What are you doing?’

Morthen’s English was basic and sometimes barely understandable. Her words were full of the particular palatals and diphthongs of the Tuthanach (Tallis was pronounced Tallish, for example) but her father had instructed her sufficiently in his strange tongue for her to make a little sense.

Tallis turned where she sat; her hair fell forward to cover her face and the scar on her jawline; it also hid her smile; when Morthen remained motionless Tallis beckoned her forward and the girl approached, walking in a peculiar, crouched way. Her hair was smeared white and tied down with a red-painted strip of cloth from which strings of bone and shell hung. Morthen reached out to touch the older woman’s dry hair, the flaxen hair that so fascinated the Tuthanach women. Tallis remained quite still, neither irritated nor amused by this gentle exploration of difference. Morthen’s impish eyes, full of wonder now, stared hard into Tallis’s. ‘There
is
green there. It’s true.’

‘There wasn’t always. Only for the last few months.’

She had already heard it commented upon in the settlement: that although she was
injathuk
, she carried no sky in the bone of her head, but the green woollen robe of the voice-of-earth was showing through; she was becoming
rajathuk
.

To Tallis, all this superstition was meaningless; what
mattered was that she had a certain power. Although the change of her eye colour was a slightly worrying thing …

In belated answer to the girl’s first question, Tallis said, ‘I’m making a new mask. The last of my masks. It will help me open the hollowings … oolerinnens … more easily. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

But Morthen was already thinking along a different forest track. She asked, ‘Is Scathach my brother? Truly?’

She had removed her touch from Tallis’s hair and now crouched, drawn in on herself, as she might crouch around the fire in the height of winter.

Tallis agreed. ‘Of course. Your
half-
brother that is. He had a different mother than you. Tig is your only full brother.’

Morthen’s childish eyes flamed with anger; she snarled, a brief and bestial distortion of her lips. ‘Tig is
not
my brother,’ she spat. ‘He had no mother. He came from the
first forest
.’ She tapped her head furiously.

Tallis smiled, understanding what she meant. Tig was a more recent mythago. Wynne-Jones’s, no doubt.

Morthen’s flare of anger died as quickly as it had been kindled. Tallis gathered her masks and looped the leather strap through the eyes, slinging them on to her right shoulder. Morthen prodded the other pack and Tallis gently tapped the inquisitive fingers away. She glanced wistfully at the willow pole, with its subtle moon features.

Almost. One more hour and I’ll have you
…

Then she followed the girl. They passed around the winding track which led through the densest wood towards the river.

Morthen was excited. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said on three occasions, as if urging Tallis to remain interested.

They came to the river. With a shiver of anger Tallis saw the black horse tethered to a low branch. The tether
was in the form of a noose around its neck. It had struggled, but was now calm. Triumphantly, Morthen presented her gift.

‘I caught it. It was alone.’

Tallis stared at the animal, then cautiously established a touch upon its muzzle. ‘I still want to ride you,’ she said, and the beast snorted. Tallis removed the tether. ‘Go, if you want.’

Black mare stayed. Tallis smiled at Morthen. ‘Thank you. For the gift.’

Unaware of anything more than that Tallis had wonderful control over animals, Morthen slapped her own cheeks in delight. ‘I’ve named her for you. You can ride her. Her name is Swimmer of Lakes. That will be important. You’ll see …’

Swimmer of Lakes. An odd name for a horse. Morthen clearly knew more about the land than Tallis had imagined.

She made her final agreement with the black mare. ‘You swim one lake for me, I’ll swim one lake for you. This is Tallis’s Promise.’

So she blanketed the beast, and made a harness that didn’t cut. She led it to the open land around the Tuthanach enclosure and protected it from dogs.

In the meantime, Morthen delighted in showing Tallis what she and her father had discovered in the woods around the river: stones carved deeply with the images of blind, dead human faces; a tower, its slate tiles fallen but the ornate and gilded furniture of its prisoner still recognizable in the ruin, though its occupant, and its meaning, had long since fled into the storm skies. What Morthen called ‘the end of the wood’ turned out to be the high wall of a Roman fort, overgrown but still impressive. Tallis used the latrine. It was a simple stone seat above a
deep, dry sewer, but it was a marvellous change from squatting over maggots. There were grain stores here, and barracks, and graffiti that seemed as fresh as if they had been daubed that day. Morthen found a sword, then a pennant wrapped in leather. It showed an eagle and a helmet, but tore as Tallis tried to hang it out to read the inscription.

In one of the grain stores there was a pack of rats, each the size of a wild cat. Tallis was the last of the two to flee.

There were tombs, too: from ornate black marble mausolea, still impressive as they rose above the choking wood, to earth mounds and narrow entrances, lined by chiselled stone and leading deep into the natural realm below the roots of the forest. The oddest piece of flotsam in that land was a horn, forty feet long and wide enough at its trumpet end for Tallis to stand inside and shout. It was carved from real horn and there was no sign of it being more than a single piece. Morthen tried to blow its narrow end. Tallis heard the breath, then realized that the girl’s voice had been transformed into haunting words, not English, not Tuthanach …

They left the horn behind them but noticed, for a day or more, that the woods in that region seemed active, as if something had come to disturb the peace.

Wynne-Jones was flying as a bird. Tallis had been in the settlement for five days. ‘Is he leaving us or coming home?’ she asked. Morthen laughed, but Scathach slumped forward by the sweat-soaked palliasse. The vigil had sucked away his vitality. He was flesh and blood but his spirit was beating against the gate to the unknown region. His father was there, but he could not himself enter and lend his strength to the old man’s journey home.

Finally, Morthen took Tallis up the river to the mist-shrouded lake, with its marsh creatures and giant willows.
Swimmer of Lakes was strong and bore the double weight with ease, but when Tallis urged the beast into the muddy shallows among the rushes the horse drew back. Tallis dismounted and returned to dry land. She would not force her new-found friend to cross this place just yet.

But it was to the marsh that all the travellers came, and all of them would have to cross its still, grey waters. Beyond the lake was the land which called to ghosts – and Harry was there too!

So Tallis spread her masks around her and placed the Hollower on her face. Morthen stood behind her watching apprehensively as the woman undertook a ritual which she did not comprehend. Her apprehension turned to outright fear when the sky darkened suddenly and the waters of the lake were lashed into a fury. Dark roots coiled like snakes into the air and formed a sinister tunnel. The willows around the lake leaned and creaked, shedding birds from their branches like a myriad swirling flecks of black ash. A storm wind flattened the rushes and a great gushing swirl of snow poured from the hollowing, sending Morthen screaming back to the shelter of trees.

Through the arch of roots Tallis saw a steep-sided winter valley. Oaks and thorns clung to the rocks, their branches shedding snow. Dark fingers of stone poked against the pale, dead sky, a ragged palisade. The river thundered over boulders and the woman who watched could see the sharp angles and straight lines of stones that had fallen from whatever ruin had once guarded this narrow way.