Mythago Wood - 1 (6 page)

To what end, Chris?' I asked quietly, and in all truth could not see a reason
for so tampering with the ancient forces that inhabited both woodland and human
spirit. Christian was clearly obsessed with the idea of raising these dead
forms, of finishing something the old man had begun. But in my reading of his
notebook, and in my conversation with Christian, I had not heard a single word
that explained
why
so bizarre a state of nature should be so important to
the ones who studied it.

Christian had an answer. And as he spoke to me his voice was hollow, the mark
of his uncertainty, the stigma of his lack of conviction in the truth of what he
said. 'Why, to study the earliest times of man, Steve. From these mythagos we
can learn so much of how it was, and how it was hoped to be. The aspirations,
the visions, the cultural identity of a time so far gone that even its stone
monuments are incomprehensible to us. To learn. To communicate through those
persistent images of our past that are locked in each and every one of us.'

He stopped speaking, and there was the briefest of silences, interrupted only
by the heavy rhythmic sound of the clock. I said, 'I'm not convinced, Chris.'
For a moment I thought he would shout his anger; his face flushed, his whole
body tensed up, furious with my calm dismissal of his script. But the fire
softened, and he frowned, staring at me almost helplessly. 'What does that
mean?'

'Nice-sounding words; no conviction.'

After a second he seemed to acknowledge some truth in what I said. 'Perhaps
my conviction has gone, then, buried beneath . . . beneath the other thing.
Guiwenneth. She's become my main reason for going back now.'

I remembered his callous words of a while ago, about how she had no life yet
a thousand lives. I understood instantly, and wondered how so obvious a fact
could have remained so doggedly elusive to me. 'She was a mythago herself,' I
said. 'I understand now.'

'She was my father's mythago, a girl from Roman times, a manifestation of the
Earth Goddess, the young warrior princess who, through her own suffering, can
unite the tribes.'

'Like Queen Boadicea,' I said.

'Boudicca,' Christian corrected, then shook his head. 'Boudicca was
historically real, although much of her legend was inspired by the myths and
tales of the girl Guiwenneth. There are no recorded legends about Guiwenneth. In
her own time, and her own culture, the oral tradition held sway. Nothing was
written; but no' Roman observer, or later Christian chronicler, refers to her
either, although the old man thought that early tales of Queen Guenevere might
have drawn partly from the forgotten legends. She's lost from popular memory - '

'But not from hidden memory!'

Christian nodded. 'That's exactly right. Her story is very old, very
familiar. Legends of Guiwenneth rose out of stories from previous cultures,
perhaps right back to the post-glacial period, or to the time of the Urscumug
itself!'

'And each of those earlier forms of the girl will be in the wood too?'

Christian shrugged. 'The old man saw none, and nor have I. But they
must
be
there.'

'And what
is
her story, Chris?'

He looked at me peculiarly. 'That's hard to say. Our dear father tore the
pages about Guiwenneth from his diary. I have no idea why, or where he hid them.
I only know what he told me. Oral tradition again.' He smiled. 'She was the
child to the younger of two sisters, by a young warrior banished to a secret
camp in the wild-woods. The elder sister was the wife of one of the invaders,
and she was both barren and jealous, and stole the girl child. The child was
rescued by nine hawks, or somesuch, sent by her father. She was brought up in
the forest communities all around the country, under the guardianship of the
Lord of Animals. When she was old enough, and strong enough, she returned,
raised the ghost of her warlord father, and drove the invaders out.'

'Not much to go on,' I said.

'A fragment only,' Christian agreed. "There is something about a bright
stone, in a valley that breathes. Whatever else the old man learned about her,
or from her, he has destroyed.'

'Why, I wonder?'

Christian said nothing for a moment, then added, 'Anyway, legends of
Guiwenneth inspired many tribes to take offensive action against the invader,
whether they were Wessex Chieftain, which is to say, Bronze Age, Stonehenge and
all that; Belgic Celts, which is to say Iron Age; or Romans.' His gaze became
distant for a moment. 'And then she was formed in this wood, and I found her and
came to love her. She was not violent, perhaps because the old man himself could
not think of a woman being violent. He imposed a structure on her, disarming
her, leaving her quite helpless in the forest.'

