Avilion

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘She won’t do it. She thinks she will, but she will not.’

  ‘I know. And if she stays here, she will be isolated once her father dies.’

  ‘Not long to that. He’s drying up, soon to shed.’

  ‘I know. I know.’ Haunter grieved. ‘I can feel the withering in him myself. He’s been sap-lost for a long while.’

  He paused. ‘Perhaps the red in Yssobel could be persuaded to go the Lodge? To the edge?’

  But Green shook her head, a rustle of disappointed certainty in her thoughts. ‘No. Your instinct was right. I exist with her. I know how she feels. This is where she belongs. If she goes anywhere at all, it will be back to Lavondyss. Assuming she can find a new way to get there.’

  ‘The red. So restless, so restless.’

  ‘I know.’

  Jack on his own, assuming that Narine’s words implied resurrection and were not just a trick to allow her to collect her death-meal, would be confined to Oak Lodge and the world beyond.

  Green said nothing. She had patience. Yssobel was in a trance. Narine was wrapped inside her cloak. Won’t Tell was sitting next to Silver. They were talking quietly. Night had come and Peredur had found more torches to make this garden gathering behind the wall into a place of ceremony and respect.

  With a feeling of immense sorrow, a dismaying rush of thought and realisation, Haunter came to terms with that simple truth: that if he went with Narine, Jack could achieve the target of his boyhood dreams. He could be free to live in the world which his father had taken for granted, until Guiwenneth had come into his life and he had lost himself in despair and hope. At the heart of Ryhope Wood.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he whispered to his sister. ‘Go back to Yssi. Tell them that Narine may have me.’

  And with a silent kiss, Green had gone.

  Yssobel woke with a surge and a cry of anguish. For a moment she was startled by the fires around her. Her heart was racing and she felt an immense sense of loss.

  Green confronted her. The decision has been made. We live with it now.

  Narine was triumphant. She raised her wings and began to beat the air. The woman in her was gone. She rose suddenly into the night sky and began to croak.

  Jack’s dead body twisted and writhed for a few moments, and then was still and grey again.

  Yssobel saw a human figure walking down the hill from the Iaelven wood. It was hard to make out features, but Green illuminated the night. The sylvan form of Jack, grey-green, skin gnarled like bark, hair lank like overhanging ivy entwined with arms and legs. He was naked. He approached the tall garden wall, walking unsteadily, and began to raise an arm towards the Villa. It was a gesture of finality, a final call for comfort.

  The dark shape of Narine dropped out of the night and took him in her talons, as swift as a hawk takes a hare, sweeping him aloft as he struggled and screeched in dreadful pain, gathering him into her own cruel custody.

  Narine had tricked them.

  Jack lay cold in death and Peredur and the others moved the body to the coolest room in the Villa. Yssobel felt betrayed and angry, but had already come to terms with the loss of her brother during the Under-realm and Over-lake journey under the direction of the Crow-queen, Narine. It had been a timeless journey, in permanent twilight. No sleep had been needed, and the world around them had existed in silence. They, too, had travelled in silence, only Peredur’s horses - he would not abandon them - making sounds of protest when they were made to swim through the gloom behind the barge that Narine had summoned.

  They might have travelled for a day or so, or a week. The air was cold. Jack had become corpse-grey, but stayed only as if he was asleep.

  In the dead and dark of night, the Iaelven gathered their bows and quietly returned to the entrance to their realm, at the top of the hill. Silver followed, hand in hand with the tall, rather gawky figure of the Hawkings’ boy. It was at the insistence of the Amurngoth that Won’t Tell stayed with them, a reversal of their earlier desire to shed him. In some part of their Iaelvish minds they perhaps saw the human as hostage to future fortune.

  Won’t Tell had not complained, however. Yssobel had heard the laughter between the young man and the glowing, ancient, never-ageing Silver. They had found more than a common tongue of language.

