The Bone Forest (Ryhope Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  In his gentle grasp, Inkmarker began to shudder, and the shaman glanced down. The boy’s face was ashen, his mouth moist and open. The Wolfhead reached down and lifted the crude mask of the dog, placing it against his apprentice’s face, tying the wooden frame with the ivy thongs.

  Inkmarker cried out, the words bubbled from him, causing a sudden flurry, birds perhaps, from the hidden recesses of the ruins.

  “Sir Gawain came to the ruined castle, and there among the fallen stones found the remains of many knights! The battle standards fluttered in the chill wind, the last memory of the brave warriors! The King would be saddened to see so many places at the table round empty of his kin!”

  The words fled into the misty stillness, but they seemed to set in motion a vibration in the earth. The Wolfhead crouched slightly, drawing the boy into the lee of a low wall. Out of the mist five riders galloped on black, blanketed warhorses. Their heads were bare, though they wore the same bright breastplates. Each carried a long lance, shaped of pale wood. They laughed as they rode, calling out at each other. They came from nowhere, they were swallowed by the air. Behind the shaman the wall corroded. He stepped away from it, eyes wildly alert as the shapechanger imposed a small, circular tower upon the decaying stone.

  This was a dangerous place!

  But the daemon was here, now. It was speaking through the boy. It was chanting through the boy. The word sirgawain meant nothing, but the rest of what Inkmarker had cried out sounded like … like a story, perhaps.

  “What can you see? What can you hear?” the old man asked, his eyes gleaming as he watched the drooping features of the dog, and the terrified eyes of his apprentice through the widened orbits.

  Suddenly, Inkmarker rubbed his legs, wincing and jerking as if being struck. His cries were of pain. His body seemed to be suffering from blows. He whimpered, then almost cooed: “Don’t hurt me. Please. Don’t hurt me …”

  Then he snarled; enraged, he turned on the Wolfhead and struck and scratched at the gaunt, stooped man. The shaman held the boy’s hands, kept the bitten nails from tearing at his ancient flesh.

  The apprentice shouted, “Let me out! Let me out! Unlock the door! Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt my mother! Let me out! Stop shouting! Stop screaming at her! Drunken bastard! I will use that language! Stop screaming at her!”

  And then a third change, and he started to cry. He hunched down and the shaman let the body fall, but kept his own hands upon his young friend’s tormented, possessed body. The tears flowed from the boy.

  “Where are you?” he sobbed. “Why don’t you come? Gawain … Arthur … Where are you? I’ve called for you from the books. Why don’t you come?”

  Now the Wolfhead whispered to his Inkmarker, to the daemon which spoke through the unwilling scribe. “Where do you exist? By what name are you known? Who is the child?”

  Inkmarker was silent for a moment, then through his racking sobs he managed to say, “My name’s Stephen. My name’s Stephen. Are you Gawain?”

  “Where are you?” the seer persisted.

  “I live in Gillingham. You should know. You should know. This is the place you fought to save. Now save me. Get me away from this house. Please! Get me away from my father …”

  Before the Wolfhead could speak further, again Inkmarker was possessed. He struggled in his master’s grasp, and cried out, as if reading loudly from a text: “At the centre of the old town is a large well, which once reached a depth of a hundred feet. It is now reached through the basement of Selfridges and can be viewed by special request. Two of the stones, those with names scratched upon them, are in the local museum. Known as the knights’ stones, the names, Ealgawan and Badda, are reputed by legend to be those of two of Arthur’s knights (Gawain and Bedwyn, according to tradition) who tried to protect the town of Gillingham (then known as Croucomagum or stone mound) against the numerically superior forces of the Saxon warlord Gilla.”

  The Wolfhead listened to this in astonishment. But slowly the words, the strangest words, made a certain sense to him.

  Gillingham. The accent was odd, but that was clearly Gilla’s homestead, this very village. Gilla’s people had settled here. Arthur was a name. There were many warlords who were called such. The Wolfhead remembered the tall, Roman noble who had recruited from the horsemen in the townships around Camulodunum, on the east of this country. That had been centuries before. The man had been called Pwyl, but had carried the emblem of a bear locked in mortal combat with a dragon, and he had been nicknamed Artorian of the Red Branch. Artor. The shaman did not recognize the strange name Sella Friggas; it sounded something like a god, and perhaps the reference was to the temple of this unknown deity.

