Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (Mythago Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  The other two canoes were similar to my own. In one of them, his face still twisted with the pain of the mortal wound to his breast, lay a man in an iron-studded leather jacket and a pair of cloth trousers that were striped in the dull green of moss and the fading purple of dying heather. A thin, bronze torque was wound around his neck, the heads of wolves on the overlapping ends. His moustache – saffron-coloured, like his hair – was elaborately fashioned, curling down over the grim set of his mouth. His hair was odd, drawn up on each side of the crown of his head, the parting in the middle shaved in an inch-wide line, the bare scalp pricked out with purple chevrons. He lay, in death, noble and magnificent, and with all the despair of his lost life etched into the frown and gape of his face.

  And in the last, small boat, his companion perhaps during the journey to the edge of the wood when I had seen her, Guiwenneth lay asleep, her left hand still holding a bronze dagger, a small oval shield on her breast, its pale wood painted with the image of a leaping stag. Her face was intricately decorated with circles, spirals and other symbols. As I looked at her, I began to cry. I couldn’t help it. There was a truth I had to face and I couldn’t face it.

  I had met her as a child and glimpsed her as a grown woman for only a moment from my bedroom window. But the look she had given me, and the way I now felt for her – whether by guile or magic, or simple love at first sight, I could not imagine, I did not care – I knew only that I was in pain, and that I longed for that gentle face to open again, to look at me with a wink and a knowing smile, a look of longing that would echo my own.

  It was not possible that she was dead, rather than asleep. There could be no point in her being dead!

  Tearfully, I leaned over her. I could see no wound on her, but neither could I detect any breath from her mouth, and for a few moments I was confused, and perhaps this helped to keep despair at bay.

  I was still staring at her when a hand like a giant claw wrenched me by the shoulder, pulling me back from the tethered boats. The naked Elidyr scowled at me, pushed me aside, then bent over each body in turn, patting the cheeks, tugging the ears, touching the gashes on the ‘dead’. As he probed the belly wound in the Saracen, the man stirred and growled. Ironjacket’s mouth opened as his ribs were parted by the probing fingers of the guide, an expression of pain half felt through rising consciousness.

  I laughed out loud with relief and delight, since Guiwenneth too was stirring. They were still alive, then. All of them. They had burned their dead, the trumpeter, back below the Hogback Ridge. These were the wounded survivors of the skirmish.

  But who was Elidyr, and why was he dragging them back along the river?

  I had no answer to this at the time, and to my disappointment, the five sleeping figures continued to do just that: sleep soundly, though the hound, like the red-feathered bird, was now alert and very noisy. I crouched by Guiwenneth’s boat and stared at her. And for the first time a shadow passed across my vision. I remembered the woman whom my father had summoned, as beautiful as this sleeping figure, but warped and made sinister by the man who had brought her into life.

  It was not possible … was it? … that Huxley had left others like her in the wood? It was a cold thought in the mind of a drowsy man.

  I was being called by name and came out of my reverie.

  Elidyr was watching me closely, leaning down towards me, his big hands making gestures that I thought were pacifying.

  ‘Chris! Chan! Chris! Chan!’

  He was waving me towards my boat, indicating that I should enter it and – by his elaborate gestures – that I should fall asleep. I declined vigorously, pointing to Guiwenneth and referring to her by name. This surprised the river-walker and sent him again into an agony of indecision; He stalked back among the trees, scratching at the fungal rings that wreathed his waist and buttocks, slapped at the branches, swore at the air, then grabbed his damp clothes and dragged them over his limbs, returning to the water’s edge.

  ‘Guiwenneth!’ he agreed loudly, nodding. Then he moved his pointing finger to Ironjacket, the proud Celt, and raised his hands in that universal gesture that says, ‘I just don’t know.’

  I think he meant that he didn’t know his name.

  The dark-haired woman was ‘Issabeau’, and he added a word that sounded sinister, waving a hand towards the sky, then simulating the cutting of his throat three times, his eyes popping with meaning.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be careful of her.’

  The Saracen was ‘Abandagora’. The buck-skinned primitive was apparently called ‘Jarag’.

