Merlin's Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘Ee-Tig, cranno argak ee-eikBurton en-en na-ig?’ You knew Burton? (This Tig eye-felt wind-felt that Burton man-stranger?)

  Tig spat a small bone onto the dying fire. He eyed Farrel suspiciously for a moment, then rose up on his haunches and passed wind noisily. He seemed to find the offensive action very funny. Farrel laughed too, rose up and repeated the action. Tig opened his mouth wide and shrieked with laughter. Farrel repeated his question and Tig spat onto the fire. The saliva hissed and steamed and Tig laughed. Farrel asked for the third time.

  ‘Kok.’ Yes.

  ‘Ee-eikBurton ’g-cruig tarn baag?’ Is Burton dead and buried? (That Burton eats earth, skin cold?)

  Tig hesitated. Then his hand touched his genitals, his head inclined. He didn’t know, but he was uneasy.

  ‘Ee-eikBurton pa-cruig pronok dag?’ Is he alive? (That Burton kisses earth, urine warm?)

  Tig said he didn’t know.

  ‘Ee-Tig ganaag ee-Farrel olo ee-eikBurton ee-Farrel ka’en ka-en?’ Are you afraid of me because you think I was Burton’s friend? (This Tig afraid of this Farrel because that Burton this Farrel were not not-strangers?)

  ‘Kok.’

  ‘Ee-Farrel cranno orgak ee-eikBurton. Ee-Farrel en-Burton, ’n nik Farrel.’ I knew him but I didn’t like him. I have a woman. (This Farrel eye-felt wind-felt that Burton. This Farrel not touch/never touch that Burton. This Farrel close/touch woman Farrel.)

  What would she think, he wondered, of being used as a sex object to a twelve-year-old moron? Joke. How many thousands of years would it be for the joke to be appreciated? To the Tuthanach, to all the Boyne peoples, denial of friendship to a man had to be coupled with a declaration of friendship with a woman. It seemed so unrealistically simple to believe that a man with a woman whose sexual appetite was high would not have a close male friend … (nik, woman, implied a sexually aggressive woman; a woman or man without any such desires was called crum-kii – stone legs.) It was a bizarre piece of nonsense and yet it appeased. Like the beast that presents its hindquarters to an attacker – submission. The name of the game.

  Tig was much happier. He clapped his hands together repeatedly, pausing only to chew a ragged nail on his left index finger.

  ‘Ee-Tig en-Burton. Ee-eikBurton en-Tig. Ee-Tig tarn ee-eikBurton baag na-yit.’ I didn’t like Burton either, and he didn’t like me. But I killed him some time ago. (This Tig never touch that Burton. That Burton never touch this Tig. This Tig skin Burton cold several yesterday.)

  ‘A-Tig tarn ee-eikBurton baag?’ You killed him?

  ‘Ee-Tig …’ eyes downcast, voice lowering. ‘Ka-kok.’ I hope so/I wish to do so/I think so. Which was it? Farrel felt infuriated with himself. What had Tig said?

  ‘Orga-mak ee-eikBurton m’rog?’ Where is Burton’s body? (In all the wind Burton’s head?)

  ‘Ee-Tig-ee-Farrel Tig cranno na’yok.’ I’ll show you now. (This Tig this Farrel Tig eye feel high sun.)

  FOURTH TRANSMISSION – SIXTH DAY

  The simplicity of the language is deceptive, I’m sure. I talk easily with Tig, but have an uncomfortable feeling that he is misunderstanding me in subtle ways. Nevertheless one thing seems sure – Burton is in trouble, and possibly dead, killed at the hands of the backward boy who is now so important to me (while he is in the crog the dogs don’t come near). Everyone who should be here is ‘touching earth’. You might dispense with that as something unimportant – tilling the ground somewhere? Planting seeds? Nothing of the sort.

  Tig led the way across the hills, some miles from the river. The forest is patchy across the downs, never really managing to take a dominant hold on the land – trees in great dense clusters hang to the tops of some hills and the valleys of others so that as one walks across the country there appear to be bald knolls poking through the foliage on all sides. Tig himself is inordinately afraid of the woods and skirts them with such deliberation that I feel some dark memory must be lying within his poor, backward skull.

