Lavondyss

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘Wyn!’

  The girl scrambled into view, coming over the earth bank between the thorns. She looked puzzled by the change, alarmed by it. She was holding a small, black object, a doll; her crudely-made bone necklace rattled about her chest as she slid down into the enclosure.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Wyn asked his daughter.

  She stood before him, a chubby child, well wrapped in grey and brown furs, with deer-hide leggings and shoes. Her face was bright, the eyes deep brown and almost almond in shape. Moisture beaded her upper lip. Her black hair had been tied in tight plaits a few days before, and greased with animal fat to make them shine. They were coming undone now and bits of leaf littered the tangles.

  ‘It’s my first rajathuk,’ Morthen said, holding the doll up to her father. ‘I made it this morning.’

  Wyn took the doll and turned it in his fingers. She had blackened it in the fire. There was no recognizable face, but the circles she had scratched were representative enough. An instinct, born of years of experience, told him that the wood was blackthorn.

  ‘How can it be a rajathuk?’ he asked pointedly. Morthen looked blank. He said, ‘What part of the tree did you make it from?’

  Sudden enlightenment! She grinned. ‘A branch –’

  ‘So it’s an …?’

  ‘Injathuk!’ she said loudly. ‘Voice on the wind!’

  ‘Exactly! The trunk brings the voice from the bones which live among the rocks of the earth; the branch spreads the voice on seeds, insects and the wings of birds. A very different function.’

  Morthen looked darkly up at the rajathuks, the ten enormous idols.

  ‘Skogen is changing,’ she said with a frown. ‘He’s different.’

  ‘Quite right …’

  Wyn felt pleased with himself. He had predicted that Morthen – half human, half woodland creature, like her lost brother, poor adventuring Scathach – that she would have a human awareness of the change. The Tuthanach, mythagos, could not of course sense such things.

  ‘Skogen is changing. What does that tell you?’

  She fingered the bone necklace, finding reassurance in its cold, ivory smoothness. Her eyes engaged him totally; they shone; they were so beautiful; her mother had been beautiful too. Now that beauty had been reduced to bones, browning in the stale air of the mortuary house.

  Morthen said, ‘A new voice is in the land.’

  ‘That’s right. A voice from outside, from the ghost world which I’ve often told you about.’

  ‘England,’ she said, pronouncing the name perfectly.

  ‘Yes. Someone from England. He is approaching us. He is causing change.’

  Wyn stood, reached for his daughter’s hand. She took it gladly, holding her doll in the other. They walked slowly around the half circle of statues. There was a movement in the open entrance to the bone lodge.

  ‘A jackal!’ Morthen hissed, alarmed.

  ‘Birds,’ her father said. ‘Birds are always allowed in and among the dead. Only birds, though.’

  The girl relaxed. They continued their slow walk. A dark cloud was gathering over the forest. There was the smell of snow in the air.

  ‘Ten masks to see the trees,’ Morthen said, reciting the liturgy of her father’s magic, ‘and ten trees to carry the voice …’

  ‘And when they speak? What do they speak of?’

  She had forgotten the answer. Wyn ruffled her hair and smiled. ‘They tell of what they saw!’

  ‘Yes! Trees cast longer and older shadows than the Tuthanach. They see further than the people can see.’

  ‘Well done. We’ll make Morthen-rajathuk of you yet!’

  Again, there was movement in the mortuary house. Wyn frowned and held Morthen back. Since she was a child, she was not allowed beyond the guarding circle of wood.

  ‘That’s not a bird,’ Morthen said, her dark eyes wide. She clutched her doll to her chest, as if protecting it.

  ‘I believe you’re right.’

  Wyn-rajathuk walked unsteadily between the idols, brushing their massive columns with his shoulders. He thought the earth trembled slightly as he passed into the forbidden place. The narrow entrance to the mortuary house was empty, black. The smell of decomposition was strong; of ash, too, mixed with the rotting flesh. The grass on the turf roof was long; the earth had slipped, hiding the tops of the stones which formed the entrance. This sort of change was quite natural; but to have happened overnight meant that it was the work of the skogen. The wind caught the dull rags on the poles that lined the house, the clothes of the dead; they flapped in the wind while the silence of the bone-lodge swallowed the flesh they had once warmed.

