Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle)

by Robert Holdstock

  Scathach gently rubbed his father’s wrist. ‘I’m sorry. I truly am.’

  The news had deflated the old man. He sighed with disappointment and lay carefully back on the straw pallet. ‘Never mind …’ he whispered, and closed his eyes. Soon he was sleeping.

  Tallis stayed with Scathach for a while but found the atmosphere in the long-house increasingly uncomfortable; it was smoky, and her lungs became choked. It was cold, too, an icy wind sneaking in through the thatch and through gaps in the mud wall. There was the smell of bitter herbs and of Wynne-Jones’s incontinence, and soon the idea of the crisp outside world became attractive again.

  If Scathach had wanted her to stay she would have stayed, but he remained distant, not responding to Tallis’s touch. He slumped, then turned slightly, staring through the gloom of the house towards the north, as if he could see through the walls, through the wood, to that place of battle, that cold place, which lay northwards and to which he and Tallis – as everything that passed this way – seemed to be moving.

  Morthen slipped into the lodge, circling Tallis warily and keeping her eyes averted. She seemed nervous at first, then almost resentful of the older woman’s presence. Tallis resolved to remain for a while, but turned her gaze away. The girl whispered to her brother.

  ‘There are tamers in the valley. They’ve cleared a trapping ground, half a day’s tracking to the south. There are only a few of them, but they have several horses.’

  ‘Tamers?’ Scathach asked indifferently. ‘What are tamers?’

  ‘Tamers of horses,’ Morthen said excitedly. ‘Their weapons are poor. Their stone points are very crude and we can cut their nets easily. They’re big men, but stupid, covered with clay streaks on their bodies. We should subdue them easily.’

  ‘You’re just a girl,’ Scathach murmured, and Morthen looked shocked. Her brother was less than interested in her information, but Morthen seemed determined to win his favour. ‘All I will do is cut the tethers. First-hog-of-summer and others of the hunters will do the raiding. I’ll bring you back a horse. I’ll name it for you.’

  ‘Thank you. Be careful.’

  Morthen reached out and rested her hand on her brother’s face. ‘I will soon be older,’ she murmured. Tallis grew aware of the girl’s angry gaze towards her, then Morthen had slipped away, leaving a swirl of grey smoke where her body had passed by the hearth.

  Tallis left too. She already had her travelling companion, Swimmer of Lakes, and if she thought of the wild horses in the valley at all it was simply to wonder about the legend of the tamers: to subdue the spirit of the wild animal; to be permitted to ride upon its back; yes, magic would have been necessary in early thought, and cult legends certainly would have grown around the hunters who snared the fast, proud creatures.

  She returned to the mortuary house. Tig was nowhere to be seen. The fire had been kicked over, though, the ash distributed around the floor. From the earth bank outside she looked north; soon she saw the bulkily-furred figures of Morthen and three of the hunters; they followed the edge of the wood, round to the south, and were soon lost to sight.

  But to the north: there was just greyness, a swirling mist; and perhaps the hint of mountains and winter beyond. It was hard to see detail; the canopy of the forest grew black and shapeless, only the shuddering elms reaching gigantically above the sea of foliage. She heard her name again, and again she emerged as if from a dream and found that time had passed. When she looked down the hill she saw Scathach making his way slowly towards her, through the dense thorns. He carried Wynne-Jones on his back; the old man beat at the thorns with his stick, one arm held tightly around his son’s neck. They came into the enclosure. Wynne-Jones rammed his stick into the ground then eased himself down from his mount. He slung his cloak of feathers over the staff and Scathach helped him to sit down in the slight shelter that this garment offered. He was facing the rajathuks. His good eye glittered as he stared at them. But Tallis, as she came down the bank, could see that he was frightened. His white beard was ragged. A blue line had been daubed across his forehead and round his short white hair.

  Scathach had entered the mortuary house. He came out again. ‘No sign of Tig.’

  ‘Keep watch for him,’ Wynne-Jones said sharply, anxiously. ‘He can’t be far away …’ Then he turned to smile grimly at Tallis, adding quietly but audibly, ‘And I don’t want that little killer anywhere in slingshot range. He’s too accurate.’

