Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) (15 page)

There was a cut on my ankle, no less deep than if real wolf-gut had gouged into me. The blood flowed and I bound the wound carefully.

Angry though I was, all I could think of was the girl’s laugh of surprise that her trick had worked, the glint in her eyes and the sudden apprehension that followed as she knew that she would be punished for causing the longhouse rafters to be broken.

And if indeed she were punished, then no doubt the sting of the wet birch branch sharpened and heightened her power. I don’t know. I could think of nothing from then until the moment, early in the first spring dawn, when I slipped away along the path at dawn, nothing but the girl and the way she had tested me, and teased me.

Yes. I wanted her fingers on my body again.

Yes, I wanted her to read me, though she would have understood nothing.

And yes, I was determined that it would never happen. I knew that if she touched me, now, I would be dead before too long.

She may have conjured a giant swan, and dazzled guileless eyes. I was more aware that she had squatted down and smothered a blazing fire without harm, using the searing heat for magic!

As if exhausted by this recollection of an event so long in his past, Merlin sank down inside the cowl and fell silent. Martin stoked the fire and sparks swirled among the spreading oaks, to dim and die below the black but star-bright void of the night sky
.

Abruptly, the grim figure sat up and drew a wheezing breath, which Martin thought might have been a chuckle. Merlin whispered, ‘It all comes back to me. I can see that time again as clearly as a fish can see the fly
—’

When I left those tribal lands in the far north, Vivien followed me. I had known she would. Since she was young she was trapped in the place by her own inexperience, but at length she learned of the existence of the path, and she used her skills to enter the long walk, the movement around the path that is endless, that is its own world. By the time she took her first faltering step – no doubt aided by the wings of birds, her favourite manifestation – lifetimes had passed, and I was in the land of the Pretini, which you probably know as Albion, or Logres – the place has many names. My bone had still not broken, but the fire that she had extinguished during that simple illusion among the Pohola burned within me, forming a link across the ages.

I constantly dreamed of fire. She burned into me from the years lost.

She ran like a wolf across the land. She swam across the ocean. She slept in caves and moved through the sap in the trees. She came close to me, then found her form again, a powerful woman, now, still seeking to understand the marks upon my body.

The truth is that there is a great attraction in the moment of touching. The moment she touched my painted, patterned flesh, the moment that she felt the
carved bones
below
that flesh, she was not just intrigued, she was seduced. The shaman with his cold hands suffered a similar seduction, but was easy to deny. Vivien was wilier by far, and had the talent of time, the ability to play her strategy across more than a single lifetime’s span.

She knew that she had touched power, touched secrets that could be of great use to her. She intuited that having touched my power she could either have it, or live in its shadow, but that we could not share it. How could we?

If Vivien were to have my skills, she would have to wear my skin. She would have to age by wearing my own age; all beauty would have to be sacrificed to wear the scarred skin of an older man.

Her exuberance, her youth, prevented her from pursuing this until the bone in her body broke. She was clever enough to hold the break, so that though the years passed for her, she aged slowly. As I remained a wolf, seasoned, skilled and always lean, she aged steadily; but she had her charms, and her wings, and there is nothing so youthful as the first flight of a bird at the breaking of dawn.

Old, then, yet still young, Vivien pursued me for the secrets in my flesh.

To confuse her, I created a shadow of myself and sent it back along the path, back to the northlands, travelling towards the sunrise.

It was my intention to meet the shadow again as our
paths crossed, and take it back, but I never found it. It still wanders somewhere; perhaps it was seduced from the path, perhaps it faded. It’s hard to know these things, although I have heard of a land bridge in the far east, where the ice makes a thick bridge between this and another world, so perhaps it strayed further than I realised. It was a small shadow, possessing small magic. More charm than substance, you understand, and though its life should have been long, it would have been at the whim of all creatures.

Nevertheless, the trick worked at first and I was not aware of Vivien again until after I had stayed for many years in the forests of the Caledon.

