Merlin's Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  A second voice: I am wind, who has been called God-singer by the Kalokki who were the first men, and is called Tag and Feng-po, and Huaillapenyi, I am breath and life, I am death, the rising odour of decay, I am storm and rage, light and dark, I am thunder and fear, I am the changing seasons of time, I am the urger of seas and the calmer of wings, I will be remembered as Taranis and Wotan, Thor and Zephyrus and Ga-oh and Hino and my thunder shall be heard until the final fire, but you, Farrel, who knows all these things, should know also that this is the moment of our great sorrow, where we abandon our domain and enter the minds of men, for only in the minds of man can we continue to survive …

  And others, then, crowding in, jostling to be heard: I am fire who is Tinedia, who will be Svarogich and Sun and Steropes … I am water who is Uisceg … I am sky … I am serpent … All these Farrel heard and consumed, and then they fell away, back into the rock, up into the wind, leaving just a fragment of each god, a morsel of each great being, settling in his crowded mind.

  He rose from the earth, shaking his body and feeling the dirt and clay fall from his limbs and his mouth and his eyes. The day was cold; he was conscious of rain, of heavy cloud, of a dullness about the saturated countryside: he loved this. Some greater or lesser part of him was aware that a full two seasons must have passed while he lay in his intimate embrace with the earth. From this same greater or lesser part of him came an alien thought, a last tearful cry from his dead future; truly a great and noble glory will have gone by my time of glass and steel.

  The new born child turned to regard the virgin land. Rain beat against him, washed him. He opened his mouth to drink it and his laughter joined the gentle sounds of the natural world.

  I’ve found life, at last, at last …

  The great gods were still there, he thought, as he blinked rain away and stared at the greenness all around him. They were dying, now, committing their great suicide, surviving only in the Tuthanach and their children, and their grandchildren, and so on until they were spread everywhere … this they were doing as a gesture of acquiescence to man, but just by staring through the rain, through the unspoiled distance, the man called Farrel could see those gods, could feel them and smell them and hear them.

  As he ran down the knoll he could sense them, too, in the brightness of his mind. They were with him by inheritance when he came here, and now they had come direct and he was ecstatic at the greater awareness they had brought him of so many things … over the centuries their presence would dilute and become weak and perhaps they had not reckoned on that.

  There was plenty of time for them to explore him and understand how things would be. As far as Farrel was concerned there were more important things to do than worry over a day and an age when he would be dust and ashes.

  He was a part of the earth, now, a man of the earth, a Tuthanach. His people were building a temple to the earth, and he knew how magnificent that temple would be, for he had seen it. He would mark the rocks of the temple with his soul, raise the walls of the temple with his sweat, and fill the temple with his ecstasy. He ran faster across the rain-soaked land until he could hear the sounds of the stone being carved.

  The earth went with him.

  The Bone Forest

  Time past and time future

  Allow but a little consciousness.

  T.S. Eliot

  1

  The sound of his sons’ excited shouting woke Huxley abruptly at three in the morning. His breath frosting in the freezing room, he shivered his way into his dressing gown, tugged on slippers, and walked darkly and swiftly to the boys’ room.

  ‘What the devil –?’

  They were standing at the window, two small, excited shapes, their breath misting the glass. Steven turned and said excitedly, ‘A snow woman. In the garden. We saw a snow woman!’

  Rubbing the glass for clarity, Huxley peered down at the thick snow that covered the lawn and gardens, and extended, without break, into the field and to the nearby wood. He could just see the fence, a thin dark line in the moongrey landscape. The night was still, heavy with the muffling silence of the snow. He could see clearly enough that a set of deep tracks led from the gate, towards the house, then round to the side.

  ‘What do you mean? A snow woman?’

  ‘All white,’ Christian breathed. ‘She stopped and looked at us. She had a sack on her shoulder, like Father Christmas.’

  Huxley smiled and ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘You think she’s bringing presents?’

  ‘Hope so,’ said Steven. In the dark room his eyes glittered. He had just turned eight years old, a precocious and energetic child, and Huxley was conscious of the extent to which he neglected the lad. Steven was forever soliciting instruction, or games, or walks, but there was so much to do, and Huxley rarely had time for frivolity.

  The wood. There was so much to map. So much to discover …

  He found the torch and went down to the back door, opening it wide (pushing against the drifted snow) and shining the beam across the silent yards. Steven huddled by him. His elder brother Christian had returned to bed, cold, teeth chattering.

  ‘What did she look like, this woman? Was she young? Old?’

  ‘Not very old,’ Steven whispered. He was holding on to his father’s dressing gown. ‘I think she was looking for somewhere to sleep. She was going towards, the sheds.’

  ‘Dressed in white. Not very old. Carrying a bag. Did she wave at you?’

  ‘She smiled. I think …’

  By the light of the torch he could see the tracks. He listened hard but there was no sound. Nothing in the chicken hut was being disturbed. He closed the back door, looked out of the front, shining the torch around the wide drive and the garages.

