A blast of cold wind made her wince. Her eyes stung. The unexpected brightness of snow made her blink. What was happening? What had happened to summer? The air was heavy with the smell of burning. Several figures walked across the enclosure; they were clad in dark clothes. They were moving from the entrance gate towards a strange-looking hut from which the smoke was billowing. The entrance was guarded by two enormous trees, their branches severed, their trunks sheer and thick. A high wooden fence surmounted the steep earth walls. Coloured rags fluttered from the points. One of the figures carried a pole with the enormous antlers of an elk strapped to the top. White rags fluttered from the blades.
The vision was brief, a fleeting glimpse of a world beyond her own. Then real-sight returned, and Simon was standing before her, a few yards away. It had grown even darker. The hands ran their old, cold fingers over the skin of her neck, then her cheek. The fingers smelled of earth. The nails were broken, grimy. When they touched her lips she didn’t flinch. She tasted salt.
The hands were removed. Her head filled with whispers. Trees creaked and groaned before a hard wind; horses whickered and struggled through snow. Riders shouted, leather straps whipped against taut hide. Harnessing jangled. Women shouted. Children wailed and were hushed. A drum beat a sharp, slow rhythm. She could hear the sound of pipes, imitating bird-song.
Slowly, Tallis turned; the sudden sounds in her mind faded again. One of the hooded women stood behind her, the dark robe stinking of sweat and woodland. The old hands, pale-fleshed and gaunt, hovered before her face, the fingers flexing slightly and occasionally touching her skin. The white mask regarded her expressionlessly through its slanted eyes. The unsmiling mouth seemed to have saddened slightly.
Tallis reached up and took the mask, lifting it gently away from the face beneath. Dark eyes, old eyes, watched her from deep folds of sagging flesh. The mouth smiled but the lips stayed pressed together. The broad nostrils widened as gentle breath was sucked from summer air. Wisps of white hair blew from beneath the cowl.
‘You’re the one who tells me the stories,’ Tallis whispered. ‘What do I call you?’
There was no response. The ancient gaze remained, studying the child’s face with great curiosity. Then the bony fingers plucked the mask from Tallis’s grip and the lips twitched again in the slightest of smiles.
Which faded almost immediately. The ground shook slightly. The old woman glanced to the west, alarmed. There was a sudden, frightened movement among the trees and Tallis saw White Mask’s two companions, heard their anxious cries.
The earth vibrated.
Tallis frowned and the frown deepened as White Mask stared at her, more in fear than friendship. The sparkling eyes widened slightly in their nests of wrinkles. Her right hand reached out and pushed Tallis gently on the shoulder.
‘Oolerinnen,’ said the woman, her voice an odd whisper.
‘Oolering?’ Tallis repeated.
‘Oolerinnen!’ White Mask said urgently and tapped Tallis’s head before pointing to the Keeton house on its far hill. Then she was running swiftly back into the concealing trees, scrambling up the earth bank and moving to the place where the field hedges led to Ryhope Wood.
When Simon spoke to her Tallis jumped with fright. She had not noticed the boy coming up to her, standing right by her. She had been lost in her own mind, an intense image, this time, of walking stiffly and carefully along the edge of a great cliff, or a feeling of terrible despair wrenching at her heart …
‘Who were they?’ Simon asked again. His face had lost all its character. It was round and pale, frightened.
‘My teachers,’ Tallis murmured. ‘But something has frightened them.’ She walked quickly to the low gap in the earth banks and stared at her house, now just a dark, angular shape on the skyline. ‘They said … they said I was hollowing … but how can I be? I don’t understand. What were they trying to say?’
Simon was unnerved. He had retrieved his stick and now carried it like a spear, raised above his shoulder. ‘I’m going home,’ he said. The sunset was an orange glow, streaked with black clouds. It reminded Tallis of fire, over beyond the wood, beyond the dark land.
‘Wait …’ she called and after a moment’s hesitation the boy came back.
