Lavondyss

by Robert Holdstock

  It surprised Tallis to see, as her eyesight penetrated the mask of leaf and wood, that this shaman was young, as young, perhaps, as Willow-jack and Jack-hazel. He carried a sharpened staff and five decaying, woody heads had been impaled upon it. He waved the staff and the dead branch-tusks of the several heads clattered.

  ‘It’s known as Ghost of the Tree,’ Wynne-Jones whispered. ‘A shamanistic function.’

  Tallis smiled again. ‘I’d noticed,’ she whispered back.

  ‘Skogen reflected this ancient form. Your mask. My totem …’

  ‘Everything is older than we think.’

  The Daurog group now crouched at a cautious and respectful distance from the fire. The elder among them opened his sack and spilled berries of many different kinds on to the ground. There were nuts, too, and acorns. He looked at Tallis. Tallis cut several strips from the sizzling joints of the wild pig and reached forward to toss them closer to the Daurog. Ghost of the Tree moved forward in an awkward crouching fashion, watching the humans suspiciously. He picked up a piece of the flesh, sniffed it and tossed it down. He pointed to two discarded bones and Scathach threw them over. The shaman broke the bones with his bare hands, and used the jagged edges to scratch at his bark. He passed one fragment to Oak, the elder.

  Tallis rose and walked over to the pile of nuts and berries. Everything was here, dogwood, holly, cherry, buckthorn, sloe and even strawberry. She selected from among them, knowing that they could eat very little of this forest feast.

  Trade having been done, they settled to take the meal, to eat, to indicate their good intentions. The Green Jacks were disturbed by the fire, but Wynne-Jones placed pieces of flint on their side of the flames. This symbolic gesture seemed to satisfy them.

  Darkness, then a bright moon. The fire glowed and Wynne-Jones kept it fed. He and the old Daurog remained awake, watching each other across the small space. At one point the fuller figured female – Holly-jack – came up to Oak-elder, crouched, staring at Tallis, who had been alerted from her drowse. She spoke to her leader in her woodland chatter. After a while she came over to Tallis and bent down to peer at the human. Tallis was conscious of an overpowering and putrid odour, of sap running in streams down the silvery branch-tusks, of young eyes, of young power. The female Daurog sniffed the air then whispered words. She came even closer and emitted a sound like laughter. She touched a finger to Tallis, then to herself, trying to communicate in some way.

  Tallis touched her own fingers to the sharp holly on the female’s belly and something fluttered in the wood-flesh, causing the mythago pain. The black fungal mass of her sex quivered, and odd sounds came from the Green Jack’s hollow mouth, like whistling gasps.

  And in her body, the struggling of wings …

  Holly-jack drew away, moonlight on evergreen causing her to shine among her fading friends.

  He recognized the mythago form (Wynne-Jones whispered to Tallis in the silence of the night) from stories he had heard about them. They were far older than the Tuthanach, probably engendered by the association with the first post-Ice Age forest of the Mesolithic period, ten thousand years or so before the birth of Christ. By Bronze Age times the ‘green man’ – Green Jack, or Hooded Robin, the medieval ‘wodehouse’ – had become a solitary forest figure, partially deified, reflected in and mingled with such elemental forms as Pan, and Dionysus, and vaguely remembered dryads. But to the Mesolithic hunter-nomads they formed a forest kingdom, a race of forest creatures, saviours, oracles, and tormentors all at the same time; they arose in the mythogenic unconscious both to explain nature’s hostility to the people’s actions, and to express the hope of survival against the unknown.

  All he knew of the early Daurog myth was the creation myth. He summed it up for Tallis:

  With the coming of the Sun a cave opened in the ice, as far down as the frozen earth. In the cave in the ice, lying on the frosted soil, were the bones of a man. The Sun began to warm the bones.

  The man had eaten a wolf before he died, all other animals having fled the winter. The bones of the wolf lay with the bones of the man.

  The wolf had eaten a bird before the man had hunted and killed it. The owl had been cold and slow and had been a poor meal for the wolf. The bones of the owl lay in the bones of the wolf in the bones of the man.

