Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock
Swim with me, through underground rivers, through streams
– Cunhaval, the great hound, sniffed at the air –
I know the best forest tracks. Run with me. I fear nothing
– Moondream gleamed –
Castle stone by moonlight; the castle is breathing; beware, beware
– Lament sang to her in old familiar melodies, and Tallis recognized the words and she felt chill –
A fire is burning in bird spirit land. My bones smoulder. I must journey there
‘I am journeying,’ Tallis whispered. ‘I can’t go any faster.’
And Morndun howled at her, its spectral presence insinuating cold fingers into her mind, a tentative probing of the darkest region of her unconscious –
Release the ghost from your bones. Ghost follows ghost into the realm of ghosts. Release the life from your bones. There is no other way into the unknown region.
‘I shall do what I have to do to find my brother. There is no point in dying.’
Sinisalo’s voice was the calling of a playful child, running between the trees, hiding, teasing. It too called –
Bring out the ghost. Bring out the ghost.
Angrily, Tallis blocked her ears. A fish jumped in the water. A tree root flexed, then was still. Through her fingers Tallis could hear the horses protesting against the growing, icy wind. The platform of rushes vibrated, almost unbalancing her.
The hollowing formed!
The transition was so abrupt that it took her by surprise. As her mouth opened to gasp her shock it filled with snow and dead leaves. She spat violently. Water rushed over rocks. A storm wind raged against the dull sky she could see, trees flexed and bent like flowers. The sides of the valley were steep. There was too much snow for her to tell whether this was the place she had seen before, with the stone walls of the castle rising among the thick, frozen trees. But it was the same deep gorge – and it was on the other side of the lake!
She gathered her masks and stepped towards the hollowing, fighting against the gale that blew into the quieter realm of the marsh. Behind her, Wynne-Jones scurried forward. Behind him, Scathach tugged at the horses. Tallis stepped across the threshold and screamed as the true cold struck her. She was deep in a freezing river, and the bank was yards away. She turned and helped Wynne-Jones through into the gorge. He blinked his good eye and looked up, looked around, a half smile on his lips. Snow drove against him, but he just brushed it aside. He was experiencing something utterly new for him: his first controlled passage into a geistzone under the guidance of an oolerinnen; his first safe transit of the threshold for so long guarded by the bone, wood and bird-wing magic of the shaman.
Tallis screamed at Scathach to hurry. The man appeared at the gate; he looked shocked and shaken. He had passed through hollowings before, but never into a realm of such ferocity. Branches cracked from trees and plunged into the turbulent waters behind Tallis, who clutched her cloak and cowl, holding them tightly against the tearing wind.
‘Hurry!’
The gale threatened to blow her into the water. Scathach tugged at the crude bridles of the three horses and the beasts, terrified by the transition from tranquillity to rage and protesting loudly, stepped through.
Tallis took hold of Swimmer of Lakes, tried to calm the animal and succeeded. She led the mare to dry land, then reached a hand to help tug Wynne-Jones from the surging river. Scathach wrenched the two other animals to safety; and the opening between worlds faded, winter darkness replacing the light from the lakeside.
‘We are north of the marsh,’ Wynne-Jones said through chattering teeth, ‘But not as far north as I would have hoped.’
They hastened into the shelter of rocks and wood, wary of falling branches but aware that they had little choice but to seek refuge from the storm in the wind-shadow of great trees. It was almost night. They had very little time. The snow was blinding but had blown so hard that it had not yet formed a blanket on the land. Scathach slung canvases between trees that surged and shuddered. Tallis tethered the horses, backs to the wind. Wynne-Jones eventually succeeded in starting a small fire.
They huddled together, wrapped in the canvas from the beached craft.
By early morning the ferocious wind had dropped. A fine snow fell for a while, then that too ceased. A welcome calm descended. The horses ceased to struggle and Wynne-Jones slept. Scathach came close to Tallis and they curled up together, her face buried in the fur collar of his clothing, his arms reaching into the warmth below her cloak.
