Avilion (Mythago Wood 7)

by Robert Holdstock

  And after a moment all joy had gone from the pale features of her face. She was so old and yet so young, and she was shivering as the light grew dim. The Iaelven had drunk from the lake, washed their lank hair, and now seemed concerned.

  ‘I have to go,’ Silver whispered. ‘This is where it ends. The old one will come with you, back to the field. He needs Avilion. He can speak in our own tongue as well; don’t be fooled by him.’

  Jack was startled by this quick elfin chatter from the woman. ‘The field? Back to the field?’

  ‘Go back. Go back! It’s the way to cross.’

  The younger Amurngoth had begun to depart along the road. They seemed to have no time even to acknowledge Jack. Silver walked behind them, constantly glancing over her shoulder and beckoning.

  Jack and Won’t Tell followed at a distance. The boy, for some reason, seemed excited. His walk had become a jig and he looked up at the sky and smiled. When Jack quietly questioned him, all Won’t Tell said was: ‘We’re on our way.’

  Both were sad to see Silver disappear into the dusk, back along the road that had led from Peredur’s stone. But they walked back into the forlorn field, disturbing the last of the scavengers, those bone-eaters desperate enough to try and find a feast within the armour. They croaked and screeched and settled in the trees. Jack walked through the wind-flow of colour, the rags of the fallen.

  Won’t Tell was nervous despite his new-found excitement. ‘This was a great battle.’

  ‘An important one,’ Jack said. ‘I wish I knew more. This is where a king died and was taken to a place of resurrection.’

  ‘Arthur?’

  Jack was surprised. ‘Yes. Arthur. What do you know about Arthur?’

  Won’t Tell stared at him as if looking at an idiot. ‘Everybody knows about Arthur,’ he said. ‘Everybody.’

  For a moment Jack was torn between concern that his body-guard had gone and his realisation that he had spent too long in the woods.

  The elder Amurngoth was already kicking its way among the bones.

  ‘I have been too long away from the edge. I do not know what is known,’ Jack said.

  Won’t Tell took his hand and held it tightly. ‘But you got there, Jack. You’re a wood haunter. You can go anywhere. You don’t have to know things, just do things. You will take me home, won’t you?’

  ‘I will take you home. I promise. Just don’t tell anyone your name.’

  ‘Not even you?’

  ‘Not even me.’

  Click and whistle sounded from the field. The Iaelven elder was beckoning. Jack hastened towards him, aware that the whole hill was moving.

  The creature motioned him down and Jack dropped to a crouch, the boy beside him. The wind was strong now and there was a howl to it that suggested the cries of the dead. The tartan strips were alive with movement. A deeper movement was surfacing.

  As they crouched among the dead, so the hill began to grow into a forest. It sprang through the earth, a writhing of life that encompassed and gorged upon the bones, drawing them in, white matter and the terrible beauty of tartan drawn into the dark of bark, shattered fragments gleaming in the spreading leaves of the branches; this was a yew forest, and it emerged out of old time, and each thick gnarled trunk was shaped and carved and battered by the lives and deaths that had happened within its bounds.

  Resurrected, Avilion came to claim Jack and Won’t Tell. The Amurngoth screamed as he was absorbed into one of the giant trees, but his last glance was one of peace and pleasure.

  Avilion did not choose between those it took. This Iaelven, whatever he had done in his long life, had done enough to deserve the island.

  As Jack and Won’t Tell huddled together, a grove formed around them, thick enough to contain them as prisoners. The banners and strips of clothing hung from the branches, draped across shields and broken weapons. But it was not a place that Jack felt was threatening.

  There was no sense of movement, just the rich growth and a warm stillness. Then the boy whispered, ‘Someone’s approaching. ’

  There was a rustle of the undergrowth, a muttered curse, and a man in light, tarnished, weed-racked armour stepped into the grove, facing Jack. His hair and beard were wet, as were his boots. His strange eagle-face helmet had been pushed back on his head. Jack saw the design of the raptor as the man bent to cough up water before sitting down slowly, leaning back among the roots.

