Lavondyss

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘Scathach?’ she shrugged. ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Can’t you give me a hint?’

  Tallis laughed. She was suddenly warm again, and whatever event had overtaken her had passed away. She jumped to a low branch and swung from it, causing a small shower of leaves to descend upon the man below. ‘I can’t give you a hint about something that hasn’t happened yet,’ she said, returning to the earth and staring at him. ‘It’s a strange story, though. Isn’t it?’

  ‘It has its moments,’ Mr Williams agreed. Then quickly he asked, ‘What’s so special about a Knight of five chariots and seven spears?’

  She looked blank. ‘His number of single combats. Why?’

  ‘Where was the Battle of Bavduin?’

  ‘Nobody knows,’ she said. ‘It’s a great mystery.’

  ‘Why would the sons be made to eat with their shield hands?’

  ‘They were in disgrace,’ Tallis said and laughed. ‘The shield hand is the coward’s hand. That’s obvious.’

  ‘And what exactly is a son’s kiss?’

  Tallis blushed. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said.

  ‘But you used the words.’

  ‘Yes, but they’re just part of the story. I’m too young to know everything.’

  ‘What is “that stone which is not true stone”?’

  ‘I’m getting frightened,’ Tallis said, and Mr Williams smiled at her, raising a hand, ending the inquisition.

  ‘You’re a fascinating young woman,’ he said. ‘The story you have just told me is no story that you made up. It belongs in the air, in the water, in the ground …’

  ‘Like your music,’ Tallis said.

  ‘Indeed yes.’ He turned where he sat and glanced at the wood. ‘But I don’t have a shadowy figure whispering to me when I compose. I caught a glimpse of her. Hooded; white mask.’ He looked back at Tallis, whose eyes were wide. ‘I could almost feel the breeze between you.’

  He slipped from his uncomfortable perch in the heart of the dying tree. He brushed bark and insects from his trousers and then looked at his watch. Tallis stared up at him, suddenly gloomy.

  ‘Is it time to go?’ she asked.

  ‘All good things,’ he said kindly. ‘This has been a wonderful two days. I shall tell no one about them except one person, and that person I shall swear to secrecy. I have returned to one of the places of my first real vision, my first real music, and I have met Miss Tallis Keeton and heard four wonderful stories.’ He extended his hand towards her. ‘And I would like to live another fifty years, just so that I might know you. I’m like your grandfather, in that.’

  They shook hands slowly. He smiled. ‘But alas …’

  They walked back across the fields until they came to the bridleway into Shadoxhurst. At once Mr Williams picked up his pace, raising his stick in a final farewell. Tallis watched him go.

  When he was some distance away he stopped and looked back at her, leaning on his stick. ‘By the way,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve found a name for the field, the one by the wood.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Find Me Again Field. Tell it that if it argues, the old man will come and plough it up! It won’t argue long.’

  ‘I’ll let you know!’ she shouted after him.

  ‘Make sure you do.’

  ‘Write some nice music,’ she added. ‘None of that noisy stuff!’

  ‘I’ll do my very best,’ his voice came to her as his figure diminished, dwarfed by the trees that lined the bridleway.

  ‘Hey!’ she yelled.

  ‘What now?’ he called back.

  ‘I haven’t told you four stories. Only three.’

  ‘You’re forgetting Broken Boy’s Fancy,’ he shouted. ‘The most important story of them all.’

  Broken Boy’s Fancy?

  She saw him out of sight. The last she heard was his voice intoning the melody which he had earlier called “Dives and Lazarus”. What did he mean, Broken Boy’s Fancy?

  Then there was just the sounds of the earth and Tallis’s laughter.

  [SINISALO]

  Broken Boy’s Fancy

  (i)

  The child was born in September, 1944, and christened on a warm, clear morning at the end of the month. She was named Tallis in honour of the Welsh family, in particular of her grandfather, who had been a fine storyteller and who had much enjoyed the comparison of his skills with those of Taliesin, the legendary bard of Wales. It was said of Taliesin that he had been born from the earth itself, had survived the Great Flood, and told fine tales in the winter lodges of the warlord, Arthur.

