Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  Nevertheless, the trick worked at first and I was not aware of Vivien again until after I had stayed for many years in the forests of the Caledon.

  One day I sniffed her presence. The air in those mountains is very clear. I have always believed smell to be a form of substance, invisible to the eye, continually shed like skin from the body. I knew she was in the land, though still distant, and I packed my things and walked south.

  In any case, it was time to leave the Caledon. There was very little of interest in the forests, although the game was good, the game is always good. I had been there for far too long and I was tired of the cold, tired of the flight of gulls, which could take me out across the wide sea but show me only rocks. The ocean to the west is a forbidding place. If there is a magic beyond it, it defied my eyes to see it.

  I rested for a few years or so in the land of the Parisii, near a large town called Eboracum. The distress of dogs, one day at dusk, told me that they had smelled the small enchantress and again I fled.

  I passed time in high hills, in deep woods, and confronted passing horsemen, often solitary princes or low kings, seeking this, seeking that, the mind of the warrior king in those days was singularly triumphant, and discovering the lost arms and armour of forgotten heroes was all they seemed concerned with.

  In each act of confrontation there was a moment – the moment of surprise, as they saw this wild and hairy man screaming at them from the tree – when their thoughts spilled out like sun through a sudden break in clouds. I fed upon these fears and thoughts, and in this way kept abreast of change as I slowly travelled south.

  At some point I sent a second shadow north along the path, but this time the trick failed. She found it and turned it round, and I let it pass me by. She pursued me, then, with energy, running through her lives with the agility of a cat. And in time her persistence was rewarded.

  Our paths crossed in the fort of Caerleon, one bitter autumn evening, when the cattle and sheep were being drawn back behind the high walls as the light faded, and the fires lit to show the land. There was a raiding party on its way and the stronghold’s warlord, Peredur, was to make a chariot charge against them. Fire and fury was all about me as I stood within the gate and watched the nightland, the confusion and fear of imminent battle. The air was filled with prayers and charms. The blood in the horsemen and the farmers was a sour stench in every corner where they crouched, drinking deeply, waiting for the onslaught.

  Vivien came running through the heavy gates just as they were being closed, her red cape flowing, the cowl back from her long hair and pale, beautiful face. She saw me and ran to me, breathless. ‘Got you! At last.’

  She tugged my beard and frowned, then smiled. ‘Still black, still strong. It isn’t fair. You look no different now than then. Are you using charm? Do you need charm?’

  I replied as ambiguously as possible. ‘I use charm occasionally. I never need to use it. And you?’

  ‘I use it!’ she said directly, staring at me as if daring me to comment. ‘Oh yes. I use charm.’ Then more immediate concerns occurred to her. ‘Where do I get food? I need water. Will we die? There’s no need for us to die, my feathered arms can carry us both. I’m so glad to see you again. It’s been a long hunt. But where do I get food?’

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  And she fell against me, no longer the enchantress, simply a refugee, exhausted and in need. I led her through the fires and cattle to the heart of the fort. I had pitched my tent here, above a hidden well. This bubbled briefly through the ground and satisfied her need.

  Her performance on arrival at the stronghold, her behaviour, I am certain was not a guile, simply the last defiance of her long journey in search of me.

  The enemy had built no fires, their warriors scattered in discreet bands from the river to the higher land, north of the fort. Their tactic, clearly, was to invite a night attack. Almost certainly there was a larger band waiting to fire the gates and pillage the stronghold.

  I counselled the warlord as to this, but found that his own seers, by reference to their local augurs, had perceived the same eventuality. They could not, however, locate the bigger army, a task I attended to with as much phony ritual and simple illusion as possible (I was earning my keep, you understand) and discovered them hiding in the overhang of the river bank, a force of horsemen some sixty strong. I could see as well that most of them had come by boat, and that they were unused to the stolen horses with which they had been supplied.

  They would be ferocious, then, from the land of the Eriu, probably, but they would have the disadvantage of the night, unfamiliar trails and restless steeds.

  This was the sort of language the warlord of Caerleon understood. He divided his horsemen at once, carefully allocating them to two attacking forces.

  The lightning raid on the group of men by the river left them shattered. The horses were driven off – twenty recaptured and led back to the fort – and skirmishing along the woodland edge left honours even and the dead paired-up.

  The hostiles licked their wounds and marched northwards at dawn, seeking smaller prey. Vivien taunted them for a while with ravens, which she was adept at summoning, while in the fort there was a feeling of the feast and celebration.

  But Peredur was furious.

  In his eyes he had treated the raiders with honour, he had paired-up the dead, he had won the skirmish. The fact that the Eriu had stayed in his land was an insult to his name.

  Grimly, then, he picked his ten best warriors. They put on black cloaks, black armour, black helmets, armed themselves with feathered spears, knives, but no shields. At dawn they rode from the fort in silence, eleven against forty.

  Later, near dusk, seven of them returned, Peredur leading the bloody troop, two heads slung by their hair across the neck of his horse, forty sword hands tied to the spears, the four dead knights tied to their flagging mounts.

  He sent boats to the twenty Eriu who had survived the second battle and who were now by the river again, to take them home.

