Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) (36 page)
‘What the devil is it?’
He turned in his chair, furious at the interruption to
his train of thought. Steven stood in the doorway, in his dressing gown, looking shocked, nervous. He was holding a mug of hot chocolate.
‘What is it, boy? I’m working!’
‘Will you tell me the story?’
‘What story?’
Huxley glanced back at his journal, laid his finger on the last line, trying to summon the words that were fading from mind so fast.
Steven had faltered. He was torn, it seemed, between running upstairs, or standing his ground. His eyes were wide, but there was a frown on his face. ‘You said as soon as you came back you’d tell me a story about Romans.’
‘I said no such thing!’
‘But you
did
…!’
‘Don’t argue with me, Steven. Get to bed with you!’
Meekly, Steven stepped away. His mouth was tight as he whispered, ‘Goodnight.’
Huxley turned back to the journal, scratched his head, inked his pen and continued. He had written – concerning Ash – that she might have had:
some awareness of what I believe was called the
Urscumug?
But probably she dates from a time considerably later than this primal myth.
The mythago that is Ash can
manipulate
time. This is an incredible discovery, should it be confirmed by later study. So Ryhope Wood is not just a repository of legendary creatures created in the present day … its defensive nature, its warping of time, its playing with time and
space … these physical conditions can be imparted to the mythago forms themselves: Ash’s magic – perhaps legendary in her own time – seems to become
real
in this wood. WJ and I
have
travelled through time. We were sent, separately, to an event that had occurred in the cold, ancient past, an event of such power (for the minds of the day) that it has drawn to it not just
our
space and time, but others too, similar times, alternatives, the stuff of fantasy, the stuff of wilder dreams.
For one brief instant, the wood was opened to dimensions inconceivable. Grey-green man came through, returned. And for my part, my memory was affected, a dream, perhaps, like many dreams … I had thought the meadow to be newly cropped, but clearly this had been a dream, and I had misremembered.
Ryhope Wood plays tricks more subtle than I had previously imagined.
I am safely home, however, and WJ too. He talks of ‘gates’, pathways and passages to mythic forms of hell. He is becoming obsessed with this idea, and claims to have found such a gateway in the wood itself.
So: two old men (no! I don’t feel old. Just a little tired!), two tired men, each with an obsession. And a wealth of wonder to explore, given time, energy, and the freedom from those concerns that can so interfere with the process of intellectualising such a wondrous place as exists beyond the edgewoods.
Huxley capped his pen, leaned back and stretched, yawning fiercely. Outside, the late summer night was
well advanced. He blotted the page of the journal, hesitated – tempted to turn back a few pages – then closed it.
Returning to the sitting room he found Jennifer reading. She looked up at him solemnly, then forced a smile.
‘All finished?’
‘I think so.’
She was thoughtful for a moment, then said gently, ‘Don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep.’
‘What promises?’
‘A story for Steven.’
‘I made him no promise …’
Jennifer sighed angrily. ‘If you say so, George.’
‘I do say so.’
But he softened his tone. Perhaps he had forgotten a promise to tell Steven a Roman story. Perhaps, in any event, he should have been gentler with the boy. Reaching into his pocket he drew out the wrist drum that Ash had left.
‘Look at this. I found it at the Horse Shrine. I’ll give it to Steve in the morning.’
Jennifer took the drum, smiled, shook it and made it beat its staccato rhythm. She shivered. ‘It feels odd. It feels old.’
Huxley agreed. ‘It
is
old.’ And added with a laugh, ‘A better trophy than that last one, eh?’
‘Trophy?’
‘Yes. You remember … that raw and bloody bone in my study. You kicked it and called it a trophy …’
‘Raw and bloody bone?’
She looked quite blank, not understanding him.
Huxley stood facing her for a long while, his head
reeling. Eventually she shrugged and returned to her book. He turned, left the room, walked stiffly back to his study and opened the journal at the page where grey-green man had left his second message.
The message was there all right.
But with a moan of despair and confusion, Huxley placed his hand upon the page, upon the scrawled words, touched a finger-tip to the part of the paper where, just a few days ago, there had been a smear of blood, confusing and concealing part of grey-green man’s script.
