The Bone Forest (17 page)

Slowly the grip relaxed. The Wolfhead lowered himself to a crouch. He was at first puzzled, then excited, at what his young scribe had told him.

"Indeed," he whispered. "Then you must have drunk that broth from the skull."

"No! I didn't! And I won't. Although I am hungry…"

Ancient eyes tore apart the soul of the youth. But old magic bowed, in its wisdom, to the showing of youthful talent.

"You have done more than I could do," the shaman murmured. "If you can touch the demon-son, then you can find the way to banish it back to the pits of the earth." The man picked up the shattered mask, passed it back to his apprentice. He placed a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Did you say you were hungry?"

"Hungry enough to eat a dog… no! Not a dog!"

The Wolfhead laughed, and his grip on the boy's neck tightened. "Where
is
the body of that hound?" he asked softly, and Inkmarker's gorge rose again.

(III)

When he had finished eating—a small bowl of thick broth and a hunk of oatcake—Inkmarker was instructed to write:

The nature of the demon is strange. It is either youthful—a form perhaps of Mercurian or Mabdagda
—
or it has ingested the soul of a child, and it is this struggling soul whose nightmare is expressed in the ruins. The shape of the village is bent and twisted and given an appearance that is remote from my experience. These structures are from another world, from hell. Inkmarker is attuned to the child in the demon. Through his eyes other pictures, other worlds, can be seen which are absent from my own vision. He, then, can see through the gate in the skull, into hell. I see only what the demon sends through the gate in the world. To summon the demon I shall use Inkmarker and the "journeying" mask he has so cleverly made, to call upon the child's soul. The demon may well follow, and I shall destroy it
.

Hand resting lightly on the boy's shoulder, the Wolfhead returned along the rough track between the woods, to the rise of land that led to the earthworks. The day was still, now; the scent of rain was strong, bringing out the smells of the rich earth. In the trees, creatures shuffled restlessly, and Inkmarker glanced nervously about.

"What made you kill the dog and make the mask?" the Wolfhead asked.

Inkmarker clutched the wet hide tightly, glancing down at the crumpled features of the dog. "Impulse," he said. "But you told me about the ten tracks into hell… I knew about Cunhaval… I didn't kill the dog…"

The Wolfhead smiled as he walked, his gaunt face tightening. "Cunhaval: the running of a hound into the unknown region." He nodded, slightly proud that his apprentice had absorbed so much of his own secret ways. "The tracks are ancient. I myself carry
all
the 'journey masks,' but use only the ghost, Morndun. When I enter the otherworld, I pass in as a ghost. But today I shall try and draw the demon into our world. It is you who will do the running."

There had been more changes to the village. The stone walls that had so recently risen tall and turreted from the bank, now were crushed and decayed, overgrown with thorns and twisted oaks, small, gnarly trees that jutted from crevices and the tumbled brick. But a high pole, with a fluttering pennant, stood close to the ragged cluster of houses and ragged walls at the center of the enclosure.

Everywhere was draped in a pale, heavy mist, which hung quite still despite the sound and sensation of a cold wind blowing through the ruins. As the Wolf head led the way through the broken buildings, Inkmarker jumped and twitched at each odd sound: the whinnying of a horse, the sudden scampering of a dog, the creak of wood, the rattle of arms and armor.

Close to the well, the tattered rags of tents and pennants fluttered silently in that same impossible breeze. Broken lances of enormous length lay everywhere. Light gleamed suddenly on the face of a horse, carved out of steel. It was a mask of sorts, or perhaps protective metal for a war-beast, cast aside among the duller gleam of bones.

In his gentle grasp, Inkmarker began to shudder, and the shaman glanced down. The boy's face was ashen, his mouth moist and open. The Wolfhead reached down and lifted the crude mask of the dog, placing it against his apprentice's face, tying the wooden frame with the ivy thongs.

Inkmarker cried out, the words bubbled from him, causing a sudden flurry, birds perhaps, from the hidden recesses of the ruins.