  For seven months or more, well into the winter, which was fortunately mild, Peredur strengthened the ramparts of the fortress, a tremendous task, filthy and exhausting, but one undertaken with great enthusiasm by the people who sheltered on the hill.

  Such was Peredur’s command and authority that only the sourness of the ale was ever complained about, a fault which he addressed at once by sending a raiding party across the wide river to the islands in the marshes, where apples and honey were produced in abundance.

  He was a great man, this one, and in the presence of great men, magic is enhanced. As such I was able to move the heavy tree trunks used in the re-construction, and even aid the transport of new gates, heavy blocks of blue-stone that would eventually be hauled down and used as grave markers.

  Peredur affected my magic more than any other man. I put wings on his shabby little horses, or so it must have seemed to his knights, since they were able to ride at the canter for half a day and the horses were as fresh at dusk as at dawn. In this way Peredur patrolled the land to the east as far as Camulodunum and north beyond the seven totems that marked the edge of Eboracum. This was a vast distance for any man to be recognised by name and to have the pattern on his sword known too.

  Peredur was truly the offspring of the wolf.

  Behind the new walls, the warlord built new houses, as if to say this is my final place; this place will endure.

  He enlarged the forges and the bakeries and built new grain stores. He described the house that he wished to construct for me where my tent was pitched, but I refused, tempting though it was. But as if he needed to demonstrate his gratitude, he surrounded the tent with a wicker fence – which made it hard to walk out by night, since he had included only a single gate. But his need was stronger than my irritation, and Vivien and I inhabited a skin house on a birch frame, behind a wall of willow.

  We had wanted to be left alone, but we became a place of homage. We were plagued with effigies in straw, with l
imbs in coarse clay or bread, with painted wood and feather charms. These things accumulated, slung and strung to the wicker, thrown into the tent, buried just around the edge. At night we would gather them in, but by the morning there were twenty more. Some had power, and these we acknowledged and responded to. Most were simple dreams, and we discarded them as quickly as we could, taking them by the sackful to the deep woods at the bottom of the hills. Vivien dug a shaft there, faster than I have ever seen – I found nothing ominous in this at the time – and plugged it with stone in such a way that we could open it at leisure to deposit more of these charms.

  I imagine the shaft is there today, rank and sour with hopeless dreams.

  If the scouring of that pit did not disturb me, Vivien’s water magic did.

  I had never shown her how to conjure water from the earth – this is a strong magic, and must be carefully applied – but she must have watched me from afar, or spied through the eyes of a bird. I caught her out when I saw her at the forge, bringing water in a bucket. I fled at once to the tent and felt the ground. It was damp. The filling cup was wet as well.

  She had found out how to tap the source!

  But what was she doing at the forge? I feared the worst, and devised charms against iron, bronze and tin. I was already protected, by my nature, against bone and wood, but in any case these substances were not easily controlled by fire, only subject to its heat.

  Discreetly, I watched her. She was fussing at the bellows, shaking her head at the ironworker: not right; not that way, this way. Do it again. And again.

  At length a small shape appeared from the coals. Vivien watched as the ironworker tempered it in the water from our well. Steam billowed and she saw me, smiling quickly, perhaps with embarrassment, or guilt. She reached into the bucket and brought the cooling object to me. It was not iron at all, but bronze, bright as the sun. It was in the shape of three leaves of the May tree, with four berries and a single thorn. I could not believe this exquisite work to be the handicraft of the man who worked the forge, but the talisman was so enchanting that I took it and turned it.

  The thicket itself could not have produced as perfect a twig in such perfect detail.

  ‘What is it for?’ I asked Vivien. She laughed and kissed my cheek and chin.

  ‘It’s for you.’

  ‘What does it do?’

  ‘It shines,’ she said, still amused.

  ‘What does it give me?’

  ‘Shining!’

  ‘What does it take from me?’

  ‘Nothing but darkness. A touch of darkness.’

  ‘But I like darkness. I need it. I walk with dreams and darkness. I thought you knew that.’

  ‘It doesn’t touch the shadow. It’s not a taking thing. It’s a shining thing. Like you.’

  ‘Why are you giving it to me?’

  ‘Because I love you, idiot. Because we complement each other.’

  ‘You spied on me to learn how to make the water rise.’

  ‘Not at all. I thought about the water, and how it might rise by magic. I constructed the magic myself. I didn’t spy on you. That would have been wrong. You either tell me, teach me, or leave me to my own devices. Don’t be jealous.’

  She punched my chest, hard! and walked past me back to the tent. The thorn was sharp – I was careful not to draw blood. The shining leaves felt soft, the bronze soft. When the sheen of the metal bloomed, when the leaves began to green, they would be powerful indeed.

  I reciprocated the gift almost at once. We went away from the fortress and found a place of isolation, high on the hill, with a view, further to the south of Lyonesse and the ocean that was consuming it.

  ‘I hate to see the world drowned,’ she said one day.

  ‘Why? What makes you sad?’

  ‘When it drowns it dies.’

