Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

He looked at her across years, across age, knew that the moments together would be short, that this sad reunion was an event in a life, hers, as rich and complex as any tapestry; he knew that Rebecca was here because her lines had brought her here, and that in her own world she would soon be so far from him that not even the sound-wires would be able to connect them, and again she would be gone.

  His voice dropping, his voice resigned, he said simply, ‘I know.’

  Martin built and stoked the applewood fire until the small parlour was glowing with light and warmth. He spread a blanket on the hearthside, undressed and lay back. Rebecca finished her bath and ran naked into the room, clutching a bath sheet which she flung over the two of them, shivering beside him. Martin felt the steam and heat from her body, a cooling dampness. When the attack of shivering had passed she sat up, the towel around her shoulders, looking at the man, smiling and shaking her head. ‘You are lean. You used to be so chubby! I don’t think I’ve ever seen so flat a stomach.’

  ‘Come on. Flynn is the most athletic man you’ve ever met. Your words, five years ago, last letter I ever had from you.’

  Rebecca laughed, leaning her head towards the fire so that her coppery hair could start to dry. ‘What are you talking about? I wrote every week. Didn’t you get my letters? Obviously a bad postal service.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Besides, Flynn is nothing but bone and sinew. Athletic but not aesthetic, not that I give a damn. I don’t want to talk about Flynn. I want to talk about us. So just get me warm. Please?’

  ‘This reminds me of that first night. When I came here? Do you remember? I was a sad, bedraggled soul, and you and Sebastian hated me.’

  Martin smiled as a vague memory of Rebecca’s arrival in the family entertained him. ‘They made such a fuss of you. They kept comparing you to me. I got really angry …’

  ‘They were teasing you. I could see it so clearly. It was obvious. I thought it was funny—’

  ‘What was funny?’

  ‘—the way you couldn’t see it. You were such a sheltered boy. Such a cautious boy … But I was hungry, and defensive, and new, and confused. I was missing my own home, my own parents. Dad – my Dad – was always teasing. I loved his teasing. It’s what I missed most when he died. And then I found that my “new” Dad was just as bad – just as good! It was like coming home again. I missed it all so much when I went to Australia. Flynn is so straight … “if it’s irony it must be metal”; “say what you mean and mean what you say”. It comes from having to dissect the literal from the symbolic in reconstructed languages, I suppose.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘It’s his job. What he calls digging out the hard foundations below the crumbling ideas of walls and towers. And he’s good at it. But he’s: So! Serious! He’s learned to cherish the clear signal of a clear statement. I’m not criticising him, you understand.’

  ‘Of course you’re not. Perish the thought.’

  ‘Bastard! Anyway you were always easy to wind up.’

  ‘Who’s denying it? I didn’t like you. Not at first. I didn’t want you in the family. I didn’t like the way you and Seb teamed up to dance through the people on the path. I felt excluded.’

  ‘You were excluded. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t fancy you even then. You intrigued me. But you were a pain in the butt.’ She looked at the fire. ‘Poor little Seb. What the hell did he do, I wonder? What did he do that he had to die like that?’

  Martin was surprised by her comment. ‘You sound as if you think it had something to do with the path.’

  ‘Do I? I’m not sure. But I am sure he went inside the people once too often. I bet every child around here still does it, of course. But most of us stopped seeing them after a while. As if we’d been … as if we’d been contacted. Or maybe completed. I don’t know. Something like that. But Seb, he kept on seeing them. And he kept on drawing those funny bottles. Do you remember? Long, thin bottles, with little trees and little men inside them.’

  ‘I do remember.’

  Martin leaned towards the fire, puzzled. ‘Contacted? Completed? What does that mean, Beck? Do you feel completed in some way?’

