Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

by Robert Holdstock

  And in due course – by now time had ceased to register – I came to the greater, darker clearing among the massive oaks, the shrine, well known to my father, that was the place of the Horse Goddess. I had heard the rattle of the skulls tied to the lower boughs and that morbid sound drew me from the darkness into the circle of light that illuminated the massive statue at the centre of the sanctuary. Made of bones and branches, the Horse faced me, eerily watching me from the eyes that had been shaped in the bridled head. There was a strong breeze and the leather trappings that adorned the hundred skulls around the edge of the clearing whipped like tendrils, clattering where their metal decorations clashed.

  I hated this place; I believe Huxley had hated it. But it was the entrance to the inner forest, and all things passed this way, and therefore Guiwenneth – my Guiwenneth, the wild girl grown older – had passed this way, too.

  A sudden shaft of daylight, released as the canopy rolled and shifted in the wind, illuminated the brilliant shield that stood between the statue’s legs. And I remembered something that my father had written about just such a shield, which changed according to who or what passed by:

  If there is significance in the restless decor and patterning of the shield, I have yet to find it. But that it does change is of great interest. The designs seem to reflect the latest visitor from the heart of the wood: Wessex warrior-priests of the Bronze Age fading into the figures of Aegean dancers, and then to Viking dragon ships or lost Roman legions – each mark, each picture, each symbol telling a tale, or suggesting a route if the puzzle can be pieced together.

  The shield was oval and as tall as a man. Rimmed and with a central boss of iron, patterned in bronze on the outer leather, it was made of oak so thick that I could not lift it. It was certainly not meant to be used in war or combat, at least not by men of my own physical stature.

  I examined the detail of the latest design to cover its face. Five ravens circled the top of the shield; a white horse, curiously elongated and catlike, graced its centre; and a white-faced mask, framed in luxuriant auburn hair, stared at me from the lower quarter. This mask appeared to be the object of desire of two crudely drawn wrestling warriors, whose interlocked arms and grimacing faces formed a circle above it.

  I stared at that image for a long time. I couldn’t help feeling it signalled that Guiwenneth had passed by this way, but also that my father was still in the deep, still searching for the woman who obsessed him.

  To the naked eye there was no way of telling which direction among the great oaks the party had taken some hours previously. But Huxley’s inventiveness, his residual-aura-detector, should at least have been able to indicate the general direction of the departure. This small gadget, like a torch but with neither bulb nor glass at its end, only a series of copper needles fanning out like a pin cushion, functioned (he had claimed) by responding to the residual life energy of those who had passed by. Huxley had been infatuated by the notion of ley lines and patterns of energy and memory both in earth and in the confined spaces of glades and clearings, even in the root network of the heartwood itself. A small dial indicated the highest source of this residual aura by the simple device of a needle flicking to maximum and then dropping again, as a magnet might respond to a lodestone.

  To my surprise – and to my admiring delight – the needle duly flicked and I began my journey to the heart of the wood, passing to the right of the statue of the Horse, following the route suggested by this unlikely piece of electronics. There was a heavy scent of mould in the air, and a claustrophobic darkness for a while, but in a minute or so the oppressive sense of enclosure dissipated, as I had known it would, and I was on a wide track, a summer sun overhead, the land opening before me and dropping away, perhaps to a river. In the distance the land rose again into the great swathe of primal forest that would soon be my home for as long as I remained in Ryhope Wood.

  The ridge ahead of me was like the hunched back of an animal, topped with a spine of conifers that reminded me of quills. This was the Hogback Ridge, a place which Huxley had often visited and referred to in his journal. Indeed, as I tentatively explored the rocks and wind-curled thorns that fringed the rise of land, I found the rusting remnants of more of his strange detectors, fragments of metal, broken dials attached to trunk and branch, their function long since dead with time.

  How often had my father paced to the summit of this ridge, I wondered? And what had his machines told him about the ebb and flow of myth and legend in this place? It was a strange sensation to know that the man had made his camp here, surveying the inner wood perhaps from this very spot.

