Avilion by Robert Holdstock
‘That, I know now, will be impossible.’
‘Then find life’s pleasure soon. Leave me, Yssobel. Leave me alone. Don’t follow me. Don’t waste your life.’
And as if Guiwenneth’s words could command the oracle, the Diadoran shield became just reflection and brightness. The image was gone.
Yssobel banged the surface with her fist, crying for a moment. Then that reassuring hand upon her shoulder, and when she stood, Odysseus was there.
‘I heard your side of a difficult conversation.’
She wiped the tears from her eyes, angry at herself. ‘My mother is stubborn. I must find this Legion.’
‘Shall I hold you for a moment? Or shall we get on?’
Meeting his gaze, she saw warmth that she remembered, softness in eyes that could narrow to a glitter of fury. Eyes that would see death. Eyes that would become blind to the fury of the man, when Troy would be breached.
‘Yes. Hold me. Hold me hard. Stay with me until I can find this night army.’
Was this the man she had known from the villa? Or had she created him, merely the memory of a man she’d loved, imbuing the ‘change’ with a faint memory of that love? The marks upon his body were the same as she remembered. The gentleness of his arms was as she remembered. The softness of his kiss was as she remembered. The sadness in him, the sense of being alone, was certainly that of the man who had been the Odysseus of her own days, before he had found the island where he would settle, where he would find the wife he loved - Penelope, as she had learned it from Steven - and father the son he would adore.
There were times when Yssobel despaired at being this half creature, half human; the red and green conflicting within her head and heart.
But she was green now, and so was this man-myth. And he was holding her with compassion and understanding:
I heard your side of what must have been a difficult conversation.
She realised she loved him, even if he was not the man who had danced with her by the fire, even of he was not the same young Greek who had brooded, future-pining, in the cave in Serpent Pass.
She had no hesitation. She invited his love. He welcomed it.
And after, he said, ‘I watched you when you thumped that shield, when you cried. So I ask you: will you watch me now?’
Yssobel agreed readily, tying her hair into Jack’s silver clasp, stepping back again into one of the dangling shields and laughing as she set off a chain of ringing. Odysseus clothed himself, and sighed. ‘My life is a reflection. And I’ve done none of it yet! Palaces, palaces, walls, shields. Wherever I go I see myself reflected!’
‘In my own eyes, you are reflected with affection.’
He gave Yssobel a knowing smile. ‘So I gather. But alas.’
‘Alas ...’
‘Stay with me for a few moments more. One more glance.
There is a question I need to ask - and then we’ll try to find Legion. This, for the moment, is your time, not mine. But please watch me as I’ve watched you. I need to know you’re there.’
‘I’ll be here,’ she said quietly.
She watched him as he crouched by the giant shield, his head bowed, his voice a whisper. And she heard the name. Penelope. He was seeking hope, hope in the woman who would be his homeward cause after the great war against Troy. This was ill-advised, but Greeks were Greeks, and Odysseus was a canny man, and no doubt he was building this painful vision into his strategy. Whatever he was seeing, it made him angry. Judging by his bodily actions beside the shield, he was killing men. Then he was whispering love.
My life is a reflection . . .
No sooner than having loved one woman with all his body and all his strength, he was loving another in dream and anticipation. Yssobel didn’t find this easy, but she guarded his back. This had been her promise. And she took the clasp from her hair:
Avilion is what we make of it.
And looked at it, and used it as a charm of hope. Hope that she would return with her mother to the home where her mother belonged.
It rises. It rises. It turns face about, turning back, taken aback by the call from Yssobel.
The resurrected man gathers his commanders. ‘We go back.’
‘Back where?’
‘There is something I have to do. We go back.’
‘Time is taking us to a great confrontation. That’s what we do. We cannot disobey the journey.’
Christian turned on the man who had spoken. He drew his blade, pushed it hard into the man’s body. As the man sank, so Christian engaged the gaze of all the other men under his command. ‘We turn back. Do we turn back? I say we turn back. There is something I have to confront. Are any of you prepared to argue?’
‘We are Legion,’ said one of the other men. ‘But if you say we turn back, then we turn back. As long as we can return to serve Time and its demands. Will you agree to that?’
‘I agree to that.’
There was general approval for the strategy.
They found Uzana in the room of monsters. She was holding an apple, eaten to the core, standing in front of the gaping, tooth-terrifying mouth of a huge reptile, staring at it.
‘These are such strange beasts,’ she said as Yssobel approached. ‘There is life in them, and no life at all. This one could have snapped me in half in a heart’s beat. It clearly doesn’t want the remains of my apple.’
She tossed the core into the creature’s maw, wiped her fingers on her skirt and looked around, all curiosity and innocence.
‘If these beasts existed, I’m glad not to have lived in their world. The size of them!’
‘Where’s Narine?’
She focused again. ‘Narine? She’s found a room of oracles. She’s trying to find Legion for you. There’s a hard time to come, she thinks, and I agree. She’s also trying to find Arthur.’
She grinned. ‘If he’s in a bad mood, we’re all in trouble.’
