Avilion

by Robert Holdstock

  Odysseus’s hand was on hers, his gentle gaze intense. ‘Are you certain of what you’re doing? Are you sure you want to find this man?’

  Yssobel felt a shiver pass through her body. What was it her father used to say? As if a ghost had just walked over her grave.

  ‘I was impelled to find this place to find my mother. To find Gwin. But I know that I also came here to find my uncle. I’m not sure at all who is calling to whom. All I know is that when I saw him in the shield he was frightened. He could sense me watching him, and he was uneasy at being spied on by a ghost.’

  ‘You told me,’ Odysseus reminded her, ‘that you’d also seen him brutally murder one of his commanders.’

  Yssobel was silent for a long while, though when Odysseus made to remove his hand she reached to keep it clasped over hers. ‘Ask them if they know where in this chaos he keeps his own camp.’

  The reply was that Christian always moved at the head of the army, his men spread out to either side of him, riding slowly. But as it approached the time when they would rest, he withdrew to the centre and formed his palisade.

  Two more Athenians suddenly appeared, carrying supply sacks and a roll of furs. They were curious about Yssobel as they placed their tarnished helmets alongside the others and lay down on the inside of their shields. They had been to the baggage train to fetch supplies and bedding for the next few days. Words were exchanged among the Greeks, and agreement was reached.

  Odysseus made a sign of thanks.

  ‘We’ve been invited to eat with them. Dried goat’s liver, and guts stuffed with olives, almonds and cheese.’

  Yssobel hadn’t realised how hungry she was and raised an appreciative hand.

  Quite suddenly, as if on command, the forest army was silent. Everyone was at rest. Odysseus too had curled up some way from the fire and closed his eyes. Woodland shapes emerged now, walking quietly between the sleeping forms. A hand touched Yssobel’s shoulder and she turned to meet the wide-eyed gaze of the female dryad from earlier.

  ‘Your thoughts are disturbed,’ the dryad said sympathetically. ‘You are anxious. Part of you has the scent of blood. There is also the scent of sap from a wound. Your uncertainty entangles with ours. Do you need help?’

  Yssobel embraced the night air. Smoke-tainted, the breeze was chilly. She submerged the red in her, the echo, the fragment that remained, and let the whole of her mind and body become part of the forest.

  The wood nymph led her to a young oak, its branches strong, only one of them lightning-struck. ‘I guard this tree. It’s what we do. My tree is yours while you search. You still have time to escape to the stone hills.’

  ‘I abandoned my life to find this place. How could I run from it to save the life I’ve abandoned? Besides, why are the stone hills any safer? This army consumes everything in its path, from the underworld to the mountain. That much I’ve learned.’

  Disappearing into night shadow, the female had slipped away as Yssobel’s words reflected back the dryad’s suggestion. Now Yssobel leaned against the oak, closing her eyes. Her skin hardened, her head was drawn back, and slim, thorny fingers touched and nicked her skin, drawing her deeper into the sapwood.

  She entered a noisy and confusing world of overlapping memory, and life and dreams.

  She could hear the distant sounds of voices, and some of them called her name. Was that Jack? Was that her mother? Nothing was clear. The earth moaned, the network of roots below her raged with movement, sparked like fire where they touched. The hollow dreams of this ghost army were a raging argument between fear and pleasure, anticipation of adventure, and loss of that which had once been loved.

  So many dreams, so many languages, so many fleeting images of youthful summers and the hard graft on the land, and the hard push of war.

  Legion itself was a living being. It became aware of her, an outsider, a parasite that had crawled below its skin. She was being watched, studied, there was a presence around her that was curious, although it was not threatening. It probed and assessed. There was no definable shape to it, no elemental presence, just the looking and listening, as if Yssobel were being explored by fingers that did not touch her, an animal cautiously sniffing and watching, without blinking, to see what this strange arrival from outside its skin might have been.

