Avilion

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘I know you’re not.’

  ‘But it’s as if . . . he’s lost.’

  ‘We’re all lost, lad. We’ve been lost since birth. We’re in a place of the lost. But you and I, and Yssi and Gwin, we’re alive, right? We’re alive. We live well. We can’t get out, but who needs to? When you’re older you can leave home and make of this place what you will.’ Steven reached an arm around his son. It was so hard sometimes to make joy out of their situation, to encourage in the lad a sense of belonging in a world in which they did not, truthfully, belong. And soon, no doubt, he would face the same difficulty with Yssobel. She had just forewarned him of that.

  Suddenly Jack asked: ‘Is Huxley alive? Or just mythago?’

  ‘My father? My father is dead. The Huxley you see at the edge? Mythago. Yes. You’ve seen him in too many shapes and forms for it to be anything else. Some are formed by me, some by you, some by Yssi.’

  ‘Why does he haunt us?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jack. I truly don’t know. You have to remember: it’s only you who sees him.’

  Jack took his father’s hand for a moment, holding it tightly, staring across the garden. ‘I think my sister sees him sometimes. She pretends not to. Do you want to see him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I think that if he’d wanted me to see him he would have allowed it. As it is, I’m glad that my young man, my drainage-hating son, is in touch with a memory of a man who once meant a lot to me.’

  ‘Can I come with you to find Gwin?’

  ‘No!’

  It was a good day’s slow ride to Dun Peredur, through difficult country. Ealdwulf rode ahead, heavily armed. Steven followed with the packhorse.

  They passed through a change of season, and for a while were in a place of never-changing dusk. Sometimes they could see fires in the forest. But mostly they rode in summer and the day.

  Steven still thought of time as minutes and hours, having been born and raised outside the wood. His body innately sensed the steady passage of time.

  The fort was overgrown now; most of the buildings had collapsed or were ivy-covered. The gates were hanging on their hinges, and it was certain that Steven’s approach could be heard. Dun Peredur was a small fort: it had once been a crowded place, and there were signs of casual occupation everywhere, including the use of the place by wild dogs, which Hurthig had driven off.

  The young Saxon had tethered the horses by one of the forges and was sitting close by, leaning back and drinking from a small jug. When he saw Steven he nodded to his right. Ealdwulf tended to the horses, then went to his son and crouched down to talk. Steven sought Guiwenneth in the chaos of vegetation and building.

  She was sitting among the overgrown stone walls that had once formed the king’s hall, but she was sad, her knees drawn up to her chin, her fading red hair a tangle, partly of the feathers she wore in them, partly of leaves and sweat. She was anguished. Steven noticed she was sitting on the circular stone slab that had once formed the feasting table. She glanced up as he approached, smiled wanly, then straightened, stretching back, lying supine and gazing at the sky.

  ‘You’re not a happy woman, Jack tells me.’

  ‘I am not a happy woman.’

  ‘May the man who loves her ask what has happened to turn happiness into fear?’

  ‘Fear?’

  ‘You’re afraid. I’ve only seen it in you once before, but you’re afraid.’

  ‘I’m not afraid.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Lost. Angry. Thinking of the kill.’

  He was shocked by that. ‘What kill?’

  ‘The man who stole me! The man who raped me! The man who sent his guard to kill me! That Fenlander. Hunting me through the forest, in the snow.’

  For a moment Steven couldn’t respond. Was she talking about his brother Christian? As if she had seen his confusion, as if she had guessed his own train of thought, she looked up and gave him the briefest of smiles. ‘He’s in the valley, Steve. The moment Yssi called to me from the valley, I sensed him too. It was like a knife turning in my belly. A storm of thunder. Silent, but terrifying thunder. I had to go! I couldn’t stay there, in the villa.’

  Yssobel had called to her mother? Steven had noticed the moment, but it must have been when she had declared that her father could not have been the waiting hunter. The connection between daughter and mother was strong. The ‘green’ side of the girl was very strong indeed. They communicated through the very earth itself.

