Lavondyss

by Robert Holdstock

  Tig was frightened. He was under siege. Would he be glad of Tallis’s presence, or hostile to it?

  She decided that a blunt question was her best recourse. ‘Are you intending to eat me?’

  Tig laughed sourly. ‘I thought you were afraid.’ He shook his head. ‘There is no purpose to be served. I have all the dreams of your England that I need. It feels such a terrible place, so much barren land, so little in the way of forest, so much crowding in the villages, so much shadow and rain …’

  Tallis smiled. ‘Wyn-rajathuk told me once that I would never be able to return to that “terrible place”. I assured him that I would. But I had expected to be taking my brother with me, and all I have done is glimpsed him. He is still here, still around. If I go back to my own land I shall never find him. If I stay, perhaps I shall stay until I die. I would have liked to question Wynne-Jones about these things,’ she sighed. ‘But he made a feast for you, and a cruel mask to trick me …’

  Tig grinned and patted his hand on the ground before his crouched body. ‘But you are forgetting something …’

  A cry! A shriek of anger. It came from the wood, between the cruig-morn and the settlement. It interrupted Tig and he stood, ashen-faced, bleeding from his scars. He raced for a slingshot. Tallis went to the top of the earth bank and stared down at the tree line. Then her spirits rose. There was a woman there. She was tall. She was painted half in white, half in black. A cloak of feathers was wrapped around her, tied at the waist. Her headband was feathered too, long pale yellow tail-feathers.

  ‘Morthen!’ Tallis cried. Despite the anger at their last encounter, despite the wounding, Tallis wanted to know the girl again. Alone in this vast forest she needed to gather round her all the familiar things she knew, and that meant Morthen, who was the only possible ally she now had left.

  Morthen screamed in her own language. Tig danced in a circle, then howled, a rising and falling cry of challenge. Blood literally burst from his body and he smeared it with his right hand, while in his left he crushed the skull of a crow.

  Morthen threw back her head and laughed, then turned and ran back to the woods. Tallis followed quickly. She crossed the settlement area, following the traces of the girl, but suddenly, as she reached the river, she saw the footprints end. In the silence of the spirit glade she looked north and south along the water, but there was no sign of Morthen, although close by, above her head, there was a disturbance in the trees.

  She looked up into the branches, but could see nothing.

  Dusk came as she waited there, and Tallis, cold and hungry, returned to the mortuary house.

  Five fires burned on the earth wall. Tig ran between them, piping briefly at each, then finally uttering a raucous screeching sound, which Tallis took to be a challenge to the birds. He watched the skies nervously, and Tallis suspiciously. She entered the mortuary enclosure and smelled food being charred. Tig had speared several small animals and they sizzled over wood-fire flames.

  Without being asked she ate some of the stringy meat. It was strong and unpleasant and killed her appetite. When she had finished, Tig came to the fire and ate a little, sucking his fingers. He smelled disgusting, now, and was shaking.

  ‘Morthen is trying to kill me,’ he said. ‘I killed her father, the old shaman. She is outraged. She will try to revenge the old man. Then she will kill you too.’

  ‘She has had her chance to do that,’ Tallis said. ‘She struck me three times and left me to bleed.’

  ‘Is her other brother dead? Scathach?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tig nodded thoughtfully. ‘A part of me thinks “good” when I hear that. But the other part of me, the old man, is saddened, even though he knew it had to come.’

  His words thrilled Tallis. She could hardly bear to speak for a while, but watched Tig as he tore a further strip of meat and chewed it quickly, gulping it down and glancing round.

  ‘The old man is in you? Wyn-rajathuk?’

  Tig smiled. She guessed that he had been waiting for Tallis to understand. He was canny as he watched her, and almost kind. ‘I told you earlier. I ate his dreams. I speak in his tongue, now. I can remember many things. Oxford. A friend called Huxley. A daughter called Anne. England. The terrible place.’

  ‘Not as terrible as the place which I’ve just visited.’

  After a moment’s hesitation, perhaps as the swallowed dream that was Wynne-Jones came forward in the mind of the mythago: ‘You found the place of ice, then? You found Lavondyss?’