And where now there was no blood. No blood at all.
He sat for a long time, staring out through the open windows, to the garden and the wood beyond. At length he picked up the pen, turned to the end of the journal and started to write.
It would seem that I am not quite home
Confused about this
.
Maybe Wynne-Jones will have an answer
Must return to Shrine again
Everything feels right, but not right
Not quite home
The legend of the powerful enchanter, seduced by a young, ambitious protégé, is a well known story, and of all such tales, that of Merlin and Vivien is arguably the most profoundly engaging. The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson devoted a wonderful chapter in his epic
The Idylls of the King
, his re-exploration of Arthur, and the Matter of Britain, to these two wily characters. It is, in my view, the most startling and powerful of the scenes that Tennyson recreates, and very inspiring.
Merlin’s Wood
is a short novel, in four parts, each distinctively written, designed around the theme of ‘the stealing of power’. Of all the novels I have written over the years, this is perhaps the most challenging: nearly two hundred pages of deception and trickery, a collection of moments both of magic and mayhem, of alternative worlds and the recognisable realm.
It is a novel told along the narrow path that divides real existence, as we would understand it, from the possible world that might have arisen had our older and more naturalistic (pagan) beliefs remained profoundly present
in European society, rather than having been absorbed by Christianity. There are versions of folk songs, as well as of the poem
The Night Before Christmas
!
Merlin’s Wood
is also a tale of possession, both physically, and in the form of the intense need we have to
know
, to satisfy the craving that is curiosity.
And it is a tale of murder driven by lust and longing – which is the essential tale of Merlin and Vivien.
The genesis of
Merlin’s Wood
can be found in my short story ‘Scarrowfell’, which deals with a similar world, close enough to our own to recognise, but different because the reality of what we (these days) call ‘paganism’ is still informing the imaginary society – both from its landscape, to the thinking and beliefs of its people.
And it took only one visit in the late 1980s to the
Fôret de Broceliande
, Merlin’s fabled birthplace, and a vacation in Brittany, camping among the tangled woods and monumental stone remains of the prehistoric people who had once inhabited that part of the country, to become entranced with a ‘Vision of Magic’ that simply
had
to be written.
I wonder if Tennyson visited Brittany, and was equally entranced?
Finally, there is one phrase in that long poem by Tennyson that struck me at once, and which inspired and underwrote the horror and the terror of the family tale that is central to
Merlin’s Wood
:
How from the rosy tips of life and love
.
Flash’d the bare-grinning skeleton of death!
—two powerfully evocative lines that have so many
different meanings! And in this short novel, I have tried to tease out as many as I can.
The stories that accompany
Merlin’s Wood
all draw on the same notion of ‘a vision of magic’. The earliest, ‘Earth and Stone’, was written out of a passion for imagining the landscapes and beliefs of pre-historic Ireland, a time of amazing conceptual and artistic development. I explored the landscape with a very close friend. There are wonders there, still buried below the clay, waiting to be found. A trick is played on my hero, an arrival from the future. The young boy who tricks him – Tig (his full name means: Never-touch-Woman, Never-touch-Earth) – became central to
Lavondyss
, in the Mythago Cycle. I have always had a soft spot for that young trickster. In the 1970s I crouched in the tomb mounds and walked the rain-shallowed earthworks, the remnants of kings and of the stories of the glory of those kings, and I was astounded. Much affected. I felt very much like a visitor from the future, though in truth, it was as if the forgotten years had come alive for me.
‘Scarrowfell’ was written to be read aloud, with music, preferably folk music, something jaunty. The opening verse is from the, Albion Dance Band’s
Morris On
. I read it one Hallowe’en. It is set in an alternative world to ours where the absorbing and corrupting of older beliefs, by Christianity, has not been fully achieved. My intention was to explore how blind power (cf. Odin) corrupts innocence. It is not the newest of ideas, a fact I know, but I found it powerful when I wrote it.
