Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) (29 page)
What had sounded like the frantic passage of a
herd
of these wonderful creatures was in fact the furious bolting of four horses only.
One came close enough to show Huxley the grey and bloodied hide of its flanks. This was the creature ‘decorated’ with burning and smouldering torches. It towered over him, its mane full, flowing and lank; it reeked richly of dung. The horse turned briefly to stare
at him and its eyes were filled with a feral panic. Huxley pressed himself against one of the great birches, which shuddered as the beast kicked at the trunk, turning to expose huge, cracked teeth that were the colour of summer-ripened wheat; it moved on, then, working its way inwards, escaping its tormentors.
The tormentors, following close behind the horses, were humans, of course. And Huxley was soon to realise what Ash had done.
There were four men, dark haired and heavily cloaked. They moved through the forest, uttering shrill cries, or gruff barks, or resonating song fragments that increased in pitch until they became an ululating echo. Sometimes they screeched
words
, but these were frightening and alien sounds. Each of the men wore his hair in a different, elaborate plaited style. Each was bedecked with stone or bone or shells or wood. Each had a colour on his face: red, green, yellow, blue. They passed by Huxley, sometimes running, sometimes laughing, all of them torn by thorn and holly, the leaf and wood impaling their crude clothing, so that they seemed no less than extensions of the birch and thorn forest itself.
Crying out and celebrating their vigorous pursuit of horses!
It was, Huxley chose to think at that moment, their way of controlling the horses. How many myths of the
secret language
of horses had come down to modern times, he wondered briefly? Many, he imagined, and here were men who
knew
those secrets! He was watching an early herding, the horses pushed into the tangle of
the wood, the best way to trap them, in fact, a
wonderful
way to trap them, in a time before corrals or stables! Run the horse into the thicket, and the sheer difference in size between
chaser
and
chased
would have marked the difference between
eaten
and
eater
.
For he had no doubt at that moment – this being a pre-neolithic event – that these beasts were being herded for food, rather than as creatures of burden.
Striking at the underbrush with long, flint-edged sticks, the four men strode past. And the hindmost of them, looking as broad in his heavy furs as he was tall, turned suddenly to stare at the hooded intruder, green-grey light glittering in pale eyes. On his chest he wore an identical amulet to that which Huxley had found in the Horse Shrine. He touched it, almost nervously, a gesture of luck, perhaps, or courage.
His companions called to him, shrill sounds, almost musical in their rhythm and pitch, that sent birds whirring from the tree tops. He turned and was gone, consumed by the thickets of holly, and the confusing patterns of light and shade of the birchwood. Nervously, Huxley tugged the green hood of his oilskin lower over his face.
I followed, of course. Of course! I wished to see this ritual herding through to its final, awful conclusion. For I had now begun to imagine that a
sacrifice of horses
would be the outcome of the pursuit to which Ash, by her magic, had despatched me.
Yet, in substance I was wrong. It was not to be the
oddly bedecked stallions that were sent on to the afterlife, encouraged there by flint and by flax rope. Not immediately, anyway. In the wide clearing, with its tall, crudely fashioned wood-gods, the horses were disturbed by the smells and the cries of extinguished life. The gathering of winter-clad men calmed the beasts. The glade in the birchwood echoed to the thumping of wood drums and the chanting of ancient hymns. There was laughter within the cacophony of sacrifice, and throughout all, the whooping cries of other herders, the music of magic, punctuating the confusion, serving to bring peace to the restless horses as they were held by their harnessings, and loaded with their first real burden.
Towards dusk, the horses were sent into the world again, running, slapped to encourage them, back along the broken tracks, towards the edge of the wood, wherever that lay. On their backs, tied firmly to cradles of wood, the horrific shapes of their pale riders watched the gloom, dulled eyes seeing darker worlds than even this darkening forest. The first to depart was a chalk-white corpse, grotesquely garrotted. Then a man, still living, swathed in thorns, screaming. After that, a ragged creature, stinking of blood and acrid smoke from the part-burned but newly skinned pelts that were wrapped around him.
