The Bone Forest (4 page)

He wanted his journal. He scrawled notes in the rough pad he carried with him, but the pad was wet, and writing was difficult. Around him the wood was vibrant, shifting, watching. He felt intensely ill at ease, and after a few minutes shrugged on the pack and began to retrace his steps, away from the river.

Half a day later he had reached the Wolf Glen, the shallow valley, with its open sky, where he and Wynne-Jones had separated several days before. This was an eerie place, with its smell of sharp pine, its constant, cool breeze, and the sound of wolves in the darkness. Huxley had seen the creatures several times, fleet shadows in the dense underbrush, rising onto their hind limbs to peer around, their faces half human, of course, for these creatures were no ordinary wolves.

They moved in threes, not in packs; and never—as far as he could see—in solitary. Their barking resolved into language, though of course the language was incomprehensible to the Englishman. Huxley carried a pistol, and two flares, well wrapped in oilskin, but ready to be lit if the wolves came too close.

But in the three visits he had made to the Wolf Glen, the beasts had shown curiosity, irritation, and then a lack of interest. They had approached, gabbled at him, then slunk away, running half on hind limbs, to hunt beyond the edge of the conifer forest, beyond the low defining ridge of the Wolf Glen itself.

If Wynne-Jones had returned here he would have left the prearranged mark on one of the tall stones at the top of the Glen. No such mark was in evidence. Huxley used chalk to create his own message, gathered the necessary wood for a fire, later in the day, and went exploring.

At dusk, still Wynne-Jones had not returned. Huxley called for him, his voice echoing in the Glen, carrying on the wind. No hail or hello came back, and a night passed.

In the morning Huxley decided that he could wait no longer. He had no real idea of the passage of time, this far into Ryhope Wood, but imagined that he had now been absent the better part of a day and a night, longer than he had intended. He had a precise idea of how distorted time became as far in as the Horse Shrine, but he had never tested the relativity of these deeper zones. A sudden anguish made him strike hard along the poor trails, cutting through deep mossy dells, drawn always outward to the edge.

It was always easier to leave the wood than to enter it.

He was exhausted by the time he reached the area of the Horse Shrine. He was hungry, too. He had brought insufficient supplies. And his hunger was increased by the sudden smell of burning meat.

He dropped to a crouch, peering ahead through the tangle of briar and holly, seeking the clearing with its odd temple. There was movement there. Wynne-Jones, perhaps? Had his colleague come straight to this place, to wait for Huxley? Was he roasting him a pigeon, as he waited, with a flagon of chilled local cider to accompany it? Huxley smiled at himself, laughed at the way his baser drives began to fantasize for him. He walked cautiously through the trees, and peered into the glade.

Whoever had been there had heard him. They had backed away, hugging the shadows and the greenery on the opposite side. Huxley was sufficiently attuned to the sounds, smells and shifting of the wood to be aware of the human-like presence that stared back at him.

Between them, close to the bizarre shrine, a fire burned and a bird, plucked and spitted, was blackening slowly.

The Horse Shrine, in its oak glade, is my main point of contact with the mythic creatures of the wood. The trees here are overpoweringly immense organisms, storm-damaged and twisted. The trunks are hollow, their bark overrun with massive ropes of ivy. Their huge, heavy branches reach out across the clearing and form a roof; when the sun is bright, and the summer is silent, to enter the glade is like entering a cathedral. The graying bones of the odd statues that fill the shrine reflect the changing shades of green and are entrancing and enticing to the eye; the horse that is central to the shrine seems to move; it is a massive structure, twice the height of a man, bones strapped together to form gigantic legs, fragments of skull shaped and wedged to create a monstrous head. It could be some dinosaur, reconstructed out of madness by an impressionist. Shapeless but essentially manlike structures stand guard beside it, again all long-bone and skull, lashed together with thick strips of leather, impaled on wood, some of which is returning to leaf. They seem to watch me as I crouch in the shifting, dancing luminosity of this eerie place.

