Merlin's Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  At that moment he was a dead man alive again; at that moment my song was magic. At that moment he was at a distance from me, because his own curiosity now extended not to the land which we loved, nor to the past which we were trying to recreate in our minds, but to me, to a French woman, born near the forest of Paimpont, orphaned when fourteen years old, now a possessor of magic, not just an explorer of magic tradition.

  The Lake-finder’s Tale

  The old ‘bosker’, Conrad, came to the farmhouse shortly after dawn, a dark figure moving effortlessly along the path, the early sun catching on his small, silver spectacles. Martin had been unable to sleep, his mind full of Rebecca’s story and the idea that to dance inside the ghostly figures from Broceliande was to become possessed by some shadow of the past. Rebecca slept soundly in the bed behind him. Martin peered down as Conrad rummaged in the long grass by the hedges and found two eggs, which he inspected and pocketed. He was wearing a wide-brimmed leather hat – he had made it himself – and a long, grey overcoat which flapped around him as he moved. He carried two short wooden staffs, slung on his back like rifles.

  Seeing Martin at the bedroom window he waved, then let himself in to the warm kitchen below. Martin came downstairs. The old man stood, hat in his hands, white hair combed back into a long pigtail, tied with grass-twine. He was looking around sadly.

  ‘I watched Eveline as she went to her cold home, the other day,’ he said. ‘I was by the wood. I didn’t want to intrude by the fires.’

  ‘I wish you had. You’d have been very welcome.’

  ‘I’m going to miss her. She was just a girl when I came here first, but she helped me build my houses in the forest. She always let me have eggs – and bread, sometimes. I traded foxes, after your father died. She couldn’t bear to kill them, but they have to be controlled.’

  ‘I understand,’ Martin said quickly, feeling uncomfortable. ‘But please stop controlling them from now. I’m more than happy to let you have eggs whenever you want.’

  As Martin picked a dozen of the larger eggs from a wicker basket, placing them carefully in Conrad’s sack, the old man said carefully, ‘You’re a fox lover, then?’

  ‘Always have been.’

  ‘So am I at heart. But trade is trade.’

  Martin offered the remains of yesterday’s heavy loaf and a farm cheese that was now over-ripe. The old bosker seemed delighted.

  ‘Would you like some breakfast?’ Martin asked him.

  ‘I ate in the forest at first dew. Thanks all the same.’

  Conrad seemed to relax. He pulled on his hat and lifted the pack to his shoulder. He was staring at Martin curiously, grey eyes bright in the weather-etched face. ‘Are you still frightened of me, Martin?’

  ‘Good God no.’

  ‘You used to be—’

  ‘Kids are always frightened of hermits. And you were once an enemy soldier, left behind by the war. We used to make up terrible stories about what you did in the woods.’

  ‘A living demon, eh?’ Conrad laughed. ‘Yes, I remember. I used to listen – I could hear you all from a long distance. It’s a talent I seem to have developed since coming here,’ – he sounded wry – ‘Sometimes your fantasies amused me, sometimes – not often – they made me sad. I was a long way from my first home, and harmless to everything inedible, which included children—’

  ‘Ah yes, but we didn’t think so.’

  ‘All except Rebecca, your special friend Rebecca.’ Conrad winked. ‘She wasn’t afraid of me. Anyway, I would watch you children chasing the ghosts from the forest as they walked the path. I couldn’t see them, of course, no adult could. But I could hear them. It was an extraordinary experience. It still is. Which is chiefly why I came to see you. There’s something I want to show you …’

  ‘Shall I wake Rebecca?’

  The old man glanced back. ‘No. This is for you alone.’

  Conrad might always have been a part of Broceliande. He was as eternal, as familiar, indeed as elusive, usually, as the strange ruins that could be found just inside the forest’s skirts. But he had not been born here, nor come into existence here. In his own words, ‘There comes a moment in every person’s life, I now realise, when as they are marching forward they become aware that in fact they are running away. At that moment, home is where you are standing, and this place, this gloomy edgewood, became my second home.’

