The Hollowing
Page 34
On the second night, Jack-his-father taunted Bran. “One of my sons is safe again, taken home. Give me back the others.”
“Not even if the flesh rolls from my bones and I catch my death of a cold.”
They were by a lake. Jack waited until Bran planted a second seed and pissed upon it, crying, “To see the Isle of Women, that would be a fine raid!” then, when the man had laughed scornfully and retired to sleep, he rolled from his sack and grew into a strong willow. He reached out over the deep water and shaped his prow, then his hull, and used branches as oars. He became a low, sleek galley, and the raiders found him in the morning and imagined it had drifted to the shore by night. They clambered aboard and rowed to the middle of the lake, towards the forest trail beyond that led to their own land.
But half-way across the lake, Jack opened the branches that formed the hull and the galley foundered. Man and beast swam to the shore, but a great pike caught the hair on the head of Jack’s second brother and carried the head up the river, out of this unknown region, back to the land of his birth. Jack-his-father was gathered in and slung across the neck of a horse, to be carried on. He felt like singing, but kept silent.
A third night, then, and Bran placed Jack-his-father in the ground, placing the last of the wheat seeds from the bargain into its mouth. “If you make a tree that can shelter and feed my companions, and from which I can see the Isle of Women, then you shall have your third son back.”
Jack grew. He was the oldest of oaks, wide and strong, trunk dressed with creeper and a place big enough for a house in the angle of every branch. The host of men camped below the spreading lower branches. There were fallow deer here, plump geese, and sweet, young pigs. The hunting was good. Sharp-juiced apples grew from the middle boughs. Strong-breasted fowl nested higher, within bowshot. Wild wheat bristled from the swathes of ivy, and made good bread. It was a great place to be, below this solitary oak, and they stayed here for the better part of the season, growing fat and thinking themselves on the Island of Ease.
Each day Bran climbed higher into the tree, but turned back before reaching the top out of fear, not liking the way the birds sang. But all the time he was thinking of what the Bold Boy had said to him: that he would be able to see the Isle of Women from the higher branches. It was a place Bran hungered for. To know its direction would give him great power over the land. He would not be caught by the spirit tracks that confused mortal men if he knew where, in the west, he was heading.
Jack-in-the-tree waited.
One evening, when the skies were clear and the air still and warm, Bran climbed the tree to the very top. From here he could see to the edge of the world. He saw the Isles of the Mighty, the Land of the Young, the Isle of Women, and when he had learned how to get to them all he began to climb down. But as fast as he climbed down, so Jack-in-the-tree grew, until the oak became so heavy above the ground that it began to wave and bend in the wind. Soon it cracked across its roots, and fell heavily to the rocks on the shore of the Isle of Women, where the body of Bran was smashed and broken.
Jack became himself again, the Bold Boy, Loud Proclaimer, and picked up the head of his youngest brother. He could never run faster than the hound, so he became a hound in form, and ran from this unknown place, back to the lake, back to the open land, back to the ploughed field and over the rise of forested ground to the place of his father’s lodge. His brothers were there, but his sister had disappeared the summer before, and he would not find her again for many years.
He spat out the last of the seeds and planted them, then rebuilt the house. A town flourishes there now, and it is still the best part of the island for growing wheat. A white figure, carved on the hill, marks the place of Jack’s defiant stand against the raiders. From its head, looking towards the setting sun, his sister’s strange tomb can sometimes be seen at dusk.
ALSO BY ROBERT HOLDSTOCK FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
Celtika
The Iron Grail
Mythago Wood
Lavondyss
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE HOLLOWING: A NOVEL IN THE MYTHAGO CYCLE
Copyright © 1993 by Robert Holdstock
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers, 1993
Published by Earthlight, 2003, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
An Orb Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holdstock, Robert.
The hollowing : a novel in the Mythago cycle / Robert Holdstock—1st Orb ed.
p. cm
ISBN 0-765-31110-0
EAN 978-0765-31110-8
1. Victims of violent crimes—Fiction. 2. Forests and forestry—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 4. Missing children—Fiction. 5. Visionaries—Fiction. 6. Boys—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6058.O442H65 2005
823'914—dc22
2004065468
First Orb Edition: May 2005
eISBN 9781466840317
First eBook edition: February 2013