  But Huxley was now deeper, engaged on his own journey. He was beyond this ridge, and beyond the river that I knew curved around the bottom of the hill, taking the traveller through deep gorges and towards the setting sun. To dwell on the flux of time and space in this realm was to go mad with confusion. At any moment, the man might come striding through the spine of trees, aged by tens of years, perhaps by days only.

  These thoughts occupied me for a while. I was reluctant to leave this place of open hill and rusting intellect; it was my father’s shrine, in every sense and in every way as significant as the gruesome Horse that marked the multitude of crossroads into the past.

  But after an hour I had made a sort of peace with this place and ascended to the spine of the ridge. Rarefied, clean air, a crisp breeze, a wonderful silence, these were the sensations as I stood between two tall conifers, my arms outstretched like a man on a cross, or a man embracing the far horizon. I was heady with triumph and with anticipation. I had already seen a coil of smoke curling from the forest below me. Light shimmered on movement for as far as the eye could see across this ocean of wildwood. Something was out there waiting for me, and the thought of this was both frightening and exhilarating. And I assumed, also, that Guiwenneth herself would be there, at the edge of the inner forest. And it was with confidence, if caution, that I began the walk down to the hidden river, and that enigmatic curl of smoke.

  I had begun the journey, and I had made my first mistake.

  PART TWO

  The Forlorn Hope

  There is no limit to my foreignness, every word means something to someone somewhere. I will find one you know.

  Alanna Bondar, from Agawa host

  Five

  I had expected to find a camp at the riverside below me, smouldering embers signalling its position. In feet I found a funeral pyre, crudely and hurriedly erected, only half consumed by flame, sufficient to char but not cremate the long body that lay upon it, its hands on its chest. The pyre was still glowing and in time the journey of this particular dead soul would be achieved, but for the moment it stood in a clearing among smoke-blackened crack-willows, both a tribute to the loyalty of friends and a consequence of the need of those friends to travel quickly.

  Everything about the arching corpse, its grim mouth gaping, suggested that it was a man. Four crudely shaped wooden poles had been erected at the points of the pyre, and ogham symbols had been hacked upon them, but without a knowledge of that code the meaning was elusive. I noticed, though, a fragment of bronze, a segment of tube that had been placed upon the dead man’s chest, perhaps, before rolling off as the cadaver had writhed in the first, fierce heat. And at once I was reminded of the vertical bronze trumpet I had glimpsed from Oak Lodge. This might have been the mouthpiece.

  How this man had died I couldn’t tell. I approached, but a gust of wind enflamed the smouldering embers and the fire licked high for a few seconds before dying down. I stepped back to a respectful distance.

  In a second clearing, however, some way from the river, I gained a fair idea as to how the trumpet-blower had met his end. There had been a hard fight here, and the sour-sweet smell of it was strong on the humid air. A severed hand lay in the protecting curl of an elm’s root; long locks of black hair, scalp attached, were caught in cracks in the bark of the same tree; slices of blood-stained leather and linen clothing lay everywhere. The trees sh
owed the marks of slashing blades, powerfully deployed. And huddled together, as if asleep, two dead men had been placed in the overhang of a thorn bush, side by side, heads tucked down, knees drawn up, arms folded. They might have been Buddhist monks in deep contemplation. They were naked, no doubt since clothing and weapons were always of value to someone, somewhere, and I guessed that these had been the enemy of those who had built the pyre.

  There had been an encounter, then, but with whom it was hard to tell. That the two dead men were tattooed was not surprising. Huxley had written several times that: it seems all life in prehistoric ages boasts body decoration of this type; like a coded script, the designs contain more information than is at first apparent.

  But I could not read them.

