The Bone Forest

by Robert Holdstock

  Huxley capped his pen, leaned back and stretched, yawning fiercely. Outside, the late summer night was well advanced. He blotted the page of the journal, hesitated—tempted to turn back a few pages—then closed it.

  Returning to the sitting room he found Jennifer reading. She looked up at him solemnly, then forced a smile.

  “All finished?”

  “I think so.”

  She was thoughtful for a moment, then said gently, “Don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep.”

  “What promises?”

  “A story for Steven.”

  “I made him no promise …”

  Jennifer sighed angrily. “If you say so, George.”

  “I do say so.”

  But he softened his tone. Perhaps he had forgotten a promise to tell Steven a Roman story. Perhaps, in any event, he should have been gentler with the boy. Reaching into his pocket he drew out the wrist drum that Ash had left.

  “Look at this. I found it at the Horse Shrine. I’ll give it to Steve in the morning.”

  Jennifer took the drum, smiled, shook it and made it beat its staccato rhythm. She shivered. “It feels odd. It feels old.”

  Huxley agreed. “It is old.” And added with a laugh, “A better trophy than that last one, eh?”

  “Trophy?”

  “Yes. You remember … that raw and bloody bone in my study. You kicked it and called it a trophy …”

  “Raw and bloody bone?”

  She looked quite blank, not understanding him.

  Huxley stood facing her for a long while, his head reeling. Eventually she shrugged and returned to her book. He turned, left the room, walked stiffly back to his study and opened the journal at the page where Grey-green man had left his second message.

  The message was there all right.

  But with a moan of despair and confusion, Huxley placed his hand upon the page, upon the scrawled words, touched a finger-tip to the part of the paper where, just a few days ago, there had been a smear of blood, confusing and concealing part of Grey-green man’s script.

  And where now there was no blood. No blood at all.

  He sat for a long time, staring out through the open windows, to the garden and the wood beyond. At length he picked up the pen, turned to the end of the journal and started to write.

  It would seem that I am not quite home

  Confused about this.

  Maybe Wynne-Jones will have an answer

  Must return to Shrine again

  Everything feels right, but not right

  Not quite home

  Thorn

  for John Murry

  At sundown, when the masons and guild carpenters finished their work for the day and trudged wearily back to their village lodgings, Thomas Wyatt remained behind in the half-completed church and listened to the voice of the stone man, calling to him.

  The whispered sound was urgent, insistent: “Hurry! Hurry! I must be finished before the others. Hurry!”

  Thomas, hiding in the darkness below the gallery, felt sure that the ghostly cry could be heard for miles around. But the Watchman, John Tagworthy, was almost completely deaf, now, and the priest was too involved with his own holy rituals to be aware of the way his church was being stolen.

  Thomas could hear the priest. He was circling the new church twice, as he always did at sundown, a small, smoking censer in one hand, a book in the other. He walked from right to left. Demons, and the sprites of the old earth, flew before him, birds and bats in the darkening sky. The priest, like all the men who worked on the church—except for Thomas himself—was a stranger to the area. He had long hair and a dark, trimmed beard, an unusual look for a monk.

  He talked always about the supreme holiness of the place where his church was being built. He kept a close eye on the work of the craftsmen. He prayed to the north and the south, and constantly was to be seen kneeling at the very apex of the mound, as if exorcising the ancient spirits buried below.

  This was Dancing Hill. Before the stone church there had been a wooden church, and some said that Saint Peter himself had raised the first timbers. And hadn’t Joseph, bearing the Grail of Christ, rested on this very spot, and driven out the demons of the earth mound?

  But it was Dancing Hill. And sometimes it was referred to by its older name, Ynys Calidryv, isle of the old fires. There were other names, too, forgotten now.

  “Hurry!” called the stone man from his hidden niche. Thomas felt the cold walls vibrate with the voice of the spectre. He shivered as he felt the power of the earth returning to the carved ragstone pillars, to the neatly positioned blocks. Always at night.