  ‘I suppose so. I went through the first forest. I became the forest. I suppose I entered my unconscious mind … have never known such pain. I feel violated, consumed; yet I feel loved.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what I feel. All my life I thought that Lavondyss was a realm of magic. Cold, yes. Forbidden, yes. But I thought it was a vast land, with many aspects. I found it to be a place of murder. A place of guilt. A place of honour. A place of the birth of a belief in the journey of the soul.’

  ‘It is a vast land,’ the boy who was Wynne-Jones said slowly. ‘It does have many aspects. You entered only that part of it that is personal to you. It was personal to Harry too, of course. Each of you was born with memory of the same ancient event, and the abundance of later myths and legends that had developed from it. The closer you came to the place of Harry’s entrapment the more your mind and the wood co-operated to create the route through which you would enter that shared, mythic landscape. Lavondyss for you – for all of us – is what we are able to remember of ancient times …’

  ‘I begin to understand that, now,’ Tallis said softly, watching the blankness in the young man’s eyes as his mouth moved to articulate the words of an intelligence more than five thousand years in his future. ‘I had been fashioning the place of our meeting throughout my childhood, following the pattern that Harry had established …’

  ‘And did you find Harry there?’ Tig murmured.

  ‘He was trapped in the second son of a family. He had been trapped there since I created Bird Spirit Land from a vision of a great battle, Bavduin. It wasn’t Harry who had interfered with his journey into Lavondyss, but me. When I banished birds from Scathach’s grave I banished them from the snow world where Harry was a visiting spirit in a young, dreaming boy. He couldn’t get away. They burned me and the magic broke. Birds came. He took wing and left. I glimpsed him for a moment, then I lost him. I didn’t touch him. I feel I’ve failed.’

  ‘And how did you get back?’ Wyn asked.

  Tallis smiled. ‘You told me that the Daurog were of my own creation, not Harry’s. You were right. About one of them, at least. I was Holly. I entered her and saw ourselves – you, Scathach, me – ride up the river. When I was in the first forest, millennia seemed to pass. I was an old wood. I watched odd creatures, extinct animals. Hundreds of years passed before I was carved into Old Silent Tree and entered the heart of the wood, the beginning place. Coming home, in Holly, time passed very rapidly. I remember the way she looked at me in the wood, when I was travelling with you. I remember how I looked at her. Holly and I were the same. I had made the mythago of my own journey home. Even as I was going to the realm, I was coming home. I find that a strange thought, even though you told me it would happen. You said, to travel to the unknown region is often to travel home. I would be journeying in both directions.’

  Tig seemed to sink into himself for a moment, then looked up. ‘It’s what the old man had heard. He hadn’t understood its true meaning.’

  He fell silent. He stoked the fire below the blackened carcases of small mammals. Although he, like Tallis, had eaten little, there seemed to be no appetite in the air. The moon was bright through storm-laden clouds. The wind was crisp. Tallis searched Tig’s gleaming eyes for a sign of Wynne-Jones, but the old man was simply a restless spirit, an elemental, fluttering in the branches of Tig’s forest brain. His voice was an ancient wind. The dream would be fading fast. And Tig did not have the smell of survival about him.

  Wings beat th
e air, then passed away. Tallis shared the young man’s chill look.

  ‘She is coming for me again,’ he whispered. It was Tig who spoke now.

  ‘I’ll help protect you,’ Tallis said.

  ‘I’ll drive her off. My work here isn’t finished. There is a great deal to return to the people. I am the guardian of the knowledge of the way of the earth. She must be kept away until the task is done.’

  Tallis remembered Wynne-Jones’s brief account of the Tig legend. His death, when it came, would be terrible. She remembered, too, Wynne-Jones telling her that Morthen would one day be Morthen-injathuk. Tallis was adrift in a world of magic. All around her, everything she encountered seemed to reflect that same magic. It was in Tig. It had been in Dreamer-Harry. It was in Tallis herself. Wherever Scathach was undergoing his resurrection, it was as a magic man. It would be in Morthen.

