From the corner of her eye she noticed the priest, in his shirtsleeves, standing at the open door to the church, watching her suspiciously. She waved to him, stepped away from the tree and walked along the massive, exposed root that pointed towards her own farm, and Ryhope Wood beyond.
She was almost certainly right. The life of the tree reached all the way to the old, dark forest. She could imagine the root as it probed across the mile or so of land to link with the edgewoods of the estate; perhaps it had always been there, the tenuous contact between a solitary adventurer into the brick and tarmac realm of the world and the moist and gloomy world of its birth.
A car pulled up by the roadside and sounded its horn twice, breaking Tallis’s contemplative mood. Mr Williams stepped out from the back of the car, on to the green. Tallis slapped a hand to her mouth, feeling at once very guilty and very embarrassed. He smiled at her briefly, then plodded over, buttoning up his jacket against the cool summer’s afternoon.
‘It’s just as well that I forgot,’ he said as he came up to her. There was an edge to his voice, Tallis thought.
‘You forgot?’ she said.
‘That we were supposed to meet.’
‘I forgot too. But at least we didn’t get soaked.’
A flash of irritation touched the man’s features. He seemed about to say something, but then changed his mind, smiled and said, ‘No. We didn’t get soaked, did we? Ah well.’ And brightening: ‘Did you enjoy the dancing?’
‘Not much.’
‘You seemed to be having a good time, being whirled around by those burly youngsters. I felt tired; I wanted to think about your strange song; so I went back to the Manor.’ He looked around at the green with its churned up turf and the scatter of litter. Then he looked at the tree, and at Tallis.
‘You’ve got a certain look in your eyes,’ he said, frowning. ‘One of those looks. Something’s up. Something has happened. Can you tell me about it?’
‘Old Forbidden Place,’ Tallis said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Old Forbidden Place,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know its true name yet. It’s a place in another world. My brother Harry is lost there, I’m certain of that. I’ve had glimpses of it. And someone – not Harry – has come from that forbidden place to the edge of the wood. Last night I worked out some more of the story, but I still don’t understand the whole thing. And I still don’t know where Harry fits in …’
Mr Williams smiled and shook his head. ‘I can’t understand a word of what you say,’ he said after a moment. ‘But I like the sound of what you say: Old Forbidden Place. Yes, it has a ring about it. It sounds mysterious. Unknown.’
‘It is. Very unknown.’
He leaned towards her and spoke quite softly. ‘Darest thou now O soul, walk out with me toward the unknown region. All is a blank before us, all waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.’
‘Yes,’ Tallis said, shivering. ‘Yes. I do.’
Mr Williams seemed taken aback for a moment. Then he chuckled. ‘It’s part of a poem. By Walt Whitman. Your strange name reminded me of it.’
‘Oh.’
‘Your place, your forbidden place … it must have existed long ago. A very long time go.’
‘Longer ago than memory,’ Tallis said. But you mustn’t say the name again. Not until we know its true name. I’ve already said it twice, you once.’
Mr Williams nodded amused agreement, then looked at the oak tree, the One Alone. ‘This is a fine old specimen. Three hundred years if it’s a day. Do you think it reaches right down into the earth? Even as far as your forbidden, secret place?’
Tallis said, ‘This is the One Alone. Its name has just come to me and I’ve realized what it is. It’s not a lonely tree at all. It’s part of the wood.’
‘Part of the wood? Which wood?’
‘Ryhope Wood,’ the girl said, and added, ‘where you were walking yesterday.’
‘That’s a mile or more away –’
‘But this tree is a part of it, and probably always has been. Its root tells you that …’
Mr Williams followed her fleeting gesture across the common to the road where the root could be seen to rise above the level of the turf. Tallis went on, ‘If I stand round here –’ she went round to the far side of the tree – ‘I’m outside the wood. But when I come round … like this … I’m coming into it. The edge of the wood is the farthest tree, no matter how far it is from the main forest. That’s how the bird spirits came to me, last night.’
