Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing!’ I wailed at her.

  ‘Nor do I,’ she said through her tears, her head shaking, her arms around her body as if she were cold. ‘But I am in such pain, now. I must end the pain. I must start a new life, somewhere away from all of you, all of you!’

  She was still not on the tree.

  ‘I love you!’ I shouted at her, and she cried and wailed more loudly, staring at me through a face that was crushed with grief and fear and tears.

  ‘I love you too, Chris,’ she managed to say, her voice small with despair. ‘My little boy … oh my lovely little boy … how could you become such a thing – such a terrible thing … how could you kill him?’

  I ran to her, put my arms around her, but she pushed me back as if frightened of me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I shouted, terrified at the rejection. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Nothing … You’ve done nothing … Not yet, not yet! You’re too young. But it will turn out so badly for you. I have seen it. I have seen what you’ll become. I can’t bear it – I can’t bear the pain—’

  It hasn’t happened, I wanted to scream at her! That fat, scarred man killing Steven wasn’t me! I’m just a boy. The old woman lied to you. And if it wasn’t a lie, it was nothing more than a prediction! She was giving you a prediction only. You can act to stop the dream from coming true!

  What I said was, ‘Don’t believe what that old woman said to you. What did she say to you? Don’t believe it!’

  ‘You are your father’s son. I had dreamed what she said already. It was already pain in my life.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing! Nothing you think I’ve done ever needs to be done! Don’t die. Mummy!’

  ‘My sons are gone. My poor boys. My poor little boys.’

  ‘I’m here! I love you!’

  ‘Both of them … gone. I’ve seen their going. I’ve raised a devil and a hanged man.’

  It hadn’t happened like this. These were ‘almost’ words. They were ‘not quite right’ words. I didn’t remember it like this at all. This day was no longer mine!

  And behind me Mabon whispered, ‘It was like this. And this day is yours, though you remember it with a different voice. You’ve come this far, now see it through. We always remember part of the truth. We always forget a part in equal measure. This is how it was, Chris. See what happens next! Face the truth. And then—’ he laughed in my ear. ‘And then I might let you have her back from the dead.’

  ‘My mother? You can do that?’

  ‘No. You can do it But to bring her back, first she has to die!’

  I turned to look at Mabon and cried out with shock.

  It was my father who stood there, but he was so dishevelled, so ragged, so filthy, his face painted black and white with the features of a tusked pig, that for a second I didn’t recognise him.

  Naked, his belly sagging, his beard scrawny, the muddy mask falling away from his features, all I could see was how he stared at Jennifer, his mouth twisted into a grimace of hate.

  ‘Why don’t you do it?’ he roared at her. I closed my ears with my hands, ducking away from this terrifying, stinking apparition that had moved upon me so silently through the field of barley, coming from the wood.

  His voice, and my mother’s voice shrieking back, were just the drones of bees and engines, and I pressed my fingers hard into my head to stop the words of hate forming.

  Listen, Mabon whispered. Listen.

  My mother was screaming, ‘Go back to her. Go back to that girl from the wood …’

  ‘Don’t you think I would? I can’t find her. If I could find her do you think I’d stay in this love-forsaken place?’

  ‘Look at you! Look at what you’ve become! Nothing but a beast. Leaves, mud, filth, the marks of the savage on your face and body … you are filth, George! You are savage! Go back to the wood. Go back to your filth. Go back to that girl!’

  ‘Let me go!’ my father roared. ‘I beg you, woman. Let me go! Each time I get close to her, you call me back. Each time I find the scent of her in my nostrils, your stink, the stink of my house, the stink of my sons calls me back. Let me go for once and for all!’

  ‘I will be glad to do that. And may God have mercy on your sons while they are boys; because as men they are doomed to a terrible death!’

  ‘Then I will be free of them too. Dance for me, Jennifer! Dance and let me go! Come on! I’ll help you!’

