Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (22 page)

The gateway to the winter world had long since faded. Tallis, staring at the glimmer of light on the dingy glass of the greenhouse, realized that it was a sign of the new day. She began to hear activity everywhere. It was as if she were coming out of a dream. The sounds of dawn intruded into her conscious mind and at once made her feel cold.

She picked up her new doll and went into the garden, scudding her feet through the dewy grass to make patterns in the moisture. The dog was prowling in the garden, sniffing out the signs of night’s visitors. Distantly, rooks called and flapped restlessly in their high nests.

There was another sound, though, and this one set her
pulse racing. It was like a low roar, very animal, very weird. She ran to the gate and stared into the distance. A heavy mist hung over the stream at the bottom of the field. But as she watched she heard the sound again and saw the furtive yet confident movement of a tall animal in the hollow.

Its antlers pierced the surface of the fog, moving like hard fingers in the clearer day.

Suddenly the beast broke cover. It was on the far side of the water and after a glimpse of its broad body, Tallis lost sight of Broken Boy among the oak and elm hedge that lined Sad Song Meadow.

‘Wait for me!’ she shouted and clambered over the gate. The dog chased after her, barking loudly. It didn’t jump the gate and by the time Tallis was at the stile it had become silent again. The girl entered the mist by the stream, picked her way across the stepping stones and emerged on the stag’s spoor, tracking it precisely along the hedge.

After a few minutes she arrived, breathless, at Hunter’s Brook.

Without ceremony, but moving very carefully, she took four steps into Find Me Again Field. She was being watched from the far wood, but when she looked there she could see no movement, nor guess where the watcher was hiding. It was Broken Boy, though, she was sure of that. He had waited for her all these years. He had been thought dead, killed by poachers, and perhaps, indeed, he had suffered just that fate. But there was far more to Broken Boy than just old meat on tall bones.

And he wanted Tallis!

She bent down, now, and pushed the hawthorn doll into the hard ground, working it vigorously to break the sun-dried turf, then twisting it into the clay earth beneath. When the head was below the grass she closed the wound
with her fingers, spat on the cut and placed her hand upon it. ‘I know you now,’ she said aloud. ‘I know your name. You can’t trap me.’

A few minutes later she reached the broken road which had once led to the lodge. She stood in the high grass, listening to the sounds of movement in the dense woodland. Then she approached the fence, with its faded notice, and quickly clambered over the loose wire. Immediately she could see the yellow light of the glade by the ruined house.

She picked her way carefully along the hard path underfoot and came, for only the second time in her life, into the garden of the place which the wood had claimed. She was shocked by what she saw.

The great black totem had fallen, split along its length and now a mass of beetles crawled in the hollowed-out inside; it was sinking into the clinging grass that had once been a lawn. Its leering smile was turned into the earth. Draped on trees around the clearing were skins and fragments of hide; deer, fox, and rabbit. The deep pit in the lawn, which a few years ago had been dry and dead, was smouldering now. Tallis approached it cautiously, glancing frequently at the crowding trees with their rotting rags of animal skin.

The pit was filled with charred bone. She kicked at the fire’s remains and a fine ash floated into the dancing light.

Nervously she called out. The heavy trunks of oak absorbed her words, deadening the sound, and replied only with the rustle of bird life in their branches. Tallis patrolled the small garden area, observing everything: here the remains of a wire fence, there, impaled by roots, several slats of wood which might have come from a chicken coop, or kennel.

With a start she suddenly saw the crawling carcass of a sheep; it had been thrown into the undergrowth and its
bloody face, stripped of flesh, seemed to be watching her. Now, as she listened, she heard the buzz of flies; and when she leaned close she caught the first smells of the process of decay.

Who had been here?

She crouched by the warm ash and picked out five or six fragments of bone. They were small, from some small animal … a rabbit perhaps, or a small pig. When she closed her fingers around them no images came into her mind and she smiled to herself, remembering her own story of the Bone Forest.

‘No talent for prophecy,’ she murmured aloud.

She gathered more of the bone and filled one of her pockets. She searched the ground for footprints, but found only traces of a horse. Following these she found the track which led into the deeper wood, through the dry fern and nettle that constantly grew to block such paths.

And she thought of the young man wearing the skin of a stag, the sun making his pale body seem smooth, his movements lithe, like an animal’s, his actions, by the stream, so swift, so savage …

‘So this is where you’ve been hiding –’

Was he watching her? Was he here now? She looked slowly round, but sensed no danger.

And she was here for a different purpose, in any case. She walked through the saplings that crushed against the house, stepped carefully through their guarding ranks and pushed at the broken windows of the study, moving them in, then tugging them out again to make a gap through which she could squeeze her body. It was quite bright in the room, the roof being open in several places to the elements.

Broken-backed and rotted books lay everywhere. Tallis walked among them, kicking them aside, and stepped
round the central feature of the study, a great oak, forked at his base to form an awkward seat. Its double trunk reached through the crumbling ceiling, into the light. Like everything else in the room it was laced with ivy.

Some of the display cases still had their glass fronts intact, but they were upturned and their contents scattered. Tallis picked through a pile of broken pottery, touching the shards and moving them aside almost gently to expose metal spearheads, flint artefacts and all manner of strange coinage and bone statuary.

But it was not for these mementoes of history that she had come and she moved back around the central tree to the ivy-covered desk which she had seen on her previous visit.

