The Bone Forest (Ryhope Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  The Kalokki have gone. They ceased to be in my dreams. With their passing came a time of resting and sleep. I have let the world on my body grow and flourish in its own, inexorable way.

  Now, though, there is a great itching. I am swathed with the cracking, crusty signs of eczema. My skin seeps a thick and stinking exudate. What has happened? Great swathes of the Pectoralis Valley, and the Belly Plain, are barren. The wildwood exists in patches only, small, amoebic spreads of green in the orange and yellow wasteland. And even through that greenness I can see great lines and tracks of red, roadways, perhaps, although what travels along them is too small to see.

  A heavy smog hangs above the groin. It is an impenetrable smoke, oily to the nostrils, and sulphurous … The air of the room is filled with a distant buzzing, like machines. Even as I watch I see the edge of the forest shrink a little. The itching increases. There is pain in my bowels.

  Someone is drilling deeply into the world. Seeking for what, I wonder?

  I have slept too long. I have let too much time pass. I cannot stand the itching. Whilst the pain of the Kalokki’s forest clearing had been a pin prick, suffered to allow them to establish their presence upon the world, this eczema is too much.

  I smear and squeeze, scratch and smudge. I blow away the smoke from above my groin. I scratch at the soreness and the hard scabs of the cities. A black and tarry residue fills my fingernails and I scrape it out between my teeth.

  Soon there is stillness on the land. And peace.

  I will have to find food for a while, but the grasslands will soon be reestablished upon the world. Then, the first seeds of the forest will germinate and the wildwood will return.

  And once more I will dream by an ancient light.

  Magic Man

  Crouched in the mouth of the shrine-cave, One Eye, the painter, shivered as black storm clouds skated overhead and the wind whipped down from the northern ice-wastes to plague the grasslands with its bitter touch.

  The tribe should be gathered together before the darkening skies could loose their volleys of rain and lightning; then they would huddle into the cliff wall and wail and moan their misery. When the rains passed the women would come, invading the shrine-cave and screeching at One Eye because he had not stopped their soaking.

  He squatted, looking out across the grasslands to the man-high rushes that waved and danced in the biting winds. Stupid women, he thought. Stupid, stupid women. They should understand that his drawings were for the spirit of the hunt, not for their own comfort. They should be pleased when their men brought home bison, deer and, increasingly, the reindeer that strayed from the snows of the northern valleys.

  “One Eye!” hailed a child’s voice. One Eye looked down to where a small boy scrambled up the slopes of the cliff towards the cave.

  “Go away, child. Go away!” shouted the old man angrily. But he knew it would be no use. The boy, brown and dusty, crawled into the mouth of the cave and squatted there, breathing heavily. The sight of One Eye’s empty eye socket staring at him no longer perturbed the would-be painter as once it had.

  “I want to draw.”

  One Eye let his grey hair fall over his one good eye, clenched his mouth tight in an obstinate gesture of annoyance and shook his head. “Go away, child. Wait for the hunters.” Outside, the wind howled against the cliff and the dark sky grew perceptibly darker.

  “I want to draw.” Big eyes stared at the old man, childish features, open, honest. The boy was filthy; his hair was lank and filled with grass from his earlier romping. “I’m tired of making these!” He threw the inaccurately made axe from his hand and it clattered down the slopes to land heavily among the women below. One of them looked up and shouted angrily. She was cleaning a skin and had blood up to her elbows. The fire around which the group squatted burned low, and charred bones and wood poked blackly from the pile of ashes. An adolescent girl, underdeveloped and sulky, prodded the dying embers with a spear. The boy, in the shrine-cave above, was angry. “I want to draw a bear. One Eye, please! Let me draw a bear, please?”

  “Look,” snapped One Eye, pointing. Black shapes against the grey sky, the hunters returned. They walked slowly, spears clutched tightly, animals slung over their shoulders. Leading them came He Who Carries a Red Spear, his scarred face angry, bleeding from gashes on his cheeks. He waved his red-ochred spear at the group and the women stood, shouting their greeting. Red Spear, thought One Eye. How I wish a bison would get you. The tall hunter strode into the camp. He had a deer slung over his shoulders. His fur and leather tunic had been torn away and he walked naked, black hair coating his body from neck to toe, acting as a fur in itself. He was unaware of the death-thoughts of the old man above his head. Today he had not killed a bison. Today the hunt, for him, had failed. He was angry.