  ‘You’re safe in the villa,’ Steven said. ‘You’re safe with me. With Ealdwulf and Hurthig.’

  ‘Yes! Yes! But not in the valley. And not from what’s in the valley. He’s coming for me again. And I’m older, now. And you’re right . . .’ She reached for Steven’s hand and held it to her breast, clutching tightly and starting to shake with tears which she then forced back with will and strength. ‘I am afraid of him. And therefore I must kill him. I will not allow myself to be taken again.’

  ‘You won’t be.’

  Guiwenneth was quiet for a while; then she kissed the hand she was holding, not looking up. Then she whispered: ‘Steve . . . something else. I find this difficult. Please don’t be angry.’ Tears touched his skin as she squeezed the fingers. ‘I’m not sure who I am,’ she said in a small voice. I’m not sure I’m yours. I think - I dread to think - that I’m his. That’s why I’m lost. That’s why I ran. That’s why I’ve come here, to my father’s house. I can’t dream my own life. Only you can. What happens to me has already happened to me in your own mind. Only you can know.’

  Steven was shocked by what she had said. It had never occurred to him that the woman who had walked out of imarn uklyss might not be the same woman who had emerged from his own memory. It had certainly never occurred to him that she might be his cruel brother’s.

  ‘What makes you think this, Gwin?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel haunted. It’s happened before and I said nothing. But earlier, when you took Yssobel to the valley - it was very strong.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But he’s close again. I just know it.’

  Resurrection.

  ‘Come back to the villa.’

  Guiwenneth shook her head. ‘Not yet. I’ll stay here for a while. Hurthig will stay with me. My father’s ghost sometimes walks here. I’d like to see him.’

  There was nothing Steven could really say. He kissed her, called for Ealdwulf, explained what had been said and the two of them rode back to their home.

  Yssobel

  Guiwenneth changed after that day. Her moods turned darker, she became distant in a way that saddened Steven. She often left the villa for weeks at a time, though when she returned she was usually radiant, almost her old self.

  ‘I’ve been shedding ghosts,’ she would always say, with a smile.

  ‘It’s certainly time to shed clothes and take a wash’ was the joke that soon became established.

  Steven never asked Guiwenneth where she had been, and apart from a pronouncement that she had been ‘inwards’ and ‘shedding ghosts’, she volunteered nothing. He guessed she went up to the old fort, hoping to see her father’s ghost. When she was asleep in the villa she would often cry out for help, or murmur: ‘I hope I’m safe now.’

  It took only a gentle kiss to quieten her, though.

  Yssobel was also greatly affected by her father’s walk with her into imarn uklyss, but in a very different way. She became obsessed by the place. Steven was educating the children to the best of his abilities and memory, but Yssobel turned every lesson into Lavondyss. She painted from imagination, wrote childish stories, made links between the historical characters that her father spoke about and the place beyond the fire. Ealdwulf had made her a small harp. It was crude, though intricately carved; the sound it produced was raw rather than sweet. And yet, in Yssobel’s hands, it produced tunes that were mellow and sad, echoes of lost music, all flowing from the mind and the fingers of the half-girl
.

  Her room was in the heart of the villa and was the warmest. She had hung several painted skins on the walls, and tapestries that had been found in a storeroom, but she had left room for art.

  Indeed, Yssobel’s large space, with its purple and red mosaic floor lovingly reconstructed from the scattered tesserae, had become a gallery of her art and creations. Faces and figures peered from the walls, from among the tapestries, or ran around them in ancient chases. Clay figures were grouped on small shrine tables, their bodies elongated and weird. She had made a model of how she imagined the valley to be, and tiny men and women were placed within it, marking places where she dreamed the openings from Lavondyss could be found

  As she grew older the art became more sophisticated. Steven watched with fascination. He and Ealdwulf repaired other rooms in the sprawling villa and Yssobel eventually had three: one to sleep in, and two in which symbolic beauty and savagery crowded the walls and the rough-hewn tables around her workbenches.