  His army column had been marching past Broceliande. Conrad was sixteen, not particularly frightened, not particularly lonely. He was just a soldier in a column, moving forward towards the coast. There were not enough trucks to transport all the troops, in those early winter months of 1944, and so like Caesar’s legions they tramped the rough roads to the west, sometimes aware that a watery sun was leading them on.

  ‘But I had no faith, no real belief. My father had always talked of duty, and of family, but his words, sincere though they were, were of no comfort to me. I wonder sometimes if there can be any greater pain than realising that you are no longer part of a family that once was your whole life.

  ‘As we marched past Broceliande my First Home broke into shattered memories. Everything simply fell apart. I hated where I had come from. I loathed that savage war. I despised the principles that drove it. I was not alone in this, of course, but the forest took me and me alone.

  ‘I deserted quickly. I used a strip of oilskin to wrap my weapons and bury them; the rifle was a bolt-action Lee Enfield, more like twenty pounds in weight than nine, or so it seemed, and I was glad of the freedom from this burden.

  ‘That first day, I walked a wide circle, walking to the limit of what I felt I needed. That circle, I discovered later, was more than two miles across.’

  This disc of land had become Conrad’s Second Home. He walked its circumference five times, first entering the dark forest, then emerging and skirting the villages, crossing the fields and the farmlands before entering the woods again. All of this was done at night because he was in fear of his life, now, and his uniform would certainly have been an invitation to murder.

  In all the long years since then he had never once stepped outside the circle, as he had defined it during those February days. ‘I belong here. I made it right that I belonged here. I became accepted, eventually welcomed. I don’t belong across the circle, but I’ve lived long enough, and circled hard enough, to make this small land my land. My home.’

  Now Conrad led the way into that small land and into the forest, following a wide, winding path that was tall with wet, webbed grass and purple thistle. He stopped occasionally to listen. The air was moist, almost stifling.

  His first house was a shack constructed out of corrugated iron, wooden panels and old doors. It was covered with black oilskins. Around it, on a picket fence, hung thirty or so carcases of grey squirrels, in various states of decomposition. Two foxes’ heads on poles were a grim reminder of Conrad’s main usefulness to the farms around the wood.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ the bosker said with a chuckle, glancing back at Martin. ‘Into the place which terrified you once upon a time.’

  Martin pulled aside the oilskin door, ducked through the small entrance space into Conrad’s living quarters. The floor had been hollowed out and lined with sandbags and turves. His bed was at one end, in a stream of light from the only window, a gap below the metal eaves. His fire was at the other end of the small room, built out of bricks, with an iron chimney to the outside world. The walls were hung with skins and furs; hooks and leather ties dangled from the ceiling, ready for hanging game. He had a chair and a table, and a small chest on which stood two tiny, framed and faded photographs, one of a shy, fair-haired girl, holding a cat, the other of two people sitting on a garden chair, a couple who looked out of the frame with solemn expression.

  As Conrad stored his new supplies, Martin noticed that above the bed were five crude paintings, all of the girl, all from different angles: one of each profile, her full face laughing, her face looking coy, a discreet nude, they had been execute
d in crayon on smoothed and chalk-whitened wood.

  Light spilled suddenly into the shack. Conrad had pulled back the doorflap, waiting quietly for Martin to finish his inspection.

  ‘Just a ghost,’ the old man said, and Martin felt embarrassed, stepping quickly away from the portraits.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was an intrusion. I was too curious.’

  ‘No intrusion at all. She’s long gone, now. Long changed. But she keeps me in touch with my younger spirit.’

  They continued inwards, the track narrowing and becoming more difficult, the oaks crowding from the sides.

  ‘Be careful,’ Conrad called, as he smacked at wet briar to clear the route. ‘This is the way the ghosts come. If I say get off the path, do so immediately. They sometimes move very quietly.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Martin called back. ‘I can’t see them or hear them any more. I’m too old. They can’t harm me …’

  Conrad’s voice as he moved ahead was steely. ‘They can harm you. Just do as I say. For Eveline’s sake, for your mother’s sake.’