‘Bird spirits?’ Mr Williams asked weakly.
‘Mythagos. They attacked me. I created the gate they came through. I don’t know if I created them or not. But they’re definitely mythagos.’
‘Mythagos?’
‘They attacked me. I thought the tree was my enemy, but trees can’t help the way they’re used and mythagos always come from the trees. The birds came to punish me for driving them off from Scathach. Like I told you yesterday. I made the field, where he lay wounded, into a magic place, a secret place. No birds could get into it except as spirits. Bird spirits. For some reason that has caused anger. They’re very angry with me.’
After a time of contemplative silence, the old man laughed. ‘This is a game, is it?’
‘No,’ Tallis said, amazed. ‘No. It’s not.’
Frowning: ‘Then you can really work magic?’
‘Simple magic. Simple enough to drive the birds off.’
‘Will you tell me more about it? About Old Forbidden Place?’
She raised a finger to her lips. ‘Don’t say the name again. It’s unlucky.’
‘But will you?’
‘I don’t know the whole story. I can only tell you part of it.’
‘That will do.’
Tallis thought hard. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. She looked up at the One Alone. ‘I’m still learning about it. Tomorrow I might know a little more.’
‘Tomorrow …’ Mr Williams repeated. He came to a decision, then, and returned to the car, speaking briefly with the driver. The car drove off. When he returned to Tallis he was smiling. ‘I’ve decided to stay. Your story is something that I would very much like to hear. I am about to begin final work on a piece of music and I need some inspiration. If I can’t find original songs –’ he beamed down at the fair-haired girl – ‘perhaps I will hear an original story.’
‘I know lots of stories,’ Tallis said. ‘Would you like to hear the whole story of Bird Spirit Land?’
The old man nodded thoughtfully. ‘But I’d rather hear about you, first. Tell me as we walk. And then we’ll find somewhere to have a cup of tea …’
A while later they were in Stretley Stones meadow, wading through the damp grass to the fallen stones. The sun was out, it was warm again. Tallis showed Mr Williams the ogham markings and explained what she believed them to say; she let him stand beneath the oak where Scathach had lain so helplessly; he closed his eyes and tried to imagine the scene.
When they sat on Scathach’s stone Tallis felt sad for a while and Mr Williams, seeing this, remained thoughtfully, respectfully quiet. When the sadness had passed Tallis told him the story. He sat rapt and silent throughout, and when she had finished he remained staring at her, his head slowly shaking.
‘That’s a good story.’
‘It’s a real story,’ Tallis said. ‘It happened here. It happened to me.’
‘What a dark and gloomy world you paint. Bird Spirit Land sounds like a frightening place; do you believe it really existed?’
‘It exists now,’ Tallis said. ‘I made it. Or at least, I saw it. This is it. We’re sitting in it. This meadow. Wherever Scathach is, it exists there too.’
‘In the “long ago”, perhaps? The long past.’
‘In the long past,’ Tallis agreed. ‘I was shown a vision of the place, but I interfered with what I saw. I opened the hollowing to Scathach’s world; I used my own mind to do that; but then I attacked the carrion birds, drove them off. T
hat’s why the bird spirits attacked me yesterday. They came to the edge of the wood to try and kill me, but I danced too fast for them …’
It wasn’t true. She shuddered as she caught herself in the lie. She had been helpless in their grip, thrown between them like a rag doll. For whatever reason, they had let her live, leaving her to stumble in the mud and reach for the antler … only to see it snatched away by the green girl, the spirit of the earth from the Shadow Dance.
She realized that her friend was speaking to her. He was saying, ‘Is this the only strange world that you’ve created? The only place of visions? You said something about Old Forbidden Place.’
‘Old Forbidden Place is everywhere,’ Tallis said quietly, staring at the oak tree ahead of her. ‘All the hollowings are just a part of it.’