‘I’m scared,’ he whispered. ‘Those people were gypsies.’
‘They weren’t gypsies. They were my friends.’
Simon glanced in the direction of the wooded slope. ‘Your friends?’
‘Really! And one of them told me a part of a story. I need to tell it to you, to settle it. To make it real …’
‘Tell me at your house.’
‘I want to tell you now. Here. In the tomb place.’
Again, Simon was puzzled. He looked around. ‘The tomb place? This is an old fort. You know it is. Brave warriors rode out from here, blades gleaming, shields rattling.’
‘Dead men were burned here,’ Tallis contradicted. ‘Bones smouldered. Now be quiet.
He had fought against his father and been banished to a place where there was no true stone. He was alone in the strange land except for the hunting. He hunted with weapons of bone and ash and polished obsidian. He rode wild horses. He ran with hounds that were as tall at the neck as a horse. His bone-tipped spears impaled salmon whose scales were fashioned from silver. To travel far, in this world of mad creation, he was carried in the talons of an owl.
His need to return to the place of his birth became overwhelming. But there was no way back for him, and though he rode north and south along the great gorge, and found caves and ancient tombs through which a strange wind blew, he could not escape the dream. His world lay out of reach.
He tied his white standard to the antlers of an elk and rode on the beast’s back, but when it reached the high mountains it shook him off.
He made a bark canoe and let the river take him, but he slept during the night and when he woke he was beached again, close to the steep track up to the castle gates.
He tried magic and entered a strange forest. Here he found the image of a woman carved in wood; in moonlight she came alive and he fell in love with her, and he lingered here and was lost again for many years.
But out of the night, out of the dream, his mother came to him. She took his hand and led him to the waters of the gorge. She placed him in her barge, where he lay with his head in a pillow made of her robes. She summoned the spirit of her father, which appeared in the form of an animal. She tricked the magic from him and launched the barge, which drifted with the current and this time crossed the river. His mother watched it go.
His journey home had begun at last.
‘Have you finished?’ Simon asked at length. He looked apprehensive. Tallis was aware of him, but her thoughts were elsewhere. She stared hard at the place where she had met the cowled women, where they had finally made physical contact with her.
Why had they suddenly been so frightened?
‘We should get back,’ she said distractedly. ‘There’s something happening … I’m not sure what exactly. But I’m frightened.’
Simon needed no second prompting. He was off and away. ‘I don’t want to end up on a roasting spit …’ he shouted dramatically.
Tallis was irritated by her cousin’s cowardice. As she ran after him, through the earthwork’s gate, she shouted, ‘You’re old enough to know the gypsy stories are just to stop us falling into ponds.’
‘That’s what I thought until those old crones followed us here,’ Simon argued. He was already at the bottom of the hill.
‘Simon. Wait! There’s something wrong –’
Half-way down the hill she stopped. There was movement on the darkening land, a shifting of earth features that was wrong. Behind her the trees shuddered. The hill seemed to tremble, to shiver. The wind, a warm summer breeze, began to swirl; it carried the scent of snow.
‘Simon! Come back …’
‘See you at the house!’
It was so dark. It was wrong. It had been twilight a few mo
ments before, now it was night, even though the sky to the west was still a broad strip of brilliant orange.
At the bottom of Barrow Hill she crouched down, aware that the whole world was trembling. The surface of Hunter’s Brook broke into violent ripples. The alders almost hissed as they shivered. Above her, night’s clouds formed a vortex, a great storm pattern centred over the earthworks.
She imagined White Mask tapping her head again … saying the word … oolerinnen … oolering … hollowing …
‘I’m hollowing,’ Tallis said aloud. ‘It’s happening through me. I’m making a gate. It’ll trap Simon. Simon!’
As she screamed, so she stood. Simon was a distant silhouette, still running. The earth around him writhed, snake-like. Something thrashed into the air, scattering dark matter as it moved. The boy’s shape vanished.