  Bolting the door closed he chased his son up to bed, then tucked himself down below the covers, taking ages to get the circulation back into his frozen hands and feet. Jennifer slept soundly next to him, a hunched, curled lump below the eiderdown.

  Not even wild horses could wake her when the weather was as cold as this.

  4 JANUARY 1935

  What had woken the boys? Did she call to them? They say not. They were aware of her in some secret way. Steven especially is attuned to the woodland. And it is he who has called this latest visitor from the edge ‘Snow Woman’. It may be that she is nothing more than a traveller, using the shelter of Oak Lodge as she makes her way towards Shadoxhurst, or Grimley, one of the towns around. But I am increasingly aware that the wood sheds its mythagos in the night, and that they journey into the unreal world of our reality, before decaying and fading, like the leaf and woodland matter that they are. There have been too many glimpses of these creatures, and insufficient contact. But in the spring, with Wynne-Jones, I shall make the longest journey yet. If we can succeed in passing the Wolf Glen and entering more deeply, then with luck we should begin to make a firmer contact with the products of our own ‘mythago-genesis’.

  He closed the book and locked it with the small key he kept hidden in his desk, then stood and stretched, yawning fiercely as he tried to wake up a little more. A tall, lean man of forty-five, he was inclined to stoop, especially when writing, and he suffered agonies of back pain. He took little exercise, apart from the long treks into Ryhope Wood, and, as happened every winter, he was allowing himself to become unkempt. His hair was long, hanging over his collar slightly, and with its burden of grey in the oak brown, he was beginning to look older than he was, especially now that he had a winter’s growth of grizzled beard (to be removed before he started teaching again, in a week’s time).

  The diary in which he had just written was not his regular journal, the scientific record of his discoveries and experiments with Wynne-Jones. This was a more private book in which he was keeping a log of ‘uncertainties’. He didn’t want Steven or Christian reading accounts of his study of them. Nor Jennifer. Nor did he want his dreams read, but the dreams he recorded, after visiting the wood, were sometimes so appalling that even he had difficulty in confrontin
g them. These were private thoughts, a private record, for analysis in quieter times.

  He kept this second log hidden behind the bookcase where his journals were shelved. He placed the book there now, then tugged on his Wellington boots and overcoat. It was just after dawn, seven thirty or so, and he was aware of two things: the odd silence of the day outside (no clamour from the chicken house), and the second set of tracks through the snow.

  These led back, almost in parallel with the first. He could see, now, as he followed them at a distance, that a coat or cloak had trailed between the prints. The right step dragged slightly, as if the woman had been limping.

  At the gate, which opened to a track and then a field, there was a crush of snow where the visitor had climbed over and fallen, or struggled upright. Beyond the gate the tracks led down towards the winter wood, and Huxley stood there for a while, staring at the tall, black trees, and the dense infill of bright green holly. Even in winter Ryhope Wood was impossible to enter. Even in winter it was not possible to see inwards more than fifty yards. Even in winter it could work its magic, and dissolve perception in an instant, spinning the visitor round and confusing him utterly.

  There was such wonder in there. So much to learn. So much to find. So much ‘legend’ still living. He had only just begun!

  Steven appeared in the doorway, wrapped up warmly in muffler, school overcoat and boots. He sank in snow up to his knees and had to wade with great difficulty towards his father, his cheeks red, his face alive with pleasure.

  ‘You’re up early,’ Huxley called to his son. Steven bent down and scooped up a snowball. He flung it and missed, laughing, and Huxley thought about returning fire, but was too intrigued by what he might find in the chicken hut. He was aware of the look of disappointment on Steven’s face, but blanked it.

  Steven followed him at a distance.

  There was no sound from the ramshackle chicken house. This was unnerving.

  When he opened the door he smelled death at once, and half gagged. He was used to the smell of a fox-attacked hut, but often the scent of the fox itself was the odour that was most prominent. There was only the smell of raw meat, now, and he stepped into the slaughterhouse and his mind failed to comprehend what he could see.

  Whoever had been here had made a bed of the chickens. There had been twenty birds and they had been torn into fragments, and the fragments, featherside up, had been spread about to make a mattress.

  The heads had been threaded onto a length of primitive flax, which was looped across the hut from one shelf to another.

  A small patch of burning, with charred bones, told of the fire and the meal that ‘Snow Woman’ had created for herself.

  Expecting mayhem, finding such order in the slaughter, such ritual, Huxley backed out of the hut and closed the door, puzzled and perturbed. The sound of such slaughter should have been deafening. He had heard nothing. And yet he had lain awake for most of the night, after the boys had disturbed him.

  The chickens had made no sound as they had died, and the smoke from the fire had not reached the house.

  Aware that Steven was standing by him, looking anxiously at the chicken house, Huxley led the boy away, hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Are they all right?’

  ‘A fox,’ Huxley said bluntly, and felt a moment’s irritation as he realised that his tone was callous. ‘It’s sad, but it happens.’

  Steven had not failed to understand the meaning of his father’s words. He looked shocked and pained. ‘Are they all dead? Like in the story?’

