Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle)

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘I came from my mother’s belly,’ Morthen said.

  ‘Yes. You did. But your mother … all of her generation of the clan … came from the wood, generated by the fire in the head of the man like me, the man who passed by this river years ago, and who stopped for a while … and slept. And made a dream.’

  He could see that Morthen was still having difficulty with the concept despite the fact that he had repeatedly educated her in the nature of the mythago. But if she were fully mythago herself she would not even have been able to talk to him like this.

  Wyn-rajathuk rose unsteadily to his feet and plucked a yellow feather from the ruff of his cloak. Morthen stood too. She picked up the portion of fish in its wrapping as if sensing what he would say. And she looked sad when he spoke, but accepted his words.

  ‘You must go to the water lodge and take shelter there, with the women. It is high time you did so, but I have another reason for sending you away. The skogen is thinking very hard about the mortuary house – that’s why the changes in the land are affecting it – and it is dangerous for you to be too close to me. If the skogen is who I think it is, he will be very aware of your spirit. I don’t want you to change, but there is wood in your flesh and he can influence the wood.’

  ‘Is it my half-brother?’ Morthen asked. ‘Is it Scathach coming home?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. My son is journeying back. And I have a strong feeling that he is very angry …’

  He placed the yellow feather at the top of the staff and used a length of animal gut to secure it. ‘This may well be the last feather on the staff. When you become Morthen-injathuk please take that feather to mark the first of your own years. Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise,’ the girl said and stared down at the fur-wrapped package in her hands.

  The skogen was close. Very close. It would arrive in the land at any moment.

  When Wyn-rajathuk inspected the totem trees on the mortuary hill he found them to be black with rot, even Shadow-of-an-unseen-forest, which had recently sprouted new growth. It was dead, now.

  All of this had two messages for the man who had – despite his intellect – become effective in the way of the shaman: firstly, that the source of the contact, which had so enlivened Shadow-of-an-unseen-forest, was now so close that the communication was unnecessary, and the visual signs of its approach had ceased. Secondly, that there was a new magic in the land. Tig’s magic. The magic of the rajathuk was fading, in the manner of fable, not of history.

  A new system of symbology, of harnessing the unconscious power of certain individuals in the society of the land … a new magic was emerging from the ancient mind-stratum that was the Tuthanach.

  All through history, Wyn knew, such sudden, explosive changes in belief and understanding must have occurred: a conception of ego; self-imaging; an understanding of nature; conception of afterlife; an understanding of conception itself. And all of these things, simple evolutions of thought, began with the children, the new generation: symbolized in one child: the prodigy, the gifted child, the holy child.

  Tig was such a creature. Through him – Tig never-touch-woman, never-touch-earth– through this odd, violent child, a whole culture would be born, and a new concept of the afterlife would become imprinted on two thousand years of human life.

  Tig would organize the construction of great earthen tombs; he would interpret the random symbols of the middle Stone Age and initiate their formation into an accepted and comprehensible system of stone and wood carving. He would, by so doing, be responding simply to a sudden alteration in the relationship between the human conscious and its unconscious counterpart. But in Ireland and Western Europe of the fourth millennium B.C., it would be the underworld which spoke, and its voice would be manifold, and a more orderly system of nature worship would come into being, fashioned by a considerable degree of foresight.

  Tig would begin all this.

  He had never existed, of course, not as a real human child. He was myth. He was the interpretation, belonging to a later age, of how the new system of belief and practice had been born. Tig’s life, his aggressive, ghost-eating existence, was due solely to the birth from imagination of a population eager to explain their origins.

  But Tig lived as powerfully as any child. Because he lived in all humankind.

  He was formed from archetype.

  He was power.