‘Simon!’
She started to run. With a great crack and an exhalation of foetid air, the earth before her opened and a stone slid into the world, rising into the night, scattering mud and turf. The dirt rained down. The stone screeched like an animal as it twisted upwards, twice her height, then three times. It began to lean …
Tallis backed away, stunned, astonished. The great monolith shuddered, then began to fall, smashing into tree and land, hitting with a primal sound that made the girl’s stomach knot with fear.
I can’t be doing this …
She crossed the violent stream. Ahead of her, where the field began to rise, a pillar of wood twisted into view, its gnarled trunk warped and wrenched by hidden forces. It cracked, like a tree broken in a storm; where the broken section fell to the ground it formed a clumsy arch and a brilliant winter light shone into the evening; a blast of snow curled through and stung Tallis’s skin.
A shape moved there, a man on horseback, twisting the mount around and around to keep it on the spot, to stop it surging through the gate. Light shone on polished helm, on the iron trappings of the bit and bridle. There was a flash of colour. Metal jangled.
Tallis veered to the right as she ran, avoiding the broken tree. Tree roots looped terrifyingly into the air, thrashed and whipped at her, formed loops and arches through which chill winds blew from hidden worlds. The sound of riders was loud; men cried out, calling to her.
‘I’m not ready!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t take me now! I’m not ready!’
Where was Simon? What had happened to him?
‘Tallis!’
The slow cry was loud, but in a voice she didn’t recognize. It almost taunted her. She stumbled away from the sound, tripping over squirming roots, screaming as they wrapped around her legs. She tugged and kicked, pulled at the earth to free herself …
The ground thundered. It opened, sending her reeling back as a great grey stone thrust up from the earth, and beside it a second, forming a weatherworn gate through which the eerie light of the Otherworld glowed.
She fought against the raging winter wind, head low, hands reaching out to force herself away from the freezing rock. All around her, monolithic stones and scarred trunks of wood were rising into the night world. The dead returning. The past coming back, to trap her, to trip her, to summon her to the forest.
She reached Windy Cave Meadow. She almost stumbled into a henge, not seeing the glitter of alien starlight in the space between the ortholiths until she was almost upon it. She twisted to one side, tripped over a thick root which was squirming from the earth, then picked herself up and reached the gate to her garden.
She couldn’t find the latch. She flung her body over the gate, pulling herself home, falling heavily on to the lawn on the other side.
An odd silence seemed to fall. She stood at the fence staring out across the tortured fields, seeing the black shapes of tree and stone against the fainter grey of the sky. A man called to her again. The way in which he shouted her name was curious, quite frightening. She looked to the sound and saw three human shapes, running towards the house.
For the third time her name was called. The men were coming up the hill from the brook, one leading several horses. Behind them four torches burned on the land and a white, man-like shape was moving in a strange, erratic way, as if dancing. Birds flew overhead. The sound of their wings told Tallis that they were circling. She watched them for a moment before another sound drew her attention to the woodsheds.
For a second she thought she was looking at a tree. Then she saw it was a man. As he stepped out of night’s shadow she could see that he wore long, thin twigs of thorn, stitched to a dark hood which covered half his face.
‘Thorn …’ Tallis whispered, appalled. ‘I thought you were my friend –’
She fled to the house, slamming shut the door and bolting it. She stood in the kitchen, watching the handle. When it was tentatively tried she screamed and went through into the sitting room. She closed the curtains just as a bird banged against the glass, its black body fluttering for a moment before it recovered its wits and sped back into the night.
The front door was open. She rammed it shut, bolted it, then noticed Simon’s stick on the hall floor. He had run well. He was safe.
On the landing she jumped up to the window and peered out towards the earthworks.
Fires still burned on the fields between the house and the wood of the mythagos. Shapes moved.
