Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘You know what I mean, Sir Escrivaune! You know very well what I mean! Carnal lust!’

  ‘Mind your manners! Is my shield polished?’

  His comment confused me. He repeated it. ‘Is my shield polished?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Then polish it again.’

  ‘I will. But the question won’t go away.’

  ‘I don’t feel inclined to answer your question. Polish my shield!’

  ‘I’m leading the horses. I can’t lead and polish at the same time.’

  ‘Then just lead the horses. Stop talking about her father.’

  ‘I will. But the question won’t go away. And think as well of mother! What about her mother?’

  He turned on me furiously.

  ‘My task is a simple one, Christian! Do you understand me? Simple! I enter the castle. I become that slit-necked chancer whose quest I accomplished, that Beloved Knight, that Mordalac for seven days and seven nights. My armour shines! I drink, I eat, I laugh, I service!’

  ‘Not in your armour.’

  ‘Of course not in my armour! And at the end of the seven days and seven nights my squire brings me news of a challenge! Don’t forget that part of the plan! Squire! I leave full of bravado, and I do not return! I have been defeated in fair combat. The slit-neck’s helmet and sword are returned to the grieving Gracious Lady. In due time, when the grieving is over, she finds comfort and consolation on her back with someone else! In his armour or out of it! In that same time, I am getting on with my own life! Don’t condemn me, slathan of Kylhuk!’

  ‘Sorry. I’ll shut up, now.’

  ‘Polish my shield.’

  ‘I’m leading the horses.’

  ‘Then lead them better!’

  ‘What about the rose and ivy? The castle is in disguise.’

  ‘So am I. Two masks will surely be a block to the truth for as long as I need it!’

  ‘Will they?’ I asked nervously. ‘Are you sure about that? Is that a Truth or a Guess?’

  ‘It’s a Hope,’ said Escrivaune. ‘And in case you’re not aware of it, Christian, Hope is a two-edged sword every bit as dangerous as that sword of Mordalac’s, that steel blade which Kylhuk danced around and still got stung by. Hope is both challenge and despair. We weave our lives around Hope, and succeed or die according to the pattern of that weave. Enough now, slathan. What little wit I have I’ll need if I’m to secure the dowry. If you smell rotting ivy, retreat. More importantly: keep the horses on half-rations so that they’ll run fast when we leave. But water them well; keep them gently bridled but not saddled, lightly tethered and facing the gate.’

  ‘And your shield polished to perfection?’

  ‘The shield is more than just a shield. Your forlorn friend is in the gryphon. The better polished, the safer our escape.’

  ‘I’m glad you told me,’ I said, wondering what friend he could have meant, and assuming he meant Issabeau, who among my ‘forlorn friends’ was the only one I was confident could assume the shape of an animal.

  But a gryphon?

  Our ethereal guide had seen a castle in two halves, covered with rambling rose and ivy; we had seen a castle that exuded an air of desertion. But as we came through the woods to the drawbridge we might have been stepping towards Camelot. The walls were painted white, the towers streaming with coloured pennants. The courtyard into which we were led was alive with the activity of animals, wagons and the inhabitants of the stronghold. Yes, the place stank of the farmyard, but the smell of fires was also a warm and welcoming odour; and the aroma of cooking, and of the honeyed ale that I had come to associate with this mediaeval period, soon overwhelmed our senses.

  We were greeted by the baron, the Lord of Brezonfleche, and Escrivaune, in his guise as Mordalac, was received with grace and charm by the astonishingly beautiful Lady Brezconzel.

  ‘God’s Truth,’ he murmured to me through the laughter as we stood in the mud by the main steps, ‘I think I’ll stay for ever.’

  ‘I suspect that’s exactly what they have in mind for you,’ I retorted and Escrivaune glanced at me sharply.

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning this castle changes its look as you approach it. Please summon that little wit you referred to earlier.’

  ‘S’Truth! You’re right.’

  I slipped away, leading the horses, and found the animals grain and stabling as close to the gate as possible. I did as Escrivaune had instructed, but noticed that I was watched by eyes expressing puzzlement, the castle’s ostlers confused as to why I left the steeds half ready.