  Rebecca wriggled closer, her hand resting on his warm skin, just above the knee. She seemed to be shivering again. ‘I think so. I don’t know so. There’s something in Broceliande that is seeping out. Merlin’s spirit, of course. We’ve always known that, haven’t we?’ She smiled, then spoke the local lore, the belief based on forgotten legend. ‘Merlin sleeps in the heart of the wood, trapped by the enchantress Vivien in a thorn tree, or an oak tree by some accounts, inside a column of air that hides him from all eyes but hers. His dreams, his nightmares, creep to the edge to provide for us, to divide us, to test us, to seek out the true hearts among us.’

  ‘That’s fairy-tale. The people on the path aren’t dreams, or nightmares. And they don’t interfere with us.’

  ‘Don’t they? But that’s not the point. The point is, this is a haunted place, and it always has been. We take the ghosts for granted. Not everyone sees them, just a few, and all of us stop seeing them after a year or so and start to doubt our memory. But we never talk about them outside. Why is that? Why do we keep quiet? Is something stopping us? Have you ever spoken to anyone in Amsterdam about the people?’

  ‘Never. They’d think I was mad.’

  ‘But why do you say that? You know you’re not. You’re no more mad than everybody else. We share a common experience and we share a common fear of communicating that experience. It’s as if we’ve become afraid of what happened to us as children, when we saw them, when we danced inside their skins. Except that you never did, of course—’

  ‘In fact, I did. Just once. It was terrifying. It felt as if I was gliding on a cold lake, and there was a woman singing, but it only lasted an instant.’

  Rebecca frowned, staring at him for a moment. ‘I didn’t know that.’ She turned away. ‘Yes. I think I remember.’

  ‘No you don’t. This is the first time I’ve mentioned it.’

  ‘Well, my point is, most of us saw them for months. Some only got a glimpse. And for all of us there was a moment when we got frightened …’

  ‘Christ. That’s what Jacques told me …’

  ‘Jacques? Is he still alive?’

  ‘Very much so, still building sheds and making charcoal. He was at the cold-earthing, four days ago.’

  ‘The funeral, Martin. We call them funerals in the outside world, these days.’

  ‘I like the old terms. Anyway, he took me to Quiberon, out on the coast where the stones are. Told me about my grandfather … about how he’d felt that he could have saved him from drowning, even though he was a child at the time … And he said just what you’ve just said. He had suddenly got frightened, and known that it was time to stop the encounters.’

  ‘With the path …’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rebecca sighed, stretching out across the rug, dry and warm, her hands behind her head as she stared at the black beams of the ceiling.

  ‘To go away is to see more clearly, Eveline said, but she was trapped. She wrote to me – just once – she said she loved me but for my own sake, stay away. We get blinded in this place, she said. We take too much for granted. We don’t see how trapped we are, how used we are. All that protects us is that we are afraid to talk about it. But who’s trying to stop us talking about it?’

  ‘You never talked about Broceliande to Flynn?’

  ‘A little. I didn’t find it easy.’

  When I first arrived in your home, I didn’t believe in the people on the path. I thought you were all crazy, dancing around at midnight, describing thin air as if there were human figures in it. I used to watch you from the garden. I was watching you the night Seb danced into the frightened people, the week before he died. You thought I was in bed asleep, but I never slept in the middle night; I was too frightened. There were too many prowlings and breathings, too many noises, and I was new to the house, and my new fa
ther still scared me a bit, even though I had no reason to be frightened.

  I’d seen other children playing with the ghosts – do you remember Thierry? What a crazy boy. Always shouting, always calling to them: ‘Tell me your story! Tell me your story!’ And Suzi. Always nattering away, happy with all the people, always urging them to stay, having a real relationship with them. And all I could see were my new friends, and my new brothers, addressing the emptiness. But I’d also heard adults talking about their own childhoods, and the way they’d followed the people on the path, and some of the terrible and wonderful things that had happened to them shortly afterwards. So I was intrigued. I assumed it was just because I didn’t know how to look. My eyes were wrong, which is why I started to rub them, and screw them up. It was so painful. I became so obsessed with seeing that I became crazy. When I finally cut the eyelids to let in more light – remember that? – I was finally taken in hand. I still have the scars, but they’re lost in the skin-lines now, thank God.

