Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle)

by Robert Holdstock

  He stared into the distance, where a brighter life filtered drowsily through the forest canopy.

  Who are you? he thought. How long will you take to get here? How will you get into Lavondyss?

  He was suddenly aware that Morthen was standing, watching him. She looked startled and nervous.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  She glanced along the river. ‘I heard something. I think someone’s coming.’

  ‘Quickly. Into the rocks …’

  The girl scrambled into hiding behind her father. There was silence for a few minutes, then a sudden disturbance in the trees and birds went swooping and screeching through the clearing. A moment later three riders came galloping through the water from the shadowy green down-river, kicking up a great spume of spray. A fourth rider emerged from the wood and rode down to the river’s edge, close to the spirit poles. The first three had uttered loud cries – war-cries, Wyn imagined – as they had swept into this part of the river’s course. Now they stopped, turning their horses where they stood, a nervous action as they stared at the totems with their ragged shrouds, then searched the land and the wood around. The leader seemed to stare directly at Wyn and the old man cowered lower in hiding.

  The riders were all of a type: tall, broad, dark-cloaked for winter travelling. Their beards were red and had been combed into a great spray of hair. They wore leather caps with loose cheek flaps and their faces were striped with black paint. The trappings on their huge, dark-maned horses were very simple; the saddle cloths were of a dull, broad check pattern.

  One of them rode savagely at a totem; a bronze sword flashed briefly; there was the sound of wood cracking and the top of the pole, with its raggy remnant, flew twenty yards across the water. The four of them laughed. The sword was sheathed. Reins were whipped on withers, flanks kicked by leather-booted legs, and the riders stormed off, away from this place of the dead, crashing through the shallows up-river until they were lost from sight.

  Slowly, cautiously, Wyn and Morthen returned to the water’s edge, looking thoughtfully after the wild troupe.

  ‘Were they the skogen?’ Morthen asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then who were they?’

  ‘It wouldn’t mean anything to you if I told you.’

  ‘Try me. I’ve understood strange things before …’

  ‘Later!’ Wyn hissed at her, suddenly almost urgent in his actions. ‘Come on. I want to see what they do when they reach the marshes.

  ‘Marshes? What marshes?’

  ‘Don’t keep asking questions. Come on. Let’s follow them …’

  Wyn found a turn of speed which delighted his daughter. Although she ran ahead of him, her father was never far behind. Sometimes she led along the tree-line where the bank was clear, at others along woodland tracks when the giant trees, which had slipped into the river, made passage along the edgewood difficult. Wyn used a staff to help support his body, but he was energized, excited, and he rebuked Morthen for her glances of astonishment at his agility.

  The sons of Kiridu … could they really have been Pryderi’s early bronze-age precursors? So much of the great Celtic saga of Pryderi was lost, swallowed by the later romance of Arthur … but that he was legendary in the remotest of times was unquestionable. Wyn had seen so many parts of the cycle of tales, yet never the man himself. He had been Kiridu, in the old language. He had had four sons … in that old legend …

  Could these riders have been those sons? Each and every one of them black-hearted, black-souled, doomed …?

  If so, then they would cross the lake ahead by boat! Wyn hastened his step, desperate to see this part of the myth-cycle which had so tantalized him during his years in the wood. The coming of the boatman would confirm the identity of the riders …

  After a day the river became dull with mud. The woodland thinned. Alder replaced oak, then huge willows and stands of silvery thorn. A different silence hovered over everything.

  ‘We’re close to the lake,’ Wyn said.

  ‘I’ve never been this far,’ Morthen said quietly.

  ‘I come here often,’ her father murmured. ‘The lake is one of the natural gathering grounds for life in the wildwood. It’s an impassable place; simplistically so, but memorably. There are a hundred stories associated with it, most of them very grim.’

  He looked down at the attentive girl. ‘Stories from the Boatman of the Dead to the burial barge of Arthur …’

  ‘After my time,’ the child said pointedly, and with a wit which ought to have been utterly incongruous.

