Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (32 page)

It was she who held the net, glancing uneasily in Wyn’s direction as she slowly wound it in. The man walked out towards the struggling bird and raised a stone club to despatch it.

The blow never fell.

As quickly as they had appeared the heron-hunters had disappeared sinking down into the water so that they were lost in the natural landscape of the marsh.

Between them and Wyn a horse suddenly struggled into view, its rider familiar to the old man. Beside it came a second, then a third. They struggled in the mud, the voices of the men raised in muffled irritation.

The fourth rider emerged from the reeds almost where Wyn was crouching, but like his companions he was intent on staring at the far side of the lake, where the wood was lost in haze.

‘What are they looking for?’ Morthen hissed.

‘A fleet of black ships,’ Wyn answered in a whisper, ‘pulled by a gigantic man who walks on the surface of the water. It will be their way into the unknown region beyond the lake …’

Again, Morthen asked, ‘Who are they?’ This time, Wyn, after the merest hesitation, said, ‘Indo-European raiders. Nomads. Their clan is called the
Alentii
. They are very savage, or rather were … two and a half thousand years before Christ … they raided the early farming settlements of eastern Europe before becoming absorbed into the earliest emerging Celtic groups.’

Most of what he had said had been in English. Morthen looked grim, glum and annoyed. ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she confessed.

He smiled, tapped her on the nose. ‘What do you expect? You’re a Neolithic savage. These people are sophisticated Bronze Age murderers. In fact …’ He rose a little, to peer at the nervous riders on their restless horses. ‘In fact, I think they’re the sons of Kiridu. They are seeking a way into the underworld to steal the body of the woman who guards the dark. To violate her. To bring up and control spirits from her soul.’

‘What will happen?’

‘I don’t know the full story. They will try to ride into the underworld, but they will be caught by a labyrinth which will form around them wherever they ride. I am uncertain as to the outcome. I don’t know if they will ever escape …’

Morthen nodded as if she understood every word. She stared in fascination at the restless horsemen as they waited in the marsh, watching the misty waters.

‘Then that’s where they’re riding now …’ she said. ‘To the underworld. To Lavondyss …’

Wyn-rajathuk couldn’t help laughing, although he kept the sound to a minimum. Morthen smiled uncertainly. ‘What’s funny?’

‘Nothing,’ her father said. ‘Nothing is funny. You are quite right. Everything and everyone who passes up this river is seeking a way into Lavondyss. They say of that realm that it is the place where the spirit of the man is no longer tied to the seasons. Lavondyss is freedom. Lavondyss is the way home …’

He was suddenly wistful. All he knew of Lavondyss he had learned from those mythagos with which he had been able to communicate. It was a place where time ran riot, perhaps where there was no time at all … and it was home. He felt this powerfully. To think of Lavondyss was to think of Oxford, and Anne, and a life which he had never fully forgotten. He should have tried to enter the
heart-of-the-wood. He should never have succumbed to the frailty of his body, to his sense of age, to the wisdom that had told him to settle, to rest, to give up the quest.

He was a voyager who had turned back. For most of his life he had watched the spirit of adventure pass him by, folk of all ages, families, clans, even armies … all of them moving from the crowded spaces of a human mind, through a time of wood and leaf litter, to a place where they could find freedom …

He was about to whisper more to the girl when she grabbed his arm, her eyes wide with fright. She pointed across the lake.

‘A man! Walking on water!’

The sons of Kiridu had seen the apparition also, and they became restless, kicking forward, deeper into the thick water at the edge of the lake. Wyn-rajathuk raised himself up to get a better look.

The boatman was tall but he was no giant, and the illusion of his walking was because of the sinuous movement of his body, twisting from side to side as he used a pole to manoeuvre himself towards the side of the lake. He stood in a shallow coracle, its sides scarcely an inch above the level of the water. He was not so much dressed as armoured in an odd framework of lengths of wicker tied about his body and his legs and covered over with leaves, mistletoe and water lily. In several places the wicker had snapped and stuck out from his limbs like broken spines. Around his neck was slung the carcase of an otter.