‘I’m not ready,’ she whispered. ‘Harry! … I’m not ready to go yet! I haven’t marked Broken Boy …’
White rag on the beam of the antler. The image from her vision was powerful. Her birth gown, a strip of white, tied to the broken tine of the stag. It was what she needed to do. First! Before going!
She crept back to her room.
Closing the door carefully behind her, she listened for a moment, then turned to the window intending to see who or what might have been in the garden.
A man was standing there and she screamed. At once the man moved across the room towards her. The strands of thorn bound to his hair rustled slightly. He raised a hand and held an object towards the terrified girl.
When he stopped in the middle of the room Tallis calmed down. By the faint light from outside she could see that the window behind him was open and that he was the figure from the garden.
He was holding Find Me Again Doll.
‘I buried that in a field,’ Tallis whispered.
His broad hand took hers, pressed the earth-spattered piece of wood into her fingers. He was not a tall man. His body had the smell of leaves about it. The mask on his face was made from soft skin, an animal’s dark-furred …
‘You’re Thorn,’ Tallis said softly. ‘I thought you were my friend.’
Thorn shook his head. His wide lips, visible below the flap of the mask, stretched into an odd smile. There was something familiar about him … Then he reached up and removed the thorny branches from the leather band tied around his head. ‘Dressed up to look like Thorn,’ he said softly. ‘But still a friend.’
His voice … it echoed in Tallis’s mind, a haunting sound … so familiar …
He hesitated, then added, ‘It’s a good defence against the carrion eaters.’
Tallis was startled. Not just the sound of his voice but the fact that he was speaking English. She had come to expect only alien sounds from the woodland creatures, the mythagos. This awkward but understandable speech was a surprise to her.
‘You speak English’, she said unnecessarily.
‘Of course. It’s my father’s language.’
Tallis frowned at that. ‘What language does your mother speak?’
Not-Thorn said, ‘The language of the Amborioscantii.’
Tallis swallowed hard. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Hardly surprising’, Not-Thorn said. ‘It hasn’t been spoken in this land for generations. The Amborioscantii are the shadows-in-the-stone people. They built a great spirit place of stone; the faces of the dead look out from each grey rock. My mother was the fabled daughter of their greatest leader. Her name was Elethandian. Stories about her probably still exist in your
world, but my father was unsure. Nevertheless her story is a terrible one, and has a terrible end. My father knew her for only a very short time, a few years, before the heartwood called to her again and she vanished. I have only the faintest of memories of her …’
‘That’s sad …’ Tallis whispered. Her eyes were well accustomed to the darkness, now, and she realized that this young man was the Stag Youth from the year before, after whom she had named Hunter’s Brook. Now, though, he was dressed more fully, a baggy shirt which might have been wool, and trousers that appeared to have been stitched together from ragged strips of leather and linen, an odd and ungainly apparel.
And yet his voice … it still murmured at her. She had heard it before. She knew this man from another place, and perhaps even now she knew where that place had been, but was unprepared to confront it …
‘The last time I saw you,’ she said, ‘you were naked. Nothing on but that mask and your boots.’
Stag Youth laughed. ‘I didn’t know you then. I had only been in the forbidden world for a few days. I was starving and that young deer saved my life.’
‘But why were you so bare?’
‘Why? Because the animal on my head, the mask, helps me think like the beast. The animal on my feet helps me stalk like the beast. The earth smeared on my body helps me hide against the land. It’s the only way to kill a deer.’
‘Are you hunting now?’ Tallis asked boldly. ‘Why are you wearing the mask?’
He reached up and removed it. In the faint light his green eyes gleamed. He seemed anxious as he watched the girl, saw her surprise, then a half-smile touched his lips.
‘You know me, then …’
Tallis was stunned. She was staring at the man, she realized, her eyes wide, almost frightened.
What could she say? What could she say? That only a few days before she had seen this man lying half-dead in a field, at the base of an oak tree? That she had sensed the passing of his life even as she had watched him?
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