Mythago Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  I had hardly recovered from the frisson of apprehension that the sight of this dead warrior elicited in me when I heard movement beyond the drawbridge.

  ‘A horse,’ Keeton said, and I heard the whickering of such a beast and nodded.

  ‘I suggest we make a strategic withdrawal,’ I said.

  But Keeton hesitated, staring at the wooden gate.

  ‘Come on, Harry ….’

  ‘No. Wait … I’d like to see inside ….’

  And even as he stepped forward, scanning the arrow slits above the gate, there came the sound of wood creaking, and ropes singing with strain. The huge drawbridge came crashing down. It struck the near bank just inches from Keeton’s startled figure, and the jarring shock in the earth made me bite my tongue.

  ‘Christ!’ was all Keeton said, and backed towards me, fumbling for the pistol in his waist pocket. A figure on horseback was revealed in the high gateway. It kicked its mount forward, and lowered its short, blue-pennanted lance.

  We turned and ran for the woodland. The steed galloped after us, hooves loud on the hard ground. The Knight cried out at us, his voice angry, his words familiar yet meaningless, with a suggestion of French. I had had time to take in only very little about him. He was fair-haired and thinly-bearded, and wore a dark band around his head, although a heavy steel helmet was slung on the back of his saddle. He was clad in a mail shirt and dark leather breeches. The horse was black with three white hooves –

  Three white for a death! Guiwenneth’s rhyme came back to me with numbing force.

  – and was decorated in the simplest of red trappings: on the reins, across its neck, with a patterned saddlecloth hanging below its belly.

  The horse snorted behind us, thumping heavily across the turf, nearer with every stride. The Knight kicked and urged it faster. His mail shirt rattled, and the bright helmet struck noisily against some metal part of his saddle. Glancing back as we ran for cover, I could see how he leaned slightly to the left, the lance held low, ready to be jerked up as it struck at our bodies.

  But we plunged into the cool undergrowth seconds before the lance was struck angrily against a towering blackthorn. He kicked his steed into the woodland, leaning low across the beast’s withers, and holding the lance carefully against the flank. Keeton and I circled him, hugging bush and trunk, trying to avoid his eyes.

  After a moment or two he turned and went out into the dusk light again, galloped up and down the length of the scrub for a few minutes, and then dismounted.

  Now I realized how truly huge this man was, at least six and a half feet tall. He swung his double-edged sword and hacked his way through the thorn, shouting all the time in his quasi-French.

  ‘Why is he so damned angry?’ Keeton whispered from a few feet away, and the words were overheard. The Knight glanced towards us, saw us, and began to run in our direction; sunlight caught in glinting flashes on his mail shirt.

  Then there was a shot. Not from Keeton. It was a strange, muffled sound, and the moist, mossy air was suddenly acrid with the smell of sulphur. The Knight was flung back, but didn’t fall. He stared in astonishment to our right, holding the shoulder where the ball had made its glancing strike. I looked too. The shadowy form of the cavalier who had shot at me by the mill-pond could just be glimpsed. He was frantically re-priming his heavy matchlock rifle.

  ‘It can’t be the same man,’ I said aloud, but the mythago turned towards me and smiled, and even if it was a different genesis, it was the same form which I had previously encountered.

  The Knight walked out of the bosk and called his horse. He began to strip the trappings from the animal. With a slap of his broad blade on its hindquarters, he gave the horse its freedom.

  The cavalier had vanished into the gloom. Once before he had tried to kill me. Now he had saved me from a potentially murderous attack. Was he following me?

  As the uncanny thought occurred to me, Keeton drew my attention to the part of the encroaching woodland from which we had first seen the castle. A figure stood there, gleaming greenly in the fading light. Its face was ghastly and drawn, but it was armoured, and was watching us. It had probably been following us since our encounter at the Stone Falls.

  Unnerved by this third apparition, Keeton led the way through the greenwood, following the course we had set ourselves before. We were soon out of sight of the great fortress, and from behind there came no obvious sound of pursuit.

