Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (19 page)

‘Hollowings?’

‘Visions. More than visions … contacts. But I can’t make any sense of them, or of the forbidden place. Not until I know its true name.’

‘This business of names,’ Mr Williams said, ‘is slightly confusing. Who exactly
knows
its true name?’

‘People who have been there and come back. If they didn’t know its name they wouldn’t have been able to
get
back.’

‘You seem to know all the rules …’

Tallis shook her head. ‘I don’t, though. And I don’t know all the names, either.’

‘It sounds a very grim place indeed. Is it like the Underworld, do you think?’

‘I suppose it is. But a living world, not a world of the dead.’

‘Like Avalon?’

Tallis, perhaps to his surprise, turned wide eyes upon him. She seemed startled. Then she frowned as she whispered, ‘Yes … yes it is … that’s something like it. That name. It’s an old name. Avalon … something like Avalon …’

‘Avalin?’ Mr Williams ventured. ‘Ovilon? Uvalain …’

Tallis waved him silent. ‘I’ll hear it soon. I’m sure I will.’

‘Iviluna? Avonesse?’

‘Ssh!’ Tallis said, alarmed. Her head was full of echoing sounds, like a voice in a valley, shouting at her, half lost on the wind. The sounds came and went, a name, so close … so close …

But it drifted away again and she was left with the smell of damp air and the touch of heat on her cheeks as the sun began to burn fiercely from between the clouds.

Mr Williams watched the girl anxiously as the minutes passed and she remained quite still, as if in a daze, staring dreamily at him. She seemed to be listening to something a long way off. Indeed, there was a sudden movement in the hedge and when Mr Williams glanced there he realized that they were being watched. He caught a glimpse of a dark cowl, and the hint of white below it. Almost at once the figure withdrew into shadow, but Tallis had gone pale, her face almost rigid, almost old …

‘Are you all right?’

Tallis said, ‘A name is like a call. When you name something you call it. Now I begin to understand …’

‘What do you understand?’

Tallis’s whole demeanour had changed. She was shivering, despite the heat. Her wretchedly pale face became even gaunter and the fair hair that hung so lank around her shoulders seemed to shiver and glitter with the shaking of the girl’s body. Mr Williams felt a slight breeze around him and glanced back to where that enigmatic figure had been standing, just seconds ago.

A white face … a movement … then just shadow.

Tallis smiled at him suddenly, disarmingly. ‘The Bone Forest,’ she said. ‘Yes … of course … now I have it …’

‘Speak to me,’ Mr Williams urged, concerned for the girl’s well-being. ‘What’s going through your mind?’

‘A story,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve been thinking of it on and off for several days. Now it’s been told to me completely. Have you had enough stories yet?’

‘No. Not yet. The more the merrier.’

‘Then I’ll tell you the Tale of The Bone Forest.’

‘Another good title.’

‘It’s an old tale, but not as old as some, and not the oldest version of it, either.’

Reaching out to take her hand, Mr Williams said, ‘Someone told you this story?’

‘Yes.’

‘When.’

‘Just now. Just a moment ago. Do you want to hear it?’

Mr Williams felt frightened, he didn’t know why. He let Tallis’s hand drop and sat up straighter. ‘Yes please.’

She was strange, very tense. Her voice was the same, but the words seemed wrong for her. Although her eyes glittered as she spoke and her lips moved, and her tongue licked her lips, and she breathed between sentences …
the old man had the distinct sensation that someone was speaking
through
the girl.

And yet …

It was a disturbing moment, but he had little time to think about it because Tallis had raised both of her hands for silence, had closed her eyes and re-opened them, exposing a watery, vacant gaze, focused in the middle of nowhere.

‘This is the story of The Bone Forest,’ she said softly. ‘When you summon good, you always summon evil …’

The Bone Forest

The young woman had not been born in the village, and so she was forced to make her camp outside its walls. She had arrived at the edge of the forest one spring day, and she was a very sorry sight indeed. Her skirts were long but ragged, as if stitched together from bits and pieces of the cloth that is used to dry the sweat off a horse. Her blouse was stained with the juice of berries. Her hair, which was very tangled, was so dirty that it took a sharp pair of eyes to catch the fine fire of its hidden colour. She was pretty, though, even if two of her teeth were missing. And she carried – apart from a cloth sack with her simple tent and utensils – two leather pouches.

