Avilion (Mythago Wood 7)

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘But you came for Arthur!’

  And Uzana said softly: ‘We’ll come for him again, if needs be.’

  Narine went on, ‘As we crossed the lake, our world changed. A world shift. It happens to us. We suddenly knew, on the lake, that we were coming for you.’

  ‘How?’ Yssobel asked, confused but not disturbed by what they were saying.

  ‘I told you,’ said Uzana. ‘We read your dreams.’

  Yssobel said: ‘I still don’t understand. In my dream, in my father’s story, he was taken to Avilion by three queens.’

  ‘Well, weren’t there? Three?’

  ‘That man, that warlord we came to collect,’ Narine said fiercely, ‘He was his armour. As for how much more he was than that - who knows?’

  ‘And you wear Arthur’s armour now! Queen and king in one.’

  ‘Virgin beauty, soft-skinned, encased by bloodied leather.’

  Narine agreed, smiling and glancing at Yssobel. ‘Iron-cut, yes, and deeply wounded, but strong enough to bear the blows.’

  ‘For a while at least,’ the other woman added. ‘Strength contained, concealed in strength.’

  ‘Life, vibrant, in the vale of death. Which is why you will be tested!’

  ‘Welcome to the place you’ve made your own.’

  ‘Indeed!’ said Narine. ‘Now, let’s get on!’

  Yssobel in Avilion

  Odysseus dreams

  In his dreaming, he had seen her: the flame-haired girl, riding towards him.

  In his dreaming, he had loved her. There was passion in his dreaming.

  A cool sea breeze accompanied him as each day he walked to where the beach began, to the soft sea touch, and stood there; sometimes spear in hand, sometimes shield upon his back. In anticipation.

  Eyes closed; asleep yet not asleep.

  Not singing, now. Not here.

  He had sung the song of the Island of the Lost, and was lost until awakened fully. In the half-awakened part of him, below Lethe’s comforting, concealing shroud, below her sleep-veil, he knew that this was no more than rehearsal time.

  This was his life in practice. This was the dream of the dream to come.

  The flame-haired girl would rouse him.

  And sometimes he whispered her name:

  Yssobel.

  ‘There he is,’ said Narine. ‘There’s your man.’

  I recognised him at once. He was older, though not by much. He was standing at the edge of the strand, leaning on a spear, a shield cast in front of him, half in the water. He was staring out to sea; wistful yet mournful.

  I dismounted, flung Uzana the reins. ‘Are you safe?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘He looks aggressive. Are you sure he is a friend?’

  ‘Very much my friend. But stay close. There’s something not right here. But yes . . .’

  I looked at my horse-straddling companions as they leaned down to rest after the hard ride. ‘Yes, I feel safe.’

  Dear Odysseus.

  He looked so confused, but recognised me as I walked up the shore towards him. I was unarmed. He dropped the spear. He acknowledged me with a quiet smile, and then turned away.

  ‘Follow me,’ he whispered.

  Built into the cliffs behind the sea was the entrance to a palace; it was identical to the marbled gateway that had led to his cave in Serpent Pass, though beyond the pillars there was an open gate, not the grim mouth of a hollow in the hill.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ I asked as we walked.

  ‘I do. I do. Though memory is faint for the moment.’

  ‘We were lovers. In a different place. Don’t tell my father. I lied to him.’

  ‘I think we were,’ he agreed. ‘Though I think a greater task, a greater love is coming to me.’

  ‘You’re right. I won’t tell you her name. Nor the perilous journey you’ll make to find her, though I’ve read of it. I know of it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  He paused, turned back. ‘You know more of me than I know of myself, then. Though I already have an idea, as you’ll see.’

  ‘I will never betray the trust that comes with knowing you so much. I need you for a while. Be my friend, please; just for the time I need you.’

  He looked at me, not so much confused as curious. Then he bowed his head. ‘I accept that. Now follow me. I will take you to a frightening place. Perhaps I need you too. Who knows? Who knows where fear of the future grows?’

  Broad-shouldered, dark-kilted as he was, I couldn’t help but touch his spine.

  Odysseus turned again and took me in his arms. The embrace was strong.

