Mythago Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  On the dawn of the eleventh night, the bones of the strangers who guarded the gates rose and ran, screeching, into the boggy woods. There were eight of them, ghastly white, and still wearing the garments from the time of their sacrifice. The ghosts of these strangers fled in the form of black crows, and so the shrine was unguarded.

  Now, from the wolf stone came the great spirits of the wolves, huge shapes, grey and fierce, leaping through the fires and across the great ditch. They were followed by the horned beasts of old, the stags which ran on their hind legs. They too went through the smoke of the fires, and their cries were frightening to hear. They were dim shapes in the mist on that cold morning. They could not kill the Outsider, and they fled back to the ghost caves in the earth.

  Finally, the boar spirit squeezed from the pores of the stone and grunted, sniffing the morning air, lapping at the dew that had formed on the wild grass around the stone. The boar was twice the height of a man. Its tusks were as sharp as a chieftain’s dagger, and the spread of a full-grown man’s arms. It watched as the Outsider ran swiftly around the circle, spears and shields held so easily in his hands. Then it ran towards the north gate of the circle.

  In that dawn, in the mist, the Outsider cried out for the first time, and though he stood his ground, the spirit of the Urshacam terrified him. Using amethysts for eyes, he sent the head of the eldest son of Aubriagas back to the shrine, where the tribes were huddled in their hide tents, to tell them that all he required was their strongest spear, their sweetest ox, freshly slaughtered, their oldest clay flagon of wine, and their fairest daughter. Then he would go.

  All of these things were sent, but the daughter – fairer, it was thought, than the fabled Swithoran – returned, having been rejected by the Outsider as ugly. (She was not at all unhappy about this.) Others were sent, but though they were beautiful in all the various ways of women, all were rejected by the Outsider.

  At last the young Warrior-shaman Ebbrega gathered twigs and branches of oak, elder and hawthorn and fashioned the bones of a girl. He fleshed them with the rotten leaves and litter from the sties, the hard droppings of hare and sheep. All this he covered with scented flowers from the woodland glades, blue, pink and white, the colours of true beauty. He brought her to life with love, and when she sat before him, naked and cold, he dressed her in a fine white tunic, and braided her hair. When Aubriagas and the other elders saw her they could not speak. She was beautiful in a way they had never seen, and it stilled their tongues. When she cried, Ebbrega saw what he had done and tried to take her for his own, but the chieftain restrained him and the girl was taken. She was called Muarthan, which means loving one made from fear. She went to the Outsider and gave him an oak leaf, shaped from thin bronze. The Outsider lost his reason and loved her. What happened to them after does not concern the life of this people, except to say that Ebbrega never ceased to search for the child he had made, and searches still.

  Kushar finished the tale and opened her eyes. She smiled at me briefly, then shifted her body into a more comfortable position. Keeton looked glum, his chin resting on his knees, his gaze vacant and bored. As the girl stopped speaking he looked up, glanced at me and said, ‘All over?’

  ‘I’ve got to write it down,’ I said. I had managed to take notes only on the first third of the tale, becoming too absorbed in the unfolding images, too fascinated by what Kushar had been saying. Keeton noticed the excitement in my voice, and the girl cocked her head and looked at me, puzzled. She too had seen that her story had affected me strongly. Around us, the shamiga were drifting away from the torches. The evening was finished, for them. Understanding was just beginning for me, however, and I tried to keep Kushar with us.

  Christian was the Outsider, then. The stranger who is too strong to subdue, too alien, too powerful. The Outsider must have been an image of terror to very many communities. There was a difference between strangers and the Outsiders. Strangers, travellers from other communities, needed the assistance of the tribes. They could be helped, or sacrificed, according to whim. Indeed, the story that Kushar had just told had referred to the bones of the strangers who guarded the gates into the great circle, which was surely Avebury, in Wiltshire.