Here I have seen human forms from the paleolithic, the neolithic and the Age of Bronze. They come here and watch the greening of the spirit of the horse. To the earliest forms of Man, this silent respect is for a wild, untamed creature, a source of nourishment rather than burden. To later forms, it is a closer need that is reflected. Some visitors to the shrine leave brilliant trappings and harnessing, invocations to their primeval form of Epona, or Diana, or any other
Goddess of the Steed
. These I have collected. Many of them are fascinating.

I have watched and recorded many of these visitors, but failed to communicate with any of them. All this now changed as I encountered the woman. She was in the glade, tending a small fire, and staring up at the decaying statues. Alarmed by my sudden arrival, she stood and drew back into the edgewood, watching me. The sun was high, and she was drenched in shadow and green light, blending with the background. The fire crackled slightly, and on the still air I could smell not just burning wood, but the charred smell of some meat or other.

I waited cautiously, also within the scrub that lined the glade. Soon she reemerged into the cathedral, and crouched by the fire, spreading her skirts. She began to sing, rocking forward in rhythm, prodding at the smoldering wood. She was very aware of me, glancing at me continually. I gained the impression that she was… disappointed. She frowned and shook her head.

Eventually she smiled, and there was an invitation to approach in that simple gesture. As I stepped through the tangled grass and fern of the glade, her lank hair fell forward. It was copper-hued, magnificent, but full of leaf-litter, nature's decoration. She occasionally pushed it back with her free hand, watching me through eyes that were enchanting. Her clothing was of wool, a skirt dyed a dull shade of brown, a faded green shawl. She wore a necklace of carved and painted shapes, bone talismans, I thought, and many of these were strikingly bright. Rolled beside her was a cloak, fur side hidden for a while. Then she unfurled the garment to fetch out a thin knife, and I saw white fur—fox fur, I think—and knew at once that this creature was the "Snow Woman" that the boys had seen last Christmas.

We sat in silence for a while. She cooked and picked at the small bird she had snared, a wood pigeon, I believe. Around us, the dense wood seemed alive with eyes, but this is the life of Ryhope Wood, the sylvan-awareness drawing out human dreams and fashioning forgotten memories into living organisms. When I am in the oak and ash zones, deeper than the Horse Shrine, I can often
feel
the presence of the wood in my unconscious mind; images at the edge of vision seem to slip past me: out of mind, into the forest, to become shaped, then no doubt to return to haunt me.

Was this woman one of my own
mythagos
, I wondered?

She carried an ash stick, and when she had finished eating she lay this across her lap before flicking earth onto the smoldering wood of her fire. She smiled at me. There was grease on her lips and she licked at it. Below the grime she was truly lovely, and her smile, and her laughter, were enchanting. I mentioned my name and she grasped what I was trying to do, referring to herself in some incomprehensible tongue. Then, seeing my puzzlement, she held up the stick and pointed to herself. She was called Ash, then, but this reference meant nothing to me.

Who or what was she? What aspect of legend was embodied here? By sign and smile, by gesture, by the tracing of shapes in the air, by exaggerated communication with fingers, we began to understand each other. I showed her a rag effigy that I had gathered from near this shrine on the inward journey, and she stared at this bounty with puzzlement (at first) and then with an odd, searching look. When I dangled a bronze, leaf-like necklet—found by a stream—she touched the piece, then shook her head as if to say "don't be so childish." But when I showed her an ocher-painted amulet that I had found in the Horse Shrine itself, she exhaled sharply, looked at me with murderous, then pitying eyes. She would not touch the object and I ran it through my fingers, wondering what message reached from this crafted bone to the mind of the woman. The uneasiness lasted a little while, then—by sign—I asked her about herself.

She returned to me, a bird returning from a flight of fancy, a mind returning to the reality of a woodland glade. In a moment or two she seemed to understand that I was questioning her about her own history. She frowned, watching me as if wondering what to reveal. I noticed distinctly, but took no warning from the observation, that she looked afraid and angry suddenly.

Then, with the merest shrug, she reached into her rolled cloak and drew out two leather bags which she shook. One of them rattled, the sound of bone shards.

