Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (53 page)

She watched the ruins take Tallis, the walls and the stones becoming trees again, responding to a glow of green that radiated from the woman as she sat within her nest of rags. They took the man as well. Bodies crushed and absorbed, Tallis-Holly herself became trapped in the quivering, silent forest that filled the stone place.

So she went into the room, pushing through the foliage, and found the place where the woman’s corpse had rotted down. She lay down and a sweet slumber came. A long night. She dreamed of childhood. She remembered Mr Williams. She sang old songs, and giggled at remembered stories.

When she woke she had shed her leaves, and the wood-bones lay discarded and piled around her. The trees had gone, absorbed back into the stone, which shimmered with a last remembered green, oozed a final sheen of sap.

Tallis was cold and she fled the place. Her naked skin puckered with a dust of ice. She went among the people of the tents and found dark clothes, and furs.

She stayed here for several days. The people lived both on the edge of the world and on the edge of the battle. Sometimes they looted the dead, sometimes they honoured them. Their tents covered the cliff ledges, hugged the trees; every cave was used. One cave was a shrine.

Tallis left her masks there.

After a while the pain of what had happened to her went away. She had entered the first forest. Wynne-Jones had been right. It had been no simple journey.

Her hands had aged. She could hardly bear to look at them. They were like gnarled wood. When she finally looked into clear water and saw her face, she wept bitterly as she greeted the old woman who stared back at her.

‘But I found Harry. I saw my brother. Didn’t I? I released him from the tomb. He called to me. I came. I did what he needed. He flew away. But I saw him. Perhaps I can expect no more.’

She returned to the settlement of the Tuthanach, a journey of countless days and great difficulty. At the beginning of the great marsh she found the Daurog’s boat. Although it was awash, she could see how they had repaired the leaks with rushes and she made the patching good again, launching the frail craft with all her might and throwing herself into the shallow hull, lying there, exhausted, as it drifted through the fog and the silent water.

She felt almost sick with apprehension as she followed the course of the river and came to the spirit glade where she and Scathach had first found Wynne-Jones. What would she find? Was the old man back? Had Scathach, too, undertaken a journey through the first forest, only to return, aged but triumphant, from the underworld?

She followed the overgrown tracks. She had already seen how the spirit poles by the water were rotten, encrusted with fungus. Emerging into the clear space
around the compound she could see at once that it had fallen into decline. A thick scrub of wood filled the clearing. The palisade had fallen, the earth had slipped. The houses of the Tuthanach were broken, the thatched roofs gone, the daub walls melting under rains.

It was deserted. But among the new trees making their mark upon the land were enigmatic mounds, in the shapes of crosses. Tallis walked among them, prodded them with her staff. When she shifted a little of the earth from one she shuddered to see the grey flesh of a man, face down in the ground.

They will go through a death by burial, and rebirth
.

There was smoke from the hill where the mortuary house guarded its legacy of bones. And Tallis could hear a thin piping sound from that direction. Odd, pleasing notes, catching the drifting air, fading in and out of hearing like a sea-tide. As she came closer the notes resolved into a tune, and with a half-smile and a beating heart she echoed the tune from Sad Song Field, humming the simple melody.

Why she had expected to find Wynne-Jones she couldn’t say; perhaps because she associated the tune with Mr Williams, and so she had climbed the blackthorn hill with the image of an old man at the top, crouching in his furs, piping her back to his life.

She found Tig, of course, and the young man lowered the bone whistle and watched her through his pale and terrifying eyes. When he smiled she saw filed and sharpened teeth, two of them quite broken off. He had made a fire pit where once the proud rajathuks had stood. When he rose to his feet he was tall and his loose hide cloak fell away from his body, which was taut and muscular, covered with scars and blisters and the old and fading patterns of ochre, copper-salts and blue berry juice. He
was a painted man, skin wrecked by mutilation but body hard and ready for the years of survival ahead of him.

‘You’ve come to see Wyn-rajathuk,’ he said in a hoarse whisper, emphasizing the shaman-term, sneering slightly. Tallis was astonished to hear him talk in English.

‘Is he here?’

‘He has been here for some time. I’ll fetch him.’

He went back into the crumbling cruig-morn, ducking below the sloping stone lintel and crawling along the dark passage. Tallis crouched down, shaking her head. She had not the slightest doubt of what Tig would bring out to show her – an armful of bones, perhaps; his skull. But the old man coughed at the exit to the bone lodge, eased himself out and stood. Tallis cried out with delight as she saw Wynne-Jones’s familiar features. He was grey, his face stiff with cold, and he had difficulty smiling. The eyes that watched Tallis through the white-bearded flesh were bright, though, full of intelligence. His sight had come back.

‘Hello, Tallis,’ he whispered hoarsely.

‘Wyn …’ she said, but she felt her heart grow cold. The old man shuddered. His face wrinkled, collapsed. A tongue probed through the grey lips.

‘Hello, Tallis,’ Tig mimicked in a high pitched voice. He raised a hand and detached the soft flesh-mask from his face, letting the old man’s features crumple in his hand. He shrugged off Wynne-Jones’s fur cloak and was naked again.

Tallis felt like crying. Above her head a bird circled suddenly and Tig jerked back, his movement of triumphant trickery suddenly banished. The bird was huge, black-and-white-feathered. It was long necked and had a vicious, curved beak. Tallis had never seen a creature like it. It spiralled up on warmer air, then cried out and dropped swiftly to the north, vanishing among high trees.

The sudden flight had unnerved the young man. He watched the bird until it was well out of sight, then scratched at his seeping, savaged skin, mouthing silent words.

‘Why did you kill him?’ Tallis asked, and Tig’s impish face turned back to her.