  And now he was more powerful than Wyn-rajathuk because he had performed according to legend: he had confronted the guardian of the old bone lodge and threatened to eat his head. The shaman would flee from the land. Tig would pursue him and kill him, and then return and summon the forces of the earth. There would be a death by burial for all among the clan, each and every man, woman and child sinking into an earth grave and arising renewed. Only Tig would remain unburied; he would remember the stories of the clan. He would become their memory. This was why he sucked the bones of the dead. These stories would be placed, renewed also, into the reborn people of the Tuthanach, and they would build the first great tombs, and for the first time communicate with their ancestors.

  When all of this was done, the young man called Tig would be impaled upon a pointed stone and a carrion bird would eat his eyes, his tongue and his heart, nesting upon him until his ghost, too, fled the flesh.

  Still alive, he would walk away from the people and live on, eyeless, speechless, heartless, ghostless, to remind them of their betrayal.

  And even this was not the earliest form of the myth …

  So far as Wyn-rajathuk was concerned, however, the head on his shoulders was one piece of good eating that he fully intended to carry into safety. But he could not do this until the skogen had come … Because the skogen was his son, and it had been ten long years since he had seen the boy.

  If Tig was close to controlling the world of the Tuthanach, for the moment at least he had his mouth full with the mortuary house.

  Yes, Wyn thought. Yes, there is time. I can afford to wait here for a few days more.

  Morthen will take care of me.

  The decision made, the next steps were simple. He walked to the settlement of the Tuthanach, entered the gate and stood, watching the chaos that crawled, clucked, ran, hewed, washed, stoked, thatched and screamed. His presence at the gate caused a certain quiet to descend upon this ordinary life: the chickens scattered; the whelps yapped and were ordered quiet. Morthen was playing with a girl of her own age. She stared at her father, but caught his eye and made no overt sign of affection or concern.

  Wyn-rajathuk drove his feather staff into the ground, worked it left and right so that it burrowed into the earth. Old-woman-who-sang-to-the-river came out of the long-house, on the arm of her son, the oldest man in the settlement and a man as grey and lined as Wyn himself, despite there being twenty years difference in their age. The other women came behind, and Jykijar – First-hog-of-summer – with his boar’s-tusk staff and his frightening look of the hunter; he was bored, waiting for the time when his hunting magic could again be demonstrated.

  Old-woman-who-sang-to-the-river came up to Wyn and placed a hand on the shaman’s arm. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘You no longer need me.’

  ‘But who will protect the mortuary house? Who will chant to the sun? Who will challenge the moon? Who will help me sing to the river?’

  ‘Listen to the voice of the young man,’ Wyn said. ‘He will not touch woman. He will not touch earth …’

  ‘Tig?’

  ‘Tig. He has come among you. He is bringing a new voice to your people.’

  ‘We are your people too.’

  ‘No longer,’ Wyn said. ‘I came from outside. I must return to the outside.’

  The old woman backed away, touching her ears, the sign of great respect. The other Tuthanach imitated her, even First-hog-of-summer.

  Wyn-rajathuk unslung his cloak of feathers and hung it on the spirit staff. The wind caught the ruff, the yellow feathers bristling as if with unease.

 
He tore off his crudely-woven tunic. He kicked off his shoes. Quite naked now, he backed away from the stockade, from the community, from the ever-present eyes of the ten family totems; from his life.

  Stripped of his power, an outsider, a man alone, alone in a world which functioned according to dream, he went back to the river, to the place where the dead said goodbye to the water before beginning their long spirit walk to Lavondyss. To this place where he so often danced while Old-woman-who-sang-to-the-river made the elementals spin and scurry with her strange chanting.

  Here he sat, without food, without drinking, without sleeping … for five days.

  He made a staff from a length of broken alder. He made a shoulder cloak from leaves. He washed in the water every day, excreted when he felt the need, baptized himself. He never drank.

  When he was empty and dizzy with loss, he began to feel how close the skogen was.

  He sang to the coming force. He sang to his son. He danced in circles when the moon could see him. He remembered all the calling rituals; he kept them alive in this dead place, alive despite the new magic of the boy. He was the last of the ghosts, the last bone that would contain power. One day, too, even Morthen’s skeleton would be consumed by the new shaman.

