Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (49 page)

She led her horse to the very edge of the woodland, and peered out through the scrub at the rise of land before her. Oh yes, she knew this place, she remembered it, she could recognize all the details. She knew just where she stood, as seen from the twisted, ancient oak on the skyline. The tree was in silhouette, but there seemed to be flames in one of its branches; flames that licked high, then guttered and were gone, only to flare again … as if a fire was coming and going … as if the fire was not of this time, but spent brief minutes in the tree, then flared in another world, before revisiting the winter branches.

There was no one below the tree. The field ahead of her, across the small stream which flowed here, was darkening below the storm. It was strewn with corpses.
This was the end of the battle that she had seen. These were the dead whose stink had touched her when a child. Those were the broken spears and spinning, shattered wheels of chariots whose mournful death had so affected her as she had tried to protect Scathach from the Scald-crows.

The swirl of carrion birds would be behind her, above the forest, out of sight. Perhaps even now they were beginning to circle, to weave around the field, stretching out into a thin and malevolent line as they spiralled in to gorge …

Only to be thrown back by the magic of the fire in the tree, the tree spirit, herself, flickering through time, watching, watching for the clay-haired rider.

The pyre would be to her right. She was too late to save him. She knew this with a sickness and sadness that could manifest only as a cold feeling, a dead feeling inside her. She knew she had ridden from the woods, screaming her grief … but she felt no grief, only a terrible inevitability, only cold acceptance. Where was the passion she had witnessed, as a child, in her angry figure? Where was the sorrow? Where the determination to honour her lover’s death, as he burned in Bird Spirit Land?

Only ice. Only knowledge. Only acceptance …

Then to her right, a woman screamed. Tallis was shocked for a moment, and remained quite still. A terrible thought had flashed through her mind. There was a fast and furious movement in the woods, the sound of a horse stretched to exhaustion, the slap of leather against flank and the dull sound of hooves on blood-soaked turf. Tallis ran from the treeline. Her steed trotted after her.

Smoke from Scathach’s pyre was black, rising high into the dusk. The flames licked around the wood, around the corpse. The arms of the dead warrior seemed to flex, moved by heat, twisted by the consuming flame. A figure
in black was just disappearing into the wood. Tallis thought she could hear the creak of a cart …

Then a woman on horseback burst from the wood, stumbled through the shallow stream-waters and struggled on to the field. She rode around the blazing pyre. Her black cloak streamed behind her. Her clay-stiffened hair took the yellow of the flames. Her body glistened, red streaked arms, white-and-black streaked face. Her cries of sorrow and anger were like the fleeting cries of dawn birds, banished from this forbidden place of battle, this Bird Spirit Land …

Morthen reached for the foot of the corpse and dragged Scathach’s body from the funeral mound. She flung herself from her horse and smothered the burning body with her black cloak. She shrieked his name. She cradled him in her arms. She kissed his lips, brushed at the burned flesh, slapped his face to try to wake him … but her brother from the wood was dead, and she leaned down, sobbing silently, furling him into her body like a dark bird gathering in its chick.

The girl was now a woman; she was years older. Tallis could recognize this fact even beyond the mask of clay. For a few minutes she stood in shocked silence; she had been so sure that the rider from the woods had been herself … but now, realizing that the lover she had seen had been Morthen, she felt angry and upset. And yet, she could not apply that anger to jealousy, she could not storm out across the field and challenge Wynne-Jones’s daughter for the body of the man they both, in their own ways, loved.

Suddenly Morthen seemed to sense the watcher. She turned slowly to look towards Tallis, her eyes fierce, her mouth twisted with fury. She was like a witch, a hag, all youthful beauty banished below the lines and hatred in her face. She stood, reached for the clumsy metal blade
she now carried, flung back her cloak to expose patterned nakedness, threw back her head, howled Tallis’s name, then Scathach’s, then her own, then looked again, silent, furious, to where Tallis hovered in the shadows at the edge of the wood.

