Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  Through hamlets, closed against the rain, through country lanes, winding between grey fields and gleaming trees, they traced an erratic course southwards, driving near the cliffs, then looping inland, then back to the edge of the great sea. It was a journey in which they regularly passed the signs of habitation, yet saw not one single human being.

  At last the road dropped towards a pebble beach. The restless sea curled and whitened as it heaved against the dark rock of the small bay. Stones, like a ring of black fingers, probed from that swell, out below the waves.

  ‘There,’ Jacques said, turning off the engine. ‘There at last!’ He took a moment to light a cigarette, then remembered to offer Martin one. The paper was damp, but the sharp smoke made Martin heady and relaxed. They peered through the rain for a while in silence. After a few minutes Jacques wound down the window and flicked the smouldering butt into the abyss. Martin did the same, then squirmed and twisted into his oilskin. He followed the older man, out onto a path that looked down on the drowned stone circle.

  ‘There!’ Jacques said again. ‘You see?’ He pointed through the rain beyond the circle. ‘You see the stones of the second ring? Two rings together, side by side, stretching into the sea, one of them more drowned than the other. Can you see?’

  Two dark fingers of smooth rock appeared then disappeared beneath the swell, a long way out across the ocean.

  ‘Yes,’ Martin said, adding, ‘How old are they?’

  ‘The rings?’ Jacques shrugged. ‘Six thousand years, some say. Or maybe only a few years.’ He chuckled. ‘It depends on how you think of them. When we built them, when we put them upright, they marked a land that was hallowed, but has now been swallowed. Maybe people around here are descended from the builders, eh? Who knows? The stones wear the sea like a skin. You can see how it gleams on them! At low tide, during the hot summers, you can walk among them. It’s muddy, they’re crusted—’ he meant with barnacles, ‘but you can touch them. I’ve heard stories that they sing, some that they dance, and some that they feed on the blood of young girls.’ He laughed again, glancing at Martin curiously, green eyes narrowed against the wind and rain, but watching for a reaction. ‘And of course, under certain circumstances, or maybe in certain minds, they do. They do. Everything is true. I’ve always believed in spirit,’ he said. ‘But it’s something you just accept, not make into daft ritual. Do you have them in Amsterdam?’

  ‘Girl-eating stones?’

  ‘Ritualisers. The people who sing to the stones. The people who think that aliens made them. Crystal gazers.’

  ‘We call them The New Age. The Age of Aquarius, in the sixties. People then used to long for it to come. I’ve worked with many of them. Most of their dream was hope, expectation. If their dreams had come true, they’d anyway have grown older, moved on …’

  Jacques laughed throatily, then hawked and spat away from the wind. ‘I agree with you,’ he said. ‘Dreams are for dreaming, not living. But that said, there’s one dream I’d like to have come real, which is why I asked you here. I’ve lived my life with it. I stood here and hoped it. I longed for it. I dreamed of my father for years, for decades. If I could switch back the clock …’

  Martin wasn’t following his drift and said so. Jacques pointed out to sea again. ‘There. Right there. Follow my finger …’

  He was pointing to the outer ring of stones, perhaps to the tallest stone that could be glimpsed at the ebb of the swelling water.

  ‘I was fourteen years old,’ Jacques said. ‘The storm had come in fast. The far horizon darkened, but Eveline and I kept playing on the beach. My mother seemed alarmed, but we kept playing on the beach. The blackness spread like colour soaking through water. It swept towards us, although where we played was still in the sunlight. My father was on the small boat. Eveline and I had each had turns with him. Now he was alone, and enjoying a few minutes of peace away from us. The sail was full and he was turning to come back to the bay. The darkness was like a veil, like a net being flung towards us. The sea began to rise, and we were called from the beach and taken up this very path. Soon the sea began to heave into the rocks. The stone circles were awash. We watched the swirl of cloud, the blackness. It was flowing very fast. I had never seen a storm like it.’

  Jacques was suddenly speaking strangely, almost dreamily. Martin felt that this story, this memory, had been rehearsed for years. He spoke as if reading from a book.

