Mythago Wood - 1 (20 page)
Authors: Robert Holdstock
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Contemporary, #Fantasy, #Fantasy Fiction, #Great Britain, #Forests and Forestry
She looked irritated; but couldn't escape my sudden
bear
hug. She looked resigned, then sighed. 'Why do you ask me questions?'
'Because I want answers. You fascinate me. You frighten me. I need to know.'
'Why can't you accept?'
'Accept what?'
'That I love you. That we're together.'
'Last night you said we wouldn't be together always . . .'
'I was sad!'
'But you believe it's true. I don't,' I added sternly, 'but in case . . .
just in case . . . anything
did
happen to you. Well. I want to know about
you, all about you. You. Not the image figure that you represent. . .'
She frowned.
'Not the history of the mythago . . .'
She frowned even more deeply. The word meant something to her, but the
concept nothing.
I tried again. "There have been Guiwenneths before; perhaps there will
be Guiwenneths again. New versions of you. But it's
this
one that I want
to know about.' I emphasized the word with a wiggle and a squeeze. She smiled.
'What about you? I want to know about you too.'
'Later,' I said. 'You first. What were your first memories? Tell me about
your childhood.'
As I suspected would happen, a shadow passed across her face, that brief
frown that says the question has touched an area of blankness. And that
blankness had been known, before, but never acknowledged.
She sat up and straightened her shirt, shook her hair back, then leaned
forward and began to pluck the dry grass from the ground, knotting each fibrous
stem around her finger. The first memory . . .' she said, then looked into the
distance. The stag!'
I remembered the discovered pages of my father's
diary,
but tried to blot his own record of the story from my mind, concentrating
totally upon Guiwenneth's uncertain recollection.
'He was so big. Such a broad back, so powerful. I was tied to him, leather
knots on my wrists, holding me firm against the stag's back. I called him Gwil.
He called me Acorn. I lay between his great antlers. I can remember them so
well. They were like the branches of trees, rising up above me, snapping and
cracking at the real trees, scraping the bark and the leaves. He was running. I
can still smell him, still feel the sweat on his broad back. His skin was so
tough, and sharp. My legs were sore with rubbing. I was so young. I think I
cried, and yelled at Gwil, "Not so fast!" But he ran through the
forest, and I clung, on, and the leather ropes cut at my wrists. I can remember
the baying of hounds. They were pursuing him through the wood. There was a horn,
too, a huntsman's horn. "Slower," I cried to the stag, but he just
shook his great head and told me to cling on tighter. "We have a long
chase, little Acorn," he said to me, and the smell of him choked me, and
the sweat, and the hurt of his wild chase on my body. I remember the sunlight,
among the trees. It was blinding. I kept trying to see the sky, but each time
the sun came through it blinded me. The hounds came closer. There were so many
of them. I could see men running through the forest. The horn was loud and
harsh. I was crying. Birds seemed to hover over us, and when I looked up their
wings were black against the sun. Suddenly he stopped. His breath was like a
loud wind. His whole body was shaking. I remember crawling forward, tugging at
the leather ropes, and seeing the high rock that blocked the way. He turned. His
antlers were like black knives, and he lowered his head and cut and jabbed at
the dogs that came for him. One of them was like a black demon. Its jaws gaped,
all wet. Its teeth were huge. It lunged at my face, but Gwil caught him on the
prong of
one antler and shook him until his guts spilled.
But then there was just the sudden wind-sound of an arrow. My poor Gwil. He fell
and the dogs tore at his throat, but still he kept them from me. The arrow was
longer than my body. It stuck out of his heaving flesh, and I can remember
reaching to touch it, and the blood on it, and I couldn't move the shaft, it was
so hard, like a rock, like something growing from the stag. Men cut me loose and
dragged me away and I clung to Gwil as he died, and the dogs worried at his
entrails. He was still alive, and he looked at me and whispered something, like
a forest breeze and then snorted once and was gone . . .' She turned to me.
Touched me. Tears stained her cheeks, glistened in the bright day. 'As you will
go, everything will go, everything that I love . . .' I touched her hand, kissed
her fingers.
'I'll lose you. I'll lose you,' she said sadly, and I couldn't find the words
to respond. My mind was too filled with images of that wild chase. 'Everything I
love is stolen from me.'
