Lavondyss

by Robert Holdstock

  Tallis heard cries. Bird cries. The birds returned, invaded Bird Spirit Land and flocked and swarmed above the funeral pyre.

  Fierce Eyes and his mother used nets to catch them, stamping on their heads as they struggled in the loose, confining space. When they had killed twenty they laughed together. Other birds stood on Tallis, pecked at her, pecked at the charred flesh of the youngest son.

  The hunters of birds piled their catch and the moment of elation passed as the woman came into the tent space to watch the death flight of her youngest born. In the beaks of birds, he went to whatever place would entertain his spirit. As each black creature fluttered and flapped away into the greying sky, she watched it, tears in her eyes.

  ‘Goodbye Arak,’ she whispered with each of them. ‘Goodbye Asha …’

  It was night. The fire had burned low. Tallis was charred wood, hardening, still aware through this gate into the first forest of what was occurring around her. Dreamer came to the fire and brushed among the ashes. He lifted Tallis in his hand, the small fragment of coal that she had become. He kissed her, held her to the breast where the skin of the youngest son was warmed by his own skin, and the horn of the stag kept the life and the memory of the youngest son alive.

  She watched from the burned wood. The shards of horn stood out starkly against the snow-cloud sky. (An image from another life: lying below Broken Boy, looking up at the summer sky through the broken reaches of the creature’s antlers. It had been a sexual feeling. An intense feeling. A recognition of the link between herself and Harry …)

  Dreamer went out into the still night, wading through the snow. If there was a moon it was behind clouds, causing brightness without form, a glow in the heavens, life struggling to pierce the confusing fog. Birds came and flapped around the body. He remained still and one of them settled on his shoulder, hopped to his head and reached a yellow beak to peck at his eyes.

  The bird pecked and pecked.

  The boy’s blood flowed and he was blinded.

  Tallis fell to the snow.

  The spirit in the boy lifted from the bones, from the flesh, through the furs. The man was there. Tallis remembered the way he had looked. He gleamed blue-yellow in the night. He was naked and there was no longer a burn upon his face, but he was the brother she remembered. He was gaunt. She could see Dreamer through his insubstantial form.

  Dreamer spoke to her, but the words were in a different voice from the boy’s.

  ‘We all have our own ways out of the first forest,’ Harry said. ‘I was trapped. You trapped me. Now you have released me. Thank you. I shall not be far away. I shall find you again. You are not dead. You have simply journeyed. I shall not be far away.’

  There was the sudden sound of wings. The elemental presence seemed to shrink. It rose into the air and was dark against the moongleam through the clouds. Dreamer sang a shaman song, a chant of journeying, a celebration of release into the spirit world.

  Crow-Harry circled, came close to the charcoal shard that was his sister, winked, then rose and was gone, flying to the south, to home, to warmth, to freedom.

  Dreamer fell to his knees, blind, bleeding, journeying on wings of song.

  But he was smiling.

  He flailed around on the snow. He found Tallis and lifted her. He kissed her blackened face. He hugged her charred body. He stared at her through eyes that saw the shadows of many lands. He had absorbed Arak, and could see the shadows of forests. So he was vision maker, now, as well as memory. Fierce Eyes, with his bone knife and sense of triumph, would lead them safely to the warm. There would be stories told. The family would never be forgotten. All the world would know what had happened here.

  Arak journeyed to the forbidden places of the earth.

  But after he had been lost he was brought home again.

  Goodbye, he said to Tallis.

  The woman was packed up. Dead birds, plucked and dried, were slung from her belt. The cold would keep them good. They would eat the carrion of the carrion eaters as they journeyed south, out of the forbidden place. Fierce Eyes was impatient. He began to walk away. His mother, his woman, followed.

  Dreamer summoned them back.

  He took the tiny bones of the stillborn girl from where they had been buried in the ice. Sightless, seeing all, he placed them by the bones of his brother. He had the remains of the wolf. He found a fragment of his grandmother. He placed berries from his hidden pouch beside these shards of life. He put the skull of a bird on top of it all, then impaled the heart of his father on the beak of the bird. He piled up snow and covered the remains. All this happened in the area of the tent, the warm place that had been their haven. He pressed the snow to make a mound, a burial mound. Fierce Eyes and his mother made a wall of snow around the mound.