One day I sniffed her presence. The air in those mountains is very clear. I have always believed smell to be a form of substance, invisible to the eye, continually shed like skin from the body. I knew she was in the land, though still distant, and I packed my things and walked south.

In any case, it was time to leave the Caledon. There was very little of interest in the forests, although the game was good, the game is always good. I had been there for far too long and I was tired of the cold, tired of the flight of gulls, which could take me out across the wide sea but show me only rocks. The ocean to the west is a forbidding place. If there is a magic beyond it, it defied my eyes to see it.

I rested for a few years or so in the land of the Parisii, near a large town called Eboracum. The distress of dogs, one day at dusk, told me that they had smelled the small enchantress and again I fled.

I passed time in high hills, in deep woods, and confronted passing horsemen, often solitary princes or low kings, seeking this, seeking that, the mind of the warrior king in those days was singularly triumphant, and discovering the lost arms and armour of forgotten heroes was all they seemed concerned with.

In each act of confrontation there was a moment – the moment of surprise, as they saw this wild and hairy man screaming at them from the tree – when their thoughts spilled out like sun through a sudden break in clouds. I fed upon these fears and thoughts, and in this way kept abreast of change as I slowly travelled south.

At some point I sent a second shadow north along the path, but this time the trick failed. She found it and turned it round, and I let it pass me by. She pursued me, then, with energy, running through her lives with the agility of a cat. And in time her persistence was rewarded.

Our paths crossed in the fort of Caerleon, one bitter autumn evening, when the cattle and sheep were being drawn back behind the high walls as the light faded, and the fires lit to show the land. There was a raiding party on its way and the stronghold’s warlord, Peredur, was to make a chariot charge against them. Fire and fury was all about me as I stood within the gate and watched the nightland, the confusion and fear of imminent battle. The air was filled with prayers and charms. The blood in the horsemen and the farmers was a sour stench in every corner where they crouched, drinking deeply, waiting for the onslaught.

Vivien came running through the heavy gates just as
they were being closed, her red cape flowing, the cowl back from her long hair and pale, beautiful face. She saw me and ran to me, breathless. ‘Got you! At last.’

She tugged my beard and frowned, then smiled. ‘Still black, still strong. It isn’t fair. You look no different now than then. Are you using charm? Do you need charm?’

I replied as ambiguously as possible. ‘I use charm occasionally. I never
need
to use it. And you?’

‘I use it!’ she said directly, staring at me as if daring me to comment. ‘Oh yes. I use charm.’ Then more immediate concerns occurred to her. ‘Where do I get food? I need water. Will we die? There’s no need for us to die, my feathered arms can carry us both. I’m so glad to see you again. It’s been a long hunt. But where do I get food?’

‘I’ll take you.’

And she fell against me, no longer the enchantress, simply a refugee, exhausted and in need. I led her through the fires and cattle to the heart of the fort. I had pitched my tent here, above a hidden well. This bubbled briefly through the ground and satisfied her need.

Her performance on arrival at the stronghold, her behaviour, I am certain was not a guile, simply the last defiance of her long journey in search of me.

The enemy had built no fires, their warriors scattered in discreet bands from the river to the higher land, north of the fort. Their tactic, clearly, was to invite a night attack. Almost certainly there was a larger band waiting to fire the gates and pillage the stronghold.

I counselled the warlord as to this, but found that his
own seers, by reference to their local augurs, had perceived the same eventuality. They could not, however, locate the bigger army, a task I attended to with as much phony ritual and simple illusion as possible (I was earning my keep, you understand) and discovered them hiding in the overhang of the river bank, a force of horsemen some sixty strong. I could see as well that most of them had come by boat, and that they were unused to the stolen horses with which they had been supplied.

They would be ferocious, then, from the land of the Eriu, probably, but they would have the disadvantage of the night, unfamiliar trails and restless steeds.

This was the sort of language the warlord of Caerleon understood. He divided his horsemen at once, carefully allocating them to two attacking forces.