  Tig was destined to die. He was also destined to pass knowledge back to the resurrected tribe of the Tuthanach. Strange vision, old memory. There was old memory in the land, and Tig was the ‘human’ carrier of that memory. If he died, the Tuthanach would not pass into the next generation. Unless it was through Morthen?

  Was Wynne-Jones still there? She called softly for the old man.

  He came forward, rattled the bars of his woody cage and made the young man smile. ‘He’s here,’ Tig whispered.

  ‘What did I witness? What was Lavondyss?’

  ‘Tell him what you saw …’

  Tallis recounted the transformation and encounter.

  ‘You witnessed not a legend but the deed of murder that caused the legend. That is the nature of Lavondyss: It is the place, made from mind out of memory, where the first stories lie, the deeds that generate the myths, through the memory of children. Dreamer survived to tell the tale of that terrible time. It may be that the rest of the clan, those who had gone ahead, perished. The summer land was filled with the descendants of the family who had been left behind. Dreamer’s tales, enlarged and remembered, became the stuff of legend; a son murdered, his corpse stolen, becomes – in story – a son denied a castle except in a forbidden realm. A grandmother who teaches a child to carve, then witnesses his death at the hands of her son, becomes Ash, teaching a lame child to hunt in strange realms, only to witness his death at the hands of something – the Hunter – that she has created herself. When Harry called to you for rescue he used all the versions of the story. He had entered the deed. He had entered the memory of the deed. He had entered the nugget of fact that lies in every mind. He became trapped there. He reached through the forest of his own mythagos, to his sister …’

  Tallis closed her eyes. The words ran around her head in circles. She had come to find Harry, and had only released his spirit. Something … something irritated her. It was the question she had asked before, and even as she spoke it now she began to see the answer.

  ‘But I trapped Harry,’ she said. ‘And I trapped him after he had contacted me. If he hadn’t called to me I wouldn’t have learned the hollowing; if I hadn’t learned the hollowing, I wouldn’t have seen your son, Scathach. If I hadn’t seen Scathach and wanted to protect him, I wouldn’t have made Bird Spirit Land. If I hadn’t made Bird Spirit Land, I wouldn’t have trapped my brother Harry by denying him the bird in which to leave the unknown region …’

  Tig murmured, ‘When you made that Bird Spirit Land, you affected time, you affected Harry’s journey. You changed things. You changed the details of the first murder. Bavduin, the battlefield, was just a later echo of that event, connected to the past through your two minds.’

  ‘I understand that. All my life I’ve known that you should never change a story.’

  ‘Your creating of Bird Spirit Land was the beginning. Harry reached to you through a confusion of time and ages. He arrived too early.’

  ‘That I understand too. But why did it begin? It began with Scathach. Why? I made the spirit land after I had seen your son arrive in the world of England. I made it a year after his arrival. It was your son who started all this off. Scathach is the beginning. He inspired me to hollow his future and his death. By interfering with that vision I trapped my brother …

  ‘But how could I do that? Who was Scathach? Why is he the link?’

  ‘He was the old man’s son by Elethandian of the Amborioscantii,’ Tig said slowly.

  Tallis asked, ‘And who was Elethandian?’

  ‘She was Harry’s daughter. She was only half of the wood.’ Tig grinned. ‘You are Scathach’s aunt. That is the link between you.’

  Tallis sat slowly back on to aching legs, shaking her head and breathing steadily in the chill air. Tig cocked his head, watching her peculiarly. It was hard to tell how much of the boy was present, how much of the old man.

  ‘You knew all the time, then. But why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘He didn’t know it until he was almost at the site of Bavduin. Your question of linkage had been disturbing him. It came to him suddenly. He returned here as much because of that knowledge as for his journal.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Because Elethandian herself would have been there. She is part of the same legend cycle. She is the mother who goes to the place of her son’s death. There she finds the spirit of her father, disguised as an animal –’

  ‘Me!’ Tallis said, understanding. ‘I was the spirit of Harry. And she was the old woman in the black veil …’

  ‘And she sacrificed her own life to give a new life to her son. He couldn’t bear to see that.’