  ‘My father got tangled in the rigging. The boat was very small. It seemed to skip for a moment in the sea-wind, nosing up then down and the man seemed to be sitting very precariously. He was drenched, his thick white hair draped about his face. The boat was awash. He saw his family, safely up on the path, and waved, then made signals with his hand.

  ‘I remember my mother shouting something; I can’t remember what. The boat was twisting on the sea, too far out for safety, the sail full one moment then flapping the next, and he hauled and tugged at the ropes as the ocean broke across the bows. Again my mother shouted to him, her words lost in the wind that was now beginning to scream from the west.

  ‘Above us, the black swirled over, and the rain struck us, and our eyes became half blind so that all we could see was the white of the sail, the dark hull, and the black shape of the man who struggled to guide the small vessel into the haven of the bay. When the boat tipped over it happened so fast I missed it, even though I was watching and shouting and crying for my father. One moment the white sail was a proud balloon, the next there was just the sea, and something splashing, a shape splashing.

  ‘That was the moment when the sea became a monster, when the wind hit it, when the storm changed the cold water into a beast.’

  Jacques was in a dream, his eyes almost closed, tears squeezing from the corners, his words oddly stilted, his description strange for this charcoal maker and handy-man.

  ‘It became a monster of many backs. The backs rose and heaved, green and scaly, flecked with white, shining as the monster rolled below the surface. You could see the muscles, the writhing limbs. On the beach, the monster’s teeth exploded upwards, white enamel, sucked back into the tide just as the monster was trying to suck back the desperate man who was swimming for the shore. Around him, as he swam for his life, the limbs of the creature rose and fell, its huge back following him, trying to throw him, then suck him down as it subsided.

  ‘He reached the stone. Do you see it? That stone there, yes, the dark one, the sharp one, you can see it now as the waves drop, the outermost stone of the second circle. It rises twelve feet from the sea bed. It was his only haven. And he reached it by sheer guts and reached around it, embraced it, and clung there. All the while the monster in the sea raged at him, sucked at him, tried to draw him back.

  ‘I believe, or I have dreamed, that I saw him smile. He certainly waved. Believing himself to be safe, if cold, he clung to that great stone, to that great past, to the spirit of land, defying the sea. He clung like a limpet. Have you ever tried to prise a limpet from the rock it lives on? You need a chisel. When the creature sticks and grips, it cannot be dislodged, it cannot be sucked into the maw of the monster. And like a limpet embracing the old stone, my father resisted the tide that sucked at him, drew at him, tugged at him. It surged around him, it broke across him, it pulled and dragged at his legs, but he held on, he held on.

  ‘So the ocean, seeing that it would not draw him back, now changed its tactics. It was the moment my mother knew we had lost him. It began to smash him against the friend who had found him. It lifted him and smashed him; it twisted him, drew at him, then flung him to the very stone to which he clung. His head became a bloody mess. It concentrated on his head, of course. It crushed his bones against the rock, stunned him, bruised him, broke him bit by bit, until soon his strength had gone and his whole body was lifted and broken on the circle.

  ‘Three times, maybe four, the sea cracked my father against the rock to open him. And then the pulp was drawn away, down and gone from us, gone for ever.

&nb
sp; ‘He never came back, not a single trace of him, not even the boat. Nothing.’

  The rain beat down. It had found a way through Martin’s oilskin and was freezing against his shoulder. Jacques had finished speaking and they scurried back to the car, squirming and twisting out of their waterproofs, flinging the wet garments onto the back seat before spending a few minutes smoking, listening to the drum of rain, to the odd silence that is invoked by that hollow sound.

  ‘Why do you dream of him?’ Martin asked at length. ‘I don’t understand. If you could turn the clock back, how could you help him?’