Arthur wakes from the dream
A bird was sitting on his chest; dark-feathered, not pecking, curious. It flew off at the very moment when he opened his eyes, flying straight into the trunk of a tree, falling, then flying on; bruised but not life-abandoned.
Arthur sat up. The air was sweet with the smell of the lake. His wound was blood-congealed; painful. There was life in him, life he had thought taken. He was among the trees; his men were asleep by the lake.
He rose unsteadily, groaning with the discomfort of the deep strike that Morthdred had inflicted upon him. He realised suddenly that he was naked.
This was very puzzling.
He walked down to the lake’s edge and kicked Bydavere. His close companion snorted out of sleep, looked up, then sat up, startled. ‘Where in the name of the Good God have you just come from? We sent you off in the barge. With the women.’
‘Clearly not. Give me something to cover myself. I’m freezing.’
‘I don’t understand it. How can you be here when we dispatched you to Avilion?’
‘Clothes! Give me clothes.’
‘A cloak?’
‘Good thinking,’ he agreed, with a cold, narrowed look at the other man. ‘I don’t imagine reeds and rushes would do it.’
Covered and warmed in Bydavere’s cloak, Arthur crouched among his companions; they ate frugally. They all seemed nervous. They discussed the situation.
‘We put somebody on the barge,’ Bydavere said. ‘A body that looked like you, same copper-coloured hair.’
‘How heavy?’
‘Quite light. Now you mention it.’
Arthur was neither angry nor amused. He shook his head. ‘Bydavere: my death has been stolen from me. By whom I don’t know. I don’t understand it. And I dreamed a whispered voice: I never knew why I would steal the armour, just that I would have to do it. Let me steal this little time inside your skin. Strange words. But they have left me with life. What shall I do? Take revenge or show gratitude?’
Bydavere sank back on his haunches, his face a mask of confusion. He scratched at his lan
‘I’d be grateful just to be alive again,’ said Emereth. ‘Though, of course, this could be a death trick. You look quick, which is to say, not dead. Which is a good thing. But possibly you’re not. Though if you’re not, then quite what you are is a difficult thought to think with.’
‘Thank you. I assure you I’m alive.’
Emereth smiled and nodded, glancing nervously at Bydavere. ‘Of course you are. Bydavere?’
Bydavere said, ‘This was not a life stolen, nor a death. It was a fate stolen. Arthur: in my briefly considered judgement, you have been denied for the moment, only for the moment, the life after death that will become your - how can I put it, how to put it? - your life-after-death heritage. I have always thought that there is something about you that will last. God knows what that something will turn out to be, but something. Don’t seek vengeance. Seek truth. And seek the person who - I suspect, from the smell . . . did I tell you about the smell?’
‘No,’ Arthur said darkly. ‘You did not tell me about the smell.’
‘It was a woman’s smell. I’m sure of it. I’m not without experience in that arena. Even as we put the body on the barge, I thought: this is not Arthur. Women smell different to Arthur.’
‘I sincerely hope so,’ Arthur agreed quietly.
‘We must find this woman. For whatever reason: she has claimed your death, and she needed to claim it. No revenge at first, therefore, just assistance. And then revenge. That’s what we do.’
‘It is indeed,’ said Arthur, and reached to take his friend’s hand in his. ‘It is indeed. But she went across the lake. How do we get across the lake?’
‘By the Good God, Arthur,’ Bydavere sighed. ‘Can’t you ever ask a question that has an easy answer?’
In the oracle room, in the Palace of Green Porcelain, Yssobel pulled back from the whispering voices she had heard. The oracle was a rock-carved well of crystal water, its rim carved in the shape of three hares on their sides, limbs entwined, heads turned up to the listener. The eerie sounds of the conversation between Arthur and Bydavere shifted between the open mouths of these three stone-shaped images of the fast-moving animals.
Yssobel recognised the voices, even though they were spoken almost with a faintness that she might have associated with an echo on the wind. She had heard the men speaking as they had nursed Arthur, and later, as they had cried and joked before sinking into the drunken slumber that had given her her opportunity.
To steal his death.
Narine had called loudly for Yssobel when she had whispered Arthur’s name into this particular museum exhibit and had begun to hear a conversation. The scene, again a reflection in this place of memory and reflections, had shimmered on the water.
‘He’s coming for you,’ Uzana said. ‘I’ve collected men like him before. They’re confused at first, thinking they’re still alive - when they’re not! But at the end they just get angry. Your man is the other way round. But yes, as certain as a crow feeds on dead meat, he’s coming for you.’
‘He’ll take the same barge,’ Narine agreed. ‘Those two men on the barge will tell him everything. They’re just transporters. This way, that way. They have everything to lose if they fail.’
‘This man Arthur, and his cohort; they’ll have a long chase,’ Odysseus said thoughtfully. ‘They will not know in which direction we’ve gone.’
Narine laughed, looking scornfully at the young Greek. ‘Don’t you see? Didn’t you hear? Bydavere is a hound! He will follow Yssobel’s scent like a hound!’ And she added, with a small nod of her head. ‘Oh yes. They’ll know where to follow.’
‘How can a man be a hound?’ Odysseus asked. ‘Are you saying he can beast-change his body? Man into dog?’
