Mythago Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘Trouble,’ he whispered, and I turned too, and felt a sudden shock as I saw the ring of angry-looking men around us. All but one – an older man in authority – had a bow drawn, the arrow pointed either at myself or Keeton. One of them was shaking, the bow trembling, the arrow wavering between my face and chest. Tears marked this man’s face in a great streak through the grey paint with which he was decorated.

  ‘He’s going to shoot,’ Keeton hissed, and before I could say, ‘I know,’ this manifestly distressed man had loosed the arrow. In the same instant the older man next to him had raised his staff, clipping the edge of the bow. The arrow was nothing but a sudden, shocking sound, passing between Keeton and myself and impacting with a tree, deeper in the woods.

  The ring remained, the arrows pointed. The distressed man stood, crestfallen, angry, his bow held limply by his side. His chief came forward, searching our eyes with his, aware of the stone-bladed spear I held. He smelled sweet, a strange phenomenon, sweet like apple, as if he had daubed his body with apple juice. His hair was braided five times, and painted with blue and red whorls.

  He looked between us at the bodies of the youngsters, then spoke to the men around him. Bows were lowered, arrows unnocked. He could see that they had been dead for days, but to check his point he ran a finger over the blade of my spear, sniggered, then checked my sword, which impressed him, and Keeton’s knives, which puzzled him.

  The two bodies were dragged out into the clear space by the river and bound with twine. Two litters were made, crude affairs, and the corpses reverently placed upon them. The band’s leader crouched above the girl, staring at her face. I heard him say, ‘Uth guerig … uth guerig …’

  The man who had been the girl’s father (or the boy’s, it was hard to tell) wept silently again.

  ‘Uth guerig,’ I murmured aloud, and the older man glanced up at me. He tugged the partridge feather from the girl’s right hand and crushed it in his own. ‘Uth guerig!’ he said angrily.

  So they knew of Christian. He was uth guerig, whatever that meant.

  Killer. Rapist. Man without compassion.

  Uth guerig! I dared not tell them that I was the brother of that murderous creature.

  The deer gave cause for some concern. After all, it belonged to us. The haunches and cadaver were brought close by, and the ring of men stood back, some of them smiling and indicating that we should take the meat. It took very little in the way of gesturing to indicate that the meat would be a gift from us to them. I had hardly smiled and shaken my head before six of them swooped upon the pile and slung the great joints over their shoulders, walking briskly along the river’s edge, towards their community.

  Life-Speaker

  Sixth night. We are with a people who guard river crossings, called the shamiga according to Steven, who remembered their name from his father’s account. A strangely touching burial for the two youngsters we found. Also unnervingly sexual. They were buried across the river, in the woods, among other graves, the earth piled high above the ground. Each was painted with white spirals, circles and crosses, the pattern on the girl different from that on the boy. They were laid in the same grave, straight out, arms crossed on chest. A piece of thin twine was tied to the tip of the boy’s member, and tugged around his neck to simulate erection. The girl’s passage was opened with a painted stone. Steven believes this is to make sure they are sexually active in the other world. A large mound of earth was raised over the grave.

  The shamiga are mythagos, a legendary group, a tribe out of fable. Odd to think of it. Odder than being with Guiwenneth. They are a legendary people who guard – and haunt, after death – the river crossings. They transform into stepping stones when the river floods, or so the legend goes. There are several fables associated with the shamiga, all lost in our own time, but Steven learned a fragment of one such tale, concerning a girl who stepped into the water, ducked down to assist the crossing of a Chieftain and was taken to help build the wall of a stone fort.

  The shamiga do not appear to specialize in happy endings. This became clear later when the ‘life-speaker’ came to us. A girl in her early teens, quite naked, painted green. Quite alarming. Something happened to Steven and he seemed to understand her perfectly.

