Avilion (Mythago Wood 7)

by Robert Holdstock

  The face of the man who called to her. The lost man.

  The man she had called resurrection.

  And her sadness lifted, and she began to feel warm.

  Yssobel’s safe return was greeted with relief and an understanding of her sadness at the disappearance of her good friend Odysseus. The courtyard was thick with snow, though for the moment the blizzard that had until then raged all day had ceased. It was after dark and they had approached with torches, following their line of sight to where fires struggled against the wind on the walls of the villa.

  Shivering and half-starved, Yssobel and Hurthig were glad to leave the feeding, rubbing down and stabling of the horses to others. The beasts had done well in the conditions. Now it was water from the well, to be heated at least to warm, that Yssobel craved.

  After bathing, and allowing Rianna to comb through the tangle of her hair, she went to the dining room to join the others. Most of the winter visitors had already had their small meal and departed. Only the Saxons remained and the Huxleys. The dining room was at the back of the villa, away from the head of the valley, and therefore warmer and cosier, with its open-hearth fire and goat-skin carpet. Everything in the room had been crafted by Ealdwulf, from the long table to the hard chairs, from the drinking cups to the carved wood platters on which the frugal fare was served.

  Yssobel told her parents what she had found in the Odyssey cave, as they called it. She showed them the portrait that Odysseus had painted of her, which she believed to have been his way of saying goodbye. But there was no grief in her, she explained, when Guiwenneth asked her the question, and no, no sense of loss other than that of a lost friend.

  Realising what her mother was intimating, she said very pointedly, leaning across the table: ‘We were friends. We were not lovers.’

  Steven murmured, ‘Good. We won’t have to be bringing gifts to a little Greek, then.’

  He went on, ‘If it’s any consolation, though nothing is certain this deep in Ryhope Wood, I’m sure he’ll be safe. I don’t think anything has survived of his story between, what, five and fifteen? We shall never know why he has chosen to be in the wilderness, in a cave, making images of the various gods and goddesses. A strange isolation. But we know he went to his home at Ithaca. And we know he helped win a great siege.’

  ‘I know, daddy. You’ve told me the story. The hollow horse. You’ve also told me that whatever is created from our minds in this place is created with that person’s strengths and weaknesses. Not every mythago will follow its true track.’

  ‘I hope this one does,’ Steven said gently.

  Yssobel forked up the last piece of meat from her platter, agreeing silently as she chewed, pushing the plate to the centre of the table. The Saxon family gave their thanks for the meal and left, and Yssobel thanked Hurthig again for his companionship on the ride. Then she said, continuing the previous conversation, ‘But suddenly I’m aware of the man in the valley again. The man who calls to me.’ She glanced at Steven. ‘Your brother.’

  At that, Guiwenneth’s fists clenched and her voice rasped, ‘You’ve not mentioned him for years. What makes you mention him now?’

  Her face had become ashen and drawn. It startled Yssobel. She had been talking out of the red side of her life, the human side. But it was the green side that regarded her mother now, and it was shocking for her to see.

  Guiwenneth’s features had become like a wood skull, coated in translucent skin. Yssobel could hear the crack of wood, the creak. It was as if her mother’s whole body was being broken, resisting only because of its residual strength. Glancing at her father, Yssobel could tell that he was seeing nothing of this.

  Jack had seen it, though. What he called the ‘haunter’ in him, the forest part, had perceived the terrible change in his mother. He watched her in consternation, then glanced at his sister and shook his head.

  Yssobel didn’t know what she had said. She remembered that years ago Guiwenneth had fled the villa for her father’s fortress, upset by the man in the valley, but Steven had never told his daughter why. And eventually she had forgotten about it.

  After a few moments Guiwenneth returned to normal, though her look was still that of an angry woman. ‘You should leave him alone,’ she whispered. ‘He is a rotten man.’

  ‘He doesn’t feel that way to me . . .’

  ‘Leave him alone!’ Guiwenneth shouted. ‘Get him out of your mind, if you can that is. If he hasn’t already snared you through the branch and root that winds through your insides.’

