Mythago Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘By the God Cernunnos!’ I repeated, and she laughed and began to run along the track. I chased her. She had listened to the way I blasphemed and adapted such blasphemy to the beliefs of her own age. Normally she would never have expressed surprise with such a religious oath. It would have been a reference to animal dung, or death.

  I caught her – and therefore she had intended me to catch her – and we wrestled on the warm grass, struggling and twisting until one of us gave in. Soft hair tickled my face as she leaned to kiss me.

  ‘So answer my question,’ I said.

  She looked irritated, but couldn’t escape my sudden bear hug. She looked resigned, then sighed. ‘Why do you ask me questions?’

  ‘Because I want answers. You fascinate me. You frighten me. I need to know.’

  ‘Why can’t you accept?’

  ‘Accept what?’

  ‘That I love you. That we’re together.’

  ‘Last night you said we wouldn’t be together always …’

  ‘I was sad!’

  ‘But you believe it’s true. I don’t,’ I added sternly, ‘but in case … just in case … anything did happen to you. Well. I want to know about you, all about you. You. Not the image figure that you represent …’

  She frowned.

  ‘Not the history of the mythago …’

  She frowned even more deeply. The word meant something to her, but the concept nothing.

  I tried again. ‘There have been Guiwenneths before; perhaps there will be Guiwenneths again. New versions of you. But it’s this one that I want to know about.’ I emphasized the word with a wiggle and a squeeze. She smiled.

  ‘What about you? I want to know about you too.’

  ‘Later,’ I said. ‘You first. What were your first memories? Tell me about your childhood.’

  As I suspected would happen, a shadow passed across her face, that brief frown that says the question has touched an area of blankness. And that blankness had been known, before, but never acknowledged.

  She sat up and straightened her shirt, shook her hair back, then leaned forward and began to pluck the dry grass from the ground, knotting each fibrous stem around her finger. ‘The first memory … ’ she said, then looked into the distance. The stag!’

  I remembered the discovered pages of my father’s diary, but tried to blot his own record of the story from my mind, concentrating totally upon Guiwenneth’s uncertain recollection.

  ‘He was so big. Such a broad back, so powerful. I was tied to him, leather knots on my wrists, holding me firm against the stag’s back. I called him Gwil. He called me Acorn. I lay between his great antlers. I can remember them so well. They were like the branches of trees, rising up above me, snapping and cracking at the real trees, scraping the bark and the leaves. He was running. I can still smell him, still feel the sweat on his broad back. His skin was so tough, and sharp. My legs were sore with rubbing. I was so young. I think I cried, and yelled at Gwil, “Not so fast!” But he ran through the forest, and I clung, on, and the leather ropes cut at my wrists. I can remember the baying of hounds. They were pursuing him through the wood. There was a horn, too, a huntsman’s horn. “Slower,” I cried to the stag, but he just shook his great head and told me to cling on tighter. “We have a long chase, little Acorn,” he said to me, and the smell of him choked me, and the sweat, and the hurt of his wild chase on my body. I remember the sunlight, among the trees. It was blinding. I kept trying to see the sky, but each time the sun came through it blinded me. The hounds came closer. There were so many of them. I could see men running through the forest. The horn was loud and harsh. I was crying. Birds seemed to hover over us, and when I looked up their wings were black against the sun. Suddenly he stopped. His breath was like a loud wind. His whole body was shaking. I remember crawling forward, tugging at the leather ropes, and seeing the high rock that blocked the way. He turned. His antlers were like black knives, and he lowered his head and cut and jabbed at the dogs that came for him. One of them was like a black demon. Its jaws gaped, all wet. Its teeth were huge. It lunged at my face, but Gwil caught him on the prong of one antler and shook him until his guts spilled. But then there was just the sudden wind-sound of an arrow. My poor Gwil. He fell and the dogs tore at his throat, but still he kept them from me. The arrow was longer than my body. It stuck out of his heaving flesh, and I can remember reaching to touch it, and the blood on it, and I couldn’t move the shaft, it was so hard, like a rock, like something growing from the stag. Men cut me loose and dragged me away and I clung to Gwil as he died, and the dogs worried at his entrails. He was still alive, and he looked at me and whispered something, like a forest breeze and then snorted once and was gone … ’ She turned to me. Touched me. Tears stained her cheeks, glistened in the bright day. ‘As you will go, everything will go, everything that I love … ’ I touched her hand, kissed her fingers.