  At dusk, after the burial, the shamiga feasted on our fresh kill of venison. A great fire was kindled, and a ring of torches placed around us, about twenty feet away. Around the fire gathered the shamiga, more menfolk than women, I noticed, with only four children, but all wearing brightly coloured tunics, or skirts, and waist-length cloaks. Their huts – away from the river, where the ground had been cleared – were crude affairs, square plan, with shallow thatch roofs, each building supported by a simple frame of hardwood. From the waste-tips and the remains of old buildings – indeed, from the graveyard itself – we could see that this community had been here for many generations.

  The venison, spit-roasted and basted with a herb and wild-cherry sauce, was delicious. Politeness required the use of twigs, sharpened and split into forks, with which to consume meat. Fingers were used to tear the meat from the carcass, however.

  It was still quite light when the feast finished. I discovered that the grieving man had been the father of the girl. The boy was inshan: from another place. A crude communication by sign language continued for some while. We were not suspected of being evil; reference to uth guerig were rudely shrugged away – it was not our business; questions about our own origins produced answers that puzzled the gathered adults, and after a while made them suspicious.

  And then a change came over our hosts, a buzz of anticipation, a great deal of understated excitement. Those among the gathered clan who did not watch Keeton and myself with a sort of amiable curiosity, glanced around, searching beyond the torches, watching the dusk, the woodland, the gentle river. Somewhere a bird shrilled unnaturally and there was a moment’s cry of excitement. The tribe’s elder, who was called Durium, leaned towards me and whispered, ‘Kushar!’

  She was among us before I realized it, passing among the shamiga, a dark, slim shape, silhouetted against the burning ring of torches. She touched each adult on the ears, eyes and mouth, and to some she gave a small, twisted twig of wood. These were held reverently by most, though two or three of the shamiga made little graves in the ground and buried the offerings at their feet.

  Kushar dropped to a crouch before Keeton and myself and examined us closely. She was daubed with green paint, though her eyes were ringed with thin circles of white and black ochre. Even her teeth were green. Her hair was long and dark, combed out very straight. Her breasts were mere buds, and her limbs thin. She had no body hair. The feeling I had was that she was only ten or twelve years old, but how hard it was to gauge!

  She spoke to us and we spoke back in our language. Her dark eyes, gleaming by torchlight, focused more upon me than upon Keeton, and it was to me that she gave the small twig. I kissed it, and she laughed briefly, then closed her small hand around mine, squeezing gently.

  Two torches were brought and placed on each side of her and she settled into a more comfortable kneeling position, facing me, then started to speak. The shamiga all turned to face us. The girl – was she called Kushar? Or was kushar a word for what she was? – closed her eyes and spoke in a slightly higher pitch than I thought was normal for her.

  The words flowed from her tongue, eloquent, sibilant, incomprehensible. Keeton glanced uncomfortably at me, and I shrugged. A minute or so passed and I whispered, ‘My father managed to understand somehow – ’

  I said no more than that because Durium glanced at me sharply, leaning towards me, his hand outstretched in an angry gesture that clearly indicated, ‘Be silent!’

  Kushar kept talking, her eyes still closed, unaware of the gesturing going on around her. I grew very conscious of the sounds of the river, the torches, the rustle of the woodland. So I almost jumped when the girl said, and repeated, ‘Uth guerig! Uth guerig!’

  Aloud I said, ‘Uth guerig! Tell me about
him!’

  The girl’s eyes opened. She stopped speaking. Her face looked shocked. Around me the rest of the shamiga were shocked as well. Then they became restless, upset, Durium loudly expressing his own irritation.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly, looking at him, then back at the girl.

  ... tells all stories with her eyes closed, so that the smiles or frowns of those who listen cannot effect a shape-change upon the characters within the story.

  The words, from my father’s letter to Wynne-Jones, were haunting fragments of guilt in my mind. I wondered if I had changed something at a crucial point, and the story would never be the same again.

  Kushar continued to stare at me, her lower lip trembling slightly. I thought tears welled up in her eyes for a second, but her suddenly moist gaze became clear again. Keeton remained dutifully silent, his hand resting against his pocket where he carried the pistol.

  ‘Now I know you,’ Kushar said, and for a moment I was too surprised to react.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her again.