As he twisted and poled his way out of the haze and towards the waiting hunters, so, behind him, appeared the fleet of dark ships: five in all, high sided coracles, blackened, watertight, each large enough for two men.

Wyn smiled. He could think of a later story that would very much romanticize this particular basic image. A
ferryman ferrying coracles: very sensible. Everything was practical, save that the ferryman himself had become fantasized: dressed in willow branches, decked with lily (the water) mistletoe (for winter) and broad leaf (for summer).

‘Let me see …’ Morthen hissed, struggling to stand, but Wyn had felt a sudden fatherly concern, recognizing the menace in the movements of the sons of Kiridu as they dismounted and waded out to greet the boatman. He had the strongest of intuitions as to what would happen next and he forced his daughter down into hiding, despite her uncomfortably loud cries of protest.

His feeling had been right.

The ferryman was swiftly and savagely hacked down from his unsteady craft. He screamed three times, odd sounds, like the shrill cry of a bird. There was a flash of blooded bronze in the hazy light, then his body appeared floating into the reeds; the horses, disturbed by the smell of blood, shifted nervously through the shallows, panicking, protesting.

The sons of Kiridu fetched their mounts and calmed them, then tethered them to the five coracles. They destroyed the boatman’s craft to make crude paddles, then began to cross the lake, quickly disappearing into the haze, seeking the place where the upstream flow of the river entered this wilderness of reed and mud.

Soon everything was silent again, save for the occasional whinnying of one of the horses as it was dragged into deep water, its master unaware of the fact that by their act of senseless brutality the sons of Kiridu had set in motion the disastrous conclusion of their journey to the underworld.

Wyn-rajathuk looked with different interest at the giant willows which grew at the water’s edge, each one reaching out across the marsh haze. The act of murder was a
common one, he thought. The next time he came here he was sure there would be a new tree, growing from the mud where the boatman’s mutilated body was slowly being wound around by the roots of the forest.

Sensing that it was safe, and that her father was shocked, Morthen slowly rose to her feet and peered at the empty lake. ‘Did they kill him?’ she asked. Wyn nodded grimly. He had seen all he wanted to see, all he needed to see. He took his daughter’s hand and led her back to firmer ground. But Morthen remained intrigued by the riders.

‘Why did you laugh when I asked you where they were going?’ she asked again, as they returned along the river, then followed a deeper track.

‘I wasn’t really laughing,’ Wyn said. ‘I was remembering the epic tales of my own time. It always seemed to be so easy to get into the underworld. You fought giant dogs or serpents, but mostly any convenient cave or well would do, you’d just ride right in.’

He stopped for breath, sitting on the fallen, mossy trunk of an oak which stretched out across the river, caught by the branches on the opposite side. Morthen watched the flash and dart of silver finned fish.

Wyn said, ‘But you
can’t
just ride into Lavondyss.’ He was talking more to himself, now, staring vaguely into the distance. Morthen half watched him, half watched the life in the river. ‘You have to find the true pathway. And each adventurer has a different path to find. The true way to the heart of the realm is through a much older forest than this forest …’ He stared up through the canopy to the bright, autumnal sky. ‘The question is … how do we get
into
that older forest? There was a time when the power was understood, when the path could be found. But even by the time of your own people, the Tuthanach, all that was left were the wooden symbols, the idea, the
words, the sham rituals of people like me …’ He smiled at Morthen, who was twisting one of her plaits around her fingers and watching him through brown eyes that were intense with concern; perhaps she thought her father was distressed. Wyn said, ‘Shaman. That’s me.
Sham
. Rajathuk …’

‘Injathuk,’ she contributed, not understanding.

‘Indeed. Injathuk. Wizard. Warlock.
Druid
. Scientist. I’m known by many names over the centuries, but they all mean one thing:
echo of a lost knowledge
. Never
guardian of the power
. Even as
scientist
that was true …’ He stared away from the girl at the swirling force of nature, at the silent power of the forest. ‘Perhaps I’m wrong on that … perhaps science will find its own way into the first forest …’

Morthen interrupted him, her hands raised, signalling that she was becoming frustrated with this diatribe in two languages, one of them occult. ‘If it’s so hard to get into Lavondyss, then why do these riders even try? If they can’t get into the place where the spirit soars away from the seasons, then why do they try?’