Finally came a figure decked and dressed in rush and reed, so that only his arms were visible, extended on the crucifix-like frame that was tied about the giant horse. He was on fire; the blaze taking swiftly. Flame streamed into the night, shedding light and heat in eerie streamers as the great stallion galloped in panic towards me.
I thought I had moved quickly enough to take avoiding action, but before I knew it the beast had collided with me, one front leg striking me a blow to the side, then its shoulder pitching me down. I curled up to protect myself, but my body seemed to disobey and struggled to stand …
For one eerie moment I sensed I was
behind
the flaming figure, feeling the heat on my body, the wind and fire on my face, the rough movement of the horse below me.
The illusion lasted a second only before I was pitched backwards again, stunned and disorientated as I lay on the ground, stifled as if hands were pressing down on my mouth, neck and lungs.
I recovered swiftly.
I cannot record the full detail of what I saw in that, clearing – so much has faded from memory, perhaps because of the blow from the stampeding horse. I am still shocked by the nature of the sacrifices and the awareness that the murdered men seemed
willing participants
in this early form of acknowledgement of the power
of the horse
.
Such wonderful creatures, and yet they would be both friend of Man and carrier of his destruction …
All of this was passing through my mind as a freezing night fell upon the primaeval world, and other thoughts too: by horse would come war, and plague, and the populations to overrun and overwhelm the food available from the land. By horse would come the fire that clears, and kills, and cleanses.
But this forest, this event, reflected something that had occurred
tens of thousands of years before the present!
Was I witnessing one of the first true
intuitions
of early humankind? That the beast could be both friend and foe to a tribe that increasingly looked for control over nature itself? Sacrifice was made to new gods: the assuaging of fears. And it entertained me to think that later, much later, John the Divine would remember these early fears, and talk of the four horsemen, in fact describing his deep-rooted memories of an ancient understanding …
But with darkness came silence, and with the freezing silence of night came my helpless abandonment to sleep.
I awoke from the dream to the wet nuzzling of a dog. I was at the edge of Ryhope Wood – God alone knows how I had got there – in the scrub that overlooks the fields of the Manor House. The dog was a springer, being walked by an alarmed and determined woman, who strode away from what she presumably believed to be a tramp. She called for her hound, which bounded after her, not without a regretful and hungry glance towards me.
7
When he opened the back door to Oak Lodge, Jennifer screamed and dropped the mug of tea that she was holding. She looked at her husband through wide, frightened eyes, then collapsed back with relief against the table, laughing and brushing at the tea which had spilled over her dressing gown.
‘I didn’t realise you’d gone out again …’
Her words were meaningless, but he was too tired to think. He said, ‘I must look terrible. I should bath at once.’
He was dog tired. He drank the fresh tea she made, and wolfed down a slice of buttered bread. Steven came and watched him as he undressed, stripping off his stinking clothes, drawing hot water from the tank to make a deep bath. Jennifer picked up the clothes, frowning as she watched her husband.
‘Why did you put these on again?’
‘Again? I don’t know what you mean … I’m sorry … to have been away so long …’
He sank into the water, groaning and sighing with pleasure. Steven and Christian giggled on the landing outside. They had seen their father’s naked body, something they had never witnessed before, and like all children this glimpse of the forbidden had amused and shocked them.
When he had washed himself, and dried off, he went to Jennifer and tried to explain. She was distant. He had already noted from the calendar that his absence, this time, had been two days. For himself, the passage of time had been much greater, but even so, Jennifer was rightly anguished, and had suffered an intense day of concern.
‘I hadn’t intended to be away so long.’
She had made him breakfast. She sat opposite him at the table in the dining room, and leafed through
The Times
. ‘How could you get so dirty in so few hours?’ she said, and he frowned as he forked slices of sausage into
his mouth. Her words were confusing, but he himself was confused, now. He was oddly disorientated.
