Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (17 page)

One of the farmers said, ‘That’s “The Captain’s Apprentice” …’

‘Ssh!’ said Mr Williams.

Tallis, who had hesitated at the interruption, continued singing.

She finished the song but it had not gone right. The words had changed and the tune had changed. It had been
perfect
this morning, but now, under different circumstances, she felt she had distorted it.

She watched Mr Williams, who took a moment to realize that the song had finished.

‘That’s very nice,’ he said. ‘And you have a nice voice. Very nice.’

‘Is it a new song?’ Tallis asked anxiously. ‘Does it have magic?’

Mr Williams hesitated awkwardly before saying, ‘It’s a truly
lovely
song. The strangest words I’ve ever heard. Truly lovely. I would like to write it down, with your permission.’

‘But is it a
new
song?’

‘Um …’

She stared at him. His face told it all. She said sadly, ‘An old song?’

‘An old song,’ he agreed sympathetically.

‘But I only made it up this morning.’

He leaned towards her. He was impressed, she thought. ‘Then it is still a remarkable achievement.’

She was confused, sad, slightly irritated. ‘I don’t understand … I made up the words! I really did!’

Mr Williams watched her thoughtfully. ‘Such strange words …’ he whispered. ‘Such a strange mind …’ He
drew breath and sighed. ‘But alas … the tune you used is just … well, how shall I put it? Is just a little reminiscent of something else.’

‘
Same
bloody tune,’ said one of the men, and the others laughed.

Mr Williams ignored them, letting Tallis share his own contempt with the merest hint of a smile at her. ‘It’s called – in one form, at least – it’s called “The Captain’s Apprentice”. I used it once myself, in a piece of music. My music wasn’t as nice as yours. Too many violins. But it’s quite an old tune.’

‘I heard it in Sad Song Meadow,’ Tallis said. ‘There was nobody there, so I thought I could use it. I didn’t mean to steal it.’

Mr Williams stared at her. ‘You first heard it …
where
did you first hear it?’

‘In Sad Song Meadow. It’s near my farm. It’s really called The Stumps. But when I was nine I began to hear the singing. I’m not afraid. My grandfather told me not to be, so I’m not.’ She frowned. ‘I really
didn’t
mean to steal it.’

Mr Williams shook his head. He scratched at his chin nervously. ‘Why not? That’s what they’re there for. Tunes belong to everybody. So do stories.’

‘I didn’t steal the words,’ the girl said quietly.

‘I know you didn’t. Words are always private, even if they’re as strange as the words you used!’ He smiled. ‘Your “young love” in this “bird spirit land” is a lucky young man indeed. Does he go to the same school as you?’

The old men laughed again. Tallis looked up at them, not liking the feeling that they were mocking her. Mr Williams looked contrite, but he said nothing. Tallis decided to forgive him. ‘His name is Scathach.’

‘The song was very sad,’ Mr Williams said. ‘Any reason for that?’

For a moment Tallis was inclined to say nothing about the events in Stretley Stones meadow. But the kindly look in her friend’s eyes, and his slight frown of concern, finally overwhelmed her caution. Although she had sung to Scathach, she had not yet shared the burden of her grief with anyone and now, fighting back the tears, she let the feelings and the words flow from her.

‘He’s gone away from me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know for how long. I saw him at the bottom of the oak. It’s a
hollowing
. The oak tree, I mean. A place of vision. You know, somewhere where you can see into the Other-world? So of course he doesn’t belong to our world at all. He’d been very badly wounded. He must have lived hundreds of years ago. The crows were trying to get him, but I drove them off. I made the place into Bird Spirit Land and that will have made them angry. Then the hags came, though. I don’t think they’re the hooded and masked figures that haunt the wood.
They’re
mythagos. These hags were part of the vision. They came and dragged him away, on a horrible cart with all heads and limbs tied to it. I thought they were going to cut him up, but they were his friends after all. They burned his body on a pyre. Not his spirit of course. That will have gone through its own hollowing and I can fetch it back. But then … but then a woman came. She came out of the wood, all chalk-streaked and screeching. She rode around the flames. She was very upset and it was probably his lover, in which case, who am I? And what am I? He can’t have
two
lovers. That wouldn’t be right. And I was too busy thinking about it and the hollowing slipped away. So it’s just a tree again. But I felt I had to sing the song to him, just to let him know that I really do want to love him one day, but I’m not old enough to follow him yet.
And in any case, my brother Harry is in the wood, and I’ve promised to look for him too. But I can’t look for them both, so I really don’t know which way to turn …’

She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath, watching Mr Williams as he sat in absolute, blank-faced silence. The farmers around him were staring at her in astonishment.

