Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

In the morning Huxley decided that he could wait no longer. He had no real idea of the passage of time, this far into Ryhope Wood, but imagined that he had now been absent the better part of a day and a night, longer than he had intended. He had a precise idea of how distorted time became as far in as the Horse Shrine, but he had never tested the relativity of these deeper zones. A sudden anguish made him strike hard along the poor trails, cutting through deep mossy dells, drawn always outwards to the edge.

  It was always easier to leave the wood than to enter it.

  He was exhausted by the time he reached the area of the Horse Shrine. He was hungry, too. He had brought insufficient supplies. And his hunger was increased by the sudden smell of burning meat.

  He dropped to a crouch, peering ahead through the tangle of briar and holly, seeking the clearing with its odd temple. There was movement there. Wynne-Jones, perhaps? Had his colleague come straight to this place, to wait for Huxley? Was he roasting him a pigeon, as he waited, with a flagon of chilled local cider to accompany it? Huxley smiled at himself, laughed at the way his baser drives began to fantasise for him. He walked cautiously through the trees, and peered into the glade.

  Whoever had been there had heard him. They had backed away, hugging the shadows and the greenery on the opposite side. Huxley was sufficiently attuned to the sounds, smells and shifting of the wood to be aware of the human-like presence that stared back at him.

  Between them, close to the bizarre shrine, a fire burned and a bird, plucked and spitted, was blackening slowly.

  5

  The Horse Shrine, in its oak glade, is my main point of contact with the mythic creatures of the wood. The trees here are overpoweringly immense organisms, storm-damaged and twisted. The trunks are hollow, their bark overrun with massive ropes of ivy. Their huge, heavy branches reach out across the clearing and form a roof; when the sun is bright, and the summer is silent, to enter the glade is like entering a cathedral. The greying bones of the odd statues that fill the shrine reflect the changing shades of green and are entrancing and enticing to the eye; the horse that is central to the shrine seems to move; it is a massive structure, twice the height of a man, bones strapped together to form gigantic legs, fragments of skull shaped and wedged to create a monstrous head. It could be some dinosaur, reconstructed out of madness by an impressionist. Shapeless but essentially manlike structures stand guard beside it, again all long-bone and skull, lashed together with thick strips of leather, impaled by wood, some of which is returning to leaf. They seem to watch me as I crouch in the shifting, dancing luminosity of this eerie place.

  Here I have seen human forms from the palaeolithic, the neolithic and the Age of Bronze. They come here and watch the greening of the spirit of the horse. To the earliest forms of Man, this silent respect is for a wild, untamed creature, a source of nourishment rather than burden. To later forms, it is a closer need that is reflected. Some visitors to the shrine leave brilliant trappings and harnessing, invocations to their primaeval form of Epona, or Diana, or any other Goddess of the Steed. These I have collected. Many of them are fascinating.

  I have watched and recorded many of these visitors, but failed to communicate with any of them. All this now changed as I encountered the woman. She was in the glade, tending a small fire, and staring up at the decaying statues. Alarmed by my sudden arrival, she stood and drew back into the edgewood, watching me. The sun was high, and she was drenched in shadow and green light, blending with the background. The fire crackled slightly, and on the still air I could smell not just burning wood, but the charred smell of some meat or other.

  I waited cautiously, also within the scrub that lined the glade. Soon she re-emerged into the cathedral, and crouched by the fire, spreading her skirts. She began to sing, rocking forwards in rhythm, prodding at the smouldering wood. She was very aware of me, glancing at me continually. I gained the impression that she was … disappointed. She frowned and shook her head.

  Eventually she smiled, and there was an invitation to approach in that simple gesture. As I stepped through the tangled grass and fern of the glade, her lank hair fell forward. It was copper-hued, magnificent, but full of leaf-litter, nature’s decoration. She occasionally pushed it back with her free hand, watching me through eyes that were enchanting. Her clothing was of wool, a skirt dyed a dull shade of brown, a faded green shawl. She wore a necklace of carved and painted shapes, bone talismans, I thought, and many of these were strikingly bright. Rolled beside her was a cloak, fur side hidden for a while. Then she unfurled the garment to fetch out a thin knife, and I saw white fur – fox fur, I think – and knew at once that this creature was the ‘Snow Woman’ that the boys had seen last Christmas.

