Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (Mythago Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  Kylhuk’s Legion was not like this, though it was ordered in its own way and was huge, seeming to stretch forever through the forest, a sprawling beast (now mostly sleeping) laid out according to Kylhuk’s needs.

  In a Roman legion there were traditionally six thousand men of war. Manandoun had referred to this one as ‘an animal marching on ten thousand legs’, but Gwyr thought that four thousand was more like it, two thousand men, women and children, although if Manandoun was including the dogs and horses, each of which had four legs, he may have been closer to the truth. Kylhuk’s Legion had whole packs of dogs scattered through, its line, hounds of all types and mastiffs the size of bulls; also, four herds of wild ponies, which would be broken in and used as the need developed.

  Indeed, as we rode down the line later, there was an outburst of angry shouting from some of the fires as a spike-haired boy astride a black, narrow-muzzled wolf-hound came bounding past us, leading five angry, kicking horses by rope tethers. He was whooping and laughing, holding the dog by its mane, kicking the beast’s sweating flanks with bare feet.

  We watched them go and Gwyr said, ‘One of Kylhuk’s first tasks was the capture of the hound Cunhaval from its master, Greidos son of Eiros. That hound has mated with every bitch in Legion and the place now swarms with its bastards. Like the one you’ve just seen. The children in Legion organise hunting parties – for its fleas!’

  And then, as if the moment had not happened, he continued his thought on the number of legs in Legion, saying that as well as horses and dogs there were also weasels, foxes, sacred hares and bulls, not to mention owls, eagles and hawks, none of them tethered but flying free, attached to the column by magic and by instinct.

  ‘And there is a woman who keeps cats,’ he added as an afterthought, but said no more, looking distinctly uncomfortable even at mentioning the fact.

  That first night, as Gwyr and I rode slowly down the line, I became overwhelmed by the size of the column, the dazzling fires with their chattering, laughing or sleeping groups of fighters and their mates, the confusion of armour and weaponry, the chaos of tents, some of them ornate with pennants flying, some made from bent willow and animal hides, some nothing more than a few skins wrapped around the yellowing long-bones of mammals.

  We rode through a forest that was alive with light, that droned with voices, and which also flexed and flashed with distorted perception: on many occasions, during that first tour of the defences of the Legion, I saw people emerge from nowhere, trunks giving up the shapes, or the earth opening to disgorge a human form, a fire sucked down then flaring up again as a man or woman stepped through the flames as if nothing had occurred at all.

  If I asked Gwyr a question along the lines of, ‘Who is that?’ or ‘How on earth?’ or ‘In this forest can someone step out of the fire?’ he would most often shrug and say, ‘Truthfully, if I knew the answer to that I’d be a wiser man than I am,’ which became such an incantation that I began to laugh when he said it, or even voice the words along with him. On an occasion or two he explained that these apparitions were part of the perimeter force that used the secret ways, or the charmed ways, or the ghost-born ways, legendary and mostly forgotten forms of magic, to hold the flank of Legion against those malevolent forces that surrounded the garrison like so many predatory animals.

  The flanks were also defended by groups of armed men. These, as in any legion, were formed from groups of warriors of the same culture, and so Viking patrolled with Viking, and mail-clad Norman stood arrogantly debating his fate with shorn-haired compatriot. I saw soldiers with muskets who might have been from the seventeenth century, Saracens and crest-helmeted men from the near east, Greeks and Goths, Scots and Sumerians, all of them recognizable because history and the carvings on rock-tomb, pottery and chalice have preserved the form and shape of their beard, hair and armour. And I saw dozens of other groups whose dress and attitude confounded me, all of them spread down the line, band upon band of them, becoming hundreds, all of them resting now that Legion had dropped to its haunches for the night.

  When Legion advanced, the Forlorn Hope spread out before it, and the Silent Towers, as they were called, behind it, for reasons that I would learn later. Behind those scouts at front and rear was a formidable defence, divided between armed warriors and specialists in the ways of magic. Gwyr listed them for me, and I became dizzy with these specialist functions, but I remember that he talked of earth-walkers, spirit-travellers, shadow-fighters, shamans who could become hounds, eagles, salmon or stags, running or swimming through the forest with an animal’s sense. There were ‘Oolerers’, who opened and closed hidden gates, called Hollowings, so that the Legion could slip briefly into another time before slowly flowing back again, avoiding danger. And the woman who kept cats, he added, shuddering.

