The Bone Forest by Robert Holdstock
When they were near the clearing known as Old Stone Hollow, Caylen led the way to the side. They wormed through nettles, hands behind their necks, and found an old trickle-stream, dried now that summer had been halfway exhausted. From this they peered, through dried bracken and the tangle of a rose bush, at the small, grassy clearing, with the great wind and rain-etched boulder poking up from deep in the ground. In front of this rock a small, wooden shelter had been built, and the red-haired man, stripped to the waist, was busy hammering iron nails into the sloping roof. No house, then, but a shrine of some sort. Smoke rose from his tiny fire, and a fish slowly grilled there. The wrapped object that was so precious to him stood against the boulder. Caylen could see that the man had painted things on that stone, strange shapes and symbols, and pictures of animals too. They were painted in blue and green, and he had painted similar symbols on his arms, and on his chest. Caylen knew of the tribes in the north and east who painted their bodies in this way, but this one was from the west, from the far west, or so his father had said in Caylen’s hearing, from the land across a great sea, where a thousand kings ruled.
He didn’t even speak their language, although he had learned enough words to indicate his needs. He was here because he was a fugitive, because he was protecting something from evil forces in his homelands.
After a while Caylen grew restless. He drew back from the glade, Fergus following, and began to walk towards the river. They were puzzled by the man, and intrigued, and they were aware, too, that Caswallon and the other villagers were uneasy with him, although he was in no way hostile.
Abruptly they were surrounded by boys, and Caylen felt a stinging blow on his face where a spiky, green nut had been thrown. There was laughter, and the screech of boyish anger that precedes a boyish punishment. But Caylen was in no mood for trouble and he found his temper at exactly the right moment, swinging a dead stick with a loud whack against the leader’s head.
He was off then, the boys in pursuit. Where Fergus went he didn’t know, and for the moment didn’t care. His backside still hurt, and the head that he had struck had belonged to the boy whose knife had carved the pain. They chased him, shouting and yelling, but he was surefooted and swift, and knew the way to the river better than they. He ducked through dense stands of oak, and plunged into bramble thickets, not caring about the scratches to his legs and arms, preferring that pain to the pain of the senseless beatings.
The boys closed on him where the forest thinned, but now he could hear the water, the rushing waters of the great river, and he sensed he was safe, even though a part of his mind still questioned the strangeness of the fact.
He ran down the bank, waded in and felt the river’s coldness sting all the way to his waist. The flow was gentle, the mud below soft and sucking. It was a long way across, a good minute’s wade, and then he scrambled out, just as Domnorix led the gang of panting youths out of the woods and to the water’s edge. Fergus appeared, farther away, and shook his head, smiling but smiling uncertainly. He crouched, exactly as Caylen was crouching, and stared at the gentle water.
The boys threw stones for a while, which Caylen dodged with arrogant ease, even lobbing a few back. Domnorix taunted him. “Only a demon could get across those rapids. Only someone possessed by evil magic could float across those waters. You’re an evil thing, Caylen, your father knows it, your mother knows it. Evil. Evil.” And others cried, “Possessed, possessed!” And still others taunted him with, “Unbirthed, unbirthed!” or, “Crow’s spawn, crow’s spawn.”
All of this Caylen had heard a hundred times before, and so he sat on the river bank and grinned, watching the boys across the calm waters until they went away.
Fergus walked down to stand across from him. “How do you get across, Caylen?” he called, and smiled almost nervously, as if he didn’t want to hear the answer.
“I’ve told you,” said Caylen, not angrily, but with a patience that he was determined to preserve for this one friend of his. “I waded across. The water is calm. Why don’t you try it? It’s easy.”
Fergus shook his head. He looked at the river, then at Caylen, and he seemed lost; he was more of a child than his nine years made him; and he needed Caylen very much. He seemed stick thin in his baggy cotton trousers and ragged shirt, his limbs scratched by bramble and thorn. Across the water the two boys watched each other, each longing for closer company, each aware that they were united in friendship through the vagaries of life in such a small community.
“No one could wade through that, Caylen,” Fergus said. “You have a trick, don’t you? There’s a way across that we can’t see, but which you found. Tell me where it is … go on, tell me!”
“It’s right in front of you,” urged Caylen, and now a sudden edge of desperation entered his voice, and his manner. He stood up, tossed a pebble into the river. It splashed and the water was so calm that the ripple was able to spread slowly outward before it was carried away. Above the placid surface, Caylen could glimpse the ghostly image of the tumbling rapids; faintly, he could hear their rush. “Please, Fergus … Please! Wade across. Honestly, there’s nothing dangerous here, nothing at all.”
Fergus shivered, wrapped his arms about his shoulders and again shook his head. His eyes were kindly, his smile telling Caylen that it was all right, that though he didn’t dare wade across, it wasn’t going to change their friendship.
Oh Fergus, thought Caylen desperately. If you would just find the courage not to believe your eyes, to come across to me. That would show the other boys that I’m not some evil spirit. It would convince my father that the things I see are not abnormal, not unnatural. One friend, bearing out my word, and it could be so different, and the chief of the village would not have to stay hidden in the forests for the shame of his son.