  We sat in silence for a while. She cooked and picked at the small bird she had snared, a wood pigeon, I believe. Around us, the dense wood seemed alive with eyes, but this is the life of Ryhope Wood, the sylvan-awareness drawing out human dreams and fashioning forgotten memories into living organisms. When I am in the oak and ash zones, deeper than the Horse Shrine, I can often feel the presence of the wood in my unconscious mind; images at the edge of vision seem to slip past me: out of mind, into the forest, to become shaped, then no doubt to return to haunt me.

  Was this woman one of my own mythagos, I wondered?

  She carried an ash stick, and when she had finished eating she lay this across her lap before flicking earth onto the smouldering wood of her fire. She smiled at me. There was grease on her lips and she licked at it. Below the grime she was truly lovely, and her smile, and her laughter, were enchanting. I mentioned my name and she grasped what I was trying to do, referring to herself in some incomprehensible tongue. Then, seeing my puzzlement, she held up the stick and pointed to herself. She was called Ash, then, but this reference meant nothing to me.

  Who or what was she? What aspect of legend was embodied here? By sign and smile, by gesture, by the tracing of shapes in the air, by exaggerated communication with fingers, we began to understand each other. I showed her a rag effigy that I had gathered from near this shrine on the inward journey, and she stared at this bounty with puzzlement (at first) and then with an odd, searching look. When I dangled a bronze, leaf-like necklet – found by a stream – she touched the piece, then shook her head as if to say ‘don’t be so childish’. But when I showed her an ochre-painted amulet that I had found in the Horse Shrine itself, she exhaled sharply, looked at me with murderous, then pitying eyes. She would not touch the object and I ran it through my fingers, wondering what message reached from this crafted bone to the mind of the woman. The uneasiness lasted a little while, then – by sign – I asked her about herself.

  She returned to me, a bird returning from a flight of fancy, a mind returning to the reality of a woodland glade. In a moment or two she seemed to understand that I was questioning her about her own history. She frowned, watching me as if wondering what to reveal. I noticed distinctly, but took no warning from the observation, that she looked afraid and angry suddenly.

  Then, with the merest shrug, she reached into her rolled cloak and drew out two leather bags which she shook. One of them rattled, the sound of bone shards.

  By gesture, she had made certain strange comments during the previous hour, and now she compounded my confusion. First she shook out the contents of the larger bag, dozens of short fragments of wood, strips of bark, some dark, some silver, some green, some mottled, all gouged with a small hole. I formed the idea that she had something, here, from every type of tree. With her eyes on the amulet that I had shown her, she picked out two of these pieces of wood, held them in her left hand. She sang something softly and the glade seemed to shiver. A coolish breeze whipped quickly through the foliage, then danced up and away; an elemental life-form, perhaps, summoned then dismissed.

  From the second bag she poured out the bone, forty or fifty shards of ivory. From these she picked a single piece. Holding wood and bone in her hand she shook the three fragments, before threading a loop of thin, worn leather throug
h the holes and passing the necklet to me. I accepted it, remembering, with no clear understanding, the gift she had left by the gate during the winter. I put the necklet on.

  She sat back and replaced the rest of the wood and ivory into their respective bags. Then she stood and gathered her fox-fur cloak, and with a knowing smile, stepped out of the glade and into the silence and darkness of the forest. Her last gesture before departing was to rattle a tiny wrist-drum, a double sided cylinder of skin, beaten by small stones attached to thongs.

  I had no idea what to do next. She had seemed to dismiss me, so I rose, intending to leave the glade and return to Oak Lodge.

  6

  Huxley got no further than the first overpowering oak. As he ducked below its heavy branch, heading towards the narrow track outwards, his world – the wood itself – turned inside out!