  There were Arthurian knights, their heavy armour gleaming as they rode, their horses huge compared to the smaller ponies that Kylhuk owned in multitude; and these knights were either ghost-born or holy (Gwyr used the expression ‘hallowed’, which I took to mean the same thing).

  Ghost-born were not to be interfered with. They were reluctant additions to Legion, parasites on the back of the noble column, seeking a totem that was as dark in its meaning as it was in its appearance. ‘A Dark Grail? I asked.

  ‘Truthfully, if I knew the answer to that—’

  ‘You’d be a wiser man.’

  He looked at me irritably and I smiled, then laughed as he walked his horse below a low-slung bough and cracked his head.

  ‘Perhaps we have seen enough for the night,’ he said, composing himself after he had rubbed the area of the blow. ‘The heart of Legion is around Kylhuk himself,’ he pointed into the forest. We had ridden ten miles or so in one direction, and returned half-way along the other flank. Circling the heart had taken several hours and my impression was that Kylhuk and his train lay a mile or so from this rim, behind more circles of defences.

  And I was certainly tired now, my backside sore, my thighs aching from the stretch across the horse.

  Legion slept. Gwyr and I rode slowly between the fires, returning to where Guiwenneth lay below a woollen blanket, her back to Someone son of Somebody, who lay with his hand on Issabeau’s outstretched arm (a pale limb in the night, everything about her so delicate). Guiwenneth stirred as I lay down beside her, Gwyr again having taken the horses to their own station.

  She looked at me sleepily, then touched fingers to my cheeks and smiled. ‘I wanted to come with you,’ she said. ‘But you went before I knew it.’

  ‘Gwyr has shown me the defences of the legion,’ I said. ‘I’ve learned a lot.’

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ she murmured, then stretched to kiss me, putting a hand round my head and holding my face to hers, her lips on my cheek, then, after a moment’s hesitation, her lips on mine. ‘Come under my blanket. Keep me warm.’

  I went under her blanket. She was a slender shape in my arms, wriggling and snuggling closer to me, reaching a cold hand inside my shirt for my warm flesh. But if I’d hoped for passion I was disappointed. She mumbled and murmured, drifted into sleep again, her hair covering my face. I had to move it away with my chin and nose, since my arms were entwined with hers.

  And I slept. And I slept well.

  And at dawn, when I woke, I woke to the sight of Guiwenneth beside me, her eyes open, her breath in rhythm with my own, our faces still very close.

  ‘Good morning,’ I murmured.

  ‘You sleep very peacefully,’ she said. ‘I’ve been watching you.’

  And then she kissed me again. But before I could kiss her in return she had thrown off the blanket, risen lithely to her feet and scampered into the cover of the bushes.

  A horn sounded. A long, low note, then the frantic beating of a drum. Distantly, I heard the whinnying of horses, the angry barking of dogs and the shouts of men.

  Legion came alive. Its fires were extinguished, its tents dismantled, its human occupants put to their stations after snatching breakfast from
wherever they could. Manandoun, white-cloaked, white-haired, his face painted scarlet, rode up with an entourage of two, one a striking woman, yellow-haired, solemn and with a plethora of weaponry slung across her shoulders, from her waist, even strapped to the high, leather boots with which she gripped the heaving flanks of her sleek and feisty mare. I was not introduced, but in any case, she had eyes only for the distance, as if dreaming of the fighting for which she was clearly well equipped. The other was a man in a silver helmet with stylised faceplate and leather armour – ‘the Fenlander’, Gwyr informed me later.

  ‘Good morning to you from Kylhuk, and indeed from me,’ announced the scarlet-faced Manandoun, as he tried to control his restless steed. ‘He hopes you slept well on your first night here, and indeed, I have that same hope.’

  ‘I slept very well. Thank you.’

