Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (38 page)

I want to go back, she whispered to Scathach.

One glance at the grim set of his face was enough to tell her that such was a luxury now lost. He shook his head. He looked wilder; fear was etched on his handsome features, now. His eyes were restless and he too felt the confining force of the forest, the bearing down of branches, the crushing weight of trunks and great rocks as they followed Broken Boy at the edge of the shallow, through narrow defiles of rock and into deep, echoing caverns, through restless alderwoods and stands of choking holly and oak.

We may be away a little longer than I thought, he said to her. I had expected to emerge into a snow landscape, not here. I don’t know this place. I’m just following your
gurla
…

Broken Boy will lead me safely back, she thought.

But Broken Boy had a final irony to lay at Tallis’s cold and water-sodden feet.

The stag started to run. The horses quickened to follow. Gyonval was nearly unseated as his roan mare bucked, then cantered, striking its rider against a low-slung branch. Above the canopy, the dawn was alive with the sounds of birds. They had been riding for only a short while, summoned from sleep by the roaring of their animal guide. The beast’s antlers, more broken now than ever and stripped of their ragged velvet, seemed to glisten with dew. Its haunches steamed. It raced through the wood as if pursued by ravening dogs. Tallis slipped from the saddle and only Scathach’s strong arm stopped her from tumbling below the hooves of her horse. ‘Ride better!’ he snapped. She gripped the long hair of her mount’s mane, but as the animal weaved through the river, stumbling on muddy banks and slithering and
sliding over the fallen trunks of rotting trees, so she was bounced and thrown. Soon she was crying with pain and fear. Her masks clattered over the saddle, but they remained in place.

Suddenly they were in a misting dell. The streaking light which fell from on high was almost divine, shafting radiance. The fog swirled, gleaming yellow; leaves shimmered. There were a myriad colours here and the whole place seemed to tremble. The mist seemed to flow from the dark trunks of trees. The dell was awash with ferns and sapling growth. Broken Boy turned and faced the breathless riders.

He watched Tallis.

He shook his broken head. Strands of saliva dripped from his open maw. He shook as if with pain, or fear …

The stag appeared to freeze; its limbs turned to wood; its head tipped up and back, as if in a final moment of pain. As its jaws parted, the dell filled with a deep booming cry. Almost too fast to follow, the shape of the stag changed, enlarging, expanding, growing tall towards the trees whilst the broken antlers widened, becoming huge blades of bone. The legs, braced apart, stretched swiftly, thickened, formed a gateway through which a swirl of snow entered the cool dell.

The horses bucked. Tallis slipped from the saddle again, but was held in place by strong arms, Gyonval’s this time. He grinned at her. Her masks swung heavily around her neck. Her head ached with the roaring of the dying beast.

The great elk faced them, higher than the trees, antlers lost in the foliage. Its body dripped water, as if rain were falling on its back and running from its flanks and belly. Ivy grew out over the trunk-like limbs, sprouting, shooting, reaching its way in seconds until the elk was swathed in green. Bushes of holly burst from its skin. Roots of
trees crawled through the cracks, trembled across the enfoliated hide.

Soon there was silence, save for the murmur of wind above and the rustle of the new growth. A gigantic and rotten wooden gate, Broken Boy transformed now showed them the way to the heart of the realm. The forest beyond was in the deep of winter, and Scathach wrapped his furs around the shivering form of Tallis before he followed Gyonval and the others through the hollowing and into the frozen land.

If he was aware of Tallis crying, he said nothing.

Are we lost?

Yes
.

You said you would get me home
…

I don’t know how to do that any more. I can’t seem to turn. I can’t retrace our steps. I’m being drawn deeper, to my own home
…

What am I going to do? What about my parents?

I wish I had an answer for you. I don’t
.

Harry will help me … I know he will
…

Then the sooner we find your brother the better
.

(Tig’s fingers moved across her face. Dreams oozed from bones, crowded her drowsy mind, tumbled out of order, sharp and painful; vivid memories of the years of being lost, the intense loneliness, longing for home, missing her parents, missing the lost summer days, and her room, and her books.)

But Scathach drew closer to her. He took her hunting, racing through the woods in pursuit of small game. He taught her use of the bow and the sling; she was never able to use them well. But her body grew, extending like the stag’s, and she soon was an ungainly young woman,
tall, twig-thin, bulked out only by the patchwork fur clothing and cloak garments knitted together with crude leather strands and fastened by bones at the throat.

She carried her masks and learned to use them, glimpsing the world in different ways as she peered through the eyes of a child, or a fish, or a hunting hound. The wood was alive with strange creatures. The lost band crept their way inwards, aware of the eyes that watched from the darkness and the gleaming armoured figures which sometimes kept pace with them for hours before dropping away into dense undergrowth.

They kept to rivers. Tallis fashioned a crude tent from hides, taken on the hunt. She regarded it as her own lodge, the seer’s lodge, and she huddled within its wigwam space, watching the men as they sat around the fire and talked, or skinned their kills.

During the years, she extended the size of the tent and one day, after running with Scathach for hours through the wood, pursuing a small pig, they returned to the tent together, made a small fire and huddled close, feeling the heat on flushed skin, watching the light in each other’s eyes, on each other’s lips. Tallis felt suddenly very close to her companion. It was a time of change for her; her agony at being lost lessened as she discovered the feeling in herself that was satisfied by his company, and his laughter, and his body pressed close within hers.

– and pain. Such pain. The river running hard; a fire burning; deep night, and Scathach beside her, wiping the sweat that poured from her face. Gyonval, hunched and concerned, watching from beyond the fire, his face so pale, his long hair hanging lank, his hands toying with the small doll which Tallis had fashioned and which he had agreed to hold, to help absorb the agony.