By gesture, she had made certain strange comments during the previous hour, and now she compounded my confusion. First she shook out the contents of the larger bag, dozens of short fragments of wood, strips of bark, some dark, some silver, some green, some mottled, all gouged with a small hole. I formed the idea that she had something, here, from every type of tree. With her eyes on the amulet that I had shown her, she picked out two of these pieces of wood, held them in her left hand. She sang something softly and the glade seemed to shiver. A coolish breeze whipped quickly through the foliage, then danced up and away; an elemental life-form, perhaps, summoned then dismissed.

From the second bag she poured out the bone, forty or fifty shards of ivory. From these she picked a single piece. Holding wood and bone in her hand she shook the three fragments, before threading a loop of thin, worn leather through the holes and passing the necklet to me. I accepted it, remembering, with no clear understanding, the gift she had left by the gate during the winter. I put the necklet on.

She sat back and replaced the rest of the wood and ivory into their respective bags. Then she stood and gathered her fox-fur cloak, and with a knowing smile, stepped out of the glade and into the silence and darkness of the forest. Her last gesture before departing was to rattle a tiny wrist-drum, a double sided cylinder of skin, beaten by small stones attached to thongs.

I had no idea what to do next. She had seemed to dismiss me, so I rose, intending to leave the glade and return to Oak Lodge.

Huxley got no further than the first overpowering oak. As he ducked below its heavy branch, heading toward the narrow track outward, his world—the wood itself— turned inside out!

From the warm and musty odor of summer, suddenly the air was sharp and autumnal. The light from the foliage was stark, brilliant; the drowsy green luminosity had gone. Trees, dense and dark, rose straight and bleak around him. These were birches, not oaks; thickets of holly shimmered in the lancing silver light. He stumbled through this unknown world, scratched and torn in his panic to orientate himself. Above him, birds screeched and took to wing. A cold wind swept through the upper branches. Unfamiliar smells struck at random, damp leaf mold, pungent vegetation, then the crystal sharpness of autumn. The light from above was startling in its brightness, and if he glanced up, then looked around him, the trees showed as black pillars, without feature, almost formless.

He suddenly heard horses crashing through the forest, their lungs straining as they ran, their whinnying screams telling of the burden of pain and bruising inflicted by this tangled, ancient wood. Huxley glimpsed them as they struggled past, immense creatures, each impaled on its back with what he assumed quickly were the signs of
taming
: one carried flaring torches, spears with burning heads that had been stuck deeply through its thick skin; another was decorated with stems of corn or wheat; a third with tight bundles of greenery and thorn, blood seeping from where the sharpened stalks of some of these plants had been pushed too deep. The fourth carried in its flesh the slim, quivering shafts of a pale wood—
ash
perhaps—that were arrows, each trailing rags of the skin of creatures, the gray, white, brown and black of furry hides.

What had sounded like the frantic passage of a
herd
of these wonderful creatures was in fact the furious bolting of four horses only.

One came close enough to show Huxley the gray and bloodied hide of its flanks. This was the creature "decorated" with burning and smoldering torches. It towered over him, its mane full, flowing and lank; it reeked richly of dung. The horse turned briefly to stare at him and its eyes were filled with a feral panic. Huxley pressed himself against one of the great birches, which shuddered as the beast kicked at the trunk, turning to expose huge, cracked teeth that were the color of summer-ripened wheat; it moved on, then, working its way inward, escaping its tormentors.

The tormentors, following close behind the horses, were humans, of course. And Huxley was soon to realize what Ash had done.

There were four men, dark haired and heavily cloaked. They moved through the forest, uttering shrill cries, or gruff barks, or resonating song fragments that increased in pitch until they became an ululating echo. Sometimes they screeched
words
, but these were frightening and alien sounds. Each of the men wore his hair in a different, elaborate plaited style. Each was bedecked with stone or bone or shells or wood. Each had a color on his face: red, green, yellow, blue. They passed by Huxley, sometimes running, sometimes laughing, all of them torn by thorn and holly, the leaf and wood impaling their crude clothing, so that they seemed no less than extensions of the birch and thorn forest itself.