'How long did you know her?' I asked, and he shrugged.

'I can't tell, Steve. How long have I been away?'

'Twelve days or so.'

'As short as that?' He seemed surprised. 'I thought more than three weeks.
Perhaps I knew her for no time at all, then, but it seems like months. I lived
in the forest with her, trying to understand her language, trying to teach her
mine, speaking with signs and yet always able to talk quite deeply. But the old
man pursued us right to the heartwoods, right to the end. He wouldn't let up -
she was
his
girl, and he had been as struck by her as had I.I found him,
one day, exhausted and terrified, half buried by leaves at the forest edge. I
took him home and he was dead within the month. That's what I meant by his
having had a reason for attacking me. I took Guiwenneth from him.'

'And then she was taken from you. Shot dead.'

'A few months later, yes. I became a little too happy, a little too content.
I wrote to you because I had to tell
someone
about her . . . clearly that
was too much for fate. Two days later I found her in a glade, dying. She might
have lived if I could have got help to her in the forest, and left her there. I
carried her out of the wood, though, and she died.' He stared at me and the
expression of sadness hardened to one of resolve. 'But when I'm back in the
wood, her myth image from my own subconscious has a chance of being formed . . .
she might be a little tougher than my father's version, but I can find her
again, Steve, if I look hard, if I can find that energy you asked about, if I
can get into the deepest part of the wood, to that central vortex . . .'

I looked at the map again, at the spiral field around the hogback glade.
'What's the problem? Can't you find it?'

'It's well defended. I get near it, but I can't ever get beyond the field
that's about two hundred yards around it. I find myself walking in elaborate
circles even though I'm convinced I've walked straight. I can't get in, and
what-ever's in there can't get out. All the mythagos are tied to their genesis
zones, although the Twigling, and Guiwenneth too, could get to the very edge of
the forest, down by the pool.'

But that wasn't true! And I'd spent a shaky night to prove it. I said, 'One
of the mythagos has come out of the wood ... a tall man with the most
unbelievably terrifying hound. He came into the yard and ate a leg of pork.'

Christian looked stunned. 'A mythago? Are you sure?'

'Well, no. I had no idea at all what he was until now. But he stank, was
filthy, had obviously lived in the woods for months, spoke a strange language,
carried a bow and arrows . . .'

'And ran with a hunting dog. Yes, of course. It's a late Bronze Age, early
Iron Age image, very widespread. The Irish have taken him to their own with
Cuchulainn, made a big hero out of him, but he's one of the most powerful of the
myth images, recognizable all across Europe.' Christian frowned, then. 'I don't
understand ... a year ago I saw him, and avoided him, but he was fading fast,
decaying ... it happens to them after a while. Something must have fed the
mythago, strengthened it. . .'

'Some
one,
Chris.'

'But who?' It dawned on him, then, and his eyes widened slightly. 'My God.
Me. From my own mind. It took the old man years, and I thought it would take me
a lot longer, many more months in the woodlands, much more isolation. But it's
started already, my own interaction with the vortex . . .'

He had gone quite pale, and he walked to where his staff was propped against
the wall, picked it up and weighed it in his hands. He stared at it, touched the
markings upon it.

'You know what this means,' he said quietly, and before I could answer went
on, 'She'll form. She'll come back; my Guiwenneth. She may be back already.'

'Don't go rushing off again, Chris. Wait a while; rest.'

He placed his staff against the wall again. 'I don't dare. If she has formed
by now, she's in danger. I have to go back.' He looked at me and smiled thinly,
apologetically. 'Sorry, brother. Not much of a homecoming for you.'

As quickly as this, after the briefest of reunions, I had lost Christian
again. He was in no mood to talk, too distracted by the thought of Guiwenneth
alone and trapped in the forest to allow me much of an insight into his plans,
and into his hopes and fears for some resolution to their impossible love
affair.