  The Watchman’s fire crackled and flared in the lee of the south wall. The priest walked away down the hill to the village, stopping just once to stare back at the half-constructed shell of the first stone church in the area. Then he was gone.

  Thomas stepped from the darkness and stood, staring up through the empty roof to the clouds and the sky, and the gleaming light that was Jupiter. His heart was beating fast, but a great relief touched his limbs and his mind. And as always, he smiled, then closed his eyes for a moment. He thought of what he was doing. He thought of Beth, of what she would say if she knew his secret work; sweet Beth; with no children to comfort her she was now more alone than ever. But it would not be for much longer. The face was nearly finished …

  “Hurry!”

  A few more nights. A few more hours working in darkness, and all the Watchman’s best efforts to guard the church would have been in vain.

  The church would have been stolen. Thomas would have been the thief!

  He moved through the gloom, now, to where a wooden ladder lay against the side wall. He placed the ladder against the high gallery—the leper’s gallery—and climbed it. He drew the ladder up behind him and stepped across the debris of wood, stone and leather to the farthest, tightest corner of the place. Bare faces of the coarse ragstone watched the silent church. No mortar joined the stones. Their weight held them secure. They supported nothing but themselves.

  At Thomas’s muscular insistence, one of them moved, came away from the others.

  With twilight gone, but night not yet fully descended, there was enough grey light for him to see the face that was carved there. He stared at the leafy beard, the narrowed, slanting eyes, the wide, flaring nostrils. He saw how the cheeks would look, how the hair would become spiky, how he would include the white and red berries of witch-thorn upon the twigs that clustered around the face …

  Thomas stared at Thorn, and Thorn watched him by return, a cold smile on cold stone lips. Voices whispered in a sound realm that was neither in the church, nor in another world, but somewhere between the two, a shadowland of voice, movement and memory.

  “I must be finished before the others,” the stone man whispered.

  “You shall be,” said the mason, selecting chisel and hammer from his leather bag. “Be patient.”

  “I must be finished before the magic ones!” Thorn insisted, and Thomas sighed in irritation.

  “You shall be finished before the magic ones. No one has agreed upon the design of their faces, yet.”

  The “magic ones” were what Thomas called the Apostles. The twelve statues were temporarily in place above the altar, bodies completed but faces still smoothly blank.

  “To control them I must be here first,” Thorn said.

  “I’ve already opened your eyes. You can see how the other faces are incomplete.”

  “Open them better,” said Thorn.

  “Very well.”

  Thomas reached out to the stone face. He touched the lips, the nose, the eyes. He knew every prominence, every rill, every chisel-mark. The grains of the stone were like pebbles beneath his touch. He could feel the hard-stone intrusion below the right eye, where the rag would not chisel well. There was a hardness, too, in the crown of Thorns, a blemish in the soft rock that would have to be shaped carefully to avoid cracking the whole design. As his fingers ran across the thorn ma
n’s lips, cold, old breath tickled him, the woodland man breathing from his time in the long past. As Thomas touched the eyes he felt the eyeballs move, impatient to see better.

  I am in a wood grave, and a thousand years lie between us, Thorn had said. Hurry, hurry. Bring me back.

  In the deepening darkness, working by touch alone, Thomas chiseled the face, bringing back the life of the lost god. The sound of his work was a sequence of shrill notes, stone music in the still church. John Tagworthy, the Watchman, outside by his fire, would be unaware of them. He might see a tallow candle by its glow upon the clouds, he might smell a fart from the distant castle on a still summer’s night, but the noises of man and nature had long since ceased to bother his senses.

  “Thomas! Thomas Wyatt! Where in God’s Name are you?”

  The voice, hailing him from below, so shocked Thomas that he dropped his chisel, and in desperately trying to catch the tool he cut himself. He stayed silent for a long moment, cursing Jupiter and the sudden band of bright stars for their light. The church was a place of shadows against darkness. As he peered at the north arch he thought he could see a man’s shape, but it was only an unfinished timber. He reached for the heavy stone block that would cover the stone face, and as he did so the voice came again.