  The men dropped their kills close in to the cliff wall and then dragged the skins and axe baskets from where they had been distributed about the fire. The women crouched against the sloping wall of the overhang and giggled as the hunters covered them with taut skins, making rough and ready tents against the cliff face. They hammered special narrow points through the skins to hold them down, propping them up in the middle with spears. The skies darkened, distant thunder rolled and the grass whispered and sang as it bowed to the groaning winds.

  “Go down,” snapped One Eye. “Into the tents with you. Leave me in peace, brat. Leave me.”

  The boy darted back into the cave and laughed as One Eye screeched with surprise. He waited for the painter to come after him, but One Eye had fallen suddenly quiet, watching the slope below him. There was the sound of someone climbing up to the cave. The boy crawled to the entrance and began to shake as he saw his father coming up towards them.

  He Who Carries a Red Spear crouched beside One Eye and snarled. “What happened to your magic today, old man? Why didn’t I kill a bison, uh?” Mouth stretched back into a hideous grin, eyes narrowed, Red Spear struck fear into the heart of One Eye. One Eye cowered back, but a hairy and powerful hand reached out and grabbed him by the neck. The hunter snarled, increased the grip until the bone nearly snapped, then released the painter, looking back into the cave.

  “Drawings! Paintings!” Hard eyes turned on One Eye. “Only spears kill animals, you old fool. Spears, stones … and these.” He held up his bare hands, the fingers curved with the power they possessed. “I have killed bison with my bare hands, old man. I have twisted their heads, their necks twice the thickness of my body. I have twisted them until the bones snapped and splintered, the muscle tore and the blood spurted over my body. Drawings! Pah!” He smashed One Eye across the face. “If it weren’t that they, stupid fools, believed this nonsense, I should kill you. I should break your neck between my thumb and forefinger. I should snap you in two and throw your useless body to the scavengers. I should give you to the Grunts to devour.”

  “My paintings,” mumbled One Eye, “show the hunt. They protect you. They give you power over beasts.”

  Red Spear laughed. Behind him a hunter climbed into the cave and touched the bitter man on his arm. “Your wife is singing for you, Red Spear. She is eager.”

  He Who Carries a Red Spear grunted. “Hear that, old man? My wife sings for me. All the women in this tribe I could have if I so desired. Because I am the best hunter!” He pounded his naked chest and inched towards the painter, the stench of his body strong and sickening. “I hunt with weapons, not with paintings …” And as he said it he clutched dirt in his hand and threw it over the ochred walls. He took his son by the arm and threw him down the slope before him, sliding down and disappearing into the tent.

  The other hunter looked sympathetically at the old man. “He killed no bison today. You must forgive his anger.”

  One Eye shook his head. “He is the half-kin of a Grunt—that explains much to me.” Thunder crashed nearby and the black skies flared with the streaking lightning to the north. “He sneers at the magic of my paintings,” One Eye murmured. “The paintings bring luck, they bring kil
ls.” He looked at the blood-smeared hunter. “They don’t say who shall make the kills. They bring kills to the tribe. He must understand that …” He looked away. “But I fear he never shall—he cannot understand, just as none of his father’s spore can understand, that beasts and men have spirit.”

  The hunter nodded. “He only understands kill. And soon, One Eye, he will kill you. Be careful.” The hunter turned to go. One Eye reached out a hand and stopped him. “How many kills today? How many?”

  “Ten,” said the hunter. “More than enough. But we shall go into the herds again tomorrow.” His eyes flickered beyond One Eye to the cave walls. “Paint us luck, old man.”

  Then he was gone and the storm broke, rain sheeting down and drumming off the taut animal hide tents below. The women moaned and cried and the men laughed and loved. One Eye sat in the darkness at the back of the cave and thought over and over of the ten dead animals he had drawn the day before.