There was a young man in the village who had been named Cuwyn, because he had once been hound-footed and fast on the hunt, but was now lame. He was the youngest of three and his brothers had fought in battle, died honourably, and been given burial beneath fine mounds of chalk and earth. He watched the young woman from the village wall and after a year he decided to go out and ask her three things. So he dressed in his hunting green, and strapped a paunching knife to his belt. He sharpened two spears and mended a net.

In the village he was laughed at. Cuwyn ‘fleetfoot’ was going on the hunt. A lame stag is living in the north, they told him; then laughed. A fish without fins has been seen swimming in the slow brook!

Cuwyn ignored them all. He was an outcast in his own village. He was the warrior who had not died and been buried with his brothers.

He recognized a fellow traveller.

So he polished his teeth with a piece of stripped hazel and went out to the woman’s camp, where she was prodding at a small fire. She looked very thin and very hungry.

‘I have three questions for you,’ he said to her.

‘Ask them,’ the woman said.

‘The first question is, what is your name?’

‘I have been here a year, ignored and abused, and no one has asked me my name. So make any name you like.’

‘I shall call you Ash, since I see that you have an ash twig in your right hand and in all likelihood it is to ash that you will return when you are dead.’

She smiled but said nothing.

He asked his second question. ‘What have you been eating for the year?’

‘My own heart,’ said Ash. ‘I came here to bring luck to you all, and you have left me out here with only lame wolves, stinking boars and carrion birds for company. Fortunately I have a big heart and it has kept me going.’

‘Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ said Cuwyn. ‘This is my third question. What have you got in those two sacks?’

Now Ash looked up at him and smiled. ‘Prophecy,’ she said. ‘I thought you would never ask.’

‘Prophecy, is it?’ the young man murmured, scratching at his cheek and thinking hard. ‘There is one thing in the way of prophecy which this village could benefit from …’

‘And what is that?’

‘A knowledge of the forest. Too many times we hunt without success. The wood is deep, dark and dense. You could be standing next to a brown bear and both of you miss the other.’

‘Are you a hunter then?’ Ash asked.

‘I am,’ lied Cuwyn, glancing away.

‘Then I can help you,’ said Ash. ‘But only you. In return for a small cut of the meat I shall make you into the Hunter himself. Your hunting will be wilder than the Devil’s. The beasts you bring home will feed whole armies.’

So Cuwyn sat down by the young woman’s fire and watched her strange way of prophecy.

In the first leather bag she had twigs from every tree that grew in the wood. She had gathered them over the years and there was not a tree in the land which was not in the bag in the form of a short, trimmed stick.

‘This is my forest,’ Ash said, as she held the twigs towards him.

‘Every forest is here, even from before the Ice, and until the next Ice, which a few women have seen by looking into the fire which melts copper. All the woods from every age, here, in my hand. If I break a twig, like this –’

And she broke the ash twig that she had earlier been holding –

‘– I have destroyed a forest in a far-off place and a far-off time. Can you hear the howling of the fire? The screaming of the men who run before its flames?’

‘No,’ said Cuwyn.

Ash smiled. ‘Because you have no true hearing.’

She rattled the second leather bag.

‘In here I have the bones of many beasts, small fragments that I have gathered on my journeys. Not
everything is here. But Man is. And for food there are pigs, and hares and deer and horses. There are plumed birds and fat fish. More than enough to keep a sallow youth like you from going hungry.’

He looked at the shards of brown bone, which Ash had tipped into the palm of her hand.

‘They mean nothing. They are bits of dulled ivory. How can you tell which is which?’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not until they are thrown.’

So she closed her eyes and cast the twigs and the bones. Eyes still shut she reached into the pile of wood and drew out two of the sticks. She placed them in a cross before her. Still blind she took a piece of bone and placed it on the top of the twigs. When she finally looked at them she hesitated, then said, ‘In a forest of oak and hazel, a giant pig is running on a northward track.’

