Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock
She felt an urge to enter Bird Spirit Land and sit on the stone she imagined to be Scathach’s, but she resisted the urge because of what had happened. For some reason she imagined that the meadow, and his grave, were forbidden to her. So she skirted the field and went on to Hunter’s Brook, crouching down and watching the nameless field and the dark stand of woodland by the damp, cool light of the new day.
It was the same wood that she had seen in her vision, and a clay-painted rider had come from it, crying out, grieving for the dead man …
I must cross the field, Tallis thought angrily. I must find its name so that I can cross safely to look for Harry. But it has no marks, no stones, no hillocks, no trees, no scars, no ditches. What are you called? What are you called?
She heard the sound of someone whistling. It was a jaunty melody. It reminded her of songs she had heard throughout her life; Gaunt was always whistling to himself. It was the sort of tune that would soon fill the air at Shadoxhurst, as the dancing and the playing got underway. Only this tune wasn’t coming from a flower-hatted Morris dancer, or gaily-skirted local girl in clogs and bonnet.
Tallis watched the old man carefully. He seemed to have emerged from Ryhope Wood. As she concentrated on the figure the edge of her vision was alive with hovering, darting shapes. He was a mythago, then; she had called him from her own mind, like the Hollower, like Gaberlungi …
The old man walked along the edge of Ryhope Wood, through the long grass and dense bush. Soon the marshy ground began to suck at him. His whistling stopped and his voice grumbled with irritation. He waded out of the undergrowth and came across the dry field, towards Hunter’s Brook. He was limping and used a stick to help in his movement. He saw Tallis crouching on the other side of the water and, as he raised his stick in greeting, so she straightened up.
The stranger was very tall and very robust. He was wearing green trousers and heavy boots and some sort of showerproof jacket that hung on his shoulders like a baggy cloak. His hair was very short and very white and parted precisely, high on one side of his head. His face was pale, quite heavy, but he had a warm and kindly look about him. He smiled at the girl, then pursed his lips and whistled again, arriving at the edge of the stream and easing down to pull off his boots.
‘Not thinking what I was doing,’ the big man called to Tallis. ‘Walking along, enjoying the early morning: straight into a bog. Could have been twenty feet down by now.’
There are bogs in the fields, Tallis thought, but not where you were walking.
She remained silent, nervous of the creature … increasingly uncertain that he was a mythago. The stranger was glancing at her uncomfortably.
‘You’re out early too,’ he called.
Tallis nodded. The man smiled. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
She protruded her tongue, cheerfully, to demonstrate that the cat had not been near her.
He had completed the removal of his boots. His socks were quite wet and he stretched his legs out so that the new sun could dry them. He leaned back on the grass, resting and relaxed. ‘I stayed the night at the Manor House. A very nice place indeed. A very good supper. Henry the Eighth used to hunt here, you know.’ He propped himself up on his elbows. ‘I’m here for the festival. Are you going to the festival?’
Of course, Tallis thought. Everyone goes to the Shadoxhurst folk festival.
‘If you are, then no doubt I’ll see you there. I shan’t be doing any dancing, though.’ He chuckled, looking around at the quiet landscape. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘that said, I used to be a very keen dancer, I came here when I was a very much younger man. I was collecting songs. Old songs. Country songs. The festival in the village was very exciting for someone like me, newly down from London. The place has a certain charm. A certain magic. I can’t explain it. Can you explain it? All I know is, it has drawn me back after many years and I feel as excited as a child given his first train-set.’ He looked at Tallis quizzically again. ‘Are you frightened of me? Told not to talk to strangers?’
Of course not, she thought. Not frightened of you.
‘Of course not,’ she said aloud.
‘Ah! It speaks after all. Is there a name which goes with your caution?’
‘Tallis,’ Tallis said.
The stranger looked impressed. ‘That’s an unusual and a lovely name. It’s well named, too. A very fine man had that name once. A few hundred years ago. He wrote music for the church. Very good music indeed.’
He felt the bottoms of his feet, then tugged on his boots and stood up. ‘It all begins at mid-day, doesn’t it?’ And added, ‘I thought so,’ as Tallis silently affirmed. ‘Well, there’s just time for a bite of breakfast. By the way, do you know any songs?’
Man and girl faced each other across the running brook. Tallis smiled, then gave loud voice to ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. The man laughed and rolled his eyes. ‘Yes. Well. I think that one’s a little too familiar to bother collecting.’
‘Do you collect songs?’ Tallis asked.
‘Didn’t I tell you? Music is still my business. I’ve heard a thousand songs sung in a thousand ways, and many of them are truly beautiful and very old indeed. But I do wonder, sometimes, how many songs I’ve missed. And there’s certainly one that I’ve missed. I heard it when I was a young man, and it slipped out of my head before I could write it down.’ He smiled at Tallis. ‘It would be nice to find it. So if you hear it, perhaps you could come a-calling. A new song can work magic.’
Tallis nodded solemnly. She raised a hand as the big man walked away. Then she called, ‘Is there a name which goes with your search?’
He turned, raised his stick and laughed. ‘Williams,’ he called. ‘Very ordinary. Very plain. But Tallis is a lovely name. Very lovely. See you at the festival!’