  ‘Thank you for the introductions. But why are they all asleep?’

  Elidyr stared at me. ‘Huh?’

  I tried to ask my question with gesture. The big man grumbled and said with emphasis, ‘Gureer! Gureer! Gwithon. Angat. Ankaratha! Gureer!’

  I repeated, ‘Gureer?’

  Elidyr waved a hand in front of his mouth and repeated, ‘Gureer,’ then tapped a finger from his lips to my ears.

  An interpreter! He was ruing the absence of an interpreter, a gureer, or a human of that name.

  I made walking motions with my fingers and said, ‘Let’s go and find this gureer: You lead the way.’

  He seemed delighted at my decisiveness and busied himself at the tethers on the fallen tree, waving me to my canoe as he did so. I stepped in gingerly and sat quite still as he untied his sleeping charges and slung the mooring ropes across his shoulder. I had expected him to continue up the river, but with a loud sigh and a grumble that seemed to go on for ever, he let the six boats float out ahead of him and drift downstream, tugging them back against the drag of the current, leaning back and taking their weight before slowly returning the way he had come, waist deep in the water.

  * * *

  For a while, facing Elidyr, I was fascinated to watch the big man at his work, reminded of stories of the Irish hero Bran, who had dragged great ships across the Irish Sea to effect an invasion of Wales; reminded of the boatman of the Styx, and all the boatmen of all the rivers of the Underworld; and I wondered what role in legend this worried giant filled, and why, indeed, every action he took seemed to fill him with an anguish of indecision?

  As he walked through the deep river, tugging at the ropes, struggling to prevent one small vessel from drifting to the bank, or snagging on a broken branch, so he watched me, the furrows in his brow as restless as a sea of snakes as his mood and thoughts changed.

  After a while he reached a hand towards me: ‘Go to sleep,’ he seemed to say.

  I remembered Treasure Island. ‘Neither oxen nor wainropes could make me sleep in this terrible place,’ I asserted, and tightened my grip around my knees.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  He sighed wearily, hauled at the Saracen’s barge, brushed aside the heavy bough of an over leaning willow, then grunted with effort as the river suddenly deepened and became more turbulent, running through glistening granite rocks formed from gigantic, broken statues.

  But I could not stay awake. One moment the sweating, bearded face was staring down at me from above the burden of coils of rope …

  … the next, the sun was dappling my vision through a breeze-blown lacework of high foliage. I was on the ground, my pack below my head, the sound of voices and laughter touching my awareness as I surfaced from swirling dreams of my mother’s death and my father’s anger.

  The chatter stopped; a man’s voice spoke in tones of alarm; a woman’s sounded calming. A moment later, Guiwenneth crouched over me, her hand a gentle touch on my chest, her hair a tickling presence on my face. She smelled fresh. Her cheeks were pale, the painted spirals washed away, and from the way she looked at me, and smiled at me, she certainly knew me.

  ‘Guiwenneth,’ I whispered and she cocked her head, raised her eyebrows, repeated her name in an accent that I knew I would never reproduce. And then she said, ‘Christian,’ and I agreed quickly, adding, ‘I’m glad to find you.’

  And now I was certai
n: this was not the angry woman I had met before, my father’s diabolical creation. At least, she was not the same manifestation. Something, certainly, connected the one with the other, but the look in her eye, the sense of familiarity and belonging, was comforting and warming. She helped me to my feet, brushing at my clothes, talking in her fluid language to the unnamed man, the Ironjacket, who leaned on his sword and regarded me coolly, answering his companion in monosyllables.

  The others paid me brief acquaintance: the Saracen touching his hand to his head and heart, the sorceress Issabeau repeating her name to me without much interest, the elk-skinned hunter slapping his hands together as if crushing shells, which it turned out he was doing. He tossed me the river-food that he had been processing, a gritty, slimy mollusc that he indicated I should eat.

  I ate.

  It was an unpleasant snack, but it seemed the courteous thing to do.