We sat for a long time in silence. The children, with their wretchedly
vociferous dog, chased back along the edge of the wood, and again saw us, and
scampered, abashed and afraid, out of sight. Guiwen-neth's fingers were a nest
of entwined grasses, and she laced small golden flowers into them, then wiggled
her hand, like some strange harvest puppet. I touched her shoulder.
'How old were you when this happened?' I asked.
She shrugged. 'Very young. I can't remember, it was several summers ago.'
Several summers ago. I smiled as she said the words, thinking that only two
summers ago she had not yet existed. How
did
the generic process work, I
wondered, watching this beautiful, solid, soft and warm human creature. Did she
form out of the leaf litter? Did wild
animals carry sticks
together and shape them into bones, and then, over the autumn, dying leaves fall
and coat the bones in wildwood flesh? Was there a moment, in the wood, when
something approximating to a human creature rose from the underbrush, and was
shaped to perfection by the intensity of the human will, operating outside the
woodland?
Or was she just suddenly . . . there. One moment a wraith, the next a
reality, the uncertain, dreamlike vision that suddenly clears and can be seen to
be real.
I remembered phrases from the journal:
The Twigling is fading, more
tenuous than the last time I encountered him . . . found traces of the dead
Jack-in-the-Green, worried by animals, but showing an unusual pattern of
decomposition . . . ghostly, running shape in the hogback, not a pre-mythago,
the next phase perhaps?
I reached for Guiwenneth, but she was stiff, rigid in my arms, disturbed by
memories, disturbed by my insistence that she talk about something that was
clearly painful to her.
I
am wood and rock, not flesh and bone.
The words she had used several days before sent a thrill of shock through me
as I remembered them.
I
am wood and rock.
So she knew. She knew
that she was not human. And yet she behaved as if she
were.
Perhaps she
had spoken metaphorically; perhaps it was her life in the woods to which she had
referred, as I might have said
I
am dust and ashes.
Did she know? I longed to ask her, burned to see inside her head, to the
silent glade where she loved and remembered.
'What are little girls made of?' I asked her and she looked round sharply,
frowning, then smiling, puzzled by the question, half-amused as she realized,
from my own smile, that there was a riddle-like answer.
'Sweet acorns, crushed honeybees and the nectar of bluebells,' she said.
I grimaced with disgust. 'How horrible.'
'What then?'
'Sugar and spices and all things . . . er . . .' How did it go? ' . . .
nicest.'
She frowned. 'You don't like sweet acorns or honeybees? They're nice.'
'I don't believe you. Not even grubby Celts would eat honeybees.'
'What are little
boys
made of?' she asked quickly, and answered with a
giggle, 'Cow dung and questions.'
'Slugs and snails, actually.' She seemed duly satisfied. I added, 'The
occasional hindquarters of an immature hound.'
'We have things like that. I remember Magidion telling me. He taught me a
lot.' She held up her hand for silence, while she thought. Then she said, 'Eight
calls for a battle. Nine calls for a fortune. Ten calls for a dead son. Eleven
calls for sadness. Twelve calls at dusk for a new king. What am I?'
'A cuckoo,' I said, and Guiwenneth stared at me.
'You knew!'
Surprised, I said, 'I guessed.'
'You knew! Anyway, it's the
first
cuckoo.' She thought hard for a
moment, and then said, 'One white is luck for me. Two white is luck for you.
Three white for a death. Four white, and a shoe, will bring love.'
She stared at me, smiling.
'Horse's hooves,' I said, and Guiwenneth slapped me hard on the leg. 'You
knew!'
I laughed. 'I'm just guessing.'
'It's the first strange horse you see at the end of winter,' she said. 'If it
has four white hooves, then forge a shoe and you'll see your loved one riding
the same horse in the clouds.'
'Tell me about the valley. And the white stone.'
She stared at me, then frowned. She was suddenly very sad. 'That is the place
where my father lies.'
'Where is it?' I asked.
'A long way from here. One day - ' She looked away. What memories did she
entertain now, I wondered? What sad recollections?
'One day, what?'
Quietly, she said, 'One day I would like to go there. One day I would like to
see the place where Magidion buried him.'