  After about an hour we waded across a small stream and ran swiftly (Tig covering his head with his hands and wailing all the time) through a thinly populated woodland, emerging on the rising slope of one such bald hill that I had seen earlier. Boulders probed through the soil which was perhaps not deep enough to support the tree life. There were shallow carvings on many of the boulders and Tig touched some of these reverently. Most noticeable about this hill, and most puzzling – and indeed, most alarming – was the profusion of small earth mounds, overgrown with a sparse layer of grass and invisible from any substantial distance. Tig ran among these mounds, the highest of which was no more than four or five inches from the ground and vaguely cross-shaped, and eventually found a resting position on one of the least carved boulders. His stiffly crouched figure seemed overwhelmed by fear and regret, his hair sticking out from his head like some bizarre thorn growth, his thin limbs smeared with dirt and crusted with his own faeces. He stared at me with an expression of total confusion and I tried to put him at his ease but he turned half away from me and began to vocalise an imitation of the lark song that echoed around us from the vast early spring population.

  I asked him about Burton and he merely clapped his hands together and shrilled all the louder.

  You will have the picture – I appeared to be standing in a wide and irregularly laid-out cemetery. Crouching over the nearest mound I excavated a little of the earth away. A few inches below the surface my fingernails raked flesh and came away bloody!

  I can’t explain it but I panicked completely. Some terrible dread crept into my whole body, some inexplicable fear of what I was witnessing. I left Tig sitting there singing with the larks and starlings and ran back to the crog. I shook for hours and failed to sleep that night. The blood beneath my nails clotted and blackened and when I tried to wash it away it wouldn’t come. In my frantic efforts to clean the stain I tore one of my nails right back to the quick and that sudden, appalling pain brought me back to my senses. I can’t explain it. My reaction was panic. Something external possessed me for an instant and I was psychologically unready for the power of it. There is something in the ground of that hill, and I don’t just mean a body.

  I shall return tomorrow and report again.

  Farrel left the crog at dawn. The grass was wet underfoot, and across the valley a heavy mist hung silent and sombre. The birds seemed quieter today and what song he heard was often drowned by the murmur of the trees and the disturbing crying of the wind.

  Strange, he thought, how mist seems to tangle itself in the forest, hanging in the branches like cotton.

  He made his way back towards the strange cemetery on the hill, stopping occasionally to listen to the stillness, hoping to hear Tig crashing towards him, or calling him. When he emerged onto the hillside the mist had lifted and he could see, from the top of the knoll, the river Boyne and the scattered tumuli of the Tuthanach. He could see the hills where, in the next few years, work would begin on the massive sheer-fronted mounds of Newgrange. Who or what, he wondered, would be honoured by that vast structure? And who or what would be honoured by the second and third giant tumuli, built to the east and west of Newgrange at almost the same time (and not centuries earlier as the dating techniques of Farrel’s time had suggested).

  Of Tig there was no sign. The larks began to sing quite suddenly and sunlight pierced the early morning clouds, setting the forest alive with light and colour. As if – reflected Farrel – some force of night and cold had suddenly gone. Normal service being resumed …

  Where he had dug in the soil of one of the human burial places yesterday, there was now no sign of interference. The earth was smooth and quite firmly packed. Tig, probably, had repaired the damage.

  Farrel wasted no time in excavating down to the flesh again. He felt a cold unease as he cleared the soil from the naked back of the Tuthanach male, that same surge of panic, but today he controlled it. He scooped the earth out of the narrow trench until the man’s body lay exposed from head to buttocks. Face down in the
mud the man looked dead; his skin was cold and pale grey, the pallor of death. His arms were outstretched on either side and Farrel, on impulse, dug the soil away from one limb to discover the fingers, clenched firm into the earth as if gripping.

  Turning the man’s head over Farrel felt a jolt of disgust, a fleeting nausea. Open mouthed, open eyed, the earth was everywhere. It fell from the pale lips, a huge bolus of soil, dry, wormy. It fell from his nostrils and from his ears – it packed across his eyeballs, under the lids, like some obscene blindness.