But Fergus had heard movement in the woods and waved a brief farewell to Caylen before slipping into the gloom of the undergrowth. Caylen saw a figure passing along the river, hidden by darkness and the bramble thickets. For a second he saw the gleam of sun on metal, and made out the stubby horns of the stranger’s helmet. But then that glimpse had been lost in the great confusion of movement as a brisk wind disturbed everything, including the river. Caylen sat for a long while watching for the horned man, but he had gone.
The wind dropped, and with its passing Caylen realised what an unnatural wind it had been, neither a summer breeze, nor a storm wind blowing in advance of a fall of torrential rain. It had been wind like a breath, blowing in a wide circle so that the branches of trees moved one way, and across the river blew oppositely; it was a warm wind, like the passing of some spirit, and Caylen felt the hair on his neck prick up with apprehension. He looked up the river, and down, but saw nothing apart from the wide, gentle waters as they curved from north to south.
Behind him the forest was eerily still. Small animal trackways led through it to the rising hills deeper inland, and the overgrown valleys of a country into which none of the people of Caswallon had ever ventured. From the tree tops on the village side of the river those hills could be seen, cloud-shadowed, green, and the marks of a ridgeway were obvious. But it was a ridgeway that no man had ever travelled, or could remember anyone having ever travelled. There were those who had sought it; it would have made easier passage of the journey north to the edge of the truly deep and dense forests where no tribes lived and the hunting was good. But however the voyager approached that ridge he came upon some impossible barrier—the rapids, or cliffs, or impenetrable, marshy woodlands. The land beyond the rapids was a mystery, even to the boy who could see beyond the illusion of danger.
Caylen had ventured through the silent tangle-woods only once, and that was recently. He had stood in a clearing by a wood-choked stream, and looked up the slopes of a hill. He had thought he could hear the sound of a village on the other side. But as he had tried to cross the blocked stream he had become suddenly overwhelmed with fear, and had turned and run frantically back to the river.
Strangely, he had known
Still, he felt something of that apprehension now as he stood and faced the gloomy woodland. He took a deep breath, lobbed a stone among the trees, then took a few paces towards them, kicking through the fern and bracken until he was fully shaded by the foliage.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he could see the metal totem standing there. Tall, spindly legged, its arms reaching outward, its eyes wide and dead … He caught just a glimpse of it as sun broke through the foliage, and he could see that it was silvery, metallic, like some iron god erected at the edge of a tribal land. There was a sound, a wailing like some banshee, but it was distant and it merely made him glance about, frightened.
He walked a little deeper into the forest, picking his way carefully. The place was unnaturally silent, no birds, no rustling of wind-blown foliage. He felt he was being watched.
At the wood-clogged stream, again the heart-stopping fear snagged at him, but he fought it down, stepped over the rotting carcases of tree and branch, and came, within a few paces, to a thistle-choked clearing.
What he saw here astonished him. It was the ruin of a building made all of stone. It rose nearly as high as an oak, and its windows were straight sided, perfectly regular. Creepers, ivy, weeds of all sorts had grown up through the strange structure, adding to its aura of desertion.
Caylen had heard of stone buildings—in the north of his own lands, it was said, houses were made of white stones piled one on another; and across the ocean, in lands where the sun shone all year round, there was a race of warlike men who built stone houses as high as the clouds.
A thin strip of iron surrounded the ruined building. It hummed softly and when Caylen reached to touch it he felt an unpleasant tingling on his skin that made him draw back.
The next moment a bat shrieked down close to him, its audible screech so loud in his ear that he himself screamed, and turned and ran, watching as the huge night-beast circled twice through the trees, its wings outstretched, its mouth still emitting that supernatural cry. It was gone, then, into the woods, back to its daytime resting place.
Caylen caught his breath, tried to stop his hands trembling, then walked shakily back to the river and quickly crossed it.
He stood on the far bank for a moment, and stared at the water. He could see the great swirling rapids. Jagged rocks poked up and broke that awesome flow of water, as they would break a man who slipped and was carried onto them. He watched the raging foam-covered river, and the drowning eddies, and he looked through them at the placid river as it truly was. He would never understand why only he could see beyond this illusion, and he would never understand who created the dream, and why.
But for the moment he was cold, and wet. His heart was still racing, and his body was still tied in knots of fear, the sort of fear that not even a rampaging wild boar would normally induce in him.
Every day the horned man came to the village for food and drink, and every day he sat and for a while tried to communicate with Caswallon and the others. The sense of unease was almost tangible. Not a man crouched without his sword, even the stranger, who detected the tension and was wary of a sudden fury. To thank the village for their help he spent a whole day rebuilding a ruined outhouse, a thatched building, more than a man’s height from the ground to point, roomy enough inside for the sheep to huddle when the winter snows covered the forest and made the ground hard as rock.
The job was finished swiftly; the stranger was skilled at his job, and of course, once he had tokened his gratitude by working alone for an hour, the others helped. He placed his helmet on his head, then, and towards dusk ran back into the forest, his black cloak flowing behind him. When Caylen ventured near to his glade, even though it was night, he could hear the sound of building, the expansion of the ceremonial place that the stranger was constructing for his own ends.
