Merlin's Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  I decided to hide stone-moving in a girl, since I was certain that this would confuse Vivien, and in any case, the frustrating of people’s expectations is something in which I delight. It is a simple form of control, but can be quite effective. I shaped the girl from the long-gone, from my memory of a place where the rock, below baking deserts, is vastly hollowed to make a labyrinth of tunnels, all designed to conceal the body of a king or queen. Vivien, of course, had touched upon this magic, when she had made the shaft, but she had only scraped a single shard of knowledge and there was a great deal left for her to win. And so it continued.

  Whenever I could, I summoned a child from the past or future, from different lands along the path, gave them body, gave them substance, gave them spirit, gave them charm, then carved my secrets on their bones. One after the other they went into the wood to hide, awaiting their chance to escape the forest and travel southwards on the path, that long walk through the valleys, along the shores of the sea, then through the mountains, the journey that would eventually re-unite them with me, their source.

  Seven in all, shapechangers all, I sent them on their way, and soon there was a hollowing inside of me, a sublime yet painful vacancy, as much to do with the scouring of my magic as with the sense of vulnerability that now possessed me.

  I had kept a few charms back, of course, and just as well.

  Vivien, a vision of the huntress, soon after dragged a fawn into the clearing by the falls, her bloody knife held between her teeth. Quickly, she opened and emptied the creature, then dug shallow pits for the storage of excess meat before butchering the animal.

  She was naked, she always hunted naked, and as she crouched to her work – inviting, vibrant flesh working on the sweet, dead haunch – my raven spread its wings.

  ‘Aha!’ she said, noticing my hungry stare, the flush on my skin. She grinned, putting down the knife, coming to me first to preen and then to pluck my feathers.

  The mist was in her hair and on her skin as she flew above me, her voice loud, her grip strong as she hunted me to the finish.

  Stretched out upon me, listening to the fall of water, she said, ‘I enjoyed that. But I have to finish off the beast.’

  ‘The beast is finished. Believe me!’

  ‘The beast we’ll eat!’ she laughed. But at once I saw the shadow, the hint of understanding. She had sensed something wrong. She had touched the hollowing inside of me.

  She was suddenly cold. ‘I have to joint the kill. I shouldn’t have taken it. It’s too much for our needs. But what could I do? Old Provider should have created smaller deer. If I kill, I kill for a month. You can’t simply kill a tenth of the beast!’

  She was wrong about that, but I kept the knowledge to myself. ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘So am I. Lie back and let the moisture cool you.’ She stroked my languid flesh, relaxing me, then hardened her grip, staring carefully into my right eye as I squirmed with the sudden shock.

  ‘There’s something wrong.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong.’

  ‘Are you quite certain?’

  ‘I’m quite certain that I’m tired. I’m quite certain that I’m hungry, that you’re hurting me. What else do you feel is wrong?’

  ‘You weren’t as close. You didn’t feel as close. But perhaps I’m being foolish.’

  ‘I’ll make up the fire, then.’

  She looked down at me, still holding me in her hand as a cook would hold the heart of a slaughtered pig, looking closely, looking for signs of the worm.

  ‘I don’t know that I believe you,’ she whispered.

  She rose to her feet suddenly and jumped, legs tucked against her chest, into the icy waters of the pool below the fall. Seconds later she had scampered out, screaming with the cold, laughing, signifying her understanding that the action had been foolish, yet had been wonderful to her senses. She had banished her suspicions.

  ‘Make that unholy fire! Quickly! Quickly!’

  The children were all gone. It had taken several years, but the last had left the forest and they were alone, now, pursuing for a while their own lives, their own adventures.

  I was vulnerable. I felt my age. I took to dreaming, which is to say, to flying, and became the haunter of battlefields, spying from above, or from the past at the strange ways into the Otherworlds. I was not recognised. I learned nothing I didn’t know already.

  Dreaming, I became weak. Weakened, Vivien saw her chance to take what she did not yet know was lost to her.

  Quickly, quickly, then, she made her preparations.