The lightning raid on the group of men by the river left them shattered. The horses were driven off – twenty recaptured and led back to the fort – and skirmishing along the woodland edge left honours even and the dead paired-up.

The hostiles licked their wounds and marched northwards at dawn, seeking smaller prey. Vivien taunted them for a while with ravens, which she was adept at summoning, while in the fort there was a feeling of the feast and celebration.

But Peredur was furious.

In his eyes he had treated the raiders with honour, he had paired-up the dead, he had won the skirmish. The fact that the Eriu had stayed in his land was an insult to his name.

Grimly, then, he picked his ten best warriors. They put on black cloaks, black armour, black helmets, armed themselves with feathered spears, knives, but no shields. At dawn they rode from the fort in silence, eleven against forty.

Later, near dusk, seven of them returned, Peredur leading the bloody troop, two heads slung by their hair across the neck of his horse, forty sword hands tied to the spears, the four dead knights tied to their flagging mounts.

He sent boats to the twenty Eriu who had survived the second battle and who were now by the river again, to take them home.

For seven months or more, well into the winter, which was fortunately mild, Peredur strengthened the ramparts of the fortress, a tremendous task, filthy and exhausting, but one undertaken with great enthusiasm by the people who sheltered on the hill.

Such was Peredur’s command and authority that only the sourness of the ale was ever complained about, a fault which he addressed at once by sending a raiding party across the wide river to the islands in the marshes, where apples and honey were produced in abundance.

He was a great man, this one, and in the presence of great men, magic is enhanced. As such I was able to move the heavy tree trunks used in the re-construction, and even aid the transport of new gates, heavy blocks of blue-stone that would eventually be hauled down and used as grave markers.

Peredur affected my magic more than any other man. I put wings on his shabby little horses, or so it must
have seemed to his knights, since they were able to ride at the canter for half a day and the horses were as fresh at dusk as at dawn. In this way Peredur patrolled the land to the east as far as Camulodunum and north beyond the seven totems that marked the edge of Eboracum. This was a vast distance for any man to be recognised by name and to have the pattern on his sword known too.

Peredur was truly the offspring of the wolf.

Behind the new walls, the warlord built new houses, as if to say this is my final place; this place will endure.

He enlarged the forges and the bakeries and built new grain stores. He described the house that he wished to construct for me where my tent was pitched, but I refused, tempting though it was. But as if he needed to demonstrate his gratitude, he surrounded the tent with a wicker fence – which made it hard to walk out by night, since he had included only a single gate. But his need was stronger than my irritation, and Vivien and I inhabited a skin house on a birch frame, behind a wall of willow.

We had wanted to be left alone, but we became a place of homage. We were plagued with effigies in straw, with limbs in coarse clay or bread, with painted wood and feather charms. These things accumulated, slung and strung to the wicker, thrown into the tent, buried just around the edge. At night we would gather them in, but by the morning there were twenty more. Some had power, and these we acknowledged and responded to. Most were simple dreams, and we discarded them as quickly as we could, taking them by the sackful to the
deep woods at the bottom of the hills. Vivien dug a shaft there, faster than I have ever seen – I found nothing ominous in this at the time – and plugged it with stone in such a way that we could open it at leisure to deposit more of these charms.

I imagine the shaft is there today, rank and sour with hopeless dreams.

If the scouring of that pit did not disturb me, Vivien’s water magic did.

I had never shown her how to conjure water from the earth – this is a strong magic, and must be carefully applied – but she must have watched me from afar, or spied through the eyes of a bird. I caught her out when I saw her at the forge, bringing water in a bucket. I fled at once to the tent and felt the ground. It was damp. The filling cup was wet as well.

She had found out how to tap the source!

But what was she doing at the forge? I feared the worst, and devised charms against iron, bronze and tin. I was already protected, by my nature, against bone and wood, but in any case these substances were not easily controlled by fire, only subject to its heat.