  * * *

  We found the road on the fourth day after leaving the shamiga. Keeton and I had separated, forcing our way through the tangled forest, seeking a boar run, or stag track, anything to make the going easier. The river was away to our left, dropping into a shallow gorge, where the bank was unmanageable.

  Keeton’s cry did not startle me because it was not anguished. I cut through the thorn and bramble towards him, realizing at once that he was in a sort of clearing.

  I emerged from the underbrush on to an overgrown and decaying brick roadway, about fifteen feet wide and with gutters on either side. The trees formed a sort of arch across it, a tunnel of foliage, through which sunlight filtered.

  ‘Good God,’ I said, and Keeton, standing in the middle of this unlikely track, agreed with me. He had shrugged off his pack, and was resting, hands on hips.

  ‘Roman, I think,’ he said. Another guess, and in this case a good one.

  We followed the road for a few minutes, glad of the freedom of movement after so many hours picking our way through the forest. Around us, birds sang shrilly, feeding, no doubt, on the flying insects that swarmed in the clear air.

  Keeton was inclined to think of the road as a real structure, overtaken by woodland, but we were surely too deep for that to have been the case.

  ‘Then what’s the purpose of it? I don’t have fantasies about lost roads, lost tracks.’

  But that wasn’t the way it worked. At one time, a mysterious road, leading beyond the known land, might have been a strong myth image; over the centuries it degenerated, but I could remember my grandparents talking about ‘fairy tracks’ that could only be seen on certain nights.

  After a few hundred yards, Keeton stopped and indicated the bizarre totems that had been placed on each side of the crumbling road. They had been half-hidden in the underbrush, and I cleared the leaves from one, disturbed by the sight which greeted me: a decaying human head, its jaw stretched open and an animal’s long-bone rammed through the mouth. It had been impaled upon three sharpened stakes of wood. Across the road Keeton was holding his nose against the stink of decay. ‘This one’s a woman,’ he said. ‘I get the feeling we’re being warned.’

  Warned or not, we continued to walk. It may have been imagination, but a hush enveloped the enclosing trees. There was movement in the branches, but no song.

  We noticed other totems. They were tied to the low branches, sometimes strung on bushes. They were in the form of rag creatures, little bags of coloured cloth, with the crude representations of limbs drawn upon them. Some had been impaled with bones and nails, and the whole unnerving presence of the offerings was suggestive of witchcraft.

  We passed below a brick archway which spanned the road, and scrambled over the dead tree that had fallen beyond it. We found we had come into a cleared space, a ruined garden, pillars and statues rising from a tangle of weeds, wild flowers and a bramble thorn gone wild. Ahead of us was a villa of clear Roman design.

  The red tiled roof had partly fallen in. The walls, once white, were dulled by time and the elements. The entrance door was open and we stepped into the cold, eerie place. Some of the mosaic and marble flooring was intact. The mosaics were exquisite, showing animals, hunters, scenes of country life, and gods. We stepped carefully across them. Much of the floor space had already collapsed into the hypocaust.

  We toured the villa, exploring the bath-house, with its three, deep pools, still lined with marble. In two of the rooms the walls were painted, and the features of an elderly Roman couple gazed at us, serene and perfectly groomed �
�� the only blemishes were the savage sword cuts that had been made across the throats of each, hacking into the wall itself.

  In the main room, on the marble floor, there were the signs of several fires, and the charred, chewed bones of animals had been flung into a waste pit in the corner. But the fires were cold, long dead.

  We decided to stay here for the night, a change from pitching the small tent in the cramped and lumpy spaces between insect-infested trees. We were both on edge in the ruined villa, aware that we were spending the night in the product of fear, or hope, of some other age.

  In its way, the villa was the equivalent of the broch, and of the great castle whose walls we had skirted a couple of days before. It was a place of mystery, lost and no doubt romanced about. But to which race did it belong? Was it the end of the Roman dream, the villa where the last Romans lived? The legions had pulled out of Britain in the early fifth century, leaving thousands of their people vulnerable to attack by the invading Anglo-Saxons. Was this villa linked with a Romano-British myth of survival? Or was it a Saxon dream, the villa where gold might be buried, or where the ghosts of the legions remained? A place of quest, or of fear? In Keeton and myself it inspired only fear.

