Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘What else do you want me to fetch? Quickly, I must get on with the ploughing.’

  Olwen’s father thought hard for a moment, then said, ‘If this marriage is to take place, there will be so many guests that I could not possibly afford to feed them all without Cerithon’s hamper.’

  ‘Cerithon’s hamper?’

  ‘Yes. A small thing, made of briar and willow. Four men can carry it easily and, once opened, it can feed everyone with their particular delights.’

  ‘I have never heard of it. But I will get it for you easily.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh, but I do …’

  ‘And the horn and silver cup of Votadinos, which will supply strong, sweet drink endlessly, and therefore save me a great deal of money. Yes, you must get that too. Neither man will part with his treasure, though.’

  ‘They will be easy to get.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure. Others have tried it.’

  ‘It will be easy to get them,’ Kylhuk declared. ‘But you must tell me where they are.’

  ‘That’s a good question. They are hard to find. You must ask the houndsman, Mabonos son of Modron, who was stolen from his mother when a boy.’

  ‘And where is he?’

  ‘I’m not sure. You should ask his cousin, Yssvyl, who lives with the oldest animals.’

  ‘And where are they?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but if you can find the boar called White Tusk, you will find the hunter Othgar in close pursuit, and he will help.’

  ‘And where shall I find him?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but the houndsman Gordub, son of Eyra, will certainly know.’

  ‘And where is he?’

  ‘Again, I’m not sure, but if you can find the Long Person, she may answer your question.’

  ‘Enough!’ said Kylhuk. ‘We could stand here all night only to grow older by ten years. I must get to the field and plough and sow it’.

  ‘I forgot to tell you. You’ll need the spotted oxen of Amathaon, son of Don for that.’

  ‘I’ll get them easily. Where are they to be found?’

  ‘I’m not sure, though Caratacos the Wanderer will know.’

  ‘And where is he?

  ‘I’m not sure, but if you find …’

  ‘Enough!’ shouted Kylhuk.

  ‘Remember your manners,’ Olwen’s father said angrily, and Kylhuk apologised. He glanced at Olwen who rose to her feet, her cheeks blushing, her eyes filled with love. Kylhuk stared up at her and felt the muscles in his neck straining. He tried to think of an endearment, something romantic to say to the Tall Woman, a love token.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said in his strongest voice.

  ‘Hurry,’ said Olwen. ‘And be careful of tricks.’

  ‘Tricks? What tricks?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she replied. ‘But the brother of Dillus the Bearded will know …’

  ‘Goodbye!’ said Kylhuk in exasperation, and with Manandoun and Bedivyr he hastened from the hall and set about his task.

  He had ploughed one strip of the field when Manandoun rode up to him from the west, his face whitened with chalk, a white pennant tied to the blade of his spear. ‘Kylhuk! This is not a field, this is a burial ground.’

  ‘I know,’ said Kylhuk as he hauled on Amathaon’s spotted oxen, keeping the second furrow straight.

  ‘Those are not piles of earth, they are mounds covering the tombs of kings.’

  ‘I know,’ said Kylhuk. ‘And they are harder to flatten than I’d thought.’

  Now Bedivyr charged at him from the east, wheeling round nervously, white pennants of protection on shoulders, elbows, knees, ankles and around his neck and waist.

  ‘Kylhuk, these are not pots and bones and bits and pieces. You are disturbing the dead!’

  ‘I know. I can hear them shouting as the iron shares cut through them and turn them over.’

  ‘Those are not rocks at the edges of the field, they are carved stones, older than time.’

  ‘I know, Bedivyr. I have seen them. I will haul them down later.’ He turned the oxen to begin the third furrow.

  ‘You must leave this place alone. As you plough the field, the dead are being called back from their islands!’

  ‘I know! Do you think I can’t hear them riding towards me?’

  ‘You are bringing terrible consequences upon yourself!’ shouted Manandoun as his horse reared with sudden fright.

  ‘I will confront those consequences later. First, I must plough this field.’

  ‘Olwen’s father has tricked you!’ pleaded Bedivyr.

  ‘I know! And when I have finished ploughing the field, I will think what to do about it!’