  ‘I’Il lose you. I’ll lose you,’ she said sadly, and I couldn’t find the words to respond. My mind was too filled with images of that wild chase. ‘Everything I love is stolen from me.’

  We sat for a long time in silence. The children, with their wretchedly vociferous dog, chased back along the edge of the wood, and again saw us, and scampered, abashed and afraid, out of sight. Guiwenneth’s fingers were a nest of entwined grasses, and she laced small golden flowers into them, then wiggled her hand, like some strange harvest puppet. I touched her shoulder.

  ‘How old were you when this happened?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Very young. I can’t remember, it was several summers ago.’

  Several summers ago. I smiled as she said the words, thinking that only two summers ago she had not yet existed. How did the generic process work, I wondered, watching this beautiful, solid, soft and warm human creature. Did she form out of the leaf litter? Did wild animals carry sticks together and shape them into bones, and then, over the autumn, dying leaves fall and coat the bones in wildwood flesh? Was there a moment, in the wood, when something approximating to a human creature rose from the underbrush, and was shaped to perfection by the intensity of the human will, operating outside the woodland?

  Or was she just suddenly … there. One moment a wraith, the next a reality, the uncertain, dreamlike vision that suddenly clears and can be seen to be real.

  I remembered phrases from the journal: The Twigling is fading, more tenuous than the last time I encountered him … found traces of the dead Jack-in-the-Green, worried by animals, but showing an unusual pattern of decomposition … ghostly, running shape in the hogback, not a pre-mythago, the next phase perhaps?

  I reached for Guiwenneth, but she was stiff, rigid in my arms, disturbed by memories, disturbed by my insistence that she talk about something that was clearly painful to her.

  I am wood and rock, not flesh and bone.

  The words she had used several days before sent a thrill of shock through me as I remembered them.I am wood and rock. So she knew. She knew that she was not human. And yet she behaved as if she were. Perhaps she had spoken metaphorically; perhaps it was her life in the woods to which she had referred, as I might have said I am dust and ashes.

  Did she know? I longed to ask her, burned to see inside her head, to the silent glade where she loved and remembered.

  ‘What are little girls made of?’ I asked her and she looked round sharply, frowning, then smiling, puzzled by the question, half-amused as she realized, from my own smile, that there was a riddle-like answer.

  ‘Sweet acorns, crushed honeybees and the nectar of bluebells,’ she said.

  I grimaced with disgust. ‘How horrible.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Sugar and spices and all things … er … ’ How did it go? ‘... nicest.’

  She frowned. ‘You don’t like sweet acorns or honeybees? They’re nice.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. Not even grubby Celts would eat honeybees.’

  ‘What are little boys made of?’ she asked quickly, and answered with a giggle, ‘Cow dung a
nd questions.’

  ‘Slugs and snails, actually.’ She seemed duly satisfied. I added, ‘The occasional hindquarters of an immature hound.’

  ‘We have things like that. I remember Magidion telling me. He taught me a lot.’ She held up her hand for silence, while she thought. Then she said, ‘Eight calls for a battle. Nine calls for a fortune. Ten calls for a dead son. Eleven calls for sadness. Twelve calls at dusk for a new king. What am I?’

  ‘A cuckoo,’ I said, and Guiwenneth stared at me.

  ‘You knew!’

  Surprised, I said, ‘I guessed.’

  ‘You knew! Anyway, it’s the first cuckoo.’ She thought hard for a moment, and then said, ‘One white is luck for me. Two white is luck for you. Three white for a death. Four white, and a shoe, will bring love.’

  She stared at me, smiling.

  ‘Horse’s hooves,’ I said, and Guiwenneth slapped me hard on the leg. ‘You knew!’

  I laughed. ‘I’m just guessing.’

  ‘It’s the first strange horse you see at the end of winter,’ she said. ‘If it has four white hooves, then forge a shoe and you’ll see your loved one riding the same horse in the clouds.’

