Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (31 page)

Continuing on this track they eventually came to the wide river.

There was more light here; the canopy was thinner as it stretched across the water. The area was marked with
feathered poles, each representing one of the dead of the clan who had been brought here to lie in the embrace of the spirit of the river, before being taken to the mortuary house there to be left to rot, then dismembered, then burned.

Morthen hated this place, preferring the greener, more intense light of the hunting trails further down the river, where the water was deeper, the fish fatter, and there were strange ruins to explore and make camps within.

No Tuthanach would come to this river-spirit place, of course, unless they were carrying the decomposing dead, but Wyn had no such qualms and his daughter was partly of his less-superstitious flesh.

She parted from him now, though, and ran off along the bank to find a place to fish with her short spear, bone hooks and gut net. He heard her splashing through the shallow water, glimpsed her as a dark shape moving against the brilliant yellow green before merging again with the shadows.

Wyn was left alone with the gentle rush of the river, the stirring of branches in the autumn wind, and the chatter and screech of birds.

He found his watching place, a deep nook in the stand of large, water-smoothed rocks at the woodland edge. Once, the river had been higher; it had scoured the limestone and formed a useful overhang for when it rained, a comfortable seat on which he could write, and gullies and crevices in which he could secrete the objects and totems of his
other
trade: his trade as
scientist
.

He curled up in the space between boulders, made himself comfortable and watched the river, abandoning himself to thoughts of England again.

He spent hours of each day here, and sometimes all of the night. Morthen was aware of this, and was sometimes worried by it, but she never questioned her father’s
actions. He had told her that he was ‘journeying’ into his spirit dreams when he came to this place. It was sufficient answer for the girl.

As daughter of the shaman she was well used to running his private lodge and helping with the gathering and preparation of food; her father had his own business to attend to: for the benefit of the clan.

The truth of the matter was that he came here to get
away
from the Stone Age! He wanted to think of his past and to indulge his never-ending fascination: the documenting of the movement of mythagos along the river.

In the last few months this traffic had increased dramatically, a fact which had made Wyn think with renewed interest about the river, and the vast expanse of marsh and lake from which this stretch of water flowed.

He was convinced that the whole waterway was an aspect of one of the small streams that crossed the Ryhope estate, where his colleague George Huxley had lived, and to which he, Wyn, had been a frequent visitor. The particular stream he was thinking of had entered Ryhope Wood just two hundred yards from the house; it emerged, on to the farmland beyond, no more than a quarter of a mile away.

And yet …

During its passage through the primal forest, that simple brook underwent a fantastic transmogrification, becoming at one point an immense sequence of rapids, boiling between sheer cliffs, and at another the silent marshes which Wyn had come to know and love in his years with the Tuthanach. The river flowed into the
heart
of the wood, into Lavondyss itself. Then it flowed on, back into the wildwood, back towards England …

The Tuthanach lived on the outward flow; Wyn’s home was down-river. But the passage of the mythagos was in
the opposite direction, to the north, to the heart of the realm …

The mythagos which passed this point most usually were on foot. A few rowed past in shallow boats, fighting the current; some of them rode on horseback. All passed warily by the rag-littered totemic poles, aware that they should not linger in so haunted a place.

In the years that he had sat there, studying the products of his own and other men’s dreams, he had seen fifty or more of the legendary creatures. He had seen Arthur, Robin and Jack-in-the-Green in so many of their manifestations that he felt he had seen them all. He had seen Norse Berserks, Cavaliers, British soldiers, armoured knights, Romans, Greeks, creatures with much about them that was animal, animals that seemed to have a human awareness, and an abundance of life that owed as much to the world of the tree as it did to the human limbs that carried it. He had seen what he believed to be
Twrch Trwyth
, the enormous boar that Arthur had hunted; a vast creature in its totemic form, it had run amok among the spirit poles of the dead, its spines brushing the canopy, its tusks scarring the trunks of the trees. It had run on, along the river, vanishing into the wood. This drama apart, the encounter had thrilled Wyn-rajathuk, since he had also seen the clan-warriors, an early group from the Iron Age cultures of middle Europe, whose violence and whose standard of the ‘wild boar’ had given rise to the later fables of the ‘hunting of giant animals’. One myth, human in shape, had been transformed into a new myth, animal in shape, and yet the essential story of repression, confrontation, and subjugation was the same.