  Dreamer placed Tallis on the snow, facing south, facing home.

  Then he sniffed the air, took his brother’s arm, and allowed himself to be led away.

  Somewhere, in an unknown region, his spirit, his lost ghost, flew above dark forests.

  The long winter came to an end. Tallis sank through the snow, nestled among the bones. The snow melted. Tundra covered the land. Animals walked there, the vibration of their passing stirring Tallis from her earthly sleep. Small plants grew upon the tundra, and then the seeds buried with the bones hatched.

  Thorns and holly grew where Tallis lay, absorbing the marrow of the wolf and the crow, sucking the sad life of the stillborn infant, tapping the memories of Old Silent Tree and the grandmother skull that nestled by it. Out of the earth came a scrubland, and this scrubland grew and became a wood. The first tree in the wood had been holly, wrapped around with ivy. Shaded by prouder trees, Tallis waited in the stillness, watching the movements of summer through gleaming green and spiky leaves.

  The Daurog formed. The holly shuddered. Sap drained in strange directions. Leaves curled to form flesh; branches twisted to shape bones. The holly tree shrank, then burst out again, swelling into the shape of a woman. It detached itself from the thicket and reached rose-thorn fingers into the hard earth. It moved aside the earth and found the petrified wood that was the heart in the forest. Black, because it had been burned a thousand years ago; it still showed the shape of the face impressed upon it. The Daurog opened her belly and placed the stone inside. At once it began to hatch. Warm, seeing through holly-eyes, heart beating like the frantic flutter of a bird, Tallis went with Holly-jack, deeper into the forest.

  She was alone. After many days there was a movement behind her and she turned to see a strange-shaped man, crouching, watching. He wore necklets of forest fruit; his skin was a confusion of leaves; rushes grew from his scalp. Tallis-Holly recognized the Daurog shaman. He stood and came towards her. Leaves rustled. He lay down, smiling, his serpent’s member twisting, rising. Holly-Tallis felt impelled to straddle the force of magic, and knelt above the grinning wood and let him enter, let him feed upon her and fertilize the growth of birds.

  She went with him through the forest. He danced in moonlit dells, shivered in thickets, pranced at the edge of the wood, grinned at travellers from the green of the bush. There were others with him, gathered on his journey: a leader, and two warriors, and a woman. All their leaves were different. They passed silently and swiftly through the rankest, wettest wood, feeding on the soft fungus of the bark of trees, sucking at the dampness in the rotting litter, chewing the lichen from mossy, greying stones.

  When they came to the river they stopped. Tallis-Holly watched and soon three riders passed from the human world, an old man, a young man, a woman with a face like stone. Tallis smiled. Holly-Tallis followed with the others. The encounter came at dusk.

  At some point during the evening, Tallis-Holly went to the crouching wary form of the woman, and watched herself watching the Daurog, and saw the fear and the tiredness in her eyes. She could not tell the human who she was, but she remembered the feeling of affinity; she tried to indicate that affinity, a finger pointed to holly and to human flesh, but the blank look remained
in that fur-wrapped, pale-faced Tallis. The feeling between the two females was strong, however, and Tallis-Holly smiled to recognize it.

  They shared food. Holly-Tallis gave birth to birds. The pain was very great. Released, she joined the others. They went up the river together. At a great marsh Holly sailed with the other Daurog in a battered craft, entering the mist for days, helping to propel the ancient boat across the stinking, shrouded waters. She had felt sad watching as Tallis had slipped behind her, a figure on the shore, watching with concern but without understanding, since she had failed to place her Moondream mask across her face, and thus could not see the woman in the land.

  Winter came and the Daurog shed their leaves. The wolf emerged, sometimes the bird, and Holly-Tallis huddled, alone and unloved, her evergreen skin a challenge and an irritation to the others.