  “God take your gizzard, Thomas Wyatt. It’s Simon. Miller’s son Simon!”

  Thomas crept to the gallery’s edge and peered over. The movement drew attention to him. Simon’s pale features turned to look at him. “I heard you working. What are you working on?”

  “Nothing,” Thomas lied. “Practising my craft on good stone with good tools.”

  “Show me the face, Thomas,” said the younger man, and Thomas felt the blood drain from his head. How had he known? Simon was twenty years old, married for three years and still, like Thomas himself, childless. He was a freeman of course; he worked in his father’s mill, but spent a lot of his time in the fields, both his family’s strips and the land belonging to the Castle. His great ambition, though, was to be a Guildsman, and masonry was his aspiration.

  “What face?”

  “Send down the ladder,” Simon urged, and reluctantly Thomas let the wood scaffold down. The miller clambered up to the gallery, breathing hard. He smelled of garlic. He looked eagerly about in the gloom. “Show me the green man.”

  “Explain what you mean.”

  “Come on, Thomas! Everybody knows you’re shaping the Lord of Wood. I want to see him. I want to know how he looks.”

  Thomas could hardly speak. His heart alternately stopped and raced. Simon’s words were like stab wounds. Everybody knew! How could everybody know?

  Thorn had spoken to him and to him alone. He had sworn the mason to silence and secrecy. For thirty days Thomas Wyatt had risked not just a flogging, but almost certain hanging for blasphemy, risked his life for the secret realm. Everybody knew?

  “If everybody knows, why haven’t I been stopped?”

  “I don’t mean everybody,” Simon said, as he felt blindly along the cold walls for a sign of Thomas’s work. “I mean the village. It’s spoken in whispers. You’re a hero, Thomas. We know what you’re doing, and for whom. It’s exciting; it’s right. I’ve danced with them at the forest cross. I’ve carried the fire. I know how much power remains here. I may take God’s name in oath—but that’s safe to do. He has no power over me, or any of us. He doesn’t belong on Dancing Hill. Don’t worry, Thomas. We’re your friends … Ah!”

  Simon had found the loose stone. It was heavy and he grunted loudly as he took its weight, letting it down carefully to the floor. His breathing grew soft as he reached for the stone face. But Thomas could see how the young man drew back, fingers extended yet not touching the precious icon.

  “There’s magic in this, Thomas,” Simon said in awe.

  “There’s skill—working by night, working with fear—there’s skill enough, I’ll say that.”

  “There’s magic in the face,” Simon repeated. “It’s drawing power from the earth below. It’s tapping the Dancing Well. There’s water in the eyes, Thomas. The dampness of the old well. The face is brilliant.”

  He struggled with the covering stone and replaced it. “I wish it had been me. I wish the green man had chosen me. What an honour, Thomas. Truly.”

  Thomas Wyatt watched his friend in astonishment. Was this really Simon the miller’s son? Was this the young man who had carried the Cross every Resurrection Sunday for ten years? Simon Miller! I’ve danced with them at the forest cross.

  “Who have you danced with at the crossroads, Simon?”

  “You know,” Simon whispered. “It’s alive, Thomas. It’s all alive. It’s here, around us. It never went away. The Lord of Wood showed us …”

  “Thorn? Is that who you mean?”

  “Him!” Simon pointed towards the hidden niche. “He’s been here for years. He came the moment the monks decided to build the church. He came to save us, Thomas. And you’re helping. I envy you …”

  Simon climbed down the ladder. He was a furtive night shape, darting to the high arch where an oak door would soon be fitted, and out across the mud-churned hill, back round the forest, to where the village was a dark place, sleeping.

  Thomas followed him down, placing the ladder back against the wall. But on the open hill, almost in sight of the Watchman’s fire, he looked to the north, across the forest, to where the ridgeway was a high band of darkness against the pale grey glow of the clouds. Below the ridgeway a fire burned. He knew that he was looking at the forest cross, where the stone road of the Romans crossed the disused track between Woodhurst and Biddenden. He had played there as a child, despite being told never ever to follow the broken stone road.

