Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (27 page)

As Scathach galloped closer Tallis could see how the swirl of birds around the Oyzin were flying
through
its elongated body. They spiralled from the winter brightness of a world glimpsed through the feathers, then circled into the dark storm sky of the real world before flowing like a tide back into the winter. Giant wings rose and fell. A cry like the screeching of a crane cut the night air and the wind around Tallis’s clutching figure gusted violently.

Gyonval’s horse reared and bucked, a final protest before the strange knight plunged into the shuddering form of the mythago. At the last moment the horse rose in the air as if flying. The lance flashed, buried itself in the downy flesh of the creature’s neck. Then horse and rider had passed out of sight, through the body of the beast, lost in the swirl of wings and snow.

The Oyzin exploded, bursting in a silent spray of snow and ice, of birds and feathers. Tallis ducked down. Wings struck her hair, beaks pecked her back. Scathach brushed
with his hands at the frantic flock, kicked his horse so that the animal leapt the stream, stumbled, straightened and galloped for its life towards the shelter of the wood.

The surviving Jaguthin followed. Of Gyonval there was no sign. Tallis glanced back and saw a vortex of brightness drifting up into the night, dense flights of birds flowing with it as it faded.

Scathach led Tallis along a winding track, through briar-filled hollows and over mossy rocks, until at last they came into the glade before the house, the old garden. She was clutching Huxley’s journal to her chest. She was cold; the book gave her a last warmth. For a moment they kept to the edge of the wood, watching the dead house, the silent starlit clearing with its fallen totem, its rags, its ghosts. When Scathach was sure it was safe he led the way through the darkness to the French windows, then stood guard outside while Tallis returned the book to its shrine, pushing shut the drawer, reaching in the blackness to tug back the ivy, covering the secret place.

When it was done she said a silent ‘thank you’ to the man whose wisdom had created this icon of belief and quest, then slipped out to re-join her stag-youth.

‘It’s done,’ she said.

‘As is my time here,’ Scathach whispered. ‘Come on. If the Oyzin formed then the carrion eaters can’t be far away …’

‘Carrion eaters?’

‘You saw them today. Here. Head-hunters; eaters of human flesh. There is very little time and I still don’t know what magic you used to bring them through.’

‘Bird Spirit Land,’ Tallis said quietly, and she felt the sudden fright in Scathach’s body as he ran. He stopped, stared at her hard. He knew the name.

‘Bird Spirit Land,’ he whispered, his head shaking as if
he could not believe the words he was hearing. ‘What have you done? What
have
you done?’

Nervously, Tallis reached out to touch his arm. ‘I’ll show you,’ she said. ‘It’s a meadow. Stretley Stones meadow. Close to the stream …’

‘Quickly, then …’

She led him from the wood to the place where the old sign still rattled on its wire fence. Skirting Ryhope, keeping to the shadows, to the marshy edge, they came back to Stretley Stones. There was no sign of the Oyzin. The sky, cloud-streaked and bright, now, seemed empty of birds. But there was a sharp, unpleasant smell in the air, like bleach.

Tallis led the way to Strong against the Storm. The other tall oaks around Stretley Stones meadow seemed to shake as she came close. Tallis showed Scathach the mask of the bird which she had carved on the oak. The man ran his finger lightly over the shallow scar in the bark, feeling it rather than seeing it.

‘When did you do this?’ he asked.

‘At the start of the summer,’ Tallis said. ‘A couple of months ago.’

He laughed, banged the tree with his hand. ‘That was when I felt called
back
to the wood. Someone wanted us together … It was two months ago that I first realized who and what you were …’

‘There are more,’ Tallis said. And she showed him how the whole field had been ringed by her protective symbols. She indicated where she had buried the bones of blackbirds, crows and sparrows. She hinted at the knots of feathers tied to the thorn between the oaks. She remembered the circle of bird blood and urine that she had painted round the field. ‘Bird Spirit Land,’ she said, watching Scathach carefully, frightened to think of what
she knew and what she should tell him. ‘And all to stop the birds from coming and pecking at a friend.’

Now he stared at her through his pale, sad eyes. She could smell the concern in him; she
knew
he knew. But he asked, ‘What friend?’