  ‘I wish I could remember more,’ he murmured as he eased his arms away, but still holding me. ‘I seem to have spent my life on this abandoned beach.’

  ‘Your future has much in store. Abandonment will be a part of it. Don’t be frightened. At the end, there is enlightened vision.’

  ‘Tragedy? Love?’

  I closed his lips with mine, a brief memory of the past, a past that I knew could never last.

  He smiled. He looked so beautiful when he smiled, a glimmer of delight in his dark eyes. I’d taken him by surprise.

  I said, ‘What we had we had; what he have we have; what will come to us will come to us.’

  He laughed. ‘Bad poetry.’

  ‘Never claimed to be a good poet; just, if you can cast your mind back . . . a good lover.’

  ‘Gods, I wish I could cast that line. To fish for those moments, a feast of memory. I remember bleeding.’

  ‘Blood in our passion; yes, blood was the flood of love.’

  And then he was stone again, as if some life-force had abandoned him. Glazed and sorrowful, he seemed to look into the void. He turned his back. Walked along the corridor.

  ‘Follow me. But stay with me.’

  And I followed; and stayed.

  Yssobel dreams

  Now Yssobel began to see what her companions had hinted: that this was a place she knew well. She took the silver hair clasp that her brother Jack had made for her and read the words again:

  Avilion is what we make of it.

  Yes. This was a part of the place she had dreamed of, when her mother had sung the song, the Song of the Islands of the Lost. She had not expected to find Odysseus, certainly; but it began to make sense to her. And it made sense that she’d felt that sudden need, almost unspoken; the need for his help.

  She would speak about it when the moment was right. He was walking through his own future, and the palace was a place of unfelt memory. She was alive here, vibrant. She sensed that he felt lonely.

  There was a wide room with a table in it, and wine on the table, and food; chairs enough for a dozen or more. The walls - eight of them - were bright with flowing, terrible images, and Odysseus sat and looked around, then took Yssobel in his gaze. ‘Is this my life?’

  Yssobel sat and picked up fruit and olives. She was very hungry, and was also thinking of Narine and Uzana, still on the shore. ‘May my friends have some of this? Is there enough to spare?’

  ‘Of course,’ Odysseus replied with a little laugh and a teasing grin, picking up a black olive and tossing it to Yssobel. ‘I don’t even know how it gets here. Someone takes care of me. Someone here, hidden in the darker rooms.’

  ‘I’ll take it later.’

  She looked at the living marble walls. Strange creatures moved there, monstrous. And women of great beauty, walking as if in dreams, looking back across their shoulders; enticing.

  And there was war. A great walled city, men engaged in a struggle no less violent but more heavily populated than the battle where she had seen Arthur take his final fall.

  Yssobel suddenly shocked to see a woman being hauled up the steps of the city by hard-faced, hard-armoured Greeks. They clearly had intentions for her. Her infant son was taken from her arms and cast to his death from the high wall, screaming as he fell, screaming as she screamed. She was then subject
ed to the imperfection of love. And Odysseus himself, a much, much older man, was among the abusing men.

  This was a heart-stopping scene. It took the anticipated delight of the fruit out of Yssobel’s mouth. She stared at her young friend, already knowing, yet suddenly realising, what he would become.

  A dark moment.

  ‘So this is to become my life,’ Odysseus said, as if hearing the unspoken thought, looking around at the reflecting room, before standing to face the wall that was showing the death of the child.

  ‘Yes. I think it is. I’m sorry.’

  He smiled with sadness. ‘Don’t be sorry. I’ve known it since I landed here. I’d hoped you could contradict me. Obviously not. It’s hard to believe I will be that brutal.’

  ‘Don’t think about it. You have something to do before this even begins.’

  ‘Yssobel.’ He turned to look at her, a fierce, beautiful but frightened young man’s gaze, not ready yet to face the violent days ahead, his arms crossed across his chest, as if holding in the fear of the rage and blood that he knew he must spill one day.

  ‘I do not wish to be that man. I truly do not wish to be that man.’

  ‘But that is the man you are. Though not yet. Don’t think about it.’