I wandered through the kitchen and the rest of the house as he gathered his
provisions together. Again and again he assured me that he would be gone for no
more than a week, perhaps two. If she was in the wood he would have found her by
that time; if not, then he would return and wait a while before going back to
the deep zones and trying to form her mythago. In a year, he said, many of the
more hostile mythagos would have faded into non-existence, and she would be
safer. His thoughts were confused, his plan that he would strengthen her to
allow her the same freedom as the man and the hound did not seem supportable on
the evidence from our father's notes; but Christian was a determined man.

If one mythago could escape, then so could the one he loved.

One idea that appealed to him was that I should come with him as far as the
glade where we had made camp as children, and pitch a tent there. This could be
a regular rendezvous for us, he said, and it would keep his time sense on the
right track. And if I spent time in the forest I might encounter other mythagos,
and could report on their state. The glade he had in mind was at the edge of the
wood, and quite safe.

Late the following morning we set off along the south track. A pale yellow
sun hung high above the forest. It was a cool, bright day, the air full of the
scent of smoke, drifting from the distant farm where the stubbly remains of the
summer harvest were being burned. We walked in silence until we came to the
mill-pond; I had assumed Christian would enter the oak woodland here, but wisely
he decided against it, not so much because of the strange movements we had seen
there as children, but because of the marshy conditions. Instead, we walked on
until the woodland bordering the track thinned. Here Christian turned off the
path.

I followed him inwards, seeking the easiest route between tangles of bracken
and nettles, enjoying the heavy stillness. The trees were small, here at the
edge, but within a hundred yards they began to show their real age, great
gnarled oak trunks, hollow and half-dead, twisting up from the ground, almost
groaning beneath the weight of their branches. The ground rose slightly, and the
tangled undergrowth was broken by weathered, lichen-covered stubs of grey
limestone. We passed over the crest and the earth dipped sharply down, and a
subtle change came over the woodland. It seemed darker, somehow, more alive, and
I noticed that the shrill September bird-sound of the forest edge was replaced,
here, by a more sporadic, mournful song.

Christian beat his way through bramble thickets, and I trudged wearily after,
and we soon came to the large glade where, years before, we had made our camp.
One particularly large oak tree dominated the surrounds, and we laughed as we
traced the faded initials we had once carved there. In its branches we had made
our lookout tower, but we had seen very little from that leafy vantage point.

'Do I look the part?' asked Christian, holding his arms out, and I grinned as
I surveyed his caped figure, the rune-inscribed staff looking less odd, now,
more functional.

'You look like something. Quite what I don't know.'

He glanced around the clearing. 'I'll do my best to get back here as often as
I can. If anything goes wrong, I'll try and leave a message if I can't find you,
some mark to let you know . . .'

'Nothing's going to go wrong,' I said with a smile. It was clear that he
didn't wish me to accompany him beyond this glade, and that suited me. I felt a
chill, an odd tingle, a sense of being watched. Christian noticed my discomfort
and admitted that he felt it too, the presence of the wood, the gentle breathing
of the trees.

We shook hands, then embraced awkwardly, and he turned on his heels and paced
off into the gloom. I watched him go, then listened, and only when all sound had
gone did I set about pitching the small tent.

For most of September the weather remained cool and dry, a dull sort of month
that enabled me to drift through the days in a very low-key state. I worked on
the house, read some more of father's notebook (but quickly tired of the
repetitive images and thoughts) and with decreasing frequency walked into the
woodlands and sat near, or in the tent, listening for Christian, cursing the
midges that haunted the place, and watching for any hint of movement.

With October came rain and the abrupt, almost startling realization that
Christian had been gone for nearly a month. The time had slipped by, and instead
of feeling concerned for him I had merely assumed that he knew what he was
doing, and would return when he was quite ready. But he had been absent for
weeks without even the slightest sign. He could surely have come back to the
glade once, and left some mark of his passing.

Now I began to feel more
concern for his safety than
perhaps was
warranted. As soon as the rain stopped I trudged back through the forest and
waited out the rest of the day in the miserable, leaking canvas shelter. I saw
hares, and a wood owl, and heard distant movements that did not respond to my
cries of 'Christian? Is that you?'