  Wyn chuckled. ‘After your time,’ he agreed. ‘Come on! I’ll show you four thousand years of your future in one muddy, miserable, misty, reed-racked wasteland!’

  They waded through the increasingly dirty water; it felt heavy on their limbs.

  A few minutes later it was Wyn himself who led the way through the trees to the wide marsh.

  It was a desperate and lonely place, this. It was right to call it a wasteland, a wasteland of water, mud and mournful movement through the misty fringes of the lake. The far side of the marsh was lost in that heavy fog, though the tops of the bordering woodland were just visible. Tall rushes and dense stands of reed moved in the wind. The black shapes of water-birds darted and scurried in the thin, dirty water. Willows reached among them, their branches low, their roots sometimes forming bridges between islands of firmer ground.

  It stank of rot here. The sky was grey and hazy. The water of the central lake gleamed dully, lapping softly at the land, swallowing all sound.

  Crouching low they waded through the weedy shallows to a hard bank of earth. Morthen pointed out the tracks of horses, the broken reeds, the still-unsettled mud following the passing of the riders.

  ‘Where have they gone?’ she asked. Wyn shook his head. He rose from his crouch and carefully scanned the hazy willow wood and the dense stands of rushes. He tapped Morthen on the shoulder, calling her to rise and look. She saw the indistinct shape of a vast man-like creature walking out into the lake and slowly sinking into the water. A few ripples accompanied its descent, then all was silence. On the other side of the pool a dark back rose above the gleaming surface, thrashed, then was still. Two of the giant willows quivered with the movement.

  The riders were here somewhere. Wyn became nervous, worried that they might have heard him and the girl and even now be surrounding them. But all was quite silent, all still … save for the sudden appearance of a wading flock of herons, which stalked and stabbed their way towards Wyn’s hiding place, stepping delicately through the weed. The birds shrilled occasionally, one long beak raised to the sky whilst the others skimmed the water.

  Morthen, who still had her fish hooks strapped across her shoulders, began to make a barely audible Tuthanach bird-hunt chant; she fiddled with the hooks, probably assessing which would be the best to use if she were to make a running hunt through the rushes and strike at the leg of the slowest bird to rise from the water.

  Her eager anticipation was dashed. One of the herons suddenly screeched and began to struggle wildly, while the flock rose noisily above their doomed companion and wheeled away over the willows. Morthen gasped. Wyn watched fascinated.

  A hundred paces away two patches of rush rose from the water, waving wildly. The resolved into human figures, one male, one female. They had tied the tall water plants all around their bodies, from their waists up; below this they were naked. The rushes stretched half a man’s height above their heads. They were bound, probably with gut, around chest and crown, split to form vertical eyes gaps; the woman had tied back the rushes over her chest to allow her breasts more freedom.

  It was she who held the net, glancing uneasily in Wyn’s direction as she slowly wound it in. The man walked out towards the struggling bird and raised a stone club to despatch it.

  The blow never fell.

  As quickly as they had appeared the heron-hunters had disappeared sinking down into the water so that they were lost in the natural landscape
of the marsh.

  Between them and Wyn a horse suddenly struggled into view, its rider familiar to the old man. Beside it came a second, then a third. They struggled in the mud, the voices of the men raised in muffled irritation.

  The fourth rider emerged from the reeds almost where Wyn was crouching, but like his companions he was intent on staring at the far side of the lake, where the wood was lost in haze.

  ‘What are they looking for?’ Morthen hissed.

  ‘A fleet of black ships,’ Wyn answered in a whisper, ‘pulled by a gigantic man who walks on the surface of the water. It will be their way into the unknown region beyond the lake …’

  Again, Morthen asked, ‘Who are they?’ This time, Wyn, after the merest hesitation, said, ‘Indo-European raiders. Nomads. Their clan is called the Alentii. They are very savage, or rather were … two and a half thousand years before Christ … they raided the early farming settlements of eastern Europe before becoming absorbed into the earliest emerging Celtic groups.’

