Merlin's Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  And the dream broke! Rebecca wasn’t here – she had never been here – just a dream, just as Merlin had promised, but nothing more …

  ‘Rebecca!’ he cried aloud, then let his disappointment surface in tears, hugging his body, rocking where he sat as the anguish came through, and the brief touch with his family was taken away from him by the cold dawn, by cold reality.

  When the despair had quietened, he left the grove of Merlin’s tomb and followed the path to the lake. Father Gualzator saw him and stopped ringing the small, brass bell.

  ‘I was worried about you,’ the priest called from the canoe. The boat drifted sideways on the still water, just beyond the rushes. The man frowned, peering hard.

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘I saw her. I saw them both …’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Rebecca. And Daniel.’ The dream flowed through his mind again. He stared into the distance, remembering. ‘I ran for so long, Father. It was such a wilderness – nothing but forest, and rivers. I ran across hills, I ran through caves, I felt the strength of a hound in my legs, I kept running. I was so lost, but I kept running – I could hear them, ahead of me, always just ahead of me. And then I found them, by a pool below a fall of water from the high rocks. They were crouching, drinking with cupped hands. For a while they didn’t see me. I stood across the pool and watched them. Then I called to them and they seemed to hear me. I was very tired and I lay down by the pool and watched them. Rebecca lit a torch. It burned green. She waded through the pool towards me, apprehensive and curious as to whom I might be. And then she said my name. The fire burned green and she leaned down to kiss me—

  ‘She kissed me. And for a moment I was home. I had come home …’

  ***

  ‘Martin!’

  The priest’s voice was harsh in the stillness of the new day. Martin looked at the man and frowned. ‘Father …?’

  ‘Is that you, Martin?’

  ‘Of course it’s me.’

  Father Gualzator seemed unsure, his face reflecting his confusion, his uncertainty. ‘I’ve brought you what you asked for. Dressings for wounds, antiseptic, plasters, some more food.’

  What I asked for?

  ‘When did I ask for this?’

  ‘Two days ago. You came to the church. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No. I fell asleep by the grave shaft. I’m cut all over. Christ, I’m cut from head to foot …’

  The stinging began to be unbearable and he tugged at his shirt, feeling it peel away from his skin, wincing as shallow but raw wounds opened. And as he collapsed through weakness and distress, the priest shouted distantly, ‘By the Good God! What have you done to yourself?’ and rowed through the rushes, to make the shore.

  He bathed Martin’s naked body with stinging antiseptic, then brewed a pot of coffee and insisted he eat the bread and coarse pâté he had brought from the village.

  ‘These are marks similar to those on the statue we excavated. You’ve mutilated yourself, copying the old man you say you saw.’

  ‘When did I tell you about the old man?’ Martin whispered. ‘Christ! It hurts.’

  ‘I should have brought fresh clothes. I’m sorry. You made me very nervous when you came from the forest. I haven’t been thinking.’

  ‘I don’t remember …’ Martin whispered. He tugged his jacket round his shoulders, pulled on the reeking trousers, the muddy shoes. ‘Where’s Conrad?’

  ‘In his grave,’ Father Gualzator said, grimly, pointedly. ‘Where he belongs.’

  ‘Rebecca? Daniel?’

  ‘Back at the house. Where you brought them. You don’t even remember that?’

  Back at the house?

  ‘Are they … oh God … Are they …?’

  ‘Are they what?’ the priest prompted.

  Martin grabbed at the man’s jacket. ‘How are they?’

  Father Gualzator closed his eyes for a second, his head dropping as he realised Martin’s misunderstanding.

  ‘Drowned. They’re drowned. You resurrected them and brought them back to the house. I’d assumed you wanted to see them properly to their cold-earth homes.’

  ‘No!’

  Shocked by the violence of the scream from the bleeding man, the priest stepped quickly back, stumbling and falling in the shallows among the rushes. As he picked himself up he was staring at Martin with a strange expression – part fear, part anger.

