Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) (6 page)

In the light from the high windows they were
married. The child kicked as they kissed and took the two blessings. They went outside into bright, cool sunshine and paid respects at the cold-earth homes of Eveline and Albert, and then of Sebastian. The horses were straining at the tethers. Martin led Rebecca to the carriage. The riders mounted and led the way through the gate and along the path to the first village, and for two hours, with the sounds of car-horns, hunting-horns, klaxons, timbrels and the ululating voices of the younger women, they paraded the countryside and villages near Broceliande, collecting the presents and offerings of flowers, money and charms that were flung to them.

Daniel Tristan Laroche was First Named at the moment of his birth; ultrasound scans had confirmed the child’s sex some months before, but Rebecca was superstitious and no items relating to the child, not clothes nor crib, nor bath were allowed in the house until the safe delivery.

Daniel was an enormous infant, over nine pounds in weight at birth, eyes bright in the red, wrinkled skin. He was completely silent, no cry, no breath of complaint as he was confronted with the world. He took to the breast with fervour, and remained calm and compliant during his Welcoming as cold water was splashed on him at the stone well, among the hazels. The name given to him was
fort de vie
. Since he was fit, and grew normally for the first few weeks, feeding avidly and lying contentedly below the spinning objects on the playframe, it was easy
for a while to feel no real concern at his silence, or his seeming unawareness of what was happening around him. Indeed, it was a boon, since Martin had anticipated disturbed nights and short tempers.

But quickly the mood changed. Rebecca became frustrated by the silence, and Martin’s concern grew as well. Daniel slept solidly for hours at a time. He woke on being touched, and fed normally. He lay quiescent on being placed down and stared into space. Sudden sounds didn’t alarm him. Sudden movement had no effect.

Four weeks after his birth the health visitor was able to say with certainty that something was wrong.

Daniel was taken to a paediatrician in Vannes and Rebecca’s worst fears were rapidly and thoroughly confirmed. Daniel was without sight, without hearing … and therefore it was necessary to entertain realistically the possibility that he would be without speech. Genetic tests taken by amniocentesis had shown no irregularities, and in every other respect Daniel was a perfectly healthy child.

Rebecca was devastated, Martin depressed and frightened. They returned to Broceliande and closed the door of their house against the world, keeping the shutters up throughout the summer, shadows living among the shadows of their home, cradling and nursing the beautiful, silent creature who was their son.

2

Rebecca was singing in her sleep. It was an odd sound, drawn out, a single note that faded as each breath was exhausted. It was enough to wake Martin, however, and he sat up, running his fingers through the heavy sheen of sweat on the woman’s pale features. She stirred restlessly at the touch and turned away, curling into a foetal position, beginning to breathe more heavily.

Now that he was awake, Martin heard two more sounds: the tap-tap of metal on glass, and the same note that Rebecca was singing, except that it was higher in pitch, a single, sustained tone.

‘Daniel?’ he whispered, puzzled. ‘It can’t be …’

He wriggled his feet into slippers and went to the window. Two children were on the path, the Breques girl, Cathy, and her elder brother, a gawkish lad of ten. It was the girl who was relating to the invisible travellers, her raincoat swirling as she danced and spun around, exposing thin, naked limbs below. She was in a trance, her brother loping after her, his eyes wide with the wonder of what only they could see.

Again, the tap-tap of metal on glass, and Martin crept stealthily to Daniel’s room.

The two-year-old had somehow crawled out of his high-walled cot. In pyjamas, hair awry, he was spread-eagled against the window, his arms stretched above him, his fingers, one with a metal thimble on it, rapping on the pane. His face was pressed to the glass, his mouth gaping and emitting with every exhalation the single,
musical note. His eyes were wide, sightless, reflected in the window.

He jumped suddenly when Martin touched him, then turned and let his father cradle him. Small fingers traced the features of the man who lifted him into his arms. Daniel’s chin was wet with saliva. He was smiling and silent, now. He was heavy for his age, dead weight as he curled into a ball, carried back to his cot.

Rebecca was suddenly in the doorway, dishevelled and sleepy. ‘What’s going on?’

‘He was singing,’ Martin said, his heart racing, his mind still unable to grasp fully that Daniel had made this sound!
He was singing!

‘I suppose you could call it singing …’ he added.

She came over and brushed fingers lightly over the silent boy’s brow.