  I knew, then, that for all her charm, all her skills, she was simply a chancer, that is to say, a dabbler, without true insight. She thought that as Lyonesse drowned, it was gone. She had no understanding that as it drowned here so it was surfacing, reshaped, regenerated in another place. She could not feel that connection through the hard places of the earth. She saw only the sea and the rock, and the battle that was fought between them.

  By now she was intimate with my body, and I with hers. She could feel the patterned bones below my flesh, but had no understanding at all of their meaning. Truly, I felt my age, even though I was younger than her. The bone in her body cracked further, on occasion, and the skull in the beauty grinned at me as she tossed about me on the summer heath, wild hair flying. Sometimes I slowed time so that I could watch that raven hair flow dreamily against the white of cloud and the intense blue of sky.

  The day came when she caught me at my tricks and broke the charm, leaning down to bite my lip, murmuring, ‘Pay attention, you old trout! This is costing me!’

  Her words were a shock to me. She leaned back against my knees, disappointed, rather frightened, trying to squeeze the unsqueezable.

  ‘You’ve gone.’

  ‘Not for ever. What do you mean – costing you?’

  She glanced away, then pulled away, curling her body against my thighs, her dress drawn over her shoulder, her fingers and lips gently caressing the disappointing member.

  ‘I’m not as strong as you,’ she said. ‘I want the pleasure, but I have to guard against the consequences. I want to give you pleasure too—’ she phrased it precisely in this way ‘—but you don’t seem bothered by the consequences. I’m using magic, when all I want to do is use my body. You seem uncaring.’

  How deftly she had covered the slip. Did she really think I hadn’t noticed those inadvertent, angry words?

  This is costing me.

  Of course it was! She was trying to work herself below my skin, to draw out my skills. Realising the slip, she had covered quickly with concerns about childbirth.

  But it was a wonderful lie. And she was a wonderful lover.

  For all my skills, I am as blind as any other man to the way that others see us. Vivien was ageing, aged, and because I was experienced with time she seemed as luscious to me, as we loved in various private groves in Albion, as the black-feathered swan-girl of the Northlands who had aroused me by the lake. But to those around us, she was older than me, a woman in her prime, and I was still a man in firm, wisp-bearded youth. Talented, yes, but still, by appearance, a son. Our liaison, the congress of which was often heard and seen, was not hailed with the same enthusiasm when otherwise the first sign of the White May was celebrated.

  The time came, then, to leave this land, this chieftain, to follow further round the path, the long path. I mentioned it before. I was progressing south, and almost at the place on the loop of tracks and ridges that marked my own beginning.

  There was an ocean to cross. Lyonesse was gone. Boats would be needed.

  A greater difficulty was that I was loved by Peredur. He had, in that naïveté that comes with power, depended upon me because I was dependable. He was not threatened by betrayal, simply with withdrawal. It shook him deeply, but like the man of stone he was, he turned to stone for his thanks and his parting kiss.

  ‘You can’t leave! How will I move rocks without you?’

  ‘Try ropes.’

  ‘All very well to say that, but how will I test the ropes without you?’

  ‘Stretch them between horses.’

  ‘And the necks of horses? How can I possibly test the necks of horses without you?’

  ‘Do what you do best. Ride them. Ride them till they drop. Some will never drop.’

  He laughed. ‘If I ever find such a horse I’ll marry it. And when it dies I’ll follow it to the cairn! You can’t leave. How will I remember you?’

  ‘On a stone, tall and grey. Nothing else. Not if you really care for me.’

  ‘Don’t insult me. I don’t carve rock for pleasure! Far too much hard work. That’s why I employ the likes of you,’ he added with a mischievous smile. ‘Where will I put this stone? Should I make
it.’

  ‘Somewhere where not even your horses can find it.’

  ‘In the heart of the forest, then.’

  ‘Yes. And near falling water. That’s where my own heart will be.’

  ‘I forbid you to go.’

  ‘Have you ever tried to hold a shadow?’

  ‘But our shadows are always on the road. It just takes sun and fire to see them.’

  ‘Exactly. I was here before, I’ll be here again. Endlessly.’

  ‘But I shan’t see you, shall I?’

  ‘If you pass your eyes on wisely, who knows?’

  How could I explain the endless, ageless circulation of time and the path?

  How could I explain to him that I not only had generations of trail ahead of me, but unfinished business in past cycles that I would constantly – that is to say, every four generations or so – return to? His life was a function of birth, fighting, lovemaking and death. Mine was all of these things too, but without end, without end.

  I simply kissed him. I promised him that I would remember him, and this is the end of this particular conversation, because I have done what I promised to do. I have remembered him.

  Peredur was a great man, but that is all he was when it comes down to it. A man. And of importance. Like a stone broken into pieces he has become known to you in many forms, by many names.

  It would dismay you to know what a simple man of strength and weakness, wisdom and humility, lies at the core of your romances.

  Slow Ghosts

  The long day, the longest he had ever lived, was almost ended, and Martin left his vigil at the lakeside – his long watch, across the water, over the graves of those he loved – to return through the forest to the ancient grove of trees which breathed with the life of an old enchanter, a broken stone, known by many names, but to Broceliande as Merlin—