  ‘I should have guessed! It’s so obvious, now.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Who are you? Or do I even need to ask?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The priest laughed sourly. ‘What have you done with Martin?’

  ‘What do you mean by that? What do you mean, what have I done with Martin? Don’t you recognise me? I’m Martin. You fool! It’s only a beard. Only some cuts. I haven’t changed.’

  ‘No!’ Father Gualzator was defiant as he brushed water and mud from his jeans. ‘I don’t recognise you. And Martin wouldn’t call me fool.’

  Martin watched the older man, felt the cuts on his body sting as his muscular response to the priest’s attack made the skin part painfully. What had he just said?

  ‘I’m sorry, Father. I don’t know where that came from. I’m very confused, that’s all. I can’t remember coming to the church, asking for bandages …’

  ‘Of course you can!’ Father Gualzator growled, smiling grimly. ‘It doesn’t matter. What are you going to do with him? Don’t look so uncomprehending, you don’t fool me for an instant. My eyes are too old! Are you going to kill Martin like you killed Daniel?’

  ‘I don’t remember coming to the church,’ Martin said weakly. What was happening?

  ‘Martin doesn’t, I’m quite prepared to believe that. But you do. And you killed Daniel … If I’m not mistaken. Stop pretending! I know who you are.’

  Merlin allowed a quick smile on Martin’s face, then whispered, ‘Go back,’ and Martin, still confused, retreated to listen from within as the priest and the resurrected sorcerer confronted each other by the lake.

  *

  Merlin said, ‘I stopped the enchantress. I had to. In the boy she would have had fresh life. She would have been very damaging. She had learned many things – mostly illusion, but certainly some things more than that – but for all she had learned, she never learned the suppression of desire, or need, or of the senses. She never learned control, and that frightens me now as much as it frightened me then. Which is why, I suppose – it’s so long ago, now, I’ve had so much time to make my excuses – which is why I let her destroy me. It was the only way to destroy her.’

  Father Gualzator formed mud into a ball, murmuring words from the Bronzebell, Book and Nightfire, drawing on the forest to make a weapon that might hurt this raw and resurrected spirit, stalking up the bank towards the stooped body of his friend, the hiding place of evil.

  ‘And now it’s Martin’s turn. Is it?’ he challenged. ‘Another life taken. Another death. And I’m helpless, I know it.’ He hefted the mud ball pointedly, he tried to show that he understood its small significance, its possible power, its restraining power. ‘But I’ll stop you if I can … believe me.’

  ‘I do believe you,’ Merlin said. ‘And I don’t believe you’re as helpless as you claim.’ He frowned at the lump of faith-blessed mud, then shook his head. ‘Although I’m not quite sure I’m right about that. Then again, I’m not sure about very much at all. I’m too new to the world. What I am sure about is that Martin let me out. You were there to help him, I seem to remember, but I didn’t want you around. Martin let me out, then asked for my help. I’m free in one way, of course, and relieved to be so. In another, I don’t quite know what to do, where to go. I’m new to the world. I don’t recognise it.’

  ‘Let him go!’

  ‘No. When Martin let me out, he asked for my help, and there was no fear in the request, no expectation of agreement, and no fear of retribution. I was surprised by that. I tried to warn him of the damage, the possib
le damage, but he seemed certain that it was a risk he would take, and who am I, who have I ever been, to argue against a man who is prepared to take a risk? What other function do I have? Why else was I born on the path? I can give you the small magic that can arm you against an unknown enemy. I don’t make things happen, I can simply help in older, different ways.’

  ‘Let him go!’

  ‘Martin asked for my help, and he convinced me to help him. But I can’t help him unless I travel in him. For a while at least.’

  ‘And how long is “a while”?’

  ‘In fact I’m nearly finished. I’ll give him back to you quite soon. But if you want to help your friend, you should go to the church and watch him safely beyond the hill. And you should not interfere. He has a journey to make.’

  ‘Where are you sending him?’