After a week the sounds of hammering could no longer be heard, and the stranger had vanished. None ventured to the glade itself, for Caswallon had warned that until the horned man communicated otherwise the glade was his, since he had requested it.
That which he built there was a temple, a shrine, a tomb … that which he buried there was more precious to him than life itself. Not a man, nor a woman, nor child from the village was allowed to interfere with this burial, until the stranger departed and took his memories with him, leaving only the monument in Old Stone Hollow, which would pass under the care of the village.
After a week of nights made restless by rain and Caswallon’s continuing despair with his son, Caylen, word came of warriors approaching along the ridgeway from the west. Red-haired, black-cloaked, they came fast, and with weapons. They sought the horn-helmeted man, and they were coming to kill him.
Caylen was crouched in the corner of his father’s house as this news was brought. He had a fever, and his throat was sore. He was miserable because the druid had recommended that he be starved for a week, to help the illness, and to give a chance for those who had sent his evil to take him away. “The body, unresisting, can be taken by the dark world,” he had told Caylen’s father, and then had come and smeared foul-smelling substances on his lips and eyes and ears, and cut off a lock of his greased hair. This he had tied to a rabbit bone and slowly burned on the fire. Caswallon had watched all this, crouched close to the warmth, his strong features sad in the firelight, his eyes filled with anger, and remorse, and not even a hint of pity for his son.
“Is there no way to shake the possession? To make him like us, a man among men?”
The druid, squatting and eating his father’s food as he burned the hair, shook his head. He was not an old man, but his lank grey hair, and untrimmed beard, gave him a wild look, and an aged appearance. His woollen tunic was dyed blue and cut short to the knees. He wore animal-bone beads and sparkling torques of bronze on each upper arm and around his neck. He was painted with mud, of course, the grey mud from the far-off rivers close to the sea. The mud on his body was to protect him from the evil presence in Caylen, that which made the boy able to jump over water and walk through the sheer cliff wall known as Wolfback.
“It’s just a hill,” Caylen had said (two years before). “A gentle hill, with boulders. There’s no cliff!” He had walked among the stumpy trees and jutting stones, making his way up the rise of the slope. The men of the village had hung back, horrified. When Caylen walked further, there was a sudden panic. The druid, Glamach, had screamed a torrent of abuse at him, and made passes with his hands that effectively condemned Caylen to the dark fires.
Afterwards, when the shock had gone, and only the resentment remained, Caylen had sought out his friend Fergus. Fergus was terrified, then puzzled, and finally cried against his friend and confessed his confusion.
“But what did it look like I did?” Caylen asked.
“Can’t you see them?” Fergus begged, pointing to the hill. There was a sheer cliff there, Fergus explained, and at the base of the cliff were sharpened spikes of wood on which were impaled the bloody corpses of men and women, and below the corpses, the bones of others. The air was strong with the stink of decaying flesh. Whoever lived beyond the cliff was dangerous. But Caylen had walked through the spikes and the corpses, and then right on up to the cliff itself, passing through the rock as if it had not been there.
Caylen looked hard, narrowing his eyes. When cloud shadowed the sun he imagined he could glimpse the spikes; but it was like a dream, a ghostly image that didn’t last.
“He must be killed,” the druid was saying, in Caswallon’s lodge. Hostile eyes, high-lit by the red fire, watched Caylen from across the room. “But killed in the correct way. As yet I have not decided how best to use the spilling of his blood for the good of the village, and the cleansing of the stain of possession that is on it.”
And as if the words had induced in Caswallon a warlike anger, the man came across the lodge and stared down at his son, then raised his han
The pain passed away, but not the hurt. Caylen decided that he must leave the village and flee to his own special land, the land across the water where none of the village dared go. He rose after dusk, when the sky was twilight, and the forest quiet and dark. He ran lightly through the compound and entered the woods. But he had been seen and the slight, fleet-footed shape of Fergus came after him. “I heard the beating,” he said. “What are you going to do?”
“Go across the water and live there. It’s the only safe place. The druid says I must be killed in a special way.”
Fergus grimaced. “Horrible, horrible. I’ve seen a special killing. It’s horrible.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that,” said Caylen grimly. But he was glad of Fergus’s company. It made his life bearable, if not attractive.
“I’ll come with you across the rapids,” said Fergus, and in the twilight Caylen saw that his friend was crying.
“I’m glad,” he said. “You’ll be quite safe. And when we’re old enough we’ll raid the village and take all the women. That’ll teach them.”
“Good idea,” said Fergus, wiping a hand across his eyes. Caylen could see that he was genuinely frightened; having made the declaration to cross the river he could not now back down. He was sad for his friend, so brutally treated by the village, and now he was frightened by his own rashness.
Someone stirred in the lodge, and it would not be long before Caswallon noticed that his demon son had slipped away. Before tonight this would not have bothered Caswallon; but Caylen suspected that from now until they killed him they would not allow him to leave the village. It was now or never, his last chance for freedom and peace.