  There was a clearing at the deserted crossroads, and years ago he, and Simon Miller’s elder brother Wat, had often found the cold remains of fire and feasts. Outlaws, of course, and the secret baggage trains of the Saxon Knights who journeyed the hidden forest trails. Any other reason for the use of the place would have been unthinkable. Why, there was even an old gibbet, where forest justice was seen to be done …

  With a shiver he remembered the time when he had come to the clearing and seen the swollen, greyish corpse of a man swinging from that blackened wood. Dark birds had been perched upon its shoulders. The face had had no eyes, no nose, no flesh at all, and the sight of the dead villain had stopped him from ever going back again.

  Now, a fire burned at the forest cross. A fire like the fire of thirty nights ago, when Thorn had sent the girl for him …

  He had woken to the sound of his name being called from outside. His wife, Beth, slept soundly on, turning slightly on the palliasse. It had been a warm night. He had tugged on his britches, and drawn a linen shirt over his shoulders. Stepping outside he had disturbed a hen, which clucked angrily and stalked to another nesting place.

  The girl was dressed in dark garments. Her head was covered by a shawl. She was young, though, and the hand that reached for his was soft and pale.

  “Who are you?” he said, drawing back. She had tugged at him. His reluctance to go with her was partly fear, partly concern that Beth would see him.

  “Iagus goroth! Fiatha! Fiatha!” Her words were strange to Thomas. They were like the hidden language, but were not of the same tongue.

  “Who are you?” he insisted, and the girl sighed, still holding his hand. At last she pointed to her bosom. Her eyes were bright beneath the covering of the shawl. Her hair was long and he sensed it to be red, like fire. “Anuth!” she said. She pointed distantly. “Thorn. You come with Thorn. With Anuth. Me. Come. Thomas. Thomas to Thorn. Fiatha!”

  She dragged at his hand and he began to run. The grip on his fingers relaxed. She ran ahead of him, skirts swirling, body hunched. He tripped in the darkness, but she seemed able to see every low-hanging branch and proud beechwood root on the track. They entered the wood. He concentrated on her fleeing shape, calling, occasionally, for her to slow down. Each time he went sprawling she came back, making c
licking sounds with her mouth, impatient, anxious. She helped him to his feet but immediately took off into the forest depths, heedless of risk to life and limb.

  All at once he heard voices, a rhythmic beating, the crackle of fire … and the gentle sound of running water. She had brought him to the river. It wound through the forest, and then across downland, towards the Avon.

  Through the trees he saw the fire. Anuth took his hand and pulled him, not to the bright glade, but towards the stream. As he walked he stared at the flames. Dark, human shapes passed before the fire. They seemed to be dancing. The heavy rhythm was like the striking of one bone against another. The voices were singing. The language was familiar to him, but incomprehensible.

  Anuth dragged him past the firelit glade. He came to the river, and she slipped away. Surprised, he turned, hissing her name; but she had vanished. He looked back at the water, where starlight, and the light of a quarter moon, made the surface seem alive. There was a thick-trunked thorn tree growing from the water’s edge. The thorn tree trembled and shifted in the evening wind.

  The thorn tree grew before the startled figure of Thomas Wyatt. It rose, it straightened, it stretched. Arms, legs, the gleam of moonlight on eyes and teeth.

  “Welcome, Thomas,” said the thorn tree.

  He took a step backward, frightened by the apparition.

  “Welcome where?”

  In front of him, Thorn laughed. The man’s voice rasped, like a child with consumption. “Look around you, Thomas. Tell me what you see.”

  “Darkness. Woodland. A river, stars. Night. Cold night.”

  “Take a breath, Thomas. What do you smell?”

  “That same night. The river. Leaves and dew. The fire, I can smell the fire. And autumn. All the smells of autumn.”

  “When did you last see and smell these things?”

  Thomas, confused by the strange midnight encounter, shivered in his clothing. “Last night. I’ve always seen and smelled them.” “Then welcome to a place you know well. Welcome to the always place. Welcome to an autumn night, something that this land has always known, and will always enjoy.”