Mythago Wood - 1 (31 page)

The Outsiders.

And later, the men who had used fire had become almost deified as
'flame-talkers'.

'What is the end of the legend of the Outsider?' I asked Sorthalan as he sat
down again. He shrugged, a very modern gesture, and drew his heavy cloak around
his shoulders, tying the rough cords at the front. He seemed tired.

'Each Outlander is different,' he said. 'The Kinsman will come against him.
The outcome cannot be known. It's not the certainty of success that makes us
welcome your presence in the realm. It's the
hope
of success. Without
you, the realm will wither like a cut flower.'

Tell me about the girl, then,' I said. Sorthalan was clearly very tired.
Keeton too was restless and yawning. Only the infantryman seemed alert and
awake, but his gaze was fixed at some point in the distance, and there was
nothing behind his eyes except the controlling presence of the shaman.

'Which girl?'

'Guiwenneth.'

Sorthalan shrugged again and shook his head. 'The name is meaningless.'

What had Kushar called her? I checked my notes.

Again, Sorthalan shook his head.

'The girl created from love out of hate,' I suggested, and this time the
necromancer understood.

He leaned towards me and rested his hand on my knee, saying something aloud
in his language, and staring at me quizzically. As if remembering himself, he
inclined his head slightly towards the vacant infantryman, whose gaze sharpened.

'The girl is with the Outlander.'

'I know,' I said, and added, 'That's my reason for pursuing him. I want her
back.'

'The girl is happy with him.'

'She is not.' "The girl belongs to him.'

'I don't accept that. He stole her from me - '

Sorthalan reacted with startled surprise. I went on. 'He stole her from me
and I'm going to take her back.'

'She has no life outside the realm,' Sorthalan said.

'I believe she does. A life with me. She chose that life, and Christian acted
against her choice. I don't intend to own her, or possess her. I just love her.
And she loves me, of that I'm sure.' I leaned closer. 'Do you know her story?'

Sorthalan turned away, thinking deeply, evidently disturbed by my
revelations.

I persisted: 'She was raised by the friends of her father. She was trained in
the way of the woods and magic, and trained with weapons too. Am I right? She
was kept until she was a woman, guarded by the Night Hunt. She fell in love for
the first time and the Night Hunt brought her back to the land of her father, to
the valley where he was buried. This much I know. The ghost of her father linked
her with the Horned God. This much I know. But what happened then? What happened
to the one who loved her?'

It happened, then, that she fell in love with the son of a chief who was
determined to have her.
The words of the diary were strong and clear in my
mind. But was this version too recent for Sorthalan to recognize the details?

Suddenly Sorthalan turned sharply on me, and his eyes blazed; through his
beard he seemed to be smiling. He was excited, and very positively so. 'Nothing
has happened until it happens,' he said through Frampton. 'I had not understood
the presence of the girl. Now I do. The task is easier, Kinsman!'

'How?'

'Because of what she is,' said Sorthalan. 'She has been subdued by the
Outlander, but now she is beyond the river. She will not stay with him. She will
find the power to escape -'

'And return to the edge of the wood!'

'No,' said Sorthalan, shaking his head as Frampton articulated the sound.
'She will go to the valley. She will go to the white stone, to the place where
her father is buried. She will know that it is her only hope for release.'

'But she won't know how to get there!' My father's journal had referred to
Guiwenneth's 'sadness' that she could not find the valley which breathed.

'She will run to the fire,' Sorthalan said. 'The valley leads to the place
where the fire burns. Trust me, Kinsman. Once beyond the river she is closer to
her father than she has ever been. She will find the way. You must be there to
meet her - and to confront her pursuer!'

'But what
happened
after that confrontation? The stories must say . .
.!'

Sorthalan laughed and grasped me by the shoulders, shaking me. 'In years to
come they will say
everything.
At the moment the story is unfinished.'

I stood there stupidly. Harry Keeton was shaking his head in a sort of
disbelief. Then Sorthalan thought of something else. His gaze went past me and
he released me from his powerful grip. Frampton said on his behalf, 'The three
who are following will have to be abandoned.'

'The three who are following?'

"The Outlander gathered a band of men as he devastated the realm. The
Kinsman too. But if the girl goes to the valley, there is a better way for you
to meet her, and the three must be abandoned for a while.'

He stepped past me and called into the darkness. Keeton rose to his feet,
apprehensive and puzzled. Sorthalan spoke words in his own language and the
elementals gathered about us, forming a shimmering bright veil.

Three figures stepped from the obscurity of night into the glow of the
elementals. They walked uncertainly. First came the cavalier, then the Knight.
Behind them, his sword and shield held loosely at his side, came the cadaverous
form of the man from the stone grave. He kept apart from the other two, a
ghastly myth creature, born more from horror than hope.

'You will meet them again, at another time,' Sorthalan said to me. I kept
thinking that I hadn't even heard them coming down the cliff! But the sensation
of being followed was borne out as a genuine awareness and not an irrational
fear.

Whatever passed between the shaman and the warriors, the three men who might
have accompanied me in another tale stepped back into the Stygian wood and
vanished from my sight.

The consciousness of Billy Frampton returned briefly to the mythago form that
sat with us. The infantryman's eyes lit up a little and he smiled. 'We should
get some kip, mates. It's going to be a long hike tomorrow, back to the lines.
Bit of shut-eye, do us the power of good.'

'Will you be able to guide us inwards?' Keeton asked his alter-image. 'Can
you lead us to the valley of the white stone?'

Frampton looked utterly blank. 'Blimey, mate. What's all that about? I'll be
bleedin' glad just to get back to a trench and a nice plate of bully . . .'

As he spoke the words he frowned, shivered, and glanced around. That cascade
of uncertainty returned to his features, and he began to tremble violently.
'This ain't right . . .' he whispered, looking from one to the other of us.