  Their hair was long, formed into braided locks interwoven with strips of leather and colourful beads, all bloody now. They were fly-ridden and beginning to stink and I didn’t linger long. But I was sure that Guiwenneth had been taken by surprise by these men, and she and her group had fought hard for their lives, losing the trumpet-blower before continuing their inward journey, the direction of which I soon discovered as I prowled the edge of the river.

  An exposed bank of sand stretched out from below the low-hanging foliage and I saw where people had passed, walking towards the setting sun. A hundred yards from the spit of sand, the bank was furrowed where canoes had been stored and launched.

  One small boat remained, without paddle or seat, like a floating coffin, perhaps, but a hulk of oiled wood and patched hide that at least was river-worthy. Had it been left for me? Who could tell? But surely, had there been a fear of being followed, my party would have taken the boat to frustrate my pursuit.

  I was to drift with the current, it seemed to me, and await further contact.

  What Fates, what forces were guiding the flow of my own journey? It hardly seemed to matter. To enter Ryhope was to enter a confusion at the edge of things, a sensory jumble of sound and vision – glimpses and echoes that could not be grasped – that was both frightening and seductive. I had experienced these feelings on a previous occasion, and had become determined to fight through the fear, to fight the dizzying defences of this semi-sentient wildwood, to find that certain moment when a definable and welcome peace replaced the screams of the anxious intellect and the tricks that the forest was playing. It was a moment when a hand seemed to reach out and soothe everything, from mind to brow. There was a certainty attached to it, a feeling that the direction was right, that the events which were being witnessed, and the loss of control, were all being carefully monitored. I was like a child, secure in the assertion and confidence of a parent, unaware, of course, that the parent was trained to respond to my fears in just this way.

  Previously, I had turned about when this catharsis had occurred. Now, with the rediscovery of Guiwenneth as my goal, I fought against the feeling to return and let events take their course.

  I thought of Longfellow as I launched the short canoe; I lay back, my pack at my head, my arms over the side of the simple, smooth-hewn craft; I let the river take me and watched the sky through the overreaching branches of the trees. I let the motion of hull and water become the movement of time itself, taking me backwards, ever backwards, into a distance of which I had only dreamed.

  This was the edge of the Wilderness. It was the true entrance to the past and to the Otherworld and I became afraid to watch it, aware of its beauty and its confusion. To try to see it, to document it, would perhaps have been to find that it ceased to exist; and it would spit me out, hurl me back into the bright air near the cornfield by Oak Lodge, drifting again on a stream in England rather than on a river that flowed into the realm of ghosts.

  I thought of Longfellow, and his Hiawatha.

  I thought of Arthur on his way to Avalon, stretched out in his barge, three queens attending to his mortal wounds. And I rued the lack of women, black cowled or otherwise. How nice, how pleasant it would have been, to have had their strange company on this sluggish journey to the past.

  And so this simple boat of fate brought me, by the hour, towards my first encounter with the bloodied, angry group that had been to the edge of their world to find me, and had suffered a terrible loss as they returned to the garrison that protected them.

  I drifted for a long time, though precisely how long is hard to know. For a while I stared at the watch on my wrist, noting the second hand mark the passage of minutes, but this objective observation soon ceased to relate to the subjective experience, and within a few hours the mechanism had wound down and I left it so.

  Like a leaf on a stream, the canoe turned slowly in the deeper water. Later, it grounded in the shallows and I lazily reached over the side to push the craft back into the flow. Night descended then departed, and at dawn I was dew-covered and shivering, but still at peace. That same dawn, as I stared through the broken canopy over the water at the brightening sky, a massive, human shape stepped across the river and across my boat, startling me. He was untrousered and massive – I saw no more than the legs and the bulbous droop of the swinging genitals as the stride was taken, and heard a sound like rolling thunder that might have been his voice. Sitting up, shaking languor from my eyes and mind, I began to take more interest in the direction of my travel.