  After a while the curiosity waned; she entered Legion’s dream, if only for a moment, and at the periphery. In the blink of an eye, she was on a vast plain, among other armies, facing the glittering shields on a far hill. Horse-drawn chariots twisted and turned on the bone-dry earth as the moment of attack approached. The air was stifling, hot. The shield hill flashed brilliantly. When the attack began, in a furious charge of horse and chariot, there was sudden screaming as men and horses plunged into a great chasm, a rift between the armies that had been concealed by the play of light from the hill.

  Legion, called to support, did not suffer the same fate, but plunged to safety, its mission failed.

  Yssobel was treated to glimpses of other actions, some in wastelands of snow, some against dark hills, high-walled and alive with fire, some on open plains where banners blew in strong winds and the sudden attack was desperate and savage, and on a scale she could not comprehend. She had seen Arthur torn down by a spear stroke, but the armies there had been small compared to these vast gatherings of war.

  The memory of Legion retreated as quickly as it had come. Yssobel was inside its boundaries. She had been accepted. Perhaps it now expected her to become a part of its fighting force. Time would tell.

  The oak held her tightly. Her limbs had spread through the earth. She probed and sought, and still she heard the distant sound of familiar voices. They whispered to her through the whirling pool of Time and recollection that was Legion, the anguished voice of a multitude of the dead.

  A little touch of the red side in her murmured: focus on one voice. Find Guiwenneth.

  Yssobel in the Green thought strongly of her mother, brought her image to mind, remembered laughter and anger, engaged her in her mind’s eye with that fierce yet gentle gaze. Inevitably, it was a confrontation that presented itself. The two women were standing in the snow, arms crossed, facing each other, arguing about Christian. The argument was loud and intense, but to recall it, and to recall that emotionally charged moment, seemed to open a path through the forest network, and Yssobel in a huddle in her oak-haven saw her mother sitting cross-legged by a fire and watching her, from somewhere in the heart of this beast.

  There was nothing forlorn about Guiwenneth. Her hair was tied back in a leather band, and her face was patterned in blue and green, though this might have been paint rather than tattoo. She was protected by scaled armour from throat to breast, a dull sheen that could be seen through the dark bearskin wrap that was drawn around her shoulders. Her eyes were hard. There was no love in them.

  ‘So you followed me after all. And you expect me to greet you. Go away, Yssi. Your mother is not quite dead. But before dying she has a task, as well you know. You will not interfere with it.’

  ‘It’s too late to tell me that. Where are you in this heaving mass of war? Where are you hiding?’

  Guiwenneth laughed, but without humour. ‘I’m not hiding, just lost inside it. As with any battleground, finding your way through chaos is a hard challenge. Yssi, go home, if you can. Do not confront Christian. Oh yes, he’s here. Avoid him! And do not try to find me.’

  ‘I don’t know how to go home,’ Yssobel whispered through the earth, green embracing green.

  ‘Then how do you expect to take me home with you? I don’t even know how you arrived here. There must be an ingenious spirit in you.’

  ‘Inspired,’ Yssobel said. ‘From a dream. And with help from a man who is not very well pleased with me.’

  ‘Odysseus?’

  ‘No. Someone else.’

  Across the distance, in this still, moonless night, Guiwenneth was silent for a while. Then Yssobel heard her say, ‘You think you’ve come for your mother, to rescue h
er from her folly. But the truth is you’re here because Christian has called you. He might even be watching you now. You have put yourself in jeopardy, Yssi. It only makes my anger strengthen. Be careful. Be watchful.’

  Odysseus’s very words, reshaped by her mother. The red in Yssobel vibrated for a moment, a pulse of anguish. But the green was stronger. She could slip and slide among the sylvan shadows. But there was doubt again, and she could not deny that uncertainty. She wished to heal the wound with Guiwenneth. But she was profoundly intrigued to meet the man who was her mother’s life-bane. The sad and sorrowful man of whom she’d dreamed throughout her childhood; or the murdering commander, lost in his own insecurity and desolation. She had come too far to turn back now.

  Where was Jack?

