Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock
‘Very much so,’ Wynne-Jones answered simply.
‘Then how could he have called to me?’
‘To answer that,’ the old man said, ‘I need you to tell me the story of your girlhood. Your memories of Harry. And everything that has happened to you in the way of learning. I dreamed something about a castle made of stone which is not stone …’
‘Old Forbidden Place,’ Tallis said. ‘Or at least, a part of the tale. I whispered it to you while you slept.’
‘You must tell me again,’ the scientist murmured. ‘It may be that I have seen this place. A long way from here, but a place that is familiar from your whispered words.’
Her heart missed a beat. ‘You’ve been to the castle?’
But he shook his head. ‘I’ve only seen it from a great distance. It is well defended; by a storm that would surprise you. Before I settled among the Tuthanach I wandered further up the river, crossing the great marsh. But it was too cold up there, so I returned. It was too far. Too remote. There comes a time, for people like you and me, when the mind has been stripped of all that is mythic. It’s hard to describe the feeling: it’s a kind of tiredness, of exhaustion … of the spirit. I felt vigorous; my work fascinated me; I remained handsomely potent –’ He smiled and shook his head at his own unspoken memories. ‘But something had returned to the earth, and it took me with it. So I came back here, to the Tuthanach. They are an earth people and their legend is horrific, dramatic, almost senseless. Each and every one of them will undergo death by burial and rebirth renewed. They are part of the legend, of course; you and I wouldn’t survive it.’
Scathach called from the other side of the enclosure. ‘Tig is coming up the hill, from the south. He’s carrying an axe.’
‘Take me back to the lodge,’ Wynne-Jones whispered. ‘I’m tired and cold. You can tell me your stories in the warmth of my hut. And I want to hear all the stories.’
Tallis smiled. ‘I was asked that once before. It seems like a lifetime ago.’
‘There are old truths in the memories of childhood,’ Wynne-Jones said quietly. ‘Make that journey for me … then make Moondream again. I’ll give you what help I can …’
At dusk an eagle began to swoop and soar over the village. The children imitated the bird’s behaviour, arms outstretched. The young men stripped and painted themselves in black and white imitation of the feather pattern on the predator: bringing the hunting eye of the eagle to the clan.
While all eyes were on the majestic bird above them, Tallis had seen the fluttering movement of a more sinister flock, in the high trees around the river. One of the birds flapped towards a tall, dead elm, whose limbs had been stripped by fierce winds until only two remained, like gnarled horns, rising from the top of the trunk. Black against the sky, the black stork, too, was a silhouette. It perched on the elm’s horns and soon several others followed it. When they launched themselves into the dusk they seemed to fill the sky to the north for long minutes, and their cries reached as far as the village.
Scathach had seen the storks as well. He approached Tallis, drawing his fur cloak tighter round his chest. He smelled strongly of woodsmoke after his long hours in the lodge, nursing his father. ‘Are they an omen?’
Tallis turned to glance at him. She saw affection and concern in his eyes, but imagined that the love was gone, the intensity of the gaze, that knowingness that she had shared for so many years as they had fought to find this place through the forest.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But they disturb me.’
He watched the birds again. ‘Everything is going north,’ he murmured. ‘Everything. I feel impelled to follow …’
Tallis nodded her agreement. ‘That’s where I must go too, if I’m to find Harry. But first I have to make Moondream again.’
Scathach frowned, not understanding. Tallis had always kept her masks to herself. ‘To allow me to see that woman in the land. Your father says I should carve it again. I hadn’t thought it important, but perhaps my power to open the hollowings has been affected by its absence.’
‘I’ll help you make it,’ Scathach said. His hand was on her arm. Tallis wrapped her fingers round the welcome grip.
‘What about Morthen?’ she asked pointedly. The girl had returned earlier, and prematurely, from the hunt, but was not around as far as Tallis could see.