  At dawn, Yssobel walked to the head of the valley. She stood on the rock where she had balanced as a child, staring into the enigmatic and forested curve of the gorge. She missed Odysseus. She was losing Peredur. She felt bleak and alone, but she belonged here, and her life would open to new events and new challenges. It had been impulse that had set her following Guiwenneth into Lavondyss. But behind that impulse had lain the curiosity about her grandfather. She had created a faux-Avilion. But Peredur had been drawn to it - blood drawing blood, green summoning green.

  Only the mismatch of unbound Time had led to their meeting at a similar age.

  Yssobel was holding his portrait. She looked at it now. The sky was beginning to brighten, a rim of bloodlight in the darkness. Red could not see the portrait, but green could, and she stared at the face that she had made when she had dreamed of her mother’s past.

  As she walked back to the villa, Peredur and his two shield men rode slowly towards her from the gate. He was equipped and clearly moving on. Dismounting, he embraced Yssobel awkwardly, then took the picture and stared at it in the dawn light.

  One of his men called, ‘No songs. Please? Nothing poetical, I beg you! We have a journey!’

  Peredur grinned but ignored his friend, still staring at the portrait.

  ‘I’ll go through the wars, by the look of it.’

  ‘I expect you will.’

  ‘In a dream I saw my death, shot down during a flight from an invader. I was not this old.’

  ‘You cannot tell age by the scars of life.’

  ‘True enough. May I keep this? Or is it so precious that you must keep it for me and for my final moment?’

  ‘It’s yours. Take it with a granddaughter’s kiss. Survive the bruises and the scars.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  Peredur looked around, scenting the dawn, the breeze, the forest. Sighing, he said, ‘I have to leave now. Your father told me of a ruined fort, somewhere in the hills behind, along Serpent Pass. I plan to see if it has potential as a defensive base.’

  ‘Dun Peredur,’ Yssobel said quietly.

  He smiled again. ‘Dun Peredur,’ he agreed.

  ‘My mother knew of it. It was a haven to her.’

  ‘Indeed? This Serpent Pass is a place of surprises. I plan to explore it.’

  ‘I plan to explore it too.’

  He bowed deeply. ‘Then we shall find a new crossing place. A place of meeting.’

  Peredur saluted her, remounted, and the three of them rode slowly away. Yssobel had toyed with the idea of telling him that the fort was already his, explaining why it had been a sanctuary for Guiwenneth over the years, but she decided to stay quiet.

  She watched him until he was out of sight, the new sun reflecting off his shield long after his shape had become obscured by distance.

  Back in the Villa, she saw four Iaelven making their way back up the hill. She found Steven sitting by his son, who was now shrouded in some strange fabric, knitted from plant stems and coated with a sticky, waxy substance.

  ‘To preserve him for the journey, as I understand it,’ Steven said, looking up as his daughter entered the cold room. ‘They appear to want to leave at the moment of moonset, which is in the early hours of tomorrow.’ He glanced up. ‘Will you go with them?’

  Yssobel smiled even as she sighed and shook her head. ‘You know I won’t. I can’t. I belong here. I’ve said it before: the Villa is my home. Serpent Pass is the challenge to my curiosity. But dad - you should go. Go home. Go back to fresh earth and human company.’

  ‘And leave you here alone? And lose you again? How could I do that, Yssi? Rianna is almost dead. Hurthig left while you were away. This is a dead place. How could I leave you her
e?’

  Yssobel kissed the crown of his head. ‘Yssi,’ she said pointedly, ‘has plans.’

  ‘I’d be in the way, you mean.’

  ‘Never. But you’d see very little of me. Follow in the tracks of Grandfather George. Write books. You are a collector of timeless moments, timeless events. Share that wonder with the “fresh earth” world.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, holding her hand. ‘Perhaps not. We’ll see.’

  They closed the door to the cold room and went their ways to a brief and restless dream-broken dawn sleep.

  When Yssobel woke, it was the middle of the day. Her name was being murmured. As she opened her eyes she was aware of breath that smelled of rotting vegetation, and a pale moon-glow of a face, so close to her own that as she turned to stare into its watery eyes her nose brushed with its nose.

  ‘Yssi!’ the apparition hissed again. ‘Yssi!’

  She scurried away from the foul form, holding in her cry of dismay. And gradually, as her moment’s panic passed, she recognised the pallid but very much vibrant features of her brother Jack.