Tallis was prompted by this insult into an action that she knew she would regret. She walked out into the open, drew her dagger, shouted, ‘Leave him, now. He’s mine. I’ll take your brother to a proper place of burial.’

‘He’s
mine
,’ Morthen growled, her voice more feral than human. It rose in pitch. ‘He’s my
brother from the wood
. I’ve aged for him! I’ve sought him for years. I’ve found him, and you have put a magic on him.
You
have done this …’

‘Don’t be stupid. I’ve been with him since you left. He rode away from me a day ago. I’ve done nothing.
I
didn’t desert him …’

Morthen turned and ran for her horse, swinging across its bare back and violently twisting its head to face Tallis. She rode forward, kicking the beast’s flanks to make it gallop. Tallis stood her ground, and then was shocked as Morthen’s blade slammed against her jaw, almost completely following the line of the old scar. Tallis fell, feeling no pain, only a sense of numbness and unreality. The blade had been used flat. There was no cut.

She stood and faced Morthen again. How the girl had grown! She was almost as tall as the outsider. Her eyes were as beautiful as ever, even through rage, even through the warpaint. Her hair stood like spines about her head, white, fierce, stiff with clay. Her breasts were naked as she threw back her cloak again and let the winter ice make her flesh shiver. A fully grown woman, the muscles on her arms and legs as thick and obvious as a man’s. Tallis, huddled in her furs, watched this naked apparition as it stalked towards her. She fielded two
blows, then felt her left arm cut as Morthen struck swiftly, savagely; then her left leg, so that she collapsed in a heap, struck three times on the left side of her body, bleeding, left to die.

Morthen slashed through the bindings of Tallis’s cloak, stripped the woman as she lay there gasping for breath and life, mind awhirl with confused thoughts, with loss, with fear … with need. She felt the icy wind on her body. Morthen wrapped the furs around her own body, tugged on the wolfskin trousers, brushing at the bloodstain where her blade had slashed.

‘He’s dead’, she taunted. ‘And the earth knows, I regret that. But you will die too, and that I do not regret at all. Now I shall return to my father. From his own first forest I shall find my brother once again. Scathach will come out of the wood … I haven’t lived my life to fail. For you: the cold. Only the cold.’

Her crude blade sheathed, Morthen wrenched back Tallis’s head, then kissed her lips before flinging her down again.

She took me so easily. She could have killed me if she’d wanted to
….

Tallis stared at Scathach’s burned and blistered body. As she began to feel faint she reached for his smouldering cloak, the short red cloak he had taken from the raider. She tugged it off the body. Scathach’s half-opened eyes watched the heavens. His lips were swollen with the heat, ugly to look at; the line of burning began on his jaw and his fair neck was wealed and raw. She tugged off his patterned trousers and the leather jerkin. She eased them on to her body, cutting out a part of the cold. Her horse came close and watched her. She crawled closer to the funeral pyre, rejoicing in its warmth, and slept. When she woke again only a little time had passed. She found a
glowing ember and used it to close her wounds, then forced herself to stand.

Morthen had gone. Having dragged the body of her brother-lover from the pyre, she had abandoned him, returning south, Tallis imagined, to find her father again.

She had gone from Tallis’s life, then, and so the final link with Wynne-Jones was severed. Tallis was on her own for the first time in her eight years or so in this unimaginable land.

The thought disturbed her and brought her to her knees by Scathach’s scarred corpse.

Did you find your friends? Was he there? Gyonval? Were they all here? If I search the field, will I find them all again?

Now she regretted stripping the clothes from his body. She stared at the puckered, shrivelled flesh, its scars closed, all colour gone, save for blood like crude paint, its limbs without energy or force, its face without vitality. She had insulted the proud warrior. He had called to her in his dying moments, and she had thrown him a fragment of her white nightgown, which he had clasped with hope, and kissed, and kept as a precious icon. Now she had rudely stripped the corpse, and at no time during the action had she thought of that strip of white fabric …

She prised open the body’s right fist, and there, charred at the edge, was all that remained of the nightgown. Linen. Roughly made. Cheap to buy, yet how precious it had once been.