And he turned and strode back towards the wood, walking awkwardly but with great purpose.
Tallis had no sooner seen the old man out of sight, past the woods which haunted her, when his words made an impact upon her as powerful as an unexpected and mocking echo.
There is magic in a new song.
Yes! Of course! That was the answer. A song. A new song.
At last. So easy. So obvious! She would sing to the memory of Scathach. A silent song, woven about his stone, repeated and enriched from those unknown regions which were her own passions, from the pleasures and visions that were all her own. A song: until the spell was broken.
A song for Scathach.
She ran towards Stretley Stones meadow. Already she knew how the song would begin, although the words, in her mind, had an eerie chanting quality about them, a cold quality despite the image of the words … no melody as yet:
A fire is burning in Bird Spirit Land,
In Bird Spirit Land lies my young love …
I will scatter the black carrion birds …
Gaunt often sang songs. Sometimes he sang while he worked, sometimes while he sat drinking cider, sometimes when he was waking from a doze, in his chair by the apple shed. Tallis could never understand the words, droned out as they were in a rich dialect and with a melodic but deep tune. But he had said one thing to her a year or so back, which she remembered now.
She had asked him, ‘How do you manage to remember so many different tunes?’
‘Tunes is easy,’ he said. ‘It’s the words that are important. Once you’ve got the new words clear in the heart, the tunes come according to how you feel. There’s always a tune.’
‘But your tunes are very pretty.’
‘You like my singing, do you?’
‘No,’ Tallis admitted. ‘Not your singing. Just what you sing. The tunes are nice.’
Gaunt chuckled at that. ‘Well. It’s because I don’t think too hard about them. So they sort of come from where they live, not prettied up in any way. My father sang them before me, his before him. Gaunts have been singing them since, oh, I don’t rightly know. Since before the Almighty saw fit to teach them to Adam, probably.’
Now Tallis went to the fie
She began to sing the silent song, not thinking about any tune, just letting the words flow through her mind. The notes rose and fell, the rhythms changed. As she sang to herself so she stood down from the stone and stepped slowly around it, dancing to the metre that she imposed on her awkward words, letting the words change as they wanted, letting everything come from where it lived.
She was singing out loud before she had fully realized it. The branches rustled nervously. The wind flowed through the tall grass. Her voice rose high into the air, a sweet sound, carrying Tallis’s Promise away from the sanctuary.
A fire is burning in Bird Spirit Land,
In Bird Spirit Land lies my young love.
A storm is raging in Bird Spirit Land,
I will scatter the black carrion birds.
I will watch over the kissing clay of my young love,
I will be with him in Bird Spirit Land.
A fire is burning in Bird Spirit Land.
My bones smoulder.
I must journey there.
With the charm broken, the singing stopped. Tallis felt a moment’s intense sadness and allowed tears to roll down her face. She stared at the stone, then at Strong against the Storm.
All of this had been for a purpose. Somewhere, a thousand years away, her song had sent Scathach to a place where the hunting would never end, where every man could sing well and where the loving was as fierce in the winter as it was in the spring. To that many coloured land. To that other world. To that bright side of the forbidden place …
There was nothing more she could do here, now. The meadow was just a meadow and the grey stone was cold again, the spirit gone from it.
She would have rejoiced to see the Hollower at that moment, but the shadows in the wood were empty.
(ii)
Throughout the afternoon Tallis wandered through the crowded village of Shadoxhurst, looking for the old man, Mr Williams, whom she had met by Hunter’s Brook. She wanted to tell him how much he had helped her, and to sing him the new song she had composed for Scathach. But she couldn’t see him at all and this confused and worried her.
So she sat with Simon, and several other local children, on the stone wall around the church, watching the crowds and the dancing, and the strange puppet show known as the Folly Play, and of course the driving of the cattle on the village green. Tallis liked the driving of the cattle. Every so often, as one of the docile animals was being urged between the two bonfires, it would go mad, leaping about among the spectators, causing havoc. Such moments of excitement and danger were what made the festival fun, but they rarely happened.
The afternoon began to seem endless. The half-ox burned black on its charcoal fire and was eventually sliced down to its pink bones. Races and contests alternated with the dancing, but Tallis remained on the wall, a passive observer. Only when the Shadoxmen came to dance did she leave the uncomfortable perch at the church’s boundary and go and watch from closer to. Simon went with her.
‘I’m going to be a Shadoxman when I’m older,’ he said. There was a glow in his eyes as he watched the local Morris team. ‘I’m going to be Iron!’ He was eyeing the silvery blade stitched to the dancer’s chest.
Each of the ten dancers wore a different emblem, and was known by its name. Tallis knew them off by heart: feather, iron, bell, owl – who wore a stuffed owl’s head round his neck – oak, thorn, ivy, stone, bone and the leader, fire. The leader carried a tarred torch which would be lit at nine o’clock and used in the most important of ceremonies. Bone, the tallest and most robust of the dancing group, carried a great bone horn at his waist.
‘If you’re going to be Iron,’ Tallis said to her cousin softly, ‘then you won’t be my friend.’ Simon glanced at her, frowning, but she ignored him.
