Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock
Defiance, then. But Tallis had threatened him and the fear was in the boy. The fear of birds, an old magic which Tig had not yet overcome.
A flight of cranes passed over the settlement as Tallis circled the broken remains of her watching-wood. She glanced up, into the dawn sky. One of the birds began to struggle on the wing, struck by a sling stone launched from an unseen hunter at the forest edge. It fell slowly, neck twisted back. Tallis heard the distant growl of a dog. The cranes veered to the north and there was silence again.
The crane-hunter stepped into the clear land which surrounded the settlement of the Tuthanach. Tallis crouched down and the strange figure, carrying its limp prey over its shoulder, moved swiftly to the east. The man had a crane’s bill strapped, as a penis-sheath, to his groin. Skulls, feathers and the shrivelled carcases of small birds decorated his neck and limbs. His feet were clad in reed boots. He was a marsh hunter too. His marsh hound followed him. The penis-sheath caught the new sun like a lance. Shortly before he entered the wood again, the crane-hunter removed this triumphal, ritual garb, making it easier for him to run the forest, in search of a place to build his fire.
The hounds – scrawny, blunt-nosed animals – began to howl, greeting the new day. Smoke was urged from embers, then flame. The sun was a pale glow, low over the forest, subdued by autumn mist. Tallis heard Scathach’s voice, and elsewhere a woman coughing. A child wailed and a man laughed.
At once the silent enclosure was alive with sound. A man stepped through the weatherworn skins that kept the winter from one of the round lodges and shrugged on his heavy fur cloak, raising a hand to Tallis, a greeting, and watching her curiously as he walked to the earthworks, to crouch in dawn shadow and pass his soil.
Tallis picked up her broken doll and returned to the long-house, stepping down into the earth and ducking beneath the wooden lintel with its deeply incised charms. Light streamed into this place from two smoke holes in the heavy turf roof. Everywhere her gaze was confused with the stacks of furs, skins, poles, clay jars and bowls, frames for weaving, and totemic objects. Strands of shells, small stones, bones, root vegetables and dried bird-flesh hung from the blackened cross beams, rattling and shifting in the gusting breezes that crept in from the outside.
Human shapes moved through this gloomy clutter, gathering around the central fire where clay pots of water were slowly warming at the edge of the renewing embers. Ash streamed into the streaks of pale light. In the shadows the fur-clad women were stooped, shambling shapes, their alertness demonstrated only by the sparkle of dark eyes, watching the tall, strange woman from the Otherworld: Tallis.
She walked over to the far corner where Scathach and his half-sister, Morthen, were keeping vigil over the battered body of their father.
The old man should have been dying. Already the wounds to his face and neck were swollen and stinking with infection. Tallis had found curative herbs, unknown to the Tuthanach, and Scathach had demonstrated his considerable skills as a surgeon in cleaning and preparing the wounds for healing. But the conditions of this culture were so basic that by rights Tig’s attack should have been mortal.
A deeper strength kept Wynne-Jones in the land of the living. Scathach talked to him, and during the days which followed Tallis, too, whispered her story to the unconscious man, urging him to return to consciousness, to retrace his steps from the spiral path that led into the vibrant, bone-filled earth.
On the third day of his living death, Wynne-Jones turned on to his side and began to paw and kick the air. It puzzled Scathach for a while, then Morthen understood. Tallis had sensed it from the beginning. He was running like a dog, like a hunting dog dreaming of the chase. He was deep in the wood, running on a wild track, seeking water. Towards evening, when the hounds of the Tuthanach cried at hidden ghosts, Wyn-rajathuk too opened his lips and whimpered.
The next day he began to make swimming motions with his body and his mouth opened and closed. He was a fish, swimming in crystal waters. He swam for two days. Tallis watched him through the Silvering but caught only a hint of the cold river where his spirit journeyed.
