Avilion (Mythago Wood 7)

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘ “Well,” said Mogoch after a moment, staring down at the hunter. “I hope they’ll be by shortly.”

  ‘ “I’m sure she will,” the hunter said, and turned from the giant.

  ‘Mogoch used an oak tree to scratch his back—’

  ‘An oak tree ? He should have used a pine!’

  ‘Quiet!’

  ‘—then killed and ate a deer for his supper, wondering why he had been summoned to this place.

  ‘Eventually he left, but named the valley ritha muireog, which in his own language meant: “where the hunter waits”.

  ‘Later, however, the valley was called imarn uklyss, which means: “where the girl came back through the fire”.’

  For a short while after he had finished recounting this tale, Steven was silent, his gaze on the steep-sided valley, his mind detached from the purpose of this visit to the place where he had finally settled.

  It was not a dream that had drawn him in, nor even a memory; it was an uncertainty. He could remember the long journey through the valley, from the place of fire, from the stone, to this quiet place where he had waited. He could remember the horrors and the struggle against the unseen and unknown presences that inhabited this land, sufficiently so to feel an echo of that terrible time.

  But he could also remember the joy and delight, the hope and calm that rose in him when, sitting on this very rock, he had seen a shadow become a shade; and a shade become a form; and the form shape itself into the a woman he had known.

  The woman had stepped out of the valley and come to him. And her wounds had healed, though she was bedraggled and scratched by a journey that had taken her through her own hell and hardship.

  But the blood and bruising on her body had not mattered, only the smile and glow of relief when she had seen him.

  ‘I’ve found you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I knew you’d come.’

  Steven remembered how she flowed into his embrace, all strength gone, letting his own strength hold her. She seemed so small. So light. Her fingers sought his hands, clutched them hard. Her breathing became calm. Her hair was matted with time and travel, with forest and river. It was a mat of copper, long, unkempt, smelling strongly of toil.

  ‘The return was very difficult,’ she whispered. ‘The return was very difficult. I hope I’m safe now.’

  He remembered how he had held her, pressing his face against hers, opening her mouth with his, welcoming her with all of his body and clutching her to him, not letting her go, tasting and remembering everything about her.

  And when she started to cry he picked her up and carried her home.

  And when she slept, he sat by her and listened to the words she spoke in her dreams, the same words, over and over.

  ‘The return was very hard. I hope I’m safe now.’

  A small foot gently kicked Steven on the shoulder. The valley cleared in his mind’s eye and became the steep-sided shadowy pass that he had brought his daughter to see.

  Yssobel was standing on the rock, looking down. The breeze was catching the tassels on her fur leggings. Her hair, red like fire in this strange light, was flapping over her face. The look in her eyes was questioning, not alarmed. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Dreaming,’ Steven replied.

  The girl looked down the valley.

  ‘I liked the story. I’d heard some of it from Jack.’

  ‘You told me.’ Steven had taken his son through the same ritual two years before.

  Yssobel stretched out her arms in front of her, fingers pointing before she turned her palms so that they seemed to embrace what she was seeing. A moment later she let her arms drop.

  ‘The girl who came back through the flames was my mother.’

  ‘Guiwenneth. Yes.’

  ‘But who was the hunter? Who was waiting?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘Jack didn’t tell me. But it’s obvious. It was you.’

  ‘Me. Of course.’

  Yssobel shivered. She was still standing and Steven could see that she seemed uncomfortable. So small a girl, so much expression in her face. He asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘I was just thinking. I was thinking about how long you waited.’ She looked down, meeting his gaze. ‘How long did you wait, daddy?’

  The innocent question was like a blow to his head and heart. ‘If I knew the answer to that, my darling, I’d have been able to move away from this place. I waited a long time. But I don’t know how long. All I know is that I waited too long. By the time Guiwenneth came back, I was too much a part of the valley. I can never go home.’

  Yssobel frowned. ‘But you are home. This is your home.’

  Realising that he had made a mistake, Steven stood and gathered the girl into his arms. ‘Yes, of course. This is very much my home. But we’ve talked about my childhood and you know I had a home a long way from here. At the edge of the wood. That’s all I meant. I can’t go back to the old place. I’m happy here.’

  ‘Do you want to go back?’

  ‘I’m happy here, sweetheart. With you and Jack and Gwin. This is my life. This is my world.’

  The girl stared at him long and hard, still frowning. Then she shook her head and took her father’s face in her hands. What she said next shocked him.

  ‘But you’re not. You’re not happy.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  She looked sad now. ‘I don’t know. I think it might be because ... because ...’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Because . . . you wonder what will happen when we’re grown up. Where do we go? When will we go? We can’t stay here for ever.’

  No, darling. We can’t. My God, you understand my fear more than I understand it myself.

  Steven said, ‘Let me put it another way. I’m happy with you. I can’t think of a greater happiness than to have my family with me as I get old and creaky—’

  ‘And can’t hunt like you did!’

  ‘And can’t hunt like I used to hunt—’

  ‘Can’t throw your spear and hit anything other than a rock!’

  ‘I most certainly can.’

  ‘Can’t shoot straight; always putting funny smelly infusions on your shoulder to ease the pain.’