What should she say? What would be right? If she told him what she had seen perhaps he would flee in panic, back into the wood. Perhaps he would leave her, and she needed him, now. He knew the wood. He knew about the realm beyond the wood, where Harry was held prisoner. She had made a pledge to her parents to bring Harry home, and since meeting Scathach for the first time she began to feel that she could achieve that difficult task. She needed her Stag Youth as much as he seemed to need her. She needed him to help her understand. She needed his wiles and ways of the wood. She needed the reassurance of his company. And in any case, she had declared her love for him. He was strong, and he was fine looking. She knew she was supposed to
feel
things for him, in her heart, in her chest, but that would come. That would come.

Selfish! Selfish! she said to herself, but still she took the coward’s way again, shivering as she told the lie. ‘It was a vision. The vision of a battle. One of the hooded women taught me the way of vision …’

‘Go on …’

‘I saw the battle that once occurred here. There were dead men everywhere. It was dusk, in early winter, and a storm was coming. There were fires in the distance. Old women were moving through the field of the dead. They were hacking the heads from the bodies, and stripping the armour …’

‘Bavduin,’ Scathach said, his voice trembling as if some terrible truth were being revealed. Tallis watched him by darkness, remembering that name –
Bavduin
– from her
tale of Old Forbidden Place. ‘The lost battle …’ Scathach said. ‘The forgotten army … Bavduin. You’ve seen it. You’ve had a vision of the place, And you say …’ His hand reached out to her shoulder. ‘You say you saw a friend there?’

‘There was a storm, and below the storm, birds, swirling like the birds that came from Oyzin. It was a frightening sight, and I was frightened by it. One warrior was sprawled beneath the tree, this tree. I called to him. He was badly wounded. I told him my name and he called back the name by which I came to know him. I felt so sorry for him, and he was a heart-friend. I couldn’t bear to see his body looted so I made a spell to stop the birds. I frightened the old women. They fled. But they returned with a man, a druid or someone like that. His power was greater than mine …’

‘And what happened?’

Tallis shrugged. ‘They turned out to be his friends. They came and fetched him away and I was too late to stop them.’

She could still see the flames on the pyre, by the wood at the bottom of the hill, and the woman rider, and her cry, and her hair, clay-painted and as bright as the flame. But she couldn’t tell Scathach that it was him she had seen, his fate she had witnessed.

Scathach was ahead of her, however; perhaps she had betrayed the truth in every gesture, every moment of hesitation. ‘What was the friend’s name?’ he asked.

Tallis felt her heart race as she whispered. ‘Scathach. Your name …’

He nodded grimly. ‘My mother’s name for me. In the language of the
Amborioscantii
, “scathach” means “he who hears the voice”. When I was born a prophecy was made about me, that I would become “Dur scatha achen”. It is a common prophecy. It means “the boy who
will listen to the voice of the oak”. I had always supposed this meant I would grow up to be strong, like the tree. A warrior. Strong against the storm,’ he added and Tallis glanced up at her old friend, the silent tree, the place of vision. Scathach went on, ‘But perhaps it has always meant something more. While I lay in a dream, your voice reached me from the oak tree. And you had a vision of that dream …’

What was he saying. That he believed their minds had touched through the spirit realm of dreams? He didn’t seem to have grasped that it was his
death
she had seen. And yet … perhaps he was right.

He was saying, ‘Someone seems to have made sure of our meeting. But who connected us through the vision? Which lost soul, I wonder? Which “fate”?’

‘The gaberlungi?’ Tallis hazarded.

Scathach wasn’t sure. ‘They’re mythagos. They have come from your own memories …’

‘Or my grandfather’s,’ Tallis said softly, thinking that the women had been known to the land from before her birth. ‘What about the carrion eaters? Could they have made the connection between us?’

‘No,’ Scathach said. ‘They only came through today …’ Of course! ‘And anyway, they’re here because of this …’ He slapped the hard bark of the oak. ‘When you made Bird Spirit Land in this world … you made it in another. Many others! Tallis, you are young and unformed in many ways, but you have a mind more powerful than I could have imagined. Your skills have reached beyond the wood, beyond the years. You have done something that I believed only certain shamans could do; you have manipulated forest in your world and created changes in the forests of many other ages. If used carefully it is a skill that gives access to many times, many ages, many hidden places. The Jaguthin, the questing
band of knights, have been using those hollowings in legend since the first stories were told. Each is at the mercy of time and the dream, using the magic of people such as yourself to complete the cycle of their own legend. When you create a hollowing you call from past and future times, and the shaman should control the calling.’ He stroked the bird face on Strong against the Storm. ‘But you have called without control. You have released without safeguard.’