At last, with the merest raise of his eyebrows, Mr Williams drew in his breath and said very quietly, ‘Well, yes. That certainly explains everything …’

A great cheer went up from the festival crowds. Shadox Fire ran back into the central green and crossed to the oak, where the first torch still burned, held by Shadox Thorn. The two Morrismen pushed the brands together above their heads and dull flame became briefly alive, so that the renewal, the protection, was complete.

When the applause and cheering had died down Mr Williams winked at Tallis, who had recovered her composure, then slapped his hands on his knees and said, ‘Well, then. There we are. Safe from the Devil for another year.’

Tallis smiled. Several of the old men chuckled, but Judd Pott’nfer just shrugged. ‘Better safe than sorry,’ he said, and Tallis noticed how Mr Williams was suddenly humbled, thinking hard about that simple statement.

‘Best is yet to come, though,’ the sour-faced Mr Pott’nfer went on. ‘Shadow Dance, now. We’ve been dancing the Shadow Dance from before the name of the town.’

Tallis stared at him. What he had said simply could
not
be true.

‘But Shadox
is
the town’s oldest name,’ she said. ‘Nothing is older than Shadox …’

Without looking at her, Pott’nfer said, ‘This dance is
the oldest dance in the area. Older than Stretley Men. Older than anything.’

‘Then it’s older than history,’ Tallis murmured, staring at the white band of newly-shaved skin below the farmer’s dark, peaked cap.

‘No arguing with that,’ Pott’nfer said, and his friends laughed, a private joke that neither Tallis nor Mr Williams understood. Mr Williams glanced at her and asked, ‘How do you know about the village’s name?’

‘I’ve got a book on it,’ Tallis said. ‘Place-names. And our gardener, Mr Gaunt, he knew anyway. Shadox means
shadows
, but not like a sun’s shadow. It means a shadowy place. A ghostly place. A moonshadow …’

Mr Williams looked fascinated. ‘It seems to me that this village has more than its fair share of ghostly associations.’

Before Tallis could reply, Pott’nfer said gruffly, ‘This dance is older than words. So why don’t you just be quiet, young miss, and watch the fun?’

Mr Williams raised his eyebrows as if to say to Tallis, Well, then. That puts paid to that. He whispered, ‘Meet you in that field? Tomorrow? Before breakfast?’

Tallis nodded enthusiastically and the man turned back to watch the dancers form up in their lines, ready for the Shadoxhurst Shadow Dance.

It was well past dusk, now, and night was gathering. The church was floodlit and the moon was up. The torches still burned around the green, those from outside the village having been brought in. They were expiring slowly, but there would be firelight enough to see the dance through.

‘I
love
this dance,’ Mr Williams whispered.

‘It frightens me,’ Tallis contended. ‘It’s not like the others.’

‘That’s why I find it so fascinating. The Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, and this Shadow Dance, come from a
very
ancient tradition. No “happy rustics frolicking”. Except perhaps for the wild jig at the end.’

Tallis shivered with apprehension as she thought of it.

On the green, close to the solitary oak, The Shadoxmen had lined up in two rows, facing each other. Between them was a tall, weird-looking woman, dressed in black rags down to her feet and covered with a crudely-stitched cloak of hide and wool. Her face was whitened into featurelessness. On her head she wore a ‘crown’ of feathers, straw and strands of twigs. In one hand she held an L-shaped fragment of deer antler – the beam and the crown point – in the other a flaxen noose. She remained quite motionless.

To the single, simple sound of a violin, a melancholy yet lively tune, the dancers approached each other and parted, then slowly skipped around the solitary female figure in their centre. The tune abruptly changed to a leaping jig and the ten burly locals obliged, striking each other as they leapt vertically into the air. Accompanying this terrific leap, the words, shouted as one voice: ‘One of us must go but it won’t be me!’