  Soon they came to a place of ruins. The wolfish appetites surged. The Scarag attacked. One of them turned on Holly-Tallis and she fled up the path to the gate, passing a woman she knew well, remembering her earlier shock at this unexpected encounter. She watched from the gate as Tallis killed and discarded the Scarag. She hid in the silent, stony rooms and watched Tallis secretly when the woman came into the castle, dragging with her the body of a man.

  She watched the ruins take Tallis, the walls and the stones becoming trees again, responding to a glow of green that radiated from the woman as she sat within her nest of rags. They took the man as well. Bodies crushed and absorbed, Tallis-Holly herself became trapped in the quivering, silent forest that filled the stone place.

  So she went into the room, pushing through the foliage, and found the place where the woman’s corpse had rotted down. She lay down and a sweet slumber came. A long night. She dreamed of childhood. She remembered Mr Williams. She sang old songs, and giggled at remembered stories.

  When she woke she had shed her leaves, and the wood-bones lay discarded and piled around her. The trees had gone, absorbed back into the stone, which shimmered with a last remembered green, oozed a final sheen of sap.

  Tallis was cold and she fled the place. Her naked skin puckered with a dust of ice. She went among the people of the tents and found dark clothes, and furs.

  She stayed here for several days. The people lived both on the edge of the world and on the edge of the battle. Sometimes they looted the dead, sometimes they honoured them. Their tents covered the cliff ledges, hugged the trees; every cave was used. One cave was a shrine.

  Tallis left her masks there.

  After a while the pain of what had happened to her went away. She had entered the first forest. Wynne-Jones had been right. It had been no simple journey.

  Her hands had aged. She could hardly bear to look at them. They were like gnarled wood. When she finally looked into clear water and saw her face, she wept bitterly as she greeted the old woman who stared back at her.

  ‘But I found Harry. I saw my brother. Didn’t I? I released him from the tomb. He called to me. I came. I did what he needed. He flew away. But I saw him. Perhaps I can expect no more.’

  [LAMENT]

  Ghost of the Tree

  She returned to the settlement of the Tuthanach, a journey of countless days and great difficulty. At the beginning of the great marsh she found the Daurog’s boat. Although it was awash, she could see how they had repaired the leaks with rushes and she made the patching good again, launching the frail craft with all her might and throwing herself into the shallow hull, lying there, exhausted, as it drifted through the fog and the silent water.

  She felt almost sick with apprehension as she followed the course of the river and came to the spirit glade where she and Scathach had first found Wynne-Jones. What would she find? Was the old man back? Had Scathach, too, undertaken a journey through the first forest, only to return, aged but triumphant, from the underworld?

  She followed the overgrown tracks. She had already seen how the spirit poles by the water were rotten, encrusted with fungus. Emerging into the clear space around the compound she could see at once that it had fallen into decline. A thick scrub of wood filled the clearing. The palisade had fallen, the earth had slipped. The houses of the Tuthanach were broken, the thatched roofs gone, the daub walls melting under rains.

  It was deserted. But among the new trees making their mark upon the land were enigmatic mounds, in the shapes of crosses. Tallis walked among them, prodded them with her staff. When she shifted a little of the earth from one she shuddered to see the grey flesh of a man, face down in the ground.

  They will go through a death by burial, and rebirth.

  There was smoke from the hill where the mortuary house guarded its legacy of bones. And Tallis could hear a thin piping sound from that direction. Odd, pleasing notes, catching the drifting air, fading in and out of hearing like a sea-tide. As she came closer the notes resolved into a tune, and with a half-smile and a beating heart she echoed the tune from Sad Song Field, humming the simple melody.

  Why she had expected to find Wynne-Jones she couldn’t say; perhaps because she associated the tune with Mr Williams, and so she had climbed the blackthorn hill with the image of an old man at the top, crouching in his furs, piping her back to his life.

  She found Tig, of course, and the young man lowered the bone whistle and watched her through his pale and terrifying eyes. When he smiled she saw filed and sharpened teeth, two of them quite broken off. He had made a fire pit where once the proud rajathuks had stood. When he rose to his feet he was tall and his loose hide cloak fell away from his body, which was taut and muscular, covered with scars and blisters and the old and fading patterns of ochre, copper-salts and blue berry juice. He was a painted man, skin wrecked by mutilation but body hard and ready for the years of survival ahead of him.