  ‘Kylhuk feels that you must learn to walk with Legion, which will take some time and may surprise you. I share this view and would add only this: that when you cease to believe your eyes, your legs will find their true rooting on the earth.’

  ‘Thank you for the advice. I don’t understand it, not a word of it. But I’m sure I will.’

  ‘I am certain that you will. We have all, in our turn, had to find the truth in our eyes and the steadiness of our legs. When you feel confident with the motion of this great Legion, ride back with Guiwenneth to Kylhuk’s tent and Kylhuk will embrace you and answer all your questions. There is trouble following us and later you will test your arm, or at any rate, learn the smell of Kylhuk’s vengeance!’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ Guiwenneth asked from behind me.

  ‘Kyrdu’s sons. What else?’

  Nothing more was said. Nothing more needed to be said. Guiwenneth was biting her lip. Gwyr, standing also, had heaved a deep breath.

  ‘Legion will move at the next sound of Kylhuk’s horn. Be ready!’

  And Manandoun and his companions swung round from us and galloped away, merging with the forest, swallowed by the trees ahead of them.

  ‘She came to get a look at you,’ Guiwenneth said with a sly smile. ‘I thought she would.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Kylhuk calls her Raven. They’re not lovers, though Kylhuk would like them to be.’

  ‘What raven has yellow feathers?’ I asked, thinking of that tumble of golden hair.

  Guiwenneth shook her head. ‘He named her for her black heart and the darkness of her humour.’

  ‘Magnificent, though.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she came to get a look at me …’ I said, standing a little taller.

  ‘Yes. And it seems she was not impressed.’

  I had not understood Manandoun’s advice to me, about the truth of eyes and the sureness of legs, and Guiwenneth shrugged my question off when I asked her to elaborate.

  A few minutes later Kylhuk’s horn sounded, distantly but sonorously, and everyone around me turned to face the front of the column, horses held tightly, dogs restrained, wagons ready, armed men in groups of twenty-seven, a number which seemed important but which Gwyr could not explain. A silence such as that at dusk fell briefly on this gathering; it lasted a second or two only, a caught breath in time, and then the second blast of the horn sounded through the camp and everyone stepped forward—

  And the whole world lurched with them, like a ship casting off into a turbulent sea.

  How can I describe the sensation? The earth began to shudder as Legion, spread for miles through the wildwood, began to advance with a steady step. But the forest itself seemed to be dragged forward, each tree and bush, each rock, each gully, shedding a ghost of itself, which progressed with us, then faded. I stumbled to avoid hazards that were only images. I struck wood and rock that had seemed no more than illusion.

  Two worlds, then, occupied the space of Kylhuk’s legion, one drawn from an underworld that flowed up to surround and accompany us, the other the dissolving reality of a world I knew well, but which was made insubstantial by the power of the advancing beast.

  A cliff face suddenly materialised ahead of us and the whole column shifted away from it, not just those who walked and those who rode, not just the wagons and carts and animals, but the ground itself, the whole of the space around us. In doing so, we walked through broad-trunked oaks as if through images projected on the air; and a shimmering after-image of the cliff would come with us for a while, detached from the reality, then fading into nothing.

  It must have been like this to walk along the deck of a galleon, swinging in the wind and with the waves. And it was a kind of ‘sea-legs’ that I strove to find for balance, and a ‘focused-sight’ to tell which of the forests we passed through was real and which was not.

  Though even that is wrong, because it was not the case that any of these wildwoods was illusion (I learned this later from Kylhuk), simply that Legion moved forward outside what you or I might think of as ordinary space and ordinary time. These were woodlands and rivers and massive stones that in various forms had occupied the space through thousands of years, new and vibrant, eroded and rotted, and the cleverness of Legion, supernatural entity that it was, was that as it marched it used these times to hide itself from all who pursued it.

  Only when it rested was it vulnerable.

  And what strange effect, I wondered, might it have had on any passing prehistoric group, hunting or travelling up the rivers in the past, when Legion flowed for a few seconds through their space and time, pursued by those forces of Nemesis herself that Kylhuk could not shake off?