  Man and woman exchanged long, searching stares. ‘Tallis … you are Tallis …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You spoke to me in my sleep. You told me tales and adventures. You asked me questions.’

  ‘Yes. Can you remember that?’

  ‘As if in a dream,’ he replied, then beckoned her over. She went to him, crouching down on the cold earth. When he took her hands she felt the tension in him; he was shaking. The shadow of Tig masked him more than the ferocious wound that had blinded his left eye and decorated his cheeks with scars. Wynne-Jones ignored her worried look and continued to touch her, cradling her face in his hands and touching her lips with his fingers.

  ‘How old were you when the wood took you?’

  ‘Thirteen,’ Tallis said. ‘But the wood didn’t take me. I went in with Scathach. I didn’t intend to stay very long.’

  The old man found that amusing, but he said, ‘Can you remember much about England? About your life? About the world?’

  She said that she could. ‘I’ll tell you what I know, though I was a bit of a reclusive child …’

  ‘Later,’ he said. ‘I’ll hear about it later. First there is something I must show you, something to encourage you. Then I need to think about all the strangeness that happened to you as a child; my firstborn son has already told me something of your life, and of the questions you have for me.’

  His words made Tallis look sadly towards the mortuary house, a last shiver of loss making her huddle into her furs.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Wyn asked, his voice concerned and kindly.

  ‘A few hours ago I burned the remains of my own first born,’ Tallis said.

  ‘Ah …’

  After a while Wyn asked, ‘How long did the child live?’

  ‘A season or two. A few months.’ Tallis smiled. ‘I still try to remember the old way of measuring time.’

  ‘How many children … how many altogether?’

  ‘Three. The others were never properly born.’

  ‘Were they my son’s?’ Wynne-Jones asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Tallis said quickly, but she couldn’t help dropping her gaze as she told the partial lie, and when she looked back Wynne-Jones was not smiling.

  Suddenly he reached out and tugged a small, black feather from the fringe of his cloak. The cold wind blew his cropped white hair and made him shiver violently, but he resisted Tallis’s attempt to tug the cloak around his shoulders, instead pushing the feather into her hand.

  ‘Rites and rituals in late Neolithic Europe,’ he said with a wry grin. ‘A black feather to show my sorrow. Tomorrow you should bring it to the shaman’s lodge and we’ll burn it with bird fat, honey and a strip of the dried skin of a wolf. In a hollowed stone, of course, and you must scratch your body-mark upon the stone so that I can decorate it later.’ He was almost laughing, his eye narrowing with humour, the look in it one of knowingness, a shared joke between people from an advanced culture. ‘It will help the spirit of the boy to travel on. Or so they believe.’

  Tallis shrugged. ‘Perhaps it will, though. Things do seem to work in this world. Magic things. Psychic things.’

  ‘That’s very true. And it still frightens me. It frightens me how a child can be made of flesh and blood but decay to wood. What biological process is at work? Scathach and Morthen are the only two children of mine who survived out of a great number. Oddly, I realize that that means there is more of the wood in them than flesh. My son found it almost impossible to leave the edgewoods and explore the farmland around Ryhope …’
r />   ‘I know.’

  ‘And I’m afraid your own fate was sealed from the moment you entered the forest with him. Once he had been to the forbidden place – for him, England – and once he had succeeded in returning, he would have been taken by a tide, a powerful current drawing him back to the heartwoods. You are only allowed one journey into hell … He could not have returned you to England no matter how hard he had tried.’

  Tallis nodded grimly. ‘I had expected to explore the wood for a month. I have been lost here for eight years.’

  ‘Be prepared to be lost here for the rest of your life.’

  ‘I won’t ever accept that,’ Tallis said sharply. ‘I shall get home somehow.’

  ‘You will never get home. Accept that now.’

  ‘I will find my brother. I will get home. I accept nothing else.’

  ‘Ah yes …’ Wynne-Jones said, a fleeting smile on his lips. ‘Your brother. Help me up. I want to show you something.’

  He was unsteady on his feet, leaning heavily on Tallis. He used his stick and pointed up at the grim-featured totem-poles.