  Like the wild animal he had become, this boar, this man, this Huxley leapt to the bough, pulled hard on the rope and wound it round the branch, knotting it. My mother screeched, then gasped, reached up to hold the tree, hauling with all her strength to take her weight. Her eyes, half closed with strangulation, half opened now to stare at me, and I rose from my crouch, stepped towards her, aware that she was imploring me silently to help her.

  My father, legs splayed, urinated on the woman below him, leaping like a wild man on the bough, making it bend and buckle, making the woman dance below him.

  I couldn’t speak. My mother’s lips moved and perhaps she would have reached for me, but she was gripping the branch until her knuckles were white while her husband rocked her, rocked her, the pale yellow piss streaming from the fat, slack stub of his ash-grey member and drenching her hair, running from her shoes.

  All I could see was her face, bloated and bilious, puffing and pathetic, the eyes bulging, the nostrils beginning to seep blood.

  And she dropped, and the rope stopped her fall, making her gasp horribly, making her instinctively scrabble at the hemp around her neck.

  Still the beast danced upon the tree. My father inhabiting the primal form of the Urscumug.

  They take from us. They reflect us, and they take from us.

  And this is what my father thought I had seen as a child! This is why he had been so frightened of me.

  I had to save my mother! I had to throw my father from his perch. I ran towards her, leapt to reach for him, tried to grab the branch, tried to get a grip on his feet, to throw him down, to stop this killing.

  But my jump fell short I had jumped with the expectations of a man, and achieved only the success of a child. As I failed to touch the bark, my arms clutched for comfort around my mother’s waist and my weight dragged her down suddenly before I could release her, and in that quick, sharp movement I heard the wet and sickening snap of the twig that was her life.

  I fell down, wailing, my head drenched in warm and stinking water. The bough above me did not break but creaked, and the shadow of the woman swung across the tough grass below the old oak, a limp thing, drifting left to right, left to right.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ said the naked man in the tree in a low voice, as if talking to himself. ‘The boy has done the deed quicker than I could have done it myself. She’s dead. No bringing her back. But he saw what I did. He knows what ‘I’ve done. He was here, a witness … what to do? What to do? He knows what I’ve done. Though by the look of him …’

  Blows were struck at me as I lay in agony and I curled into my body. A boar’s savage teeth gnawed at my neck, while fingers squeezed my throat.

  ‘What to do? What shall I do?’

  And the voice of this primitive creature, this Urscumug as my father had called it, this half man, half animal, whispered:

  ‘I do believe you’ve been charmed. Charmed into blindness. Charmed to forget. Well that’s good. Thank God for that. Better get dressed. Better wash and change my clothes. Can’t be seen like this. Paperwork. There’ll be paperwork to do.’

  And I heard my father run through the corn like a young dog released from its leash, keen to use its new-found freedom.

  ‘Dear God … was it like that?’ I whispered in horror to Mabon. I was suddenly sick, retching and wretched with the vision of my mother’s death that had been revealed to me. ‘Was it like that? Like that? No wonder the day is no longer mine! Did the two of us conspire in my mother’s death? I don’t want to believe it, Mabon. But I do believe it!
Mabon! Mabon …?’

  But my answer was only the wind rustling the tall corn. As I turned over on my back, staring at the sky through the spreading branches of the oak, I saw that no woman’s body hung there now. And no girlish man, face cracked with white paint, stood grinning at me.

  I sat up and called for the wild rider, the strange man who had been the presence of my conscience in this imaginary place … my guardian to the truthful vision. But Mabon was nowhere to be seen. And when I stood and looked around I realised that I was not in the cornfield at all, but in a field of wild grass and thistles. Strong Against the Storm was only one among many great oaks that surrounded me, an open clearing, a bright glade with many bright paths leading away from it. The air was hot and heavy, fragrant and still, not the air of England but of the dry and aromatic islands of the Aegean.

  I began to walk towards Oak Lodge, to where it should have been, and after a few minutes I saw stone ruins in this wildwood. I had crossed a stream to get there, but the ‘sticklebrook’, as Steve and I had called it, was wider and deeper and flowing in two channels, hard into the forest.