  These introductions over, the band went about their business, allowing me to observe what I soon realised was a coming-to-terms with a new situation. In truth, they were amazed to be here. Their laughter came from astonishment. Watching their body language, it was clear that Abandagora and Ironjacket did not expect to be alive, and were discussing the reason for this sudden return to the mortal world. Jarag had formed a ring of stones and sat inside it, whittling heavily on a piece of bone with a flint blade. Beside him, apparently ignoring him, Issabeau crouched and whittled at her staff, and as she whittled, so her appearance changed. The staff, I could see, was damaged, mostly by burning. She was reshaping the symbols using a thin, iron blade, cutting down to the wood again, refreshing the magic.

  But what magic!

  As she touched here, then there, so her face became a shadow of a beast, now a wolf, now a lion, now a snake, hints only, glimpses only of the power of the animal world that was condensed into this patterned shaft. Jarag watched her suspiciously, and when her face briefly transformed into a dark-furred dog, she growled, when a cat she spat, when a deer she blinked, when the features of a monkey shimmered on her eyes and lips, she chattered; and as Issabeau herself, she smiled darkly, keeping to her task, bringing back a craft and a talent that had perhaps died with her on the occasion that had brought her to the river, in her funeral boat, drawn by her otherworldly guide.

  Six

  In the late afternoon, the lassitude in the group as they recovered from their river journey changed to fierce activity, hunting for food, the building of a basic camp, mostly a foraging for dry wood to construct a fire at the river’s edge. By dusk, Ironjacket and the Saracen had constructed a clumsy pyre as high as the tall men themselves. Jarag stripped off his skins and swam twice across the river, dragging his clothing and four lengths of newly hewn birch behind him. Dry and clothed again, he erected these posts in a row on the far bank, then chipped at them, making symbols, before crouching down in front of them, staring up the stream.

  As dusk became twilight, Issabeau lit the fire, and when it was blazing she too went to the river’s edge and sat down, singing softly as she cast small stones into the water.

  It was a cool, breezy evening. I sat on the ground, close to the warming flames, and drifted into the sounds of fire and river. After a while, Guiwenneth sat down beside me, flicking mischievously at my legs with her feathered riding crop, firelight shining in her eyes and on her lips as she watched me.

  ‘Christian, Christian,’ she whispered, and I responded, ‘Guiwenneth, Guiwenneth.’

  Then, to my surprise, she leaned her head on my shoulder and took my hand in hers. My world closed down to encompass her body and her fragrance and nothing else. Her touch was gentle and curious, her fingers squeezing each of mine in turn, then running lightly over my wrists and arms. And she talked to me in that soft and sibilant tongue that I supposed to be the language of pre-Roman Britain. It was a mellow and comforting sound. Sometimes she seemed to be emphasizing a point; once she slapped my hand as if in reprimand. Twice she said something and turned her face to mine, and when our eyes met, and when she looked down at my mouth, I wanted to kiss her. I think she saw my longing.

  ‘I’ve been with you but not with you,’ I said quietly. ‘How do I explain it? I was with the wrong you. But truthfully, you are that wild rider; you are the white-faced, chalk-haired girl who galloped me through the barley, all those years ago. God knows, it’s good to find you again, even in these strange circumstances. And you have cast a spell on me, and I certainly won’t complain about it …’

  ‘Agus acrath scathan,’ she said by way of agreement, then pointed to the river. ‘Gwyr. Ambath criath. GWYR. Hoossh!’

  ‘How can I be hoossh when I want to kiss you?’

  She relaxed into my arms again. Ironjacket walked past in the firelight, glancing darkly at me, then at Guiwenneth. He muttered something and she told him off. He laughed and made a quick movement with his right hand and Guiwenneth growled at him again.

  ‘He’s big, looks very strong,’ I said with a smile. ‘But useless with a sword, I expect …’

  ‘Hoosshh …’ was the reply to my nervous observation.

  I had already made connections between the Saracen and Issabeau, a pair, I thought, despite their different origins; perhaps part of the same story? But their intimacy, what little had been demonstrated, might equally have been that between brother and sister – or people in the same business? – as between lovers in dire circumstances.