'What isn't right?' I asked.

'This whole place. I think I'm dreaming. I can't hear gunfire. I don't feel
right.' He rubbed his fingers on his cheeks and chin, like a frozen man rubbing
circulation back into his flesh. 'This just ain't right,' he repeated, and
looked up into the night sky, at the breeze-blown foliage. I thought tears
glistened in his eyes. He smiled. 'Maybe I'll pinch meself. Maybe I'm dreaming.
I'll wake up in a little while. That's it. I'll wake up and everything will be
right again.'

And with that he tugged at Sorthalan's cloak and curled up by the shaman,
like a child, sleeping.

For my part, I managed to sleep a little too. So did Keeton, I think. We were
woken abruptly, some time before dawn. The riverside was beginning to become
visible with the approaching day.

What had woken us was a sudden, distant shot.

Sorthalan, hugged in his cloak, was watching us through narrowed, dew-touched
eyes. He remained expressionless. There was no sign of Billy Frampton.

'A shot,' Keeton said.

'Yes. I heard it.'

'My pistol . . .'

We looked back towards the place where the Hawks had attacked us, then
shrugged off our simple coverings. Chilled and aching from the hard ground, we
ran together along the river shore.

Keeton saw it, and shouted to me. We stood by the tree and stared at his
pistol, which was hooked on to a thin branch. Touching it gently, Keeton sniffed
the barrel and confirmed that it had just been fired.

'He must have fixed it like that so that it wouldn't follow him into the
river,' Keeton said. We turned and stared at the flowing waters, but there was
no sign of blood or of the infantryman himself.

I don't really know why, but for a while I felt inordinately sad, and rather
irrationally angry with Sorthalan, who seemed to me to have created a human
being simply to be used and expended. The truth of the matter, of course, was
that Billy Frampton had been no more real than the ghosts which hovered in the
foliage around our camp.

There was little time available for brooding over Framp-ton's death, however.
When we got back to the camp, Sorthalan had already rolled up the hides from the
camp, and was aboard the small boat, making preparations to sail.

I picked up my haversack and spear and waved to the boatman, finding it hard
to smile.

But a hand pushed me forward from behind, and I stumbled towards the river.
Keeton had likewise been propelled towards the boat, and Sorthalan shouted a
word at us, indicating that we should jump aboard.

Around us, the elementals were like a perpetual breeze, and the touch of
fingers on my face and neck was both disturbing and comforting. Sorthalan
extended a hand to help us board, and we hunkered down in the midships, on the
rough seats. Symbols and faces had been painted and carved, or simply scratched,
all around the inner hull -the marks, perhaps, of the families who had
originally sailed with the first boatman. At the prow, peering towards us, was
the grimacing face of a bear, its eyes peculiarly slanted, two stubby horns
suggesting more of an amalgamation of deity-figures than the simple bear itself.

At Sorthalan's instruction, Keeton and I took positions at various rigging
stations. We soon learned how to tug and loosen the sail to take full advantage
of the dawn winds. The river curved and meandered through the chasm. We skipped
over the waters, surging ahead faster than a man could run.

It grew colder, and I was glad of my oilskin. The landscape around us began
to show signs of seasonal change, a darkening of the foliage, then a thinning.
It became a cold, late autumnal forest, in a bleak, seemingly endless gorge. The
cliff tops were so far above us that few details could be seen, though squinting
against the bright sky on several occasions I saw movement up there.
Occasionally, great boulders fell heavily and noisily into the river behind us,
causing the boat to rock violently. Sorthalan just grinned and shrugged.

It seemed that the boat was dragged by a current, faster and faster. It shot
over rapids, with Sorthalan working the rudder expertly, and Keeton and myself
hanging on to the rowlocks for dear life. Once we came perilously close to the
chasm's sides, and only frantic tacking of the sail avoided disaster.

Sorthalan seemed unbothered. His elementals were now a dark and brooding
swarm of shape behind and above us, although occasionally a streak of sinuous
light would dart ahead, winding up through the autumnal forest which lined the
gorge.

Where were we going? Attempts to get an answer to that question were met with
a single finger prqdded upwards, towards the plateau on the inward side of the
river.

We came into the sun, the river a blinding, brilliant gold. The elemental
crowded ahead of us, forming a gloomy veil through which the sun was dimly
filtered. In shadow again, we gasped as we saw an immense stone fortress, rising
from the water's edge and built up the whole of the cliff to our right. It was
an astonishing sight, a series of towers, turrets, and crenellated walls,
seemingly crawling up the rock itself. Sorthalan urged the boat to the far side
of the river and beckoned us to lower our heads. I soon saw why. A hail of bolts
struck the boat and the water around us.

When we were beyond firing range I was instructed to wrench the short wooden
shafts from the outer hull, a job more difficult than it sounds.

We saw other things on the walls of the ravine, most notably a huge, rusting
metal shape, in the form of a man.

'Talos!' Keeton breathed as we sailed rapidly past, the wind tugging noisily
at the sail. The giant metal machine, a hundred feet high or more, was crushed
against the rocks, partly consumed by trees. One arm was outstretched across the
river and we sailed through the shadow of the huge hand, half expecting it to
suddenly fall and grasp us. But this Talos was dead, and we passed on from its
sad, blind face.

A strong surge of anxiety made me demand repeatedly in English, 'Where the
hell
are
we going, Sorthalan?'

Christian, by now, was miles away, days away.

The river could be seen to be curving as if around the plateau. We had
covered many many miles ourselves, and the day was nearly done. Indeed, abruptly
Sorthalan pulled the boat to the shore, moored it and made camp. It was a cold
evening, very wintry. We huddled by the fire, and spent several hours in silence
before curling up to sleep.