The Bone Forest (Ryhope Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  “Two names?”

  “Two young men. They had a minor triumph in a skirmish with raiders. There were only twelve of the northmen, and two were killed, and the slayers boasted their names by scratching them on the well-stones.”

  “And where are these two men now?”

  Gilla looked pained. “Still there. Still trapped. In the well-pit itself. The changes are occurring around them. They may even be dead, now. We haven’t heard their cries, for help, of fear, of the daemon-son itself for some days.”

  “The daemon-son?”

  “That’s what they screamed.”

  “And the young men’s names?”

  “Ealgawan and Badda. My sons.”

  It started to rain again and the gathered crowd dispersed to shelter. The Wolfhead watched the downpour, smelled the dank earth, and felt the presence of the demon, an odd, smoky odour in the wet day.

  “As I thought,” he said. “The demon is in the well. When it rains, the water bubbles, and the demon reaches into the world, bringing a smell of fire with him. You say he is changing the village?”

  “Nightmarish visions. One day a house as it was built, the next it looks as if it was stretched by a giant hand. Strange coloured stone appears,” Gilla went on, “and slats of wood, dark and thinly cut. Then hard glass, as you see in churches. And when it cracks it splinters, like blades. Stone walls appear overnight, brilliantly white, and crumble before the dawn. And always, the silver ghosts: they move through the village like spectres, terrifying creatures. We fled while we could. The village itself is possessed, not just my two sons.”

  In all the long generations of his wandering the Wolfhead had heard of nothing similar. He didn’t tell this to Gilla. He rose and drew his hooded cape around his body. Inkmarker was crouched in one of the tents, watching the iron cauldron with the animal’s skull as it boiled and gave off a rich, putrescent odour. “Stay here,” the seer said to him.

  He went, then, to find some objects that would resist the demon’s change. He picked a black, water-rolled stone from the river and quickly swallowed it. He smeared the unchanging soil onto his wrists. Then he moved among the women, searching their possessions, until he found a stone shell, petrified life, unchanging too. It was already made into a necklet and he slung it over his shoulders.

  Thus protected, he walked through the tangled woodland to the deserted village. He stared up at the immense palisade on its steep bank of earth, higher by far than Gilla’s people could or would have constructed. Trees grew from the bank, black-trunked and monstrous, warped into shapes as if twisted by winds from the four corners; their roots gripped and covered great blocks of stone, some carved with symbols and faces. These, too, were demon-wrought.

  The Wolfhead walked twice around the outer bank, then entered the village by the eastern gate. He gaped again in astonishment, this time at the twisted houses, their walls curved and angled, the stones coloured, their roofs a bizarre mixture of the thatching he would have expected and tiling as he had seen on Roman buildings. Everywhere, gruesome, ugly faces stared at him from statues, or from fragments of crumbled building.

  A turret like a Roman tower, but round, grew from the village centre; a pennant flapped there, red and gold, the shape designed on it that of a dragon. The top of the tower was castellated. The whole structure gleamed a brilliant white.

  In the air, the stink of the demon was strong.

  “Ealgawan! Badda!’ the seer called, but there was just silence in reply. Somewhere in the confusion of impossible buildings lay the well, with its two trapped men. But the shaman could not see a way into this mess of stone and wood.

  He called again, and as he did so, the earth shook. Walls crumbled further and the air crackled, as if the god Taran was sending his silent fire from the heavens. A sudden stifling wind sucked the rain away from the seer and the building in front of him twisted on its base, dry clay flaking and spilling from great cracks that appeared on it.

  The Wolfhead stepped back quickly, drawing his cloak around his shoulders. He fought to keep confusion from his mind, but he was unnerved.

  Through the rain came riders, a small band of them on enormous horses, each animal white and covered with coloured, heavy blankets. Their harnessing rattled like a Legion on the march. Their riders were silver men, bright yet blurred, as if they rode from some icy hell.

  They were as insubstantial as fog, and as quickly as the Wolfhead envisioned them, they seemed to fade, although the earth continued to shake to the sound of their riding. The seer had encountered nothing like them, but they were warriors, of that he was certain. He had seen their like from the dry forts of Babylon to the cold frontiers of the Roman Empire. He had followed in the wake of the Goths, and watched, from afar, as tall, dark-haired men in bright bronze armour had ridden in triumph around the great stones of this very land, the land of the Britons.

