Avilion

by Robert Holdstock

  She tore herself free from the dryad tree. Her skin was ripped through her thin clothing and her hair was torn. She stumbled for a moment, aware that she was surrounded by movement and noise, and that the land was shifting. From what she had learned about Legion, she was aware that it was preparing to move through time.

  Everywhere the rattle of armour being piled onto carts, the laughter that comes with a fresh task, the dogs that howl; the children making mayhem, or crying. The thunder of hooves. The rattle of chariots and the soothing voices of men, calming the nervous horses.

  The female dryad was standing close by, holding Yssobel’s armour. In the language common between her and Yssobel’s green side, she whispered, ‘I’m sorry for your wounds.’

  Yssobel shook her head. It’s of no matter. The slender woman turned away, as if ashamed. Yssobel called, ‘Thank you. All this will be gone soon.’

  ‘Good,’ the tree nymph said. Her eyes glistened with sap. She returned to her own place, leaning back into the trunk, and became as the tree she guarded, disturbed for only a moment as she touched a strange stain.

  Yssobel’s blood was still on the bark.

  Yssobel checked her wounds quickly, licked the more persistently bleeding ones and then smeared mud onto them. She was more grazed than torn. It did not occur to her to look around for Odysseus. She had seen the lake and seen her mother and she was determined to fight her way through this heaving riot of army to find her.

  She put on the armour. Then she heard her name called.

  Cloaked and ready to travel, Odysseus stood before her, the Athenians grouped behind him. His horsehair-plumed helmet was hanging by its strap from his right hand.

  ‘These men lost their families in wars between cities. They like the idea of fighting new challenges on strange beaches. So do I. We have joined forces for the moment.’

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ Yssobel said wanly. ‘I’ll miss Serpent Pass.’

  Though, truthfully, she had long since come to terms with the loss of her friend from the cave in the deep hills.

  He nodded. ‘It was by exploring further up that pass which had come to the river that brought me to the island where you found me. There is so much connection in this world. I’m sure our paths will cross again.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  They did not approach each other. Yssobel raised her hand and Odysseus bowed his head.

  As she weaved her way through the confusion, she was approached, laughed at, challenged for her cropped hair, followed; mocked. She could feel the sense of the words: a woman who wears her hair around her waist!

  Yssobel ignored it all. As once before, she had scented the freshness of a lake. She pushed through the forest, following her instincts. Campfires were being extinguished, skins rolled up, iron, bronze and stone being checked, honed, polished, all depending on the ghost who carried it.

  Noise and mayhem: but ahead of her, the laughter of children swimming, their last dip in the pool, perhaps, before they were required to rejoin the baggage train.

  The lake lay beyond a screen of drooping willows and was reached by a narrow path where two women crouched on their haunches, observing with hostility anyone who approached. Further away, sprawled on their sides, were two lightly armed men whose expression suggested they were not content. They watched as Yssobel walked past them, one of them sitting up and frowning as if he recognised her.

  The two women guarding the path stood and quickly barred the way. They were dressed in short black tunics over loose highly patterned trousers. Their expressions were fierce. They carried short bows, each with an arrow notched, ready for a quick and easy strike. Their dark hair was shaved high above the right ear and they wore ear guards, suggesting the way in which they used their small but effective weapons.

  But they too seemed to recognise Yssobel.

  ‘I’ve come to find my mother,’ she said.

  Whether they understood or not, they nodded, glancing at the belt of auburn hair, one of them even half smiling as they let her through the willows and along the path.

  Guiwenneth was emerging from the lake as her daughter approached. She was wringing the water from her hair as she caught sight of Yssobel and for a moment was startled. Then she gave a shout of what sounded like despair. She walked to where her clothes were strewn on the bank and tugged them on. This was a small lake, and its cheerful human content was being hauled out, with reluctance, by mothers of all ages.

  ‘Why did you follow me?’ Guiwenneth asked in a whisper, frowning. ‘I told you not to.’ There were tears in her eyes, and a touch of anger in her look.