  ‘The pain is called arthritis, and if you keep reminding me of my infirmities I’ll wish a touch of it on your tongue!’

  ‘Can’t even wrestle the calf down to the ground.’

  ‘But Jack can. And do I not make excellent vegetable juice and bread? And do I not tell you great stories? About the people who live all around us, and who sometimes we can see? And a few of whom you’ve even met?’

  The girl nodded enthusiastically. ‘I like your stories. I like Odysseus best of all. He makes me laugh. I wish he wasn’t so lost.’

  ‘Be careful of Odysseus.’

  ‘He’s lonely, though he has a lot of visitors and they talk for hours. He’s learning all the time.’

  ‘Be careful of him. I don’t like you riding off to visit his cave.’

  ‘I know, I know. He’s a trickster. But he makes me laugh.’

  ‘Your mother and I think he’s dangerous. And he’s older than you.’

  ‘Two years? He’s Jack’s age, daddy.’

  ‘Even so . . .’

  This was not the time to readdress his concerns about his daughter’s meanderings, her acquaintance with the people who had gathered at this end of the valley, this stopping place for the spirits who had crossed back from Lavondyss. It was time to go back to the villa.

  ‘Come on.’

  Steven reached up his hand to help Yssobel down from the rock where she was standing, but again she stared into the valley. And was looking puzzled.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘You weren’t the hunter,’ she whispered. ‘You weren’t the one who was waiting.’

  Something about her demeanour, perhaps the way she was trembling, arms limp by her sides, alarmed Steven and he found himself unable to move. ‘What do you mean?
I waited for Guiwenneth and after a long time she came back, and here we are.’

  ‘You can’t have been the hunter,’ the girl said softly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he’s still there. The hunter is still there. Still waiting. I can see him. He’s only a shadow, but I can see him. The hunter is there. He’s sad, he’s confused, and he’s calling to me.’

  The girl’s hands were icy cold. Steven reached for her and after a moment she allowed him to take her down from the rock.

  ‘There’s no one there now. No one who should concern you. This is just . . .’

  Just what? Dream? Fantasy? Imagination?

  Before he could find a way to express his thoughts, Yssobel said, ‘I’m not imagining things.’

  ‘Sweetheart: in the world in which we live, imagination is everything. Of course you’re not imagining things. What you see is what you’ve made. With this . . .’ Steven tapped her head. ‘The hunter in the valley is not me. I’m here. It’s you. Do you understand me? Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  Yssobel hugged her father. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. There is no such thing as a dream. A dream becomes life. You’ve told me this.’

  ‘Good girl. Five years old, going on twenty. Good girl. Now tell me: the hunter you can see, if indeed he is a hunter. The hunter in the valley. Does he have a name?’

  Yssobel was silent, shivering. Suddenly she became strong again, pulling herself away from her father’s embrace. She was small and stout, strong and sturdy, and she walked away from Steven, towards the twin pillars that seemed to mark the entrance to the valley.

  ‘His name is resurrection. He is held together by his scars. And he needs to be healed of his wounds.’

  Was this Yssobel speaking?

  ‘There’s no such name as “resurrection”.’

  The girl was silent. She looked suddenly sad. ‘It’s not his real name. Anyway, he’s gone now.’

  She came back to her father and took his hand, leading him away from the valley. They walked along the track that led to the villa, and Jack was waiting for them at the gates. The tall, thin boy looked anxious.

  ‘Gwin’s gone,’ he said. He always called his mother by her name. ‘She got upset by something.’

  ‘What do you mean, “gone”?’

  ‘She took the grey and a packhorse and rode through the east gate. I think she’s gone up to the old stone Dun, her father’s fort. But I’m not sure. She took Hurthig with her.’

  Hurthig was a mute young man, a Saxon, strong from working the villa’s forge, with a good protective arm.

  Steven was stunned for a moment. The boy had watery eyes. Whatever had happened, it had been upsetting for him.

  Behind Jack, Rianna appeared, walking across the courtyard from the villa itself. She was one of several older women who came to the villa occasionally, and who were trusted to look after the children. She had come, with others, from Dun Peredur, the fort of Guiwenneth’s birth, and now a haunted place a half-day’s ride away. They lived most of the time in shelters along the edge of the river that flowed into the valley, but over-wintered in the greater company of this old Roman ruin.

  ‘I was at the river, listening to the water,’ she said. ‘Guiwen neth came to find me before she left. Jack is right: she is very disturbed.’

  ‘Did she say anything?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Yssobel whispered: ‘Is mummy upset?’ She held her father’s hand tightly.

  ‘I think so.’

  She hesitated, frowning slightly, but only for a moment. ‘Is it . . . is it because of that man in the valley?’

  Steven looked down at his daughter. She was strangely bright-eyed and brightly curious. ‘I don’t know, Yssi. I’ll have to find out.’

  The Villa

  Steven had discovered the ruined villa in the fifth year of his wait for Guiwenneth; five years, that was, as far as he could estimate. The valley itself was a dangerous place. He had had no horse. It took him many days to make the journey from one end to the other, and he was constantly aware that other beings were walking the same tracks: some shadowy, real and curious of him; others ephemeral, often giving themselves away only by their movements through the woods, or the disturbance of the river.