‘Morthen is my sister and a child. I am her brother from the wood, but until she gets older, that’s all I am. And by the time she reaches a suitable age, I shall be long gone.’
‘Does she know this?’
‘She knows it. Besides, what I do with Morthen I do because of the forest in my blood. What I choose to do with you I do because of love.’
Tallis said, ‘I hadn’t realized you knew about Gyonval.’
‘I knew that you loved him. But I never felt that you’d stopped loving me. So that seemed to me to be all right.’
‘Well,’ Tallis said, with a smile and a private thrill of relief. ‘I’m glad to hear it. And you were quite right.’
She leaned towards the man and brushed her lips across the beard that grew unkempt from his cheeks. He put his arms around her.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw angry movement. Morthen was running from the enclosure, slapping the taut hides on their frames as she passed them, her clay-streaked hair flying free. She was making sounds like a bird: the screeching of a bird, defending its nest against intruders.
She knew what she would use to make the mask, but when she returned to the glade where, yesterday, she had visited the Moondream rajathuk, she found it quite destroyed. An elm grew there now. Its roots, earth-encrusted and massive, curled through the dense oak and hazel at the edge of the glade, lying lazily, snakelike upon the land, feeding freely on the forest. Its trunk was almost black; thick fungus and moss grew in the deep grooves in the bark. It rose into the evening sky; three odd, twisted branches tangled with the clouds, all that remained of the tree’s broken limbs. The glade was silent. An overpowering smell of vegetation filled the air, drifting on a fine steam. The light was sharp, the sense of power in this woodland mythago almost terrifying.
Tallis circled the giant tree twice. She found a shard of the broken totem and picked it up, feeling its dry, dead surface. Scathach waited in the forest, his eyes showing his concern as he stared into the heavens, where black storks flapped and watched the earth from the bare-bone branches.
‘Is it after you or my father?’ he whispered to Tallis when she came back to him.
‘I don’t know. But it has destroyed the rajathuk. I was hoping to sit here and make my mask …’
‘Do you have an image for it?’
Tallis stared down at the shard of the ruined statue and with a thrill of pleasure realized that she did: an image of the female in the land. An image of white moon. An image of horns, of horse, of the smile that knows, of a mother’s kiss. An image, too, of blood. An image of a child’s bones burning. An image of a wild rider, white clay on long hair, circling the pyre where her lover lay. An image of bone in flesh, a child’s cut flesh knitted closed with bone, with sharp bone fragments, the wound healed, the blood dried.
And Gyonval … gentle Gyonval. He was in the image too, his laughter, his concern, his ready acceptance that he was somehow a ghost to Tallis; that he, like Scathach, was shadow, soon to be banished by a night whose coming could not be stopped.
Gentle when he loved her.
Even as his broken body had followed its spirit into the night woods, there had been something about him: his fingers flexed just so, as if signalling to her; a frown on his face, as if he was struggling to turn his eyes to the woman by the fire; a sparkle in those eyes, the dead eyes, the tears that said how he longed to stay.
Tallis looked up, met Scathach’s eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said ‘I have an image …’
Fascinating to watch: how she smoothed down the shard of the totem to make it a circle, to flatten it out; how she trimmed and chipped to make the
Crouched in the shadows, Scathach watched, but his eyes were on Tallis, not on her fingers as they moved swiftly over the charm.
‘You truly are possessed.’
‘Yes.’
Red for cheeks, and green in subtle lines, and here the moon, made with white clay, and there the blood of the child. All from dyes and ochres used by the Tuthanach.
‘Does it speak to you yet?’
‘It has been speaking to me all my life –’
There, the spectre, the woman in the land. There the snow. There the memory. White memory, daubed, smeared …
The land remembers. There is old memory in snow.
And a gentle touch for the gentle dead.
I shan’t forget you.
And it was finished. She held it before her, stared at its eyes, kissed its lips, breathed through the mouth into the unconscious region beyond the wood. Then turned it round and held it to her face.
