Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) (17 page)

The long-to-come! She had touched the long-to-come. Not just the long-gone, then. Her fledgling power could reach through time in both directions.

But more importantly, she had crept into me through
the gaping mouth of my mask. I had been as vulnerable in that moment of astonishing vision as was a charioteer to a stray blow intended for the knight he carried.

I was lost. Instinct told me that. When the Ghost Animal, my life-guide, had danced for me, stepping out of my first mind, stepping out of the long-gone, I had known I was lost. What needed to be saved was the magic I contained. Vivien must not have it.

I spent a season thinking. I defined Broceliande by my restless pacing. I hid the lake to stop her drawing power from it. It was a risky thing to do, because of course it drew attention to the fact that I was making changes.

I blamed age and confusion for the act: too many water sources were interfering with my own vision, and quite soon, within a hundred years or so, I would have to start the next phase of my journey round the path.

Did she believe me? It’s hard to tell. Her own mask was now firmly set. Have you ever looked into someone’s eyes and seen not the loving heart but ice? Like the great ice that controls the land in the far north, that ice in the eye is a wall, a barrier, too cold to live beyond, too cold to cross, too slippery even to try to climb.

I had to get rid of my magic. I needed to hide it, to detach it from me. But I needed to hide it in such a way that I could gather it in later. The only answer was to turn it into shadow and send it on the path. I decided to send
it south, travelling down the right side of the long trail, keeping its right side outermost to the ring. My intention was that I would then return north, retracing my journey – my life lived backwards – to meet the entities at some point along the way.

Vivien, I knew, would be looking for some escape to the north. She would be watching for me to turn in my tracks. She saw me as an animal, and knew the ways of clever beasts.

I knew that she would suspect the creation of shadows. I counted on her not expecting the creation of children.

It takes time and a great deal of concentration to fabricate even a single
infantasm
. I drew on the long-gone and that part of the long-to-come that I could reach. My difficulty was that Vivien’s business, concerned mainly with providing for us, seeking the herbs, earths and waters that would enhance her own powers, did not take her away from the waterfall for very long. Even though I fashioned a Castle of enchanting visions for her, a place to explore, to stimulate her intellect, I was lucky if I had a full day to myself. I therefore chose my moments carefully.

I created seven children to carry my seven powers. I shall not concern you with the process of drawing the bones from the wood, the flesh from the wormy soil, the skin from leaves, the bloom from flowers, the blood from water, the bowels and other internals from killed animals – hares for the essence and spirit, of course,
polecats for durability, boars for aggression, birds for most other things.

Finding flowers that were not illusion-born was the hardest task, since flowers are a rare presence in the season, whereas leaves only shrink from us in the time of Deep, or winter. But my time in the northern wastelands, where Jack Frost has been created to serve the needs of the reindeer people, had taught me how to control frost and ice to maintain the bloom of life, like those crushed insects in amber shards, which when released sing briefly yet exquisitely about a time in the long-gone that not even I can comprehend. To decipher those fleeting songs will take a greater power than mine.

Flowers could be kept vibrant as long as ice could be kept hard, and I found a way of keeping ice even in the sun. It was a simple trick, but Vivien did not know it.

And in this way I hid my magic.

Song went into the first of the
infantasms
, who was a boy from the beginning of the world, because song, as you know, came before words. He chattered from the bough of an old oak for the first few hours following his creation, but at last I drew him to my breast, and soothed him. He would have been about five years old. The flowers and leaves that formed his skin were hard to smooth down, but after a while they blended with the earth. He looked a little patchy; he was an odd mixture of colours. His fragrance was confusing, but then so is song. It comes from very deep. I sent him into the forest, protected by a simple charm. He would hide for a while, then walk south, and in due course, after many
generations, we would meet on the path again, and I would take him back.