  But it was the form of the chanting that intrigued the Wolfhead in particular. The reference to “legend”.

  From where was this daemon-son calling to the world of Gilla and his people? Why was it using the child? These thoughts, these anguished cries, were simply the child’s possession terror … or were they?

  The shaman’s process of thought was abruptly ended. Inkmarker bayed and howled like a dog, dropped to a crouch, then began to leap and scrabble at the wall in front of him.

  “My dog! My dog!” he cried in his own language. Then barked fitfully and terrifyingly.

  The Wolfhead slapped him on the back. “Yes! Seek and find. Go and find the daemon. Go!”

  The boy/dog raced away, dropping his pouch of quills, parchment and ink, entering through gaps in the ruined wall, penetrating to the heart of the ruins, of the changing place. Finding the well. Finding the terrified farmers, whose brief skirmish, and triumphant killing, had led them to scrape their names on the well-stone.

  The Wolfhead followed, entering the dank place, with its foetid water, its green-slimed walls, its powerful stink of evil.

  For the shaman there was nothing to see but the crushed, petrified bodies of the two men, their grey, dead faces still showing the agony that had racked them as their limbs had somehow been absorbed by the stone of the well. They were half men, half rock, the shapes of hands and legs sculpted in the grey/green ragstone as if by the hands of those greeks, who had so beautifully wrought the shapes of the human body from the solid clay of the earth.

  The Wolf head noted all of this, and also that he had no power to free these men from their stony death.

  Inkmarker was standing upright, looking up towards the slanting, greying light that shafted from the gaps in the wood and thatching of the roof.

  His face was flexed with pain. The dog’s mask was on the floor. His lips were moving, and slowly the words began to sound …

  “High-walled camelot lay ahead of them … as sirgawain rode he could hear the sounds of the joust … he could smell the ox on the spit … a hundred flags blew in the wind from the tents of Arthur’s gathered knights … from every country the champions of Kings had come to the white-walled castle … the Queen watched from the high tower … white silk favours fluttered down from the walls and the knights took them gladly …”

  “Stop!”

  The Wolfhead clapped a hand across the boy’s face and suddenly the possession was gone. Inkmarker looked startled, then afraid. The more so as he felt the shifting of the earth, the cracking of stone …

  Sudden whiteness, as if all colour drained from the walls and ledges …

  Sudden summer breezes …

  The sudden sound of horses …

  Fragments of white gossamer seemed to drift in the air of the stifling well-space … A woman’s voice sang gently, the words meaningless.

  Inkmarker was shaking. He blurted out, “It’s all in a book. Pictures. Words. It’s all he possesses in the place where he’s trapped. He turns the pages. The ghosts are all there, the huge castles, the towers, the great horses, the silver men. He’s reading from a book of story-spells. Oh! My head! It hurts so much! And he’s so lonely!”

  As the boy struggled with the daemon’s pain, the Wolfhead was triumphant. A book of story-spells. Of course! As the daemon
looked at the images in the spells, so the world was shaped. As he chanted the hellish tales of silver knights and battles, as he described the world of his own kind, so he changed the world of Gilla’s village. In that otherworld the two men’s names had been inscribed in the Book of Hell, made into story themselves. That was the link. As the daemon sought to escape from his prison, he was twisting the gateway—this stone well!—to try to find release into the world where farmers would live in terror of his power.

  How clever to pretend to be a child reading from manuscript pages written as if for a child.

  The Wolfhead must have spoken these thoughts aloud. Suddenly his Inkmarker, who had at first been watching him blankly, then with an expression of horror, shouted out, “No! He’s not a demon! He’s just a boy. Like me. A boy, trapped and punished. Somewhere very far from here, but tied to us through the well. The true daemons are the people who have trapped him. They are hurting him. They make him very lonely. This is his only escape from the pain. He’s trying to reach to us for help. No! He isn’t a daemon. You mustn’t hurt him.”