The creation of hollowings had become a difficult and energetic process, leaving Tallis weary for hours after. When she was fully rested they ate a meagre meal, conserving their supplies of meat and berries for the arduous journey ahead, then mounted up and began to pick their way carefully through the snow tracks in the wood. They kept their path as close as possible to the river. Occasionally Tallis, masked in the Silvering, scanned the waters, but she saw no fish. Through Falkenna she glimpsed grey geese, but Scathach – expert with sword and spear – was an inaccurate shot with sling. Only through Cunhaval was she aware of life in the forest and it was not a life-form that encouraged them to slow down and set a trap.
They were wolves. They were close behind. They were following steadily through the black winter woods.
The thought was never spoken, but the identity of the pack seemed obvious.
(ii)
On the second day of their slow ride up the river they found traces of Morthen, a snail-shell hair net, slung from the branch of a tree close to the cold remains of a fire. Had the girl known they would follow her? Tallis unslung the net and fingered the broken shells thoughtfully. Everything about the odd relic suggested that Morthen had left it as a deliberate sign.
Wynne-Jones took the net and folded it carefully, tucking it into his clothing. He stepped down to the water’s edge and smelled the air hard.
‘She always used to leave little warning signs when she was younger,’ he said as he came back to the horses. ‘If we were hunting, or exploring, she would always go ahead. She would warn me of animals, or ruins, or mythagos …’
‘Is this a warning sign?’ Scathach asked. ‘What is she warning us of? Winter?’ He smiled.
‘Spring, I think.’
‘Spring!’ Tallis said, amazed, looking about her at the dark, snow-striped land.
Wynne-Jones laughed. ‘Can’t you smell it? It’s in the air. The seasons are in flight. This is the strange storm I warned you of … Come on! We’re getting close to a place that’s very important to you.’
Spring.
It burst upon them almost between one bend in the river and the next. The trees were in fresh bud, the air crisp but brighter, now, the water less fierce. They rode through spring – it took two hours or so – and entered summer. And by dusk were back in autumn; it seemed sensible to make camp in this gentler landscape, but during the night an odd wind fetched up and snow fell, followed by an appallingly humid heat.
Confused by it all, Tallis found it hard to sleep. She sat by the guttering fire and watched creatures move along the river. At dawn they were in autumn again, and as they rode on, they came back into winter.
They journeyed for four days, and in each day they crossed the seasons twice. But Wynne-Jones began to show unease. Indeed, the wind was very strange, its scent and sounds confused, quite odd.
Scathach used the periods of summer to hunt for food, and gather edible plants. They rode hardest in spring and autumn. They spent most of their time in winter, simply because travelling through the icy storm was so difficult.
When they stopped, sometimes at the junctions between seasons, Tallis could feel the flow of time, the great spiral storm that curled around some focus a few days’ riding to the north. Wynne-Jones drew a diagram with charcoal on bare rock.
‘It’s like a hurricane. It has an eye, and around that eye are the circular flows of the seasons, moving very slowly in a number of distinct zones. Because we are riding across them we
A day later, with the valley walls steepening, the gorge deepening and the river widening, Tallis found out what he meant. Towards dusk a ripple of colour fled through the summer woodland, a widening band of golden brown sweeping through the green. It happened so fast she could hardly follow the change with her gaze. One moment the forest was rich and lush, the next it had turned golden, then the leaves blew into the air, almost as if there had been an explosion.
The riders stopped. Scathach’s horse panicked and he shouted at the creature, which stamped in the water, twisting and tugging with discomfort.
Behind the leaf-fall came a gust of budding, the black branches sprouting new growth in seconds, the growth bursting into leaf. The woodland shimmered, was still – a moment’s stifling summer silence, then the howl of the new season, a freezing wind bringing death and shedding so that for the second time in two minutes the land was drenched with fallen leaves and snow.
The journey through the zone of gusting time was terrifying. Heads low, they pressed on, galloping whenever there was a moment’s calm and heat, turning away from the ice-laden wind when the ferocious shards of the glacier came at them like insects.