  The path spilled out into a clearing below the spreading branches of three massive beeches. The ground here was soft and golden brown, streaked through with the green of fern. Here, Conrad had his second home, a hemisphere of bent willow branches, covered with hides.

  ‘Hunting lodge,’ he said quickly, skirting the clearing. ‘We’ve not far to go, now.’

  Not far to go?

  For an hour that seemed like ten, Conrad led them deeper into the wildwood, through half-lit dells and marshy, silent glades, down stone escarpments and over massive, mossy rocks which caught the shifting sun with a vibrant, emerald luminosity. Muddy watercourses wound through crushing woods of oak and holly; springs spilled from ragged ledges, misting in the thin light from the glistening canopy.

  ‘We’re lost. We must be lost.’

  ‘Not lost at all. Look!’

  And suddenly they had come through the wood to the rush-fringed shore of a wide lake, and the bosker’s third home – a series of tarpaulins, slung between trees, open to the water.

  ‘Fishing lodge,’ Conrad announced, stooping to enter the shelter and beckoning Martin to follow him.

  The lodge was full of dried and drying fish, crude rods and nets, a harpoon and a further pile of skins, rabbit and fox; the cured hides of two small deer were stretched on frames and could be pulled across the open front to block the wind.

  They sat, squeezed together, and watched the gentle water. Mallards and moorhens wriggled through the rushes, dipping and pecking below the lake. The forest was solid on the other side.

  They come across in small boats, or sometimes on rafts,’ Conrad said after a while. ‘When I’m here at night, sometimes the water is covered with a low mist, and it swirls where the boat comes, the only visible sign of their passage from the heartwood. I hear the oars dipping, and the rustle of the sedges when it comes to the bank. I hear the murmur of voices, and on occasion the breathing of horses. The ghosts, which are invisible to me, follow the path by your farm, then up to the church and over the hill. The boat returns to the dark wood, after which there will often be nothing for months.

  ‘Over the lake is the heart of Broceliande but it is an older forest than the forest behind us. It doesn’t belong here.

  ‘My circle of land ends as far out onto the lake as I need to go to spear pike, perhaps twenty yards. I would never dare go further.’

  *

  I had lived in the wood for ten years before I found the lake or perhaps I should say before the lake found me. There was no sign of it when I first came here. I had probably walked across its edge fifty times since I first circumscribed my land. It had hidden from me, or been hidden from me, but one bitter winter morning I heard the sound of moorhens and gently splashing water. I was curious, aware that there should have been a grove of trees there. I pushed through the dense holly to find the lake very much as you see it now. It was covered with ice, though, almost to the edge itself, where the rushes were white with frost.

  This was the second event that convinced me of a source of magic at work, deeper in the forest. I’d already seen the strange behaviour of you children, at night on the path, your clear belief in ghosts and your parents’ reluctance to contradict you. More than that, when hunting deep in the wood I had occasionally heard the sound of a man crying out. The wailing came from a great distance, and quite soon I realised that the distance was further than I’d thought, since I discovered I could also hear the whispered words of children from a mile away. That crying voice haunted me, though. It drifted through the glades, seemed to flow down the paths through the wood, and was usually followed by a woman’s voice, laughing.

  So when this lake miraculously appeared, one morning, I could no longer deny that I’d stumbled into a place which, to put it mildly, was quite out of the ordinary. The strange way of speaking among the farmers and villagers now became more important. The traditions, the rituals that I had watched from the edgewood, all had seemed eccentric, perhaps just local habit; now they seemed to echo an older thought: the fires you put at the head of each grave, the procession of the twelve trees, the drowning of grass images, with the hair-filled puppet of a child inside … They’d never been sinister, but now they became more meaningful, although I’ve never really understood that meaning.