There was no smile, no taunting when he said, ‘It was what I had to do. He knew it. That’s why he came back. I only needed his bones, so I carved and kept the flesh.’

As if suddenly sorry for his trick he held the face towards her. ‘You may have him, if you wish. He’s inside, all of him. I used oil and resin to keep the flesh whole. The bones are there too. I don’t need them any more. He was a rich meal.’

‘No. Thank you,’ Tallis murmured, feeling sick. She looked behind her, out across the wood to where the Tuthanach lay buried. ‘Did you kill the people too?’

‘They’re not dead,’ Tig said. ‘They are simply touching earth. All manner of wonderful things will be happening to them. Old spirits are flowing through their bodies; new spirits are whispering in their heads; wolf-birds, and bear-stags, and frog-pigs are dancing in their chests; long-forgotten forests are seeding in their bellies. When they rise up again they will be mine. I have the knowledge of the people. That is why I ate their dreams. Where you stand now will soon be a great monument, with painted stones and carved stones, and a single way to the heart of the mound where the sun will shine among the dead; it will be the way, lit by the earth’s light, into a wonderful land.’

Tallis watched Tig and thought of Wynne-Jones’s words. You don’t enter the underworld through caves or tombs. That’s the stuff of legend. You have to go through a more ancient forest …

She smiled wryly as she realized that Tig
was
the stuff
of legend. Henceforth, for the Tuthanach at least, the way to Lavondyss would be far easier.

How safe am I, she wondered? She had made herself crude weapons from wood, but Tig had stone axes and knives, bone spears, hooks, slings and stones. They were scattered around the compound, where the rajathuks had once stood. Tallis suddenly realized that they were spread out as if for defence from different angles. Now that she looked carefully she could see the deliberately placed piles of stone, five spears at regular intervals, and the fluttering, feathered carcases of birds on poles on the earth bank.

Tig had made Bird Spirit Land! He was afraid of birds and he had worked his own magic to keep the predatory creatures, and the carrion eaters, away from his bone house, away from the remains of his people.

Tig was frightened. He was under siege. Would he be glad of Tallis’s presence, or hostile to it?

She decided that a blunt question was her best recourse. ‘Are you intending to eat
me?
’

Tig laughed sourly. ‘I
thought
you were afraid.’ He shook his head. ‘There is no purpose to be served. I have all the dreams of your
England
that I need. It feels such a terrible place, so much barren land, so little in the way of forest, so much crowding in the villages, so much shadow and rain …’

Tallis smiled. ‘Wyn-rajathuk told me once that I would never be able to return to that “terrible place”. I assured him that I would. But I had expected to be taking my brother with me, and all I have done is glimpsed him. He is still here, still around. If I go back to my own land I shall never find him. If I stay, perhaps I shall stay until I die. I would have liked to question Wynne-Jones about these things,’ she sighed. ‘But he made a feast for you, and a cruel mask to trick me …’

Tig grinned and patted his hand on the ground before his crouched body. ‘But you are forgetting something …’

A cry! A shriek of anger. It came from the wood, between the cruig-morn and the settlement. It interrupted Tig and he stood, ashen-faced, bleeding from his scars. He raced for a slingshot. Tallis went to the top of the earth bank and stared down at the tree line. Then her spirits rose. There was a woman there. She was tall. She was painted half in white, half in black. A cloak of feathers was wrapped around her, tied at the waist. Her headband was feathered too, long pale yellow tail-feathers.

‘Morthen!’ Tallis cried. Despite the anger at their last encounter, despite the wounding, Tallis wanted to know the girl again. Alone in this vast forest she needed to gather round her all the familiar things she knew, and that meant Morthen, who was the only possible ally she now had left.

Morthen screamed in her own language. Tig danced in a circle, then howled, a rising and falling cry of challenge. Blood literally burst from his body and he smeared it with his right hand, while in his left he crushed the skull of a crow.

Morthen threw back her head and laughed, then turned and ran back to the woods. Tallis followed quickly. She crossed the settlement area, following the traces of the girl, but suddenly, as she reached the river, she saw the footprints end. In the silence of the spirit glade she looked north and south along the water, but there was no sign of Morthen, although close by, above her head, there was a disturbance in the trees.

She looked up into the branches, but could see nothing.

Dusk came as she waited there, and Tallis, cold and hungry, returned to the mortuary house.

Five fires burned on the earth wall. Tig ran between them, piping briefly at each, then finally uttering a raucous screeching sound, which Tallis took to be a challenge to the birds. He watched the skies nervously, and Tallis suspiciously. She entered the mortuary enclosure and smelled food being charred. Tig had speared several small animals and they sizzled over wood-fire flames.

Without being asked she ate some of the stringy meat. It was strong and unpleasant and killed her appetite. When she had finished, Tig came to the fire and ate a little, sucking his fingers. He smelled disgusting, now, and was shaking.

‘Morthen is trying to kill me,’ he said. ‘I killed her father, the old shaman. She is outraged. She will try to revenge the old man. Then she will kill you too.’

‘She has had her chance to do that,’ Tallis said. ‘She struck me three times and left me to bleed.’

‘Is her other brother dead? Scathach?’

‘Yes.’

Tig nodded thoughtfully. ‘A part of me thinks “good” when I hear that. But the other part of me, the old man, is saddened, even though he knew it had to come.’

His words thrilled Tallis. She could hardly bear to speak for a while, but watched Tig as he tore a further strip of meat and chewed it quickly, gulping it down and glancing round.

‘The old man is in you? Wyn-rajathuk?’

Tig smiled. She guessed that he had been waiting for Tallis to understand. He was canny as he watched her, and almost kind. ‘I told you earlier. I ate his dreams. I speak in his tongue, now. I can remember many things. Oxford. A friend called Huxley. A daughter called Anne. England. The terrible place.’