  We built a small fire, from wood that we found in the remains of the heating system. As darkness came down, so the smell of our fire, or perhaps the smell of food, attracted visitors.

  I heard it first, a stealthy movement in the bath-house, followed by the whispered sound of a warning. Then there was silence. Keeton rose to his feet and drew his revolver. I walked to the cold passage that led from our room to the bath area, and used my small torch to expose the intruders.

  They were startled, but not frightened, and stared at me beyond the circle of light, shielding their eyes slightly. The man was tall and heavily built. The woman, tall as well, carried a small bundle of cloth in her arms. The boy who was with them stood motionless and blank faced.

  The man spoke to me. It sounded like German. I noticed how he kept his left hand resting on the pommel of a long, sheathed sword. Then the woman smiled and spoke too, and the tension evaporated for the moment.

  I led them back to the enclosed room. Keeton made up the fire and began to spit-cook some more of the meat we carried. Our guests crouched across the fire from us, looking at the food, at the room, at Keeton and myself.

  They were obviously Saxons. The man’s clothing was heavy and woollen, and he used leather straps to tie his leggings and baggy shirt. He wore a great fur topcoat. His hair, long and blond, had been tied into two braids at the front. The woman was also fair-haired, and wore a loose, check-patterned tunic, tied at the waist. The boy was a miniature version of the man, but sat in silence, staring at the fire.

  When they had eaten they expressed gratitude, and then introduced themselves: the man was Ealdwulf, the woman Egwearda, the boy Hurthig. They were afraid of the villa, that much was clear. But they were puzzled by us. With gestures I tried to explain that we were exploring the woodlands, but for some minutes the message failed to penetrate. Egwearda stared at me, frowning, her face quite pale, quite lovely, despite the lines of tension and hardship that were etched around her eyes.

  All at once she said something – the word sounded like Cunnasman – and Ealdwulf gasped, comprehension brightening his rugged face.

  He asked me a question, repeating the word. I shrugged, not understanding.

  He said another word, or words. Elchempa. He pointed at me. He repeated Cunnasman. He used his hand to indicate following. He was asking me if I was following someone, and I nodded vigorously.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and added, ‘Ja!’

  ‘Cunnasman,’ Egwearda breathed, and shifted position so she could reach across the fire and touch my hand.

  ‘There’s something odd about you,’ Keeton said. To these people, at least. And to the shamiga.’

  The woman had reached for her bundle. Little Hurthig whimpered and squirmed away, looking anxiously as the cloths were unfolded. She had placed the bundle by the fire, and I was discomfited by what the flickering light revealed to me.

  What Egwearda had been carrying, as if it were a child, was the mummified hand and arm of a man, severed just below the elbow. The fingers were long and powerful; on the middle finger was a bright red stone. In the same parcel was the broken blade of a steel dagger, its jewelled haft just a fragment of the decorative weapon it had once been.

  ‘Aelfric,’ she said softly, and laid her own hand gently on the dead limb. The man, Ealdwulf, did the same. And then Egwearda covered the gruesome relic. The boy made a sound, and at that moment I realized that he was mute. He was quite deaf. His eyes shone, though, with an awareness that was quite uncanny.

  Who were they?

  I sat there and stared at them. Who were they? From what historical period, I wondered. They were almost certainly from the fifth century after Christ, the early decades of the Germanic infiltrations into Britain. How else could they be associated with a Roman villa? By the sixth century, woodland and earth-slip had covered most of the Roman remains of this sort.

  What they represented I couldn’t imagine, but at some time a tale had been told of the strange family, the mute son, the husband and wife, carrying the precious relic of a King, or a warrior, seeking for something, seeking for a resolution to their tale.

  I could think of no story of Aelfric. The legend had been lost from the written accounts; in time, it had been lost from the oral traditions. Thereafter it had remained only as an unconscious memory.

  The Saxons may have meant nothing to me, but as Keeton had pointed out, I certainly meant something to them. It was as if … as if they knew me, or at least knew of me.