  When he had recovered from whatever ordeal he had just experienced, he pointed down to the ground. ‘Avilion,’ he grunted. Then his hand waved about the grove. ‘Avilion.’

  He said something else, closing his two palms almost together. A small part of Avilion.

  Because of the boy, Jack’s human aspect had surfaced, protectively and anxiously. He let Haunter back, and the mythago side of him seemed to wake and yawn. It looked around and was impressed.

  This is the place that Yssobel dreamed about. Does it feel strange that we sought the edge of the world and have ended up in one small part of its heart?

  Yes. But the edge was not my home, no more than Avilion is my home. The villa is my home. The icy wind from Serpent Pass; and the strange winds from the valley that brought Guiwenneth back, all those years ago.

  We will not be settling again at the villa. Not for a long time yet. Nor Yssobel.

  I know. Not for a long time.

  We’re moving. There is a shift occurring. And Yssobel is close. She is very close.

  Do you have any feeling or sense about the man sitting so close to us and looking so mournful?

  Only that the armour is not his. And that he is not dead and crossing to his otherworld. He’s red like you.

  Jack stared at the silent man. This was not Christian, but there was a great deal of similarity to Yssobel’s painting of their grandfather. The man was of much the same age, and looked weary and wounded.

  But Huxley had written: and she stole the armour of a king . . .

  Jack was about to whisper his other thought to the boy, but Won’t Tell was asleep, curled up like a cat.

  The Riot of Her Blood

  Yssobel had hoped to find her mother as she embraced the dryad tree, to find the woman with whom she had shared love and anger, and yet the earth was both friend and enemy and she was drawn deeply down.

  She felt herself extended by finger and toe, and sight and sound, and by the riot of her blood as both red and green conflicted within her.

  She flowed through the dank, drear earth and was life-charged by the vibrancy of the underworld. She could hear the sound of the dead who had been long consumed there, and the sounds of those in the act of fighting and dying and soon to be bloodied in the field of clay.

  And all of this because she was mostly sap-green. Jack was there fleetingly, travelling with Haunter, and her mother was there fleetingly, by a lake; and the fierce man whose purloined death she now owned was watching her.

  Another man watched her although he stared at her in fear from the tower in the stone castle that rose above the wood and all of which was a part of her—

  (—and reflected her childish dream and was entwined with that which was not a part of her because—)

  Legion and its ghosts had existed for an age or more and moved through times and spaces that she was able to sense distantly, as sharply as a wolf senses snow, as she toured the earth mass below her, with her blood-body in the tree and the sap in her mind in the deep flow. Legion was entwined with her.

  And she was screaming and searching for her mother, but finding only the confusion of her own mind and memory, and the terrible acts of Legion that it had performed in its eternal age, and the sense of Avilion alive and rising and coming towards her, with yew grove and oak grove and orchards, and a great heart at its centre which was beating out a rhythm of hope and restoration.

  Avilion: rising towards her and bringing with it the desperate man whose life she had denied by stealing his death.

  A very angry man, she was aware.

  Avilion, howeve
r, was without concern as it came to claim back the small part of Yssobel’s childish vision that had mis created this land of silence, and the silent sound of long-lost music, and the music of silence and the peace that comes with life in new colours; and the reflection and the yew groves and the ash groves and the high cliffs with their green cover and their small pathways, and the crossing places; and she felt all of this—

  Felt it in her heart her head her belly her sap, the flow of memory, the reflection of herself as a child.

  Painted wonder, painted fantasy. The memory of wonder . . .

  Avilion Alive is curious about her. She has stolen its dream. It has come to take it back.

  Yssobel became aware that Odysseus and several of the Athenians had formed a ring around her. She was drenched with sweat and incontinence. The tree would not let her go. Its bark had become a lover’s embrace and its tendrils wound into her flesh and held her hard. For a moment she was frightened as consciousness returned. But when Odysseus drew his sword and asked, ‘Shall I cut you free?’ she answered, ‘No.’