  ‘I could have flown to him; or I could have moved the stone closer to the shore. I had the power to do it. For a year or more I’d known I was a stone-shifter, ever since I’d danced on the path. But I was too frightened … perhaps too young. I didn’t trust myself to do it right.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I could have flown to him. I stayed on the earth. I could have moved the stone. I didn’t even try to grip it. My father died, but in my heart I know he knew that I could have saved him. That’s why he waved. He trusted me. I had danced among the people on the path – the magic was in me. He knew this, he’d heard me talk. I failed him. That’s all. And I think that’s all I can say for the moment.’

  Jacques opened the window and tossed his cigarette into the storm.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Martin said.

  ‘I didn’t expect the sea to change its game. I wasn’t ready to take on the sea. I thought he could do it on his own.’

  ‘And you thought you could move the standing stone?’

  ‘It was a gift! I’d danced and played inside the ghosts. And sometimes you get a gift if you do that, and it lasts a while then goes. Like ‘Old Provider’s’ Christmas presents, though, there’s always a catch. Like nearly every child, I was too afraid to use the gift, and now it’s gone, and your grandfather died when he might have lived.

  ‘Eveline was there too and she too felt helpless, and yet she felt she could have helped. And whatever it was happened to her during that terrible storm later made her frightened for you and Rebecca, which is why she encouraged you to go away and stay away.’

  Jacques fumbled for the starter and the Citroën shuddered into life. Martin sat back, cold and confused, and let the rain and the saturated land drift past as his uncle drove him home.

  The Songliner’s Tale

  Four days after the interment, Martin dressed warmly against the chill weather and walked through the drizzle up the path to the cemetery. He had had a restless night, waking at one point to the sound of movement downstairs. Half dreaming, half alert, he had imagined that someone was prowling about the house, at one point even entering the bedroom where he lay. Indeed, in the morning he found the back door swinging free, and the signs of sandwich-making. Not knowing his mother’s routine, nor lifestyle, he was not unduly concerned by this intrusion.

  He approached the old church, with its half-shroud of scaffolding, and as he reached for the gate, he saw a crouching figure by the hump of green-cloth covered soil, the new grave. It was a woman, he thought, from the drop of auburn hair around the figure’s shoulders, but he did not recognise her. She wore a heavy lambskin coat, green cord trousers, and black leather boots that were scratched and muddied. She was hunkered down and singing softly, her arms folded across her chest, her head raised slightly, as if looking above the top of the gleaming marble headstone.

  Her voice suddenly made contact!

  ‘Rebecca?’ Martin whispered. Her singing voice came clearer, sharper through the fine rain. ‘Rebecca?’ he called more loudly, and the woman turned to look at him. Martin stopped walking, shocked by the face that stared at him.

  Slowly Rebecca rose to her feet, rubbed at the backs of her knees and came over to her brother. Her long hair was damp, framing a strong and handsome face, aged by sun and dust. She was as hard as stone, as carved as wood; when she smiled she revealed the absence of a canine tooth, something that the younger Rebecca would have never allowed to go unfilled. But the smile was a genuine gesture of pleasure, the wry turn of the lips, gladness conveyed in every movement of face and hands as she reached for Martin and hugged him.

  ‘You look lean,’ she said, stepping back to inspect him after the embrace. ‘You’ve not been eating.’

  ‘I try to keep fit. Genes for fatness run in the family; have to keep them at bay, like wild dogs. Not eating twenty-course Indonesian meals every day helps as well, excellent though they are.’

  ‘You’ll get fat,’ she said with a smile. ‘Just like daddy, it’ll happen suddenly. But you look good now. Nice complexion.’ She pinched his cheek. ‘And no drugs, I think. No shadows. That’s good.’

  ‘I don’t take drugs,’ Martin agreed. ‘You look rugged,’ he went on. He touched the deeply etched lines about her eyes and mouth, his fingers gentle. She shrugged.

  ‘I’m a rugged lass. The outback is a hard place. The land wants to take your water. Take my hand …’

  They walked to the iron gate, then suddenly Rebecca ran, childlike, to leap and swing on the rusting hinges, looking out towards the village and the old forest – Broceliande, hazy in the rain, dark on the horizon. Martin stepped onto the gate as well.