‘Thorn’ shows the process by which this failure to destroy the old ways occurs, albeit in the life of one
simple stonemason working on a new cathedral in the twelfth century. The story was selected for
The Oxford Book of Fantasy
, edited by Professor Thomas Shippey. I cannot, and will not, deny a debt of honour to William Golding’s wonderful novel
The Spire
. My tragic hero is far less inspired than Golding’s priest, Jocelin, but his fall tells it all.
Finally, ‘The Bone Forest’: this is a Mythago tale, though set before the rest of the Mythago Cycle. I wrote it to fill in background and back-story to
Mythago Wood
, and at the request of the screenwriter who was adapting that first novel for film. As with Merlin, so with Mythago: there are many levels and layers, many depths; many discoveries to be made. ‘The Bone Forest’ is a story of love and horror, of the weird, and of the despair that will eventually lead to the love and delight of
Mythago Wood
. The grey-green man who inhabits the tale is a reflection of the birth of conscience and consent, but hateful: a trickster.
Robert Holdstock
London
November 2008
If you have enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you will find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.
For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …
For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …
Visit the SF Gateway.
Mythago Wood
1.
Mythago Wood
(1984)
2.
Lavondyss
(1988)
3.
The Bone Forest
(1991)
4.
The Hollowing
(1992)
5.
Merlin’s Wood
(1994)
6.
Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn
(1997)
7.
Avilion
(2009)
The Merlin Codex
1.
Celtika
(2001)
2.
The Iron Grail
(2002)
3.
The Broken Kings
(2006)
Novels
Eye Among the Blind
(1976)
Earthwind
(1977)
Necromancer
(1978)
Where Time Winds Blow
(1981)
The Emerald Forest
(1985)
Ancient Echoes
(1986)
The Fetch
(1991)
Night Hunter (writing as Robert Faulcon)
The Stalking
(1983)
The Talisman
(1983)
The Ghost Dance
(1983)
The Shrine
(1984)
The Hexing
(1984)
The Labyrinth
(1987)
Raven (as Richard Kirk, with Angus Wells)
Swordsmistress of Chaos
(1978)
A Time of Ghosts
(1978)
The Frozen God
(1978)
Lords of the Shadows
(1979)
A Time of Dying
(1979)
Writing as Robert Black
Legend of the Werewolf
(1976)
The Satanists
(1977)
Berserker Trilogy (writing as Chris Carlsen)
1.
Shadow of the Wolf
(1977)
2.
The Bull Chief
(1977)
3.
The Horned Warrior
(1979)
Collections
In the Valley of the Statues: And Other Stories
(1982)
To Scott and Suzi Baker
Phantasmes de l’Opéra
Robert Holdstock (1948 – 2009)
Robert Paul Holdstock was born in a remote corner of Kent, sharing his childhood years between the bleak Romney Marsh and the dense woodlands of the Kentish heartlands. He received an MSc in medical zoology and spent several years in the early 1970s in medical research before becoming a full-time writer in 1976. His first published story appeared in the
New Worlds
magazine in 1968 and for the early part of his career he wrote science fiction. However, it is with fantasy that he is most closely associated.
1984 saw the publication of
Mythago Wood
, winner of the BSFA and World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel, and widely regarded as one of the key texts of modern fantasy. It and the subsequent ‘mythago’ novels (including
Lavondyss
, which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1988) cemented his reputation as the definitive portrayer of the wild wood. His interest in Celtic and Nordic mythology was a consistent theme throughout his fantasy and is most prominently reflected in the acclaimed Merlin Codex trilogy, consisting of
Celtika, The Iron Grail
and
The Broken Kings
, published between 2001 and 2007.
Among many other works, Holdstock co-wrote
Tour of the Universe
with Malcolm Edwards, for which rights were sold for a space shuttle simulation ride at the CN Tower in Toronto, and
The Emerald Forest
, based on John Boorman’s film of the same name. His story, ‘The Ragthorn’, written with friend and fellow author Garry Kilworth, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella and the BSFA Award for Short Fiction.
Robert Holdstock died in November 2009, just four months after the publication of
Avilion
, the long-awaited, and sadly final, return to Ryhope Wood.