  ‘Why did you go?’ Yssobel retorted, taken aback, unable to prevent the anger in her own voice. This was a different Guiwenneth to the one she had seen reflected in the Palace of Green Porcelain, and yet she was most certainly the same woman. ‘Why did you leave the villa?’

  Guiwenneth, her face like pale stone, walked past her daughter without a word. Yssobel watched her return along the path to where the army was preparing for the move. Then she followed as quickly as she could. She saw the two armed men stand and accompany her mother, each of them glancing back at Yssobel and shaking their heads in warning.

  Guiwenneth’s small camp was hidden and sheltered well, pitched between three trees, covered with a broad square of canvas. It was a short walk from the lake’s edge. Four horses were tethered nearby, blanketed, saddled, bridled, ready for the ride.

  The woman herself sat in the gloom of her own cover, and her own fear.

  When she sensed Yssobel approaching, she rose and whispered again, ‘Why did you follow me?’

  ‘Because I love you,’ Yssobel said. ‘And I couldn’t understand why you left. I’m free to make my own choices. I choose to hold on to what I have. I don’t know how we’ll do it, but we can return from this place.’

  Arms crossed, the older woman stared defiantly up at her daughter. ‘You never understood! You never listened. You never felt for me, for what he’d done to me. You broke my heart!’

  Yssobel wanted so much just to take her mother in her arms. They faced each other, separated by a confusion of anger, joined by memories of their years together in the villa.

  ‘When I first saw him—’ Yssobel began.

  ‘You saw him?’ Guiwenneth was suddenly hard-featured again.

  ‘When I sensed him! When I was young. When Steven took me to the head of the valley. You know this!’

  ‘What about it?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Gwin . . . he seemed so lost, so lonely.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘No. Christian. The resurrected man.’

  It was the wrong thing to say. She should have known it. Guiwenneth went into a silent fury. She stood and came up to Yssobel, reached out and took her daughter’s cheek in her fingers, green eyes sparkling with tears of frustration, almost snarling as she said, ‘He was not lost, you young fool. He was playing the game he plays so well. To look sad, to seem weak, to look for sympathy. “Find your prey and catch it.” And rape it! You were duped! Your fascination was a haunting - in his hunting ground. If he’s close, I’ll kill him. If you try to stop me ...’

  She pushed Yssobel down to the earth, standing over her, hand on the belt where her sheathed blade was slung. ‘I’ll kill you too.’

  ‘You don’t mean that. You couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps you’re right,’ Guiwenneth repeated forlornly.

  She looked up, smelled the air, glancing around nervously. A strong wind was blowing, and the movement in the earth was powerful once more.

  But this was a different movement. This was not the tension of departing, the tremor of Legion moving off through time, but of something rising, all-encompassing.

  To both women’s astonishment, the lake began to flood its banks, flowing towards them. Distantly, children ran excitedly as the waves and the reeds, detached from their resting place, lapped and brushed at their heels.

  The sky darkened.r />
  Then the earth itself gave birth.

  Guiwenneth dreams

  I had come to the edge, I knew it. I was lost, but I found Steven.

  We could hardly understand each other except for the fact that we knew each other, having never known each other. As if from a shared dream.

  He was young: so was I. I remember the wide-eyed consternation and delight in his face as I first approached him. I had walked from the edge of the wood into a small compound, beside a large villa made of red and black brick. I had never seen its like before. A tall and beautiful home. A house which echoed with time and laughter, but also with a darkness that I could not comprehend.

  Steven was shy, gentle, funny; and very curious about me.

  Our languages combined to create an understanding and he told me stories of his life, and I tested him with riddles from mine. He seemed to know the answer every time, and I knew that when we laughed, one evening, sitting outside the strange villa and drinking a dark wine that made us laugh even more - I knew that it was he who had called me from my dream.

  I loved him there and then.