  Rebecca said, ‘It’s odd to be back. I can’t tell whether I like it or hate it. I hate this bloody weather, of course. But the smells, the colours … I’ve been bleached yellow, burned red and charred umber at various times over the last few years. And I’ve heard the songs, such wonderful old songs, Martin … But I’ve missed the colours, the greens. The real colours.’

  ‘Can you hear songs now? Are there songs in this earth?’

  She glanced at him, her expression one of deliberate if unfelt contempt. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Of course there are. The song is everywhere around us. It doesn’t sing from us, Martin, it sings through us; which is why we forget so easily in this hemisphere.’ She stepped from the gate and folded her arms, her characteristic gesture. She watched him through jet-lagged eyes, across the years of absence. ‘I don’t want to talk about the songpaths. I came here to watch my mother into her cold home and I missed it. I’m really sorry that I wasn’t here. I missed dad down, ten years ago, and I promised myself not to repeat the negligence.’

  Martin said, ‘You must have got my letter …’

  ‘I did! It came fast. And I got the first flight available, but the bloody engine failed in Bombay. A day and a half in Bombay, confined to the airport, paying three kids a tip each and every time I needed a piss, and all the cash I had was in Australian dollars! I tried to ring, but the lines just wouldn’t connect.’

  She laughed and clutched her brother’s arm. ‘That’s funny, isn’t it? Twelve years of my life I’ve spent connecting the lines, the lines between different shapes of spirit, but I can’t connect with France Telecom from Bombay Airport. I like that. It’s sort of ironic.’

  ‘Pompous little bag of bones,’ Martin murmured, echoing a childhood taunt, and Rebecca put him in a headlock, laughing as they struggled through the rain until Martin declared a truce.

  ‘I am a bag of bones. But I’m five times stronger than you, my man.’

  ‘Damn right. I said pax!’

  ‘Can I stay with you?’ she asked a while later, as they straightened clothing and returned to the rough road back to the village.

  ‘Of course. The house is as much yours—’

  ‘Can I stay with you!’ she repeated, and Martin felt the thump of his heart. It had been a long time and he flushed as he anticipated the renewed relationship. But there was no-one in his life in Amsterdam at the moment. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You suppose so. Great. You suppose so.’

  ‘Yes. You can stay with me. It’s been a long time, Beck. We’ve moved apart.’

  ‘Of course we have! But the line is still there between us. Lines like that don’t break. And I need to be close. That’s all. That’s it. I need to be close. To you. To them. I should have be
en here to watch them down.’

  ‘I wasn’t here when either of them crossed,’ Martin said quietly. ‘So they wouldn’t have known you weren’t here for the interment. They knew you’d be sent for. Eveline actually didn’t want us here. Anyway, I watched them down. They were guarded. I swear it.’

  Rebecca sighed as they walked, now linking arms, almost hanging on to Martin, jet-lag beginning to creep into her muscles. ‘She’ll be with little Seb. That’s nice …’

  ‘Not for thirty days yet,’ Martin reminded her, and she glanced at her watch.

  ‘Oh yes. I’d forgotten. Well … she soon will be with our little brat brother. It’s so odd to be back,’ the last statement made in a forceful tone of voice, the subject changed abruptly.

  Martin felt the same shudder of realisation. He too was something of a stranger in a familiar land. His life had changed, he was out of place here; and yet he was needed.

  ‘I know,’ he said grimly. ‘I think I have to stay. The farm needs sorting out. I hardly know where to begin. It would be good to have some help, Beck.’

  Martin was aware of her hesitation as they walked, the slight loosening of his sister’s grip on his arm, the sudden tightening of her fingers again. Rebecca said, ‘I’ll stay as long as I can. I’ll do what I can. But if the songs get too—’ she broke off, then smiled and shrugged. ‘I can’t explain it, Martin. My line isn’t here anymore. The sounds confuse me. If I get called back, I’ll have to go.’

  ‘Stay as long as you can. It’ll be good to have you here.’

  ‘I’ll try. But when I go, I’ll be gone before you know it. It’s the way with me.’

  ‘How very New Age,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘No. Just the way I am.’