  ‘Why, I remember doing the very same thing myself!’ her grandfather had often said to the younger, more easily influenced members of his family.

  No one had been able to find which woman’s name was the same as that romantic figure of the early days, so ‘Tallis’ was coined and the girl was christened.

  This was only the first naming. It had been performed in the church at Shadoxhurst, an ordinary ceremony conducted by the old vicar. When it was over the whole family gathered out on the village green, around the hollow oak that grew there. In the bright day a picnic blanket was spread out and a frugal but enjoyable feast consumed. Wartime rationing had not affected the availability of home-fermented cider and eight flagons were emptied. By evening, Grandfather’s spiky and amusing tales of legend had degenerated into a confused and incoherent sequence of anecdotes and recollections. He was led home to the farm in disgrace, and put to bed, but his last words on that last day of September were, ‘Watch for her second name …’

  He had prophesied well. Three days later, at dusk, a commotion in the garden brought everyone running from the house. There they saw the great lame stag, known locally as Broken Boy. It had stumbled through the fence and was trampling over the autumn cabbage. In its panic it ran towards the apple shed, butted against the wood and snapped off a fragment of tine from its right antler.

  All the adults had gathered on the lawn, watching the tall beast as it struggled to escape, but when Tallis’s mother appeared, holding the infant, it became suddenly subdued, marking the ground with its hooves, but staring at the silent child.

  It was a moment of both fear and magic, since no stag had ever come this close to them before, and Broken Boy was a local legend, a great hart of well in excess of fourteen years. What caused the creature to be held in such awe was that it seemed to have been known in the area for generations. Some years it would not be seen at all, then a farmer would notice it on a high ridge, or a schoolboy on the bridleway, or the hunt as it crossed farmland. The word would go out: ‘Broken Boy’s been seen!’ The hart had never been known to shed its antlers, and the velvet hung on the tines like filthy strips of black rag.

  It was the Ragged Hart. The rags of velvet were rumoured to be shreds of grave shroud.

  ‘What does it want?’ someone murmured, and as if brought back to life by the sound of the words the stag turned, leapt over the fence and vanished into the gathering darkness, away towards Ryhope Wood, across the two streams.

  Tallis’s mother picked up the fragment of antler and later wrapped it in a strip of the infant’s white christening robe, tied tight with two pieces of blue ribbon. She locked it away in a box where she kept all her treasures. Tallis was named Broken Boy’s Fancy and was toasted as such well into the night.

  When she was ten months old her grandfather sat her on his knee and whispered to her. ‘I’m telling her all the stories I know,’ he had said to Tallis’s mother.

  ‘She can’t understand a word,’ Margaret Keeton replied. ‘You should wait until she’s older.’

  That made the old man angry. ‘I can’t wait until she’s older!’ he stated bluntly, and returned to the business of whispering in the infant’s ear.

  Owen Keeton died before Tallis had become aware of him. He had walked out across the fields one Christmas night and died, huddled and snow covered, at the base of an old oak. His eyes had been open and there had been a look of
gentle rapture on his frozen features. Tallis remembered him in later years only in the family story of her name, and in the photograph that was framed by her small bed. And of course in the volume of folk stories and legendary tales which he had left for her. It was an exquisite book, finely printed and richly illustrated in full colour. There was an inscription to Tallis on the title page, and also a long letter from him, written in the margins of the chapter on Arthur, words conceived one winter in a desperate attempt to communicate across the years.

  She did not read that letter with any real understanding until she was twelve years old, but one word caught her eye early on, a strange word – ‘mythago’ – which her grandfather had linked by pen to Arthur’s name in the text.