At last he was a bird. His head jerked, his eyes opened. His fingers parted; a wing, feathered. Wherever he soared, wherever he flew, in the long-house he remained stretched on the rush matting, only the sounds from his throat and the twitching of his muscles identifying the nature of his flight.
‘A stork,’ Morthen said. ‘This is the final part of his journey between the two worlds.’
‘But is he leaving us or coming home?’ Tallis asked quietly. ‘In which direction is he travelling?’
She couldn’t get close to Scathach, not in spirit, although when she sat with him he often reached out and took her hand in his cool fingers. But his mind was far away, perhaps pursuing the animal guide that led his father through the underworld. His eyes remained fixed on Wynne-Jones. His breathing was slow and deep. He sipped water from a leather pouch, but ate nothing.
Tallis tugged a bone comb through his tangled curls. He let her make the gesture and murmured ‘thank you’. He was a hunched, sad shape, all the physical power in him, the strength that had complemented her own for so many years, all of that energy pouring through his dark gaze in the direction of the dying man.
Tallis told herself that this spiritual distance was a temporary thing, that the man she loved would return soon. But an increasing feeling of melancholy over the first few days made her tense and unsociable towards the Tuthanach; she was beginning to grieve for a loss which had not yet happened.
Wyn-rajathuk’s daughter saw this and it drew her close. The girl and the woman – opposites in so many ways – became friends. Tallis had been sharing space in the women’s lodge, but her height (she was six feet tall by her reckoning) and her fair-haired, aquiline looks were such a contrast to the smaller, darker clan women that she was held in a mixture of awe and fear. She wore her tattered wolfskins for two days, then agreed to wear the woollen and otter-fur clothing of the clan. The women relaxed more with her, although Tallis entertained powerful and wistful memories of childhood, when dresses had felt as billowing and uncertain upon her unformed body as this loose fitting weave.
When she left the enclosure she immediately changed back to her travelling garb. This alteration of appearance at the gate became an odd ritual, and a delightful one to the younger men. But Tallis was injathuk– the masks she carried were clear enough evidence of this – and all such workers with the voice of the earth were expected to behave strangely, and to have their private rituals of communication with the sky.
She was left alone, therefore, and free to explore the dense woodland that led, in one direction at least, to the river where she and Scathach had first emerged into the realm of the Tuthanach. There were tracks everywhere, mostly overgrown, many of them marked by animal skulls or feathered poles. So many great old trees had fallen that no path was clear enough to run along and Tallis found it wearying to clamber over so many rotting, mossy corpses, seeking the glades where yellow green light illuminated a clearing.
In such dells, invariably, the Tuthanach had built forest rajathuks. In the mortuary enclosure, on the blackthorn hill, there was a cluster of the great statues, but in the wood each was represented many times and each had its own tangled, silent clearing, its edges hung with skins, pouches, clay pots and the bones of animals: votive offerings, Tallis imagined.
She soon realized that the blackened totems were of the same genesis as her masks. The details were different and often hard to see against the glare of the sky as she craned upwards, towards the axe-hewn features. Different, yet uncannily recognizable … as if drawn from the same imagination. Falkenna and Silvering especially were similar to her own child-fashioned bark masks.
The most haunted glade of all contained the Hollower. It grinned at her; she could see traces of the red tongue against the white ochre face. Here, the trees were hung with the dismembered bodies of humans, although for a while Tallis could see no skulls, only long bones a
Was this stinking place, with its rotting statue, the gateway to Lavondyss? Had Harry come this way, found this sad glade, and passed into the ferocious winter from which he had called back to his home, a world away? Tallis placed her own Hollower over her face. Spirits moved in the shadows; human shapes, restless and frightened, drew back into the dark wood. The statue leaned away from her, its bark splitting vertically and parting just enough so that she could sense the fluttering movement inside the trunk.
It startled her. She removed the mask. The glade was as before.
For eight years Tallis had opened hollowings, yet had failed to find the path she wanted. She knew why, well enough: she was missing the Moondream mask. But even so, her power was limited. After the stag had gone, after her gurla had so dramatically transformed itself into a feature of the land, she had never again felt as powerful as on that day when the fields around her house had erupted into a riot of root and stone from other ages.