As she began to strip the ivy from the drawers she realized with a shock that someone else had been here recently; the ivy was already torn, though replaced to cover the desk like a leafy tablecloth. When she pulled at the top drawer it slid out easily, and the sodden, rotting mass that was contained within was revealed in all its stinking glory: sheets of paper and envelopes compacted into a single, yellow mass; photographs and exercise books; a bible and a dictionary; a pair of woollen gloves; a seething mass of beetle larvae.

Tallis closed the drawer and drew in a deep breath, wrinkling her nose at the terrible odour. But in the second drawer she found what she wanted, the journal she had known was here; her grandfather’s letter had referred to it and she had dreamed of an old man writing at this very desk, an image of the man who had studied Ryhope Wood’s ‘mythagos’.

The journal, too, was water-sodden and mouldy, despite its thick leather binding and the oilskin sheet which was wrapped around it. Over the years just too
much water had poured from the gaping hole above the desk, and seeped into the precious pages.

But again she saw … someone else had already opened the journal. When she eased the pages apart they opened naturally towards the end, and a green leaf had been placed between two sheets. She turned the pages carefully and could make out words, though much of the ink had run, and in places an orange mould had eaten through the paper. When she came to a page where the precise, rounded handwriting could be easily interpreted she bent forward and began to read.

Tallis was confused. Hood? Robin Hood? She turned to the front cover of the journal, easing it open. She found that her hands were shaking. She was trying not to damage the book any more than years of rain and rot had done. There were words written on the frontispiece and she stared at them long and hard:

After a minute of silent contemplation, Tallis flipped carefully back into the body of the journal:

Tallis continued to turn the pages, and at last came back to the page marked out by a leaf. The writing was blurred, the ink smeared, and almost at once she came upon a word that made no sense to her at all. But as her gaze drifted down the lines one passage sprang out at her:

After that, in an infuriating parallel with her grandfather’s letter to her, the words became obscure.

She stared at the page and came to a decision. She would have to ask her father to help her understand the words. So she wrapped the journal in its oilskin, tucked it under her arm, and eased the desk drawer shut. She felt as if she was disturbing the dead, but she knew she would bring the document back.

She turned to the French windows, intending to leave the lodge and return to her own house, but a sound outside made her start with fright. It was a rustling
movement in the undergrowth. Almost immediately she thought ‘Broken Boy’!

She ran quickly to the windows, and started to push them open, hoping to see the stag waiting for her in the clearing … but she froze, then took two quick steps back into the room, as she saw, coming towards her through the saplings the tallest, strangest-looking man she had ever seen. He was encased in fur, from the hood around his head to the thick boots on his feet. The fur was black and silver and seemed wet; it was tied around his arms and waist and legs with wide strips of leather, from which hung gleaming shards of white bone and stone and the shrivelled carcasses of tiny birds, still in their dark feathers. From beneath the hood the face that peered so intently at the house seemed very dark, but whether with dirt or a beard Tallis was not at first sure.

A second after Tallis had reached her hiding place – behind the V-shaped bole of the oak in the room – the light from the French windows was blocked by the man’s shape. He was so tall that he had to stoop to enter the study. Strangely, on this hot summer’s day, there was a smell of snow about him, and of wet. Tallis, her heart thundering, crouched low against the cool, hard wood, clutching Huxley’s journal to her chest. As the man picked his way carefully through the rubble, kicking at the shards of wood and glass, Tallis edged around to keep the tree between herself and the stranger.

His breathing was slow and he was whispering to himself, the words sometimes emerging as a growl.

Then from elsewhere in the house came the noise of wood cracking. A voice shouted, the words incomprehensible, the tones clearly female. The man in the study shouted back. Tallis risked a glance from behind the oak and saw that he had pushed back his hood and was tugging at the door from study to hall. His hair was thick
and black and tied into a topknot, with two long pigtails on each temple. It looked greasy. Two stripes of red had been painted above each pigtail. The leather binding of the topknot was slung with the skull of a blackbird, the yellow beak tucked into the tight hair at the back of the man’s head.

When the door shattered before his strength, the man stepped through. Tallis immediately darted for the outside, holding on grimly to the heavy journal. She heard a cry from behind her and the fur-clad figure came crashing through the study. Tallis yelled and slammed shut the French windows. She raced through the saplings and reached the track which led to safety. But she hesitated, catching sight of something from the corner of her eye.

A boy was watching her from the undergrowth. He stepped out into full view. He was almost as tall as her and swathed in the same black and silver fur as the man. His hair, too, was tied into a spiky bunch on the top of his head, but it was short; he wore a white strap around his hair from which hung several tiny mammals’ feet. His cheeks were smeared with green and white paint. He watched through wide, coal-black eyes. Tallis noticed that in one hand he held a small wooden figure.

This was all she observed before the boy began to screech at the top of his voice, pointing at her. What he yelled was one word, and Tallis remembered it as she ran from the lumbering man who now pursued her.

‘Rajathuk! Rajathuk!’

She fled through the dark wood, veering into the undergrowth as again she sensed a man standing close to her, although when she looked back she could see nothing. She could hear the tall figure from the study grunting and battling with the thorns that had snared him. Tallis reached daylight and climbed the wire fence.

Outside, looking in: she backed away from the trees,
stepping through the long grass carefully. The breeze shifted the wire, rustled the leaves. A face slowly formed in the gloom, a man’s face, shrouded in green. It peered at her, then frowned. She stood quite still, wondering whether the man would leave the wood and give chase, but after a while the face withdrew.