  ‘You recognize them of course.’

  Tallis stared at the wood, experiencing the feeling of familiarity. She shivered, uncomfortably close to an understanding. ‘Yes and no,’ she said. ‘They remind me of my masks.’

  ‘I’ve seen your masks,’ the old man said. ‘I saw it at once. That one is Falkenna …’

  ‘The flight of a bird into an unknown region.’

  ‘And the one with the new growth upon it is Skogen …’

  ‘Shadow of the forest,’ Tallis breathed. ‘I have always felt a strange affinity for that one.’

  Wyn laughed, a wheezing sound. ‘It was how I knew you were coming. It changed. Skogen is the changing shadow of the forest. I thought that my son was doing it, changing the totem because of the way he was reaching towards me. It was you, though. You are the skogen. You are the shadow of the forest … like Harry before you. It is in the shadows that you will find him.’

  He looked up again, pointed to the rajathuk which Tallis knew better than all, because of her own obsession with the wood …

  ‘Moondream.’

  ‘The eyes that see the woman in the land. I lost that mask. I dropped it when I left for the realm. My father has it, now.’ She smiled. ‘I sometimes wonder if he is watching me through it.’

  Wynne-Jones seemed alarmed by what she had said, though. ‘You must make it again. If the masks have remained of importance to you, you must certainly fashion it again.’

  ‘Important to me?’ Tallis shrugged. ‘I use some of them. Others I hardly ever use. They seem to work, though. I see things through them …’

  ‘You miss the point of the masks,’ Wynne-Jones murmured, stroking his grey beard and watching Skogen. ‘Perhaps you are not yet ready to use them correctly.’

  ‘I use the Hollower whenever I wish to cross a threshold …’

  Wynne-Jones chuckled. ‘Of course. What else would you use? But Tallis … listen to me … in legend’s terms, the masks, like these rajathuks, are the facets of an oracle! The voice of the earth speaking its vision through the shaman: that’s me; or you; or Tig. You cannot use the masks as an oracle if one of them is missing.’

  He turned to stare at Tallis, who pulled a face. ‘But they still work.’

  ‘They work to an extent. But they could work much better. Think of each mask alone as being on a chain. That chain leads from the mask, when you wear it, deep into your mind. There are many concealed places in your mind, many forbidden or forgotten places. Think of each mask as reaching to one of those locked parts of the mind. The patterns on the masks, the shape of the wood, the touch of the wood, the smell of the wood, any smell you have incorporated, the bright colours, or the dull shades … all of these are part of the essential pattern, the essential knowledge, the unknowing knowing that is at the heart of magic. Each mask unlocks lost memory when you look at it; each mask gives access to a lost talent: it opens the door, if you like, and lets the legends out … or perhaps in across the threshold. So if that is the capability of one mask at a time … think of the power of all ten!’

  Tallis said nothing, frightened by the old man’s words. He simply shrugged, tapped her on the shoulder with his staff, then pointed again at the rajathuks.

  ‘Think about oracles later. For the moment, look closely at the faces of my masks. Do you see? They’re lopsided. One eye on each seems to be ruined. One side of the mouth droops. Do you see?’

  Understanding blossomed in Tallis’s mind. She began to shake in anticipation of Wynne-Jones’s words.

  ‘Years ago,’ he said, ‘a man from outside the realm passed up the river towards Lavondyss. The wood sucked out his dreams to make mythagos. He made everything you see, the Tuthanach, the lodge … the totems. There is only one thing I can tell you of these totems. He had a mark on the left side of his face. It was a mark that controlled his life. He was obsessed with it. Disease, perhaps, or a wound? Deformed?’

  ‘Burned,’ Tallis said. She stared at Skogen. Suddenly its dead face took on life. Wynne-Jones was right. The shadows there were shadows of Harry, not the forest. It had seemed a cruel and empty face; now she saw urgency and sadness. Had he gone into the wood to find a way to cure the blemish?

  Burned in the war. Shot down. Burned. He had come to her in the night.

  I shan’t be far away. There is something I have to do. A ghost I have to banish.