  From the warm and musty odour of summer, suddenly the air was sharp and autumnal. The light from the foliage was stark, brilliant; the drowsy green luminosity had gone. Trees, dense and dark, rose straight and bleak around him. These were birches, not oaks; thickets of holly shimmered in the lancing silver light. He stumbled through this unknown world, scratched and torn in his panic to orientate himself. Above him, birds screeched and took to wing. A cold wind swept through the upper branches. Unfamiliar smells struck at random, damp leaf mould, pungent vegetation, then the crystal sharpness of autumn. The light from above was startling in its brightness, and if he glanced up, then looked around him, the trees showed as black pillars, without feature, almost formless.

  He suddenly heard horses crashing through the forest, their lungs straining as they ran, their whinnying screams telling of the burden of pain and bruising inflicted by this tangled, ancient wood. Huxley glimpsed them as they struggled past, immense creatures, each impaled on its back with what he assumed quickly were the signs of taming: one carried flaring torches, spears with burning heads that had been stuck deeply through its thick skin; another was decorated with stems of corn or wheat; a third with tight bundles of greenery and thorn, blood seeping from where the sharpened stalks of some of these plants had been pushed too deep. The fourth carried in its flesh the slim, quivering shafts of a pale wood – ash perhaps – that were arrows, each trailing rags of the skin of creatures, the grey, white, brown and black of furry hides.

  What had sounded like the frantic passage of a herd of these wonderful creatures was in fact the furious bolting of four horses only.

  One came close enough to show Huxley the grey and bloodied hide of its flanks. This was the creature ‘decorated’ with burning and smouldering torches. It towered over him, its mane full, flowing and lank; it reeked richly of dung. The horse turned briefly to stare at him and its eyes were filled with a feral panic. Huxley pressed himself against one of the great birches, which shuddered as the beast kicked at the trunk, turning to expose huge, cracked teeth that were the colour of summer-ripened wheat; it moved on, then, working its way inwards, escaping its tormentors.

  The tormentors, following close behind the horses, were humans, of course. And Huxley was soon to realise what Ash had done.

  There were four men, dark haired and heavily cloaked. They moved through the forest, uttering shrill cries, or gruff barks, or resonating song fragments that increased in pitch until they became an ululating echo. Sometimes they screeched words, but these were frightening and alien sounds. Each of the men wore his hair in a different, elaborate plaited style. Each was bedecked with stone or bone or shells or wood. Each had a colour on his face: red, green, yellow, blue. They passed by Huxley, sometimes running, sometimes laughing, all of them torn by thorn and holly, the leaf and wood impaling their crude clothing, so that they seemed no less than extensions of the birch and thorn forest itself.

  Crying out and celebrating their vigorous pursuit of horses!

  It was, Huxley chose to think at that moment, their way of controlling the horses. How many myths of the secret language of horses had come down to modern times, he wondered briefly? Many, he imagined, and here were men who knew those secrets! He was watching an early herding, the horses pushed into the tangle of the wood, the best way to trap them, in fact, a wonderful way to trap them, in a time before corrals or stables! Run the horse into the thicket, and the sheer difference in size between chaser and chased would have marked the difference between eaten and eater.

  For he had no doubt at that moment – this being a pre-neolithic event – that these beasts were being herded for food, rather than as creatures of burden.

  Striking at the underbrush with long, flint-edged sticks, the four men strode past. And the hindmost of them, looking as broad in his heavy furs as he was tall, turned suddenly to stare at the hooded intruder, green-grey light glittering in pale eyes. On his chest he wore an identical amulet to that which Huxley had found in the Horse Shrine. He touched it, almost nervously, a gesture of luck, perhaps, or courage.

  His companions called to him, shrill sounds, almost musical in their rhythm and pitch, that sent birds whirring from the tree tops. He turned and was gone, consumed by the thickets of holly, and the confusing patterns of light and shade of the birchwood. Nervously, Huxley tugged the green hood of his oilskin lower over his face.

