‘We can’t go any further now, Sam,’ she said. ‘We’re not ready, I guess.’
‘Not you yet. No, no, no.’
Turning with sudden recollection they saw oddly shaped jewelled hands disappearing below. How long had the machinoix been with them?
‘She must be close to death,’ said Sam Oakenhurst.
‘Can you help her?’ asked the Rose.
It was only then that they saw the shapeless ruin of Paul Minct, its upturned mask a blazing battleground of brands, its eyes enlivened at last with the fires of hell.
The Rose made a movement with Swift Thom. There came a jolt, like a mild shockwave. Sam Oakenhurst felt water wash up his legs and reach his back.
He heard the sound of a tide as it retreated from the shore and he smelled the salt, the oily air of the coast. He opened his eyes. The boat was gone.
Eventually his vision adjusted. He understood what had happened. He lay on his side in the water, as if left there by a wave. A little above him, on the beach, the Rose was calling his name. ‘Sam! The Fault has taken the meat boat.’
‘Maybe Paul Minct achieved his ambition?’ Away in the distance were the tranquil skies which marked the Biloxi Fault. Mr Oakenhurst turned on to his back. He began to get to his feet. He shuddered at the state of his clothing and was glad there were no witnesses to their coming ashore. The Rose appeared unaffected by their adventure. Taking his hand she waded briskly through the shallows and brought them up to the tufted dunes. A light wind blew the sand in rivulets through the grass.
‘The meat boat was accepted and we were not. Whose sacrifice?’ She pointed. ‘See! We have Biloxi that way, New Orleans the other! We shall go to the Terminal, Sam. I have a purpose there.’
‘I cannot go there yet,’ he told her. ‘I must go to New Orleans. Is it too much for me to learn? Too much that is novel and incomprehensible?’
‘Ah, no, Sam. You already know it in your bones. Come on to Biloxi, mon brave. Later, maybe, you go to New Orleans, when I can come with you.’ Standing against the yellow dunes, her hair still wild, a red haze in the wind, human in form but radiating the quintessence of the rose, all its exquisite beauty, Mrs von Bek made no indirect attempt to persuade him, either by gesture or word, and for that he loved her without reserve.
‘You must go alone to Biloxi,’ he said. ‘There is a price for our salvation and I return to New Orleans to pay it.’
‘Oh, don’t go, Sam.’ Clearly she found this request almost distasteful, though she had to make it. ‘Are you sure this is nothing more than your own addiction?’
‘On my honour, I swore to help you. On my honour, I must keep my bargain with those who helped me fulfil that pledge to you.’
She accepted this in silence, but it seemed to him that he had wounded her or that she disbelieved him. He said more softly:
‘I will meet you at the Terminal. It is not my life I owe them, but my respect. I must acknowledge their sacrifice. Courageously they defied their most powerful taboos to do what I asked of them. And here we are, Rose, thanks to their courage.’
‘And ours, Sam. I would return with you now, but I, too, am bound to a promise. If I lived after my business with Mr Minct I said I would deliver a message to Mr Jack Karaquazian at the Terminal Café. So I must make my way there and, yes, I will wait for you, Sam, at least until the boredom grows intolerable.’ She smiled. ‘Yes, I will meet you again, whenever our luck will have it so. Then, I hope, you will want to come with me beyond the colour fields, beyond the universe known as The Grail, to the wonders of the Second Ether, where plurality forever holds sway. There you will discover what it is to be jugaderos and paramours, Sam. What it is to be alive! There’s more than me in this for you, Sam.’ Her lips released a sigh.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think you will not forget me, Rose. You know who I am.’
‘By and large, Sam.’ She turned away.
As he put the Rose, the ocean and the dunes at his back and took the broken old road towards Louisiana, her voice returned to him on the wind.