  It came as a shock one day, when Steven went to see his now-teenage daughter, to be confronted by a death mask, life-sized and painted in the true colours of recent mortality, and to recognise his own brother, Christian.

  ‘That one scares me,’ Steven said gently. The girl shrugged, holding it up and staring at the closed eyes.

  ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. This is just how he was. But he’s back now.’

  Steven shivered. ‘Back where? In the valley?’

  ‘No. Not at the moment. Further away than that. He’s very strong now. But there’s something sad about him. I can’t tell what it is, but he’s searching for something. Or perhaps for someone.’

  Yssobel turned the death mask left and right, then put it down, glancing up at her father. ‘Come to criticise or to help?’

  ‘I don’t criticise.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You do it very carefully, but I always know when you don’t like one of my paintings, or masks.’

  ‘Some of them are a bit grim. But as I’ve said before: your talent is remarkable.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s a forest talent, not human. It’s the green in me, not the red. I wish you could see my dreams, daddy. Sometimes they’re so wonderful I wish I would never wake from them.’

  ‘I’m glad you do, though.’

  Yssobel was now tall for her age. Riding, swimming and the necessity of participating in the villa’s more robust tasks had made her lean and very strong. Though she had inherited her mother’s features, there was something harder about her look.

  Guiwenneth had noticed it develop. ‘She has the look of her grandfather Peredur, I’m sure,’ she had once said. ‘I’ve only glimpsed him, but I think there is softness in his manner, but not in his features.’

  ‘Tell me a dream,’ Steven asked his daughter. ‘One of the wonderful ones.’

  ‘Well, I have a dream that keeps coming back . . .’

  I’m very young and I’m playing in the garden with a wolf puppy. Three women are sitting, guarding me, talking and laughing. It’s a bright day and there are seven birds circling overhead.

  Then the birds dart down and one of them picks me up and carries me very high. They play a game with me, swooping and soaring and one drops me - the feeling of falling is not frightening at all, just startling. And another catches me. Down below, the women are running around through the gardens and groves, staring up, but I’m being well protected by these huge birds.

  Then suddenly we fly to the edge of the forest. I’m dropped and this time nothing catches me. That’s the only frightening bit. But I land on the back of a young hind and she runs into that wood, with me clinging on. And she brings me to a river, or sometimes it’s a lake, where there are armoured men sleeping. Only they’re not sleeping. They’ve been killed in battle. They’re very young. They look like they are dreaming, but they’re very still and very cold. Their armour is wonderful, bright, some of it bone-white, some spring-leaf green, some dusk-red, and one set the sheen of patterned copper, the colour of my hair, the colour of my mother’s hair. (Where it isn’t greying.)

  This man is a prince. And I don’t know why I do this in the dream, but I kiss him on the cheek, and remove his helmet and his armour and put it on, and lie down beside him.

  After a while we both sit up and he seems angry. Why have you stolen my armour? he asks.

  Because you were pale and cold and I thought you were dead. I wanted to wear it so that you would be remembered.

  He laughs. Do you know me, then? he asks

  No, I say.

  Then why would you wish to remember me?

  For a moment I have no answer. Then I say in the dream: I need to remember something of someone, or I will have nothing to remember. I need to wear their skin.

  And he asks with a smile, My armour is my skin?

  Your armour is the mask, I reply, and he’s silent for a moment, dark eyes watching, brow furrowed, thoughtful.

  Would you have worn it in battle? he asks, and I reply that the armour is not even as strong as a boar’s-tusk cuirass and helmet, or three layers of bull’s leather stitched through with thin shards of the hard, black thorn. But the armour is beautiful, and it fits me to perfection, and I tell him so.

  Then you may take it, he says. And I will find armour of leather and bone and thorn. And wherever you go, I shall follow you until I find you again. But for the moment I must sleep. It has been a hard day, and a gruelling challenge. The tip of a sword is inside me and it is as cold as a winter’s waking.