‘Hollowings?’
‘Visions. More than visions … contacts. But I can’t make any sense of them, or of the forbidden place. Not until I know its true name.’
‘This business of names,’ Mr Williams said, ‘is slightly confusing. Who exactly knows its true name?’
‘People who have been there and come back. If they didn’t know its name they wouldn’t have been able to get back.’
‘You seem to know all the rules …’
Tallis shook her head. ‘I don’t, though. And I don’t know all the names, either.’
‘It sounds a very grim place indeed. Is it like the Underworld, do you think?’
‘I suppose it is. But a living world, not a world of the dead.’
‘Like Avalon?’
Tallis, perhaps to his surprise, turned wide eyes upon him. She seemed startled. Then she frowned as she whispered, ‘Yes … yes it is … that’s something like it. That name. It’s an old name. Avalon … something like Avalon …’
‘Avalin?’ Mr Williams ventured. ‘Ovilon? Uvalain …’
Tallis waved him silent. ‘I’ll hear it soon. I’m sure I will.’
‘Iviluna? Avonesse?’
‘Ssh!’ Tallis said, alarmed. Her head was full of echoing sounds, like a voice in a valley, shouting at her, half lost on the wind. The sounds came and went, a name, so close … so close …
But it drifted away again and she was left with the smell of damp air and the touch of heat on her cheeks as the sun began to burn fiercely from between the clouds.
Mr Williams watched the girl anxiously as the minutes passed and she remained quite still, as if in a daze, staring dreamily at him. She seemed to be listening to something a long way off. Indeed, there was a sudden movement in the hedge and when Mr Williams glanced there he realized that they were being watched. He caught a glimpse of a dark cowl, and the hint of white below it. Almost at once the figure withdrew into shadow, but Tallis had gone pale, her face almost rigid, almost old …
‘Are you all right?’
Tallis said, ‘A name is like a call. When you name something you call it. Now I begin to understand …’
‘What do you understand?’
Tallis’s whole demeanour had changed. She was shivering, despite the heat. Her wretchedly pale face became even gaunter and the fair hair that hung so lank around her shoulders seemed to shiver and glitter with the shaking of the girl’s body. Mr Williams felt a slight breeze around him and glanced back to where that enigmatic figure had been standing, just seconds ago.
A white face … a movement … then just shadow.
Tallis smiled at him suddenly, disarmingly. ‘The Bone Forest,’ she said. ‘Yes … of course … now I have it …’
‘Speak to me,’ Mr Williams urged, concerned for the girl’s well-being. ‘What’s going through your mind?’
‘A story,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve been thinking of it on and off for several days. Now it’s been told to me completely. Have you had enough stories yet?’
‘No. Not yet. The more the merrier.’
‘Then I’ll tell you the Tale of The Bone Forest.’
‘Another good title.’
‘It’s an old tale, but not as old as some, and not the oldest version of it, either.’
Reaching out to take her hand, Mr Williams said, ‘Someone told you this story?’
‘Yes.’
‘When.’
‘Just now. Just a moment ago. Do you want to hear it?’
Mr Williams felt frightened, he didn’t know why. He let Tallis’s hand drop and sat up straighter. ‘Yes please.’
She was strange, very tense. Her voice was the same, but the words seemed wrong for her. Although her eyes glittered as she spoke and her lips moved, and her tongue licked her lips, and she breathed between sentences … the old man had the distinct sensation that someone was speaking through the girl.
And yet …
It was a disturbing moment, but he had little time to think about it because Tallis had raised both of her hands for silence, had closed her eyes and re-opened them, exposing a watery, vacant gaze, focused in the middle of nowhere.