  I approached the ruins through the undergrowth and began to smell honey and spices. Where Oak Lodge had once stood, now I could see a white-stone house, fronted by marble pillars painted in exotic blues and reds. The roof was made from rounded, terracotta tiles, gently sloping. Small windows, their shutters opened, seemed to watch me darkly. This was how I imagined ancient Greece might have been, the air so hot and dry, perfumed with rosemary and thyme and lavender, so still and silent that time itself might have been suspended for the moment of my passing through.

  I stepped to where the door to the kitchen had once been, ducking below a stone lintel into a square, white-walled room, where a fire burned in the corner hearth, and a stocky, muscular man in a black tunic and leather sandals, his dark hair shining and tied back with coils of copper wire, his beard a thin line around the angle of his jaw, stirred the contents of a wide, copper pan slung above the flames.

  He looked up as I entered, then beckoned me over, scooping some of the stew into his spoon and holding it out to me.

  ‘Careful! It’s hot. I think I’ve used too much honey. I could die for honey. But too much can spoil good meat. Taste it, Chris. Tell me what you think.’

  This was Mabon, I knew from his voice, but without the mask, without the chalk-streaked hair and the clothing that he had copied from Guiwenneth. His legs were dappled with tiny red and yellow animal symbols, I noticed, like freckles, and I thought of Issabeau’s tattoos of the Oldest Animals. Thinking of Issabeau, I noticed Someone son of Somebody’s rough cloak in the corner. The proud Celt had been here too, then.

  ‘It’s fish,’ Mabon said, still holding the spoon towards me. ‘Pike, to be precise. A great lake-water hunter. I caught it from a pond while you were sleeping after seeing the truth of your mother’s death. Go on, Chris. Taste it.’

  His statement confused me. Had I slept after the vision of Jennifer’s murder? It hardly seemed likely! And I certainly couldn’t remember doing so. But I couldn’t find the words to raise the question as Mabon stared at me, his offering held out towards me. I accepted the spoon and ate the morsel of pike. It was good, very succulent, a little sweet and aromatic for my taste, though again I didn’t see the need to comment. I could see the fish’s head on a platter, gawping at me grotesquely, all jaws, teeth and evil, still eerily alive despite its being severed from the body.

  ‘It is sweet, but it’s good,’ I said after a moment.

  ‘This is a dish we cook when an old friend comes home,’ Mabon said, again stirring the pot. ‘Or when a new friend arrives: a birth, perhaps; a union of families; or the return from war of a man who knew a dead son and has brought his armour and his sword-hand back to his village. The head of the fish, with its teeth and savage jaws, is cut away. That means no more pain, you see? Only the sweetness and succulence of the flesh remains, which symbolises the comfort of friends. The honey is important. The dead stay fresh for a long time if placed in honey. We preserve a lot of things in honey, from mothers and sisters to ideas and hopes. So friendship and life can stay fresh too, if preserved in the idea, of honey.’

  What in God’s name was he talking about?

  ‘I don’t understand what is happening,’ I said sorrowfully. Then the tears I had been fighting back suddenly surfaced. ‘I killed my mother! I thought I was trying to hold her up, hold her own weight against the pull of the earth around her neck. But I hung on to her like a child at her breast, and I heard her neck go. I heard the snap! I killed her … and my father, dressed in skins, danced on the tree, danced and sang on the tree.’

  I think I cried out loud. I screamed at this black-clothed man for thinking about nothing but fish and honey and the preserving of the dead. He seemed a callous presence in a dream that was filled with pain and fear, and terrible grief.

  I could still feel the boy’s weight of my body, slung on my mother’s waist, I had done to her – without intending it – what the families of hanged men in centuries past had been allowed to do to quicken the death, by execution, of a loved one.

  After a while I felt gentle hands on my face. Fingers smeared the tears across my cheeks. Honeyed breath scented the air as Mabon crouched beside me and whispered: ‘You must understand – before you could have her back, you had to know the way she died. There are no quick paths through the forest, Chris. No short cuts. You were “charmed” that day into forgetting the truth. That is why you called to me. That is why I am here to help you. Mabon. My name means Remembering Shadows. I am Memory brought back through the broken dream. You were charmed into forgetting truth. Someone cast a spell on you.’