  For a moment Tallis watched the young shaman; the words of the old man, murmured in the old tone and accent of the boy, fluttered restlessly in her head.

  ‘Then Scathach may have come home too?’ she said, hardly daring to hear the answer from the old man’s eaten bones.

  ‘He’ll be there.’ Tig grinned. ‘You told the old man of the protection of his son’s body by stone –’

  Leaf Man and Leaf Mother –

  ‘Yes. I hung them over the body. Leaf Mother and Leaf Man.’

  ‘You became Leaf Mother to return. You summoned the Daurog. You travelled as the Daurog Holly-jack. You shed the Daurog like a skin.’

  Leaf Man. Shaman. The Daurog that had escaped the winter killing. She had travelled with Scathach too, his own spirit returning from the unknown region of Lavondyss in the woodland form of Ghost of the Tree. Perhaps it should have been she herself who had travelled in that particular form! They had not recognized each other, and yet an affinity between them had sent them to the ground in a lover’s embrace within moments of their finding each other.

  Tig struggled within himself. His eyes were on the heavens, frantically searching for the creature that haunted him. The fire made the sweat and seepage on his naked body gleam. Tallis realized that she was losing Wynne-Jones. The boy was over-powering his eaten memories of the man.

  She rose and left the mortuary enclosure, walking uneasily down the hill, back to the silent settlement, the river, and the passage north again. Behind her she heard Tig piping and chanting. It was a desperate sound.

  Somewhere – to the west, she thought – a bird screeched loudly. Then the air was disturbed by the sudden flight of giant wings, beating towards the boy on the earth wall of the old charnel house.

  She climbed the steep path to the ruined castle, passed through the gate, found the room where the forest had taken her. The remains of Holly-jack were on the floor, crushed, rotting wood, disturbed by wind. A few green leaves remained among the bones.

  By the window to the ledge were the remains of Ghost of the Tree. Tallis crouched by them, fingered the wood, the dried leaves, the crumbled skull. If these remains had been here when she herself had returned from the Otherworld, she hadn’t seen them.

  Her masks were still in the cave. She sought among them. Which should she wear? She placed Morndun across her face, but there were too many ghosts and it disturbed her to see what occupied the same air, but on a different plane.

  There was no mask with wh
ich to search for Scathach.

  She moved about the cliffs, the woods, the ledges. She sought among the shuffling figures at every fire. She lifted cowls, turned faces to the light, tried to find a language that could be understood. She searched for days.

  If he had been here he had gone. He had not lingered. Perhaps, like Tallis herself, he had decided to return to the Tuthanach. They had passed on the river, during winter, perhaps, and had not seen each other as they had braved the storm.

  She was wrong.

  She returned to the shrine-cave, hungry and cold, and there was a man there, crouched over her masks, feeling them with gnarled and shaking fingers. He straightened a little as she approached him from behind. He looked round slightly, listening to the sounds she made. His hair tumbled grey from the scalp. The skull in his face poked through shrivelled flesh. His eyes were open, but there was no fire there now.

  She placed her hands on his shoulders and leaned down to kiss the top of his head.

  ‘Ghost of the Tree,’ she whispered. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  He sighed, let his head fall, a gesture of intense relief. He smiled and cried, shaking his head slightly, reaching up to cover her hand with his. He was silent for a long time, his breathing ragged as he began to accept that his time of waiting was at an end, and that Tallis had come home to him.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked.

  ‘Walking in the woods,’ she said.

  Coda

  I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, And I become the other dreamers.

  Walt Whitman

  The Sleepers

  The pain had ceased, but her head still felt light. She lay among the furs of her bed, face half-turned towards the glancing light from the small window of her hut. There was a strong wind outside, and she could smell snow. She hoped the coming storm would not be too ferocious. Year by year the mound of earth and stone that covered Scathach had been worn away. Soon there would be nothing left to go and kick. She visited Scathach every day. She kicked the earth. You should have waited longer. I needed you more.