It got colder. I spent more time in the tent, creating a sleeping bag out of
blankets and some tattered oilskins I found in the cellar of Oak Lodge. I
repaired the splits in the tent, and stocked it with food and beer, and dry wood
for fires. By the middle of October I noticed that I could not spend more than
an hour at the house before becoming restless, an unease that could only be
dispelled by returning to the glade and taking up my watching post, seated
cross-legged just inside the tent, watching the gloom a few yards away. On
several occasions I took long, rather nervous sorties further into the forest,
but I disliked the sensation of stillness and the tingling of my skin which
seemed to say repeatedly that I was being watched. All this was imagination, of
course, or an extremely sensitive response to woodland animals, for on one
occasion, when I ran screaming and yelling at the thicket wherein I imagined the
voyeur was crouched, I saw nothing but a red squirrel go scampering in panic up
into the crossed and confused branches of its home oak.

Where
was
Christian? I tacked paper messages as deep in the wood, and
in as many locations, as I could. But I found that wherever I walked too far
into the great dip that seemed to be swallowing the forest down, I would, at
some point within the span of a few hours, find myself approaching the glade and
the tent again. Uncanny, yes, and infuriating too; but I began to get an idea of
Christian's own frustration at not being able to maintain a straight line in the
dense oakwood. Perhaps, after all, there
was
some sort of field of force,
complex and convoluted, that channelled intruders back on to an outward track.

And November came, and it was very cold indeed. The rain was sporadic and
icy, but the wind reached down through the dense, browning foliage of the forest
and seemed to find its way through clothes and oilskin and flesh to the cooling
bones beneath. I was miserable, and my searches for Christian grew more angry,
more frustrated. My voice was often hoarse with shouting, my skin blistered and
scratched from climbing trees. I lost track of time, realizing on more than one
occasion, and with some shock, that I had been two, or perhaps three days in the
forest-without returning to the house. Oak Lodge grew stale and deserted. I used
it to wash, to feed, to rest, but as soon as the worst ravages of my body were
corrected, thoughts of Christian, anxiety about him, grew in my mind and pulled
me back to the glade, as surely as if I were a metal filing tugged to a magnet.

I began to suspect that something terrible had happened to him; or perhaps
not terrible, just natural: if there really were boars in the wood, he might
have been gored by one, and be either dead or dragging himself from the
heart-woods to the edge, unable to cry for help. Or perhaps he had fallen from a
tree, or quite simply gone to sleep in the cold and wet and failed to revive in
the morning.

I searched for any sign of his body, or of his having passed by, and I found
absolutely nothing, although I discovered the spoor of some large beast, and
marks on the lower trunks of several oaks that looked like nothing other than
the scratchings of a tusked animal.

But my mood of depression passed, and by mid-November I was quite confident
again that Christian was alive. My feelings, now, were that he had somehow
become trapped in this autumnal forest.

For the first time in two weeks I went into the village, and after obtaining
food supplies, I picked up the papers that had been accumulating at the tiny
newsagents. Skimming the front pages of the weekly local, I noticed an item
concerning the decaying bodies of a man and an Irish wolfhound, discovered in a
ditch on farmland near Grimley. Foul play was not suspected. I felt no emotion,
apart from a curious coldness, a sense of sympathy for Christian, whose dream of
freedom for Guiwenneth was surely no more than that: a fervent hope, a desire
doomed to frustration.

As for mythagos, I had only two encounters, neither of them of much note. The
first was with a shadowy man-form that skirted the clearing, watching me, and
finally ran into the darkness, striking at the trunks of trees with a short,
wooden stick. The second meeting was with the Twigling, whose shape I followed
stealthily as he walked to the mill-pond and stood in the trees, staring across
at the boathouse. I felt no real fear of these manifestations, merely a slight
apprehension. But it was only after the second meeting that I began to realize
how alien the wood was to the mythagos, and how alien the mythagos were to the
wood. These creatures, created far away from their natural age, echoes of a past
given substance, were equipped with a life, a language and a certain ferocity
that was quite inappropriate to the war-scarred world of 1947. No wonder the
aura of the woodland was so charged with a sense of solitude, an infectious
loneliness that had come to inhabit the body of my father, and then Christian,
and which was even now crawling through my own tissues, and would trap me if I
allowed it.