  I was in the sky, in cold but brilliant sun, aware that the first snows of this Deep were gathering to the east. Below me, five men had gathered by a lake and the lake waters swirled about the centre. Something was rising, either summoned by these men, or coming to attack them. They seemed quite nonchalant, crouching with their horses, and I circled lower, casting an inadvertent shadow.

  I had been seen in that moment, and sling-shot was loosed to drive me off, but these travellers in the long-gone (yes, I liked to fly into the past as much as hunt the present) were less interested in a falcon than in the hollowing that was opening before them, the way through the water to a deeper place than the scrubby land around them.

  Who they were is of no relevance; if you must know, they were five brothers, Kyrdu’s sons; they were in many ways the scourge of the long-gone, they were adventurers, mercenaries, sorcerers by acquisition. Their stories – their adventure was immense – may have been remembered after them. Somehow, though, I doubt it. They went too far. If you are interested I can tell you another time.

  What is important is that as I watched them, I felt my right wing crack, as if twisted by invisible fingers, and knew at once that my death had come.

  I found the right winds and swooped, looped, glided and struggled back to Broceliande. I came above the falls and saw Vivien above my dreaming body. She was dressed in green, her black hair flying as she raised the axe and struggled with her task.

  I dropped upon her, clawed and scrabbled in her hair until she backed away, allowing me to come back home.

  It was too late, of course. Dismembered, spitted on her special thorn, I could do nothing as she danced her swirling dance, nine times round my corpse, throwing up the earth, holding it there, using the magic she had stolen from me, burrowing into the cold-earth home, then gathering stones and slices of fallen trees to make the traps.

  She had not yet reached below my flesh to steal the magic; she was not yet aware that my bones were smooth again.

  She danced through Broceliande. I could still hear, through my dislocated pain, the way she laughed.

  ‘Fool!’ she called me. She shouted it loudly.

  She swam in the cold waters, climbed trees to their precarious tips, chased down game with her bare hands, tearing the swirling fabric of her green dress as she haunted the wildwood in her ecstasy.

  Bloody, muddied and triumphant, she came back to where I lay.

  ‘Fool,’ she whispered tenderly, then kissed my dry lips, touching my eyes with raw-skinned fingers before, in the last act of her imprisonment of me, she put them out.

  ‘What have you done? Where has it gone?’

  The words, screeched like the scald-crow, were as sweet to my ears as song.

  I had few charms left, but I had kept one back, a special gift.

  I had been dreaming by the waterfall when she had killed me, but my bed was a grey rock, and I shaped this, now, into the precise form of my broken, severed body. And on its mossy skin I carved the signs and runes of all the magic that I knew, but in a garbled form, sufficient to understand with the right wit, with time, with imagination, but certain to be incomprehensible to the lovely woman, the sinister woman, who had been a joy in my life – truly, the best of companions, the best of lovers; who can blame her for her more primal needs? – but a lovely woman who must now come to hell with me.

  ‘Where has it gone? Where has it gone?’ she shrieked.

  I w
ould have answered her, had I been able.

  In her earlier moment of frenzied triumph, pursuing an older magic, she had devoured my tongue.

  She threw me, head down, into the shaft she had fashioned in the manner of those shafts designed to conjoin with the Otherworld. She found – I have no idea from where – amulets and metal shards that would bind me to the earth; chalices and clay jugs that had once been buried with the dead; moonshards in silver, some in crystal, that would keep me forever in the shadow.

  She let the earth fall back from its wildly spinning column, burying me. As it fell, she sealed the shaft at the four prime points with rounds of oak (she had learned well), then topped it with stones, topped these with the statue, whose nature and secrets had defeated her; and this she covered with earth, sprinkling the dirt with seed so that it would grow green.

  Grow green and keep me down!

  Then, in one moment, she put forth the charm

  Of woven paces and of waving hands,

  And in the hollow oak he lay as dead,

  And lost to life and use and name and fame.