  But the Outsider was different. He was terrifying because he was unrecognizable, incomprehensible. He used unfamiliar weapons; he spoke a totally foreign tongue; his behaviour did not conform; his attitude to love and honour were very different from what was familiar. And it was that alien quality that made him destructive and without compassion in the eyes of the community. And Christian had indeed now become destructive and compassionless.

  He had taken Guiwenneth because that is what he had dedicated his life to achieving. He no longer loved her, was no longer strongly under the effect of her, but he had taken her. What had he said? ‘I care about the having of her. I have hunted too far, too long, to worry about the finer aspects of love.’

  The story that Kushar had told was fascinating, for there were so many ingredients I could recognize: the girl made from the wild, nature sent to subdue the unnatural; the symbol of the oak leaf, the talisman which I still wore; the creator of the girl reluctant to part with her; the Outsider himself terrified of one thing only, the spirit of the boar, Urshacam: the Urscumug! And his willingness to accept the tribute of cattle, wine and girl and return to his ‘own strange realm’, as Christian was now making for the very heart of Ryhope Wood.

  What had happened in the tale afterwards, I wondered, and perhaps I would never know. The girl, the life-speaker, seemed attuned only to the folk memories of her people; events, stories, passed down by word of mouth, changing, perhaps, with each telling, which is why they insisted on the strange rule of silence during the recounting, frightened of the truth slipping away because of the responses of the listeners.

  Clearly, much truth had already gone from the story. Heads that talked, girls made from wild flowers and dung … perhaps all that had happened was that a band of warriors from another culture had threatened the community at Avebury and had been appeased with cattle, wine and marriage to one of the daughters of a minor chief. But the myth of the Outsider was still terrifying, and the sheer anxiety of encompassing the unknown was a persistent and deep-rooted concern.

  ’I’m hunting uth guerig,’ I said, and Kushar shrugged.

  ‘Of course. It will be a long and difficult pursuit.’

  ‘How long ago did he kill the girl?’

  ‘Two days. But perhaps it was not the Outsider himself. His warriors guard his retreat through the wildwoods, to Lavondyss. Uth guerig himself may be a week or more ahead of you.’

  ‘What is Lavondyss?’

  ‘The realm beyond the fire. The place where the spirits of men are not tied to the seasons.’

  ‘Do the shamiga know of the boar-like beast? The Urscumug?’

  Kushar shivered, wrapping her thin arms around her body. ‘The beast is close. Two days ago it was heard in the stag glen, near to the broch.’

  Two days ago the Urscumug had been in the area! That almost certainly meant that Christian had been close by as well. Whatever he was doing, wherever he was going, he was not as far ahead of me as I’d thought.

  ‘The Urshacam,’ she went on, ‘was the first outsider. It walked the great valleys of ice; it watched the tall trees sprout from the barren ground; it guarded the woodlands against our people, and the people before us, and the people who came to the land after us. It is an ever-living beast. It draws nourishment from the earth and sun. It was once a man, and with others was sent to live in exile in the ice valleys of this land. Magic had changed them all to the appearance of beasts. Magic made them ever-living. Many of my people have died because the Urshacam and his kin were angry.’

  I stared at Kushar for a moment, amazed by what she was saying. The end of the Ice Age had been seven or eight thousand years before the time of her own people (which I took to be an early Bronze Age culture that had settled in Wessex). And yet she knew of the ice, and of the retreat of the
ice …. Was it possible that the stories could survive that long? Tales of the glaciers, and the new forests, and the advance of human societies northwards across the marshes and the frozen hills?

  The Urscumug. The first Outsider. What had my father written in his journal? I am anxious to find the primary image … suspect that the legend of the Urscumug was powerful enough to carry through all the Neolithic and on into the second millennium B.C., perhaps even later. Wynne-Jones thinks the Urscumug may pre-date even the Neolithic.

  The trouble with the shamiga was that their life-speaker could not spin tales to order. During my father’s contact with them, references to Urshacam had not occurred. But clearly the primary mythago, the first of the legendary characters that had so fascinated my father, came from the Ice Age itself. It had been created in the minds of the flint-workers and hunter-gatherers of that cold time, as they struggled to keep the forests back, following the retreating cold northwards, settling the fertile vales and dales that were so gradually exposed over the generations-long spring.