  “You are already possessed,” the seer murmured hoarsely, watching the contortions on his apprentice’s face, the tears fill the eyes. “I should have realised as much. The daemon is halfway through to this place.”

  Inkmarker backed away, fetched up hard against the wall, against one of the petrifying corpses. His fingers, reaching for support, brushed against one of the incised names, and he jerked his touch away, whimpering like the half-wild dog of earlier in the day.

  The Wolfhead was reaching slowly into his bag of magic. He watched the boy as he did so, considering, planning, thinking how to treat this new possession.

  “You don’t understand,” Inkmarker breathed. “If you put on the ghost mask, perhaps you’ll see what I could see.”

  The shaman had drawn out a bone knife, carved from the shoulder blade of a boar. It was polished, honed sharp. It caught the light from above.

  Inkmarker sobbed. He was no match for this powerful man of magic. He darted around the strange well-room, skidding on the slick stones of the floor. The man moved after him. The boy snatched up his hound’s mask, and held it to his face, frantically tying the ivy behind his head. He growled, wild and loud. He raised his hands in protection. His eyes glittered as they watched from Cunhaval’s running track.

  “I’m coming for you!” he shouted, and the other boy stopped turning pages. The dog leapt against the door. It grew larger. It grew fiercer. Its body hit against the door and the house shuddered. The boy ran from his bed to the battered door and listened.

  “My dog! Let me have my dog!”

  Inkmarker leapt again. His front legs were stretched out, his claws extended. He struck the Wolfhead, struck the door, and the door came down. There was a brief pain, then loving arms around his neck, ruffling the fur on his head and cheeks. Tears of delight. Cries of joy. There were shouts, hard, angry, drunken cries. A man’s voice. A woman screamed.

  But the boy and his hound were off and running, out through the landing window, over the roof of the garage, down towards the town, where the traffic growled and there was freedom to be had.

  The Boy who Jumped the Rapids

  The horn-helmeted man had come from the far west, following the ridgeways and woodland tracks, and crossing streams and rivers at the nearest point, not at their shallows. From the state of his clothes it was clear that he had journeyed through the dark forests where the Belgic peoples ruled; from the downwind smell of him, the hint of salt and sea, it was clear that he had travelled across the wide ocean that separated two lands. His hair hung lank and fire-red from beneath his strange helmet, a helmet with stubby horns and sparkling decorations. When the sun was bright the helmet flashed in the way of gold, and sometimes in the way of silver. And again, sometimes it gleamed in the way of bronze. But there was no iron there, not that the boy Caylen could see.

  Word had already gone ahead to the forest community of Caswallon’s people, and now only Caylen and two men discreetly trailed the stranger as he ran along the high ground, squinting at times into the distance, seeking smoke, perhaps, or the sea. Caylen moved stealthily through the undergrowth, pausing occasionally to watch the horned man as he ran and danced past in the open. The boy had never seen anything, or anyone, quite like this dark-cloaked foreigner; he didn’t walk like a warrior; nor did he run, crouched and wary, like a hunter. He ran upright, his cloak streaming behind him, a narrow, skin-wrapped object held firmly in his right hand. At times he actually leapt into the air, twisting about and spinning as he touched the ground again so that his cloak swirled about him. His voice, at these times, was a loud cry, a triumphant cry, echoing away across the woodlands and the grassy downs, and frightening the dark carrion birds that nested in the spruce and ash trees.

  At dusk the man came down from the ridgeway and followed the tracks, of hunters and animals both, through the forest until he came to the tall, wooden totem that stood where the river forked. This was the holy place at the apex of the streams.

  Within minutes he had found the village, though the village had been expecting him since before noon.

  He stood outside the heavy palisade, outside the open gate, and stared across the muddy compound at the low roundhouses, the broken animal pens, the roped dogs, hysterical in their excitement and barking loudly, the huddle of women in their drab green robes, the children, excitedly gathered in a goat-house, peering at the stranger through the thin, wicker walls. He looked also at the line of dark-haired men who stood facing him, their spears and swords held across their chests. Chickens, ducks and grey puppies ran noisily between them, disturbed in their empty-headed ways by the tension in the air.