  They left him alone and he got on with the job. When he returned to the gates of the fort on the white hill, Kylhuk found them closed. Manandoun and Bedivyr were there. Inside, there was music, a great feast, and the sound of Olwen’s grief and her father’s triumphant laughter.

  ‘You were tricked,’ said Manandoun.

  ‘I know. But knowing that I was tricked is less of a burden than knowing how I was tricked.’

  ‘You should not have ploughed over the tombs in the field.’

  ‘There’s more to this trick than just that,’ said Kylhuk, trying to think through everything that had been said in the hall earlier.

  ‘Nevertheless, you should have stopped the ploughing.’

  ‘When I start something I have to finish it.’

  Bedivyr slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Well spoken! Such a quality in a man is both a good thing and a bad thing!’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Kylhuk.

  ‘And on this occasion it was a bad thing,’ Manandoun muttered pointedly as they rode away, the angry dead in slow pursuit.

  Unable to find hospitality that night, they camped in the forest.

  ‘I have learned one thing at least from this difficult encounter,’ Kylhuk said as he drank from his cup.

  ‘That you are a fool and easily deceived?’ Manandoun suggested.

  Kylhuk finished the cup, then wiped his lips.

  ‘I have learned two things at least from this difficult encounter,’ he amended. ‘Manandoun has referred to one of them, and I have learned that lesson and no one will deceive me again.’

  ‘Ho ho,’ said Manandoun.

  ‘Indeed. Ho ho. But we’ll see about that. The other thing is that something has been passed on to me, some burden, and Uspathadyn is celebrating because he is a free man. He has tricked me into calling down the anger of the dead. But he has also set me the task of finding this hamper and the silver horn.’

  Bedivyr muttered darkly, ‘There is more to those gifts than meets the eye.’

  ‘There is more to the pursuit of those gifts than meets the eye,’ Kylhuk said, and Manandoun added:

  ‘By the head on my shoulders, you are right to say that. The danger is in the pursuit of the beast, not in the beast itself! I am game for this, Kylhuk. I was born for this hunt. And may my arm fail me if I ever call you a fool again.’

  The two of them embraced, while Bedivyr shuffled uneasily by the fire, saying, ‘I have come this far and God Knows, it is not a long way back to the place where I started …’

  ‘Which particular god are you referring to?’ asked Manandoun.

  ‘Whichever one follows me noting my deeds in combat.’

  ‘I’d noticed a certain absence of gods,’ Manandoun said dryly, looking round at the night as he stoked the fire.

  ‘I will ignore that discourtesy. My point is, I will not return to Pwyll until this man Kylhuk is free of the burden.’

  ‘Thank you!’ Kylhuk said. ‘Manandoun … Bedivyr … My good friends! This is just the beginning of something!’

  ‘Indeed!’ said Manandoun.

  ‘I have no idea what that something is,’ Kylhuk went on, ‘except that it involves a hamper of food and a silver horn filled with drink. When it is ended, we will all three of us look back and celebrate its ending. We will rejoice in
its ending. Whatever it might be that has ended. I cannot say fairer than that. Shall we stay together?’

  ‘I will not leave your company by my own will,’ said Manandoun.

  ‘Neither oxen nor the wain-ropes they pull will drag me away from this small band,’ agreed Bedivyr, ‘terrible though this situation is.’

  ‘Well spoken,’ Kylhuk said. ‘And my head on this: I will not abandon either of you until Olwen’s father’s own head is on the end of my spear.’

  ‘That’s that, then,’ said Manandoun. ‘We are all agreed. And you will certainly need a big spear for the head you propose to sever. But now we must think about what to do next. I would suggest that the three of us are not enough to take on everything that is behind us, and everything that is ahead of us.’

  Manandoun’s counsel was wise. And besides, on the hill behind them a line of men had risen and stood watching their fire, but try how he might, Kylhuk could see no features on them, only shadow, and he knew that they were ghost-born.

  He, Manandoun and Bedivyr fell to thinking.

  Fourteen

  A fight had started at one of the tables, a disgraceful insult to the memory of Manandoun, and Kylhuk had been increasingly aware that he should intervene on behalf of his friend.

  When he reached the point in his story which signalled an end to the beginning and an anticipation of the ending, where the three of them were ‘falling to thinking’, he stopped the narrative.