  As he wound his way through the wide pass, he often saw boats or small colourful barges, floating down towards the stone. They were eerily silent as they passed, and as still as death, though sometimes a face would appear from beneath a cowl and stare at him forlornly.

  He had always found some form of shelter, and manageable hunting, fruit orchards and wild crops, and the makings of fire.

  He was not unaware that what he encountered was surfacing from his own memory. He tried to suppress the darker thoughts he carried. To think of romantic stone castles and armoured knights was to think of war. The brightest notion he carried was of a Roman villa, terracotta tiles, whitewashed walls, colourful mosaic floors in every room, a place packed with animals and laughing children; and with stores of grain and wine.

  Some forgotten part of legend embraced such a farmstead, and one day he had discovered that it had formed there, at the top of the valley - though not exactly as he had expected it.

  The outer gates were broken and rotten, the courtyard cracked and weed-infested. The villa itself was in disrepair. Most of the roof tiles had slipped and were broken, the mosaic floors of the ten rooms grown through with roots or scrubby trees. The two gardens, at the side and the back, were growing wild, though the trees were mostly fruit trees, untended, knotty with calluses on their bark, and thick with fungus. But still producing.

  The gates faced the deep valley. At the rear, a field led to a steep hill, rising to thick wood. There was a small gate to what Steven called ‘the east’, and outbuildings to the ‘west’. All around, there were smaller valleys, leading away into smaller unknowns.

  Several of the rooms were habitable and Steven spent time cleaning them, and sealing them against whatever weather this end of the valley might choose to throw against the place. After he’d cleared the gardens and the central courtyard of the square-shaped villa, the land began to grow flowers among the fruit trees, and it attracted bees, and wild fowl, and small wild pigs that rooted and ran when he approached but seemed almost to embrace the villa, as if once they had been a part of it, and their very tangible spirits were returning.

  And people came too. At first just drifters, seeking shelter before continuing on whatever journey was taking them to their final destination. Once, ruins of this sort had been the living spaces of all manner of migrating peoples, after the Roman occupation of Britain had ended. Eventually the villas had fallen, returned to earth, been covered by new land.

  Not this one.

  Steven tried hard to locate some clue as to the nature of the family that had lived here in the centuries when the old stone and river gods, and the gods of hearth and home, had still been invoked. A family of four, he discovered: parents; the children a boy and a girl. And each had had their own sanctuary, a fact he surmised from the statuettes and wax remains he found; and each had had their own servants or slaves.

  The villa had also been a place of horses. He found the collapsed stables in the woodland behind the villa itself.

  There was one group of arrivals he recognised at once, having seen them when he had first entered Ryhope Wood. They arrived at night, waving torches to signal that they were there, calling out in a language of Germanic dialect with which Steven had become vaguely familiar. A man, a woman and a boy who didn’t speak, and they were called Ealdwulf, Egwearda and Hurthig. They had with them six scraggy and tired horses, on one of which was a leather bag containing the mummified arm of a tattooed man, a beautiful, ornate gold ring on its middle finger. The relic of their warrior king, Steven discovered later.

  They were seeking a place they had heard of; a place of healing. They refused to say its name.

  Steven smiled, thinking to himself: That’s a lot of healing.

&
nbsp; But Ealdwulf and Egwearda stayed, and Hurthig grew, became strong and great fun with his antics, and told wild tales in mime from his own dreams. Hurthig seemed less concerned with the family’s journey than with his curiosity about the strange land in which he found himself.

  And they were still living in the villa when Steven took his five-year-old son Jack to the head of the valley. They were still there, protecting and involved in the everyday routine of living in Villa Huxley, when Steven returned with Yssobel to find his son upset and confused, and Guiwenneth fled to her father’s fort.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ Jack was anxious.

  ‘No. You stay here with Egwearda. Have you finished the repairs to the drainage channels?’

  The boy shook his head. It was work he hated and Steven knew that, but it had to be done. ‘I’ve seen him again. The old man. I’ve seen him.’

  Steven had slung a saddle and supply sack over the back of one of the horses, and Ealdwulf had supplied a second. He was ready to go after Guiwenneth, but realised now that his haste was due more to concern for the woman than care for his son.

  Ealdwulf took the horses to the gate and tethered them, and Steven took Jack to the shade of an olive tree, where they sat down for a while together.

  ‘Where was he this time?’

  ‘Across the river, standing in the shadow.’

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘He was watching me. He didn’t say anything.’

  ‘What were you doing by the river?’

  Jack hunched down a little. ‘Just fishing.’

  ‘Catch anything?’

  ‘A rainbow. It slipped the hook.’

  Steven waited for a moment, knowing that Jack’s disturbed state of mind was because of his growing obsession. ‘Was it my father? Are you sure?’

  The boy agreed silently. ‘He’s very grizzled and very scruffy, but I can always tell it’s him. His eyes, the way he looks at you . . . it’s just like you. He stands and stares, then turns and disappears. It’s like he wants to come in, but can’t cross over. I feel sad for him.’