  ‘So am I,’ she said. ‘But no harm has been done. The story has not changed. I did not recognize you.’

  ‘I’m not so sure I understand –’ I said. Keeton had been watching the two of us peculiarly. He said, ‘What don’t you understand?’

  ‘What she means …’

  He frowned. ‘You can understand her words?’

  I looked at him briefly. ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I don’t know the language.’

  The shamiga began to make a hissing sound, a certain sign that they wished silence, that they wanted the history to continue.

  To Keeton, the girl was still speaking the language of two thousand years before Christ. But I understood her, now. Somehow I had entered the awareness of this young life-speaker. Is that what my father had meant when he referred to a girl with ‘clear psychic talents’? And yet, the astonishing fact of our establishing communication stopped me thinking about what had really happened. I could not have known, then, what a devastating change had occurred in me, as I sat by the river and listened to the whispered voice of the past.

  ‘I am the speaker of the life of this people,’ she said, and closed her eyes again. ‘Listen without speaking. The life must not be changed.’

  ‘Tell me of uth guerig,’ I said.

  ‘The life of the Outsider has gone for the moment. I can tell only the life that I see. Listen!’

  And with that urgent statement I fell silent –

  Outsider! Christian was the Outsider!

  – and attended to the sequence of tales that the life-speaker recounted.

  The first tale I remember easily; others have faded from mind because they meant little, and were obscure. The final tale affected me strongly, for it concerned both Christian and Guiwenneth.

  This was Kushar’s first tale:

  On that far day, during the life of this people, the Chieftain, Parthorlas took the head of his brother, Diermadas, and ran back to his stone fort. The pursuit was fierce. Forty men with spears, forty men with swords, forty dogs the height of deer, but Parthorlas outran them, holding the head of his brother in the palm of his left hand.

  On that day the river had flooded and the shamiga were hunting, all save the girl Swithoran, whose lover was the son of Diermadas, known as Kimuth Hawkspeaker. The girl Swithoran stepped into the water and ducked her head, to aid the crossing of Parthorlas. She was a stone as smooth as any stepping stone, with her back so white and pure as it rose above the water. Parthorlas stepped upon her and jumped to the far bank, then reached back and plucked the stone from the river.

  It nestled in his right hand. His fort was stone built and there was a gap in the southern wall. And on that day Swithoran became a part of the fort, stuck in the hole to stop the winter winds.

  Kimuth Hawkspeaker summoned the clans of his tuad, which is to say of the lands he controlled, and made them swear allegiance to him, now that Diermadas was dead. This they did, after a month of bargaining. Then Kimuth Hawkspeaker led them and charged them to lay siege to the stone fort.

  This they did, for seven years.

  For the first year, Parthorlas alone shot arrows at the assembled host on the plain, below the fort. For the second year Parthorlas flung metal spears at the host. For the third year he fashioned knives from the wood of carts, and so kept the furious host at bay. In the fourth year he flung the cattle and wild pigs that he kept in the fort, keeping just enough to sustain him and his family. In the fifth year, with no weapons and little food and water, he flung his wife and daughters at the army on the plain, and this scattered them for more than six seasons. Then he flung his sons, but Hawkspeaker flung them back, and this frightened Parthorlas even more, for his sons were like broken-backed hens, and pecked for favours. In the seventh year Parthorlas began to fling the stones from the walls of his fort. Each stone was ten times the weight of a man, but Parthorlas flung them to the far horizon. In time he came to the last bits of the wall, where the winter draughts were blocked. He failed to recognize the smooth white stone from the river and flung it at the War Chief Kimuth Hawkspeaker himself, killing him.

  Swithoran was released from the stone-shape and wept for the dead chieftain. ‘A thousand men have died because of a hole in a wall,’ she said. ‘Now there is a hole in my breast. Shall we slaughter a thousand more because of that?’ The clan chiefs discussed the matter, then returned to the river, because it was the season when the big fish swam up from the sea. The place in the valley became known as Issaga ukirik, which means where the river girl stopped the war.