After a few hours the speed of change slowed. They found a pocket of spring/summer oscillation and camped overnight there, conscious that just yards away a biting winter was flaring and dying, the trees sprouting, then blackening again, as if the buds were tiny creatures, grasping and snatching at the light, then quickly tugging back into their wood-bark holes. They came to the ‘eye’ of this storm, below a sullen, winter sky, and at once Tallis began to recognize the deep canyon which she had hollowed those days before, with Morthen.
‘It’s here,’ she whispered to Scathach. ‘We’re coming close. This is the place …’
The young warrior brushed frost from his straggling beard and searched the steep sides of the valley, his breath misting. ‘I feel it too,’ he said. He seemed alarmed, his horse turning nervously. ‘Listen!’
Tallis heard the howl of wind among trees, the clatter of stones. She glanced at Scathach, frowning. He had a half smile on his face and his green eyes were suddenly alive with excitement. ‘Battle!’ he said. ‘Can you hear the battle?’
She shook her head. ‘Only the wind …’
‘More than wind! Sword strikes … horses at the gallop … shouting. You must hear it.’ He still stared at the cliff top. ‘It’s up there, beyond the woodland. And my friends are there too …’ He turned fierce eyes on Tallis, then reached to hold her arm. Now there’s a link between us. Your castle, my field of battle, close together …’
Wynne-Jones too had begun to recognize the dark and frozen place. Their movements echoed here, the sound of the river loud, though only Scathach seemed able to hear the distant cries of fighting. The canyon walls came close together as they rode in gathering darkness. Above them, jutting fingers of rock and branch almost obliterated the sky: stone ruins overgrown with black trees, the broken edifices of the ancient place covering the canyon, seemingly hewn from the stone itself.
Among those ruins, among the blackened oaks and thorns, fires burned.
Now, when Tallis listened hard, she could hear a drum being beaten as a warning. It was a familiar sound to her. And perhaps the drum beat had been the noise which had excited Scathach. When she looked into the dark she saw corrupt towers and crumbling walls, high on the cliff, the rooting place, now, of gigantic trees. Black shapes moved there, some huddled below the leaning walls, others flapping against the grey skyline.
‘It isn’t as I saw it in my dreams.’ Tallis said. ‘The gorge was wider. The castle was less ruined. Any youngest son trapped here could easily have escaped.’
Not listening to her, Scathach said simply, ‘This place draws me. It tugs at my ghost.’
He stood in the crude stirrups of his saddle and smelled the air hard, seeming satisfied. ‘The smell of battle! It’s unmistakable. Bavduin is close. I’d recognize that smell anywhere.’
‘If only I had my journal,’ Wynne-Jones complained. ‘Something to write with, to record this.’
‘Look around you,’ Scathach hissed suddenly as they came round a curve in the river, riding slowly. He turned in the saddle, face shocked. ‘Look everywhere! Everywhere around!’
White rags fluttered in the trees. Light glinted on armour. Figures moved slowly in the darkness. Tallis gasped as she saw the bones of men and horses piled by the river and flung into the branches, grim remnants of those who had not won the day. Warriors crouched by the water, some drinking, some just staring. Tallis smelled blood and the more offensive stink of ordure. A horse skidded on ice, whinnying loudly as it fell to its side. It recovered, struggled to its feet and galloped away up the canyon, riderless, trappings flying.
As her eyes grew more accustomed to the hellish gloom, Tallis could see how many of these forlorn corpses were gathering on the north bank of the river. They ignored each other in death, though sometimes they crouched no more than an arm’s reach away from each other, even touching as they slipped on the ice. They had eyes only for the journey downwards, now, and battle-fervour, love and pride had long since been sucked from them, leaving them soulless husks: in bronze, or leather, fur-cloaked or bright trousered. Helmets gleamed, some with tall plumes, others decorated with animals, others plain. The shoreline bristled with the spikes of spears and swords, rammed into the hard mud, no longer needed.