  Wyn-rajathuk stepped into the darkness that was his domain. The passage inside was long. Two rows of oak trunks supported the roof. Between the trunks were the urns of those who had been burned, and the hollowed stones where the grey stuff from their skulls had been placed for the birds to feast. Elsewhere were the bones of the childless. At the far end of the house crouched the shrivelled, stinking corpses of the two Tuthanach who had been recently drowned. They could not be burned until the water of the spirit had been squeezed from their bodies.

  Jackals had certainly been here. Fleshy, chewed bone, littered on the stone floor, told the shaman this simple fact. And the carrion birds too had taken their fill, entering through the special gaps in the roof. Light penetrated dimly from those grassy windows. Two birds fluttered in the shadows.

  And then …

  The boy moved into dim light, crouched, apprehensive. He was holding the long bone of one of the child corpses.

  ‘Put it back,’ Wyn-rajathuk said softly.

  ‘I need it,’ Tig said.

  ‘Put it back. You should have asked me first.’

  The boy darted behind one of the wooden pillars. Wyn stepped back into the daylight, standing before the entrance. A few minutes later Tig emerged, the child’s femur still held to his chest. He crouched in the entrance to the bone lodge, a wild sight, an animal, ready for flight.

  ‘Return the bone to cruig-morn, Tig.’

  ‘I need it. You mustn’t make me.’

  ‘Why do you need it? What will you do with it?’

  Tig shivered, glanced to his right, then looked up at the circle of guarding totems, their faces turned from him. He was afraid, yet defiant, and Wyn had been expecting this moment for some time. Recently, Tig’s appearance had changed. He was still the same elfin-faced lad of eight, his features sharp, his eyes like a cat’s, his hair tied back with a band of otter’s fur; but the boyishness had been fading recently; he had begun to assume the appearance of a corpse; he could be drawn, pinched and deathly white. Wyn knew well enough that when he was in the these states he was ‘journeying,’ flying … experiencing the detachment from his body which was a part of the growing shaman experience. This was a normal change and not the influence of the skogen. But the stress and physical abuse were taking their toll of his looks. He wore the same sort of trousered wolfskin clothing as Morthen, but he had pierced the hide with the bones of birds, sharp needles, hundreds of them; some of them had entered his flesh. The black blood stained the grey fur. He had scarred his face deliberately (but not deeply). He was becoming shaman, guardian of memory. And he had not even become rajathuk as yet.

  ‘What will you do with the bone?’ Wyn asked again.

  ‘I will carve it. I will suck out what is left of its ghost.’

  Wyn shook his head. ‘The ghost of that child has been returned to the people, now. They have eaten its flesh. There is no ghost in the bone.’

  ‘There is always a ghost in the bone. When I suck it out I will have been well fed. I will become white memory of life. I will become haunter of caves. I will become bone itself. Bone always outlasts feather. My magic will be stronger than your bird magic.’

  ‘You are Tig. You are a boy. You have no magic. You are my son.’

  ‘Not your son …’ Tig hissed angrily, shaking his head. The violence in the words star
tled Wyn, the anger silencing him. He watched Tig. Tig became uncertain, but there were no tears in his slanted eyes.

  The boy had worked it out, then. An astonishing thing for a mythago to do. Wyn had always known that Tig would come to terms with the manner of his own creation. It was part of the myth-story that was Tig that he would do just such a thing. He had long since become aware that he had had no natural mother. And the Tuthanach, although they fed him and clothed him, were always wary of him. He lived with his father and his sister Morthen in Wyn’s small, square hut, outside the enclosure of the village, but he was rarely to be found beneath the roof, spending far more time in the forest glades.