  The Keetons’ farm was a wonderful place for a child to grow up in. The house stood at the centre of a large garden in which there were orchards, machine sheds, greenhouses, apple sheds and woodsheds, and wild places hidden behind high walls, where everything grew in abundance and in chaos. At the back of the house, facing open land, there was a wide lawn and a kitchen garden, fenced off from the fields by wire designed to keep out sheep and stray deer … all except the bigger harts, it seemed.

  From that garden the land seemed endless. Every field was bordered by trees. Even the distant skyline showed the tangled stands of old forest that had survived for centuries, and into which the deer fled for protection in the season of the hunt.

  The Keetons had owned Stretley Farm for only two generations, but already they felt a part of the land, tied to the community of Shadoxhurst.

  Tallis’s father, James Keeton, was an unsophisticated and kindly man. He controlled the farm as best he could, but spent most of his time running a small solicitor’s business in Gloucester. Margaret Keeton – whom Tallis would always think of as ‘severe but strikingly beautiful’, after the first description of her mother she ever overheard – was active in the local community, and concentrated on managing the orchards.

  The main running of the small farm was left to Edward Gaunt, who tended the garden and greenhouses too. Visitors always thought of Gaunt (he himself preferred the bare name) as the ‘gardener’, but he was far more than that. He lived in a cottage close to the Keeton house and – after the war – owned much of the livestock on the farm. He was paid in many ways, and the best way – he always said – was from the sale of cider made from Keeton apples.

  Tallis was very fond of Mr Gaunt, and in her early childhood spent many hours with him, helping in the greenhouses, or about the garden, listening to his stories, his songs, telling him stories of her own. Only as she grew older did she become more remote from the man, as she pursued her own strange interests in a secretive way.

  Tallis’s earliest memory was of Harry, her twice-lost brother.

  He had been her half-brother, really. James Keeton had been married before, to an Irish woman who had died in London, early in the war. He had married again, very quickly, and Tallis was born shortly after.

  Tallis had memories of Harry which were of a loving, gentle and, to a delightful degree, teasing man; he had fair hair and bright eyes, and fingers that never failed to find her funny-bones. He had returned from service action unexpectedly, in 1946, having been reported as ‘missing, presumed dead’. She remembered him carrying her on his shoulders across the fields that separated their garden from Stretley Stones meadow where the five fallen stones marked ancient graves.

  He had sat her in the branches of a tree and teased her with threats of leaving her there. His face had been burned – she remembered that blemish vividly – and his voice, at times, very sad. The burn had followed the crash of his aircraft when fighting over France. The sadness came from something deeper.

  She had been just three years old when these memories became a part of her life, but she would never forget the way the whole house, the whole land, seemed to sing whenever Harry visited the farm; joy, perceived in her own childish way, despite the shadow which he carried with him.

  She remembered, too, the angry voices. Harry and his stepmother had not been at ease with one another. Sometimes, from her small room at the top of the house, Tallis would watch her father and Harry walking arm-in-arm across the fields, deep in conversation, or deep in thought. During this time, which the child found immensely sad, the sound of the sewing machine, downstairs in the workroom, was like an angry roar.

  Harry had come to the house at dawn, the summer of Tallis’s fourth birthday, to say goodbye. She remembered him leaning down to kiss her. He had seemed hurt. Hurt in his chest, she thought. And when she asked him what was the matter he smiled and said, ‘Someone shot me with an arrow.’

  In the half-light his eyes had glistened and a single tear had dropped on to her mouth. He whispered, ‘Listen to me, Tallis. Listen to me. I shan’t be far away. Do you understand that? I shan’t be far away. I promise! I’ll see you again, one day. I promise that with all my heart.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ she whispered back.

  ‘Somewhere very strange. Somewhere very close to here. Somewhere I’ve been looking for for years, and should have seen before now … I love you, little sister. I’ll do my best to keep in touch …’

  She lay there without moving, without licking away the salty taste of his tear on her lips, hearing his words again and again, marking them for ever. Soon she heard the sound of his motorcycle.