‘Don’t look at me through the eyes …’
Tallis sat quietly, Scathach’s words frightening her. She stared through the mask at Wyn-rajathuk, old, broken man, fascinatedly watching the process of creation. His eyes narrow, he glanced at his son-from-the-flesh-and-wood, then back at Tallis.
‘Don’t look at him.’
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t look at him.’
‘What will I see?’
‘Don’t look at him!’
She lowered the mask. There was a sudden wind and the small fire in the shaman’s lodge guttered. Stones and shells, slung on twine, rattled. Sheaves of the parchment, on which Wyn kept his journal, fluttered. A brief moment of the winter which pursued her sent a scampering chill through the warm place.
Scathach had gone. Tallis heard him walk away from the lodge. Then the heavy skins which formed the door were still again, the fire burning more calmly.
She stared at the mask, her touch on the wet colour of its face like a lover’s touch on moist, flushed skin. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘He is going away from you,’ Wyn said quietly. He tugged at his sparse white beard, then drew his dark fur robe tighter around his bent shoulders. He looked very ill and frightened. Tallis knew that he was worried about the boy: where was his son? Where was Tig hiding?
At his words, though, she looked up sharply. Scathach going away? Wyn raised a finger to his lips and said, ‘I imagine he is afraid that the same spectre haunts him, calling him to Bavduin, that took his friends, Gyonval and the rest. He didn’t want you to see it, perhaps because he doesn’t want to know the truth as yet.’
Puzzled, Tallis shook her head. She knew Scathach’s quest was for Bavduin, but he was not himself Jaguthin; he had merely joined the band. Why should he be called like the others?
‘He became Jaguthin when his life in the wood became inseparable from theirs,’ the old man said. He picked up his journal and leafed through the parchments until he found a certain sheet, then read it through in silence. For a moment he looked as if he would pass the script to Tallis, but he changed his mind. He stoked the fire so that it flared, then reached behind him for a pouch of thin leather which contained charred bones. He rattled the pouch. ‘Recognize this?’
Tallis nodded. Wyn-rajathuk shook the pouch, then banged it on the ground, then struck it against his shoulders; he chanted softly as he made the rhythmic movements, and the words were nonsense words.
Tallis recognized what he was doing immediately, and sensed the point of what he was trying to tell her. She flew back through imagination to the festival at Shadoxhurst, to the dancers, the nonsense words they often chanted as they went through their formations.
Jiggery, higgery, hoggery, joggery …
‘The land remembers,’ she whispered. ‘Men dance and chant, they fight with sticks, and one rides among them on a hobbyhorse, striking them with a bladder filled with pebbles … we don’t forget …’
‘We just forget why,’ Wyn-rajathuk agreed. ‘There is no magic left in the festive practices of Oxford, or Grimley, or wherever – the Morrismen and Mummers – no magic unless the mind that enacts the festival has a gate opened to the first forest –’
That expression again. First forest.
‘– but how many times have I stood and laughed as that man on the hobbyhorse, a fool, an outsider to the troupe, prances round and through the dancers? The devil. The joker. The wily one. Old Coyote himself. Trickster. Reduced, in our time, to a fool on a stick for a horse, waving the symbols of forgotten shamanism. We always see that aspect, but we forget that first he must have been a warrior too. He is outside the band, yet a part of it. As a hunter he will die in the forest to become a warrior; as a warrior he will die in battle, and be resurrected to become a sage. The three parts of the King. Remember your stories of Arthur and his knights? Arthur had been all of those things himself: hunter, warrior, then king.’ Wyn smiled, perhaps remembering those tales himself, or some connection with them that he had witnessed in the wood. ‘Of course my son is being called,’ he murmured. ‘He has been the hunter. When he entered England he died, in one sense. Now he is a warrior. His death and resurrection as shaman lies in his future. His flight on wings of song and dream lies many years ahead …’
‘I will be gone by then,’ Tallis said. She leaned forward and passed her hand through the flames of the small fire, letting its glow and its heat excite the ancient in her.