  The owl had eaten a vole. Its tiny bones lay there too.

  The vole had eaten seeds and nuts and because it sensed the long winter to come it had eaten a little of everything: acorns, hazels, haws, hips, sweet catkins, sour apples, sharp sloes, soft blackberries. The seeds of the forest lay among the bones of the vole and the owl and the wolf and the man.

  The Sun warmed the bones, but it was the seeds which grew, feeding on the marrow in all the bones, which had cracked with the frost. The life that grew was half tree, half man. It had the speed of the wolf. It had the cunning of the vole. Like the owl, it could lose itself in the forest.

  In spring its flesh was clothed in white flowers. In summer, oak leaves shivered on its body. In autumn, berries burst from its flesh. In winter it grew dark and fed on the sap in trees, or the blood of animals. Then spring again, and with the greening of the land the creature gave birth to birds before waiting in the deepest thicket for the call of the Men who were hunting and gathering from the forest. In spring, summer and autumn it grinned at them from the greenwood. Only in winter did it snap their necks to gorge upon their warm sap.

  Each year the painful birth of birds brought more seeds, more bones, more wolves into the forest. Soon there were many of the Daurog. They copied the form and ways of Man, but saw how Man was clearing the forest and saw how this destruction released elemental spirits from the earth which had once been frozen.

  So the Daurog spread out to mark the limit of the heart of the wood. No Man was allowed to enter into that heart and live. But outside the heart of the wood the Green Men brought berries and fertility in the form of birds to the villages and farms of the people.

  Only in winter did the wolf emerge to stalk the snow wastes and the bare forest for prey. The people called them Scarag.

  In this way, Man and Daurog lived in uneasy harmony for many generations, each keeping to their realm, each finding power in the other, each recognizing the other in themselves …

  There was more (Wynne-Jones went on, after a pause for breath and thought) but it was fragmentary.

  Tallis was concerned that these Green Jack had come to kill them. ‘We’re in the heartwoods, after all …’

  Wynne-Jones thought not. These Daurog were going north; they were themselves adventurers. And the presence of Holly-jack – evergreen woman among the slowly transforming Scarag – was familiar to him; there was a story-cycle about her, but he didn’t know the details. They might find out during the days to follow.

  During the night Tallis woke to the sound of wind in branches. Scathach was curled up asleep. She sat up abruptly, confused and still dizzy from slumber, and a hand reached out to silence her. Wynne-Jones was alert. He pointed into the faint moonlight on the far side of the glade and Tallis felt a moment’s shock as she saw what was happening there.

  Holly was astride the supine form of one of the younger males, it was hard to tell which. She was on her knees above him, back arched, body shaking, hands held to her head as if to block out pain. She rocked slightly. Moonshine on the holly leaves showed the way she twitched and jerked as the blackthorn spines probed deeper into the soft moss of her womb. It was she who made the sound. It was clearly pleasure.

  The male was silent, watching his mate with an almost curious indifference.

  A few moments later, Holly-jack flung herself on to her lover’s blackthorn chest. She stood, slowly turned, and where the spines had penetrated her she oozed bright sap. She watched Tallis, then touched hands to her mouth, running her fingers down the bifurcated branches of her tusks. And then she was gone, into the nightwoods, towards the river.

  A few minutes later there was a human scream; the night, for a while, wa
s filled with the sound of birds.

  Stunned by what she had seen, Tallis was silent for several minutes; then she turned to Wynne-Jones. ‘Are they mine? Are they mine? Have I created these creatures?’

  ‘I would think so,’ the old man said, but he was not sure. ‘They seem to recognize you. Something about you attracts them. Holly-jack at least. They seemed fascinated by you. Yes, I would think they have formed from a pre-mythago pattern in your own mind …’

  The copulated male was sleepy. (Tallis saw now that it was Willow-jack.) On his paunchy torso a spined snake curled and flexed as if in ecstasy, slowly shrinking.

  Ghost of the Tree appeared suddenly in the moon, holding his staff of heads. Tallis could not see clearly but he seemed to be pushing something on to the staff, working it round until, with a crack, it slid into position. Then he was quite still, staring at the humans. Watching him, Tallis soon could not see him. He had become a small tree. He was forest darkness, rustled by breeze. Only the slight flexing of his left hand gave him away, this green man, nearing his winter death.