Tallis realized that the young man was shaking. When she took his hand she felt how cold was his flesh, how he trembled.

And she was thinking of the story of the Bone Forest, and Ash, who could rub two twigs together and add bone and send the fleet-footed hunter to a strange wood, where the hunting was magic.

I am Ash
, she thought.
I am Ash
.

Scathach was saying, ‘I remember my father talking of Bird Spirit Land. A terrible place. A place of winter and slow dying, a place where a great battle was fought. A place that traps souls. The dark side of Lavondyss. When you create it, so it calls to the angry spirits of twenty thousand years. That’s why the Oyzin came, and the carrion eaters. And more will be emerging from the wood. Bird Spirit Land is an
angry
place. Poor Gyonval … part of the cycle of tales of the Jaguthin contains their Seven Moon Rides; in one of them, a knight destroys a giant, who is disguised as a bird. I had not expected him to be summoned to his fate so fast. There are usually signs of the calling …’

He was suddenly nervous, glancing out across the night lands, then up into the sky, sniffing the air, listening to the murmur of the wind. ‘There is so little time,’ he said. ‘We
must
get back beyond the edge of the wood before dawn. We
must
find your animal guide …’

He took Tallis’s hand again and ran with her, back towards the broken road that led into Ryhope Wood. Tallis, breathless, managed to gasp out, ‘Who
is
your father?’

‘I’m afraid he’s cold bones, now,’ Scathach said. ‘I’ve been gone a long time and the years run differently in the wood. But if he’s still alive then he can tell us much. He can explain things to you far more clearly than I can. He has lived in the wood, at the very edge of Lavondyss, for many years. He understands the way of ghosts, the way of shaman, the way of the dream …’

‘But who
is
he? He was from this world, you said.’

‘You read about him in the Book. He’s my reason for being here. He sent me on an errand. But I’m afraid I’ve failed him …’

‘WJ …’ Tallis said. Scathach had stopped by the wood’s edge, staring back to the place where Gyonval had destroyed the apparition of the Oyzin. He seemed tense, alert for movement.

‘My father’s great companion was Huxley. The man who inhabited the Shrine. Huxley died here, in this forbidden world, shot by an arrow that had been fired ten thousand years before. But my father entered the wood, came close to the heartwoods and became
Wyn-rajathuk
. He found peace, and magic …’

Wyn-rajathuk
.

Tallis recognized part of the word from the encounter with the carrion eaters that morning. The child had shouted the strange syllables at her, as if in fear … or recognition.
Rajathuk
.

And Wyn?

Wynne-Jones, of course, Huxley’s colleague, the little man who had helped Huxley work out the primal nature of the wood and the existence of the mythago life forms which inhabited it.

Wynne-Jones the scientist. And Scathach was this man’s half-human, half-mythago son, born of flesh and of wood, born of science and of legend: a woman, daughter of a fabled chieftain, who herself had been called away to fulfil the terms of her own forgotten story.

Tallis wanted to reach out and hug the young man, her Stag Youth. For no reason that she could fathom she felt sad and affectionate towards him. But he suddenly cried aloud, a sound of delight, and ran through the long grass to where a man was leading a limping horse up the rise of Find Me Again Field.

Gyonval had survived his encounter with the Oyzin.

(iv)

The Jaguthin were mythical hunters, Scathach whispered to Tallis, later during the night as they crouched around a small fire in a clearing. There were many mythago forms of the same legend, reaching back to a time which was quite unknown and unfamiliar to the people of Wynne-Jones’s own world, England – Scathach’s forbidden land. Those first forms of the Jaguthin had been seekers rather than warriors. They had been selected by lot among the clans of the first hunter-gatherers to trek across the winter land in the wake of what had been known as an ‘Ice Age’. They had gone in search of valleys, plateaux, forests and game herds; their quests had been simple and practical, to help the clan families find peace and warmth and food in a world that seemed determined to obliterate them.