  ‘It’s the way we do things in my country,’ I said, but without Gwyr to interpret, my words might well have been in the language of the Devil.

  That night we feasted in style, seated at a long table, facing a roaring fire at the side of the hall. Eight immense hounds, fur the colour of bracken, lean-bodied, muzzles like the dead-eyed features of a python, prowled the hall, eating bones and fighting among themselves. Thin, insubstantial music was played from a gallery and Escrivaune and his Lady danced a sedate routine alone before circling the hall and drawing all the other knights and their ladies, the squires and the daughters into the spiral dance.

  I was on my guard all the time, but when I finally succumbed to sleep that night – on a bench a few yards from the glowing logs, among others of my status – I dreamed well, and woke at dawn to find everything in its place, and all quite normal.

  And except for the feasting, it was like this for five days.

  I began to feel relaxed. Castle life was cold, busy, noisy and dull, but since my tasks consisted only of looking after our horses, supervising Escrivaune’s bodily needs – water to wash in, if a quick splash of face and chest could be called washing, and a sharp blade for his cheeks since his Lady’s own skin was looking noticeably raw from his intimacy – I managed to find time to myself.

  But on the sixth night, as Escrivaune made his bed-time preparations, he whispered to me, ‘Polish the shield.’

  The gryphon shield was hanging on the wall among the shields of other guests and knights under the baron’s protection. I took it down and cleaned the soot and grime from its face, then lay it on the floor below my bench as I slept.

  In the dark hours, with the fire now a dull glow in the deep hearth, I woke to find the gryphon standing over me, eyes bright, breath foul, jaws open to reveal gleaming teeth. Its tail flexed angrily, its claws flashed as they extended from the pads.

  ‘Follow!’ it whispered.

  ‘Issabeau? I thought Kylhuk had sent you elsewhere.’

  ‘Follow!’

  Was this Issabeau in animal disguise?

  The voice had not been hers. I crept after the shadow. It rushed through corridors, down spiral stairs, then out into the yard, a shape almost invisible against the night, so swift, so silent that sleeping dogs stayed still and tethered horses hardly shifted from their stations.

  The gryphon led me deeper into the castle.

  Suddenly I could smell decay. Suddenly the air was full of desolation. We entered a tower and ran lightly up its winding staircase … entered a room where dark, still shapes hung from the rafters, turning slightly with the breeze of our arrival. Discarded armour lay everywhere, catching faint rays of light.

  Above us, the wooden ceiling creaked and whined in erotic rhythm, and I could hear a man’s voice howling in pain, a woman’s laughing.

  ‘Get the skin!’ hissed the gryphon.

  I looked into the darkness, but the shadow had fled, though it stopped in the entrance to the tower and repeated, ‘Get the skin!’

  Suddenly the ceiling opened and light spilled down. A shape tumbled towards me, screaming, attached to a rope around its neck which sprang taut and stopped the fall. In that moment of spilled light, before the ceiling closed, I had seen the skinned men hanging around me, the snakes around them, intimately entwined, bulging eyes turned to me in anger at the interruption of their congress. Escrivaune’s part-flayed and bloody carcass
swayed among them, now, his scaled Lady wrapped around him like a python, her jaws holding a glistening, sickly sack.

  His skin!

  I could hardly think what to do. The tower was alive with hissing. The hanging men were crying feebly, all save Escrivaune who was screaming with all his lungs.

  The fall had not killed him, then.

  I had only my sword and my strength. I ran to the Lady and tugged at her tail, pulled her from the knight and cut the hissing head from her body. The sack of skin seemed to wrap itself around me, hugging my arm like a terrified and grateful pet. I jumped and jumped again, slashing at the rope that held my friend, and eventually he fell down, screeching with pain as his raw flesh contacted my touch and the floor.

  We ran through the night. The gryphon danced ahead of us, sending the bloodhounds scattering, and by effort of illusion, shape-shifting and pure determination, we found the horses. I had still kept them half bridled, and they reacted violently to the smell of my friend’s half-skinned torso, but this only served to make them livelier. As the gryphon ran like a cat up to the ropes that held the bridge, loosening the blocks that held the pulleys and letting the wooden road fall across the river, so Escrivaune clung on grimly to his charger, galloped through the gate, his squire in frantic pursuit, dogs in pursuit of the squire, but dogs only, as if no human life existed that could be roused and riled to follow.