To be able to talk about what he had seen! If only
…

He pushed the thought aside, because there was something more important to contemplate.

Of all the creatures which had passed this place, journeying to the north, towards that inaccessible realm, Lavondyss – of all of them one creature had
not
been the product of the mind; he had been of the flesh.

Why he thought of a male, Wyn couldn’t say, but he was certain that a man, a man like himself, a man from
outside
the wood … such a man had ridden past this river point. He had passed by before Wyn’s time here, but perhaps only a few years before. Whoever that man had been, it was he who had left the Tuthanach behind, and the ruins, and much else besides, he who had scattered this part of the wood with his own mythogenic lifeforce.

Now, though …

Now
another
such was coming.

Wyn-rajathuk could sense its approach with every murmur of his intuition. Again, he saw the new arrival as a man and he was alerted by his old-age common sense to the nature of change in the forest; this was not part of his shamanism, his journeying into the spirit realm. He was just quite
certain
of the approach of one of his own kind, one from outside …

He stared into the distance, where a brighter life filtered drowsily through the forest canopy.

Who are you?
he thought.
How long will you take to get here? How will you get into Lavondyss?

He was suddenly aware that Morthen was standing, watching him. She looked startled and nervous.

‘What’s the matter?’

She glanced along the river. ‘I heard something. I think someone’s coming.’

‘Quickly. Into the rocks …’

The girl scrambled into hiding behind her father. There was silence for a few minutes, then a sudden disturbance in the trees and birds went swooping and screeching
through the clearing. A moment later three riders came galloping through the water from the shadowy green down-river, kicking up a great spume of spray. A fourth rider emerged from the wood and rode down to the river’s edge, close to the spirit poles. The first three had uttered loud cries – war-cries, Wyn imagined – as they had swept into this part of the river’s course. Now they stopped, turning their horses where they stood, a nervous action as they stared at the totems with their ragged shrouds, then searched the land and the wood around. The leader seemed to stare directly at Wyn and the old man cowered lower in hiding.

The riders were all of a type: tall, broad, dark-cloaked for winter travelling. Their beards were red and had been combed into a great spray of hair. They wore leather caps with loose cheek flaps and their faces were striped with black paint. The trappings on their huge, dark-maned horses were very simple; the saddle cloths were of a dull, broad check pattern.

One of them rode savagely at a totem; a bronze sword flashed briefly; there was the sound of wood cracking and the top of the pole, with its raggy remnant, flew twenty yards across the water. The four of them laughed. The sword was sheathed. Reins were whipped on withers, flanks kicked by leather-booted legs, and the riders stormed off, away from this place of the dead, crashing through the shallows up-river until they were lost from sight.

Slowly, cautiously, Wyn and Morthen returned to the water’s edge, looking thoughtfully after the wild troupe.

‘Were they the skogen?’ Morthen asked.

‘No.’

‘Then who were they?’

‘It wouldn’t mean anything to you if I told you.’

‘Try me. I’ve understood strange things before …’

‘Later!’ Wyn hissed at her, suddenly almost urgent in his actions. ‘Come on. I want to see what they do when they reach the marshes.

‘Marshes? What marshes?’

‘Don’t keep asking questions. Come on. Let’s follow them …’

Wyn found a turn of speed which delighted his daughter. Although she ran ahead of him, her father was never far behind. Sometimes she led along the tree-line where the bank was clear, at others along woodland tracks when the giant trees, which had slipped into the river, made passage along the edgewood difficult. Wyn used a staff to help support his body, but he was energized, excited, and he rebuked Morthen for her glances of astonishment at his agility.