  I followed, of course. Of course! I wished to see this ritual herding through to its final, awful conclusion. For I had now begun to imagine that a sacrifice of horses would be the outcome of the pursuit to which Ash, by her magic, had despatched me.

  Yet, in substance I was wrong. It was not to be the oddly bedecked stallions that were sent on to the afterlife, encouraged there by flint and by flax rope. Not immediately, anyway. In the wide clearing, with its tall, crudely fashioned wood-gods, the horses were disturbed by the smells and the cries of extinguished life. The gathering of winter-clad men calmed the beasts. The glade in the birchwood echoed to the thumping of wood drums and the chanting of ancient hymns. There was laughter within the cacophony of sacrifice, and throughout all, the whooping cries of other herders, the music of magic, punctuating the confusion, serving to bring peace to the restless horses as they were held by their harnessings, and loaded with their first real burden.

  Towards dusk, the horses were sent into the world again, running, slapped to encourage them, back along the broken tracks, towards the edge of the wood, wherever that lay. On their backs, tied firmly to cradles of wood, the horrific shapes of their pale riders watched the gloom, dulled eyes seeing darker worlds than even this darkening forest. The first to depart was a chalk-white corpse, grotesquely garrotted. Then a man, still living, swathed in thorns, screaming. After that, a ragged creature, stinking of blood and acrid smoke from the part-burned but newly skinned pelts that were wrapped around him.

  Finally came a figure decked and dressed in rush and reed, so that only his arms were visible, extended on the crucifix-like frame that was tied about the giant horse. He was on fire; the blaze taking swiftly. Flame streamed into the night, shedding light and heat in eerie streamers as the great stallion galloped in panic towards me.

  I thought I had moved quickly enough to take avoiding action, but before I knew it the beast had collided with me, one front leg striking me a blow to the side, then its shoulder pitching me down. I curled up to protect myself, but my body seemed to disobey and struggled to stand …

  For one eerie moment I sensed I was behind the flaming figure, feeling the heat on my body, the wind and fire on my face, the rough movement of the horse below me.

  The illusion lasted a second only before I was pitched backwards again, stunned and disorientated as I lay on the ground, stifled as if hands were pressing down on my mouth, neck and lungs.

  I recovered swiftly.

  I cannot record the full detail of what I saw in that, clearing – so much has faded from memory, perhaps because of the blow from the stampeding horse. I am still shocked by the nature of the sacrifices and the awareness that the murdered men seemed willing participants in this early form of acknowledgement of the power of the horse. />
  Such wonderful creatures, and yet they would be both friend of Man and carrier of his destruction …

  All of this was passing through my mind as a freezing night fell upon the primaeval world, and other thoughts too: by horse would come war, and plague, and the populations to overrun and overwhelm the food available from the land. By horse would come the fire that clears, and kills, and cleanses.

  But this forest, this event, reflected something that had occurred tens of thousands of years before the present! Was I witnessing one of the first true intuitions of early humankind? That the beast could be both friend and foe to a tribe that increasingly looked for control over nature itself? Sacrifice was made to new gods: the assuaging of fears. And it entertained me to think that later, much later, John the Divine would remember these early fears, and talk of the four horsemen, in fact describing his deep-rooted memories of an ancient understanding …

  But with darkness came silence, and with the freezing silence of night came my helpless abandonment to sleep.

  I awoke from the dream to the wet nuzzling of a dog. I was at the edge of Ryhope Wood – God alone knows how I had got there – in the scrub that overlooks the fields of the Manor House. The dog was a springer, being walked by an alarmed and determined woman, who strode away from what she presumably believed to be a tramp. She called for her hound, which bounded after her, not without a regretful and hungry glance towards me.

  7

  When he opened the back door to Oak Lodge, Jennifer screamed and dropped the mug of tea that she was holding. She looked at her husband through wide, frightened eyes, then collapsed back with relief against the table, laughing and brushing at the tea which had spilled over her dressing gown.

  ‘I didn’t realise you’d gone out again …’

  Her words were meaningless, but he was too tired to think. He said, ‘I must look terrible. I should bath at once.’