First forest … where was the first forest?
She said hesitantly, not fully understanding how to frame the words, ‘Two beliefs war within me: I am convinced that I will find my way back home again. And I dream of dying in a great tree … burning … is that the first forest?’
‘You are at the edge of the first forest,’ Wyn-rajathuk told her; there was something about the expression on his wounded face, the slight edginess of his good eye, that made Tallis suspect he was holding back. But she didn’t comment. ‘All your life you have been at the edge. You have opened threshold after threshold and stepped closer and closer to the centre of the realm, to the heartwood – to Lavondyss. But you still have a journey to make and it will be a terrible journey. It will bring you home, yes, but equally it will take you further from home than you have ever imagined. You will travel in two directions at once. You will probably die. You do not enter the first forest for fun, for adventure. When you go there, do not expect to return.’
‘Harry is there. In the unknown region. I promised to set him free.’
‘You will never set him free. Not in the way you mean. There is no return from that unknown region.’
She was silent for a moment. Hunger clawed at her. Close by, faint against the growing wind, a woman sang. Then came another sound: a boy’s voice, shrieking at the top of its lungs. The shrieking sent shivers up Tallis’s spine, and Wyn-rajathuk paled even more as he straightened and stared, alarmed, through the lodge walls, towards the mortuary hill. The boy’s taunting turned to laughter, drifting on the chill night air. It was possible to hear the way he summoned the old man, calling his name in a mocking tone, calling out for his dreams, calling that he wished to eat those dreams.
Tallis reassured him. ‘He won’t enter the compound. He won’t come close to the lodge. All the families are watching for him, to drive him off …’
Wyn shuddered violently and leaned down again, sucking at the fire’s warmth. After a while he seemed to relax and Tallis prompted him further. ‘You seem to be saying that this first forest is an imaginary place. You are saying that I will not ride there, or open a hollowing, or step down through a cave, but must find the threshold to a journey inwards. How do I find that threshold?’
‘Through the story of your Old Forbidden Place. Through the castle.’
‘Where is the castle?’
‘You have already seen it. When you opened the hollowing. Beyo
Tallis was confused again, disbelieving; a strange response in a world where ghosts walked and shadows cast effective spells. ‘And by coincidence I have found it? I can’t accept that.’
‘Not by coincidence. You have been looking for it for eight years. You were bound to find it.’
‘Did I dream it then? How can I have dreamed it as a six-year-old? Why did I see it in a story? Who were the gaberlungi women who could tell me about a castle that it turns out you know all about? How could I have seen your son Scathach in a vision, and named a land Bird Spirit Land out of my childish dreams, and arrive here to find that you know about Bird Spirit Land, and Bavduin? And your totems have the same names as my masks, but I made those names up! Why are we so linked?’
Wyn-rajathuk placed small sticks on the fire, letting Tallis’s edgy, urgent questions settle in the air. His pallid flesh glowed. He smiled. ‘Why – through your brother Harry. Who else? I thought I’d told you earlier. You found Harry years ago! You found him and you entered him. Look around you. Everything is Harry. All of this. The wood, the river, the Tuthanach, the birds, the stones, the totems … The first forest that he imposed upon the world is the world in which I live and through which you are journeying. The world in which you and I exist is not nature, it consists of mind! You have been in your brother’s skull for years. You have simply not learned to speak to him.’
‘But he’s trapped,’ Tallis protested. ‘He called to me from a winter place. He called to me. I can find him again, his physical body, not just his mind.’
Wyn-rajathuk thought about what she had said, then slowly agreed. ‘It’s not a journey I would wish to undertake. But I am not you, and except for the shadow-elms I see little evidence of genesis from you – you are moving too fast, perhaps. But you are not yet sucked dry. Which means you have creative energy. Perhaps you can find the location of the earthly remains.’