  It was so short a time of love and contentment. The edge of the wood burst into fire. Hawks came tumbling through, bronze-metalled men, savage and screeching, the hawk-masks they wore taking on a life of their own. And the horsemen followed them. And the fat and ugly man came through last of all, his hair burning, a crown of fire. He ignored the flame that scarred his head until one of his comrades reached out and brushed the fire away. It was as if he had not been troubled by the heat - though the marks were there.

  His eyes were on me, and on Steven, my lover, caught by those Hawks and held down.

  Others dragged me and tied me. I was slung over the broad back of this burned man’s horse. He lifted my face and kissed me, grinning with triumph. He said words that made me sick. He turned to Steven, his brother, and the last I saw was Steven being hanged by the neck from a rafter.

  I knew later that he had survived that execution.

  I had been told tales of ‘eternity’. I came to know its meaning. Eternity is not endless; it is pain and despair for what seems to be a lifetime. But there is peace at the end of it.

  The long trek through the great wood, the growing desire in this burned-haired man to exercise his strength upon me, which finally he did, all of it lasted an age.

  There was no desire in him when done, no pleasure, just disappointment.

  It was Steven who had called to me, not that man, that Christian. And Christian knew it. He went through agony. I could see it in his face and in the screaming of his words, in his anger at having found what he thought would be love, finding only eyes that were cold and hard. I was a ghost in his world; but I was Steven’s ghost, not his. And I was glad to be Steven’s ghost. Not his.

  He carried me far, a prisoner, bound and protected, cherished yet hated.

  Then we were in snow, a winter place, although a wall of fire burned by my father’s stone, where my father’s life was carved; and Lavondyss lay a few steps away if you knew how to get there.

  Christian was lost, desperate, alone. He had no purpose, he had no desire.

  He had me killed.

  As I died, I remembered one of the songs that the Jaguth had sung in my later life. It was my father’s song, though he had perished before I ever knew him.

  Such is the nature of all men.

  Shallow defies their depth

  When tenderness and anger come surging as a flood.

  Deep-rooted uncertainty, and the need for love,

  Conflict within the riot of their blood.

  And where am I now? I have met the man who is my father and yet who is far younger than me. Where am I now? Is this a death dream?

  I ache for the need to kill the man who haunts me. I also ache for the need to love. And my daughter haunts me, as if I’m some resurrected ghost . . .

  Yssobel suddenly took her mother by the right shoulder and backside and threw her into the lake. The woman came up, spluttering and angry, but woken loudly from the spoken and savage reminiscence. Her daughter stood on the bank, furious. ‘Stop dreaming, Gwin! Why did you leave? The true reason!’

  Guiwenneth shouted back, ‘Because I’m dead!’

  ‘You don’t look dead to me,’ her daughter replied coldly. ‘Get out of the lake, mother. Something is happening and I don’t like the feel of it.’

  The earth was birthing a new forest, a forest of yews. The children ran screaming. Horses panicked. The world became darkened with green, even the lake draining down as the wood consumed Legion.

  But within this new growth surfaced old hate.

  Christian moved through the burgeoning underbrush without effort, stepping between the rising trees, his eyes fixed on Guiwenneth. Behind him came five men, their long cloaks flapping as an autumn wind blew cold and hard. For a moment he saw Yssobel and hesitated in his step. Guiwenneth ran for her sword, but Christian was faster. He pushed her into the water, her second drenching, following her in.

  Yssobel stood defiantly before the five men. Peredur suddenly stepped among them and they all seemed alarmed. They had been expecting Aelfrith, no doubt. Peredur’s face was dark with anger and pain.

  ‘If any one of you enters the lake,’ Yssobel said quietly, ‘they must pass me first.’

  A furious struggle was taking place. Peredur stepped forward. ‘What happens in the water happens. I promise you there will be no interference.’

  He came and stood by Yssobel, turning to face Christian’s companions.

  Guiwenneth and Christian were below the surface. There was a gush of red among the rushes. Guiwenneth surfaced and screamed, then dived again. Christian came up, howling like a hound. He too sank again.

