Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (15 page)

At last the strange ritual was over. Tallis watched as he took a knife and scratched the stone in a line from top to bottom, then used the blade to strike it powerfully along its edges …

The blows didn’t seem strong enough to have made the deep marks of ogham, but Tallis watched intrigued. Were they carving Scathach’s name? Was this the strongest spell they knew with which to steal the warrior?

Suddenly it was done. The stone fell heavily to the ground. (There was no Stretley Man in that position in Tallis’s own time.) The women ran at the sleeping form of Scathach and were met by a hail of stones from the tree. The attack drove them off, bloody and screaming.
Only black veil was unaffected, standing a little way back, watching the tree.

‘You won’t take him. You won’t take him!’ Tallis screamed. ‘He’s mine. He belongs to me …’

She was out of stones again. She slipped quickly back to the heart of the oak to gather more. Thunder struck loudly and she was rocked in her precarious perch by the gusting, powerful wind. As she filled her arms she suddenly froze.

Where was the dusk? What was the storm doing
here?

‘Scathach!’ she screamed. ‘Oh no. Oh no!’

She felt back along the branch, almost losing her grip. She flopped down at her vantage point and stared into the field, between the fires.

Scathach was gone. She could hear the cart creaking and she leaned down to watch it go. Scathach was flopped in it, his legs trailing over the edge. The old man was walking beside it, his staff across the body. The old women wailed and hauled their prey to some quiet place, to strip it in peace. The black veil had been tied around the standing stone, the hag’s triumph blowing in the storm.

‘
Scathach!
’ Tallis cried, repeating the name endlessly as the tears and the grief came.

She had failed. She had failed to protect him. She had failed the Hollower’s task for her. Anguish was a cold, twisting knife, cutting her bones, her flesh, her spirit.

Fire was spreading up the oak from two torches which had been flung to its base. Tallis sobbed, watching the flames. She had tried so hard to save her lovely warrior, and she had not been old enough to do it, her spells had not been strong enough. The Hollower had whispered the way of vision-making, and she had controlled time in the vision until she had
doubted
herself: she could remember the exact moment when she had lost control of the
Hollowing, when she had become afraid that her simple presence in the tree would not be enough to dictate the flow of Scathach’s life …

And she had paid the price; Scathach had paid the price. She had failed to save him. Her doubt had been an interference, and by interfering she had
changed
Scathach’s story.

Or
had
she changed the story?

It was only as her desperation and despondency eased that she was able to review the events of the last few hours and finally see the actions that gave the lie to her belief in Scathach’s gruesome fate.

It was with a sense of shock that she realized that the wailing of the women had not been a cry of triumph, but the keening of despair, of sadness; if there was triumph it was for the rescuing, not the stealing of the warrior’s corpse.

Everything she remembered, now, increased her awareness that she had mistaken the plangency of their voices for the crowing of carrion birds, alone with their prey. The image of that old man, pointing to Scathach, pointing to himself … Had he been saying that he belonged with them? Is that why the hags had abandoned the bodies in the middle of the field, because they had seen one of their own princes?

It all came horribly clear to her. The hags had been of
his
people, and they had seen him below the tree, and seen the tree spirit which guarded him, and assumed that the spirit was trying to
steal
him. They had tried to
save
Scathach from the tree spirit. How badly they had misunderstood what she had been doing. She had been protecting him from slaughter. Now it seemed she had been protecting him from his own kind, his own clan.

Perhaps she could bring him back by calling more gently. Yes, that would be good. They had not yet reached the river and they had heard her shout once before. She would climb into the arms of Strong against the Storm for one last time and call to them, to reassure them, and tell them her name so that when Scathach was recovered fully from his wounds he would always remember her fondly.

Her time with him was not now; it would be later, when she was older.

For the moment she was just a tree spirit, but not one of whom they needed to be afraid.

She ran three times around each of the fallen stones, the Stretley Men, not knowing which of them was Scathach’s stone, then she returned to the tree and climbed it swiftly, crawling along the branch to where the storm was raging and a torch-lit night stood as the first marker of the dead of the lost and ancient battle.

She had expected to see the cart and the rag-robed women and it was with a final, sickening shock that she realized that time had eluded her again. Now, by the river, a great pyre burned, its flame a silent dance against the wall of the forest behind.

A man lay on that pyre. It was Scathach, of course. Tallis could tell that – and she could see, too, that already the fire was claiming him for ash.

Below her the oak tree was burned and blackened, the fire gone, its ghost residing in the smouldering trunk; but Tallis was hardly aware of this. She cried for Scathach, watching as the flames began to consume him, bright life rising into the storm sky.

And the last thing she saw was a horse and rider gallop from the forest and pass around the blaze, black cloak and dark mane streaming. Why she thought it was a woman Tallis couldn’t tell, but she saw the rider pass around the pyre from right to left, once, twice, and then again, the flame bright on her white, clay-stiffened hair, the gaunt black lines on her face, the red streaking of her naked limbs. Her cries of sorrow were like the fleeting cries of the dawn birds, banished from this forbidden place of winter, this Bird Spirit Land.

(i)

She was still distressed a week later – it was early August, now – and had not become involved in any way with the preparation in Shadoxhurst for the annual festival of singing and dancing. She didn’t have much to say to anyone and her parents left her to her sullen contemplation of the land. When her mother spoke to her about the manifest concern that her daughter was feeling, Tallis simply said, ‘I have to make it up to him. I misunderstood. It will have hurt him. I
have
to make it up to him. Until I do that I can’t start looking for Harry again. Or the Hunter.’