She was growing old. She was more than twenty, by her reckoning. She was growing old. She carried the relics of a different ageing process. The forest, in its many ways, was sucking out her soul, her spirit. It was sucking out her dreams. It was draining her.
She realized with sudden, silent anger that she was sinking into melancholy again; she drew in a sharp breath, stood and slapped the side of the Hollower. One side of its grinning face seemed dead, she noticed, an odd difference from her own mask.
If the wood was draining her, surely something had happened, now, that would give her a charge of energy. She had come close … for only the first time … close to Harry. Outsiders attract outsiders. Now that she had found Wynne-Jones she was certain that she had reached a place where her brother’s anima had caused a brief riot in the woodland before he had passed on, up the river …
She often went to the river during these first few days. She saw Morthen there twice but concealed herself, although she noticed where the girl, too, found security from passing eyes: a high stand of rocks, some yards from the muddy bank, that at first seemed sheer and solid but which on investigation proved to be hollow and a natural shelter. On the night when Wyn-rajathuk began to swim, on his journey, as a silver fish, Tallis came to these protecting rocks and curled up, to sleep through one night on her own.
She was woken at dawn by four dogs, gigantic hounds, barking and baying as they sniffed and splashed their ways through the shallows. One of them came up to the rocks, braced its forepaws on the high boulders and peered down at the crouching woman. Tallis raised her iron knife menacingly and the hound withdrew, chasing after its fellows. Tallis remained in hiding for a while. A man, cloaked, carrying a staff, walked by on the far side of the water, keeping close to the undergrowth and uttering a short, high-pitched chant every time he circled round one of the feathered spirit poles. His head was cowled, his face bearded. With a shiver Tallis noticed that he carried two wooden masks on his back.
He passed by swiftly, not lingering in this totem-ridden place of the dead. Tallis followed him on foot a long way up the river until the next stretch of water could be seen, a bubbling series of rapids streaming between the crowded, leaning trees. The caped figure stepped across stones at this point, passing from one dense thicket to another, not looking back.
‘Everyone is going up the river …’
Even horses!
One came by her now, a black mare, its trappings and harnessing ragged, old and rotten. Metal had eaten into the creature’s flesh and its hide was stained and stiff with caked blood.
‘I don’t remember you from the story books …’ Tallis murmured as she made her cautious approach to the wary animal. It was not old, but it was weary. There was a great dark stain on the remnants of the saddle blanket which still draped its back, stuck to the horse by the congealed lifeblood of its one-time rider.
Tallis caught the beast and soothed it, then removed what she could of the man-made torment which bound it. When she walked back to the place of the dead, the black mare followed. Tallis’s own horse had been killed by falling rocks, some weeks before. Scathach – after the loss of his Jaguthin friends – had taken to running through the wood and the wild tracks on foot, an expression of loss the reason for which he was unable to articulate.
‘You could well be a welcome friend,’ Tallis whispered to the animal. ‘If you’re still here tomorrow I shall assume I can ride you. But I won’t name you, so you will always be free. But if I do ride you, expect to go into a strange region.’
The next day Morthen made her boldest approach to Tallis, to establish friendship.
Tallis had been aware of the girl’s furtive presence for some minutes before she finally crept into the spirit glade where Tallis was sitting and crouched in the shadows behind the older woman. Tallis remained quite still. She was surrounded by her masks, which she had laid flat and face up in a circle. The wolfskin pack which contained her special relics was placed neatly before her, but still bound. Aware of the girl she nevertheless kept her gaze upon the eyes of the wooden statue, seeking in its bizarre shape for the clue to “Moondream”.
The Moondream totem was made from a willow trunk. The female aspect of the shape was evident, but the true beauty of the rajathuk emerged through the representations of earth and moon in the subtle flow of the carved wood, and the clever conjunction of those symbols with the human features. It had already begun to communicate with the woman from the far realm.