‘Ma romance, nouvelle romance. Ma romancier, muy necromancier. Ma histoire, muy histoire nouvelle. Joli boys all dansez. Joli boys all dansez. Sing for me, ole, ole. But they shall not have muy vieux carre. Joli garçon sans merci. Pauvre pierrot, mon vieux, mon brave. Petitpierrot, mon sweet savage. Le monde estfou. El mundo c’est moi.’
There was to be a final miracle: It seemed to him that the distant yell of the Biloxi Fault took fresh harmonics from the Rose’s song and amplified and modified it until for a while a vast unearthly orchestra played the old tune, told the old story of lies and truth, of betrayals and sacrifices, of quests and oaths, of love and loss and resolutions that are not always tragic. The old story which is echoed by our own.
~ * ~
This sequence began with Colour and will end with Routes. Thanks to Los Tigres del Norte (Musivisa), Mamou (MCA Records), The Movies Sound Orchestra (Yel) and the bands at Michaux’s, New Orleans.
<
~ * ~
In April 1994, I reminded Rob Holdstock that I would very much like him to write a story for this volume of New Worlds.
He replied on June 11.
David Garnett
Dear David,
Thanks for your note and I’m sorry to have been so slow responding. Two reasons for my distraction: first, the story I’d planned to show you (‘Merlin’s Wood’) grew into a novel! And secondly, that business at Hockley Mere in Norfolk, I mentioned to you, has been taking some interesting twists and turns. I’ll be getting back into Science after twenty years! Real Soon Now ...
It occurs to me that the letters from the paleo-botanist who contacted me might be of interest, since they deal, as does the whole Hockley Mere ‘event’, with a subject close to the modem SF heart.
I enclose her side of the correspondence; see what you think. In any case, I’ll be in touch in July.
All the best
Rob
~ * ~
The Charisma Trees
Robert Holdstock
(Letters from Rebecca Knight of the Department of Botany, Cambridge University, 1992-1994)
~ * ~
August ‘92 (letter)
Dear Rob,
Thanks for the book, but especially thanks for your time and work with Phil and myself at Hockley Mere. As you’ve no doubt discovered, taking peat-samples from thinly wooded Norfolk Fenland is laborious, wet, tiring on the arms, and very, very dirty! Thank God for the Dancing Poachers pub, even if it is a gathering point for the metal-detector mafia, the bloody treasure hunters! Anyway, more to the point: our research project is not just one page further along, thanks to your efforts - it’s beginning to take a whole new direction! There was something very strange and very exciting in one of the samples we took that day. I’ll get to it in a moment.
For your information, since you’ve asked, the cores you took were two inches in diameter, went forty feet deep, reaching down through one hundred and fifty thousand years of time, more or less. We have some horrendous names for the feet and inches along that core which mark out the centuries: Alerod and Windermere Interstadial (those were the warm times); Older and Younger Dryas (the woody times); Devensian, Flandrian and Holocene ... it goes on!
So you have sampled oak and elm wildwood at a time when only boar, bears and beavers hunted the magic groves. Oh yes, there were beavers at work in Norfolk a hundred thousand years ago, same style of dams, same effect on shaping the woodland around the rivers as you get in Canada.
Anyway, your core was a fine sample, and an interesting one. A ‘good call’, as we Americans say. It has a charcoal line in the Older Dryas, followed by an inch of grassland pollen: this means that about a hundred thousand years ago the forest around Norwich burned down - a ferocious fire, by the looks of it, very localized, quite inexplicable. The area never recovered. The climate cooled, and a sort of cold savannah took over; an open grassland scattered with stands of beech and silver birch, patches
of scrub-oak and wych elm, acting as shelters to ungulates, rodents and birds of prey. This was rich grassland, though, and would have been grazed by many species of creature, mostly now extinct.
But most interesting of all, we’ve found the pollen of an equally extinct tree, a shade-tolerant ecotype of Corylus avellana: yes, the famous and magical British hazel, the sacred Tree of Avalon, whose nuts carry wisdom and inspiration and whose twigs can find water and make rain!