In all her time with him she had never told him the details of what she had seen, that day one summer. Had he grasped this shard of hope with any real understanding, she wondered?

She rode to the tree. Scathach lay over the withers of her horse, his arms dangling; there had been no way to arrange his butchered corpse with more dignity.

She rode to the tree. She looked up.

Bare branches, winter-stripped against the fading sky. And yet when she had peered down at Scathach’s body she had looked through leaves, through summer. There was no fire there, now, no sign of life, nor of the spirit that had once shrieked at the local folk who had emerged from the fortress demesne to loot and honour the dead: Four black-robed women and one man, robed in grey, a greybeard: he had understood the mythology of stone. The grey stone lay there now, chipped by his blade, cold on the ground, marking the place of rescue.

They had carried the body away on a rude cart. But they had built a pyre for Scathach, and in so honouring the man they had indicated their recognition of him.

She looked up. She dismounted, then climbed the tree, tugging and hauling herself high into the branches.

Go into Lavondyss as a child
…

This was not the tree as she remembered it. Had she positioned herself here? Or over here? Which of the various branches had been the branch along which she had lain, and watched the dying Scathach? The tree was not the same in this world. She could only approximate the position.

So she found a place in the old tree which gave her a familiar view of the land. There she lay, cold and wounded, clutching the branch and staring at the corpse of Scathach, limp over the black horse.

There was no romance here, only the sickening remnants of battle, the dead looted, some still lying, waiting for the carrion eaters.

Night came close.

Scathach had lain just so … and she had been here … and had seen there
…

And so if she twisted round, perhaps she could see back to her own world, to the meadow … what was it
called? And the stream … it had had a name once, but she couldn’t remember it. And that wide field. Windy Field? And the house, and her home …

Perhaps she should fetch her masks. Perhaps one of them would allow her to see more clearly: the ghost in the land, or the child that she had been, or the old dog, or the rooks in the tall trees, or the woman …

She twisted on the branch, the wound in her leg hurting very much, still bleeding. She ignored the pain. She stared at the winter world through every aspect of this old tree. Somewhere below, only a few minutes away but in another world completely, she was running back to the house, Simon in hot pursuit.

What did you see? Tallis! Tell me. What did you see?

Somewhere close, somewhere – yes! just minutes away! – somewhere she was a child again, and Gaunt was pottering, and her father was getting angry with her antics …

And it was summer, late summer. Mr Williams was walking in the countryside, listening for odd songs, looking for that magic to be found in a new song. The festival would soon be under way. The dancers would dance, the mannequin would shiver and give birth to the green girl. The antler and noose would be used in the mock execution of the Morrisman, and the wild jig would bring everyone on to the green, laughing and screaming in the hot, summer night …

But there was only winter. And the field of the mythical battle of Bavduin, or Badon, or the Teutoburgian Wood, any of the names which had characterized this mythical confrontation to end an era, to end hope … This was the centre of the field, and a tree marked that place, and to this centre one hero among heroes always came …

She had seen Scathach.

She might have seen … who? Any of a thousand
princes who had crawled away from the fire to shed their blood and start a legend …

If I jump from the tree I will be home again. I can start again. If I jump
…

Temptation seduced her. Her horse reared as she fell and Scathach’s naked corpse slipped from its insufficient bindings, falling awkwardly, an ungainly mass of pale flesh and bone, head turned up, eyes dull. She had not passed into another world.

Tallis tugged the body back on to the animal, then climbed into the saddle behind it. There was nothing for her, now, nothing apart from Harry. She did not believe that she could bring Scathach back to life, but he could at least be with her in the fortress as she made her journey into the first forest, as she went in search of whatever it was that had ensnared Harry, made him a prisoner in Old Forbidden Place.

She returned through the black woods, past the shrines, to the narrow defile which marked the nearer barrier to the castle. She rode down the steep path, then up through the collapsed gate and into the area of the pinnacle of land on which the fortress had been constructed. On the way she placed her masks in the shrine cave by the tents, where the fire burned.