  ‘War? That I can understand. But that woman . . . what we will do to her . . .’

  ‘Her name is Andromache. The wife of Hektor. Troy was the war. I painted images, some of them of you, on the back of the scrolls that taught me about them.’

  Odysseus frowned, stood and searched the shaping wall.

  ‘Hektor? I know him. He’s here. He stares at me.’

  He saw the man, pointed him out. On the shaping wall, metal-eyed Hektor was running towards him, shield held hard, sword hidden behind his back. ‘Hektor. There! A fierce fighter. He terrifies me. All bronze terrifies me when shaped into the leaf-blade. But it’s not my own weapon that will kill him. A ghost I know as Achilles will kill him.’

  ‘That’s right. Achilles will take him down. But the city will fall.’

  The young man came back to the table.

  He took Yssobel’s hands in his. There were tears in his eyes. ‘Not fallen yet. I’ve not even been there. It seems as if I’ve a long and dangerous path to walk.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Yssobel replied. ‘And I do not believe you are in any real fear of the leaf-blade.’

  ‘If you think that’ - he smiled thinly as he looked at her - ‘then you don’t know the twist and thrust of fear. But I do hope you’re right.’

  He sighed, looking thoughtful and anguished for a moment. Relaxing then, he returned his attention to Yssobel. ‘Now: to you. What help is it that I can I give to you? I’ll do anything I can.’

  Yssobel hesitated for a long moment; her gaze was drawn again to the savagery of the Trojan Andromache’s death by the Greeks, the child torn from her arms. It was a moment of doubt; whether or not to stay with this man, in his oracular palace. But she reminded herself: he was not yet the man that he would become.

  She said softly, ‘I need to find my mother.’

  Suddenly, Narine was at the door, a horse held by the reins that she gripped in her hands. She was not happy.

  ‘We’re starving!’

  She eyed the table where food was plentiful. Uzana peered over her shoulder. ‘How long were you going to make us wait?’

  ‘Come in,’ Odysseus said gently. ‘Leave the horse, though.’

  They sat and ate like beasts, always watching the young Greek. They drank water, not wine. They settled back and looked around at this living-walled room. Narine noticed the beach charge towards the defences of Troy, and the men coming towards the observer. ‘Quite a battle!’

  ‘Quite a life,’ Uzana added, looking around at the shifting images, the heaving sea, a crystal palace towards which a salt-soaked and beaten man was crawling. ‘What strange beasts. What a journey this shows. Is this your life to come?’

  ‘Apparently.’ He glanced at Yssobel.

  ‘Does it daunt you?’ Uzana asked.

  ‘Very much so. But I’ll work out strategies to cope with it. Especially after the journey home after the war.’

  ‘Well: if it is, I’d like to be there with you. There is excitement in your life; challenge.’ Uzana looked round at the scenes. ‘How does it end? Your life.’

  ‘With slaughter, if the wall is to be believed.’

  Uzana and Narine followed his hand to where it pointed at his murdering of several men in a small, tight room, where a tree was growing and holding up the ceiling. ‘That is my home. Those men tried to steal it. But as yet, I haven’t begun even to shape the home. This oracle is almost too challenging.’

  Narine stuffed a fig into her mouth, looking quickly at Yssobel, a look that said: is he mad?

  ‘We should get on,’ Yssobel said. ‘I have to find an army of ghosts called Legion. And there is a man to find, riding with it. I need to understand him.’

  ‘Legion?’ Odysseus said. ‘Why would you want to find Legion?’

  ‘Because they’ve taken my mother Guiwenneth.’

  ‘Zeus! Legion! That will be a task!’

  ‘You know it, then?’

  His eyes had brightened. ‘I’ve seen it several times. I don’t know where it is now, but I know where to start looking. But getting there will not be easy.’ He looked at Uzana. ‘I assume you’ll come with us?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then eat up. Eat everything. But not the table,’ he added, with a smile. ‘I sleep on it. I’ll tend to your horses. Tomorrow we ride.’

  ‘Where to? And how far?’ asked Yssobel. ‘We have to think of supplies.’

  ‘To a set of caves, fronted by green porcelain. I’ve seen it. And yes, it’s a long journey. But it contains a mirror to the world. We’ll see things there.’