As they crashed back to the earth, so one of the Shadoxmen split off from the group and ran into the crowds, leaving only nine men, then eight, and so on until only one of the Shadoxmen remained, circling around the central female figure.

‘This is the bit I
really
like the best,’ Mr Williams whispered.

Tallis, aware of what would happen at the end of the dance, was looking apprehensively around among the crowds. Where were the dancers who had quit the field? Where were the guest dancers, the Pikermen, the Thackermen, the Leicester Hubbyhousers and the rest? They
would be sneaking through the audience, selecting their targets for the wild jig. Tallis secretly wanted to be pulled on to the green to dance, but was less than secretly embarrassed and afraid at the thought of it.

She could see no movement behind her.

On the green, the last of the Shadoxmen to remain – Shadox Bone – drew the bone horn from his belt and began to sound it, only inches away from the stationary woman’s face, as if challenging her … or calling to her. This deep and eerie summoning lasted for all of sixty seconds, and the audience watched in breathless silence.

And suddenly the female shape shuddered. From beneath its skirts darted a girl in a green and red tunic, with her face painted a featureless green. The crowd cheered and the blowing of the horn ceased. The girl took the antler pickaxe and the noose from the hands of the mannequin. She ‘struck’ at the Shadoxman, then ‘hanged’ him. Each action was accompanied by a great roar of approval from the watchers, and then the accordion started up a sprightly and rhythmic wild jig.

The crowds parted and eight of the nine dancers who had been ‘lost’, plus all the guest dancers, came racing back on to the green, each with a struggling, twitching ‘victim’, some of them children, most adults, men and women both.

Tallis started to laugh with glee at the vision of the protesting audience, but the laughter turned to a scream as two firm hands lifted her from her feet and whisked her through the old men and on to the dancing square.

‘No!’ Tallis shrieked. ‘Mr Williams!’

But all she could hear was Mr Williams’s loud, cheering laughter.

Who had got her? Which of the Shadoxmen had taken her? She had to know! She had to know!

She was swung around dizzyingly, pulled forward into
the dancing mass then back again. The man who held her seemed to spin before her face, a blur of white and colour, a brief scent of the flowers that laced his belt, a sudden jingle of the bells that were tied to his wrists. She tried to see his face but could see only the orange of his beard. She looked for the symbol that he carried …

Owl? Stone? Iron? Feather? Which one? Which one?

She saw it at last. A spray of twig, with its five red berries, stitched to his breast.

He was Thorn, then. Thorn.

A friend.

Oak passed in front of her, grinning down at her, a thickly bearded man, strong like a tree. Bell swung her round, the bronze bell on his chest ringing out in its different, duller tone. She held hands with others and skipped in the spiral line, through arches of arms, through tunnels of bodies bent at the waist, in and out of the leaping figures of the Morrismen.

Arms up, arms down, a rousing cry of nonsense words
(riggery, jiggery, hoggery, huggery)
and around again, trapped in the swirl of bodies. She looked up and saw the pale face of the clock on the church. The night sky was full of sparks from the fires which had been kicked into new life by the wild dancing.

She came close to the split oak on the green and as she was whirled past thought she saw white birds emerging from the hollow trunk. It was a moment of alarm. Something beat around her head, a whirr of wings. She looked back –

The oak shivered and leaned towards her …

Something was rising within it … ghostly …

Tallis was whipped up into the air by strong arms, then placed down, tugged and twirled by the raucous dancers. She laughed, then stumbled.

She fell on the cold earth, her hand getting muddy
where the turf had been churned to the soil. A strong arm wrenched her up to her feet again. She looked up and felt a moment’s panic as she saw the owl’s head on the man’s chest. A second figure grabbed at her and sent her flying and she saw the pale features of Feather, the bird’s wings bristling on his hat. The music faded, the swirl of bodies, the cries of the festival folk, became distant, even though they flung themselves around her. All she could hear was the cry of birds, voices raised, the screeching, howling, chattering sounds of all the birds in the world, and she could feel their wings and the air stirring and the night sky darkened as they circled above her.