  I wonder how long she embraced the statue, exploring its marks, working her fingers into every line and every shape and every crook and cranny of that broken stone, a lover sifting the cold ash of dead passion for some longed-for, warming ember?

  The writing is tantalising because like a maze carved into the heart of a mountain it keeps on almost coming home, but never quite. And once she had engaged with those tantalising signs, once the first clues and hints of hidden power had embraced her fingers and her eyes, she was trapped, her spirit trapped, she was bound to me, tied by need, by greed, by a magic that was unfurling more slowly than the winter storm can level a snowcapped hill.

  Each of us, then, was trapped by the other, and perhaps we both deserved the fate. If I had truly wished to keep the woman away from me, I could have done so. Lust, intrigue, the need to control her vibrancy, all these things perhaps had made me evil, and I can say this now because I have paid the price, and so has she. Eventually, because that bone was broken at her birth, her flesh succumbed to time. Her bones, still smooth, lie at the bottom of the pool, by the waterfall.

  As for the broken man himself, murdered that cruel time in the long-gone, I began to dream again. It was all I had power to do.

  The damage was too great. I had nothing left to do but wait.

  Vivien, for the time she lived, was as tied to Broceliande as was I. My children, carrying my magic, rounded the path time and time again, passing through the forest. Vivien was aware of them, but not of what they meant.

  Yet somehow, as they walked through this old place, close to the murderous shaft, they sent off shadows, little echoes, shaped by experience, memories of the murder, raised by the pain that still survives within this grove. I was helpless to stop this process by which slow ghosts began to walk the path, moving southwards in the wake of my seven children, my eternal children.

  Each ghost was a restless creature, a fragment of magic, magical to the short-lived children of Broceliande, and you danced within them, age after age, and shadow magic was yours for a while, odd powers, small talents, a moment of control, lost to each of you when the child in your heart was lost.

  The ghosts moved south, then east, then north and west, following the path; echoes dogging the tracks of hidden wisdom. And time and time again they passed this place, my life in circles, never-ending circles.

  Then crying ‘I have made his glory mine,’

  And shrieking out ‘O fool!’ the harlot leapt

  Adown the forest, and the thicket closed behind her …

  And the forest echo’d … ‘fool’.

  PART FOUR

  The Spirit-Echo’s Promise

  When shall we meet again, sweetheart

  When shall we meet again?

  When the bright thorn leaves on broken trees

  Are green and spring up again,

  Are green and spring up again.

  The Unquiet Grave (folksong; variant)

  The Spirit-Echo’s Promise

  A heavy mist was rising in the glade; it began to obscure the leaning stone, the shaft, the cowled shape of Conrad, who was whispering in a voice that was becoming hoarse and faint.

  Martin prodded the fire, placed wood on it, shivered with a sudden cold. He realised he was becoming drowsy, a striking, irresistible tiredness that he recalled from his last night with Rebecca.

  Merlin was watching him darkly. ‘If it isn’t already clear to you, let me make it clear; I have very little of my old skill left. Having put my talents outside of me, in the children, it will take time to gather them in again.’

  ‘Did you travel in Rebecca? The priest thinks you did. You’ve been escaping the grave-shaft for centuries, he said …’

  ‘The prison has been weakening, certainly. I could tell. It occurs periodically when the second shadow I released along the path to deceive Vivien – the one that failed – passes through Broceliande. As it does so it draws me up, it draws her out, it gives us a brief fling at life, a fling at each other, it gives me an opportunity to taunt her …’

  ‘Costing the lives of families!’ Martin shouted angrily. ‘Costing the lives of children … My family, my child!’

  The hooded figure lowered its head. Martin fought against the weariness that was draining all strength from his limbs.

  Merlin said, ‘When we use a human body, it certainly dies. It becomes a spirit on the path itself—’

  ‘Always looking back. Always frightened.’

  ‘They are all frightened. My children too. I made them frightened. I made them cautious.’