  Yssobel reached through the network, scouring the night-woods, summoning him to sight and mind, but though she imagined she could hear him, and the grim chatter of the boy who came with him, he was elusive here. She had created the outskirts of Avilion, a world of visions and reflections from her own imagination, and constructed simple links with the strongest elements in her life; but Legion was not hers, and it was a barrier to the network outside its confines.

  She began to emerge from the dryad’s home as, in this deep part of the night, the forest was beginning to stir again and torches were being lit. She was cold. Turning to look at where the Athenians were sleeping, Yssobel could see Odysseus sitting up and watching her, although after a moment he stood and relieved himself away from the fire. Everywhere the silence of the night was breaking into the murmur of a new activity.

  The slender dryad, the beautiful nymph, slipped back to her tree, smiling, shivering. ‘Was it a help to you?’

  ‘Thank you. But I don’t know. I spoke to my mother, but it was not a good exchange.’

  ‘Our feeling is that this intrusion of men and fury will soon be moving on. The destruction was less than we’d feared. Will you stay? There are many havens here, and you are half like us, and vigorous. We like your spirit.’

  ‘Thank you. I have no idea where I’m going at the moment. Though I spoke with someone I love. Thanks to you.’

  ‘Good, good,’ the lovely dryad said, and touched gentle fingers to Yssobel’s dew-damp face. ‘Something, then. Something achieved. Please stay.’

  But before Yssobel could answer, before she could respond to this strange, almost desperate invitation, a man was standing before her, though not physically, just in her mind’s vision. It was Arthur. His face was masked in iron. His eyes gleamed with anger. He was very calm. His words were distant, blunted, but there was something of nemesis in them.

  ‘You stole my death. I will have it back.’

  Then the flash of vision had gone.

  Shaken by the suddenness of it, Yssobel stepped back into Legion and found her Greek companion.

  Peredur and Christian

  When he felt he could trust those around him, when he felt safe among his guard and his commanders, Christian would erect a small protective palisade at the heart of the army, and with his aides and advisers he would discuss the visions and the calls that would come to them. He called it ‘scrying’, but the youthful woman and blind, ageless man who murmured the calls from out of Time and from across the land called it ‘gathering’.

  They gathered the screams of need and anguish, and the army responded. They were mercenaries who fought for no monetary pay. Their pay was the extension of their warlike lives after death. There was a hunger in Legion, and it was ill-disposed to beauty.

  That had been then. Recently, everything had changed. Christian no longer felt safe; there was a vulnerability in him which came from his instinctive awareness of the way his men looked at him. He no longer erected the palisade wall but camped in the open below a roof of stitched skins to protect against inclement weather, a crude shelter from which he could see the army around him.

  He often woke with his mind a turmoil of dreams, lucid and vivid and terrifying, not in the sense that they were nightmares, just that they recalled a time in his earthly life when he had been deeply happy. He and his brother Steven had been close, friends in exploration, protective of each other in the local school, and later where they boarded, in one of the big towns far from Ryhope Wood. The war in Europe had intervened and life had changed for ever.

  Guiwenneth, the mythago of a Celtic princess, had arrived at the edge of Ryhope, and the scene was set for terrible confrontation.

  Even then, Christian had been confident. But some part of him, some part of his heart, his head, had twisted. Lost, then forming his small band as he explored the realm of Ryhope, he remembered the long journeys along the tracks and trails of the forest, the way a simple oak could catch and turn his small band of hawks. He had loved his hawks. Fighters from a time of stone and bronze, they were athletic, lithe, fierce, never removing their hawk masks, eating and drinking through the thin slits in the beaks. They burned the woods when they attacked, running through the flames. They had been faithful and they had been all the assistance needed to find Guiwenneth, those many years ago, in an age which might have been future or past, he had no way of knowing.

  The hawks were gone; all his early companions were gone, long before he joined Legion. Now, overweight and suspicious, he was not regarded well by the brash, youthful men who rode beside him.