  And that was that. A half-flayed man, who should have died of his wounds, was made well again when his skin was retrieved from the sack. His shield gleamed in starlight; the gryphon was gone; Issabeau, escaping her duties with Kylhuk to hide in the shield, Issabeau was gone.

  Our guide appeared, a dreamy, flowing shape, narrow faced and beautiful, beckoning to us, encouraging us back along the path to Legion.

  By morning, Escrivaune’s skin had reassembled. Naked and humiliated, but alive and experienced, the man rode slightly higher on the bare-backed stallion as we finally encountered the forest wall, and the protective attentions of the Forlorn Hope. His awkward posture in the saddle had nothing to do with his pride.

  ‘You did very well,’ Guiwenneth whispered to me as she lay across me later that night, still warm and wet from our lovemaking. She had tugged the cloak over our heads and we lay, cheek to cheek, in moist and pungent darkness. ‘But I was worried about you.’

  ‘Is that why you asked Issabeau to hide in the shield?’

  ‘I asked her to follow you. I didn’t know how she’d do it, but she agreed.’

  ‘She was wonderful. A gryphon!’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A mythical beast. A shadow. Without her, Escrivaune and I would both be alive and in pain for ever, and for ever the source of food and satisfaction for those succubi.’

  ‘Succubi?’

  ‘Reptiles. Demons. Lamia. I don’t know how to describe them.’

  ‘Don’t try,’ the woman said and brushed her lips over mine. ‘Don’t try and remember. Just be a source of satisfaction to me.’

  ‘A prospect that fills me with joy, since I love you so much.’

  ‘I’m glad you think that way. And we still have so much time.’

  ‘We have all the time we want in this strange, strange world.’

  ‘We have the time we have,’ she said quickly. ‘Let’s not waste it.’

  But before I could think about her words, her teeth had closed briefly on my breast, nipping me to attention, and she had wriggled down, reaching below her belly to find me, gently easing me into a second conversation.

  For a while, as my time with Legion continued, I was too busy and too confused to think clearly. I saw very little of Kylhuk himself after the funeral respects for Manandoun had been paid, and had no chance to push him on my strange role as ‘slathan’. Most contact with Kylhuk was fleeting, usually on horseback as he brought me new instructions, or a new guide to my circuit of the garrison. He always brought me a gift, anything from honey or meat to a small knife, or a cloak pin that he had thought would appeal to me. And once: a bow of strong ash, half the length of my body, and a leather quiver of arrow shafts ready to be tipped.

  ‘You should give him a gift in return,’ Guiwenneth hinted one day, and in the absence of anything better I begged a slice of thin, polished birchwood from a carpenter, red and black pigments from my ‘forlorn’ friend Jarag, a strip of leather from the young Cleverthreads I knew as Annie, and to the best of my ability painted a snarling boar on the face of the wood, staring straight out of the amulet. In charcoal around this image, as if inscribing a coin, I wrote: From dream you came; to dream you will go.

  ‘For me?’ Kylhuk demanded when I gave it to him. The look in his eye was of surprise and suppressed delight. His companion, the silent Fenlander, was uneasy behind his bronze-featured face-plate.

  ‘What do these runes say?’

  Kylhuk meant the inscription. I was ready for his question.

  ‘That you will one day return to the place from which you came.’

  ‘One day I will return to the place from which I came?’

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better.’

  ‘Nothing too profound, then.’

  ‘Hardly. I’m too young for profundity.’

  He gave me a quick, sharp look, almost quizzical. ‘But not a curse …?’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  He seemed relieved. ‘I like this old tusker!’ he said (he was referring to the boar) and kissed the red and black image on the black wood slice. He tied it round his neck and grinned at me. ‘I’ll hunt him one day. This big, bad pig. I’ll bring you his crest! All those sharp spines in one crest!’

  ‘I do believe you will.’

  ‘I know I will.’