  The ghost of his burning; an ugly mask – fire, fear and evil – a mark that had spread across his face; it had not covered him completely. But a mask is what it was, and he had hated the mask; and unlike Falkenna, Sinisalo, Hollower, it could not be used at whim. It could not be removed.

  All this Tallis expressed to the shaman, Wyn-rajathuk, who listened in silence, his hand on her arm, his eye on the face of Harry which watched from the pieces of dead wood.

  ‘Then it was Harry who passed up the river all those years ago, ahead of me. He is years ahead of you, but he is there. Those years may sound like frustration to your quest, but that is not necessarily the case. Time plays strange tricks in the wood. I’ve been lucky: Scathach has returned only four years older than I expected him to be.’ He took a breath, squeezed Tallis’s arm hard. ‘But equally, when you get to Lavondyss you may find that Harry is a million years away. I do not understand the laws which govern Lavondyss. I say this only because of what I have gleaned from the living myth of the wood. But be prepared for it.’

  Tallis helped him sit again, sheltered in his cloak. The wind was growing even colder. ‘Winter is coming,’ Wynne-Jones said.

  ‘A terrible winter,’ Tallis agreed. ‘It seems to have been following me all my life.’

  ‘What little I know of Lavondyss has left me in no doubt of one thing: it is a place of snow, of ice, of winter, of an age past when the land was frozen. Why this should be of such importance in the minds of you and me, and all the others from the world of the nineteen-forties I do not know. Later myths make of the Otherworld a place of endless hunting, endless feasting, endless pleasure … a sunny place. A bright realm. It is reached through caves, through tombs, through hidden valleys. But that is wish fulfilment. Adventurers have quested for Lavondyss since the beginning of time. I wonder how many of them knew that they would find a barren world, a place of death, of cold … no magic in Lavondyss … and yet the memory is there. There is something there, something that calls. Something that engages.’

  ‘My brother travelled there, I’m convinced of it. He called to me from the place. He is trapped there and I have made it my promise, Tallis’s Promise, to release him. If he went up-river, then that’s where I shall go.’

  ‘And what will you find there?’ Wynne-Jones asked with a smile.

  ‘Fire,’ Tallis answered without pause. She had learned of the place from an encounter some years ago. ‘A wall of fire, maintained by the fire-makers of an older age than even these Tuthanach. I shall pass through the fire and into L
avondyss.’

  ‘You will burn,’ the shaman whispered pointedly, shaking his head. ‘No one passes through the fire. No human. I have heard of mythagos which have succeeded, but they are part of the myth that says tumuli and fire guarded valleys are the way to the Otherworld. For you, the route certainly lies in another direction entirely. It will take you through a forest far stranger than this tiny Ryhope Wood.’

  ‘Harry got there.’

  ‘If Harry got there,’ the old man said, ‘then he got there by finding his own path. He certainly didn’t pass through the fire. And nor can you … Because, like me, you are human. We don’t belong. We are voyagers in our own living madness. Around you are your brother’s dreams, later modified by myself, recently modified by you. What we have that these wretched creatures around us do not, is freedom. The freedom to choose. Oh, I know Scathach has chosen for himself, for a while … but look at him, touch him, feel his mind … I was awake for just a little while and I could tell –’

  Alarmed, Tallis said, ‘Tell what?’

  ‘That the wood in him is being called. That the legend in him is being summoned. That his time with us is fast coming to an end. He must go to Bavduin, to be reunited with his knightly comrades.’

  Tallis felt sick. She looked up to the skyline, where Scathach’s tall form was a silhouette. He was looking to the north, away from the river.

  Tallis said, ‘I once had a vision of your son. I saw him at the very moment in his life when he earned the name Elethandian gave him: the boy who listens to the voice of the oak. I am not ready for him to achieve that moment of glory. Not yet …’

  She would have talked on, but Wynne-Jones had suddenly pushed his hand against her mouth. She jerked back, surprised by the anger on his face, then reassured by the apology she saw there. The hand lowered.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ the man said. ‘Like you, I’m not ready to hear or know my son’s ultimate fate. It would tempt me to interfere. If we interfere we become involved. We become trapped … I have discovered this over many years.’