"
Sir Gawain
came to the ruined castle, and there among the fallen stones found the remains of many knights! The battle standards fluttered in the chill wind, the last memory of the brave warriors! The King would be saddened to see so many places at the
table round
empty of his kin!"

The words fled into the misty stillness, but they seemed to set in motion a vibration in the earth. The Wolfhead crouched slightly, drawing the boy into the lee of a low wall. Out of the mist five riders galloped on black, blanketed warhorses. Their heads were bare, though they wore the same bright breastplates. Each carried a long lance, shaped of pale wood. They laughed as they rode, calling out at each other. They came from nowhere, they were swallowed by the air. Behind the shaman the wall corroded. He stepped away from it, eyes wildly alert as the shapechanger imposed a small, circular tower upon the decaying stone.

This was a dangerous place!

But the demon was here, now. It was speaking through the boy. It was chanting through the boy. The word
sirgawain
meant nothing, but the rest of what Inkmarker had cried out sounded like… like a story, perhaps.

"What can you see? What can you hear?" the old man asked, his eyes gleaming as he watched the drooping features of the dog, and the terrified eyes of his apprentice through the widened orbits.

Suddenly, Inkmarker rubbed his legs, wincing and jerking as if being struck. His cries were of pain. His body seemed to be suffering from blows. He whimpered, then almost cooed: "Don't hurt me. Please. Don't hurt me…"

Then he snarled; enraged, he turned on the Wolfhead and struck and scratched at the gaunt, stooped man. The shaman held the boy's hands, kept the bitten nails from tearing at his ancient flesh.

The apprentice shouted, "Let me out! Let me out! Unlock the door! Don't hurt her! Don't hurt my mother! Let me out! Stop shouting! Stop screaming at her!
Drunken bastard
! I
will
use that language! Stop screaming at her!"

And then a third change, and he started to cry. He hunched down and the shaman let the body fall, but kept his own hands upon his young friend's tormented, possessed body. The tears flowed from the boy.

"Where
are
you?" he sobbed. "Why don't you come? Gawain… Arthur… Where
are
you? I've called for you from the books. Why don't you come?"

Now the Wolfhead whispered to his Inkmarker, to the demon which spoke through the unwilling scribe. "Where do you exist? By what name are you known? Who is the child?"

Inkmarker was silent for a moment, then through his racking sobs he managed to say, "My name's Stephen. My name's Stephen. Are you Gawain?"

"Where are you?" the seer persisted.

"I live in
Gillingham
. You should know. You should know. This is the place you fought to save. Now save me. Get me away from this house. Please! Get me away from my father…"

Before the Wolfhead could speak further, again Inkmarker was possessed. He struggled in his master's grasp, and cried out, as if reading loudly from a text: "At the center of the old town is a large well, which once reached a depth of a hundred
feet
. It is now reached through the basement of
Selfridges
and can be viewed by special request. Two of the stones, those with names scratched upon them, are in the local
museum
. Known as the
knights' stones
, the names, Ealgawan and Badda, are reputed by legend to be those of two of Arthur's knights (Gawain and Bedwyn, according to tradition) who tried to protect the town of
Gillingham
(then known as
Croucomagum
or stone mound) against the numerically superior forces of the Saxon warlord Gilla."

The Wolfhead listened to this in astonishment. But slowly the words, the strangest words, made a certain sense to him.

Gillingham
. The accent was odd, but that was clearly Gilla's homestead, this very village. Gilla's people had settled here. Arthur was a name. There were many warlords who were called such. The Wolf head remembered the tall, Roman noble who had recruited from the horsemen in the townships around Camulodunum, on the east of this country. That had been centuries before. The man had been called Pwyl, but had carried the emblem of a bear locked in mortal combat with a dragon, and he had been nicknamed
Artorian of the Red Branch
. Artor. The shaman did not recognize the strange name
Sella Friggas;
it sounded something like a god, and perhaps the reference was to the temple of this unknown deity.

But it was the
form
of the chanting that intrigued the Wolf head in particular. The reference to "legend."

From where was this demon-son calling to the world of Gilla and his people? Why was it using the child? These thoughts, these anguished cries, were simply the child's
possession terror
… or were they?