  The Tuthanach were an embodiment of legend. But Tig was legend too. The two myths – Tuthanach and Tig – were overlapping. This strange accretion of two stories formed one of the earliest cycle of ‘outsider’ tales: the boy with a strange talent coming among a people who are destined to greatness under his guiding light. In a few thousand years this myth would be replayed in more memorable form! But the story had been the same, in essence, four thousand years earlier. What Tig would do for this Neolithic clan – whose story must have been strange for many centuries because of their life-ritual involving not one but ten totemic entities – what Tig would do would be to transform them with his magic, to affect their consciousness. Their story had long been lost from England by the time of Wyn’s birth – a realm, a world, a whole past-life away – but it had once been of immense power; and naturally it had lingered in the shadows …

  Wyn himself had no real role to play in this story of Tig and the megalith builders. His insight, his wisdom, his understanding of nature, his understanding of people, all of this had meant that it was inevitable he would become the clan’s magic man, their shaman. He was from Oxford, after all! He had been accepted. He was clothed and fed. He had advised them on the matter of hunting tools. He had married into the clan and helped produce a child (he had been astonished at his potency).

  Although he had once lived in the enclosure of the people he now kept apart. There was one thing which worried him, however: now that he had become shaman, had he inadvertently set himself up to play a minor, but very brief role in the Tig story?

  ‘The land is changing,’ Wyn-rajathuk said to the boy. ‘Can you tell?’

  Tig sniffed the air. ‘I smell new winter. New snow. I smell new memory. Yes. There is change.’

  ‘Do you understand the source of that change?’

  Tig thought hard for a moment, then seemed to understand something. ‘A new ghost is in the land,’ he whispered. His voice became loud. ‘I shall fight against it. And for that I shall need the strength of the people!’

  He shook the bone defiantly.

  Behind Wyn, Morthen was restless, scraping her nails on one of the totems. Tig glanced at her, but ignored her. They were not true brother and sister, though occasionally they shared the same house and they had once both called Wyn ‘father’. But in all the time together they had never spoken to each other. Indeed, Tig never seemed to see the girl.

  Morthen’s movement behind him distracted Wyn. Worried that his daughter would enter the forbidden ground he turned slightly, and in that moment of release Tig darted away from the mortuary house, scrambling over the earthworks and through the blackthorn.

  ‘Damn!’

  Wyn chased after him, but his bones were old, his flesh weak. By the time he had managed to climb the bank Tig was a long way off among the thorns. Soon he had vanished into the forest. Then Wyn caught the gleam of sun on a pale face as Tig stepped slightly out of his hiding place in the undergrowth; to watch his creator.

  Morthen and her father went down the hill and entered the dense wood again, following a clear track between the huge, sprawling oaks. They skirted the cleared land where the village had been built, glancing only briefly at the palisade of stakes and hurdles, topped by the grim skulls of animals. They could hear a child laughing and a drum being roughly beaten.

  Continuing on this track they eventually came to the wide river.

  There was more light here; the canopy was thinner as it stretched across the water. The area was marked with feathered poles, each representing one of the dead of the clan who had been brought here to lie in the embrace of the spirit of the river, before being taken to the mortuary house there to be left to rot, then dismembered, then burned.

  Morthen hated this place, preferring the greener, more intense light of the hunting trails further down the river, where the water was deeper, the fish fatter, and there were strange ruins to explore and make camps within.

  No Tuthanach would come to this river-spirit place, of course, unless they were carrying the decomposing dead, but Wyn had no such qualms and his daughter was partly of his less-superstitious flesh.

  She parted from him now, though, and ran off along the bank to find a place to fish with her short spear, bone hooks and gut net. He heard her splashing through the shallow water, glimpsed her as a dark shape moving against the brilliant yellow green before merging again with the shadows.

  Wyn was left alone with the gentle rush of the river, the stirring of branches in the autumn wind, and the chatter and screech of birds.

  He found his watching place, a deep nook in the stand of large, water-smoothed rocks at the woodland edge. Once, the river had been higher; it had scoured the limestone and formed a useful overhang for when it rained, a comfortable seat on which he could write, and gullies and crevices in which he could secrete the objects and totems of his other trade: his trade as scientist.