  ‘To fetch back the singing magic …’

  The priest shuffled uneasily by the lake, his gaze on the body of Martin, his ears attuned to the words, so civilised, so calculated, the words of a man dead two thousand years.

  ‘The singing magic? Who stole it?’

  ‘Nobody stole it. I let it go. An echo of it was captured by Rebecca. She used it once, she never lost it. If Martin can catch up with Rebecca he can find the singing magic, he can use the singing magic, he can do with it what he likes, and the consequences will all be his, because I’m still not sure what has happened to the enchantress. But he has a chance. It’s a risk he must take.’

  Puzzled, Father Gualzator looked back across the lake, back to the village, to the farm, beyond the excavated graves. To Merlin he said, ‘Rebecca’s body is in the farmhouse. Daniel’s too.’

  ‘But only the bodies, only the flesh and bones. Martin saw them on the path. The essential part of them still lives, still walks the circle. He only has to catch them. He has to dance inside them. He tried it once, a few days ago. But he wasn’t looking. You know how important it is to look. They passed right through him! He missed the chance.’

  ‘How long, then? How long will it take for Martin to find the singing magic?’

  ‘Six months, six years, six thousand years … It depends on how you look at it. He’ll catch up with them eventually, and they’ll come back to Broceliande, and life will go on for them.’

  For a moment Father Gualzator was silent, his white, lined face showing grief, a desperate sense of loss. When he spoke, his words were scarcely audible. ‘But I’ll not necessarily see them. No-one here, no-one who loves them, none of us may see them again.’

  And Merlin laughed. He was thinking of the long-gone, of the warlord Peredur, a brave man, a shining man, who had expressed the same wish that all things he could imagine should happen in the short, futile span of a single human life.

  ‘That depends how well you pass on your eyes. With such Old Eyes as yours, Father, with such long sight – you should know that very well.’

  ‘I suppose I do,’ the priest said, all resistance going. ‘I suppose I always have.’

  Merlin came down the bank and took the ball of mud from Father Gualzator’s hands. Without comment, without rebuke, without expression, he tossed the simple weapon out across the lake, then took the priest’s muddy hands in his, embracing them with his fingers.

  ‘Then why are you fighting me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because I’m frightened …’

  ‘Frightened of what?’

  ‘The way you play with people – with their lives. And deaths.’

  ‘Better to play with them than let them limp through time, warm home to cold home, birth to grave, no twists on the path. Don’t you agree?’

  Father Gualzator twisted away from the other man. ‘No! How can I? It goes against everything that the church believes in—’

  ‘And the hill?’

  ‘The hill too. The path is not straight, but it goes forward. It was never meant for us to play tricks with the path.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  The priest was shivering as he stared from the water’s edge at Martin, his friend, at Merlin, enchanting him.

  ‘I don’t, of course.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. You’ve forgotten how to play with toys. A toy is lifeless, but you give it life – you make it do things it could never do on its own.’

  ‘Our lives aren’t toys!’

  Merlin laughed. ‘Of course they are! And like toys, you can keep them to look at, or you can twist them and torment them, and give them the illusion of life. But one thing’s for sure, Father. All toys wear out no matter how well you look after them. Dance them while you can. It’s the only thing to do with toys. Surely you agree.’

  Suddenly weary, Father Gualzator looked away across the lake.

  ‘Yes … somewhere inside of me … I suppose I do. I do agree.’

  Merlin laughed quietly. ‘Then I’ll say goodbye. And I’ll let Martin go in pursuit of his Vision of Magic. And as for you, Father. Hurry home. There’s a storm coming from the west.’

  ‘A storm?’ The priest looked up, looked round. ‘Are you sure? The winds seem quite still.’

  ‘Ah,’ Merlin said with quiet humour, ‘but you don’t know the wildwoods of Broceliande as well as I do.’

  ‘No. I suppose I don’t.’

  ‘Go home. Go back to the hill. There’s nothing more, now, nothing that you can do that will make a difference. Go home.’