‘Tallis?’
The girl’s voice was quiet. She was nervous. Tallis ignored her for a moment. Her mind was adrift in a nightscape and the shape of the mask was close to her, almost formed. It was not like the previous moondream, the mask she had made after talking with Gaunt. How could it be? That particular expression of her deep unconscious world had been used and expended. When she had dropped the mask, when she had lost it, she had lost, too, that particular link with the female in the land …
She wondered, sometimes, whether her father, after he had picked it up, had destroyed it, or whether he wore it on moonlit nights; and if he did that … what else did he see? What did he hear?
‘Tallis? What are you doing?’
Morthen’s English was basic and sometimes barely understandable. Her words were full of the particular palatals and diphthongs of the Tuthanach (Tallis was pronounced Tallish, for example) but her father had instructed her sufficiently in his strange tongue for her to make a little sense.
Tallis turned where she sat; her hair fell forward to cover her face and the scar on her jawline; it also hid her smile; when Morthen remained motionless Tallis beckoned her forward and the girl approached, walking in a peculiar, crouched way. Her hair was smeared white and tied down with a red-painted strip of cloth from which strings of bone and shell hung. Morthen reached out to touch the older woman’s dry hair, the flaxen hair that so fascinated the Tuthanach women. Tallis remained quite still, neither irritated nor amused by this gentle exploration of difference. Morthen’s impish eyes, full of wonder now, stared hard into Tallis’s. ‘There is green there. It’s true.’
‘There wasn’t always. Only for the last few months.’
She had already heard it commented upon in the settlement: that although she was injathuk, she carried no sky in the bone of her head, but the green woollen robe of the voice-of-earth was showing through; she was becoming rajathuk.
To Tallis, all this superstition was meaningless; what mattered was that she had a certain power. Although the change of her eye colour was a slightly worrying thing …
In belated answer to the girl’s first question, Tallis said, ‘I’m making a new mask. The last of my masks. It will help me open the hollowings … oolerinnens … more easily. Do y
But Morthen was already thinking along a different forest track. She asked, ‘Is Scathach my brother? Truly?’
She had removed her touch from Tallis’s hair and now crouched, drawn in on herself, as she might crouch around the fire in the height of winter.
Tallis agreed. ‘Of course. Your half- brother that is. He had a different mother than you. Tig is your only full brother.’
Morthen’s childish eyes flamed with anger; she snarled, a brief and bestial distortion of her lips. ‘Tig is not my brother,’ she spat. ‘He had no mother. He came from the first forest.’ She tapped her head furiously.
Tallis smiled, understanding what she meant. Tig was a more recent mythago. Wynne-Jones’s, no doubt.
Morthen’s flare of anger died as quickly as it had been kindled. Tallis gathered her masks and looped the leather strap through the eyes, slinging them on to her right shoulder. Morthen prodded the other pack and Tallis gently tapped the inquisitive fingers away. She glanced wistfully at the willow pole, with its subtle moon features.
Almost. One more hour and I’ll have you …
Then she followed the girl. They passed around the winding track which led through the densest wood towards the river.
Morthen was excited. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said on three occasions, as if urging Tallis to remain interested.
They came to the river. With a shiver of anger Tallis saw the black horse tethered to a low branch. The tether was in the form of a noose around its neck. It had struggled, but was now calm. Triumphantly, Morthen presented her gift.
‘I caught it. It was alone.’
Tallis stared at the animal, then cautiously established a touch upon its muzzle. ‘I still want to ride you,’ she said, and the beast snorted. Tallis removed the tether. ‘Go, if you want.’
Black mare stayed. Tallis smiled at Morthen. ‘Thank you. For the gift.’
Unaware of anything more than that Tallis had wonderful control over animals, Morthen slapped her own cheeks in delight. ‘I’ve named her for you. You can ride her. Her name is Swimmer of Lakes. That will be important. You’ll see …’