  Three of them had served the previous leader of Legion, the hero Kylhuk. When Christian had found Legion, he challenged Kylhuk, who had come to regard him as a friend.

  Kylhuk had departed the death world by what was regarded by many as ‘the cheating blow’ from Christian - a strike made when the opponent had signalled for a moment’s truce. That Christian had not been challenged himself was because Kylhuk had not fought fairly either.

  That had been then.

  Christian’s act of spontaneous cruelty earlier, when he had been questioned by the more arrogant of his commanders, had resulted in a silence that he found difficult to deal with. The man he had stabbed would no longer meet his gaze. The wound was healing, but he was in pain, and he brooded quietly as he sat among the others. It had been a mistake. Christian knew that they felt their leader was out of control; but that ghost! That echo of Guiwenneth. He had been so shocked by the apparition that he had become blind to reason for a while.

  Lost in thought, he did not notice the younger of his commanders walking towards him, stooping under the canopy and crouching down. The man took off his sword belt and placed it, hilt away from his hand. This was Peredur.

  ‘I haven’t been with you long,’ the young rider said. ‘Long enough to know that something very deep is troubling you, though.’

  Christian met the steady, icy gaze. Peredur was clean-shaven, his hair hanging to his shoulders, simply combed, two slender golden clasps tying a single lock on each side of his face. Like his decoration, his armour was simple too, just leather stitched with ivory tusks, and striped flannel trousers with a leather kirtle. Christian judged his age at no more than twenty-five.

  Words from his school days came back to him, a memory of a play. ‘The head lies uneasy.’

  ‘Very clear to see. That was an unfortunate blow you inflicted on Maelin. If you had killed him, matters would be worse.’

  ‘I will make amends to Maelin. Perhaps you will be able to advise me, since they no longer communicate with me.’

  Peredur bowed his head. ‘If I can, I will.’

  Christian regarded Peredur coolly. It was the man’s calm, his certainty that was disturbing. He wasn’t used to it. Christian was conscious that he trusted no one now; perhaps he would always find a reason for mistrust. There was madness in the thinking. He asked, ‘How long had you ridden with Legion before you came to me to offer your services?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘Where were you recruited? What battle?’

  ‘It was not a battle. I was shot by an arrow while trying to save my daughter from being stolen from her mother’s arms. All the memory of it happened in a dream. How
I came to be here, I don’t know. I was alive. I took on the form of an eagle to save my child. I almost succeeded, then the arrow struck and I was at unwelcome liberty and in the world of the dead.’

  ‘You took on the form of an eagle? You can shape-shift?’

  Peredur smiled but shook his head. ‘It was a briefly received gift. The gift did not last. I had to pay a high price for it. Well, as you see! The price was my life.’

  ‘And we collected you recently.’

  ‘I remember your passing. That great, dense cohort of men at the head, and the backwards-walking army that guards the rear. I simply entered the body of the beast and rode.’

  There was a brief pause in this soft conversation. Peredur asked suddenly, ‘Who is the ghost you talk about when you’re half asleep?’

  Christian was startled by the question. ‘I talk about a ghost?’

  ‘Yes. A ghost that terrifies you.’

  ‘I use those words?’

  ‘You do,’ Peredur agreed, and whispered, ‘It’s hard to stop a dreaming man speaking, but these words do not sound good to the hearing of the men, your personal guard, who might want to challenge you.’

  ‘I agree. You don’t have to tell me.’

  After a moment, Christian decided to open his heart a little to this confident young man. He said, ‘The ghost is no more than that. She is someone I once knew. Do you never have bad dreams?’

  Peredur laughed. ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And what do they consist of?’

  ‘I told you: losing my infant daughter to a Roman. Legion is full of Romans, and I avoid them. Losing my daughter, yes. I was carrying her and I dropped her as the arrow struck; but a kindly goddess was watching over me and my friends caught the child.’

  ‘What was her name? The child.’

  ‘My lord: I hold that child in my heart. I will hold her name there too. Forgive me.’

  Christian raised a hand: nothing to forgive.