  ‘They’re all dead. Old Foxy’s got them all.’ Huxley rested a comforting hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘We’ll go to the farm later and buy some more, shall we? I’m sorry, Steve. Who’d be a chicken, eh?’

  The boy was disconsolate, but remained obedient, looking back over his shoulder, but stepping away through the snow at his father’s urging, to walk down to the gate again.

  There were tears in his son’s eyes as Huxley rounded up a snowball and tossed it in a shallow curve. The snowball impacted on the lad’s shoulder, and after a moment of sad blankness, Steven grinned, and threw a snowball back.

  Christian was up at the bedroom window, banging on the glass, calling something that Huxley couldn’t hear. Probably: wait for me!

  It was then that Huxley found the ‘gift’, if gift it was. It was by the gate, a piece of rough cloth wrapped around two inch-long twigs of wood and a yellowing bone from some small creature, a fox, perhaps a small dog. The pieces had holes bored through them. The package had sunk slightly into the snow, but he spotted it, rescued it, and opened it before the boy’s fascinated gaze.

  ‘She did leave you a present,’ Huxley said to his son. ‘Not much of one. But it must be a lucky charm. Do you think?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Steven said, but he reached for the cloth and its contents and clutched them into his grasp, rubbing his fingers over the three objects. He looked more puzzled than disappointed. Huxley teased the gift back for one moment in order to examine the shards carefully. The wood looked like thorn, that smooth, thin bark. The bone was a neck vertebra.

  ‘Look after these little things, won’t you, Steve?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I expect there’s a magic word to say with them. It’ll come to you suddenly …’

  He straightened up and started to walk indoors. Jennifer appeared in the kitchen door, a sleepy, pretty figure, arms wrapped tightly around her against the cold. ‘What’s all the activity?”

  ‘That old Drummer Fox,’ said Steven gloomily. Jennifer woke up fast. ‘Oh no! A fox? Really?’

  ‘’Fraid so,’ Huxley said quietly. ‘Got the lot.’

  As Jennifer led the frozen boy inside to breakfast, Huxley turned again and watched Ryhope Wood. A sudden flight of crows, loud in the still air, drew his attention to the stand of holly close to the ruined gate where the sticklebrook entered the wood. This was his way into the deeper zones of the woodland, and he fancied he saw movement there, now, but it was too far away to be sure.

  Two pieces of twig and a bone were small payment for twenty chickens. But whoever had been here, last night, had wanted Huxley to know that they had visited. There was, he felt, an unsubtle invitation in the shadowy encounter.

  2

  Ryhope Wood is unquestionably a stand of primordial forest, a fragment of the wildwood which developed after the last Ice Age, and which – using a power which remains obscure – has erected its own defences against destruction. It is impossible to enter too far. I can at last penetrate further than the eerie glade in which a shrine to horses is to be found. I am not the only visitor to this site of worship, but of course my fellow ‘worshippers’ come from inside the wood, from the zones and hidden world that I cannot reach.

  I have coined the word mythago to describe these creatures of forgotten legend. This is from ‘myth imago’, or the image of the myth. They are formed, these varied heroes of old, from the unheard, unseen communication between our common human unconscious and the vibrant, almost tangible sylvan mind of the wood itself. The wood watches, it listens, and it draws out our dreams …

  After the thaw came a time of rain, a monotonous and seemingly endless downpour that lasted for days, and depressed not just the land around Oak Lodge, but the life within that land, so that everything moved slowly, and sullenly, and seemed devoid of spirit. But when the rain eased, when the last storm cloud passed away to the east, a fresh and vibrant spring set new colour to the wood and the fields, and as if coming out of hibernation, Edward Wynne-Jones made a new appearance on the scene, driving to the Huxleys’ from Oxford, and arriving in enthusiastic mood one afternoon in early April.

  Wynne-Jones was also in his forties and lectured, and researched, in historical anthropology at Oxford University. He was a fussy man, with odd and irritating habits, the most obvious and annoying of which was his smoking of a prodigious pipe, a calabash that belched reeking smoke from its bowl, and did little to improve the aura around the smok
er. With his weasel looks, a certain sourness of expression that Jennifer Huxley had at once taken against, and which did nothing to relax the children of the house, he seemed incongruous as he sat, puffing on the ‘billy’, as it had been nicknamed by the Huxley boys, and holding forth in lecturer’s tones about his ideas.

  He caused a strain in Oak Lodge, and Huxley was always glad to be able to shunt his compatriot and valued fellow, researcher into the haven of the study, at the farther end of the house. Here, with the French windows opened, they could converse about mythagos, Ryhope Wood, and the processes of the unconscious mind that were at work in the sylvan realm beyond the field.

  A map was spread out over the desk, and Wynne-Jones pored over the details, stabbing with his pipe handle as he made points, brushing at the pencil-covered paper. They had detected several ‘zones’ in the wood, areas where the wood’s character changed, where the dominant tree form was different and where the season felt different from that which existed on the outside of the stand. The Oak-Ash Zone was particularly intriguing, and there was a Thorn Zone, a winding, spiralling forest of tangled blackthorn that ran close to a river, but which kept that water source hidden from view.