  ‘Tell me about the valley. And the white stone.’

  She stared at me, then frowned. She was suddenly very sad. ‘That is the place where my father lies.’

  ‘Where is it?’ I asked.

  ‘A long way from here. One day – ’ She looked away. What memories did she entertain now, I wondered? What sad recollections?

  ‘One day, what?’

  Quietly, she said, ‘One day I would like to go there. One day I would like to see the place where Magidion buried him.’

  ‘I would like to go with you,’ I said, and for a moment her moist gaze met mine, and then she smiled.

  And then she brightened. ‘A hole in a stone. An eye on a bone. A ring made of thorn. The sound of a forge. All of these things … ’ She hesitated, watching me.

  ‘Keep away ghosts?’ I suggested, and she tumbled on top of me with a cry of, ‘How do you know?’

  We walked slowly back to the house in the very late afternoon. Guiwenneth was slightly chilly. It was August 27th, if I remember, and sometimes the day would seem like autumn, and sometimes like summer. There had been a crispness in the air that morning, the first shivery portent of the new season; summer had flourished during the day, and now autumn again showed its shadow. The leaves at the very tips of the trees had begun to show signs of turning. For some reason I felt depressed, walking with my arm round the girl, feeling her windblown hair tickle my face, the touch of her right hand on my breast. My suddenly gloomy mood was not helped by the distant sound of a motorcycle.

  ‘Keeton!’ said Guiwenneth brightly, and led me at a trot the rest of the way, to the stand of thin trees that was the orchard. We wove through the copse, to the overgrown gate. We forced our way through the tangled undergrowth that swamped the fence around the cleared garden, much of which was in shadow, and darkly overhung by the branches of the oak that wound about the house.

  Keeton was standing at the back door, waving and holding up a flagon of the Mucklestone Field homebrew. ‘I’ve got something else,’ he called as Guiwenneth ran to him and kissed his cheek. ‘Hello, Steven. Why so glum?’

  ‘Change of season,’ I said. He looked bright and happy, his fair hair awry from the ride here, his face dirt-stained except around the eyes, where his goggles had been. He smelled of oil, and slightly of pigs.

  His extra surprise was half a side of spitting pig. It looked a pale and feeble cadaver compared to the grey and scrawny creatures that Guiwenneth speared in the deep runs of the wood. But the thought of a pork more succulent and less strong than the wild pigs I had become used to was immensely cheering.

  ‘A barbecue!’ Keeton announced. ‘Two Americans at the field showed me how. Outside. This evening. After I’ve washed. A barbecue for three, with ale, song, and party games.’ He looked suddenly a little concerned. ‘Not interrupting something, am I, old boy?’

  ‘Not at all. Old boy,’ I said. His Englishisms often sounded affected, and irritated me.

  ‘He’s fed up,’ advised Guiwenneth, and gave me an amused look.

  By the Good God Cernunnos, how glad I am, now, that Keeton gatecrashed that moment, those hours between us. Resentful though I was of his presence, when I was trying to get a little closer to Guin, I have never given greater thanks to that Celestial Watching-Being than I did later that night. Even though, in one way, I would be wishing that I were dead.

  The fire burned. Guiwenneth had built it up while Keeton had constructed the rough-and-ready spit. The pig was his payment for two days’ work on the farm attached to the airfield; his plane was out of service at the moment, and the farm work was welcome, as was his help. Well paid rebuilding work at Coventry and Birmingham had called away many of the farmhands from the counties of the Midlands.

  It takes a lot longer to spit-roast a pig than Keeton had realized. Darkness enveloped woodland and orchard, and we turned the lights on in the house so that the garden area, where we squatted and chatted around the sizzling meat and the brightly flaring wood fire, was bathed in a cosy glow. I attended to records, playing through the collection of dance-hall music that my parents had built up over the years. The battered old Master’s Voice gramophone kept running down, and under the influence of the beer that Keeton had purloined, the continual droning down of the voices became hysterically funny.