  But not his. Not Wyn’s. Not ever. His ghost tasted of a dead place, the place called England. It would make no sense to the boy, Tig. It would interfere with his power …

  Wyn-rajathuk danced. He sang.

  On the fifth evening the sudden flight of birds from the canopy stopped him in his slow dance and brought him eagerly to the far side of the river, searching among the trees for the source of the furtive movement his keen ears could discern. Someone or something moved in the treeline. He picked up his alder staff, turned a slow circle, scanning the whole dusklit clearing, then returned to the location of the disturbance.

  He walked towards the darkness with trepidation, with excitement. There was most certainly a figure standing there, tall, clad in furs, watching him …

  He banged the base of his river-dancing-staff against a rock. ‘Come on out. I know who you are. And it hasn’t been that long that you can’t recognize me …’

  The undergrowth quivered. The figure moved. It stepped into the light of the clearing and watched him cautiously. Wyn-rajathuk felt his legs go weak, but he stayed where he was, stayed strong.

  It was not Scathach who stood before him, but a woman. She was tall, her hair long and flaxen, wild. Her eyes, wide-spaced and dark, watched him with an intensity which was alarming. Her face was very lovely, made remarkable by the warmth and the pain that it communicated to the man who stood before her, silent. It was marred, too, with an ugliness which Wyn-rajathuk had come to associate with all mythagos: an old scar, raised and white, ran down the line of her left jaw. She was a commanding and breath-taking apparition; literally, the stink that came from her was part woman and part the smell of horse: she had been riding hard for many weeks. The furs in which she was clothed were full of sweat, full of earth, the oils of the animal not leached from the skin, now rotting. She was no hunter, then.

  She carried a bundle of wolfskin under her left arm, and over her shoulder had a group of masks, tied with twine; they were bark masks, very old, rotting. Their dead faces clattered as she moved, empty eyes, empty mouths reminding Wyn of the heads he had seen carved in stone on his long journey to this, his place of peace.

  He knew at once what she was. The features of the two masks he could see were familiar to him. The same faces watched the forest from dead trees on the mortuary hill.

  Abruptly, this apparition spoke. ‘Are you Wynne-Jones?’ it asked, and the man rocked back, astonished to hear his secret name after so long. The name sounded alien. It was from another life, another world.

  ‘I am Wyn-rajathuk,’ he whispered, teetering on his feet, dizzy with shock and hunger. Where was his son? He had been so certain that this arrival would be his son: the skogen … searching for him.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ the woman said. She was suddenly deathly white, very tired, the fire fading from her eyes as if she was suddenly at peace herself. ‘I’m trapped in the wood. I’ve been here for too many years. Thank God I’ve found you …’

  ‘I don’t …’ Wyn stuttered, realizing that he was losing control of his body, too weak to fight it. ‘I don’t understand …’

  He felt his legs begin to buckle. He had been so certain that his boy was coming home. Who was this woman? What was she carrying? How could she know of him? How had she learned of the masks?

  He saw the sudden startled look in her eyes. He heard footsteps on the rock across the river. He heard the grunt of effort. He turned.

  Tig was staggering, then straightening up. It was a fleeting motion, fleetingly caught. Then the stone hammer which he had flung at his father struck Wyn full in the face, sending him hurtling back, his consciousness draining in the moment of pain and loss …

  The strange woman cried angrily.

  Tig shouted in triumph.

  Water splashed violently as the boy raced to his kill.

  Wyn tried to sit but his body would not move. He could smell his own blood, taste it; it began to fill his eyes. There was a summer’s warmth on his face, spreading. The canopy above him began to circle, a wild dance, a death dance.