  Ironjacket was intrigued by Issabeau, I noticed. And she seemed perturbed by his presence, and they kept apart. But the proud man kept a protective eye on Guiwenneth, especially where I was concerned, and again I was unsure of his relationship with her. They spoke the same language, I had easily noticed that. And though they spoke different words from the Mesolithic hunter, the Saracen and the mediaeval Sorceress, all five understood each other, and very little in the way of signs and gesture needed to be used.

  As Guiwenneth relaxed in my tentative embrace, awaiting the results of river-fire and totem poles, I watched the tall, saffron-bearded Celt. He was very fussy about his appearance, continually stroking his moustache and those weird and wonderful wings of hair above his head. I had noticed earlier that rings of tightly interwoven snakes were tattooed or painted on his arms. Though his clothes stank, and were ragged and battle-torn, something in his demeanour suggested that he was less a tramp, more a warrior.

  It may seem strange to observe this, but all of this motley group suggested more than they displayed. I might have been in the presence of royalty (as much as a Mesolithic hunter might be described as royal), or in the presence of knights of their age.

  I had to remind myself constantly that I was in the presence of legend; and if Huxley was right, then these people, each in his or her way, had been a hero of their time, even if forgotten by later generations. But a hero once, and now alive again.

  That thought indulged me in a moment of inappropriate paternal protectiveness; for they might all have been of my own creation. These wildwood warriors might have come from my own unseen dreams.

  Certainly Guiwenneth had. I was in no doubt about it. The woman had touched my heart from the moment I had seen her at Oak Lodge, and then again, wounded, perhaps dying in her boat of fate.

  And if she were my creation now, then she had been mine then, those years ago, when she had disobeyed her guardian – Manandoun, was it? – and galloped headlong from the forest. And if she had been part of the raiding party that night, then they too were from my deep unconscious, my most secret dream, and I had called them to mark me.

  Slathan! Whatever it was, whatever it meant.

  I had not thought of slathan for years. The two nicks in my brow were all but invisible, though now, as I remembered how they had been inflicted, they began to itch again.

  ‘Slathan,’ I breathed softly and Guiwenneth looked up sharply, frowning; then touched a finger to my lips and nestled down again. I remained hypnotised by the flame, aware of Issabeau’s crouching figure and the murkier shape of Jarag on the other b
ank.

  I fell into a light sleep, but was roused by a sudden cry. Guiwenneth stood up quickly, then tugged at my hand. I followed her to the water’s edge and stood with the others, watching the approach of a boat whose hull was illuminated by flaring torches.

  It sailed towards us slowly, turning in the flow. A tall, familiar shape stood in the stern, tugging and twisting at the rudder; a leaner, harder-looking man, trim-bearded, occupied the prow, regarding us coolly. I noticed that Issabeau had put her hands to her mouth and was staring in shock. The Saracen and Ironjacket were dismayed as well. Guiwenneth was shaking her head, smiling at some secret realization. She raised a hand and acknowledged the man in the prow, and he raised a hand to her, a grim smile touching his lean features. She glanced at me and whispered, ‘Gwyr.’

  I got the distinct impression that whatever this group had been calling to, with their fires, they had summoned more than they had bargained for.

  Jarag and Ironjacket waded into the shallows and Elidyr cast a rope to the Celt, who caught it and pulled it taut, helping to slow the drifting vessel. Jarag swam back to the fire and all of us helped to draw the boat onto the bank. Elidyr unloaded several small, clay amphorae and four sacks of foodstuff. The newcomer tugged at the reins of two grey ponies which had been lying on sacking in the deeper part of the vessel’s hull. They were small animals, shaggy-maned and ungroomed. They struggled and stumbled to dry land, protesting loudly, but became calm when Guiwenneth embraced them like old friends, whispered to them, and gave them a thorough once-over by the light of the fire.

  The Saracen had opened one of the sacks and laid out food of varying types on his shield, inspecting the morsels critically and without much enthusiasm. Ironjacket cut the beeswax seal on one of the flagons and took a long draught of its contents. I smelled sweet wine on his breath and he spoke to me in a much warmer tone of voice than before. Guiwenneth was crouched by the shield, picking at fruit and chunks of grey meat. Jarag and Issabeau joined her, but Issabeau selected only an apple and walked back to the river to join the sulking Saracen.