  The man said one word, which might have been “Food”. He said it loudly, and there was something in his voice that made the pain of his empty belly obvious. Then he said, “Help”, or a word that sounded similar. His eyes glazed a moment as he looked around at the people of the village, and then he flung back his cloak and held the long, thin package above his head. “Help”, he repeated, and lowered the object to his lips, hugging it afterwards as he might hug a child. “Rianna”, he said, but the name was strange to Caswallon and his kin, and they ignored it.

  When at last the Chieftain, Caswallon—who was Caylen’s father—stepped towards the horned man, it was to welcome him. The man removed his gleaming helmet and stepped inside the palisade. His scalp, below the helm, had been scarred savagely by a sword. Caylen grimaced at the sight of the hideous wound, and the thought of the agony this man must have borne.

  It rained as it always rained in the forest: hard, for a while, driving man and beast into shelter; then gentle, almost like a sea spray. The rolling storm clouds passed away into the east, and the sky brightened. The children were driven out into the gleaming mud pond that had formed within the village walls, and set about the task of laying straw and wood walkways. When they had finished, they gathered the animals from the edge of the woodlands, chased them back into the compound, and then sneaked away among the trees.

  Caylen followed the boys at a distance. The day before, he had suffered a beating from the two sons of his father’s cousin, the warrior Eglin, blinded during a raid three years ago. These two boys were vicious and compassionless. They joked about their father in an open and openly derisory way, calling him “blind stick”, and bragging that they would have taken his head a long time before but it would not have been worth the effort. They spared no wrath from Caylen, stripping him and bruising him with malicious glee. They had carved something on his backside, but the scarring and scratching had obscured its nature from his friend, Fergus, who had helped Caylen to his special place, near the river, and bathed and patched the wound.

  “Don’t tell my father,” Caylen had said, and Fergus had laughed.

  “What would he do? Nothing! He’d do nothing. Not even with the stranger here.”

  Caylen had laughed angrily and said he knew that, but he always hoped that one day Cas
wallon would step in and defend his son from the other village children. It was a vain hope.

  Now, with Fergus, he followed the pack, keeping low in the undergrowth that lined a narrow boar-run. The other children walked boldly along the trampled bracken, snagging clothes on bramble and thorn and noisily knocking aside the wood and plant growth with sword sticks.

  “That ol’ pig’ll hear them,” said Fergus. “But it won’t attack. Not until it thinks it’s safe, and that will be us. So let’s hurry.”

  Caylen needed no second urging. He raced along the run and only dropped to a crouch when he saw the bobbing heads of the other boys in front of him, and of course on that heart-stopping occasion when he realised he was standing right by the thicket where the boar was calmly waiting for the noise to pass. He could smell it in there, musty, foetid; its breathing was rapid, almost hoarse. He thought he saw a shaft of sun glint off the cruel, curved tusks, and he realised this was a giant boar, a huge thing, that had probably come down from the deep forests inland.

  Caswallon knew it was there, but it was taboo to kill boars for two seasons, because of the goring of the druid Glamach, in the season of Bel. It would make great eating, this one, and was a severe threat to the village while it was alive. But until the season of the fires, and the blessing of Lug, it would forage the nearwoods unhindered.

  Caylen leapt past it and waited for Fergus. Fergus was a small lad, two years younger than the wiry Chieftain’s son, and his face was red with effort, his tawny hair slick and plastered with animal grease which ran down his cheeks as the heat in his flesh melted it. He clutched a tiny wooden knife, and there was such an expression of childish excitement in his face that Caylen felt his own excitement surge again. They went on, breaking through the tangled, thorny undergrowth where the ground was marshy, and finding a clearer passage through the gnarled trunks of oak and elm, where bluebells covered the ground in a single, dazzling azure sheen. The other boys had gone through here too, and Fergus led the way after them, diving from tree to tree, listening to the rustling in the distance, and the sound of bird life disturbed by the intruders below.