  Then, without another word, Kushar slipped away from me, and the two torches were extinguished. It was late, and the shamiga had all gone to their low huts, although a few of them had dragged hides to the fireside and were sleeping there. Keeton and I erected our tiny tent and crawled in.

  During the night an owl cried loudly, an irritating, haunting call. The river was an endless sound, breaking and splashing over the stepping stones which the shamiga guarded.

  In the morning they were gone. Their huts were deserted. A dog, or a jackal, had worried at the grave of the two youngsters. The fire still smouldered.

  ‘Where the hell are they?’ Keeton murmured, as we stood by the river and stretched, after splashing our faces. They had left us several strips of meat, carefully wrapped in thin linen. It was an odd and unexpected departure. This place seemed to be the community home, and I should have thought that some of them would have remained. The river was high; the stepping stones were below the surface. Keeton stared at them and said, ‘I think there are more stones than yesterday.’

  I followed his gaze. Was he right? With the river swollen by rains somewhere behind us, were there suddenly three times the number of stones than the day before?

  ‘Pure imagination,’ I said, shivering slightly. I shrugged on my pack.

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Keeton said as he followed me along the river shore, deeper into the woodland.

  Abandoned Places

  Two days after leaving the shamiga we found the ruined stone tower, the ‘broch’, the same structure that Keeton had photographed from his plane. It stood back from the river and was much overgrown. We hovered in the underbrush and stared across the clearing at the imposing grey walls, the window slits, the vine and creeper that were slowly smothering the building.

  Keeton said, ‘What do you think it is? A watchtower? A folly?’

  The tower had no top. Its doorway was square and lined with heavy blocks of stone. The lintel was intricately carved.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  We stepped towards the place and noticed at once how the ground was churned and trodden, the clear tracks of horses. There were signs of two fires. And most obvious of all, the deeper, broader marks of some large creature, obliterating the earlier tracks.

  ‘They were here!’ I said, my heart racing. At last I had a tangible sign of how close to Christian we were. He had been held up. He was two days or less ahead of me.

  Inside the broch the smell of ash was still strong, and here the marauding band had again set about the task of repair and reforging of weapons. Light shafted into the gloomy interior from the window slits; the hole where the roof had been was covered with foliage. I could see well enough, however, to notice, the corner place where Guiwenneth had been held with a cloak, perhaps, cast over the rotting straw that was still piled there. Two long, glistening strands of her hair were caught on the rough stone of this barbarian place; I unsnagged them and carefully wound them around my finger. I stared at them in the half-light for a long time, fighting back the sudden despair that threatened to overwhelm me.

  ‘Look at this!’ Keeton called suddenly, and I walked back to the low doorway. I stepped out through the tangle of briar and vine and saw that he had hacked away the plant life from the lintel, to expose the carving more clearly.

  It was a panoramic scene, of forest and fire. At each side of the lintel, trees were shown, all growing from a single, snake-like root that stretched across the stone. From the root dangled eight blind, human heads. The woodland was shown crowding towards a central fire. Standing in the middle of the fire was a naked human man, his form pecked out in detail, save for the face. The erect phallus was disproportionately large; the figure’s arms were held above the head, grasping a sword and a shield.

  ‘Hercules,’ ventured Keeton. ‘Like the chalk giant at Cerne Abbas. You know, that hillside figure.’

  It was as good a guess as any.

  My first thought about the ruined stone broch was that it had been constructed thousands of years ago and had been consumed by the woodland in much the same way as Oak Lodge was being engulfed. But we had come so far into this strange landscape, already many miles further from the edge than was physically possible, so how could the broch have been erected by human hand? There remained the possibility that as the forest expanded so the distortion of time within it expanded ….

  Keeton said the words that I knew to be true: ‘The whole building is a mythago. And yet it means nothing to me ….’