We think the ecotype must have developed and spread from a single refugium (that’s the academic’s word for the first seeding-place), which was light-starved. In other words, this tree had stamina. Or to put it another way, it had a versatile gene pool.
No: I don’t intend to get into the debate about DNA and magic attributes! Save that for your novels!
At the risk of boring you with facts (I know you prefer your own facts to anyone else’s), let me take a moment to walk you through some ancient echoes, just outside Norwich.
At fifty thousand years Before the Present, primary oak and elm returns to what for millennia has been a rich grassland, so you can imagine the Fenland as now being a stifling, unbroken forest in three layers: a gloomy and dangerous underwood of scrub-hazel, juniper, crab-apple, maythom and holly - below a vast sprawling canopy of oak. elm and lime, a sea of foliage that is penetrated vertically by oaks of enormous size! Grandfather trees, as they would be called in the Amazon rainforests.
But these oaks must have been phenomenal - nearly two hundred feet of vertical trunk, and then a vast but compact head of twisting branches, gnarled bark, leaf mass, fungal extrusions, hollowings and hollows in the mass. Miniecosystems, in other words, hovering above a broken and restless landscape of canopy and nests. (Oh yes: did I mention that we find evidence that the upper canopy was used like a land surface, swarming with birds and lightboned mammals, running the leaf mass above the half-light of the wildwood below, where the big creatures hunted?)
The core-sample you took - so much work for eight hours, so many pints that evening! - shows that during the last hundred and fifty thousand years, Eastern England was covered four times by a massive wildwood. But each period of afforestation lasted no more than ten thousand years before giving way to tundra, or cold savannah.
I know you don’t agree with me, but the wildwood is only an occasional visitor to the Earth. Because it’s long-lived in human terms, and humans achieved consciousness during its last and latest visit, we think of it as the natural state, but the wildwood really is only one face of an Earth that is continually playing with its options. Savannah, in the heat, and tundra, in the cool, are the real landscape, the most cost-effective if you want to think of it in those terms. I know we all worry about the loss of forests - their beauty, their m biota, their diversity, and their function as refugia for human populations who have become of interest to anthropologists, if that’s something you can sanction. But the Earth itself seems to recognize that big forests are simply one extreme of the Life-Fluctuation norm - deserts being the other - and so what we should be concerned with is the concreting of the Earth. As long as we have fields of grass to dream in: No problem! When the fields go... Problem!
~ * ~
October ‘92 (letter)
Dear Rob ... I’ve just been to a seminar on the whole Hockley Mere site, and here’s some information closer to the heart of a Celtophilic, nostalgic old archaeo-culture-vulture - your core, which reached down one hundred and fifty thousand years into the past, began its journey through a vertical cut of human time. In the top four feet you managed to pass through the site of a Civil War skirmish, then through one of King John’s camps (a small coin has been found); there are traces of a seventh-century settlement, possibly Efringdun, and a Celtic shrine, Icenian, probably associated with Boudicca or her husband, Prasitagus, and dedicated to Mabon. Below that, a Bronze Age cemetery with burnt offerings and obsidian beads; then a flint workshop, probably five thousand years Before Present, and finally a shell midden, almost certainly Mesolithic; a community of fisherfolk and hunters that had lived here when the coastline of Norfolk came a lot further inland - before Cromer, before Great Yarmouth!
It’s like a new excursion into Puck of Pook’s Hill, isn’t it? Downwards through time.
A foot below these echoes of Kipling’s journey, the wildwood, according to its pollen record, is strong and free, reaching to the edge of the ocean itself. But six inches below that there is nothing but the signs of ice and desolation - namely sterile clays and gravels. Then, ten feet down - about twenty five thousand years ago - we find not just the wildwood again, but fire and flint!