  At ten o’clock we poked the jacket potatoes out of the fire and ate them with butter and pickle and a thin slice of the blackened outer flesh of the piglet. Hunger appeased, Guiwenneth sang us a song in her own tongue, which Keeton was able to accompany, after a while, on his small harmonica. When I asked her to translate she just smiled, tapped my nose, and said, ‘Imagine!’

  ‘It was about you and me,’ I ventured. ‘Love, passion, need, long life and children.’

  She shook her head, and licked a finger that she’d just smeared along the remains of our precious butter ration.

  I said, ‘What, then? Happiness? Friendship?’

  ‘You incorrigible romantic,’ murmured Keeton, and was proved right, for Guiwenneth’s song had not really been about love at all, not as I had imagined it. She translated as best she could.

  ‘I am the daughter of the early hour of the morning. I am the huntress who by dawnlight … who by dawnlight … ’ She made frantic throwing motions.

  ‘Casts?’ suggested Keeton. Throws the net?’

  ‘Who by dawnlight throws the net into the glade of the woodcocks. I am the falcon who watches as the woodcocks rise and are caught in the net. I am the fish that … the fish that … ’ She made exaggerated side to side motions of her hips and shoulders.

  ‘Wiggles,’ I said.

  ‘Struggles,’ Keeton corrected.

  She went on, ‘I am the fish that struggles in the water, swimming towards the great grey rock that marks the deep pool. I am the daughter of the fisher who spears the fish. I am the shadow of the tall white stone where my father lies, the shadow that moves with the day towards the river where the fish swims, towards the forests where the glade of the woodcocks is blue with flowers. I am the rain that makes the hare run, sends the doe to the thicket, stops the fire in the middle of the round house. My enemies are thunder and the beasts of the earth who crawl by night, but I am not afraid. I am the heart of my father, and his father. Bright as iron, swift as arrow, strong as oak. I am the land.’

  These last words – ‘Bright as iron, swift as arrow, strong as oak. I am the land – she sang in her reedy voice, matching the words to the tune and the rhythm of the original. When she had finished she smiled and bowed, and Keeton applauded loudly, ‘Bravo.’

  I stared at her for a moment, puzzled. ‘Not about me at all, then,’ I said, and Guiwenneth laughed. ‘About nothing else but you,’ she said. ‘That’s why I sang it.’

  I had meant it as a joke, but now she had confused me. I didn’t un
derstand. Somehow, in some fashion, the wretched Keeton did. He winked at me. ‘Why don’t you check the grounds, the two of you. I’ll be all right here. Go on!’ He smiled.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I said, although I said it softly. But as I rose to my feet, Guiwenneth rose too, tugging down the vivid red cardigan and licking the remains of the butter and pork fat from her fingers before holding her sticky hand out to me.

  We walked to the garden’s edge, and kissed quickly in the darkness where the young oaks grew. There was stealthy movement in the woodland; foxes, perhaps, or wild dogs, drawn to the smell of the cooking meat. Keeton was an oddly crouched shape, silhouetted against the flame and flaring sparks of the fire.

  ‘He understands you more than I do,’ I said.

  ‘He sees both of us. You only see me. I like him. He’s a very gentle man. But he’s not my flintspear.’

  The wood seemed alive with movement. Even Guiwenneth was puzzled. ‘We should be careful of wolves and wild dogs,’ she said. ‘The meat …’

  ‘There can’t be wolves in the forest,’ I said, ‘surely. Boar I’ve seen, and you’ve told me of a wild bear …’

  ‘Not every creature comes to the edge so quickly. Wolves are pack animals. The pack may have been in the deep forest, in the wildwoods. They have taken a long time to get here. Perhaps.’

  I glanced into the darkness, and the night seemed to whisper ominously; shivering, I turned back to the garden, and reached for Guiwenneth. ‘Let’s go back and keep him company.’

  Even as I spoke, the dark shape of Keeton was rising to its feet. His voice was subdued, but urgent. ‘We’ve got company.’

  Through the trees that crowded about the garden fence, I could see the flicker of torchlight. The sound of men approaching was a sudden, loud intrusion in the wild night. I walked with Guiwenneth back to the fire, into the spill of light from the kitchen. Behind us, where we had stood, there too torches showed. They closed in upon the garden in a wide arc, and we waited, listening for some sign of their nature.