  He hesitated, thinking, then went on, ‘Oddly, a spirit-echo of Vivien must have stayed in Rebecca after that incident in her youth which the woodsman witnessed; when she murdered your brother. Later, when she was carrying Daniel, the echo slipped through to the child, and Vivien had a second chance.

  ‘But before Vivien was born again in the boy, I dreamed of Rebecca coming to the lakeside. I was as free as I would get, a shadow moving among shadows, not really free at all, but able to move away from the shaft. And Rebecca called to me, though of course, it wasn’t Rebecca calling. It was the enticement of the Vision of Magic. Your son was inside her, but all I could sense was Vivien. I was on the path for a while, a brief freedom, a spirit-echo only, and Rebecca was a warm shell for that dreaming spirit, and I passed into her. It would only be for days …

  ‘Once inside, realising the danger in her womb, I took away all of Vivien’s senses, all the senses in the boy Rebecca carried. It seems Vivien was stronger than I’d guessed. From what you say, she won them back.’

  ‘That was a cruel thing to do. The act against the boy.’

  ‘So it transpires. As I said, I was in a dream.’

  ‘So will I be soon. So I’ll ask you again – before I fall asleep: bring them back to me. Please! Can you bring them back to me? Or has all of this been nothing more than an opportunity for you to excuse yourself through story?’

  The face in the glamour-mask round Conrad twisted with indignation, but Merlin said, ‘When I referred to damage, when you first brought me out of the shaft, I meant the damage to your family.’

  ‘Christ! They can’t be more damaged than they are!’

  Merlin nodded kindly. ‘In the way you think, I suppose that’s true. But to bring them back risks bringing back the enchantress. And besides, the singing magic has gone. I told you this before. I am almost powerless. I can perform a few simple tricks. This body only seems alive because of glamour, and I’m quite sure that you don’t want that for your wife and son.’

  ‘No,’ Martin said quietly, frightened by the thought.

  ‘I can’t help you. I can give you illusion. Of comfort perhaps. I don’t think … I don’t think I can do more. You seem very tired. Go to sleep. I shan’t harm you.’

  Martin struggled against the charm that was closing down his mind. He thrust his hand into the fire, the pain br
inging brief life to his cry.

  ‘No! I won’t sleep! I can’t.’

  ‘You must.’

  Merlin’s grasp on his wrist was irresistible and his fingers were taken from the dying flames.

  ‘Give me some hope, then. Just give me a little hope …’

  ‘Hope?’

  Martin stared hard into Merlin’s eyes, and the corpse-grimace of Conrad showed for a moment. ‘All I can give you is a vision. A small vision – of how it might end.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Then go to sleep.’

  Martin sank down into the cold mist by the guttering fire and half closed his eyes. As he began to dream, he was aware that Conrad had risen to his feet and was looking thoughtfully, almost curiously towards the lake.

  *

  An altar bell was ringing.

  ‘Martin!’ came the cry. (Again! … he had been half-aware of being called for some minutes.)

  It was very cold. He sat up and stared around him, at the empty glade, the long-dead fire, the moisture on the grass, the scattered stones of the cairn, the trees. Where was Rebecca?

  Again, the tinkling of the bell from the lake, and the priest’s call. Martin looked at his hands, suddenly shocked to see the shallow scars, the still-sore cuts and patterns. As he stood inside clothes that were damp and rank, so he felt the pain of cuts from neck to groin. He looked quickly to the tree where the bones of Merlin lay. The yellow shards were scattered, fox-struck, batted and played with as the marrow was found to have long been sucked away. Of Conrad, of the corpse, there was no sign.

  Something was wrong. That damned bell! And the priest sounded frightened as he called. And the silence …

  And the beard on his face.

  Martin touched the thick stubble. It was wet with dew, an abrasive beard, now, a week’s growth perhaps.

  Where was the waterfall?

  He was hungry, his hands shaking. He called, ‘Rebecca? Daniel?’

  His trousers were saturated with his own urine. Around him, where he had been curled up, were the remains of bread, some rinds of cheese, the picked bones of a chicken, a china flagon that might have contained cider or water.