The shaman's process of thought was abruptly ended. Inkmarker bayed and howled like a dog, dropped to a crouch, then began to leap and scrabble at the wall in front of him.

"My dog! My dog!" he cried in his own language. Then barked fitfully and terrifyingly.

The Wolfhead slapped him on the back. "Yes! Seek and find. Go and find the demon. Go!"

The boy/dog raced away, dropping his pouch of quills, parchment and ink, entering through gaps in the ruined wall, penetrating to the heart of the ruins, of the changing place. Finding the well. Finding the terrified farmers, whose brief skirmish, and triumphant killing, had led them to scrape their names on the well-stone.

The Wolfhead followed, entering the dank place, with its fetid water, its green-slimed walls, its powerful stink of evil.

For the shaman there was nothing to see but the crushed, petrified bodies of the two men, their gray, dead faces still showing the agony that had racked them as their limbs had somehow been
absorbed
by the stone of the well. They were half men, half rock, the shapes of hands and legs sculpted in the gray/green ragstone as if by the hands of those
greeks
, who had so beautifully wrought the shapes of the human body from the solid clay of the earth.

The Wolf head noted all of this, and also that he had no power to free these men from their stony death.

Inkmarker was standing upright, looking up toward the slanting, graying light that shafted from the gaps in the wood and thatching of the roof.

His face was flexed with pain. The dog's mask was on the floor. His lips were moving, and slowly the words began to sound…

"High-walled
camelot
lay ahead of them… as
sirgawain
rode he could hear the sounds of
the joust
… he could smell the ox on the spit… a hundred flags blew in the wind from the tents of Arthur's gathered knights… from every country the champions of Kings had come to the white-walled castle… the Queen watched from the high tower… white silk favors fluttered down from the walls and the knights took them gladly…"

"Stop!"

The Wolf head clapped a hand across the boy's face and suddenly the possession was gone. Inkmarker looked startled, then afraid. The more so as he felt the shifting of the earth, the cracking of stone…

Sudden whiteness, as if all color drained from the walls and ledges…

Sudden summer breezes…

The sudden sound of horses…

Fragments of white gossamer seemed to drift in the air of the stifling well-space… A woman's voice sang gently, the words meaningless.

Inkmarker was shaking. He blurted out, "It's all in a book. Pictures. Words. It's all he possesses in the place where he's trapped. He turns the pages. The ghosts are all there, the huge castles, the towers, the great horses, the silver men. He's reading from a book of story-spells. Oh! My head! It hurts so much! And he's so lonely!"

As the boy struggled with the demon's pain, the Wolfhead was triumphant. A book of story-spells. Of course! As the demon looked at the images in the spells, so the world was shaped. As he chanted the hellish tales of silver knights and battles, as he described the world of his own kind, so he changed the world of Gilla's village. In that otherworld the two men's names had been inscribed in the Book of Hell, made into story
themselves
. That was the link. As the demon sought to escape from his prison, he was twisting the gateway—
this stone well
!—to try to find release into the world where farmers would live in terror of his power.

How clever to pretend to be a
child
reading from manuscript pages written as if
for
a child.

The Wolfhead must have spoken these thoughts aloud. Suddenly his Inkmarker, who had at first been watching him blankly, then with an expression of horror, shouted out, "No! He's not a demon! He's just a boy. Like me. A boy, trapped and punished. Somewhere very far from here, but tied to us through the well. The true demons are the people who have trapped him. They are hurting him. They make him very lonely. This is his only escape from the pain. He's trying to reach to us for help. No! He
isn't
a demon. You mustn't hurt him."

"You are already possessed," the seer murmured hoarsely, watching the contortions on his apprentice's face, the tears fill the eyes. "I should have realized as much. The demon is halfway through to this place."

Inkmarker backed away, fetched up hard against the wall, against one of the petrifying corpses. His fingers, reaching for support, brushed against one of the incised names, and he jerked his touch away, whimpering like the half-wild dog of earlier in the day.

The Wolfhead was reaching slowly into his bag of magic. He watched the boy as he did so, considering, planning, thinking how to treat this new possession.