  A while later a second figure appeared in mid-river, walking towards me, waist deep in the water. The current carried me rapidly towards this bearded human male; he was large, a giant, though not like the river-striding man I had seen before, and he grinned as I came towards him. He carried ropes over one shoulder, each attached to a boat, ten in all, some small and sleek, some simple, one ornate and masted, like a royal barque. From what I could see of him I reckoned him to be ten feet tall at least. His hand, as it reached ahead of him to stop my own canoe, was the size of a dinner plate. Strong fingers gripped the prow and he struggled to keep my craft from turning and twisting away from him. He had kindly eyes, lank black hair, a water-saturated beard and gleaming teeth. He wore a green and patterned shirt that gaped open to his huge meat-fattened belly.

  ‘Elidyr,’ he said, his voice deep and loud, and repeated the word. I slapped my chest and responded with, ‘Christian.’

  ‘Elidyr,’ he repeated, then pressed the boat’s prow against his belly, releasing his hand for a moment to make an odd little walking movement in the air, then touching the tips of his fingers to his chest and cocking his head. ‘Elidyr,’ he said softly.

  ‘Christian,’ I said in the same soft tone. He looked puzzled.

  I could learn little of the man at this stage of our encounter, of course, but because he would stay with me for a while, I would learn that Elidyr meant ‘guide’, though the nature of his guidance was far more complex than I realised. He certainly seemed confused, however, standing there with the river flowing and soaking him, and the ten small boats shifting restlessly in his wake. Bodies lay in them, I could see, and smoke rose from two.

  Elidyr kept looking back downriver, to the east. (The sun had risen in that direction, so I considered it to be the east.) Then he would look ahead to where I had come from, and frown and sigh. It was decision time, that much was clear, and he was having a terrible time with it. His sighs made the leaves tremble. The anxious beating of his free hand against the water made waves break against the rocks. Had he been looking for me? Did he recognise me? Had I arrived unexpectedly? Whatever was inspiring this indecision, it was clear that Elidyr was confronting a situation he had not anticipated.

  After a while he let go of five ropes and let the boats slip away from him. The river turned them, the low branches snagged them, but they were swept away downstream and had soon vanished. When they had gone, Elidyr waded to the bank and tied the other boats to the bough of a fallen tree. He unfurled a coil of rope from his waist and secured my own canoe, then walked up into an outcrop of rocks, stripping off shirt and trousers and slapping them against the stone, beating out the water. He was certainly about ten feet tall and I was in awe of the man.


  As he attended to his rough ablutions, I inspected his charges, and was shocked by what I saw.

  In a round coracle decorated with the eyes of animals on its oil-skinned sides, a grey-haired brute, clad in tooth-decorated buckskin, lay as if softly sleeping, a fistful of thin-shafted, flint-tipped fishing spears by his side. A mangy-looking hound, more wolf than dog, was draped across his belly, eyelids fluttering to expose the dark eyes that struggled to see from its hunt-dream. It was the breathing of this hound that gave the illusion of life to its owner.

  By contrast, in an ornate riverboat painted in sumptuous blues and reds, with an eagle-prow and roaring-lion stern, a man lay on rain-saturated and now mouldy cushions, a scimitar across his bloody body, one hand on the gash that had opened his belly and stained the green and purple silk of his shirt and billowing pantaloons. His beard was neat, in ringlets, his hair tied into a tail and draped over his shoulder. Gold and rich blue lapis-lazuli adorned his wrists, ankles and ears. I thought immediately of Saracens.

  A third boat, shrouded in white satin and filled with red flowers, was occupied by a sleeping beauty, pale skinned, her closed eyes shimmering with purple dye, her lips glistening with rouge, her hair jet black and shoulder length, her clothes similar to the Saracen’s, loose and light. A strange, symbol-covered staff was all she had with her in the way of a weapon; and a small, red-beaked carrion bird was tethered to her wrist. Very much alive, its eyes flicked and flashed as it watched first my movements, then those of Elidyr, away in the trees. Small though it was, I felt it was protecting her, even though her life was lost.