Dear God, we think of Ancient History as Stone Age, Stonehenge, Bronze Age, Romans, Trojans, King Arthur, Robin Hood - Abba! But here, before the Ice Age that shaped your country as you know it, someone lived, made tools, burned a clearing to construct a shelter, someone echoed the beaver, forgotten folk shaping the land by making their refuge out of the product of that land.
It makes me think of the question you posed to us that final night in the pub, before you left: what did they dream of? Where are their dreams now? How do we look at the land in the right way to see what they might have left for us? (I’m talking forgotten folk here, not Abba...)
~ * ~
November ‘92 (letter)
Rob ... really bad news: three evenings ago, the treasure hunters came, metal detectors in profusion. There were five of them, possibly more, since one kept talking into a mobile phone. Typical Nighthawks - leathermasks painted with bird features, army-surplus anoraks, ‘bovver boots’ and motorcycle chains. They smashed the last two cores we’d taken - the others, fortunately, had already gone to Cambridge - and burned our tents. They said we were trespassing on a ‘listed site’. When Phil pointed out that Hockley Mere was nothing of the sort, and he’d know because he’d done the routine search, as he did before sampling from any part of the land, he got two broken teeth and chain burn round his neck for his protest.
They waved a map of Britain at us - it was covered with circles, thousands of them. ‘Listed sites! Listed sites!’ the leader chanted.
Phil did absolutely nothing physical. He just kept arguing with them. This was a site of archaeological interest, he roared at the leader, as the recent coresampling would suggest. But it wasn’t yet a listed site, as they must well have known. If they’d found evidence of a settlement, they should report it to the British Museum and immediately stop all metal-detecting work at the site. The only thing their map showed was archaeological sites that had been tentatively identified from the air, or by bastards like them with metal detectors, none of which had yet been officially excavated, and which in most instances were probably not even known officially.
Then he called them ‘nothing more than thieves!’ ‘Pillagers!’ he shouted, ‘Don’t pretend differently.’
That’s when he got an old-fashioned police baton in the mouth, and four hundred pounds’ worth of dental work. He’s defiant though. This country’s heritage is being mined for gold and silver, while ‘dull’ things like clay plaques with scrawled writing on them, lifted from a Roman site, or boot buckles from a lost medieval village, get dumped in what the Nighthawks call Bad Find Pit.
From a stray comment heard before he was beaten up, Phil thinks Bad Find Pit is somewhere in the West York Moors, a deep ghyll of some sort, maybe even Gaping Ghyll itself. The ultimate votive-offering shaft! If that sounds flippant, I don’t feel flippant. I feel sick ...
~ * ~
February ‘93 (fax)
... Do you remember the pollen of Corylus we found? Curiouser and curiouser ...This ecotype of the magical hazel hasn’t been known for a hundred thousand years, but its DNA, in the pollen we extracted, was still intact and viable. It had been preserved in a sugar - trehalose, I think – which doesn’t crystallize but instead forms a sort of glass - it protects molecules, even complex ones, by forming hydrogen bonds with macromolecules in place of water. That’s how seeds, frogs, even some reptiles survive
droughts in non-active metabolic states for decades... but one hundred thousand years!
Apparently there are stands of Corylus all over the world, seeded from a Hockley Mere sample taken ten years ago. (No: I’m afraid it wasn’t a new discovery after all.) It’s a fast-growing tree, unlike modem hazel, and secretes organic matter in the same sugar-glass, presumably to protect itself against insect parasites - rather like resin, I suppose, although it must also attract creatures, I’d have thought. Do you remember visiting Wytham Woods outside Oxford? We got permission to go into the wildwood refugium, the few acres where they’re leaving the wood unmanaged for the foreseeable future, and at one point we were both almost speechless with a sense of belonging, of beauty, of being almost in a New Age fever of closeness to nature. You wanted to hug the trees, you said. In fact you did, and got very sticky as a result.
Well, that was the Corylus refuge. I’ll try and find out more and let you know.
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