  Tig was astride him. Twilight gleamed on white bone and the knife cut savagely into yielding flesh. The pain was sudden, then there was no pain. The boy sawed frantically at the living head. His elfin eyes said it all: ‘I want to eat you. I want to suck out your strange dreams …’

  A moment later he was yelping, a whipped dog. He was dragged to his feet. The woman held him firmly, gripping the wrist that held the bone knife. And a gentler pair of hands than the boy’s cradled Wyn’s head; fingers pinched at the deep cut. ‘I need a needle. Anything. A fish bone. Anything …’

  The voice was one he knew. The man who held him bent to him and whispered, ‘It has been a long hunt. You are a wily and elusive animal. But I have you now …’

  Wyn-rajathuk went into his dreams in peace, no longer afraid. The last he heard was a single word, a word which filled him with joy.

  ‘Father …’

  [THE SILVERING]

  The Sudden Flight of Birds

  Wide eyes, in a sharp, angry face, watched from between the bars of the makeshift stockade; the boy’s skin gleamed yellow with the light from the fire in the enclosure. His fingers curled around the wood. His teeth sparkled, his lips drawn back in a determined gesture of challenge.

  I shall escape. I will eat your bones.

  Tallis came close, unafraid. Tig made no move but his slanted eyes narrowed slightly, small points of brilliance following her approach. When the woman crouched down and raised the first of her masks, Tig laughed, spat, then shook the bars of his prison with surprising strength.

  He faced the Hollower. He stared contemptuously at Gaberlungi and laughed at the Silvering. But he became subdued when Tallis placed Falkenna across her features so that she watched the boy with the cold eyes and sharp face of a bird.

  ‘Why did you try to kill Wyn-rajathuk?’ she asked through the feathered wood.

  He roared out his answer (he had not understood the question) in violent words of his own tongue. Tallis heard “Wyn” and “Morthen”, but apart from that she was lost. One expression was repeated over and over again: Wyn baag na yith! Wyn baag na yith!

  When Tig was quiet again, Tallis said the same words back to him. He watched her, curious at first, then amused. Reaching through the bars he touched the flight of a bird, poked a finger gently through the mask’s mouth to the unknown and uncertain region beyond. Tallis tasted the sting of urine and salt on the finger tip, but she allowed the tentative probe to enter her mouth. The boy seemed pleased by this moment of trust.

  Tallis removed the mask, touched the wet fingertip with one of her own and watched as Tig became an animal, prowling the confined space of the corral, batting his head against the ground and wai
ling as if with grief.

  Abruptly he was back, facing Tallis. He beat the palm of his left hand against his left eye until it began to weep. He spoke words in his fragmented, chthonic tongue. Tallis listened in silence, aware only of the distress in the boy’s voice, a sense of regret, interspersed with moments of intense frustration.

  ‘I can’t help you,’ she said, and the eyes narrowed again, watching her lips as they moved to make what were to him quite threatening and occult sounds. ‘I need the man you want to kill. And I know what you have to do, so I have to stop you. Your new magic must wait. You must wait to pick through his dreams; I need to pick through them first myself.’

  As if he understood, Tig shook his head. He tugged his long hair forward, twisted it into a rope and held it diagonally across his face, bisecting his features across the nose and the left eye. He took dirt from the ground and smeared the features of his left side. It was a slow, deliberate, threatening motion.

  Tallis took a finger-length doll from the group which she wore around her shoulders and pushed it into the ground, twisting it: a watching wood.

  ‘My eyes will always watch you –’ she said, and picked up the heavy burden of masks as she stood.

  Tig laughed and lifted his skins to expose genitals that were tiny and bone white, roaring loudly as he did so.

  The boy had escaped by morning. There was blood on one of the points of the palisade. The watching-wood, which Tallis had buried, was broken in half, laid on the ground and surrounded by a circle of snail shells. The shells were perforated. They had come from Morthen’s ritual head-dress. During the night of his escape, Tig had entered the long-house, where Morthen slept close to her dying father, and stolen the webbing which she had so carefully fashioned.

  It was his way of stating power. He could have killed Wynne-Jones at that time, if he had wanted, but Tallis’s own power had subdued him just sufficiently.