  Ealdwulf was talking to me, scratching patterns on the marble. After a while I began to grasp that he was drawing a map, and I gave him paper and a pencil from the small supply I carried. Now I could see what he was representing. He marked the villa and the road, and the distant curving river – the sticklebrook – now a gigantic flow, cutting through the forestlands. It seemed that ahead of us was a gorge, steep-sided and wooded, with the river curling through its narrow valley bottom.

  Ealdwulf said the word, ‘Freya!’ and indicated that I should go up the river. He repeated the word, looking for signs of understanding. He said, ‘Drichtan! Freya!’

  I shrugged to indicate complete bafflement, and Ealdwulf gasped with exasperation and looked at Egwearda.

  ‘Freya!’ said the woman. She made funny motions with her hands. ‘Drichtan.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s all Saxon to me.’

  ‘Wiccan,’ she said, and searched for more ways to express the concept, but then shrugged and gave up.

  I asked what was across the gorge. When Ealdwulf understood the question he drew flames, pointed to our own small fire, and indicated a fire of gigantic proportions. He also seemed to be very much against my going there.

  ‘Elchempa,’ he said, stabbing the fire. He watched me. He stabbed at the flames again. ‘Feor buend! Elchempa!’ He shook his head. Then he tapped me on the chest. ‘Cunnasman. Freya. Her. Her! He was touching the map where it showed the river, some way from the nearest point of crossing of the gorge.

  ‘I think,’ said Keeton softly, ‘I think he’s saying … kinsman.’

  ‘Kinsman?’

  ‘Cunnasman. Kinsman.’ Keeton looked at me. ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘And Elchempa? Outsider, I suppose.’

  ‘El. Alien. Yes, I think that could be right. Your brother is heading towards the fire, but Ealdwulf wants you to go up the river and find the Freya.’

  ‘Whatever that is …’

  ‘Egwearda referred to wiccan,’ Keeton said. ‘That could be witch. Or wise one. It probably doesn’t mean quite what they intend …’

  With some difficulty I asked Ealdwulf about Elchempa, and his dramatic gestures of killing, burning and dismembering left me in no doubt that we were talking of Christian. He had pillaged his way through the forest, and was known and
feared throughout.

  But now Ealdwulf seemed to have a new hope. And I was that hope. Little Kushar’s words came back to me:

  Now I know you. But no harm has been done. The story has not been changed. I did not recognize you.

  Keeton said, ‘They’ve been waiting for you. They know you.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘Word spread from the shamiga, perhaps. Perhaps Christian himself has talked about you.’

  ‘The important thing is, they know I’m here. But why the relief? Do they think I can control Christian?’ I touched my neck where the scars of the rope were rough and still sensitive. ‘They’re wrong if they do.’

  ‘Then why are you following him?’ Keeton asked quietly.

  And I said, without thinking, ‘To kill him and release Guiwenneth.’

  Keeton laughed. ‘I think that might do the trick.’

  I was tired, but the towering presence of the early Saxon unnerved me. Nevertheless, Ealdwulf was adamant that Keeton and I should sleep. He gestured and repeated the word slaip! which was clear enough.

  ‘Slaip! Ich willa where d’yon!’

  ‘I’ll guard you,’ Keeton said with a grin. ‘It’s easy once you get the rhythm.’

  Egwearda came around to us and spread out her cloak, curling up safely beside us. Ealdwulf walked to the open doorway and stepped out into the night. He drew his longsword and drove it into the ground, dropping to a crouch behind it, his knees to either side of the bright blade.

  In this position he guarded us through the night that remained. In the morning his beard and clothes were dew-drenched. When he heard me stir he rose from his crouch and grinned, coming back into the room and brushing the wetness from his body. He reached for my sword and drew it from the leather scabbard. He frowned as he held the Celtic toy before his eyes, and compared it with his own hardened steel blade. My sword was curved and tapered, and only half the length of Ealdwulf’s weapon. He shook his head in doubt, but then struck each blade against the other and seemed to change his mind. He weighed and hefted Magidion’s gift to me, struck through the air with it twice, and then nodded approval.