  By such encounters – and Huxley would have agreed with me, I’m sure – were stones begun and myths evolved!

  (How quickly I was coming to accept ‘magic’ in my life. But then, like dream, in Ryhope anything could happen, though unlike in dreams, in Ryhope Wood the presence of the peculiar was defined and ruled by its existence in fiction!)

  I walked in my group of twenty-seven, aware of the joking, the arguments, the groans as bodily functions needed to be addressed ‘on the hoof’, as it were, the mocking jollity, the lies and exaggerations of the claims and stories told to conquer fear and boredom as Legion advanced into the unknown region, nosing for the first trace of the Long Person, who would guide us to Kylhuk’s final task.

  The wildwood flowed about us and our ship rocked through time and half-glimpsed worlds, swaying as it moved, settling steadily into its forward rhythm.

  How long it took to find my legs and eyes of truth I cannot say. I was suddenly hungry, breaking from my column to seek the crude wagon where the cold carcasss of roasted birds and mammals were stacked, ready for distribution. The bread was as hard as rock, baked on hot stones during the nights when Legion rested. But it melted eventually when held in the mouth long enough with wine or water, and we were not short of these commodities, and I was glad to get half drunk like everyone around me.

  Riders came through our ranks, and running men, stooped low, heading for the forward tip of Legion, to where the Forlorn Hope was spread out in the unknown world, scenting for danger and for the right path. Behind them came Manandoun, without an entourage. He spoke to Guiwenneth, glancing at me. A horse was brought for each of us and Guiwenneth asked me, ‘Do you want Gwyr with us?’

  ‘Yes!’

  She signalled to the Interpreter, then said, ‘He’ll follow us when he can. Come on now. Come and meet your marker.’

  Ten

  Some colourful, some grim-faced, some wild, some silent, the raiding bands, the solitary adventurers, all the warriors of Legion marched steadily past us as we rode furiously down the line. Baggage wagons trundled and swayed through the shifting, ghostly forest, burdened beneath screeching children who clung to each spar and beam. Naked, painted men in wicker chariots charged at us, taunted us, tried to race us as we passed. Spectral figures flickered in and out of vision. Sombre, armoured knights, some helmeted, some wild-haired and youthfully bold save for the dark look in their gaze, kept their great horses on a tight rein, matching the
steady pace of Legion’s lumbering walk.

  Soon we saw tall pennants rising from narrow, ornately-tented wagons, the flags mostly black, but one above all displaying the symbol of a boar’s tusk crossed by a rose. There was a confusion of activity now, horse riders, dog riders, masked runners, all taking messages and orders between all parts of the garrison.

  And there were frightening moments of disorientation: the feeling of plunging into a ravine where no ravine existed, or of being suddenly caught in a burst of fire; birds clawing at our heads, arrows being fired at us …

  Guiwenneth had forewarned me of this, the unseen defences that Kylhuk’s enchanters and enchantresses had erected around the heart of Legion, like glowing embers ready to be ‘ignited’ if the pursuing forces broke through the outer walls and came close to the Keep.

  So many defences! So much magic, which Kylhuk had painstakingly recruited at every opportunity during the years in which he had strengthened his army.

  ‘He has spell-casters,’ Guiwenneth had told me. ‘Controllers of Time and of Fire, Controllers of Seasons, so we can shift within a year; there are summoners of spirits, speakers to animals, fire-starters, swimmers with fish, runners with hounds, fliers with birds, and cave-walkers — they tread carefully, and only ever walk at the edges of the worlds of the dead, since most of the dead seem to be on our tail!’

  Manandoun reined in suddenly, interrupting my efforts to identify this magic, a worried frown on his face. ‘Kylhuk is not with his train,’ he whispered nervously. ‘Something has happened.’

  He raised a short hunting horn and blew three blasts. After a while, two riders galloped out of the wall of the forest, emerging like black-cloaked phantoms from the greenwood. Both had their faces painted scarlet, and one was suffering from a wound to his right arm, which he had tied across his chest.

  ‘He is at the Silent Towers. Eletherion and his brothers have breached them.’