Cuwyn needed no second prompting. He gathered up his spears, nets and snares and ran twelve miles around the forest until he saw a place where oak and hazel crowded to the light. As he entered the wood the sky changed and everything became silent. He was unnerved at first, but his vision had changed too and he seemed to see right through the trees. He noticed how a giant pig, its back raised into lethal spines, was running on a northward track. He hunted it and caught it, and although the tussle was a long one, he cut off its life and dragged its carcase home, cutting off a slice of meat and leaving it with Ash.

The second week he visited her he felt stronger. He carried two spears and two knives, but he had dispensed with the net and the snares. He crouched before Ash and she shook the bags out on to the ground, blindly selecting the two twigs and the gleaming piece of bone.

‘There is a forest where hornbeam grows in tangles
with thorn. In it you will find a deer taller at the shoulder than a tall man.’

Cuwyn stared at her. ‘In all of this land there is no forest of hornbeam and thorn.’

‘Call to it and it will come,’ Ash said. ‘It is there to be found. I did not say that you were hunting in this land alone.’

Puzzled by that, Cuwyn began to run around the edge of the forest. After a while he grew tired and entered the dense wood to find shade and a few nuts. He scratched his hand on a thorn and followed deeper into the wood, and soon the silvery trunks of hornbeam began to gleam and beckon. He battled though the thorny tangle, listening to the silence and watching the eerie sky, for it had grown dark, but not in the way of night. It was cold, too, as if there was ice on the land around. There was a deer caught in a thicket and he struck it quickly in the neck, warming himself on the paunched carcase before dragging it back to his own land.

‘Did you find your forest of hornbeam and thorn?’ Ash asked on his return.

‘Yes,’ the young man said, giving her a cut of the meat. ‘But I swear it was not there a year ago.’

‘It is not there now,’ the woman said. ‘But it existed once, when the land was younger.’

‘Cook your flesh,’ Cuwyn said. ‘Your words frighten me.’

And so it went on:

In a forest of alder and willow two wild horses were lapping at a pool.

In a wood of oak and lime, hares as fat as hogs were bounding on a southward track.

In a woody scrub of beech and juniper, game birds, too heavy with feeding, were ripe for the kill.

For nine weeks Cuwyn ran the forest edge and found
these strange woods, and in each he found the hunting that could sustain the village. His confidence grew. The wound in his leg troubled him less. He became fleet-footed. The village no longer laughed at him. He laughed at them. He felt great courage.

On the tenth visit to Ash he carried only a single spear, and one gutting knife.

She cast the twigs and picked the bone, placing it on top of the cross and opening her eyes. But she said nothing. Beneath the grime on her face her skin went white. As she made to cover the charm, Cuwyn reached out and stopped her.

‘The village is hungry. Tell me where the hunting is.’

‘It is in a forest of birchwood and thorn,’ Ash said.

‘But what is there to hunt?’

‘No beast known to mortal man,’ she said softly. ‘I do not recognize this piece of bone at all.’

‘Then I must take the chance that it will be good to eat.’

‘You will take more of a chance than that. What is stalking in the wood is more ferocious than anything you have ever hunted. And it is not running, it is looking for you. It is, itself, a hunter. Wait a week, Cuwyn, and I will throw again for you.’

‘I cannot wait. The village cannot wait. I am the only hunter now.’

Ash stared at the bone forest. ‘This wood is an evil place. Even the land rejects it.’ She broke the pattern of twig and bone. ‘What walks there is a mad thing, made from a mad mind. It has stepped out of darkness to stop you. You have taken too much. You have repaid nothing. It is my fault too. My charms, and your good hunting, have summoned an older force into being.’

‘It will have to reckon with me,’ Cuwyn said. ‘I will bring you a cut of its meat before duskfall.’

‘You will be dead before noon.’

‘I will survive longer than that.’

‘I believe that you will,’ Ash said, ‘but not in this world.’

He went, then, running along the forest edge.

Ash thought about his words. At noon she cast the twigs and the bone, but they said nothing to her. She smiled and was pleased.

He had been right, then, right in that one thing.

But an hour later she cast the twigs and the bone and shook her head sadly as she looked at the forest of birch and thorn, and the splinter of human ivory that lay upon it.

In a forest of birch and thorn, a man is running from a shadow
…