‘Hold me …’

Scathach leaned down, pressed his lips to her cheek and wrapped his arms tightly around her. There was movement. The woods became restless with the swirl and scatter of birds, disturbed from their night’s stillness. Her cries became wild, shattering the night. She clutched at Scathach’s arms, then forced her head back, rising more to a squat, knees stretched apart. She sucked the warmth from the fire. Gyonval grimaced as he grasped and shook the doll, but the pain remained in Tallis until, like a rotten tree splitting in a storm, she opened, parted, and hot, fresh life flowed from her, giving her release …

– the child is dead.

I know.

A hand on her shoulder. Fresh falling snow blotting out sound. Whiteness all about her. The river frozen. The child in the tent, still wrapped in furs. Scathach crouched behind her, hands on her shoulders. She let her head drop. He leaned his face against her neck and the shaking of his body told of his grief. She had cried all night, while Scathach had been away, hunting, further inwards. She had no grief left. She stood up, looked down at the saddened man, his hair still bearing the green and brown dyes with which he had disguised himself for the wild pursuit of game. She touched the hair, his cheeks, his lips. He held her fingers close to his mouth, then shook his head, unable to find words to express his feelings.

I’ll bury him, he said at last.

I’ll carry him with me, Tallis said. He means too much to me.

– no sense to the seasons. Sometimes winter, then summer, then spring. They journeyed through the zones of the land, adapting their hunting to the forests they found, spending weeks in any ruin that could sustain
them, trying to find some pattern to the wilderness; they left marks and camps, hoping to rediscover them, to bring an order to their aimless journey inwards.

– how many years have we been here? How many years? How old are my parents now? Have they forgotten me? Can my father see me through the mask? Can he hear me through the rough wood of the mask I dropped? Is that his voice?

Yes! He’s calling to me. My father. I can hear him … he’s calling my name.
Tallis … Tallis
… he sounds sad. No … he sounds excited.

Tallis. Tallis!

He’s coming for me. My father is coming for me. He’s shouting my name … he’s found me … he’s
found
me …

‘Tallis! Tallis!’

The girl’s voice was very distant. It might have been shouted in a dream. Tallis glanced towards the exit from the mortuary house, then frowned and looked around. The fire was dead. Tig was nowhere to be seen. Since the embers were cool, Tallis imagined that she had been sitting there for hours.

She stood up, on legs that were stiff and aching, and limped from the cruig-morn, massaging circulation back into her flesh. She stepped through the sinister half-circle of rajathuks and saw Morthen, standing uneasily at the entrance of the enclosure. The girl’s face darkened slightly when the woman stepped into view. She seemed angry, or perhaps discomforted.

‘Hello, Morthen.’

‘My father,’ Morthen said, without greeting. ‘He’s come home to us.’

‘He’s awake!’

‘Yes.’ There was a dull tone to her voice. She was definitely distancing herself from the older woman.

As Tallis began to move past her, Morthen caught her arm. Her dark eyes were fierce. The snail shells, formed into a loose net over her hair, clattered slightly as her head lifted. She said, ‘He is
my
brother. I’ve been waiting for him all my life. You must let
me
look after him now.’

Tallis tried to smile, but the girl’s fierceness froze the gesture. So she said simply, ‘I’ve been with him all of
my
life. I shan’t let him go that easily.’

Morthen made a sound like a wild animal, turned and ran down through the blackthorn. Tallis followed glancing back at the huge carvings, their grotesque faces watching her, some compassionately, some with mocking expressions. Sinisalo – child in the land – seemed to leer at her.

They passed through the gate to the settlement, weaved between the new hides stretched on their frames, and ducked into the long-house. Morthen stayed by the door. Across the gloomy interior, Tallis could see Scathach crouched by the straw mattress, his arm around the back of the old man’s head. Glimmering light caught Wyn-rajathuk’s eyes as he watched his son and listened to Scathach’s softly spoken words.

Tallis moved quietly round the house and came up behind the hunter; she sat on the rush matting and hugged her knees, listening to what was being said.

Scathach had been telling about his first journey through the wood. ‘… the Jaguthin are always called away. You were right about that. But the way of calling differs. For a while I rode with one group who were summoned by a crone, guarded by giant hounds. She emerged from the centre of the earth, surrounded by black dogs. But the Jaguthin who became my close companions were summoned at night, during the full moon. Their calling came in the form of a night spirit, a
wraith. It drifted through the branches of trees and lifted the spirit out of the man. It was both strange and terrible to see the ghosts of each of my friends leave their bodies, then to watch those bodies rise and run into the nightwoods, in pursuit of their souls.’

In a wheezing, faint voice, Wynne-Jones said, ‘They would be reunited … body and soul … at the place of the deed to be done … the great battle … all quest legend is like this … first thing is to find the inner self …’

Scathach hushed the old man, who was struggling to keep the flow of his words. ‘I lost them all. All my friends. Gyonval was the last, just a few short seasons ago. His loss distressed Tallis more than any of them. He seemed to resist the calling, perhaps because of his love for Tallis. There was a special feeling between the two of them.’

Tallis went icy cold. She touched her eyes and face and her heart thundered. She had not known that Scathach had known, not been aware that he had seen. It brought back a flood of fear and an almost unbearable memory of loss, the body of the warrior Gyonval fighting with the wood, impaling itself on a sharp branch as if that might keep the soul from parting.

An empty, broken corpse, it had walked past Tallis, stepping through the fire; above the trees the wraith was twined about the ghostly image of the man, dragging it across the canopy, even though it struggled for flight back to the woodland camp.