  He had seen the ages, but the warriors he had just visioned were from an unknown region. Like the Wolfhead himself, they were ghosts.

  He drew away from the haunted village, keeping low against the rain, frightened yet intrigued by this encounter.

  (II)

  Head low in the rain, lean body glistening, the wild dog padded warily along the edge of the river, half an eye on the tents and the miserable farmers who inhabited them, half aware of the dense thickets that bordered the bank. Inkmarker rose from his forlorn crouch, close to the stinking stew of wolfskull, gathered his short cloak around his shoulders, glanced once at Gilla—who was preoccupied with thoughts of his own—and moved in the same direction as the hound.

  The boy was hungry and angry at being so abused by his master. “I need food. Doesn’t he understand that?” His belly rumbled, the sound echoing in hollow bones. There was a scent of woodsmoke on the rain, and woodsmoke made him think of pork, charred and crispy from the fire. He kept pace with the hound, skidding on the slick turf close to the river, plunging through the briar and thorn of the thickets, listening to the dull patter of rain through trees in their full spring leaf.

  The dog crossed the stream ahead of Inkmarker, close to the earthwork that surrounded the haunted village. For a moment or two the boy crouched below the bushes, peering through the hazel scrub at the ambling shape of his master as the man paced around the high wall.

  The Wolfhead glanced his way just once, but seemed to have seen nothing. He vanished inside. A few moments later the earth shook and the trees on the earthworks twisted and groaned, seeming to reach towards the boy. Inkmarker’s eyes widened with shock and fear, and he withdrew rapidly to the river.

  The hound had caught a water rat, and was crunching through the limp, brown body, feral eyes on the boy, threatening: stay off.

  Inkmarker sat below a tree, huddled and cold. The dog whined as it ate, then growled. In seconds it gulped down the small creature.

  “Not even a tail for me? You miserable beast.” He threw a stick at the dog. The dog watched the weapon approach but didn’t move and the wood struck its head. Now it rose and padded up to the boy below the tree. Inkmarker reached out a hand and the dog snapped at the wrist, closing its teeth over the exposed flesh, but not biting.

  “Bite,” said Inkmarker. “Draw blood. Show your independence. Don’t be like me, too frightened to fight your master.”

  But the wild dog had not been wild long enough; its memory of fire and companionship was too close. It watched Inkmarker through eyes that had suddenly gone soft.

  It released the boy and ran through the wood to the earth wall, and the twisted-tree palisade. The rain drummed on the turf. Images, shapes, flickered in the air. Inkmarker could feel, rather than hear, movement in the wood. He dodged and ducked, felt the skin on his body crawl and tighten. His senses were heightened; his face bled water from the soft and gushing downpour.

  There was a horseman in the woods. There was something prowling close by … And out in the clear, the dog was behaving strangely. It was turning in circles, as if after its tail, but it seemed to b
e sniffing for something. Then it leapt into thin air, paws extended, and leapt again, as if battering against a closed door, or trying to ascend a steep bank.

  The dog watched Inkmarker. Then it turned and ran around the village, yelping and barking, every bit the frantic animal, lost and frightened. Again it leapt into the air, dropped, seemed stunned, seemed to be watching something.

  “What you are seeing?” the boy asked quietly.

  The dog was motionless. It had raised its back and the fur stood on end. It snarled, walked in a strange, stiff way, backward. Then it barked desperately, ran forward again, leapt and scrabbled in the air, falling to the wet earth.

  A moment later there was a sudden, alarming noise behind Inkmarker, and the boy turned quickly; he stepped back into the open, and watched, terrified, as the cluttered, tangled thicket behind was parted. An immense face appeared there, a dog’s face, a hound’s maw, its teeth, daggerlike and gleaming, streaming wetness.