  Then with the same ceremony he gave me the cut and battered leather glove from his right hand, which left his sword hand exposed, and I could see that Guiwenneth was astonished … and perhaps alarmed?

  ‘I like gifts,’ Kylhuk said loudly. ‘I like gifts of food and I like gifts of love. But the best gift is that gift which can only be given once. So guard that glove!’

  ‘I will. And thank you. I’ll wear it with pride as I undertake my tasks for Legion.’

  ‘You will! I’m sure of it. But you won’t like this next task, slathan.’

  ‘This doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘You must do it anyway.’

  ‘To the best of my ability.’

  That was when he assigned me to Escrivaune, the adventure I have just recounted.

  * * *

  Two evenings after my return from Castle Brezonfleche I asked Guiwenneth about Mabon son of Modron, whose rescue lay at the end of Kylhuk’s quest. I had tried to raise the subject before, not just with Guiwenneth, but encountered only shrugs, impatience, confusion or avoidance. Tonight, however, with some ten of us sitting round a good fire, succulent and spicy food and warmed sweet ale for company, Guiwenneth stood up, brushed down her tunic, shook out her long, auburn hair and raised her hands as if to say, ‘Silence.’

  She was drunk.

  ‘Mabon’s story,’ she said, ‘is tragic. There are few people who have even heard of him, and few facts are known about him, though for some of us his fate is entwined in our lives like a braid of dried grass in our hair. When I was a child, my mother told me the story of his miraculous conversation just after birth. It went like this …’

  And she began to act with her body and with different voices, to the amusement and applause of several of our dinner companions.

  ‘So!’ she said, looking at me with a grin, ‘So! The babe is in his purple swaddling, still shocked from what his Mother, the Queen, has just proposed! And what has she proposed? His answer will make it clear.’

  ‘It is not right that a young dog should lie with an old bitch; even if she is his mother!’

  (Howls of horror from around the fire.)

  ‘It is perfectly right,’ shouts Mother. ‘No whelp will result from the union. What will result is only that special knowledge that the Young Dog who is Divi
nely Born, as you are my son Mabon, needs to have about his Mother. How else will you inherit the knowledge of the land? More than whelping is achieved when Divine Son lies with Divine Mother.’

  So! Struggling in his swaddling, Mabon’s face distorts into a furious mask, the hairs sprouting on chin and cheek as the man he will become rages from the skin, fire dancing in his eyes for a moment before he is the peaceful babe again. ‘This whelp is too small and too young,’ he shouts. ‘It would suckle gladly, since it is hungry, and its eyes are on those swollen paps! Milk! Milk! It is all I have on my mind, Mother. Is there nothing to be learned from suckling?’

  Mother pulls her cloak across her fat breasts to deny milk to the infant. ‘Suckling is for the ordinary dog,’ she snaps.

  ‘Then I am ordinary. Put me to your breast, or there will never be hair on my chin!’

  ‘You are not ordinary and I will make you aware of it!’

  ‘You may try, Mother, but you won’t succeed.’

  Furiously, she reaches for the babe to chastise him, but Mabon is too quick for her.

  Confined in his purple swaddling, only his head exposed, he wriggles away from her and squirms like a maggot around the hall. Mother races in close pursuit. Round and round they go, the worm wriggling faster, little rump rising and falling, until he slithers up a roof pole and sits on a rafter, out of reach, staring down at the dishevelled woman and her weeping breasts.

  And Mother cries out, ‘The ordinary dog has always howled when it loses the scent. But a Royal Hound should listen to that howling and should always know the scent that is trailed through time and the forest. You are a Royal Hound!’

  ‘I am content to howl with the other dogs. I will be an ordinary man!’

  ‘You are not ordinary,’ roars the harridan. ‘And I will make you aware of it.’

  ‘You are welcome to try,’ shouts the infant, ‘but you will not succeed.’

  ‘I will succeed,’ says Mother, soft and grim. Then in a raised voice: ‘In the forest, the strongest tree grows alone in the clearing where a great tree has fallen. Our family is that sunlit glade, Mabon! Hallowed, a place of worship. You are the sapling that will grow during the Mother Moon and outstrip the rest of the wildwood. Ordinary men will hang their trophies from your branches.’