  Always it was the same. The number he drew was the number killed. And yet, he felt he had no real power. But one day true power over the paintings would come to one of the tribe, and then, from here to the seas in the south, beasts would be at the mercy of men—and men, perhaps, would no longer be at the mercy of the moving ice wastes to the north. The tribe must never die, One Eye realised, not with the inherent power it contained, hidden somewhere in the bodies of its hunters.

  With the breaking of the sun above the eastern horizon the boy came scrambling up to the shrine-cave. He found One Eye hard at work, drawing the shapes of hunters with a charred-wood stick.

  “Why don’t you draw them full?” asked the boy as he sat, absorbed by the growing picture of a hunt. “Why so thin? And black?”

  “Men are black,” said One Eye mysteriously. Then, pausing to glance at the boy, he lifted his eyes to the cave entrance. “Inside … we are thin and shallow.” His eyes dropped to the boy. “Beasts kill other beasts in a natural way. Man kills beasts with more than his hands. He uses spears and slings, and traps and nets. Man is more than a beast, but he has lost his goodness.” The old man looked at the coloured portraits of his animals. “They have goodness and they are full and whole. But man is shallow.” He turned to the boy. “That is why I draw the hunters thin.”

  The boy did not understand the old man’s talk. But he knew he was right. And when he, too, was a great painter, magicking animals into the traps, onto the spears, of his brothers, he would follow the tradition of One Eye.

  “Let me draw. Please. Let me draw.”

  One Eye muttered with annoyance but he passed the yellow and red pastes he had made that dawn. The boy dipped his fingers in and smudged the wall with yellow. With his left hand he used a charred stick to draw an outline around the smear. He remembered how the ribs of the bison stood out and he marked them in. He drew the legs and the way the muscles rippled with the power of the beast. One Eye concentrated on his own drawing, but again and again he glanced at the bison taking form at the hands of the boy. Finally he stopped and watched as his small apprentice drew a spear, thrust deep into the neck of the animal.

  “It is good,” said One Eye. “You have skill.” He smiled.

  The boy beamed. “May I draw a bear? Please?”

  One Eye shook his head with finality. “The bear is a hunter of man and he must never be drawn in the shrine-cave—he is beyond our magic.”

  “A bear is just a beast,” argued the boy.

  “The bear is more than a beast. We must only draw animals that run from man. Never those that attack him. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded, bitterly disappointed.

  “Old man!” He Who Carries a Red Spear crawled into the cave. “How many kills today, old man?” he sneered. “You, down!” He looked angrily at his son and the boy left the cave. Red Spear raised a fist at One Eye. “If I find him here too many more times I shall begin to think you are stopping him from being a great hunter, like me. I shall be forced to kill you … hear me?”

  He was gone before One Eye could answer. The hunters gathered together their spears and furs and walked from the cliff towards the plains where they would find bison and deer, and smaller animals to eat on the way home.

  The boy, grinning, scampered back into the cave. One Eye ignored him, staying in the mouth of the cave, watching the distant figures and wishing he was going with them. Behind him he heard charred wood scrape on the wall. He ignored it. The scraping ended and there was silence. Eventually One Eye looked around. “What do you draw, child?”

  The boy said nothing but continued working. One Eye crawled over to him.

  What he saw made him gasp with horror. He slapped the boy away from the wall and reached out to try to erase the fully drawn man from the painting of the hunt.

  “No!” cried the boy, but he fell silent. The ochre was too dry; only the arm was erased. One Eye sat and looked at the man with one arm. Then he looked at the bison with the spear in its neck. Then he looked at the boy and his face was white beneath its dusty covering.

  When the hunt returned, one of the hunters was dead. They carried him in, stretched on a fur and laid across two poles. His left arm had been severed above the elbow and he had bled to death. One Eye heard the word “bear” and he knew what had happened. Then his eye wandered to the kills of the day, to the bison still with a spear-head buried deep in its neck.