I decided to hide stone-moving in a girl, since I was certain that this would confuse Vivien, and in any case, the frustrating of people’s expectations is something in which I delight. It is a simple form of control, but can be quite effective. I shaped the girl from the long-gone, from my memory of a place where the rock, below baking deserts, is vastly hollowed to make a labyrinth of tunnels, all designed to conceal the body of a king or queen. Vivien, of course, had touched upon this magic, when she had made the shaft, but she had only scraped a single shard of knowledge and there was a great deal left for her to win. And so it continued.

Whenever I could, I summoned a child from the past or future, from different lands along the path, gave them body, gave them substance, gave them spirit, gave them charm, then carved my secrets on their bones. One after the other they went into the wood to hide, awaiting their chance to escape the forest and travel southwards on the path, that long walk through the valleys, along the shores of the sea, then through the mountains, the journey that would eventually re-unite them with me, their source.

Seven in all, shapechangers all, I sent them on their way, and soon there was a
hollowing
inside of me, a sublime yet painful vacancy, as much to do with the scouring of my magic as with the sense of vulnerability that now possessed me.

I had kept a few charms back, of course, and just as well.

Vivien, a vision of the huntress, soon after dragged a fawn into the clearing by the falls, her bloody knife held between her teeth. Quickly, she opened and emptied the creature, then dug shallow pits for the storage of excess meat before butchering the animal.

She was naked, she always hunted naked, and as she crouched to her work – inviting, vibrant flesh working on the sweet, dead haunch – my raven spread its wings.

‘Aha!’ she said, noticing my hungry stare, the flush on my skin. She grinned, putting down the knife, coming to me first to preen and then to pluck my feathers.

The mist was in her hair and on her skin as she flew above me, her voice loud, her grip strong as she hunted me to the finish.

Stretched out upon me, listening to the fall of water, she said, ‘I enjoyed that. But I have to finish off the beast.’

‘The beast
is
finished. Believe me!’

‘The beast we’ll eat!’ she laughed. But at once I saw the shadow, the hint of understanding. She had sensed something wrong. She had touched the
hollowing
inside of me.

She was suddenly cold. ‘I have to joint the kill. I shouldn’t have taken it. It’s too much for our needs. But what could I do? Old Provider should have created smaller deer. If I kill, I kill for a month. You can’t simply kill a
tenth
of the beast!’

She was wrong about that, but I kept the knowledge to myself. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘So am I. Lie back and let the moisture cool you.’ She stroked my languid flesh, relaxing me, then hardened
her grip, staring carefully into my right eye as I squirmed with the sudden shock.

‘There’s something wrong.’

‘There’s nothing wrong.’

‘Are you quite certain?’

‘I’m quite certain that I’m tired. I’m quite certain that I’m hungry, that you’re hurting me. What else do you feel is wrong?’

‘You weren’t as close. You didn’t feel as close. But perhaps I’m being foolish.’

‘I’ll make up the fire, then.’

She looked down at me, still holding me in her hand as a cook would hold the heart of a slaughtered pig, looking closely, looking for signs of the worm.

‘I don’t know that I believe you,’ she whispered.

She rose to her feet suddenly and jumped, legs tucked against her chest, into the icy waters of the pool below the fall. Seconds later she had scampered out, screaming with the cold, laughing, signifying her understanding that the action had been foolish, yet had been wonderful to her senses. She had banished her suspicions.

‘Make that unholy fire! Quickly!
Quickly
!’

The children were all gone. It had taken several years, but the last had left the forest and they were alone, now, pursuing for a while their own lives, their own adventures.

I was vulnerable. I felt my age. I took to dreaming, which is to say, to flying, and became the haunter of battlefields, spying from above, or from the past at the
strange ways into the Otherworlds. I was not recognised. I learned nothing I didn’t know already.

Dreaming, I became weak. Weakened, Vivien saw her chance to take what she did not yet know was lost to her.

Quickly, quickly, then, she made her preparations.

I was in the sky, in cold but brilliant sun, aware that the first snows of this Deep were gathering to the east. Below me, five men had gathered by a lake and the lake waters swirled about the centre. Something was rising, either summoned by these men, or coming to attack them. They seemed quite nonchalant, crouching with their horses, and I circled lower, casting an inadvertent shadow.