The sons of Kiridu
… could they really have been Pryderi’s early bronze-age precursors? So much of the great Celtic saga of Pryderi was lost, swallowed by the later romance of Arthur … but that he was legendary in the remotest of times was unquestionable. Wyn had seen so many parts of the cycle of tales, yet never the man himself. He had been
Kiridu
, in the old language. He had had four sons … in that old legend …

Could
these riders have been those sons? Each and every one of them black-hearted, black-souled, doomed …?

If so, then they would cross the lake ahead by boat! Wyn hastened his step, desperate to see this part of the myth-cycle which had so tantalized him during his years in the wood. The coming of the boatman would confirm the identity of the riders …

After a day the river became dull with mud. The woodland thinned. Alder replaced oak, then huge willows and stands of silvery thorn. A different silence hovered over everything.

‘We’re close to the lake,’ Wyn said.

‘I’ve never been this far,’ Morthen said quietly.

‘I come here often,’ her father murmured. ‘The lake is one of the natural gathering grounds for life in the wildwood. It’s an impassable place; simplistically so, but memorably. There are a hundred stories associated with it, most of them very grim.’

He looked down at the attentive girl. ‘Stories from the Boatman of the Dead to the burial barge of Arthur …’

‘After my time,’ the child said pointedly, and with a wit which ought to have been utterly incongruous.

Wyn chuckled. ‘After your time,’ he agreed. ‘Come on! I’ll show you four thousand years of your future in one muddy, miserable, misty, reed-racked wasteland!’

They waded through the increasingly dirty water; it felt heavy on their limbs.

A few minutes later it was Wyn himself who led the way through the trees to the wide marsh.

It was a desperate and lonely place, this. It was right to call it a wasteland, a wasteland of water, mud and mournful movement through the misty fringes of the lake. The far side of the marsh was lost in that heavy fog, though the tops of the bordering woodland were just visible. Tall rushes and dense stands of reed moved in the wind. The black shapes of water-birds darted and scurried in the thin, dirty water. Willows reached among them, their branches low, their roots sometimes forming bridges between islands of firmer ground.

It stank of rot here. The sky was grey and hazy. The water of the central lake gleamed dully, lapping softly at the land, swallowing all sound.

Crouching low they waded through the weedy shallows to a hard bank of earth. Morthen pointed out the tracks of horses, the broken reeds, the still-unsettled mud following the passing of the riders.

‘Where have they gone?’ she asked. Wyn shook his head. He rose from his crouch and carefully scanned the hazy willow wood and the dense stands of rushes. He tapped Morthen on the shoulder, calling her to rise and look. She saw the indistinct shape of a vast man-like creature walking out into the lake and slowly sinking into the water. A few ripples accompanied its descent, then all was silence. On the other side of the pool a dark back rose above the gleaming surface, thrashed, then was still. Two of the giant willows quivered with the movement.

The riders were here somewhere. Wyn became nervous, worried that they might have heard him and the girl and even now be surrounding them. But all was quite silent, all still … save for the sudden appearance of a wading flock of herons, which stalked and stabbed their way towards Wyn’s hiding place, stepping delicately through the weed. The birds shrilled occasionally, one long beak raised to the sky whilst the others skimmed the water.

Morthen, who still had her fish hooks strapped across her shoulders, began to make a barely audible Tuthanach bird-hunt chant; she fiddled with the hooks, probably assessing which would be the best to use if she were to make a running hunt through the rushes and strike at the leg of the slowest bird to rise from the water.

Her eager anticipation was dashed. One of the herons suddenly screeched and began to struggle wildly, while the flock rose noisily above their doomed companion and wheeled away over the willows. Morthen gasped. Wyn watched fascinated.

A hundred paces away two patches of rush rose from the water, waving wildly. The resolved into human figures, one male, one female. They had tied the tall water plants all around their bodies, from their waists up; below this they were naked. The rushes stretched half a man’s
height above their heads. They were bound, probably with gut, around chest and crown, split to form vertical eyes gaps; the woman had tied back the rushes over her chest to allow her breasts more freedom.