It was at this time, too, that I began to hallucinate. Notably at dusk, as I
stared into the woodlands, I saw movement at the edge of my vision. At first I
put this down to tiredness, or imagination, but I remembered clearly the passage
from my father's notebook in which he described how the pre-mythagos, the
initial images, always appeared at his peripheral vision. I was frightened at
first, unwilling to acknowledge that such creatures could be resident in my own
mind, and that my own interaction with the woodland had begun far earlier than
Christian had thought; but after a while I sat and tried to see details of them.
I failed to do so. I could sense movement, and the occasional manlike shape, but
whatever field was inducing their appearance was not yet strong enough to pull
them into full view; either that, or my mind could not yet control their
emergence.

On the 24th of November I went back to the house and spent a few hours
resting and listening to the wireless. A thunderstorm passed overhead and I
watched the rain and the darkness, feeling wretched and cold. But as soon as the
air cleared, and the clouds brightened, I draped my oilskin about my shoulders
and headed back to the glade. I had not expected to find anything different, and
so what should have been a surprise was more of a shock.

The tent had been demolished, its contents strewn and trampled into the
sodden turf of the clearing. Part of the guy rope dangled from the higher
branches of the large oak, and the ground hereabouts was churned as if there had
been a fight. As I walked into the space I noticed that the ground was pitted by
strange footprints, round and cleft, like hooves, I thought. Whatever the beast
had been it had quite effectively torn the canvas shelter to tatters.

I noticed then how silent the forest was, as if holding its breath and
watching. Every hair on my body stood on end, and my heartbeat was so powerful
that I thought my chest would burst. I stood by the ruined tent for just a
second or two and the panic hit me, making my head spin and the forest seem to
lean towards me. I fled from the glade, crashing into the sopping undergrowth
between two thick oak trunks. I ran through the gloom for several yards before
realizing I was running
away
from the woodland edge. I think I cried out,
and turned and began to run back.

A spear thudded heavily into the tree beside me and I had run into the black
wood shaft before I could stop; a hand gripped my shoulder and flung me against
the tree. I shouted out in fear, staring into the mud-smeared, gnarled face of
my attacker. He shouted back at me.

'Shut up, Steve! For God's sake, shut up!'

My panic quietened, my voice dropped to a whimper and I peered hard at the
angry man who held me. I was Christian, I realized, and my relief was so intense
that I laughed, and for long moments failed to notice what a total change had
come about him.

He was looking back towards the glade. 'You've got to get out of here,' he
said, and before I could respond he had wrenched me into a run, and was
practically dragging me back to the tent.

In the clearing he hesitated and looked at me. There was no smile from behind
the mask of mud and browning leaves. His eyes shone, but they were narrowed and
lined. His hair was slick and spiky. He was naked but for a breechclout and a
ragged skin jacket that could not have supplied much warmth. He carried three
viciously pointed spears. Gone was the skeletal thinness of summer. He was
muscular and hard, deep-chested and heavy-limbed. He was a man made for
fighting.

'You've got to get out of the wood, Steve; and for God's sake don't come
back.'

'What's happened to you, Chris . . .?' I stuttered, but he shook his head and
pulled me across the clearing and into the woods again, towards the south track.

Immediately he stopped, staring into gloom, holding me back. 'What is it,
Chris?'

And then I heard it "too, a heavy crashing sound, something picking its
way through the bracken and the trees towards us. Following Christian's gaze I
saw a monstrous shape, twice as high as a man, but man-shaped and stooped, black
as night save for the great white splash of its face, still indistinct in the
distance and greyness.

'God, it's broken out!' said Christian. 'It's got between us and the edge.'

'What is it? A mythago?'

'The
mythago,' said Christian quickly, and turned and fled back across
the clearing. I followed, all tiredness suddenly gone from my body.

'The Urscumug? That's if? But it's not human . . . it's animal. No human was
ever that tall.'

Looking back as I ran, I saw it enter the glade and move across the open
space so fast I thought I was watching a speeded-up film. It plunged into the
wood behind us and was lost in darkness again, but it was running now, weaving
between trees as it pursued us, closing the distance with incredible speed.