  Other Tales:

  Scarrowfell

  1

  In the darkness, in the world of nightmares, she sang a little song. In her small room, behind the drawn curtains, her voice was tiny, frightened, murmuring in her sleep:

  Oh dear mother what a fool I’ve been …

  Three young fellows … came courting me …

  Two were blind … the other couldn’t see …

  Oh dear mother what a fool I’ve been …

  Tuneless, timeless, endlessly repeated through the night, soon the nightmare grew worse and she tossed below the bedclothes, and called out for her mother, louder and louder, Mother! Mother! until she sat up, gasping for breath and screaming.

  ‘Hush, child. I’m here. I’m beside you. Quiet now. Go back to sleep.’

  ‘I’m frightened, I’m frightened. I had a terrible dream …’

  Her mother hugged her, sitting on the bed, rocking back and forward, wiping the sweat and the fear from her face. ‘Hush … hush, now. It was just a dream …’

  ‘The blind man,’ she whispered, and shook as she thought of it so that her mother’s grip grew firmer, more reassuring. ‘The blind man. He’s coming again …’

  ‘Just a dream, child. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Close your eyes and go back to sleep, now. Sleep, child … sleep. There. That’s better.’

  Still she sang, her voice very small, very faint as she drifted into sleep again. ‘Three young fellows … came courting me … one was blind … one was grim … one had creatures following him …’

  ‘Hush, child …’

  Waking with a scream: ‘Don’t let him take me!’

  2

  None of the children in the village really knew one festival day from another. They were told what to wear, and told what to do, and told what to eat, and when the formalities were over they would rush away to their secret camp, in the shadow of the old church.

  Lord’s Eve was different, however. Lord’s Eve was the best of the festivals. Even if you didn’t know that a particular day would be Lord’s Eve day, the signs of it were in the village.

  Ginny knew the signs by heart. Mr Box, at the Red Hart, would spend a day cursing as he tried to erect a tarpaulin in the beer garden of his public house. Here, the ox would be slaughtered and roasted, and the dancers would rest. At the other end of the village Mr Ellis, who ran the Bush and Briar, would put empty firkins outside his premises for use as seats. The village always filled with strangers during the dancing festivals, and those strangers drank a lot of beer.

  The church was made ready too. Mr and Mrs Morton, usually never to
be seen out of their Sunday best, would dress in overalls and invade the cold church with brooms, brushes and buckets. Mr Ashcroft, the priest, would garner late summer flowers, and mow and trim the graveyard. This was a dangerous time for the children, since he would come perilously close to their camp, which lay just beyond the iron gate that led from the churchyard. Here, between the church and the earth walls of the old Saxon fort – in whose ring the village had been built – was a tree-filled ditch, and the children’s camp had been made there. The small clearing was close to the path which led from the church, through the earth wall and out onto the farmland beyond.

  There were other signs of the coming festival day, however, signs from outside the small community. First, the village always seemed to be in shadow. Yet distantly, beyond the cloud cover, the land seemed to glow with eerie light. Ginny would stand on the high wall by the church, looking through the crowded trees that covered the ring of earthworks, staring to where the late summer sun was setting its fire on Whitley Nook and Middleburn. Movement on the high valley walls above these villages was just the movement of clouds, and the fields seemed to flow with brightness.

  The wind always blew from Whitley Nook towards Ginny’s own village, Scarrowfell. And on that wind, the day before the festival of Lord’s Eve, you could always hear the music of the dancers as they wended their way along the riverside, through and round the underwood, stopping at each village to collect more dancers, more musicians (more hangovers) ready for the final triumph at Scarrowfell itself.

  The music drifted in and out of hearing, a hint of a violin, the distant clatter of sticks, the faint jingle of the small bells with which the dancers decked out their clothes. When the wind gusted, whole phrases of the jaunty music could be heard, a rhythmic sound, with the voices of the dancers clearly audible as they sang the words of the folk songs.

  Ginny, precariously balanced on the top of the wall, would jig with those brief rhythms, hair blowing in the wind, one hand holding on to the dry bark of an ash branch.