Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) (2 page)

Jacques was suddenly speaking strangely, almost dreamily. Martin felt that this story, this memory, had been rehearsed for years. He spoke as if reading from a book.

‘My father got tangled in the rigging. The boat was very small. It seemed to skip for a moment in the sea-wind, nosing up then down and the man seemed to be sitting very precariously. He was drenched, his thick white hair draped about his face. The boat was awash. He saw his family, safely up on the path, and waved, then made signals with his hand.

‘I remember my mother shouting something; I can’t remember what. The boat was twisting on the sea, too far out for safety, the sail full one moment then flapping the next, and he hauled and tugged at the ropes as the ocean broke across the bows. Again my mother shouted to him, her words lost in the wind that was now beginning to scream from the west.

‘Above us, the black swirled over, and the rain struck us, and our eyes became half blind so that all we could see was the white of the sail, the dark hull, and the black shape of the man who struggled to guide the small vessel into the haven of the bay. When the boat tipped over it happened so fast I missed it, even though I was watching and shouting and crying for my father. One moment the white sail was a proud balloon, the next there was just the sea, and something splashing, a shape splashing.

‘That was the moment when the sea became a monster, when the wind hit it, when the storm changed the cold water into a beast.’

Jacques was in a dream, his eyes almost closed, tears squeezing from the corners, his words oddly stilted, his description strange for this charcoal maker and handy-man.

‘It became a monster of many backs. The backs rose and heaved, green and scaly, flecked with white, shining as the monster rolled below the surface. You could see the muscles, the writhing limbs. On the beach, the monster’s teeth exploded upwards, white enamel, sucked back into the tide just as the monster was trying to suck back the desperate man who was swimming for the shore. Around him, as he swam for his life, the limbs of the creature rose and fell, its huge back following him, trying to throw him, then suck him down as it subsided.

‘He reached the stone. Do you see it? That stone there, yes, the dark one, the sharp one, you can see it now as the waves drop, the outermost stone of the second circle. It rises twelve feet from the sea bed. It was his only haven. And he reached it by sheer guts and reached around it, embraced it, and clung there. All the while the monster in the sea raged at him, sucked at him, tried to draw him back.

‘I believe, or I have dreamed, that I saw him smile. He certainly waved. Believing himself to be safe, if cold, he clung to that great stone, to that great past, to the spirit of land, defying the sea. He clung like a limpet. Have you ever tried to prise a limpet from the rock it lives on? You need a chisel. When the creature sticks and grips, it cannot be dislodged, it cannot be sucked into the maw of the monster. And like a limpet embracing the old
stone, my father resisted the tide that sucked at him, drew at him, tugged at him. It surged around him, it broke across him, it pulled and dragged at his legs, but he held on, he held on.

‘So the ocean, seeing that it would not draw him back, now changed its tactics. It was the moment my mother knew we had lost him. It began to smash him against the friend who had found him. It lifted him and smashed him; it twisted him, drew at him, then flung him to the very stone to which he clung. His head became a bloody mess. It concentrated on his head, of course. It crushed his bones against the rock, stunned him, bruised him, broke him bit by bit, until soon his strength had gone and his whole body was lifted and broken on the circle.

‘Three times, maybe four, the sea cracked my father against the rock to open him. And then the pulp was drawn away, down and gone from us, gone for ever.

‘He never came back, not a single trace of him, not even the boat. Nothing.’

The rain beat down. It had found a way through Martin’s oilskin and was freezing against his shoulder. Jacques had finished speaking and they scurried back to the car, squirming and twisting out of their waterproofs, flinging the wet garments onto the back seat before spending a few minutes smoking, listening to the drum of rain, to the odd silence that is invoked by that hollow sound.

‘Why do you dream of him?’ Martin asked at length. ‘I don’t understand. If you
could
turn the clock back, how could you help him?’

‘I could have flown to him; or I could have moved the
stone closer to the shore. I had the power to do it. For a year or more I’d known I was a stone-shifter, ever since I’d danced on the path. But I was too frightened … perhaps too young. I didn’t trust myself to do it right.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I could have
flown
to him. I stayed on the earth. I could have moved the stone. I didn’t even try to grip it. My father died, but in my heart I know he
knew
that I could have saved him. That’s why he waved. He trusted me. I had danced among the people on the path – the magic was in me. He knew this, he’d heard me talk. I failed him. That’s all. And I think that’s all I can say for the moment.’

Jacques opened the window and tossed his cigarette into the storm.

‘I don’t understand,’ Martin said.