Narine laughed again, then put her arms around his shoulders, holding her mouth close to his ear, speaking softly, though the other two could hear.
‘A hound is cunning; a hound uses strategy; a hound uses all its senses and its sense; it disguises itself in the wood; it waits for its moment. It slaughters. And Bydavere,’ she added, ‘is very much like you. Or what you will become, from what I saw in your palace.’
She pulled away. Yssobel saw the spark in her Greek friend’s eyes, the hint of a smile; that hint of pride at having been compared favourably to a cunning animal.
‘In which case, I imagine we have more work to do,’ he said. ‘This great army is turning, coming back. But back to where?’
Uzana was knocking gently at the thin crystal cage that contained the mummified corpse of a woman, sitting on a three-legged stool, a snake around her ankles. ‘I don’t think we’re going to get much out of her.’
Narine consulted the three hares. The water shimmered, seemed for a moment to gleam with flashes of vision, but it revealed nothing. The Oracle of the Three Hares, as Yssobel decided to name it, clearly needed time to recover from the first effort.
On impulse, she lifted from her neck the silver clasp and finger ring that Jack had made for her. Avilion is what we make of it.
And on the small ring, crudely inscribed: Here to there. There to here.
She remembered what he’d said by the forge. How each of them would find a different world, and each return. Now she saw a different vision in the beating and shaping of the metal.
‘Legion is coming to Avilion,’ she said. ‘It’s coming here. But where is “here”? Where in Avilion?’
On an impulse, Yssobel threw the small ring into the air and let it fall onto the tiled floor, wondering if it would spin and roll to the appropriate oracle, an echo of a child’s game that she and Jack had played with a pebble and a ring of childish treasures. But the ring fell dead and still. She replaced it on her finger.
And then, as they walked back towards the entrance of the museum, Yssobel discovered the answer to her question. As she passed the wide, slowly moving picture of the men running across the field, she was surprised to see that it had changed. Now it showed a deeply wooded valley, with the tall towers and broad ivy-covered walls of a fortress, almost growing within the forest. And slowly rising into that scene were the shining armoured shapes of men and horses, visible among the trees.
Narine said, ‘That’s the Sylvan Fortress. The windows of the towers all look out towards different worlds.’
Yssobel knew that well enough. She had created the castle in the forest at the very heart of her paintings of Avilion as she imagined it. Once a beautiful castle, the land in which it stood had suddenly risen up and consumed it. Tree and stone had mated and become a single entity. She watched the slow movement of the army: tiny figures, but a multitude of them.
‘If that’s this army called Legion, then my mother is somewhere in the chaos.’
‘And to get there we need a boat,’ said Narine. ‘And there are boats in this place, if we can find them.’
They searched the galleries and soon Uzana’s call brought them to a vast chamber, where a huge, strange ship lay crumbling on its side, its deck rotting, the tatters of sails hanging from broken spars. It dwarfed all the other vessels, but there were hundreds of them, from longships and a galley with eyes painted on its prow that Odysseus recognised as a warship from his own land, to canoes and tiny coracles. Yssobel found a barge that seemed solid enough to take the four of them, and they hauled it slowly from the chamber, and pulled and pushed it to the entrance of the green palace. They rested before taking the boat across the beach, heaving it half into the water before gathering their belongings, weapons and supplies. They let the horses go, then launched the craft and hauled themselves aboard, taking up the oars.
The Sylvan Fortress
The crossing had not taken long. Soon high cliffs emerged from the sea mist and they rowed towards an obvious ravine, a narrow entrance. Now they rowed against the flow, and in heavy shadow as the rock rose sombre and sinister above them. But quite soon they emerged into the shallows and into the light.
&
Walking and resting, they made their way inwards and suddenly, startlingly, they were at the edge of a steep decline, and staring out over a thick green canopy of forest. There, distantly, were the towers and the walls of the deserted Sylvan Fortress.
Narine turned to Yssobel and smiled. ‘This is where we leave you.’ She looked at Odysseus. ‘Goodbye, you hound.’
‘Why are you leaving?’ Odysseus asked.
‘Because we smell the coming deaths, and we will have a different role than as your guides.’
Uzana embraced Yssobel, but said nothing. The two collectors, the two queens of the dead, turned and walked back the way they had come. Yssobel watched them for a while and then, quite suddenly, they seemed to rise into the air, the brightness of their clothing now turned black.
It was a hard descent to the wide valley. There were human shapes in the trees, some male, some female, all slender and very tall. All forests were inhabited by such beings. Odysseus referred to them as dryads. Yssobel knew them as trunklings, her father’s word for them when he occasionally encountered them.
Soon, the massive wall of the fortress emerged from the screen of foliage. The towers were astonishingly high, each with four windows. And indeed, as the painting had shown, where the fortress joined the earth the forest had joined the fortress, wood into stone. The foundations were massive roots, four man-lengths across. The dryads that lay within the bark were giants, naked and gnarled, eyes closed as they slept, though as Yssobel crept past them, sometimes forced to walk over them, eyes would open and the head would emerge slightly to see who or what was intruding on its slumber.