  That was the last she knew of him, and a few days later, for the first time, mention was made in the house that Harry was dead.

  (ii)

  Tallis became the tiny, confused witness of a terrible grief. The house became like a tomb, cold, echoing. Her father sat alone by the woodshed, his body slumped forward, his head cradled in his hands. He spent hours like this, hours a day, days a week. Sometimes Gaunt would come and sit with him, leaning back against the shed, arms folded, lips moving almost imperceptibly as he spoke.

  Harry was dead. He had been an infrequent visitor to the family home, although he didn’t live far away, estranged by arguments with his stepmother, and by something else, something which Tallis did not understand. It had something to do with the war, and with his burned face, and with the woods – with Ryhope Wood in particular – and with ghosts. It was beyond her understanding at this time.

  Tallis found very little comfort in the house, now. When she was five she began to create secret camps, a precocious activity for one so young.

  One hidden camp was in the garden, in an alley between two brick machine sheds; a second by Stretley Stones meadow; a third in the tangle of alder and willow that crowded part of the bank of the stream called Wyndbrook; the fourth and favourite camp was in a ruined sheep shelter among the earthworks, up on Barrow Hill.

  Each camp seemed to attract Tallis at a different time of year, so that in summer she would sit and look at picture books by Stretley Stones meadow, but in the winter, especially in the snow, she would make her way to Barrow Hill, and huddle in the enclosure, staring across Wyndbrook at the dark and brooding face of Ryhope Wood.

  Often, during these long months, she would see the black shape of Broken Boy in the distance, but if she followed him he always eluded her; just occasionally – always in spring – Tallis would find his spoor close to her house, or see his furtive, lame movement in the nearer fields and copses.

  During these early years of her childhood she missed her parents very much, missed the warmth that she had known so briefly. Where once her father had talked to her when they had walked together, now he strolled in thoughtful, distant silence. He no longer remembered the names of plants and trees. And her mother, who had always been so joyful and playful with her, became pale and ghostly. When Margaret Keeton was not working in the orchards she sat at the dining table, writing letters, impatient with Tallis’s simple demands upon her attention.

  So Tallis found refuge in her camps, and after her fifth birthday she took with her the book which her grandfather had left for her, the beautiful volume of fables and folklore. Although she cou
ld not read the print with any great facility, she consumed the pictures and invented her own simple stories to go with the images of Knights and Queens, Castles and strange Beasts that were contained there.

  Sometimes she stared at the closely packed handwriting that she knew was her grandfather’s. She could hardly read a word of it, but had never asked her parents to read the letter to her. She had once heard her mother refer to the scrawl as ‘silly nonsense’ and propose that they throw the book away and buy Tallis an identical copy. Her father had refused. ‘The old man would turn in his grave. We can’t interfere with his wishes.’

  The letter, then, became something private to the girl, even though her parents had clearly read the text. For a few years, all Tallis could read was the beginning, which was written across the top of the chapter, and a few lines at the end of a chapter where the writing was larger because there was more space.

  My dear Tallis: I’m an old man writing to you on a cold December night. I wonder if you will love the snow as much as I do? And regret as much the way it can imprison you. There is old memory in snow. You will find that out in due course, for I know where you come from, now. You are very noisy tonight. I never tire of hearing you. I sometimes think you might be trying to tell me your own infant’s stories, to make up for all the tales I’ve whispered to you.

  After that, the writing entered the margin of the first page and became cramped and illegible.

  At the bottom of the page she was able to read that

  He calls them mythagos. They are certainly strange, and

  I am sure Broken Boy is such a thing. They are …

  And the text became illegible again.

  Finally she was able to read the closing words.

  The naming of the land is important. It conceals and contains great truths. Your own name has changed your life and I urge you to listen to them, when they whisper. Above all, do not be afraid. Your loving grandfather, Owen.