  But Jack was not vibrant in his mind. He was vacant and soon became ill. For a day he lay curled and in pain, sometimes screaming, sometimes crying, at other times retching violently before wrapping his arms around his legs and mewling like an infant.

  Rianna, in tears, tried to feed him a thin soup, but he turned his head away, eventually slapping the clay mug so that the warm broth splashed across the floor of his room.

  With nightfall, Steven and Yssobel helped him to his bed, and Yssobel lay down below the furs with him, her arms around his shuddering body. He lay, his face away from her, and cried until she could bear it no longer. She woke Won’t Tell and asked him to keep watch, and the young man agreed willingly, sitting on the wooden bed, a hand resting on the weeping man’s shoulder.

  Eventually, Jack managed to sleep, a sleep so deep that he did not emerge from it until the middle of the following day.

  He suddenly sat upright. The grey pallor had disappeared from his cheeks, though his eyes were wide and startled. ‘Hungry . . .’

  Rianna raced from the room and came back with a bowl of the same soup. Jack drank from the bowl, groaned loudly and threw himself sideways as the food refused to stay down. But there was now something of true life in him. A while later he ate again, then seemed to recognise those around him.

  ‘Yssi,’ he whispered hoarsely, and then, ‘Dad. What happened to me? I feel like a ghost. I’m not real. What’s happened?’

  Steven and Yssobel exchanged a nervous glance. Then Yssobel took Jack by the hand and hauled him to his feet. He was wobbly, unsteady, and he smelled very bad.

  ‘We’re going to get you shaved, bathed and into new clothes.’

  ‘I’m a ragged man. I can tell.’

  ‘Worse than the worst mythago. But we’ll soon have you right.’

  And later, when he was kempt and clean, and had found his senses, Yssobel told him of Haunter’s sacrifice.

  He slumped forward, and tears came again. ‘I knew it. I could tell he wasn’t there. I feel like a ghost, Yssi. I’m not complete, just rag and bone.’

  ‘You’re Jack,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘All blood now. And the journey that lies ahead of you is your final journey, and you’ll be able to explore your human world.’

  Yssobel explained what had happened. Jack listened, shaking his head, but gradually began to accept what had occurred. When Steven came and hugged him, he breathed very softly and whispered, ‘Do I go or do I stay?’

  ‘Do what you must. Do what feels right.’

  Jack stepped back, his face a grimace of indecision and confusion. Then he said, ‘I don’t - I don’t feel I belong here any more.’

  Steven’s own face was a mask of repressed grief. ‘I know. I know. I always knew. Even with the green side inhabiting you, the call of the old home was stronger in you than in Yssi.’

  ‘I’ve lost something that I loved. I cannot feel the earth any more.’

  ‘Don’t be closed down by lost love. Find new love. Go to the edge. Rebuild my old home.’

  Jack turned on his father, and Steven was shocked by the way his son had grabbed him by the arms, a blaze of fury in his eyes as he said, ‘No! Not without you! We rebuild together. All of us - you, Yssi, Rianna. We can find the way home.’

  Steven disengaged himself carefully from the furious grip. ‘The Amurngoth have agreed to take your young friend back to his family, in exchange for the Iaelven child they left behind. Your friend will be safe, and you should go with them. How can I go back? What would I do there?’

  Yssobel said quietly, ‘Take over from your father. Write books. Understand the way things began. Address the mystery from a place where a man can think without the intrusion of the need to survive.’

  Jack became aware of Rianna, her arms folded, her pale, drawn face creased with a frown. She turned away and walked back into the Villa. Steven glanced round, as if the sudden breeze of her anger had caught his attention. Without looking back, he followed Rianna into the crumbling building.

  Yssobel came up to her brother. ‘You must, you truly must! Take him with you.’

  ‘I think he and Rianna . . .’

  She closed his mouth with her finger. ‘Don’t ask. Don’t think. Take him with you. He belongs where his father dreamed.’

  ‘And you?’

  Yssobel drew a deep breath, then took Jack’s hand and walked with him to the gate; and through the gate to the head of the valley.