  Steven reached out and took Guiwenneth’s hands in his. ‘Gwin. Take it easy. You’ll snap a twig!’ He smiled at the family joke, but Guiwenneth snatched her hands away. ‘More twigs snapped than you know,’ she said coldly, pushing back from the table, almost stumbling as she stood and walked from the dining room and out into the snow.

  Steven came and sat next to Yssobel. He tried to put his arm around her, but she felt angry and confused, hunching into herself, dismissing the gesture. ‘What did I say? What made her angry?’

  ‘The man you talk about, the man you paint, the man you dream about - you do dream about him, don’t you?’

  ‘Not for a long time. But I still feel he’s there . . .’

  ‘He’s a hurtful man. He began as a child as a lovely child, though we scrapped a lot, and he usually won. He began as a man as a kind and colourful and competitive and funny man. And then he went into this wood from the outside . . .’

  ‘From Oak Lodge?’ Jack asked quickly.

  ‘From Oak Lodge, yes. He followed his father into the interior. He was curious to know what George Huxley had discovered; and he became transformed.’

  ‘Transformed? Into what?’

  ‘Something evil. A man who had become possessed by a dark element in the wood, if I can put it that way. His heart was cold, but his need was a furnace.’

  ‘That’s a strange way to talk,’ the girl muttered. ‘What was his need?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  Yssobel leaned forward, head in her hands. With a glance at Jack she nodded vaguely. ‘I suppose it was my mother.’

  ‘It was. And she still hurts. And you are wrong about him, Yssi. He is not lost, nor sad. If that resurrected man is Christian, then you should never go near him. He is harmful.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘You should have told me before.’

  ‘Well, I’m telling you now. Never go near him.’

  ‘I’ll never go near him,’ Yssobel agreed in a dull tone of voice. She stood up. ‘I’m tired, now. Tell mummy I’m sorry.’ And with a kiss on his cheek, she left for her rooms.

  Jack was flushed in the face, partly from the heat in the room, partly from Egwearda’s concoction, which he’d diluted but perhaps not sufficiently. He rolled the empty cup between his palms, staring down into the bowl as if scrying the future, or perhaps the past.

  Steven watched him. The log cracked and spat on the hearth, and he knew that soon he would have to open the room to the others so that they could sleep. He might even join them, though there was a good fire in his own room.

  Jack looked up, breaking his thought. ‘What was your brother - what was Christian searching for when he entered Ryhope?’

  ‘Love, I imagine. A love that he’d already lost.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I told you about the war in Europe. I told you how I stayed in Europe after the war. Chris came home. He found our father deluded - or mad, in fact: overwhelmed by his discovery of the nature of this immense realm, immense, even though we occupy only a tiny corner. One day a woman came out of the wood. She was very beautiful. She had flowing auburn hair and was dressed in hunter’s clothing, and was a princess, running from pursuers.’

  ‘Gwin,’ Jack said, with a smile, glancing round at the door.

  ‘Gwin but not Gwin.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because the Guiwenneth who came to Oak Lodge on that particular day was either a mytha
go created by Christian or by the man of your own obsession: my father, George.’

  ‘Ah, I see now. They fought over her.’

  ‘Fought over her, and one of them killed her.’

  Jack sat back in surprise. ‘Killed her?’

  ‘Buried her in the earth by the chicken sheds. I found her bones. Only they weren’t bones by then, just scraps of cloth covering decayed wood.’

  Thinking hard for a moment, Jack asked the obvious question. ‘Which one killed her?’

  How Steven would have loved to have known the answer to that. Long ago, when he had returned home from France, to find his father lost in the wood, his brother edgy and different, finally becoming lost himself, Steven had been shocked to dig into the grave and find what was left of the woman from the greenwood. It was certain that both other men had been passionate for this beauty from early Celtic times.