  It came through the wood, walking like a horse, pushing against the trees. It passed out of the wood, brushing by the gasping, frozen boy. It stank of ferality and territory, a sharp, pissy odour that exuded from its towering flanks. The man who followed it was also gigantic, half-armoured, kilted and helmeted in the fashion of the Northmen. He glanced at the cowering scribe, then tugged at the rope with which he held the great hound.

  “Cunhaval,” Inkmarker breathed, and then sat down heavily as man and huge beast walked not through the gate into the village, but into hell, sliding into the rain, into nowhere, there one moment, and invisible the next.

  The wild dog was apoplectic. It screeched and rolled, its legs in the air, its body flexing and twisting. It seemed to die. Inkmarker thought he heard the crack of bones. Was the wild dog being crushed by the feet of the gone-hound, the daemon dog?

  “Cunhaval. Great Hound …” the boy again whispered. He remembered the tales of the beast, told to him when he had been younger and in the monastery. Cunhaval, hound of the underworld, running with its warrior master, its champion knight. And the Wolfhead too had told him about the creature, but for a different reason, a reason to do with seeing that underworld. The mask of Cunhaval, a way to watch the running of a hunting dog into the realm of spirits.

  He approached the dying creature. All wildness had fled. Then the eyes faded as its spirit, perhaps, followed Cunhaval into the world within the world.

  “What did you see?” Inkmarker whispered in the wet ear. “What vision, I wonder.” The dog’s breathing was soft; finally it stopped altogether. Inkmarker stroked its wet head for a moment, then dragged the corpse into the hollow of a thicket, drew out his knife and quickly skinned the fur from the face, cutting first around the neck, then splitting the tight flesh over the skull. Remembering what he had seen the Wolfhead do, he peeled away the face of the dog, and scraped the blood from the raw hide. He made a frame of twigs, tied with ivy strands, and secured the flesh mask to this crude base.

  Nervously and cautiously he placed the mask across his own face. He went into the clearing, looked towards the village and peered at the world through the eyes of the wild dog, the spirit of Cunhaval, the Hunter of the Otherworld.

  A moment of silence, then he was screaming and beating at the thin air in front of his face.

  He was in a confined, almost airless place, leaping at a brightly painted door, paws striking the wood, body striking a soft fabric that covered the corridor along which he prowled and raged and whined … and leapt. He could hear a voice, plaintive at first, then hysterical: “I want my dog. Let me have my dog. Please. Please. Let me have my dog …”

  Almost instantly he was in a different space, still confined, and this too was airless. He could hear the sound of the dog, battering against the door. Pictures of warriors whirled before his eyes. Horses raced through dark woods. Hoofs thundered. The eerie ululations of war-trumpets sounded loud in this bizarre prison. Feathered plumes caught the wind. Light gleamed on strangely bright and silver armour.

  And there was pain, and hunger, and the Inkmarker knew this hunger well …

  The voice again, the child-demon’s voice, “Merlin. Arthur, Sir Gawain. Sir Bedwyn. Sir Wulf. Come to me. Come now. Come now.”

  More images: of tall turrets, high walls, a deep lake around a proud castle, and Inkmarker/wild dog scurried below the prancing legs of fine, high horses, while hounds ten times his height were sent on the hunt for stags that rose like trees above the forest, and roared and called, and thundered; and armour clashed. And music made meaningless sounds, while coloured flags streamed and high, wide tents gave birth to tall, silver men …

  The fear became too much for Inkmarker and he was sick. He had eaten nothing for so long that he retched up only a pale, sour liquid. He ran from the cold, wet earthen wall, tearing the mask from his face, trying to block the screaming voice of the child-demon and banish the frightening, incomprehensible pictures of silver men and white-walled castles from his mind. He found the cover of the edgewood, crawled below the thorns, wrapped the briar and the bramble around him, buried his face in the musty mould of bracken and leaf.

  The demon had touched him. It had touched him through the wild dog. It had trapped him, made him become the dog, and the dog-part of the demon had caught his limbs and made him prance and twist and scrabble like the poor, mad beast.

  But that voice. That poor voice: “I want my dog …” Such sadness. Such fear. Such loneliness.