The Shadoxmen performed four dances before giving way to one of the guest teams. All were quite routine. The men danced in two lines of five. They fought mock dancing battles with hazel rods and small sleeve-shields and finally stripped the shields from their arms and flung them into the crowds. The person who caught the ‘fire’ shield was chased through the dancers to the increasingly rapid chant of ‘Into the wood and out of the wood and into the wood and out of the wood …’ before being hoisted up with a cry of ‘Ropeburned and daggered, she’d die if she could!’
The fire shield was always thrown to a young woman and Tallis was not unaware of the sinister connotation of that piece of folk fancy.
At dusk her parents came looking for her. They had been helping out on several of the side-shows during the afternoon and were now going for supper. Tallis decided to stay in the village and was told not to part company from Simon. She agreed. But the moment the Keetons had disappeared from the village square, Simon ran off, leaving Tallis alone again.
Now, though, as she watched the surging crowds of adults, she caught sight of the big man from Hunter’s Brook, noticing his white hair as he walked along the road on the far side of the common. He was mobbed by people and moving slowly to a place on the far side of the road, facing the green. This was where, later, the final dance – the Shadow dance – would be performed.
It was nine o’clock and the real ceremonies were about to begin. The sky was still quite light but already sparks from the dying embers of the ox-fire appeared brighter in the air, and the two floodlights had been turned on to illuminate the grey face of the church with its dark windows. A noticeable change in the atmosphere of the village occurred, the people becoming more subdued, the air more vibrant as excitement grew.
Tallis squeezed and shuffled her way through the bodies until she came to the place, on the road, where she had just seen Mr Williams. She found him, seated on a canvas chair between two old men of the village and surrounded by four more. They were all of a kind, Tallis thought about the farmers, from their muddy boots and baggy grey flannel trousers to the loose tweed jackets that hung from their shoulders. They wore caps on hair that was cut high over the ears, so that skin gleamed white between dark hat and tanned face. She knew some of them by name – Pott’nfer, Chisby, Madders. Pipes smouldered and thin cigarettes smoked between hard, yellowed fingers. They talked slowly, but in Gaunt’s thick dialect, and Tallis had trouble following what they were saying, even though she was a local girl herself. But Mr Williams, who laughed loudly and talked in his own low murmur, seemed to understand everything that was being said.
They were all facing the street, where already the unlit torches were being lined up ready for the ‘running of the fire’. The leader of the Shadoxmen would start the relay, lighting his torch from the embers of the bonfires on the green. He would then run around the square, around the village outskirts, lighting each of the fifty torches. Eventually the whole community would be surrounded by a double wall of fire.
If all the torches still burned when the leader arrived back at the great oak on the green, the village would be safe from Grim himself!
Tallis stood behind the broad shoulders of Mr Williams, wrinkling her nose at the heavy odour of the tobacco from his nearest companion’s pipe.
‘He runs faster every year,’ growled this local man.
‘We get older,’ Mr Williams observed. ‘They just seem to run faster.’
‘But in days gone, torches often faded before the circle was run …’ muttered the pipe-smoker. ‘Bad luck struck’en then.’
‘Better quality torches always help,’ Mr Williams said with a wry chuckle, and all the farmers laughed.
Behind him, Tallis said softly, ‘But there’s magic in an old torch.’
Mr Williams turned sharply in his chair, frowning. He was breathing quite heavily and a smell of smoke and beer hung on his clothes, though
‘Is there indeed? And a new torch? No magic in that?’
‘Only a new song,’ Tallis said. ‘You told me that. This morning.’
‘Yes,’ he said, pleased. ‘I know I did.’
‘Any luck?’
He pulled a face. ‘If you mean have I heard a new song …’ He looked crestfallen, shaking his head. ‘Some good versions of old songs. Nothing from the unknown archives.’
‘Not that lost song either?’
‘No. Sadly.’
‘I’ve got one for you,’ she said brightly.
‘Have you indeed?’
A great cheer went up from the crowds. The leading Shadoxman, brandishing his torch, had stuck it into the dying fire and it burned fiercely in the gathering gloom. He crossed the green to the church gate and the second torch was struck. The young man raced around the village centre. Each torch became a flare of light. One flare streamed as it moved. Someone raced past the group of old men on their chairs, flame trailing in the still air, scenting the night with the odour of tar. Children pursued; two dogs followed the children. The ruckus passed from the village centre to the perimeter, where the demons lurked.
For a few minutes there was peace, although the local dancers were clapping their hands and singing a simple chant (it was called ‘run torch run’). Mr Williams turned round again, leaning on the back of his chair and watching the girl.
All the old men stared at her, one or two of them smiling. Tallis felt slightly daunted by their amused, benign, but intense gazes.
‘Well, we’re waiting,’ said Mr Williams.
Tallis drew a deep breath. Then, in her best voice, she sang the song to Scathach.
‘A fire is burning in Bird Spirit Land
In Bird Spirit Land lies my young love …’
It was a melancholy sound and tears came immediately as both memory and the haunting qualities of her own song roused the passions in the girl’s young heart.