This was not especially illuminating for Margaret Keeton and she left Tallis to her own devices.

But what devices?

Tallis had made a grotesque mistake. The Hollower had helped her to open the first gate
clearly
to the
forbidden world, to the otherworld, to the ancient realm whose real name still eluded her, though she had struggled several times to ‘hear’ the name in her mind. The Hollower had trained her and she had ruined the training. Instead of witnessing the sad death and wonderful spiritual release of Scathach, she had
interfered
with a process which should only have been
watched
. She had changed something. She had done something very wrong. The Hollower, the masked woman from the wood, was very agitated. She followed Tallis, but withdrew into the shadows whenever the girl tried to approach.

Tallis had
changed
the vision. She had interfered. She had acted wrongly.

She felt an urgent need to make amends with Scathach. But she had no idea how to break the spell of change. She had no idea what magic to use to send his spirit on its way, to release him from the image in her own tormented mind, an image which, she was quite convinced, was trapping him in Bird Spirit Land.

She was holding him between worlds. In limbo. She had to find the charm to release him to his journey. Then, too, she would be released to pick up her own journey, in pursuit of Harry, in search of the way into Ryhope Wood.

On the day of the festival Tallis woke before dawn. She dressed quickly and tiptoed out of the house, running across the nearer fields until she came to Stretley Stones. There she stood by Strong against the Storm and watched its summer branches, listening in the silence for any hint of a winter storm. She heard nothing. The faces of the crows, scratched there a few days before, had faded. Already the great tree was absorbing her magic, healing its wound. In the days since the hollowing had ended no birds had entered the meadow, Tallis had clearly noticed that.

She felt an urge to enter Bird Spirit Land and sit on the stone she imagined to be Scathach’s, but she resisted the urge because of what had happened. For some reason she imagined that the meadow, and his grave, were forbidden to her. So she skirted the field and went on to Hunter’s Brook, crouching down and watching the nameless field and the dark stand of woodland by the damp, cool light of the new day.

It was the same wood that she had seen in her vision, and a clay-painted rider had come from it, crying out, grieving for the dead man
…

I
must
cross the field, Tallis thought angrily. I
must
find its name so that I can cross safely to look for Harry. But it has no marks, no stones, no hillocks, no trees, no scars, no ditches. What are you called?
What are you called?

She heard the sound of someone whistling. It was a jaunty melody. It reminded her of songs she had heard throughout her life; Gaunt was always whistling to himself. It was the sort of tune that would soon fill the air at Shadoxhurst, as the dancing and the playing got underway. Only this tune wasn’t coming from a flower-hatted Morris dancer, or gaily-skirted local girl in clogs and bonnet.

Tallis watched the old man carefully. He seemed to have emerged from Ryhope Wood. As she concentrated on the figure the edge of her vision was alive with hovering, darting shapes. He was a mythago, then; she had called him from her own mind, like the Hollower, like Gaberlungi …

The old man walked along the edge of Ryhope Wood, through the long grass and dense bush. Soon the marshy ground began to suck at him. His whistling stopped and his voice grumbled with irritation. He waded out of the undergrowth and came across the dry field, towards Hunter’s Brook. He was limping and used a stick to help
in his movement. He saw Tallis crouching on the other side of the water and, as he raised his stick in greeting, so she straightened up.

The stranger was very tall and very robust. He was wearing green trousers and heavy boots and some sort of showerproof jacket that hung on his shoulders like a baggy cloak. His hair was very short and very white and parted precisely, high on one side of his head. His face was pale, quite heavy, but he had a warm and kindly look about him. He smiled at the girl, then pursed his lips and whistled again, arriving at the edge of the stream and easing down to pull off his boots.

‘Not thinking what I was doing,’ the big man called to Tallis. ‘Walking along, enjoying the early morning: straight into a bog. Could have been twenty feet down by now.’

There
are
bogs in the fields, Tallis thought, but not where you were walking.

She remained silent, nervous of the creature … increasingly uncertain that he
was
a mythago. The stranger was glancing at her uncomfortably.

‘You’re out early too,’ he called.

Tallis nodded. The man smiled. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

She protruded her tongue, cheerfully, to demonstrate that the cat had not been near her.

He had completed the removal of his boots. His socks were quite wet and he stretched his legs out so that the new sun could dry them. He leaned back on the grass, resting and relaxed. ‘I stayed the night at the Manor House. A very nice place indeed. A very good supper. Henry the Eighth used to hunt here, you know.’ He propped himself up on his elbows. ‘I’m here for the festival. Are you going to the festival?’

Of course, Tallis thought. Everyone goes to the Shadoxhurst folk festival.

‘If you are, then no doubt I’ll see you there. I shan’t be doing any dancing, though.’ He chuckled, looking around at the quiet landscape. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘that said, I used to be a very keen dancer, I came here when I was a very much younger man. I was collecting songs. Old songs. Country songs. The festival in the village was
very
exciting for someone like me, newly down from London. The place has a certain charm. A certain
magic
. I can’t explain it. Can you explain it? All I know is, it has drawn me back after many years and I feel as excited as a child given his first train-set.’ He looked at Tallis quizzically again. ‘Are you frightened of me? Told not to talk to strangers?’