  So now, for Jack, he filled in the missing piece: that when he, Steven, had been alone in Oak Lodge, Guiwenneth of the Green had returned, in new guise, with different traits of behaviour and humour to the other, no doubt, but essentially the same legendary woman. And they had fallen in love, and that love had been intense. And yet they had had only a few happy days before Christian, much aged and with a band of hawk-masked slaughterers, tracked her down to the Lodge and abducted her, leaving Steven for dead.

  It was now too hot in the room. Father and son rose and went out into the freezing air of the garden, stepping into the darkness through the star-illuminated snow, breath frosting, welcoming the ice of the night on their overheated faces. The moon was low and only a crescent was visible. The edge of the wood across the rise of the Amurngoth hill was a dark wall, though it was possible to make out several sets of criss-crossing tracks, some animal, others human. There was always much movement from the valley and into the surrounding hills and passes when winter came, as if the bite of winter resurrected the life that had been gathering in imarn uklyss, sending it on its various paths; summoned by human mind and sentient wood, it was dispersed at random, probably to fade and die just as the echoes they were.

  ‘You found Guiwenneth dead,’ Jack said. ‘But she was taken into Lavondyss. Taken by whom?’

  ‘I shall never tell you. That secret dies with me.’

  Jack stared at his father, almost too curious for words. When he tried to question him further, Steven cut him short.

  ‘But you waited for her. And she came back.’

  ‘I waited for her. And she came back.’

  And with an inward shudder, Steven thought of what Guiwenneth had said to him, in her father’s stronghold, the deserted fort that rose on the hill above Eagle Valley.

  I’m not sure who I am. I’m not sure I’m yours. I think - I dread to think - that I’m his.

  Winter in the land had ended. It ended as suddenly as it had arrived, and the villa was in spring sunshine between one day and the next. The animals were let out of winter quarters, but there was no confusion in them. From shivering in misery they were suddenly frisky, and breeding was in the air.

  If winter had left the valley, it had not left the family, and the relationship between Guiwenneth and Yssobel became bleaker by the moon. As Yssobell’s fascination and obsession with ‘the resurrected man’ increased, so did her mother’s anger and fear; there were times when Guiwenneth walked the grounds of the villa by night, and when Steven saw her he felt he was looking at a ghost, that her body had become translucent; as if she was losing all substance, all connection with the world.

  This would change, though for a while only, and it changed when Yssobel began to dream of her grandfather, Peredur. One evening when Steven passed her room, the door was open and he saw her painting in a fury. She had made her own brushes, and had traded skins and meat from her hunting for pigments with the bone-shapers, tent dwellers who regularly passed through from the valley. She was always complaining that she could never get enough yellow. Red, green, black and white, but never enough yellow.

  ‘One day I will try and create the National Gallery,’ Steven said from the door.

  She waved the brush at him dismissively. ‘Not now. I’ve got him. I can’t hold him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Go away.’

  He stood in the doorway, watching her. ‘The National Gallery in London is a famous place for famous painters. I would like to take you there.’

  ‘Create it, then,’ she snapped, not looking up. ‘I know several painters in the region. A boat painter, a cave painter and a woman who paints bodies with iron pins and skin dyes. We can make a feast of it and discuss our work. But not now!’

  My my, Steven thought; sharp-tongued, sarcastic, irritable, dismissive . . . fevered.

  Yssobel was painting on parchment. He could see the black marks on the written side. ‘Where did you get the scrolls?’

  ‘There are thousands of them,’ she said. ‘Most of them just fall to pieces when you touch them. A lot are painted, really beautiful paintings. I just took a sackful of ones with writing on.’ She turned the strip of parchment over. ‘It’s what you call hieroglyphs. I get a small sense of their meaning, but that’s from the green side. It’s not very interesting.’

  Steven could hardly speak for a moment. ‘And what does your green side tell you they say?’

  ‘Just lists of battles, names of warriors, lists of weapons and chariots. There’s one that has a list of boats and the number of men who went to war in them. Really boring.’ She flipped another small pile of flattened parchment fragments, as yet unpainted in her workshop. ‘This one, in fact.’