  The women mourned that night. The hunter lay in a shallow pit at the edge of the camp and his wife rubbed ochre into his ice-cold body, groaning and keening with every pass of her hand across her dead husband’s strong chest. The fire burned high in the still night and the faces of the children and women who squatted around its warmth were solemn and drawn. Red Spear sat apart from the tribe and time and again his eyes flicked up to the dark cave mouth, where he could see One Eye squatting, watching the gathering.

  Suddenly he jumped towards the fire and kicked the burning wood. “What happened to your magic today, old man?” he screamed up at the figure in the cave. “Why didn’t you save him?” He turned to look at the dead hunter, and there were tears in his eyes, but tears of frustrated anger rather than sorrow. “He was a good hunter. He killed many beasts for the tribe. Nearly as many as me!” Swinging around he raised one clenched fist. “If you can work magic, old man, why couldn’t you have saved him?”

  A hunter jumped up from the ring and caught Red Spear by the shoulders. “One Eye cannot know the unknowable! He merely spirits the animals into our traps!”

  He Who Carries a Red Spear flung the man aside. “He does nothing!” he cried angrily. “We no longer need One Eye and his stupid paintings.”

  As he ran through the circle of seated hunters and their women, a hand reached out and tripped him. Furious, he twisted on the ground and reached for the woman who had insulted him. He stared into the calm face of his wife, brown eyes insolently watching him. “Leave the old man,” she said softly. “He does no harm and many here believe him possessed of magical power. Why waste energy and respect on killing the useless?” Her smile was the last straw in the cooling of angry fires in the hunter. He leered up at One Eye and shook his fist. But he spared him.

  A wood torch burned in the shrine-cave. A wolf pack howled somewhere on the tundra, and as the night progressed so the sound of their baying moved farther away to the south. One Eye was oblivious of their cries, he was oblivious of the howling wind and the sound of rocks falling outside the cave mouth. He worked on his picture. The boy knelt beside him, watching. He had begged to be allowed to draw, but One Eye had said no, not yet. The anticipation kept the boy silent and now he watched as animals took shape upon the cave wall, overlapping animals that had been drawn in the past, but that did not matter because those animals had been killed and now they were just ochre smears, without meaning, without consequence.

  As he worked, One Eye repeatedly glanced at the attentive boy. There was a strange look in the old man’s eye, an expression of awe.

  Well into the night, when the boy was beginning to y
awn, One Eye sat back and handed the charred wood to his apprentice. Wrapped tightly in animals’ skins, still One Eye shivered as he began to guide the boy’s hand in the drawing of men on the wall scheme. The boy, with small furs around his shoulders, hardly noticed his chill. He was enthralled.

  “Draw … your father, here. That’s right,” breathed One Eye as the boy’s hand traced the pin shape. “Arch the back, that’s right. Throw the arms up … no, don’t stop …”

  “I don’t understand …” murmured the boy.

  “See,” explained the painter, “see how he scares the bison into the traps—see, they run before him and he has no weapon. Red Spear needs no weapon.”

  The boy nodded, satisfied, and continued the picture.

  “Tomorrow,” said One Eye, “I shall accompany the hunters. That surprises you?” His whiskered face broke into a smile at the expression on the boy’s face. “I used to be a hunter, long years ago. This hunt … see how it spreads across the wall. Tomorrow will be a great day for the tribe. There will be many kills …” His voice trailed off. “Many kills. And I wish to join in on such an occasion. Now.” He guided the tiny hand to the wall. “Draw me, here. See, standing behind your father. Draw me a spear. See how I throw it at the bison your father scares …”

  Pin shapes took form upon the grey wall. The boy, excited, creating, drew as the old man instructed him. When it was finished he was beaming. One Eye was satisfied. The boy settled against the cave wall and One Eye looked at the picture of the hunt and dreamt of the kill that would be least expected tomorrow. And by the boy’s magic hand it had been depicted so! He closed his eyes and slept.

  When he was sure One Eye was asleep, the boy crawled to the wall and picked up the charred wood. Carefully he drew more hunters. But he was tired and they didn’t form as they should—they were too small, too stooped … like Grunts. Uncomfortable at what he had done, the boy smudged them away. They remained, shadows on the wall.