  I wasn’t aware, when all this was happening, of the association of Merlin with this forest. I hadn’t read Tennyson or Chrétien de Troyes, knew nothing of Thomas Mallory, or the Vitae Merlinis, or the other sources. The priest talked to me about all of them. He lent me books. But before that education I only knew that there was a vision of magic, somewhere across the lake, and that it was seeping from the forest, shrouded in the ghostly forms of the people on the path, and in that terrible moaning.

  You know how the seasons bring different scents, different feelings in the air? So it was with the wailing voice, as if there was a season for the agony, a certain day for the distress, an hour, just after dusk, when the moment of true desperation could be remembered and the air of the forest filled with the cry.

  On one such evening, when the pain of that voice had gone, I crept from my hunting lodge again and heard the wildwood speak, an odd echo, like a girl’s voice, but curiously slow. It seemed to breathe a word. I wasn’t sure, but I thought the word was ‘Fool’, and moments later the word was repeated. ‘Fool!’

  I waited, fascinated, and soon a girl from the village came running and twirling along the path. I knew her by sight, though she had never entered the wood before. She was a slight thing, fourteen years old or so, her hair almost orange in the half light, her clothing a simple dress and a loose grey cardigan.

  As she ran she seemed to dance, exactly as I have seen the children dance among the ghosts. She was murmuring as she moved. ‘I have it. I have it now.’

  She approached the clearing where I waited, unaware of me. Then she stopped and crouched, snarling and shaking her head so that her hair was wild. Laughing, she suddenly launched herself at a tree and scratched and bit at the hard bark, tearing with her fingers, stripping away whole lengths of wood. Embracing the torn trunk she flung back her head and howled and bayed, then laughed and again exclaimed, ‘I have it!’

  I felt terrified of this feral child and inadvertently drew back, drawing attention to myself. She raced across to me, coming very close, then folded her arms about her body – her fingers were bloody – cocking her head as she peered at me. Then she leered forward, lips hideously drawn back from pearl-white teeth to expose the death in her head. ‘I have it!’ she hissed, and proceeded to dance a little jig, arms still folded. ‘I have it,’ she murmured, almost singing, delighted with herself.

  At that moment a boy laughed from the darkness of the wood. The girl turned quickly, crouching slightly, then took off like a hare towards the source of the sound. The boy stepped into the half light and taunted her. ‘No you don’t! No you don’t!’

  ‘I have it,’ screamed
the girl.

  ‘You have nothing. You took nothing!’

  And at once his crowing ceased and his youthful face took on a look of great age, and great amusement, the amusement of an old man, listening to the pretensions of someone younger and still naive.

  ‘Fool …’ he added quietly.

  It was the wrong thing to do, perhaps. The girl leapt at him and in a second had torn her nails across his grinning face. They struggled. He held her hair, but she was taller, stronger, and she hunched above him, bending him and crushing him, finally sinking her teeth into the back of his neck. She shook him, worried at him, like the wolf whose shape now seemed to envelop her. Girl-like, hair tossing, legs thrashing inside her simple skirt, the hunched form of a wolf was shadowed around her, an evil glamour.

  The screaming boy was dragged away by this monstrous creature. I ran towards her, but she turned and looked at me, the struggling boy still held in those perfect teeth. I felt as if I’d been struck by falling sickness. I couldn’t move. I was on my knees. My arms fell heavily and I stayed there, watching the savage death, the boy dragged back towards the ponds, close to the village, close to the farm where the poor child lived.

  Yes, Martin. I’m sorry. The child I saw murdered by the girl was your own brother. Sebastian.

  I didn’t regain the use of my limbs until after dawn of the following day. By the time I reached the edge of the forest I could hear the dogs, and the voices of searchers, and then the terrible cry of pain, your mother’s voice, followed by the splashing of men in the shallow pond, dragging the body from its grave.

  Later I came close to your farm and listened to the grieving voices. It was clear that a wolf was being blamed – as if a wolf would have treated its prey in such a way! Even if there had been any wolves left in Broceliande!

  The children were more courageous in their suspicions, and I heard one of you say, ‘The old woodsman. He’s got one of us at last.’ And someone answered, ‘Let’s get him. We’ll burn him on the hill.’