  Surely the man was dead; but the flesh was firm – cold, yet not in that rigidity associated with recent death, nor the moving liquefaction associated with decay. Easing the body down again Farrel put his ear to the naked back, listened for the heart.

  For a long time he heard nothing. Minutes passed and he felt sure the heart was dead. Then …

  A single powerful beat. Unmistakable!

  Over the course of half an hour Farrel ascertained that the buried man’s heart was beating once every four minutes, a powerful, unnaturally sustained contraction, as if the organ were forcing round some viscous fluid and not the easy liquid blood it was used to …

  An unnerving thought occurred to Farrel and for a second he was ready to cut a vein in the man’s hand – but, quite irrationally, fear of what he would find dripping from the body held him back until he recollected the blood under his fingernails and felt a strange relief.

  He stood above the body, staring down at the un-dead corpse, then let his gaze wander across the countryside. The spring breeze irritated his scalp by catching the clay-stiffened strands of his hair and bending them at its will. As he stood on the knoll he grew irritated with his make-up and wished he could be clothed in denim shorts and a loose cotton shirt instead of being wrapped in skin that smelled of its previous owner and attracted flies.

  Everything, bar this cemetery, was so normal.

  The tumuli, the crog, the weapons and pottery, the hunting, the language – it was all just what he had expected, a new stone age colony, conscious of religion, of its ancestry, its future and its agriculture, a colony just a few generations into its life in this green and bountiful land. Further north and south were other communities. Farrel had seen the signs of them, and had read reports about them from previous expeditions to this time. Some were larger than the Tuthanach, some already showing different cultural styles. They all seemed to mix and mingle together (so Tig said) to exchange ideas, to form joint hunting trips during the winter, to compare art forms and techniques of etching them into the rock. They were basically agricultural and peaceful. They feared the Moaning Ones from the earth, and the rock stealers from across the sea, some miles to the east. But for the most part they lived without fear, growing and maturing, becoming ready to accept the new Age of Bronze, still some eight hundred years in their future, at a time when the peacefulness of this country would be shattered by the new sounds of metal clashing with metal.

  All those settlements had mixed together and had welcomed Burton – so he had reported – during his first four days in the valley. He had not told them from where he came (his arrival site, like Farrel’s) for if the Ceinarc and the Tagda were passively afraid of the Moaning Ones and the Breton raiders, they held a healthy and active hostility for one other thing – crog-Tutha, and the insane settlers from beyond the forest. They would not float their coracles through the wide bend of the Boyne that took them round the foot of the Tuthanach hills, with their scattered mounds and shrieking women. It was a fearsome area, and one where no man could go and return unpossessed.

  Reading the reports five thousand years away, Farrel had at first thought this to be a typical piece of forest-fearing, with the settlement on the wrong side of that forest being linked to those same dark forces. He had dismissed them aloud.

  Now he realised he shouldn’t have dismissed them at all.

  There was something wholly unnatural about the people of crog-Tutha. He had travelled more than five thousand years through time and expected surprises – but he had not anticipated being so totally mystified. This was not the simple life of a primitive people – it was something out of the dark corners of the supernatural!

  No-one up-time would believe him, he was sure of that.

  FIFTH TRANSMISSION – SEVENTH DAY (EXTRACT)

  … and as I filled the grave back in, Tig appeared at the edge of the wood. He ran up the hill and crouched over the mound, watching fascinated as I covered the body of the Tuthanach. I get the feeling that Tig, when he vanishes, is never far away. I always have an acutely uncomfortable feeling of being watched, and I suspect that wherever I go Tig is never far behind. What do I represent to him, I wonder? He is afraid of me still, and still refuses to show me where Burton is buried (if indeed he is buried). There are too many mounds on the knoll to excavate them all on an off-chance, so I really do need the boy to open up a little more.