  The lost broch. The ruined place of stone, fascinating to the minds of men who lived below steep thatch, inside structures of wicker and mud. There could be no other explanation.

  And indeed, the broch marked the outskirts of an eerie and haunting landscape of such legendary, lost buildings.

  The forest felt no different, but as we followed animal paths and natural ridges through the bright undergrowth, so we could see the walls and gardens of these ruined, abandoned structures. We saw an ornately gabled house, its windows empty, its roof half-collapsed. There was a Tudor building of exquisite design, its walls grey-green with mossy growth, its timbers corroded and crumbling. In its garden, statues rose like white marble wraiths, faces peering at us from the tangle of ivy and rose, arms outstretched, fingers pointing.

  In one place the wood itself changed subtly, becoming darker, more pungent. The heavy predominance of deciduous trees altered dramatically. Now a sparsely foliaged pine-forest covered the descending slope of the land.

  The air felt rarefied, sharp with the odour of the trees. And we came at once upon a tall wooden house, its windows, shuttered, its tiled roof bright. A great wolf lay curled in the glade that surrounded it: a bare garden, not grassy but heavy with pine needles, and dry as a bone. The wolf smelled us and rose to its feet, raising its muzzle and emitting a haunting, terrifying cry.

  We retreated into the thin pinewoods and retraced our steps, away from this old Germanic location within the forest.

  Sometimes the deciduous woodland thinned and the undergrowth grew too dense for us to move through it, so that we had to skirt the impenetrable tangle, striving to keep our sense of direction. In such expansive thickets we saw corrupted thatch, wicker and daub walls, sometimes the heavy posts or stone pillars of cultures unrecognizable from these remains. We peered into one well-hidden glade and saw canvas-and-hide canopies, the remains of a fire, the piled bones of deer and sheep, and encampment in the dark forest – and from the sharp smell of ash on the air, a place still used.

  It was towards the end of that day, however, that we emerged from the wood and confronted the most astonishing and memorable of these mythagos. We had glimpsed it through the thinning trees: high towers, crenellated walls; a dark, brooding stone presence in the near distance.

  It was a castle out of the wildest dreams of faerie, a gloomy, overgrown fortress from the time of Knights, when chivalry had been more romantic than cruel. Twelfth century, I thought, or perhaps
a century earlier. It made no difference. This was the image of the stronghold from times after the sacking and abandonment of the great Keeps, when many of the castles had fallen into ruin, and some had become lost in the more remote forests of Europe. The land around it was grassy, well-grazed by a small flock of scrawny grey sheep. As we walked from the cover towards the stagnant waters of the moat, so these animals scattered, bleating angrily.

  The sun was low and we stepped into the shadow of the great walls, and began a slow tour of the castle. We kept away from the treacherous slope that bordered the moat. High, slitted windows had once given archers a wide view of sieging forces, and when we remembered this we moved back towards the scrub wood. But we neither saw nor heard the signs of any human presence inside the fort.

  We stopped and stared at the tallest of the watch towers. From such a prison maidens of myth like Rapunzel had let down their golden hair, a rope for chivalrous knights to climb.

  ‘A painful experience, no doubt,’ Keeton reflected, and we laughed and walked on.

  Back into the sun, and we came to the gate. The drawbridge was up, but looked rotten and decayed. Keeton wanted to look inside, but I felt a vague apprehension. It was then that I noticed the ropes, hanging from two of the crenellations on the wall. Keeton, simultaneously, saw the signs of a fire on the sheep-grazed bank. We looked around us and sure enough, the grassland was quite churned with hoof prints.

  It could only have been Christian. We were still following him. He had preceded us to this castle, and had scaled the walls to plunder the inside.

  Or had he?

  Floating face down in the moat was a human shape. I became aware of it by stages. It was naked. The dark hair and pale buttocks were greened with slime. A thin patch of pink about the middle of the back, like a pale red algal growth, informed me of the wound that had sent this Hawk to his doom.