  He curled up in the space between boulders, made himself comfortable and watched the river, abandoning himself to thoughts of England again.

  He spent hours of each day here, and sometimes all of the night. Morthen was aware of this, and was sometimes worried by it, but she never questioned her father’s actions. He had told her that he was ‘journeying’ into his spirit dreams when he came to this place. It was sufficient answer for the girl.

  As daughter of the shaman she was well used to running his private lodge and helping with the gathering and preparation of food; her father had his own business to attend to: for the benefit of the clan.

  The truth of the matter was that he came here to get away from the Stone Age! He wanted to think of his past and to indulge his never-ending fascination: the documenting of the movement of mythagos along the river.

  In the last few months this traffic had increased dramatically, a fact which had made Wyn think with renewed interest about the river, and the vast expanse of marsh and lake from which this stretch of water flowed.

  He was convinced that the whole waterway was an aspect of one of the small streams that crossed the Ryhope estate, where his colleague George Huxley had lived, and to which he, Wyn, had been a frequent visitor. The particular stream he was thinking of had entered Ryhope Wood just two hundred yards from the house; it emerged, on to the farmland beyond, no more than a quarter of a mile away.

  And yet …

  During its passage through the primal forest, that simple brook underwent a fantastic transmogrification, becoming at one point an immense sequence of rapids, boiling between sheer cliffs, and at another the silent marshes which Wyn had come to know and love in his years with the Tuthanach. The river flowed into the heart of the wood, into Lavondyss itself. Then it flowed on, back into the wildwood, back towards England …

  The Tuthanach lived on the outward flow; Wyn’s home was down-river. But the passage of the mythagos was in the opposite direction, to the north, to the heart of the realm …

  The mythagos which passed this point most usually were on foot. A few rowed past in shallow boats, fighting the current; some of them rode on horseback. All passed warily by the rag-littered totemic poles, aware that they should not linger in so haunted a place.

  In the years that he had sat there, studying the products of his own and other men’s dreams, he had seen fifty or more of the legendary creatures. He had seen Arthur, Robin and Jack-in-the
-Green in so many of their manifestations that he felt he had seen them all. He had seen Norse Berserks, Cavaliers, British soldiers, armoured knights, Romans, Greeks, creatures with much about them that was animal, animals that seemed to have a human awareness, and an abundance of life that owed as much to the world of the tree as it did to the human limbs that carried it. He had seen what he believed to be Twrch Trwyth, the enormous boar that Arthur had hunted; a vast creature in its totemic form, it had run amok among the spirit poles of the dead, its spines brushing the canopy, its tusks scarring the trunks of the trees. It had run on, along the river, vanishing into the wood. This drama apart, the encounter had thrilled Wyn-rajathuk, since he had also seen the clan-warriors, an early group from the Iron Age cultures of middle Europe, whose violence and whose standard of the ‘wild boar’ had given rise to the later fables of the ‘hunting of giant animals’. One myth, human in shape, had been transformed into a new myth, animal in shape, and yet the essential story of repression, confrontation, and subjugation was the same.

  To be able to talk about what he had seen! If only …

  He pushed the thought aside, because there was something more important to contemplate.

  Of all the creatures which had passed this place, journeying to the north, towards that inaccessible realm, Lavondyss – of all of them one creature had not been the product of the mind; he had been of the flesh.

  Why he thought of a male, Wyn couldn’t say, but he was certain that a man, a man like himself, a man from outside the wood … such a man had ridden past this river point. He had passed by before Wyn’s time here, but perhaps only a few years before. Whoever that man had been, it was he who had left the Tuthanach behind, and the ruins, and much else besides, he who had scattered this part of the wood with his own mythogenic lifeforce.

  Now, though …

  Now another such was coming.

  Wyn-rajathuk could sense its approach with every murmur of his intuition. Again, he saw the new arrival as a man and he was alerted by his old-age common sense to the nature of change in the forest; this was not part of his shamanism, his journeying into the spirit realm. He was just quite certain of the approach of one of his own kind, one from outside …