  Most of what he had said had been in English. Morthen looked grim, glum and annoyed. ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she confessed.

  He smiled, tapped her on the nose. ‘What do you expect? You’re a Neolithic savage. These people are sophisticated Bronze Age murderers. In fact …’ He rose a little, to peer at the nervous riders on their restless horses. ‘In fact, I think they’re the sons of Kiridu. They are seeking a way into the underworld to steal the body of the woman who guards the dark. To violate her. To bring up and control spirits from her soul.’

  ‘What will happen?’

  ‘I don’t know the full story. They will try to ride into the underworld, but they will be caught by a labyrinth which will form around them wherever they ride. I am uncertain as to the outcome. I don’t know if they will ever escape …’

  Morthen nodded as if she understood every word. She stared in fascination at the restless horsemen as they waited in the marsh, watching the misty waters.

  ‘Then that’s where they’re riding now …’ she said. ‘To the underworld. To Lavondyss …’

  Wyn-rajathuk couldn’t help laughing, although he kept the sound to a minimum. Morthen smiled uncertainly. ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Nothing,’ her father said. ‘Nothing is funny. You are quite right. Everything and everyone who passes up this river is seeking a way into Lavondyss. They say of that realm that it is the place where the spirit of the man is no longer tied to the seasons. Lavondyss is freedom. Lavondyss is the way home …’

  He was suddenly wistful. All he knew of Lavondyss he had learned from those mythagos with which he had been able to communicate. It was a place where time ran riot, perhaps where there was no time at all … and it was home. He felt this powerfully. To think of Lavondyss was to think of Oxford, and Anne, and a life which he had never fully forgotten. He should have tried to enter the heart-of-the-wood. He should never have succumbed to the frailty of his body, to his sense of age, to the wisdom that had told him to settle, to rest, to give up the quest.

  He was a voyager who had turned back. For most of his life he had watched the spirit of adventure pass him by, folk of all ages, families, clans, even armies … all of them moving from the crowded spaces of a human mind, through a time of wood and leaf litter, to a place where they could find freedom …

  He was about to whisper more to the girl when she grabbed his arm, her eyes wide with fright. She pointed across the lake.

  ‘A man! Walking on water!’

  The sons of Kiridu had seen the apparition also, and they became restless, kicking forward, deeper into the thick water at the edge of the lake. Wyn-rajathuk raised himself up to get a better look.

  The boatman was tall but he was no giant, and the illusion of his walking was because of the sinuous movement of his body, twisting from side to side as he used a pole to manoeuvre himself towards the side of the lake. He stood in a shallow coracle, its sides scarcely an inch above the level of the water. He was not so much dressed as armoured in an odd framework of lengths of wicker tied about his body and his legs and covered over with leaves, mistletoe and water lily. In several places the wicker had snapped and stuck out from his limbs like broken spines. Around his neck was slung the carcase of an otter.

  As he twisted and poled his way out of the haze and towards the waiting hunters, so, behind him, appeared the fleet of dark ships: five in all, high sided coracles, blackened, watertight, each large enough for two men.

  Wyn smiled. He could think of a later story that would very much romanticize this particular basic image. A ferryman ferrying coracles: very sensible. Everything was practical, save that the ferryman himself had become fantasized: dressed in willow branches, decked with lily (the water) mistletoe (for winter) and broad leaf (for summer).

  ‘Let me see …’ Morthen hissed, struggling to stand, but Wyn had felt a sudden fatherly concern, recognizing the menace in the movements of the sons of Kiridu as they dismounted and waded out to greet the boatman. He had the strongest of intuitions as to what would happen next and he forced his daughter down into hiding, despite her uncomfortably loud cries of protest.

  His feeling had been right.

  The ferryman was swiftly and savagely hacked down from his unsteady craft. He screamed three times, odd sounds, like the shrill cry of a bird. There was a flash of blooded bronze in the hazy light, then his body appeared floating into the reeds; the horses, disturbed by the smell of blood, shifted nervously through the shallows, panicking, protesting.