  As she spoke the history, the shamiga murmured and laughed, involved with every phrase, every image. I could see very little amusing in the story at all. Why did they laugh more loudly at the description of pursuit (eighty men and forty dogs) and of the stone fort than at the image of Parthorlas flinging his wife, daughters and sons? (And why, for that matter, did they allow themselves to laugh at all? Surely Kushar could hear that response!)

  Other histories followed. Keeton, listening only to the fluent sound of an alien language, looked glum, yet resigned to patience. The stories were inconsequential, and most of them I have now forgotten.

  Then, after an hour of speaking, and without pausing for breath, Kushar told a story about the Outsider, and I scribbled it down with pen and paper, searching for clues as I wrote, unaware that the story itself contained the seeds of the final conflict that was still so far away in time, and woodland.

  On that far day, during the life of this people, the Outsider came to the bare hill behind the stones that stood in a ring around the magic place called Veruambas. The Outsider thrust his spear into the earth, and squatted down beside it, watching the place of stones for many hours. The people gathered outside the great circle, and then came inside the ditch. The circle was four hundred paces across. The ditch around it had been sunk to five man heights. The stones were all animals, which had once been men, and each had a stone-talker, who whispered the prayers of the priests to them.

  The youngest of the three sons of the Chieftain Aubriagas was sent up the hill to study the Outsider. He came back, breathless and bleeding from a wound to his neck. The Outsider, he said, was like a beast, clad in leggings and jerkin of bear hide, with a great bear’s skull for a helmet, and boots made of ash wood and leather.

  The second youngest son of Aubriagas was sent up the hill. He returned, bruised about the face and shoulders. The Outsider, he said, carried forty spears and seven shields. About his belt hung the shrivelled heads of five great warriors, all of them chieftains, none of them with the eyes left in the skulls. Behind the hill, camped out of sight, he had an entourage of twenty warriors, each a champion, all of them frightened of their leader.

  Then the eldest of the brothers was sent to study the Outsider. He came back with his head held in his hands. The head spoke briefly before the Outsider on the hill rattled his heaviest shield.

  This is what the head said:

  �
��He is not of us, nor of our kin, nor of our race, nor of our land, nor of this season, nor of any season during which our tribe has lived. His words are not our words; his metal comes from deeper in the earth than the place of ghouls; his animals are beasts from the dark places; his words have the sound of a man dying, without meaning; his compassion cannot be seen; to him, love is something meaningless; to him, sorrow is laughter; to him, the great clans of our people are cattle, to be harvested and serviced. He is here to destroy us, for he destroys all that is strange to him. He is the violent wind of time, and we must stand or fall against him, because we can never be one tribe with him. He is the Outsider. The one who can kill him is still a long way away. He has eaten three hills, drunk four rivers, and slept for a year in a valley close to the brightest star. Now he needs a hundred women, and four hundred heads, and then he will leave these lands for his own strange realm.’

  The Outsider rattled his heaviest war-shield and the head of the eldest brother cried, casting forlorn glances at the one he loved. Then a wild dog was brought, and the head was tied to its back. It was sent to the Outsider, who pricked out the eyes and tied the skull to his belt.

  For ten days and nights the Outsider walked around the stone shrine, always out of reach of arrows. The ten best warriors were sent to speak to him and came back with their heads in their hands, weeping, to say goodbye to their wives and children. In this way, all the wild dogs were sent from the shrine, carrying the combat trophies of the alien.

  The wolf stones in the great circle were daubed with wolf blood and the speakers whispered the names of Gulgaroth and Olgarog, the great Wolf Gods from the time of the wildwoods.

  The deer stones were painted with the patterns of the stags and the speakers called for Munnos and Clumug, the stags who walk with the hearts of men.

  And on the great boar stone the carcass of a boar that had killed ten men was placed, and its heart blood smeared on the ground. The speaker for this stone, who was the oldest and wisest of the speakers, called for Urshacam to appear, and destroy the Outsider.