This was a sophisticated question coming from a Neolithic child of eight years of age. Wyn paused to appreciate his daughter, pinching her cheek affectionately and smiling. ‘Because that is the way of legend, of
myth
.’

‘I don’t understand
myth
,’ she muttered grumpily.

‘Source,’ he corrected, even though he knew she was only being petulant. ‘This finding of the way is what lies at the core of legend. The oldest animals came to the land to spread out and give birth, but they first had to find the land. The
rajathuk
roamed the world during an endless night before it found the oldest bone, whose life force it could feed upon, and grow, and reach its arms to the sky so that
injathuk
could be born from its fingers and sing to the hidden Sun, and bring light.’

‘I know all this,’ Morthen murmured.

‘Well there you are. All things seek their place in the world. Seek. Find. Quest. Seek the path home. Seek the way to the first home of all. Adventuring … stories evolve to explore the
idea
of exploring the underworld. Those travellers are legends themselves. They are mythagos. They are
dreams
… and they are behaving in the manner of the dream according to the memory of the dreamer. They can’t do anything else. The man who passed this way before, the man who created your people, the man who created the marsh, he left behind a life that performs according to the way he remembered it. The sons of Kiridu could not have spared the boatman, because in legend they didn’t spare him. What they get up to between times is up to them, but when the pattern of legend tugs at them, they are helpless. They are called. Only the man who passed this way before … and me … only the two of us are free of the calling. We are
not
of the dreamstuff. We are alive. We are from the real world. We make the world around us. We fill the forest with creatures. Our forgotten ancestry materializes before our eyes, and we are helpless to stop it …’

Morthen watched her father carefully. She was restless. There was a long way to go before they reached home. Wyn knew exactly what she was thinking, since she had described the sensation to him. His words were making sweet sounds in her head, and were creating ideas and images despite the fact that he often spoke of things beyond her understanding. But slowly she was becoming frightened. His words were spirits, and the spirits could not rest in her head, they were uncomfortable. They made her heart race faster.

When Wyn had been silent for a while she asked, ‘Did that man-who-passed-this-way-before ever reach Lavondyss?’

Wyn-rajathuk smiled. ‘That’s what I’m wondering. It has only just occurred to me to ask the question …’

His daughter sat down on the rotting trunk, leaned forward and braced her chin on her hands. ‘I wonder who he was.’

‘A man destined to journey,’ her father said. ‘A man who was marked. A man seeking triumph. Any and all of these things. He could have taken the identity from any of the myriad ages that had preceded his birth. He could have disguised himself in the feathered cloak of a thousand legends. But in his heart, he was from outside. From the forbidden place. When an outsider enters the wood, change runs through the canopy like fire. The wood sucks at the mind, it sucks out the dreams –’

‘Like Tig. Sucking the ghosts in the bones.’

‘Yes. I suppose so. But as it draws on the mind so it loses something of itself. It has to, because it is
fusing
to generate myth: like a spark and a quick breath, the two thing unite in flame. Flames means change. That’s what we have witnessed today, when we saw the totems changed, and the mortuary house so run down, and the hill covered with blackthorn. Someone from my world is close to us and the wood is leaning towards him, tense and nervous, bristling with power. Can you see it? Can you feel it?’

‘No. Only the skogen.’

‘It’s the same thing.’ He watched her carefully, wondering what she could be stretched to understand. She was bright. She grasped concepts with remarkable facility. He said, ‘The skogen is making contact with us because it is
thinking
about us. That means it almost certainly
knows
us. Strictly, I should say it knows
me
. It is making an unconscious link across a great distance, and the link is showing itself in an …’

He hesitated. The girl’s eyes were wide, knowing,
demonstrating the thrill she felt at being taken so much into her father’s secret world. He was using more words from his language of power – English – than he had ever used before, and was carefully translating them for her.