‘I didn’t expect the sea to change its game. I wasn’t ready to take on the sea. I thought he could do it on his own.’

‘And you thought you could move the standing stone?’

‘It was a
gift
! I’d danced and played inside the ghosts. And sometimes you get a
gift
if you do that, and it lasts a while then goes. Like ‘Old Provider’s’ Christmas presents, though, there’s always a catch. Like nearly every child, I was too afraid to use the gift, and now it’s gone, and your grandfather died when he might have lived.

‘Eveline was there too and she too felt helpless, and yet she felt she
could
have helped. And whatever it was happened to
her
during that terrible storm later made
her frightened for you and Rebecca, which is why she encouraged you to go away and
stay
away.’

Jacques fumbled for the starter and the Citroën shuddered into life. Martin sat back, cold and confused, and let the rain and the saturated land drift past as his uncle drove him home.

Four days after the interment, Martin dressed warmly against the chill weather and walked through the drizzle up the path to the cemetery. He had had a restless night, waking at one point to the sound of movement downstairs. Half dreaming, half alert, he had imagined that someone was prowling about the house, at one point even entering the bedroom where he lay. Indeed, in the morning he found the back door swinging free, and the signs of sandwich-making. Not knowing his mother’s routine, nor lifestyle, he was not unduly concerned by this intrusion.

He approached the old church, with its half-shroud of scaffolding, and as he reached for the gate, he saw a crouching figure by the hump of green-cloth covered soil, the new grave. It was a woman, he thought, from the drop of auburn hair around the figure’s shoulders, but he did not recognise her. She wore a heavy lambskin coat, green cord trousers, and black leather boots that were scratched and muddied. She was hunkered down and singing softly, her arms folded across her chest, her head raised slightly, as if looking above the top of the gleaming marble headstone.

Her voice suddenly made contact!

‘Rebecca?’ Martin whispered. Her singing voice came clearer, sharper through the fine rain. ‘Rebecca?’ he called more loudly, and the woman turned to look at him. Martin stopped walking, shocked by the face that stared at him.

Slowly Rebecca rose to her feet, rubbed at the backs of her knees and came over to her brother. Her long hair was damp, framing a strong and handsome face, aged by sun and dust. She was as hard as stone, as carved as wood; when she smiled she revealed the absence of a canine tooth, something that the younger Rebecca would have never allowed to go unfilled. But the smile was a genuine gesture of pleasure, the wry turn of the lips, gladness conveyed in every movement of face and hands as she reached for Martin and hugged him.

‘You look lean,’ she said, stepping back to inspect him after the embrace. ‘You’ve not been eating.’

‘I try to keep fit. Genes for fatness run in the family; have to keep them at bay, like wild dogs. Not eating twenty-course Indonesian meals every day helps as well, excellent though they are.’

‘You’ll
get fat,’ she said with a smile. ‘Just like daddy, it’ll happen suddenly. But you look good now. Nice complexion.’ She pinched his cheek. ‘And no drugs, I think. No shadows. That’s good.’

‘I don’t take drugs,’ Martin agreed. ‘You look rugged,’ he went on. He touched the deeply etched lines about her eyes and mouth, his fingers gentle. She shrugged.

‘I’m a rugged lass. The outback is a hard place. The land wants to take your water. Take my hand …’

They walked to the iron gate, then suddenly Rebecca ran, childlike, to leap and swing on the rusting hinges, looking out towards the village and the old forest – Broceliande, hazy in the rain, dark on the horizon. Martin stepped onto the gate as well.

Rebecca said, ‘It’s odd to be back. I can’t tell whether I like it or hate it. I hate this bloody weather, of course. But the smells, the colours … I’ve been bleached yellow, burned red and charred umber at various times over the last few years. And I’ve heard the songs, such wonderful old songs, Martin … But I’ve missed the colours, the greens. The
real
colours.’

‘Can you hear songs now? Are there songs in this earth?’

She glanced at him, her expression one of deliberate if unfelt contempt. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Of course there are. The song is everywhere around us. It doesn’t sing
from
us, Martin, it sings
through
us; which is why we forget so easily in this hemisphere.’ She stepped from the gate and folded her arms, her characteristic gesture. She watched him through jet-lagged eyes, across the years of absence. ‘I don’t want to talk about the songpaths. I came here to watch my mother into her cold home and I missed it. I’m really sorry that I wasn’t here. I missed dad down, ten years ago, and I promised myself not to repeat the negligence.’