  The group crouched down, a circle guard as she was absorbed again into earth and time.

  Though Guiwenneth was close, Christian was closer, and it was to him that Yssobel went in her sylvan dream.

  The Riot of His Blood

  Two of the towers had shown Christian nothing more than other lands, and he had dismissed them, magnificent and strange though they had appeared to him. In the third he saw her. The ghost.

  Peredur and Aelfrith stood behind him. The others waited below. For a moment it seemed as if Christian would plunge through that window to his death, but he gripped the carved stone that surrounded the window, head lowered, gasping for breath, holding on. ‘Who is she? Who IS she?’ he whispered.

  ‘We have no answer for that,’ Aelfrith said coldly. Christian turned on him.

  ‘How many ghosts haunt you? How much of your own night is spent running from your own actions?’

  Aelfrith thought hard for a moment, finally answering, replying quietly, ‘I lost my son. I lost my life. Two losses in one skirmish. My son did not make the journey to Legion. I did, however. So life, even in death, goes on. My life changed. I haven’t the time to deal with ghosts. You, my lord, seem different.’

  Christian returned the hard look, but with a smile. ‘I envy you, Aelfrith. Your death has indeed bought you a life. I’ve seen you in action. I would not wish to be your enemy.’

  Aelfrith remained silent. Cold.

  Christian held his gaze. ‘You asked me how many ghosts haunt me. The answer is two. And I can’t tell them apart, except that one sometimes seems older. They are two shadows from the same shade. One is like the light at dawn. The other closes in on me like night. One loves me. One will kill me.’

  ‘Which one is which?’ Peredur asked diplomatically. ‘Can you tell the difference?’

  There was desperation in the man’s face as he thought about the question. Then he took a deep breath. ‘The old one intends to kill me - that would seem the obvious answer. Old enemy. But the young? I’m not sure. I don’t know who she is. I cannot reckon with her thinking.’

  ‘May we see through the window?’ Aelfrith asked. He was standing at his full height, and though his hair was turning to the colour of new-forged iron he was not intimidated by the strange man who led him. ‘I would, my lord, like to see what you have seen.’

  ‘The ghosts?’

  Aelfrith shrugged. ‘Whatever you have seen. Ghosts or enemies. We follow you. We need to know the task.’

  Christian walked up to him, glancing at Peredur. ‘You think I’m weak?’

  Aelfrith didn’t flinch. ‘No. I think you’re haunted. Your own words, not mine.’

  ‘Am I weak? Peredur?’

  ‘Haunted,’ Peredur replied calmly, aware that Christian had not looked at him as he had addressed him. ‘We are all haunted.’

  ‘Will you stand by me when the killing time comes? That is all the truthful answer that I need. Will you both stand by me?’

  Aelfrith answered without a pause. ‘I will always stand by you.’

  Christian looked now at young Peredur. ‘And you?’

  Peredur slipped his sword from its scabbard and let it fall. With a look as cold as the ice-flows of the north he answered: ‘I am not the man you think I am. I do not follow. I do not serve. I fight, yes. Sword and shield. But the truth lies there on the stairs. Return the blade or use it.’

  For a moment Christian was uncertain. Then he reached down and picked up the weapon by its tip, passing it back to Peredur. ‘I don’t trust you completely, but I think I know you. You are not natural, not even here. You are, as you rightly say, more than the man I think you are. But what is that, I wonder?’

  ‘I am one of nine eagles,’ Peredur answered easily, and with a grim smile. ‘I am one of nine stags. I am one of nine men lost in the forest, guarding a child. I am one voice among nine. I am all of the life that went before me. I am nothing in this form but the father of a woman who was stolen from her life twice in her life, but came back. As you are lost, so am I. As you are raw, so am I. Nature has claimed us. The nature of that nature differs, but we are of the same family of wanderers.’

  ‘Nature. Yes,’ Christian said, with a frown. Peredur’s strange declamation had almost startled him. ‘I believe you’re right. Nothing will prevent you from protecting your own.’