  ‘Gwyr may feel inclined to explain what happened next,’ he said to me, and rose and crossed the forest glade, where the two men, naked but for kilts and metal torques on their arms, were hacking at each other with great determination, shouting insults and laughing in each other’s faces. Blood had not been drawn, and would not be drawn, since among the clans that these people represented such an act would bring instant execution. But the duel was rowdy, and the watching crowd was becoming excited. Outside the taunting ring of Celts, puzzled legionaries, dour Saracens, ice-eyed Vikings and dismayed Courteous Men kept a watchful gaze on the proceedings, but did not interfere.

  Kylhuk entered the fray and the fighting stopped.

  I had thought that would be that, his authority stamped on the squabble, but he was not in a good mood and he snatched the sword from one man and beat him unconscious with it (without drawing blood).

  The other man backed away, then walked stiffly through the gates in the temporary palisade. I never saw him again, and suspect that an act of contrition had occurred that had left him for the forest to reclaim.

  Gwyr said, ‘You have heard the first part of the story and now have the general idea. Sometimes, when Kylhuk recounts his tale, I wonder about Olwen, that poor Tall Woman who was so attracted to the feisty youth. Is she still waiting? Does she know how fat her Beloved has become?’ He grinned, then went on, ‘Truthfully, Kylhuk was so afraid of her he would never have completed the tasks, those simple tasks as he thought of them, he would have found some way to delay the ending of the adventure. But as you have heard, Kylhuk’s quest is a harder task than anyone would have thought. We seek the hamper, we seek the horn, but that was just Uspathadyn’s way of tricking Kylhuk into adopting something very dangerous, which Uspathadyn had sworn to do and was unable to do, despite the consequence of his failure.’

  ‘What consequence?’ I asked, disliking the word.

  ‘A rather final one,’ said Gwyr pointedly, ‘and with no prospect of an Island at the end of it.’ He meant death without the Otherworld. Then more brightly, ‘But Kylhuk will achieve the task, now that he has you.’

  ‘So I’m to be tricked too.’

  ‘In one way, you have been tricked already, but Kylhuk is a different man to Uspathadyn, and if you choose to abandon him he will let you go. But without you, the great task he is sworn to accomplish will never be accomplished.’

  ‘Because I am marked as slathan,’ I said, remembering that Kylhuk had still not told me its meaning.

  ‘Yes. Whatever it is, that term he uses and will not explain.’

  ‘Gwyr, I fear that word more than I fear Kylhuk himself, or this quest that he has drawn me into.’

  ‘Well said; bravely admitted,’ Gwyr said with great affection. ‘And as long as there is a head on my shoulders and a foot on the end of each of my legs, I will stay close to you and make sure there is no further trickery. But my feeling is, it is some magic, or a certain knowledge or memory that you possess that Kylhuk needs.’

  ‘What is the task, Gwyr? Has he told you, now that Manandoun is dead?’

  ‘Yes. But only a handful of us must know. We will accompany Kylhuk himself. We have been chosen for our various skills.’

  ‘And what exactly are we to do?’

  ‘We are to undertake a rescue. We are to attempt to rescue Mabon, who is imprisoned at the very gates of the Underworld, in a place that is savagely defended. Mabon! Son of Modron! I heard about him as a child and just to say his name makes my hair stand on end and my skin crawl. This is a terrible task. But that said, you must believe me, Christian, this rescue – which many have attempted, but none with success – will have a wonderful consequence for each man and woman who takes part in it. Kylhuk is undertaking a great task, perhaps the greatest of them all. No one is born who doesn’t soon hear about and grieve for the cruel way Mabon was entombed alive.’

  ‘Entombed alive?’ I repeated emptily. Why did that sound so familiar? Echoes of Merlin from my childhood’s reading!

  ‘What happened after Kylhuk and his two companions had ploughed the field and unleashed the dead?’ I asked.

  ‘A good question, Christian, well asked—’

  ‘Get on with it, Gwyr,’ I snapped.