‘This is the story of The Bone Forest,’ she said softly. ‘When you summon good, you always summon evil …’
The Bone Forest
The young woman had not been born in the village, and so she was forced to make her camp outside its walls. She had arrived at the edge of the forest one spring day, and she was a very sorry sight indeed. Her skirts were long but ragged, as if stitched together from bits and pieces of the cloth that is used to dry the sweat off a horse. Her blouse was stained with the juice of berries. Her hair, which was very tangled, was so dirty that it took a sharp pair of eyes to catch the fine fire of its hidden colour. She was pretty, though, even if two of her teeth were missing. And she carried – apart from a cloth sack with her simple tent and utensils – two leather pouches.
There was a young man in the village who had been named Cuwyn, because he had once been hound-footed and fast on the hunt, but was now lame. He was the youngest of three and his brothers had fought in battle, died honourably, and been given burial beneath fine mounds of chalk and earth. He watched the young woman from the village wall and after a year he decided to go out and ask her three things. So he dressed in his hunting green, and strapped a paunching knife to his belt. He sharpened two spears and mended a net.
In the village he was laughed at. Cuwyn ‘fleetfoot’ was going on the hunt. A lame stag is living in the north, they told him; then laughed. A fish without fins has been seen swimming in the slow brook!
Cuwyn ignored them all. He was an outcast in his own village. He was the warrior who had not died and been buried with his brothers.
He recognized a fellow traveller.
So he polished his teeth with a piece of stripped hazel and went out to the woman’s camp, where she was prodding at a small fire. She looked very thin and very hungry.
‘I have three questions for you,’ he said to her.
‘Ask them,’ the woman said.
‘The first question is, what is your name?’
‘I have been here a year, ignored and abused, and no one has asked me my name. So make any name you like.’
‘I shall call you Ash, since I see that you have an ash twig in your right hand and in all likelihood it is to ash that you will return when you are dead.’
She smiled but said nothing.
He asked his second question. ‘What have you been eating for the year?’
‘My own heart,’ said Ash. ‘I came here to bring luck to you all, and you have left me out here with only lame wolves, stinking boars and carrion birds for company. Fortunately I have a big heart and it has kept me going.’
‘Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ said Cuwyn. ‘This is my third question. What have you got in those two sacks?’
Now Ash looked up at him and smiled. ‘Prophecy,’ she said. ‘I thought you would never ask.’
‘Prophecy, is it?’ the young man murmured, scratching at his cheek and thinking hard. ‘There is one thing in the way of prophecy which this village could benefit from …’
‘And what is that?’
&
nbsp; ‘A knowledge of the forest. Too many times we hunt without success. The wood is deep, dark and dense. You could be standing next to a brown bear and both of you miss the other.’
‘Are you a hunter then?’ Ash asked.
‘I am,’ lied Cuwyn, glancing away.
‘Then I can help you,’ said Ash. ‘But only you. In return for a small cut of the meat I shall make you into the Hunter himself. Your hunting will be wilder than the Devil’s. The beasts you bring home will feed whole armies.’
So Cuwyn sat down by the young woman’s fire and watched her strange way of prophecy.
In the first leather bag she had twigs from every tree that grew in the wood. She had gathered them over the years and there was not a tree in the land which was not in the bag in the form of a short, trimmed stick.
‘This is my forest,’ Ash said, as she held the twigs towards him.
‘Every forest is here, even from before the Ice, and until the next Ice, which a few women have seen by looking into the fire which melts copper. All the woods from every age, here, in my hand. If I break a twig, like this –’
And she broke the ash twig that she had earlier been holding –
‘– I have destroyed a forest in a far-off place and a far-off time. Can you hear the howling of the fire? The screaming of the men who run before its flames?’
‘No,’ said Cuwyn.
Ash smiled. ‘Because you have no true hearing.’
She rattled the second leather bag.
‘In here I have the bones of many beasts, small fragments that I have gathered on my journeys. Not everything is here. But Man is. And for food there are pigs, and hares and deer and horses. There are plumed birds and fat fish. More than enough to keep a sallow youth like you from going hungry.’
He looked at the shards of brown bone, which Ash had tipped into the palm of her hand.
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