'I would like to go with you,' I said, and for a moment her moist gaze met
mine, and then she smiled.
And then she brightened. 'A hole in a stone. An eye on a bone. A ring made of
thorn. The sound of a forge. All of these things . . .' She hesitated, watching
me.
'Keep away ghosts?' I suggested, and she tumbled on top of me with a cry of,
'How
do you
know?'
We walked slowly back to the house in the very late afternoon. Guiwenneth was
slightly chilly. It was August 27th, if I remember, and sometimes the day would
seem like autumn, and sometimes like summer. There had been a crispness in the
air that morning, the first shivery portent of the new season; summer had
flourished during the day, and now autumn again showed its shadow. The leaves at
the very tips of the trees had begun to show signs of turning. For some reason I
felt depressed, walking with my arm round the girl, feeling her windblown hair
tickle my face, the touch of her right hand on my breast. My suddenly gloomy
mood was not helped by the distant sound of a motorcycle.
'Keeton!' said Guiwenneth brightly, and led me at a trot the rest of the way,
to the stand of thin trees that was the orchard. We wove through the copse, to
the overgrown gate. We forced our way through the tangled undergrowth
that
swamped the fence around the cleared garden, much of which was in shadow, and
darkly overhung by the branches of the oak that wound about the house.
Keeton was standing at the back door, waving and holding up a flagon of the
Mucklestone Field homebrew. 'I've got something else,' he called as Guiwenneth
ran to him and kissed his cheek. 'Hello, Steven. Why so glum?'
'Change of season,' I said. He looked bright and happy, his fair hair awry
from the ride here, his face dirt-stained except around the eyes, where his
goggles had been. He smelled of oil, and slightly of pigs.
His extra surprise was half a side of spitting pig. It looked a pale and
feeble cadaver compared to the grey and scrawny creatures that Guiwenneth
speared in the deep runs of the wood. But the thought of a pork more succulent
and less strong than the wild pigs I had become used to was immensely cheering.
'A barbecue!' Keeton announced. 'Two Americans at the field showed me how.
Outside. This evening. After I've washed. A barbecue for three, with ale, song,
and party games.' He looked suddenly a little concerned. 'Not interrupting
something, am I, old boy?'
'Not at all. Old boy,' I said. His Englishisms often sounded affected, and
irritated me.
'He's fed up,' advised Guiwenneth, and gave me an amused look.
By the Good God Cernunnos, how glad I am, now, that Keeton gatecrashed that
moment, those hours between us. Resentful though I was of his presence, when I
was trying to get a little closer to Guin, I have never given greater thanks to
that Celestial Watching-Being than I did later that night. Even though, in one
way, I would be wishing that I were dead.
The fire burned. Guiwenneth had built it up while Keeton had constructed the
rough-and-ready spit. The pig was his
payment for two
days' work on the farm attached to the airfield; his plane was out of service at
the moment, and the farm work was welcome, as was his help. Well paid rebuilding
work at Coventry and Birmingham had called away many of the farmhands from the
counties of the Midlands.
It takes a lot longer to spit-roast a pig than Keeton had realized. Darkness
enveloped woodland and orchard, and we turned the lights on in the house so that
the garden area, where we squatted and chatted around the sizzling meat and the
brightly flaring wood fire, was bathed in a cosy glow. I attended to records,
playing through the collection of dance-hall music that my parents had built up
over the years. The battered old Master's Voice gramophone kept running down,
and under the influence of the beer that Keeton had purloined, the continual
droning down of the voices became hysterically funny.
At ten o'clock we poked the jacket potatoes out of the fire and ate them with
butter and pickle and a thin slice of the blackened outer flesh of the piglet.
Hunger appeased, Guiwenneth sang us a song in her own tongue, which Keeton was
able to accompany, after a while, on his small harmonica. When I asked her to
translate she just smiled, tapped my nose, and said, 'Imagine!'
'It was about you and me,' I ventured. 'Love, passion, need, long life and
children.'
She shook her head, and licked a finger that she'd just smeared along the
remains of our precious butter ration.
I said, 'What, then? Happiness? Friendship?'
'You incorrigible romantic,' murmured Keeton, and was proved right, for
Guiwenneth's song had not really been about love at all, not as I had imagined
it. She translated as best she could.