  ‘Someone? The Celt?’

  ‘Not the Celt.’

  ‘Of course not. Who, then? Who made me forget the truth? Who charmed me? My father, of course,’ I added with anger. ‘I don’t know why I bother to ask … If he could hide himself on the branch of the tree, if he had been there, he certainly could have blinded me.’

  But Mabon said quietly, ‘It was not your father.’

  ‘Well it was certainly not my brother. Not Steven!’

  But as I said the words, I felt a moment’s shock, remembering the raid on Oak Lodge, the girl on the grey horse.

  ‘Guiwenneth! Oh God – Guiwenneth herself …’

  My heart suddenly ached, and my chest tightened. She had certainly charmed me in my sleep. She had been present in my life as a brutal, feral savage; and then again as the woman I loved. A trickster! A charmer! Had she charmed me when I was a boy?

  ‘Not Guiwenneth!’ Mabon said with a frown. ‘Not directly.’

  ‘You, then. You seem to know all about me. Of course! You. But how? You weren’t there …’

  ‘Not me, though you have done me a service. I knew nothing about you until you came here. Once you arrived, you were as transparent as the waters of the streams outside …’

  ‘Then as I have always suspected … Kylhuk. It was Kylhuk all along. Tricky, canny Kylhuk, a man consumed by the trickery of others, tricking me …’

  ‘Not Kylhuk,’ Mabon said, again adding, ‘not directly …’

  ‘Then who? For God’s sake who? My mother? Mabon! I’m running out of possibilities.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mabon said coldly, his fingers on my cheeks, turning my tearful face to look at his own hard, bronzed features. ‘Yes. It was your mother who charmed you. Just as my own mother charmed me.’

  My last guess had been a flippant one. I was astonished by his calm answer.

  ‘My mother didn’t know the time of day most of the time,’ I raged back at him. ‘She was in a dream! She was in despair! She bottled tomatoes in her Sunday clothes, Mabon, her best clothes. She lit fires on hot summer days. She was lost in a world that my bloody father had created, and she could no more have tricked me, or charmed me, than she could have taken wing and flown south for the winter!’

  ‘She took wing in her own way, though – and summoned help. Help
from that world your father had created, used to get her out of it, I suspect.’

  I stared back at the man as he sniffed at the copper vessel, stirring the thick lumps of fish and fussing with the height of the pan above the glowing wood. He seemed so confident in his comments to me. He knew so much about me, or appeared to. My name … Memory brought back through the broken dream …

  A mythago! My mythago. Brought alive by my own need, from my own unconscious.

  I watched him, and again heard his words: she took wing – summoned help …

  I said angrily, ‘Then tell me this: whose help did my mother summon?’

  Mabon poured himself wine from a clay flagon and sipped it, watching me, half amused.

  ‘Your help. Why else are you here?’

  ‘My help? I’m helpless!’

  ‘Hardly helpless,’ Mabon said with a laugh. ‘But as to mothers – mothers, you may have noticed, have a way of making things happen. My own mother, when she couldn’t get her way with me, when she couldn’t catch me in the chase after I had fled her stronghold, when she saw that I would not submit to the demands of her Sanctuary and spend my life a captive to her goddess, and my death as bleached bones built into her altar – my own mother contrived by pure genius to imprison me at the entrance to the Underworld itself! Which is where you are now, by the way, in case you weren’t aware of it, Christian!’

  No, I had not been aware of it. And as I looked around the kitchen of this ancient house, Mabon laughed and shook his head, rose to his full height and kicked some cold embers onto the fire to damp down the heat, then walked to the door, standing there for a moment before he said, ‘It’s this way.’

  ‘The Gate of Horn?’

  ‘The open mouth that will lead you to your Grail. You passed the Gate of Horn earlier. You saw that truth lay between Memory and the Child in the Land – two things which people often think are false, but which hold the seeds of our lives!’

  I followed him back towards the twin streams, then through the woods, through sanctuary clearings, ruins, and between tall, mossy rocks.