  Someone moved swiftly, menacingly through the underbrush. Inkmarker whimpered and crawled deeper into the sylvan bosom. A hand reached for him, dragged him back by the damp seat of his pants. He was lifted bodily to his feet, and the Wolfhead shook him quiet. The old man reached down for the crumpled dog-mask, stared at it, then at the boy.

  “You are just a simple Inkmarker. If you play with magic you will feel the bite of demon teeth.”

  The boy squirmed in the powerful grasp of his master. He said, “I saw warriors in armour. They gleamed like moon on water. I saw white-walled castles. I touched the demon, and the demon’s dog. He is very young.”

  Slowly the grip relaxed. The Wolfhead lowered himself to a crouch. He was at first puzzled, then excited, at what his young scribe had told him.

  “Indeed,” he whispered. “Then you must have drunk that broth from the skull.”

  “No! I didn’t! And I won’t. Although I am hungry …”

  Ancient eyes tore apart the soul of the youth. But old magic bowed, in its wisdom, to the showing of youthful talent.

  “You have done more than I could do,” the shaman murmured. “If you can touch the demon-son, then you can find the way to banish it back to the pits of the earth.” The man picked up the shattered mask, passed it back to his apprentice. He placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Did you say you were hungry?”

  “Hungry enough to eat a dog … no! Not a dog!”

  The Wolfhead laughed, and his grip on the boy’s neck tightened. “Where is the body of that hound?” he asked softly, and Inkmarker’s gorge rose again.

  (III)

  When he had finished eating—a small bowl of thick broth and a hunk of oatcake—Inkmarker was instructed to write:

  The nature of the daemon is strange. It is either youthful—a form perhaps of Mercurian or Mabdagda—or it has ingested the soul of a child, and it is this struggling soul whose nightmare is expressed in the ruins. The shape of the village is bent and twisted and given an appearance that is remote from my experience. These structures are from another world, from hell. Inkmarker is attuned to the child in the demon. Through his eyes other pictures, other worlds, can be seen which are absent from my own vision. He, then, can see through the gate in the skull, into hell. I see only what the demon sends through the gate in the world. To summon the demon I shall use Inkmarker and the “journeying” mask he has so cleverly made, to call upon the child’s soul. The demon may well follow, and I shall destroy it.

  Hand resting lightly on the boy’s shoulder, the Wolfhead returned along
the rough track between the woods, to the rise of land that led to the earthworks. The day was still, now; the scent of rain was strong, bringing out the smells of the rich earth. In the trees, creatures shuffled restlessly, and Inkmarker glanced nervously about.

  “What made you kill the dog and make the mask?” the Wolfhead asked.

  Inkmarker clutched the wet hide tightly, glancing down at the crumpled features of the dog. “Impulse,” he said. “But you told me about the ten tracks into hell … I knew about Cunhaval … I didn’t kill the dog …”

  The Wolfhead smiled as he walked, his gaunt face tightening. “Cunhaval: the running of a hound into the unknown region.” He nodded, slightly proud that his apprentice had absorbed so much of his own secret ways. “The tracks are ancient. I myself carry all the ‘journey masks’, but use only the ghost, Morndun. When I enter the otherworld, I pass in as a ghost. But today I shall try and draw the daemon into our world. It is you who will do the running.”

  There had been more changes to the village. The stone walls that had so recently risen tall and turreted from the bank, now were crushed and decayed, overgrown with thorns and twisted oaks, small, gnarly trees that jutted from crevices and the tumbled brick. But a high pole, with a fluttering pennant, stood close to the ragged cluster of houses and ragged walls at the centre of the enclosure.

  Everywhere was draped in a pale, heavy mist, which hung quite still despite the sound and sensation of a cold wind blowing through the ruins. As the Wolfhead led the way through the broken buildings, Inkmarker jumped and twitched at each odd sound: the whinnying of a horse, the sudden scampering of a dog, the creak of wood, the rattle of arms and armour.

  Close to the well, the tattered rags of tents and pennants fluttered silently in that same impossible breeze. Broken lances of enormous length lay everywhere. Light gleamed suddenly on the face of a horse, carved out of steel. It was a mask of sorts, or perhaps protective metal for a war-beast, cast aside among the duller gleam of bones.