  When he came out of the water he was blood-bedraggled and opened. He held himself together, kneeling carefully, looking up at his companions and at Yssobel. Such sadness in his eyes.

  Christian seemed to come to a sudden understanding. ‘It wasn’t her. She was not the ghost I kept seeing. You were the ghost.’

  He was a torn and forlorn man. Yssobel went to him, crouching down, lifting his chin. She contemplated him for a long moment. ‘I dreamed of you. I even painted you.’

  ‘You haunted me.’ Regret and confusion softened his scarred features. He shook his head, gazing at the woman. ‘You are so like Guiwenneth.’

  ‘Her daughter should be just that!’

  ‘Her daughter . . .’

  ‘Everything must end,’ Yssobel murmured. ‘Dreams end the fastest.’

  ‘I suppose it must.’ He looked up, still holding himself tightly. Then he smiled. ‘Why did you cut your hair?’

  ‘You were going to damage me.’

  Christian shook his head. ‘Never. I would never have done that. I was a man afraid, and my men knew it. I was a man who took a wrong direction at the crossing place. But I feared Guiwenneth.’

  ‘You killed her once. What have you done now?’

  The wind was becoming fierce. There was confusion in the air. The widened lake heaved against the reeds. Christian’s men had backed away, drawing their long cloaks around their bodies.

  Yssobel looked at the man who she knew to be her grandfather.

  ‘What do I do? I have a greater task ahead of me. What do I do with this man?’

  Peredur drew in his breath, then shook his head. ‘Whatever you must. Whatever seems right.’

  Then from behind them: ‘You’ll do nothing!’

  Guiwenneth emerged from the lake, bloodied and furious. ‘Leave this to me,’ she growled, and walked to where Christian was sprawled.

  She stood over him, the weapon in her hand held low. Her look was determined as she pushed back her saturated hair. She was holding her side. With a long and searching stare at her daughter, she asked: ‘Have you finished charming him? I hope so. I don’t think I have very long, thanks to his blade.’

  The blow was quick and clean. Christian was gone in an instant.

  Moth
er looked at daughter, softly now. ‘Don’t try to find me again, Yssi. Go back and care for Steven. If there’s any finding to do, leave it to me.’ Hesitating only for a moment, Guiwenneth came forward and put her arms around Yssobel, leaning her face against her daughter’s. ‘I was here before, and came back. I’ll come back again, I promise. I always loved you, Yssi. I was only ever angered by you; and that anger came from fear.’

  She kissed her daughter without meeting her tearful gaze, then stepped back. She tilted back her head and uttered a series of eerie wailing cries. They had the effect of making everything go still, except for the birds, which rose in panic from their roosts in the forest.

  Legion, in the distance, was still moving in its slow, cumbersome, rhythmic way.

  Again, Guiwenneth gave voice to the call.

  The sky darkened and the wind changed, still fierce but now bringing with it a powerful animal smell. From the shadows among the yews, five huge ragged figures emerged, draped in layers of hide and fur, and wearing the masks of deer, antlers cropped to stubs.

  Guiwenneth said, ‘I felt human for a long time, but I am green; I am mythago. I always was. It’s time for me to return. If only for a while.’

  And with that, she walked towards the Jaguth. One raised its mask. A face neither human nor animal watched her, and a hand reached out for her. ‘Magidion!’ she cried. ‘I knew you would not be far away!’

  She shook the Jaguth’s broad shoulders and the group clustered protectively around the woman, turning and disappearing with her into the darkness. For a brief moment her pale features could be glimpsed, staring back at the lake.

  The face faded like a dying flame, and Guiwenneth was gone.

  After a while, Yssobel addressed a question to Peredur. ‘Why did you not protect her?’

  He shook his head and said softly, ‘Because it was her end; and she knew it. In the form that I am, I am not yet quite ready to sire the small beast that will be your mother. Don’t question Time. Question the danger that is coming to you.’

  ‘Then how did you recognise her?’