  ‘Nothing will stop you from killing what you fear,’ Peredur replied.

  ‘Then should I kill you because I fear you?’

  ‘If you fear me, then kill me. In this life I live to protect. I am a shield man. What sort of man slashes his shield in half when running into battle?’

  Christian considered this as Aelfrith fidgeted. ‘Perhaps a man who is torn in two?’

  Peredur said sharply, ‘Perhaps a man torn between two worlds. A man changed. That is what you are, is it not? A changed man? You crossed the edge, inwards, and change happened. You left only a memory behind.’

  Christian was silent for a long while. Then he walked past Peredur, back down the steps. His passing whisper was the words, ‘Who are you, I wonder?’

  Peredur stepped up to the window and looked through it. What he saw was the spread of Legion, putting out the night fires, gathering their baggage, feeding and saddling what horses they had and moving the wagons and chariots into position to attach them to the beasts that would drag them as they advanced.

  But at its centre, and in the distance, a woman with short-cropped auburn hair was walking towards a lake, where an older woman, cloaked and hooded, arms crossed over her chest, was waiting for her.

  Peredur’s heart unexpectedly raced as he realised what was going to happen now that Christian had seen this scene.

  He turned to follow the others down the steps of the tower.

  Aelfrith’s sword blow narrowly missed him because he saw it coming. The older man had not expected, perhaps, that Peredur would spend so little time at the window. But the following blow with the flat of his blade was furious and skull-cracking. As Peredur tumbled down the stone steps, Aelfrith chased after him. Christian’s earlier words had been cautious, but his mistrust had been total; he trusted Aelfrith, however, perhaps alone among his retinue.

  Dazed and bruised, Peredur had no choice but to accept the deep, thrusting blow from the burly man, though he was lithe enough to twist so that it cut into his body’s edge. He immediately rolled into a ball and again fell and tumbled down the steps to the next landing.

  Aelfrith cried out. He had slipped on Peredur’s blood and came down in a similar fall. The two men embraced without meaning to, Aelfrith’s face startled and grazed, a mask of sudden fear.

  Peredur killed him instantly with a knife strike.

  It took him some time to disentangle his body from the other man’s heavy limbs.

  Outside, the courtyard was alive with activity, yet no one else had been in the tower to look at the strange scenes from the windows. Though they would mo
st likely have fled before helping. Peredur went to the nearest cart and asked for water, but was turned away by the rough-faced man who was loading it with the help of his family. The wound in Peredur’s side was hurting, but he was holding it closed. His fear was that he would collapse into a death dream. His head was singing but without melody or harmony, a screech of pain and noise; and his eyesight was beginning to blur. He was becoming confused.

  He stumbled over the great roots at the base of the fortress, falling heavily. The last thing he knew was that he was lying on an enormous face, not so much carved in the root as living in it. The eyes of this giant blinked awake, then closed again, just as Peredur’s eyes began to close and his hand ceased to grip the wound in his side.

  Through the haze of vision he was aware of four men running towards him, long cloaks flying. He had no strength left to defend himself. He went away into darkness.

  When the light came back, Peredur flinched at the face so close to his own. Then he recognised the dark-eyed, thin-bearded man who had been dancing with Yssobel. He knew the man was Greek, but couldn’t remember his name. Peredur’s body felt comfortable and the wound had been strapped. There was strength in his limbs again. Around him, noise and chaos.

  He was helped to his feet by this man and one of the others from the group.

  ‘Yssobel,’ the man said, and pointed deep into Legion. ‘Gui wenneth. Hurry!’

  Then he picked up his helmet, shield and leather pack and indicated that he would not be coming.

  A cavalry group in bright colours came galloping by. Horns were being sounded, drums beaten. Everything was getting set to move. In a place where all of time combined there wasn’t much time. Peredur nodded to the Greek and retraced his steps across the expanse of Legion to where he knew Guiwenneth had made her own small camp.

  The Lake

  Yssobel had come out of the earth dream with a cry and a struggle for air. She had seen her mother. She knew where to go.