  ‘You’ve come to see Wyn-rajathuk,’ he said in a hoarse whisper, emphasizing the shaman-term, sneering slightly. Tallis was astonished to hear him talk in English.

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘He has been here for some time. I’ll fetch him.’

  He went back into the crumbling cruig-morn, ducking below the sloping stone lintel and crawling along the dark passage. Tallis crouched down, shaking her head. She had not the slightest doubt of what Tig would bring out to show her – an armful of bones, perhaps; his skull. But the old man coughed at the exit to the bone lodge, eased himself out and stood. Tallis cried out with delight as she saw Wynne-Jones’s familiar features. He was grey, his face stiff with cold, and he had difficulty smiling. The eyes that watched Tallis through the white-bearded flesh were bright, though, full of intelligence. His sight had come back.

  ‘Hello, Tallis,’ he whispered hoarsely.

  ‘Wyn …’ she said, but she felt her heart grow cold. The old man shuddered. His face wrinkled, collapsed. A tongue probed through the grey lips.

  ‘Hello, Tallis,’ Tig mimicked in a high pitched voice. He raised a hand and detached the soft flesh-mask from his face, letting the old man’s features crumple in his hand. He shrugged off Wynne-Jones’s fur cloak and was naked again.

  Tallis felt like crying. Above her head a bird circled suddenly and Tig jerked back, his movement of triumphant trickery suddenly banished. The bird was huge, black-and-white-feathered. It was long necked and had a vicious, curved beak. Tallis had never seen a creature like it. It spiralled up on warmer air, then cried out and dropped swiftly to the north, vanishing among high trees.

  The sudden flight had unnerved the young man. He watched the bird until it was well out of sight, then scratched at his seeping, savaged skin, mouthing silent words.

  ‘Why did you kill him?’ Tallis asked, and Tig’s impish face turned back to her.

  There was no smile, no taunting when he said, ‘It was what I had to do. He knew it. That’s why he came back. I only needed his bones, so I carved and kept the flesh.’

  As if suddenly sorry for his trick he held the face towards her. ‘You may have him, if you wish. He’s inside, all of him. I used oil and resin to keep the flesh whole. The bones are
there too. I don’t need them any more. He was a rich meal.’

  ‘No. Thank you,’ Tallis murmured, feeling sick. She looked behind her, out across the wood to where the Tuthanach lay buried. ‘Did you kill the people too?’

  ‘They’re not dead,’ Tig said. ‘They are simply touching earth. All manner of wonderful things will be happening to them. Old spirits are flowing through their bodies; new spirits are whispering in their heads; wolf-birds, and bear-stags, and frog-pigs are dancing in their chests; long-forgotten forests are seeding in their bellies. When they rise up again they will be mine. I have the knowledge of the people. That is why I ate their dreams. Where you stand now will soon be a great monument, with painted stones and carved stones, and a single way to the heart of the mound where the sun will shine among the dead; it will be the way, lit by the earth’s light, into a wonderful land.’

  Tallis watched Tig and thought of Wynne-Jones’s words. You don’t enter the underworld through caves or tombs. That’s the stuff of legend. You have to go through a more ancient forest …

  She smiled wryly as she realized that Tig was the stuff of legend. Henceforth, for the Tuthanach at least, the way to Lavondyss would be far easier.

  How safe am I, she wondered? She had made herself crude weapons from wood, but Tig had stone axes and knives, bone spears, hooks, slings and stones. They were scattered around the compound, where the rajathuks had once stood. Tallis suddenly realized that they were spread out as if for defence from different angles. Now that she looked carefully she could see the deliberately placed piles of stone, five spears at regular intervals, and the fluttering, feathered carcases of birds on poles on the earth bank.

  Tig had made Bird Spirit Land! He was afraid of birds and he had worked his own magic to keep the predatory creatures, and the carrion eaters, away from his bone house, away from the remains of his people.