  Disturbed by this strange and brutal event, Tallis found it hard to get to sleep again. She must have succeeded. She woke in the early dawn and peered around her blearily through the heavy mist that filled the wood. Everything was very still. The fire had died, though its smell mingled with the odour of the forest, the sharp scent of the undergrowth. She looked for the Daurog, but they had gone – or so she thought. There was a tight thicket of new, thorny growth in the clearing, a bird darting between the branches picking at the red and blue berries that hung from the twigs.

  The bird, a small creature, abruptly fled. The thicket quivered, then moved. It dissolved into six human forms, each taking on the attributes of head and arms and limbs.

  In the centre, Ghost of the Tree stood alone, his arms around his skull-staff, his head bowed.

  The Daurog moved about their business, eyeing Tallis with the same shivering caution as the evening before. Scathach stirred, sat up and rubbed his eyes, blinking at the dawn, scratching his beard. He shook Wynne-Jones who murmured in his sleep, then began to weep. But Tallis had no time for the old man and his sad, bad dreams of lost possessions, lost knowledge. She watched the Green Jack. Last night there had been six, then one had gone away … now there were six again. She recognized one of the females – Silver Birch – but there was a second female, now; and like the female of the night before, she too had holly on her breast and back.

  She wore the same red berries. Apart from being thinner, and less obviously female than Holly-jack, she was the same.

  Indeed, as the Daurog elder scooped nuts and berries and held them out to his family, Holly-jack came over to Tallis and stretched her branch-tusked mouth into the semblance of a smile. She rubbed a hand over the leafy belly, then plucked at the growth, tore it gently open, as if parting the folds of a shirt. Tallis felt slightly sick as a glistening space appeared in Holly-jack’s torso, with the gnarled shaft of a backbone clearly visible at the back; ribs like curves of polished mahogany gleamed. The hollow in her stomach was filled with scattered feathers. She took some out and let them drift away, still stretching the soft lips of her mouth with delight. The silvery tusks trembled.

  Holly-jack had shed her burden of birds, Tallis realized. In some way this had freed her. She had sent new life into the forest, and now she was young again, and hollow. It had not been her head which Ghost of the Tree had worked on to his skull-staff the night before. As Tallis focused her gaze on the young magic-man she could see that the newest skull was a blank-faced mask, crudely chipped out of a circle of rain-softened bark.

  She raised Skogen to her face and through it she saw Ghost of the Tree turn a quizzical and penetrating look upon her. In the damp dawn mist he radiated green light, tendrils of luminescence which reached from the points of his body into the canopy, and down to the earth. The soft light bathed him, poured from him; the trees seemed to suck it in, like water.

  * * *

  The Daurog prepared for their journey. They gathered up their few possessions and almost melted into the wood, close to the river. But now, Holly-jack and Silver Birch kept themselves in human view, and called and chattered as they ran, keeping pace with the horses of their newfound friends.

  Tallis rode with Wynne-Jones, who watched the antics of the Green Jacks with growing interest. They were certainly drawn to Tallis, he suggested to her. Something about her, some quality, some sign, had made them trust her. He could not see, nor think what that link might have been, beyond what was an evident fact to him: that they were mythagos created by Tallis, and were responding to the mind which had engendered them. They were not Harry’s creation: they were too recently generated to have been from him.

  Holly-jack – because of her evergreen skin – seemed set to be the one who would persist in winter as the human’s friend; she would be the oddest of primitive heroines. There was no ivy-jack in the Green Jack group. Holly and ivy, the green leaves of winter … the thought of it made Tallis sing the carol, and Wynne-Jones joined in, adding his cracking voice to the melancholy memory of Christmas festivity.

  As for the males: they were only days away from their final shedding. The transformation would be rapid. The sap in their bodies would dry, and with it the intelligence in their strange-shaped heads. They would become animals, ferocious, feral, fervent in their lust for the sap of life to sustain them through the cold.