  I sat for an hour or so, on a boulder, looking across the forest to where the great crog on Tara was in evidence as a winding spiral of black smoke. The encampment there, Tig tells me, is surrounded by a wooden post-fence and seems to be more hostile than the other crogs. He says they are raising earthworks behind the wooden walls; does that suggest the first dun is being raised on the site? Fascinating. I have no idea how Tig knows this. Tara lies four days to the south. Would he wander that far?

  While I watched Tara Tig sat quietly, chewing moodily on the remnants of one of those hares. I didn’t ask him about Burton, or about anything. I hoped he would tell me of his own accord. His eyes suddenly grew wide and the bone dropped from his fingers. He was looking up at the knoll and I turned to see what had scared him. It gave me quite a turn too, and I don’t blame Tig for scampering off.

  One of the graves was moving, as if the body it contained were trying to force its way out. As if …? First the man’s hands poked through the ground, the fingers bloody and dirty. Then the earth fell away from where his head was rising up and his whole body followed. He stood upright, black with dirt, and earth fell from his ears and mouth. He spat violently and shook more vigorously, brushing soil from his chest and arms. I hid behind the boulder and watched as the strange apparition turned slowly round, looking upwards into the sky through eyes still caked with dirt. He was sexually aroused and the skin of his penis was lacerated and dripping blood profusely. I have the uncomfortable feeling that he had been copulating with the earth.

  Several minutes of brushing and shaking exposed his skin again, cleared his eyes and nostrils and he seemed to get his bearings. He swept back his hair, which showed yellow through the mud, and ran off down the knoll, leaping the mounds and entering the woodlands with loud shrieks and painful crashes.

  I followed him to a small stream, a tributary of the Boyne, and watched him crouching in the flow, washing and splashing, and emptying his bowels of a phenomenal amount of soil. He warbled bird song and laughed in abrupt, almost humourless bursts. He seemed to wash himself for hours, but finally crawled up onto the bank and sat quietly for a while, obviously sensing and enjoying the scenery around him. Then he rose to his feet, waded the stream, and vanished towards the crog.

  That all occurred a few minutes ago and it means I shall not return there myself. I’m too puzzled and too frightened if you must know. I have my transmission equipment with me, but medication and field-link pack are still in the crog, which means I’m trapped here for a while, and must be careful not to injure myself.

  When Farrel arrived back at the knoll Tig was crouched over one of the mounds, the only one to show a good grassy overlay, and poking at it. He saw Farrel approaching and ran away, leapt onto a boulder and slapped his hands together.

  Farrel stared at him for a moment, then at the grave, and an icy unease crept into his mind. Oh no, he thought. Oh God, this is the moment.

  The boy gibbered something incoherent.

  Farrel asked, ‘Ee-eikBurton ’n cruig pad-cruig?’ Is Burton buried here? … (Touching earth, feet on earth?)
>
  ‘Don’t know.’

  Farrel sensed the lie. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled at the soil and after a moment he found himself staring at black hair, the back of Burton’s head. ‘Thank God,’ cried Farrel, and grinned at the boy.

  What should he do though? It might be dangerous to move the man – the best thing would be to leave Burton alone until the strange process had finished and he resurrected himself in the ‘natural’ way.

  But Farrel found he could not resist examining his colleague in the same way as he had examined the Tuthanach earlier. He scraped back the earth from Burton’s head and shoulders.

  A funny smell.

  For a moment his hands hesitated; he stared silently and motionlessly at the body beneath him. The skin was grey, cold – that was, by all accounts, normal. But there was something wrong, something indefinable, something not quite right.

  He reached down and turned Burton’s head sideways. Earth poured from empty sockets, worms fell from the gaping, toothy mouth. Where skin remained it was taut and shrunken. Putrefaction rose from the rotting brains through the holes in the skull, driving Farrel to his feet with a terrible cry.

  Sweeping back the earth from the torso he found the thigh bone fragment that had been driven into Burton’s heart as he lay there, thrusting through the rib cage from behind, ripping skin and flesh and cracking bone. The clenched fists of his colleague took on a new significance. He had died in agony.

  For a moment Farrel screamed abuse at Tig for what he had done, then his anger drained away. There was something in the boy’s eyes, something in his expression … Farrel felt instantly terrified. He reached out towards Tig and shook his head.