  ‘The palace of green porcelain!’ Yssobel whispered, almost to herself. It was the place she had visited often with Odysseus, on her long rides out from the villa. It was clear to her that he could not remember those Serpent Pass excursions. So she said only, ‘My father talked about it. He’d read about it in an ancient book . . . a bound set of scrolls,’ she added, when Odysseus looked puzzled. ‘The story of a man who made a creature from metal and stone that could move through time.’

  ‘Like Legion, then,’ Odysseus said, intrigued.

  Yssobel knew very little about Legion, but she agreed anyway.

  And though she felt a touch of guilt about the way in which she’d used some of those scrolls for her paintings, the guilt fled from her like a startled hare.

  Palace of Green Porcelain

  In the morning, Odysseus was extremely cheerful. He was up early, saddling the horses - his own was a pure white mare - and was soon to be seen galloping away from the palace, down to the sea, where he turned and shouted something abusive, laughing as he did so.

  He was dismissing his future, for the moment.

  Yssobel and the others followed him on what was a long ride around the island’s shore, to a narrow causeway that stretched across the ocean, vanishing into dawn haze. Lake had become sea here, though Yssobel had not noticed the moment of separation of waters.

  ‘It’s a dangerous crossing,’ Odysseus said. ‘If you slip into the sea, you’re lost. Something below the surface is very hungry, and very fast. I saw it happen several times. That’s why I have no friends left here. But so far I’ve been lucky.’

  He led the way, keeping his mare under tight control. The causeway was only slightly wider than a horse’s tread, and the ground was slippery.

  Throughout a long and silent day they walked the bridge between islands, below a cloudless sky, stopping for nothing, keeping a steady pace, alert for danger.

  Soon the island came into sight, rising like bull’s horns from the water; two mountain peaks.

  And the causeway widened and reached the narrow rocky beach, where a steep path led through the gorge between the mountains. Here, for a while, they rested and refreshed th
emselves.

  ‘Not far now,’ Odysseus assured them, though Narine seemed to know where she was.

  After a difficult scramble up the stony path, the cliffs closed in; the passage became gloomy. Again, Yssobel recognised the place: Serpent Pass.

  She took the lead, revelling in the eerie sense of familiarity. In just a short while she saw the first flash of light on green. As they came closer, so the carved effigy of a bull, shaped from glistening green porcelain, became clear in profile, its gaping maw the entrance.

  This was like yet unlike the strange museum in Serpent Pass, behind the villa. Perhaps that particular manifestation of the mind had been her father’s. This, perhaps, was a memory of her father’s tale of the ‘metal and stone machine that travelled in time’, entangled with her own ideas. She had certainly noticed the exquisite statue of a bull that seemed to have been guarding the entrance to the museum.

  Yssobel began to wonder what Odysseus had brought her here to see.

  ‘More reflection,’ he said when she questioned him. ‘A shield!’

  Narine and Uzana waited in the cool gorge. Odysseus led Yssobel through the open mouth of the bull. It was even colder here, and gloomy, but after walking for a while a green light began to glow, and shapes began to emerge from the rooms through which they passed. There was nothing alive among them; they were exhibits just as Yssobel’s room in the villa had been filled with objects which she had collected. Just as her grandfather George Huxley had filled his own ‘Oak Lodge’, at the edge of the world, with objects that he’d collected.

  But they were fascinating. And they were most certainly from her father’s imagination.

  ‘I love this place,’ Odysseus said as they walked through the sometimes echoing chambers, descending steps into rooms lined with shelves of scrolls (at which Yssobel glanced with a fond guilt), ascending to where vast human figures stood, their arms upraised, their eyes wide. ‘But what is this?’

  He had led Yssobel into a wide room filled with dark metal machines, some of which had wheels, wide wings and crosspieces on their snouts. These were painted brightly, some of the decoration reflecting teeth. Everything here was a chaos of war. War machines. There were the more familiar chariots, two-wheeled and four-wheeled, and several of what Yssobel knew - from what she had learned - were guns. Massive pieces of war architecture, leaning heavily, or broken.