  ‘We must have abandoned them by then,’ Wynne-Jones warned.

  ‘We’ll cross the marsh with them,’ Tallis agreed. ‘Then force a departure.’

  They reached the lake a few hours later. Tallis thought it was about the middle of the day. It was chill and overcast. She wrapped herself more tightly in her furs and hood and trod carefully with Scathach across the natural platform of reeds and rush. He had not been here before and he was alarmed by the vast expanse of water that now stretched ahead of him. His fur leggings became saturated as he paced around the edge.

  Tallis, too, was taken aback. The willows had crowded closer to the shore, a swamp of them; their branches formed a vault. Their thick trunks leaned heavily towards the middle of the lake. There were so many more than when she had been here with Morthen.

  The Daurog began to whitter and make shrill noises. They were splashing through shallow water, between massive, brooding willow trunks. Tallis and Scathach followed them. The source of their excitement was a broken barge, shaped like a small longship. Whatever had been on its prow was now gone, sheared off when the sleek vessel had been driven among the trees. It was shallow draughted, tapering at prow and stern. The mast had come down, but rags of the canvas sheets remained. They were white, decorated with a red emblem which Scathach thought might have been a bear. It was too small for a Viking longship, not sufficiently decorated for the ship of a king.

  Or so Tallis thought at first.

  The hull was holed in several places and the vessel was awash. But below the rags of canvas – which Scathach deftly cut and rolled – were garments, belts and brooches. Some of the clothing was black. Capes and cowls, and a dress with traces of gold filigree that had been woven along its edges. Tallis rolled these too. All clothing could prove useful.

  She found bronze cloak pins, clasps, bead amulets and hair-combs. There were cut locks of hair, too: tight, black curls, some of them from a beard.

  ‘Three women and one man,’ Wynne-Jones decided, as he sifted through the artefacts. ‘And there’s blood on the hull, do you see? The man was dying.’

  Tallis stared back into the wildwood, puzzled as to the fate of this craft’s enigmatic passengers.

  The Daurog pushed the boat upright. The two males climbed aboard and worked on the leaks in the hull, using bundles of rush, which the females gathered. Ghost of the Tree and Oak-elder crouched on the swollen roots of a willow, watching their repair, occasionally singing.

  Wynne-Jones had been afraid of staying too long in the company of these changing spirits of summer. His anx
iety could now cease. Though the elder, oak leaves bristling as he faced Tallis, invited them to share the vessel to cross the wide lake, she shook her head. The boat would never have borne the weight of the three of them, plus the horses. Indeed, as the Daurog clambered aboard so further splits appeared in the decaying planks of the hull. The vessel wobbled, Holly-jack chittered and watched Tallis curiously, a girl again now that the haunting of wings had gone from her – for a while.

  Ghost of the Tree rattled his skull-staff and the loose branch tusks of the dead clattered their challenge of the lake. One of the males used a length of cut hazel to pole the craft out of the willow wood and into clear water. Holly-jack waved, then pointed ahead of them to the north. Mist, distance and the lake claimed the green men. Tallis wondered if they were aware of the fact that they were moving further into winter …

  Now she created the hollowing, the threshold to the north. She wore the Hollower to do it. Scathach held the horses. Swimmer of Lakes was quite calm, but the raiders’ mounts, perhaps still missing their masters, were restless and nervous, pulling against him, pawing the rushes and the dirty water below them. Wynne-Jones crouched behind Tallis, fascinatedly watching the way space changed before her, gasping as the first vortex of darkness announced the coming of the threshold into a new geistzone.

  Her masks made a circle around her. Water rose through the eyes and mouths. She had placed Morndun – the passing of a ghost into the unknown region – at the front, aware that she wished to travel and that in the realm she was the ghost, as was Wynne-Jones, and a part of Scathach. The masks spoke to her with the voice of the past. She held each one before her, staring at the patterns and the shape. She felt each one unlock her mind. As she knelt there, water soaking into her furs, it seemed to her that the masks were singing to her. As the threshold came closer, Falkenna soared above her –

  I will give you wings to ascend the castle walls

  – Silvering struggled in a shallow pool –