  Suddenly she leaned back, chewing the end of her paint brush, gazing intently at the man in the doorway. ‘There really are thousands. A few won’t matter, will they?’

  What had she found, and where had she found it? He asked the question, and Yssobel pointed vaguely in the direction of the Serpent Pass. ‘It’s like a huge palace, built right back into the hill. Green marble on the outside, polished corridors and rooms, packed with all sorts of things. Including hunting equipment.’ She indicated with a glance the sturdy bow she used, and the tall quiver of arrows, which Steven knew she could fire with great accuracy. He realised he had assumed that Ealdwulf had made them for her.

  She was quite a lesson in surprise, this girl.

  She was painting again. ‘I found the place with Odysseus. It’s further up the valley from his horrible cave. I suggested he moved in. Warmer, for a start, but no: he had to stay in that hole in the rock. Such an odd friend. But a good friend.’ She finished the painting with a flourish, turned it round. ‘There. Got him. But you never saw him, did you? Nor Gwin.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My grandfather from the green,’ she said, intoning dramatically.

  ‘Peredur?’

  ‘War chief and hero. He has a strong face. And I can see where mother and I get our hair.’

  The portrait was astonishing. It might almost have been a photograph. Thoughtful, a careful gaze, the hint of a smile in a lean, young, lightly bearded face, copper hair curling from below a simple crested helmet, the only decoration being two panels showing chariots in full attack. The man’s face was slightly scarred. Around his neck, an eagle’s head in profile, on a leather cord. In the background, sketched in light detail, rose the hill with its high towers where Guiwenneth had been born. He was a striking-looking man.

  ‘You saw him? Or dreamed him.’

  ‘Dreamed, of course. Greenside dream. But he was very clear. He was laughing and drinking, with friends, somewhere out in the open, close to a small fire. I don’t think he was aware that I’d come so close. I think they’d been fighting. Not each other. I could smell blood. But they were triumphant. For the moment, anyway.’

  ‘He’s very handsome.’

  Yssobel turned the portrait back and considered it. ‘Yes. He is. I’m sorry he had to die so horribly. Shall I show it to my mother? Or will she rage at me again?’

  Steven considered the question without knowing what
to say. Guiwenneth was in a black mood again, for reasons he could no longer fathom, though he knew that fear and anger were at the root of it. She was so often like this, dark and despairing, though she certainly had her brighter moments; cheerful and active, full of life and energy, and eager to leave the villa for a look at the land around.

  Since there was no ‘red side’ to Guiwenneth, only the green, Steven, in the dark hours, was inclined to think that she was slowly being called back into the wood, back into Lavondyss, death in the place of creation. He couldn’t bear the thought of it, so he chose - being full of everything that was the red in man, and able to avoid more difficult issues - to put it from his mind. Although he spent as much time with Guiwenneth as he could, and as he was allowed.

  ‘I think she’d like to see it,’ he said. ‘She never knew Peredur, nor her mother—’

  ‘Deirdrath!’

  ‘Yes. Deirdrath. Killed shortly after the birth, but she talked of him from the world of the Unhappy Dead. She had loved him very much. What a life she had had with the princeling. Yes, I think Gwin would like to see it.’

  Yssobel gave a little sigh. ‘I hope so.’ And she added: ‘Shall I try to find Deirdrath?’

  ‘I don’t know, Yssi. Ask her. Sometimes we like to live with the memory we have and which we hold precious, even if what we remember is just a ghost. We don’t want them changed. But Gwin has always been curious about her father. So your portrait might be a lovely gift or it might hurt. Your choice.’

  The girl nodded, picked up a piece of charcoal and quickly adjusted a contour. ‘I believe he would have made a good impression,’ she said, with an admiring smile. ‘I think I’ll take the chance.’

  Ealdwulf suddenly appeared in the doorway, annoyed and flushed of face. ‘Dried meat. And fruit,’ he stated slowly. ‘On the table! I called you.’