When he went to his study he found that his desk drawer had been disturbed. Angry, he almost confronted Jennifer, but decided against it. The key to his private journal was lying on the desk top. And yet the last time he had written in the journal he had – he was sure – replaced the key carefully in its hidden position, pressed to the underside of the desk top.
He wrote an official entry in his research journal, and then fetched the personal diary from its hiding place, entering an account of his encounter with Ash. His hand shook and he had to make many corrections to the text. When he had finished he blotted the ink dry, sat back, and turned back through the journal’s pages.
He read through what he had written shortly before the last trip with Wynne-Jones.
And he suddenly realised that there were six additional lines to the text!
Six lines that he had no recollection of writing at all.
‘Good God, who’s been at my journal?’
Again, he stopped himself going to Jennifer, or confronting the boys, but he was shocked, truly shocked. He bent over the pages, his hands shaking as he ran a finger word by word along the entry.
It was in his own handwriting. There was no question of it. His own handwriting, or a brilliant forgery thereof.
The entry was simple, and had about it that haste with which he was familiar, the scrawled notes that he managed when his encounters were intense, his life
hectic, and his need to be in the wood more important than his need to keep a careful record of his discoveries.
She is not what she seems. Her name is Ash. Yes, You know that. It is a dark world for me. I will acknowledge terror. But there is
I cannot be sure
She is more dangerous, and she has done this. Edward is dead. No. Perhaps not. But it is a poss
The time with the horses. I can’t be sure. Something was watching
‘I didn’t write this. Dear God. Am I going mad? I
didn’t
write this. Did I?’
Jennifer was reading and listening to the radio. He stood in the doorway, uncertain at first, his mind not clear. ‘Has anyone been to my desk?’ he asked at length.
Jennifer looked up. ‘Apart from you yourself, no. Why?’
‘Someone’s tampered with my journal.’
‘What do you mean “tampered” with it?’
‘Written in it. Copying my own hand. Has anybody been here during my excursion?’
‘Nobody. And I don’t allow the boys into the study when you’re not here. Perhaps you were sleepwalking last night.’
Now her words began to fidget him. ‘How could I have done that? I didn’t get home until dawn.’
‘You came home at midnight,’ she said, a smile touching her pale features. She closed the book, keeping a finger at the page. ‘You went out again before dawn.’
‘I didn’t come back last night,’ Huxley whispered. ‘You must have been dreaming.’
She was silent for a long time, her breathing shallow. She looked at him solemnly. The smile had vanished, replaced by an expression of sadness and weariness. ‘I wasn’t dreaming. I was glad of you. I was in bed, quite asleep, when you woke me. I was disappointed to find you gone in the morning. I suppose I should have expected it …’
How long had he slept at the edge of the wood, before the woman and her dog had woken him? Had he indeed come home, unconscious, unaware, to spend an hour or two in bed, to write a confused and shattered message in his own journal, then to return to the woodland edge, to wait for dawn?
Suddenly alarmed, he began to wonder what other magic Ash had worked on him.
Where was Wynne-Jones? He had been gone over a week, now, and Huxley was increasingly disturbed, very concerned for his friend. Each day he ventured as far into the wood as the Horse Shrine, seeking a sign of the man, seeking, too, for Ash, but she had disappeared. Four days after returning home Huxley trekked more deeply, through a mile or so of intensely silent oakwood, emerging in unfamiliar terrain, not at the Wolf Glen at all.
Panicked, feeling himself to be losing touch with his own frail perception of the wood, he returned to Oak Lodge. He had been gone nearly twenty hours by his own reckoning, but only five hours had passed in the house, and Jennifer and the boys were not at home. His wife, no doubt, was in Grimley, or had perhaps taken the car to Gloucester for the day.
So it startled him to enter his study through the locked main door and to see his French windows opened wide, and the cat nestling in his leather chair. He shooed the animal away from the room, and examined the doors. There was no sign of them having been forced. No footprints. No sign of disturbance in the room. The study door had been locked from the outside.