  I suppose Eveline knew that I was trying to see the things which she herself had once seen, and long become blind to. She locked me in my room at night, although she always came back two or three times to cuddle me. The one night she didn’t come and check on me was the night when you followed Seb dancing up the path inside three ghosts, although I didn’t know this at the time. Eveline was ill, remember? And I managed to get out through the window when I heard Seb disturb you. He was always outside. I don’t think he ever slept. It was as if he’d got some magical energy that kept him hunting, hunting the spirits.

  I ran along behind you, hiding in the tree-line when the moon came out, and heard Sebastian shouting something like, ‘This is the best ever. I can hear their hearts!’ You were hanging back; you always said you’d never go inside one of these ghosts. You were probably wise. I could only see you walking slowly and nervously, and little Seb twisting and laughing. The moon went in, everything was dark, and that’s when I saw my person on the path.

  He was right at the point where the track leaves Broceliande, where the tangle of rose-briar and hawthorn thins, that marshy area, with the aspens and broken oaks … He was standing there, holding a horse by the reins. Then he stepped forward, and I could see that the horse was heavily packed and that the man, who was young and lightly bearded, had some strange bagpipes over his shoulder. There was a stringed instrument on the side of the packhorse, a piece of curved and decorated wood and a small soundbox. I didn’t recognise it, and I never heard it played, but that this ghost, this shimmering man, was a musician was all that I could think of.

  He drew back into the woods as you and Sebastian came running back to the farmhouse. He watched you carefully, and you didn’t see him. That’s odd, isn’t it? Usually the ghosts are unaware of us.

  When you’d gone, he led the horse forward up the path, hurrying slightly, although he was moving slowly, like a slowed film, but the haste was conveyed clearly. He knew I was behind him, following. I had never seen anything like it. I was enchanted. The glimmer, like fairy glamour, flowed from his edges. It filled the night air, and I tried to touch it, but felt nothing.

  I caught up with him. I felt so alive, suddenly I forgot about my eyes, which were still hurting from the way I’d slashed the skin. I can recognise now that I was aroused, that my body was aroused by imagination, by the experience of seeing a troubadour, a ghostly one, but a sort of dream recreated on that autumn night. I was thrilled by the encounter, and desperately wanted to hear him sing. So I entered him, and copied Sebastian, turning and swirling inside the dewy ghost.

  There was nothing but rage. It was terrifying. I was caught in a whirlpool of fear, of anger. The man was escaping. He was frightened of something, and secretive. The rage in him seemed to crush me. Every squirt of blood in his veins was the rushing of a waterfall; his heart was thundering. I was deafened by this man’s retreat from some terrible encounter, or so it felt. I was strangling, gasping for breath, turning desperately to find fresh air as he carried me with him, up to the hill. It was like being buried alive.

  Then, just at the last, just as I thought I was going to die, I heard the sound of pipes. He wasn’t playing them, he was remembering them. He was singing to himself in his own language, remembering the skirling notes of the pipes he carried, and I shared that thought, that moment of internal music. I touched an ancient music. I was treated to such an old song, and a song filled with such despair …

  I became haunted by that music, just as Sebastian had been haunted by his own encounter. I couldn’t sing it. It made no sense. It made sense only in my head; I could jig to it, I could twirl to it, but it was inexpressible, except in dreams.

  How old was I? I can’t remember, now. Fifteen, maybe. I spent the holiday weeks of the next two years among the stones at Carnac, hating the tourists, the wretched families who came to picnic, to photograph, but not to listen. I was listening for the dreamsongs of that time, for the old tunes, for some clue to the magic that was now in me. But I realised that even that ancient earth wasn’t old enough. To articulate the music that flowed inside me not so much like blood, more like … like a benign but omnipresent parasitic worm, invading my spaces, pulling back when it hurt me, growing inside me but as I say, inexpressible, because it was pure feeling, eroding me, fighting me, but carefully … to find out how to exorcise that music, to get rid of the ghost that something in Broceliande had driven into me, I had to go further back.