‘Bavduin is a timeless battle,’ Wynne-Jones said as he surveyed the sombre gathering of the fallen. Bones slipped from a tree, clattered to the ground on top of rusting armour. Tallis noticed shields impaled on broken branches, standards fluttering raggedly where they had been flung. A cluster of decayed heads, slung by the hair, shifted in the wind, slack jaws singing silent laments, dulled eyes following the journey of their ghosts into the unknown regions of their age.
On the cliff-side, on ledges among the crumbling ruins: a scattering of fires. And there were fires, too, on the skyline above them, while on the wind came the mournful blast of a trumpet.
Scathach cried out and raised his sword, then sheathed the weapon and slumped in his saddle, saddened, perhaps, by thoughts of his friends. Tallis remembered his fragmentary account of the battle of Bavduin, his incomplete memory of the legend that was ensnaring him.
A river flowed near to Bavduin, and each night the dead came to the water on their journey back to the cold earth of their own times and lands. Here they summoned the gods and guardians of the dead of their own people, and the ghosts mingled in the air, like mad beasts, fighting and destroying as if blind.
When she placed Morndun across her face and peered through its ghostly eyes she saw the air shimmering with elementals, sharp-faced, wraith-like, coiling and twisting above the river, streaming out of the mouths and eyes of the men by the water and from the piles of skulls by the trees. Horned shapes, scaled figures, shapes with the features of insects and spiders, birds with the faces of young women – it made Tallis shiver to witness this silent gathering of the supernatural forces of so many ages.
‘Show me,’ whispered Wynne-Jones, but when he looked through the mask he could see no more than the darkness. So Tallis described what she could sense, and then they moved on through the silent and deathly place, watching the dying and the dead with caution. They arrived at the bottom of a winding cliff path which seemed to lead to the fortress and the forest on the land above – to the open land where a strange, timeless battle was being fought beneath the dusk sky.
They stole fire from a dead man, his limed hair, torque, bare breast beneath fur-lined cloak and cloth kirtle marking him as Celtic. He had ended his own life, but in the cold had remained crouched, his hand resting on the hilt of the blade which he had pushed into his heart. Twined about the fingers of his free hand were long strands of a woman’s hair. His tears had frozen so that his cheeks and eyes co
‘They’ll be there,’ he said quietly to Tallis. ‘They’ll be there. All of them. I must go to join them.’
‘Don’t abandon the old man yet,’ Tallis said. ‘Give me time to go to the ruins and look for a sign of Harry.’
‘And pass through to Lavondyss? And leave me waiting for ever?’
‘I shan’t pass through. Not until I’ve seen what’s there and taken your father’s advice on what to do about it.’
Scathach still seemed uncertain. She pinched his cheek. ‘A few minutes in the ruins. An hour at the most. I don’t intend to be as rash as you! Then we can say a proper farewell.’
She put her arms around Scathach and he tugged her hard to his body. Their furs were too thick and they could feel very little of each other, but Tallis unfastened his cloak and quickly kissed the cold, taut skin of his throat. He responded more passionately, and for a second the faraway look in his eyes was replaced by knowingness and humour.
‘A proper farewell,’ she repeated, eyes stinging. ‘Even in this cold. Wait for me …’
‘I’ll wait for you,’ he agreed softly, and glancing at the dark river valley he added, ‘I’ll find food, if I can. Enough for several days. We could eat mythago-flesh …’
‘No!’
He grinned. ‘Then I’ll find something with a thicker hide and tougher meat. Be careful on the path. And avoid anything that sounds like fighting – and anyone who looks dead. And don’t be long …’
* * *
A steep path, leading away from the river, wound up between low, stark trees. A path made dangerous by loose stones and snow. A path cut precariously into the valley side, sometimes only as wide as an animal’s body, sometimes passing through the cliff itself.
When Tallis rode up this narrow track she sent stones tumbling to the glittering water below her, and at a certain height she stopped to listen to the sound, recognizing it from a time in childhood, from a time when she had summoned images of another world, and Harry had called to her for help.