Martin said, ‘You must have got my letter …’

‘I did! It came fast. And I got the first flight available,
but the bloody
engine
failed in Bombay. A day and a half in Bombay, confined to the airport, paying three kids a tip each and every time I needed a piss, and all the cash I had was in Australian dollars! I tried to ring, but the lines just wouldn’t connect.’

She laughed and clutched her brother’s arm. ‘That’s funny, isn’t it? Twelve years of my life I’ve spent connecting the lines, the lines between different shapes of spirit, but I can’t connect with France Telecom from Bombay Airport. I like that. It’s sort of ironic.’

‘Pompous little bag of bones,’ Martin murmured, echoing a childhood taunt, and Rebecca put him in a headlock, laughing as they struggled through the rain until Martin declared a truce.

‘I
am
a bag of bones. But I’m five times stronger than
you
, my man.’

‘Damn right. I said
pax
!’

‘Can I stay with you?’ she asked a while later, as they straightened clothing and returned to the rough road back to the village.

‘Of course. The house is as much yours—’

‘Can I
stay
with you!’ she repeated, and Martin felt the thump of his heart. It had been a long time and he flushed as he anticipated the renewed relationship. But there was no-one in his life in Amsterdam at the moment. ‘I suppose so.’

‘You suppose so. Great. You suppose so.’

‘Yes. You can
stay
with me. It’s been a long time, Beck. We’ve moved apart.’

‘Of course we have! But the line is still there between
us. Lines like that don’t break. And I need to be close. That’s all. That’s it. I need to be close. To you. To them. I should have been here to watch them down.’

‘I wasn’t here when either of them crossed,’ Martin said quietly. ‘So they wouldn’t have known you weren’t here for the interment. They knew you’d be sent for. Eveline actually didn’t
want
us here. Anyway, I watched them down. They were guarded. I swear it.’

Rebecca sighed as they walked, now linking arms, almost hanging on to Martin, jet-lag beginning to creep into her muscles. ‘She’ll be with little Seb. That’s nice …’

‘Not for thirty days yet,’ Martin reminded her, and she glanced at her watch.

‘Oh yes. I’d forgotten. Well … she soon
will
be with our little brat brother. It’s so
odd
to be back,’ the last statement made in a forceful tone of voice, the subject changed abruptly.

Martin felt the same shudder of realisation. He too was something of a stranger in a familiar land. His life had changed, he was out of place here; and yet he was needed.

‘I know,’ he said grimly. ‘I think I have to stay. The farm needs sorting out. I hardly know where to begin. It would be good to have some help, Beck.’

Martin was aware of her hesitation as they walked, the slight loosening of his sister’s grip on his arm, the sudden tightening of her fingers again. Rebecca said, ‘I’ll stay as long as I can. I’ll do what I can. But if the songs get too—’ she broke off, then smiled and shrugged. ‘I
can’t explain it, Martin. My line isn’t here anymore. The sounds confuse me. If I get called back, I’ll have to go.’

‘Stay as long as you can. It’ll be good to have you here.’

‘I’ll try. But when I go, I’ll be gone before you know it. It’s the way with me.’

‘How very New Age,’ he said with a smile.

‘No. Just the way I am.’

He looked at her across years, across age, knew that the moments together would be short, that this sad reunion was an event in a life, hers, as rich and complex as any tapestry; he knew that Rebecca was here because her lines had brought her here, and that in her own world she would soon be so far from him that not even the sound-wires would be able to connect them, and again she would be gone.

His voice dropping, his voice resigned, he said simply, ‘I know.’

Martin built and stoked the applewood fire until the small parlour was glowing with light and warmth. He spread a blanket on the hearthside, undressed and lay back. Rebecca finished her bath and ran naked into the room, clutching a bath sheet which she flung over the two of them, shivering beside him. Martin felt the steam and heat from her body, a cooling dampness. When the attack of shivering had passed she sat up, the towel around her shoulders, looking at the man, smiling
and shaking her head. ‘You
are
lean. You used to be so chubby! I don’t think I’ve ever seen so flat a stomach.’

‘Come on. Flynn is the most athletic man you’ve ever met.
Your
words, five years ago, last letter I ever had from you.’

Rebecca laughed, leaning her head towards the fire so that her coppery hair could start to dry. ‘What are you talking about? I wrote every week. Didn’t you get my letters? Obviously a bad postal service.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Besides, Flynn is nothing but bone and sinew. Athletic but not aesthetic, not that I give a damn. I don’t want to talk about Flynn. I want to talk about us. So just get me warm. Please?’

‘This reminds me of that first night. When I came here? Do you remember? I was a sad, bedraggled soul, and you and Sebastian hated me.’