  And he lies back and closes his eyes. But as he closes them, and becomes pale again, he sings softly. It’s the song I’ve often played on the harp that Ealdwulf made for me. Though the words change, and sometimes I can’t remember them, but only because I wake at a later time in the dream.

  I came to the strong place which I knew I must hold, I came to a time in my life, and I knew I must hold,

  I came to the hill where the harnessed host was waiting

  And the wind was waiting

  And a storm of rage still silent, waiting.

  And I knew that I had to hold on to what I had been given;

  And that the world was changing, and that I had to hold;

  And everything that I had once been given was gone,

  Yet everything I had been newly given was with me. Under gloom-grey sky, and over red-green earth, We held and held until we broke.

  But in the breaking, we held, and in the holding we will find Avilion.

  Suddenly Steven could see Guiwenneth more clearly in the girl. Part of the dream, the first part, echoed Guiwenneth’s own story, her own mythic past, in slender detail. Guiwenneth’s own childhood had been a tale of growing up in sadness and then strength. For Yssobel, for the girl’s dream, the events were encompassed with pleasure and childish joy.

  But in Yssobel, he now realised, there was a strong echo of a more violent beginning. He looked around at her room, and what had been beautiful in her art as he had seen it before became suddenly darker, though he suspected that his daughter herself had intended only the lighter shade of her creative efforts.

  ‘Finding dead warriors by a lake doesn’t sound very wonderful to me.’

  Yssobel shook her head. ‘It’s just a beginning. I wake up feeling very good. It’s always a feeling of something that’s going to happen next, and I like that. Jack dreams of running in the forest from huge wolves and suddenly coming to the outside world. I’ve never had that dream. I do have bad dreams, but they’re from the red side, not the green.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about them? Or your mother?’

  ‘I tell Rianna a few of them, now that she lives here. But I’ve sworn her to secrecy, so don’t even ask her. When I’m ready I’ll tell you. When I understand them.’

  Steven smiled and left her, adding, ‘Thanks for the Dead Prince story, at least. Just confirms what I’ve always known.’

  ‘That I’m weird?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘If I had a chicken for
every time you’ve told me that—’

  ‘You’d have a palace-full of eggs and feathers. I know. I know. Don’t be long. The table’s already set, and something smells good in the kitchen. And it isn’t chicken.’

  She doesn’t confide in me. And she doesn’t confide in her woodland mother. She talks to the High Woman. Maybe all of them. I don’t mind her talking to them. They carry wisdom. But I wonder why she doesn’t talk to us? Perhaps because Guiwenneth has changed so much. She has become so haunted, so distant. And perhaps because I’ve been too reticent. If so: why the reticence? Perhaps because I’m afraid of my children. Afraid of what? Perhaps of what exists on what Yssi calls the ‘green side’. And she can tell it in me. She can sniff it as she can sniff the pungency of the earth where it hides little treasures for the table; or the remains of the long-dead. She knows I’m afraid of what might emerge from her one day. Or what might be lost from her. Or what might take her away.

  Jack

  Families have their rituals. They celebrate in their own ways. In the villa the seasons were celebrated, as were the passing through of strangers, the slaughter of old hogs, the birth of foals. Birthdays were greeted with wild gifts and teasing, and Yssobel always composed a song for the occasion.

  The song she always sang for Jack was a deliberately created piece of nonsense, though it echoed the sense of loss that was to come. Everyone clapped their hands to the rhythm. As she rose to sing it, Jack groaned, head in his hands, imploring, ‘No. Please, no.’

  Yssobel grinned. Her hair was tied high and she wore a colourful bell skirt, which swirled about her as she twirled as a prelude to the performance.

  Jack, yes Jack, my brother Jack,

  Hunts in the wild, chases at the run,

  Brings back a kill, but dreams in his heart

  Of reaching the edge,

  Where our family was begun.

  Where a father met a mother,

  Though from forest mind she came,