  He was taken aback. ‘Your first discourtesy. I’m surprised by that. However, to continue:

  ‘Manandoun advised that before they did anything at all they should try to understand precisely what had happened, and the first task was to work out precisely what tasks had been set them by Uspathadyn. Although the field had been ploughed, the whole journey to fetch Cerithon’s hamper and the drinkhorn of Votadinos involved a total of thirty-six individual deeds, and buried among them was the Great Deed, the rescue of Mabon from his terrible prison.

  ‘Most of the tasks were simple. Tall Men had to be killed for their whiskers for use as leashes for great hounds to run with great horses to be ridden in great hunts on enchanted saddles that only dead men could fashion …’

  He paused for breath and I took a chance and said, ‘The whiskers of Giants? It sounds ludicrous.’

  ‘I agree,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You are not the first to comment on it. But nothing will work without them.’ He went on, ‘Kylhuk and the others worked steadily through the list, finding some of the tasks hard and others easy. But everything, no matter how simple, had a consequence.’

  ‘Consequences,’ I said bitterly. ‘Yes. This is certainly turning into a game of consequences.’

  Gwyr stared at me, thinking about my words, perhaps, and their modern allusion. Then he nodded abruptly. ‘Indeed. When Kylhuk caught the hound he released the Hounds of Hell, which now follow behind us! And wherever the hounds run, they summon the ghost-born of their kind so that it is not one pack of hounds that pursues us, but hundreds, a legion of them, and all slavering, all with great eyes—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘I get the picture. Get on with it, Gwyr.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Your second discourtesy. You are not quite the man I thought you were. However, to continue:

  ‘When the hamper of Cerithon is finally taken and opened – Yes, I see you are surprised by the thought of this quest. But the hamper is said to be of endless capacity, so it seems quite reasonable for Kylhuk and the rest of us to eat our fill before transporting it to Uspathadyn – when the hamper is finally opened, the ghost of every man and every woman and every child and every dog that has fed from that hamper will rise from the earth and come in pursuit. This has already happened with the silver horn of Votadinos, w
hich Kylhuk found last summer. It was a worse experience than could be imagined, because the ghosts were drunk, and a drunken ghost is less reasonable even than a drunken man … they are argumentative and confused … and I feel that you are experiencing this feeling even now, even as I talk to you, answering the question that you put to me—’

  ‘Get on with it, Gwyr!’

  ‘Three! Three discourtesies!’ He looked me steadily in the eye. ‘I feel a fight is coming on.’

  ‘I will not fight with you.’

  ‘Will you not? We’ll see. But to continue,’ he said warily:

  ‘One of the tasks within the task was to hunt the great boar that had sired the boar that gave Kylhuk his name …’

  ‘Trwch Trwyth,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed. And to hunt Trwch Trwyth, a huntsman was needed, and this was Kuwyn, son of Nodons. Kuwyn was a young man in whom were imprisoned the thousand ghosts who had first ventured into the Underworld. These ghosts had ruled the shadows and the islands of the Underworld from the beginning of time. But one day their time was up and they were routed and cast out, to be passed from one man to another among the living, any man who had the strength to contain them – there are many stories to do with this, I can assure you—’

  ‘I have no doubt about it. Even a maggot in this Legion has its story it seems.’

  ‘Four! Four discourtesies!’ Gwyr looked delighted. ‘My sword hand is twitching! Your white throat looks so exposed! But to continue:

  ‘When Kylhuk found Kuwyn, the demons were released from him. Kylhuk was not a fit man to accept them, however, so there they are, behind us, with the dogs, the risen dead, the Sons of Kyrdu and all the rest, a great army of shadows and evil that presses close to us and is kept at bay only by the forces that Kylhuk, Manandoun and Bedivyr sensibly began to muster around them as they rode through the wilderness of woodland, river and rocky crag, shortly after that moment when they had fallen to thinking, that moment Kylhuk told you about.’

  ‘And how did they muster those forces?’

  ‘A very good question, very well asked …’

  Gwyr waited for my response, but I kept a prudent silence.

  He frowned and went on: ‘He could not go back to Lord Pwyll, though Pwyll, being the man he was, would not have hesitated to help. But the consequence to Kylhuk would have been too great in terms of the repayment of the favour. This has all to do with courtesy and honour, as I believe you are beginning to understand in your simple way …’