Martin smiled as a vague memory of Rebecca’s arrival in the family entertained him. ‘They made such a fuss of you. They kept comparing you to me. I got really angry …’

‘They were teasing you. I could see it so clearly. It was obvious. I thought it was funny—’

‘What was funny?’

‘—the way you
couldn’t
see it. You were such a sheltered boy. Such a cautious boy … But I was hungry, and defensive, and new, and confused. I was missing my own home, my own parents. Dad –
my
Dad – was
always teasing. I loved his teasing. It’s what I missed most when he died. And then I found that my “new” Dad was just as bad – just as good! It was like coming home again. I missed it all so much when I went to Australia. Flynn is so straight … “if it’s irony it must be metal”; “say what you mean and mean what you say”. It comes from having to dissect the literal from the symbolic in reconstructed languages, I suppose.’

‘Do what?’

‘It’s his job. What he calls digging out the hard foundations below the crumbling ideas of walls and towers. And he’s good at it. But he’s: So! Serious! He’s learned to cherish the clear signal of a clear statement. I’m not criticising him, you understand.’

‘Of course you’re not. Perish the thought.’

‘Bastard! Anyway
you
were always easy to wind up.’

‘Who’s denying it? I didn’t like you. Not at first. I didn’t want you in the family. I didn’t like the way you and Seb teamed up to dance through the people on the path. I felt excluded.’

‘You
were
excluded. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t fancy you even then. You intrigued me. But you were a pain in the butt.’ She looked at the fire. ‘Poor little Seb. What the hell did he do, I wonder? What did he do that he had to die like that?’

Martin was surprised by her comment. ‘You sound as if you think it had something to do with the path.’

‘Do I? I’m not sure. But I am sure he went inside the people once too often. I bet every child around here still does it, of course. But most of us stopped seeing them after a while. As if we’d been … as if we’d been
contacted. Or maybe completed. I don’t know. Something like that. But Seb, he kept
on
seeing them. And he kept on drawing those funny bottles. Do you remember? Long, thin bottles, with little trees and little men inside them.’

‘I do remember.’

Martin leaned towards the fire, puzzled. ‘Contacted? Completed? What does that mean, Beck? Do you feel completed in some way?’

Rebecca wriggled closer, her hand resting on his warm skin, just above the knee. She seemed to be shivering again. ‘I think so. I don’t know so. There’s something in Broceliande that is seeping out. Merlin’s spirit, of course. We’ve always known that, haven’t we?’ She smiled, then spoke the local lore, the belief based on forgotten legend. ‘Merlin sleeps in the heart of the wood, trapped by the enchantress Vivien in a thorn tree, or an oak tree by some accounts, inside a column of air that hides him from all eyes but hers. His dreams, his nightmares, creep to the edge to provide for us, to divide us, to test us, to seek out the true hearts among us.’

‘That’s fairy-tale. The people on the path aren’t dreams, or nightmares. And they don’t interfere with us.’

‘Don’t they? But that’s not the point. The point is, this is a haunted place, and it always has been. We take the ghosts for granted. Not everyone sees them, just a few, and all of us stop seeing them after a year or so and start to doubt our memory. But we never talk about them
outside
. Why is that? Why do we keep quiet? Is
something
stopping
us? Have you ever spoken to anyone in Amsterdam about the people?’

‘Never. They’d think I was mad.’

‘But
why
do you say that?
You
know you’re not. You’re no more mad than everybody else. We share a common experience and we share a common fear of communicating that experience. It’s as if we’ve become afraid of what happened to us as children, when we saw them, when we danced inside their skins. Except that you never did, of course—’

‘In fact, I did. Just once. It was terrifying. It felt as if I was gliding on a cold lake, and there was a woman singing, but it only lasted an instant.’

Rebecca frowned, staring at him for a moment. ‘I didn’t know that.’ She turned away. ‘Yes. I think I remember.’

‘No you don’t. This is the first time I’ve mentioned it.’

‘Well, my point is, most of us saw them for months. Some only got a glimpse. And for all of us there was a moment when we got frightened …’

‘Christ. That’s what Jacques told me …’

‘Jacques? Is he still alive?’

‘Very much so, still building sheds and making charcoal. He was at the cold-earthing, four days ago.’

‘The funeral, Martin. We call them funerals in the outside world, these days.’

‘I like the old terms. Anyway, he took me to Quiberon, out on the coast where the stones are. Told me about my grandfather … about how he’d felt that he could have saved him from drowning, even though he
was a child at the time … And he said just what you’ve just said. He had suddenly got frightened, and known that it was time to stop the encounters.’