  Which is why I went to Australia, to the place of songlines, and songtrails, and a way of singing that you would never understand, because it isn’t singing at all, nor singing up the world of rocks and creatures as happened in the dreamtime, but being sung through. I can’t describe it.

  The other side is easier: I never had a good voice. I was always gravelly, you remember? The groaning background, Daddy used to say. But suddenly when I sang I seemed to have an effect on people. Whatever I sang, wherever I was, whatever the country.

  I silenced the chief (and his family!) of the Memoragas people – the thunder people – out behind the Mann Ranges. They were singing to the sleeping rains and asked me to join in. I was already flowing with them, they seemed to be singing through me, and when I sang it was dizzying, it was like falling, then flying. Suddenly I was the only voice. They were entranced and puzzled, watching me in silence. I seemed to fly among them, and there were so many of them, and the land shifted and changed, the light, the colour, the warmth. I was travelling through the song, some silly ditty from childhood, ‘Frère Jacques’ maybe, I’ve now lost the words, I just remember how the world dropped away when I sang, and how my song went through those watching people.

  In the morning I felt hung over, though I hadn’t been drinking. There was so much excitement outside my private space that I got up, quite naked, and peered out.

  Flynn was there, crouching with the chief and looking at water flowing from below their painted rock. There had never been a spring there, now there was new water, very cold, rich in calcium and magnesium – Flynn did the analysis – a new spring, which had come during the night.

  My song, they said, had called the sleeping water to their hunt trail. They were amazed at the new spring. They made me bathe in it. They all wanted to wash me. I sat in the muddy stream for an hour, while I was anointed and sung to, and questioned, and played to with kazoo and bark drum. They put eucalyptus leaves on my head and insisted on daubing me with the image, in yellow ochre, of a gerbil, a creature that seems to find water everywhere. It was their totem creature.

  The only truly embarrassing moment was needing to go to the toilet. Everything that I didn’t want, they valued, collecting it and burying it below a small stone.

  After that I got frightened. I was singing to people, singing anything, any rubbish, and it was affecting them profoundly. There was a touch of magic in my voice and I had no conception of it, only the knowledge that it worked. Flynn was both apprehensive and loving. He was never exploitative, although we did earn a few meals i
n the lean times by my singing in small town bars. I think he knew there was a spirit in me, he simply had no idea what it was and had no idea how to use it. We went into the desert for five years, built separate shacks, and entered our own Otherworlds. We’d meet on occasion to eat a ceremonial meal (of whatever we could find, or obtain), and spend a few hours on the mat, but most importantly we talked about our dreams. We’d end each visit by going to the small stream and bathing, then follow our separate lines again.

  That was ten years ago. It was a hard time for me, a time in which I came close to death on several occasions. But with the song in me, this song, this magic, I always came back.

  Then Flynn drowned – a terrible accident. I ran twelve miles to the billabong when I was told the news, and dragged his body from the muddy pool. He’d been dead when he was found, so they’d left him there. He was bloated with water, naked and fat, his skin fishbelly-white. He was quite dead. But I crouched on him and sang to him and the water started to ooze from him, came out of his mouth, his ears, his eyes, nose, out of his pores, his arse, even out of his cock. The water drained from him, a steady sweat, a steady flow in the cold dawn, and soon there was room in his body for the air again. He started to breathe and his body danced below me. The air went in, his eyes opened and stared at me, and I stopped the song.

  If he was frightened of me before, he was terrified of me then!

  It was the moment when my time with Flynn became fatally defined. I mean in terms of its intimacy, its … longevity? We were dying together from that moment on. But only because our time together was now defined by the song. He hadn’t known he was dead. But when people come up to you to congratulate you on being alive again you tend to get the idea that something weird has happened. Flynn was as muscular and lean as the desert where we lived; every part of his mind was trimmed to the bone. He had no time for doubt. He heard the story – that he’d had a stroke and fallen into the drowning pool – he heard the story of the songlady bringing him back to life, he knew that our friends in the wanderlands, the desert, weren’t liars; and he accepted.