I had been seen in that moment, and sling-shot was loosed to drive me off, but these travellers in the long-gone (yes, I liked to fly into the past as much as hunt the present) were less interested in a falcon than in the
hollowing
that was opening before them, the way through the water to a deeper place than the scrubby land around them.

Who they were is of no relevance; if you must know, they were five brothers, Kyrdu’s sons; they were in many ways the scourge of the long-gone, they were adventurers, mercenaries, sorcerers by acquisition. Their stories – their adventure was immense – may have been remembered after them. Somehow, though, I doubt it. They went too far. If you are interested I can tell you another time.

What is important is that as I watched them, I felt my right wing crack, as if twisted by invisible fingers, and knew at once that my death had come.

I found the right winds and swooped, looped, glided and struggled back to Broceliande. I came above the falls and saw Vivien above my dreaming body. She was dressed in green, her black hair flying as she raised the axe and struggled with her task.

I dropped upon her, clawed and scrabbled in her hair until she backed away, allowing me to come back home.

It was too late, of course. Dismembered, spitted on her special thorn, I could do nothing as she danced her swirling dance, nine times round my corpse, throwing up the earth, holding it there, using the magic she had stolen from me, burrowing into the cold-earth home, then gathering stones and slices of fallen trees to make the traps.

She had not yet reached below my flesh to steal the magic; she was not yet aware that my bones were smooth again.

She danced through Broceliande. I could still hear, through my dislocated pain, the way she laughed.

‘Fool!’ she called me. She shouted it loudly.

She swam in the cold waters, climbed trees to their precarious tips, chased down game with her bare hands, tearing the swirling fabric of her green dress as she haunted the wildwood in her ecstasy.

Bloody, muddied and triumphant, she came back to where I lay.

‘Fool,’ she whispered tenderly, then kissed my dry
lips, touching my eyes with raw-skinned fingers before, in the last act of her imprisonment of me, she put them out.

‘What have you done? Where has it gone?’

The words, screeched like the scald-crow, were as sweet to my ears as song.

I had few charms left, but I had kept one back, a special gift.

I had been dreaming by the waterfall when she had killed me, but my bed was a grey rock, and I shaped this, now, into the precise form of my broken, severed body. And on its mossy skin I carved the signs and runes of all the magic that I knew, but in a garbled form, sufficient to understand with the right wit, with time, with imagination, but certain to be incomprehensible to the lovely woman, the sinister woman, who had been a joy in my life – truly, the best of companions, the best of lovers; who can blame her for her more primal needs? – but a lovely woman who must now come to hell with me.

‘Where has it gone? Where has it gone?’ she shrieked.

I would have answered her, had I been able.

In her earlier moment of frenzied triumph, pursuing an older magic, she had devoured my tongue.

She threw me, head down, into the shaft she had fashioned in the manner of those shafts designed to conjoin with the Otherworld. She found – I have no idea from where – amulets and metal shards that would bind me to the earth; chalices and clay jugs that had
once been buried with the dead; moonshards in silver, some in crystal, that would keep me forever in the shadow.

She let the earth fall back from its wildly spinning column, burying me. As it fell, she sealed the shaft at the four prime points with rounds of oak (she had learned
well
), then topped it with stones, topped these with the statue, whose nature and secrets had defeated her; and this she covered with earth, sprinkling the dirt with seed so that it would grow green.

Grow green and keep me down!

I wonder how long she embraced the statue, exploring its marks, working her fingers into every line and every shape and every crook and cranny of that broken stone, a lover sifting the cold ash of dead passion for some longed-for, warming ember?

The writing is tantalising because like a maze carved into the heart of a mountain it keeps on
almost
coming home, but never quite. And once she had engaged with those tantalising signs, once the first clues and hints of hidden power had embraced her fingers and her eyes, she was trapped, her spirit trapped, she was bound to me, tied by need, by greed, by a magic that was unfurling more slowly than the winter storm can level a snowcapped hill.