  ‘What do you see?’ she asked. There was a stiff wind blowing. Cloud shadow made the gorge indistinct; it was almost in darkness where it curved out of sight, where it began to drop towards the monolith to Peredur, and the track to the lake.

  Without Haunter, Jack could see nothing but the land, the crags, the cliffs, the forested edges of the winding river, the silver thread that flowed in no particular direction, a life-force of its own existing at the edge of the conscious world.

  ‘She came from there, she has returned. What else can I say? Guiwenneth has made this path her own.’

  ‘And she will come back,’ Yssobel said, with a smile. ‘And I will be waiting for her.’

  ‘She will not come back. She exists in you!’

  ‘And you.’

  ‘No,’ Jack said, with a grim look at the distant shadows. ‘No longer with me.’

  His sister caught his hand again. ‘She will come back. But Jack, you and I now live in different worlds. Please go home, and take Steven with you. Dear old dad. So lost now. And think of me fondly. And dream wonderful dreams.’

  He had no words for a moment. Then he asked, ‘Yssi: what dream do you have? To wait for the return of a mother created out of bark, flower and cold earth? Is that all? What dream will sustain you until the woman comes back through Imarn Uklyss?’

  But Yssobel had an answer for him. ‘Serpent Pass.’

  Jack was instantly intrigued, half smiling as he remembered his sister’s encounters with Odysseus, in the Greek’s adolescent cave, in his place of preparation. ‘You’re going to find him again?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Odysseus.’

  ‘Absolutely not. Odysseus has embarked upon a journey far greater than mine. No: Serpent Pass is a place of mystery. It is endless, and I will never be bored, or short of a challenge. Nothing will decay in me as fast as the brick in our Villa, so long as I have a valley to explore.’

  After a moment, Jack asked, ‘What do you expect to find there?’

  ‘Whatever is to be found.’

  He laughed, looking back to where their father was still in a state of perplexed indecision. Yssobel queried his response. He explained about his father’s request for artefacts from Oak Lodge.

  ‘He wanted a story book. I found it in a pile of musty old volumes. It had his name written inside it. It was called The Time Machine.’

  Yssobel shrugged with recognition. ‘He was always talking about it. Grandfather George had gi
ven it to him as a birthday present.’

  Jack accepted the fact without acknowledging that he hadn’t known it. ‘I hadn’t realised until I found them - the books, that is - how compact they were, how . . .’ He tried to find the word. ‘How useful. They’re tiny! They would hardly make a fire. You can hold them in the palm of your hand! And yet they are a source of visions and adventure. I read the story on the way back from Oak Lodge, following the Iaelven.’

  Yssobel asked about the nature of the tale, and Jack explained: it was about a man who had created a machine that could visit the future. ‘His journey was remarkable. I was overwhelmed by it.’

  ‘What did he find there? This man. According to the book.’

  ‘A form of life that was in fact death.’ Jack struggled to remember the events, written by a man called Wells. ‘Handsome people in the future, called Elwe, or something like that, but living for nothing but beauty. But living in an under-realm, there were dead creatures, Morloks, or Morlgoths, I can’t recall clearly. And they were very much alive and living for the kill. They had design in their lives. They fed on the Elwe, slaughtered them. He described a dead world where nothing had its true place. An end of life as we know it. An end of everything. Why did Steven want to keep this book, I wonder?’

  ‘Perhaps for the pure wonder of it?’ Yssobel murmured after a moment. ‘But it sounds miserable.’ She dragged her brother back to reality. ‘And I don’t know why dad wanted such a piece of misery. Unless something written in it addresses hope and a dream fulfilled.’

  ‘We’re back to dreams.’

  She giggled. ‘And on that note, a song comes to me . . .’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Yssobel found her singing voice, hoarse and harsh because of what had occurred recently, but the words were rendered with affection.

  Brother Jack, brother Jack, he’s lost his shadow, but hears my cry;

  Our brother Jack is back!

  And he will find his place upon the path, and one day he will die,

  But Jack is back,

  The Haunter’s gone,

  A new world waits in terror for his clumsy life,