  The sons of Kiridu fetched their mounts and calmed them, then tethered them to the five coracles. They destroyed the boatman’s craft to make crude paddles, then began to cross the lake, quickly disappearing into the haze, seeking the place where the upstream flow of the river entered this wilderness of reed and mud.

  Soon everything was silent again, save for the occasional whinnying of one of the horses as it was dragged into deep water, its master unaware of the fact that by their act of senseless brutality the sons of Kiridu had set in motion the disastrous conclusion of their journey to the underworld.

  Wyn-rajathuk looked with different interest at the giant willows which grew at the water’s edge, each one reaching out across the marsh haze. The act of murder was a common one, he thought. The next time he came here he was sure there would be a new tree, growing from the mud where the boatman’s mutilated body was slowly being wound around by the roots of the forest.

  Sensing that it was safe, and that her father was shocked, Morthen slowly rose to her feet and peered at the empty lake. ‘Did they kill him?’ she asked. Wyn nodded grimly. He had seen all he wanted to see, all he needed to see. He took his daughter’s hand and led her back to firmer ground. But Morthen remained intrigued by the riders.

  ‘Why did you laugh when I asked you where they were going?’ she asked again, as they returned along the river, then followed a deeper track.

  ‘I wasn’t really laughing,’ Wyn said. ‘I was remembering the epic tales of my own time. It always seemed to be so easy to get into the underworld. You fought giant dogs or serpents, but mostly any convenient cave or well would do, you’d just ride right in.’

  He stopped for breath, sitting on the fallen, mossy trunk of an oak which stretched out across the river, caught by the branches on the opposite side. Morthen watched the flash and dart of silver finned fish.

  Wyn said, ‘But you can’t just ride into Lavondyss.’ He was talking more to himself, now, staring vaguely into the distance. Morthen half watched him, half watched the life in the river. ‘You have to find the true pathway. And each adventurer has a different path to find. The true way to the heart of the realm is through a much older forest than this forest …’ He stared up through the canopy to the bright, autumnal sky. ‘The question is … how do we get into that older forest? There was a time when the power was understood, when the path could be found. But even by the time of your own people, the Tuthanach, all that was left were the wooden symbols, the idea, the words, the sham r
ituals of people like me …’ He smiled at Morthen, who was twisting one of her plaits around her fingers and watching him through brown eyes that were intense with concern; perhaps she thought her father was distressed. Wyn said, ‘Shaman. That’s me. Sham. Rajathuk …’

  ‘Injathuk,’ she contributed, not understanding.

  ‘Indeed. Injathuk. Wizard. Warlock. Druid. Scientist. I’m known by many names over the centuries, but they all mean one thing: echo of a lost knowledge. Never guardian of the power. Even as scientist that was true …’ He stared away from the girl at the swirling force of nature, at the silent power of the forest. ‘Perhaps I’m wrong on that … perhaps science will find its own way into the first forest …’

  Morthen interrupted him, her hands raised, signalling that she was becoming frustrated with this diatribe in two languages, one of them occult. ‘If it’s so hard to get into Lavondyss, then why do these riders even try? If they can’t get into the place where the spirit soars away from the seasons, then why do they try?’

  This was a sophisticated question coming from a Neolithic child of eight years of age. Wyn paused to appreciate his daughter, pinching her cheek affectionately and smiling. ‘Because that is the way of legend, of myth.’

  ‘I don’t understand myth,’ she muttered grumpily.

  ‘Source,’ he corrected, even though he knew she was only being petulant. ‘This finding of the way is what lies at the core of legend. The oldest animals came to the land to spread out and give birth, but they first had to find the land. The rajathuk roamed the world during an endless night before it found the oldest bone, whose life force it could feed upon, and grow, and reach its arms to the sky so that injathuk could be born from its fingers and sing to the hidden Sun, and bring light.’