‘I was dreaming of him,’ she said. ‘We were sitting together below bright stars, in a wide, cool desert. It was a dream of Australia. Together we were singing up a path, rocking side to side, but aware of each other. He was an older boy in the dream, Daniel as a grown lad, with good sight and a vibrant life. We sang together …’

With a shiver of recognition, Martin said, ‘You were singing together just now. You in your sleep, Daniel by the window. A single note, not very musical.’

Rebecca smiled sadly. ‘There you are then. Mother and son on the same wavelength, the same line. What was he doing at the window?’

‘Kids on the path. The Breques children. He was tapping the window as they passed with one of Eveline’s
thimbles, but he couldn’t have been aware of them. Could he?’

‘I’m sure he could,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘Christ, he’s got to be aware of something …’

Exhausted, they took Daniel into their room, and as always the boy fell into peaceful sleep between them, even though his eyes were open.

The two years since his birth had been terrible, more for the failure to make a decision on Daniel’s future than for the fact of his disabilities. Should he be sent to a home, nursed by professionals, where his blindness and deafness could be addressed at every hour of every day? Or should he stay with parents who loved him, but who could do nothing practical to improve his physical condition? Daniel was not difficult. He loved being outside. He walked with Martin, hand in hand, and seemed, oddly, aware of that which was surely beyond his senses: the forest, the rolling sky, the passing storms, the animals in the fields.

The boy never complained. His worst moments were at night, when sometimes he would howl ferally, or scream in an hysterical way, always becoming silent after a few moments in either of his parent’s arms.

Father Gualzator had blessed him and prayed for him. Yvette Valence, the local herbalist who lived above the local post office, had prepared all manner of rubs and potions, from camomile to dogwort, from belladonna in honey to the crushed skull of an owl, whose night sight was the most perfect in the animal world. No amount of sympathy had allowed this sympathetic healing to have effect.

Yvette, like the priest, was from Basque country. After feeling ‘called away’ from the high passes and airy forests of her native land, she had followed the path that wound north, through the painted caves of the Perigord and the dense oakwoods of the Dordogne, to where Broceliande straddled the way to the coast, cutting across the ancient route. The place had felt right to her, and she had settled. She had been a close friend of Eveline’s, and was a doting friend and helper for Rebecca and Martin now, but she became frustrated with Daniel, perhaps confused and distressed by the failure of even the simplest of her healing cures. It was as if, she said, Daniel were aware of the charm she used and was blocking it.

Even the wart on his left thumb – which ought to have vanished within two days – remained obstinately in place, until one day he dipped his hand into the well water, by the hazels, and the crusty excrescence disappeared within an hour.

Yvette’s time with Daniel ceased abruptly when Martin forbade her to come back to the house. She had arrived in a lather of fury and fear, holding fresh herbs in black, cloth packets, and a cross made from the branches of a yew.

‘The boy is dead,’ she said in hushed tones. She would not cross the threshold into the house. ‘I realised it suddenly. The boy is dead. A traveller is inside him. I can’t help you any more.’

To Martin and Rebecca’s fury, she didn’t keep this information to herself, but spread it through the villages.

*

Daniel, however, was far from dead. Senseless, literally, he showed otherwise every sign of vibrant life. And he had started to sing, single notes but different notes, singing them until he was breathless and exhausted, singing them with gusto. Where the conception for such sound came from was not readily answerable, but Rebecca, who was giving classes in song at the local school, sang to Daniel at every opportunity. Perhaps he was aware of the melodies through some other sense, a synaesthetic appreciation of the creation songs of the Australian aborigines, and the corrupt creation songs – the folk songs – of old France and England, with which Rebecca was now very familiar. So the house was a musical place, although at times the double act of tuneful and single-note singing, an eerie sound that lasted for hours, was too much for Martin, and he was glad of his job, at a small design studio in a town an hour’s drive away.

A second letter arrived for Rebecca from Flynn. The first had been a short note, transparently sad, yet filled with best wishes, received shortly after Daniel’s birth. As ever, with Flynn, it was not so much a question of knowing more-or-less where he was as of waiting for him to come to the small town and check the post office for any mail. He wrote sparingly, using an old fountain pen that spilled more ink randomly than it dispensed in
the tight lines and folds of the words he expressed. Rebecca savoured the two letters, as if they were fragments of a lost shroud. Martin saw this but did not interfere. He was never in any doubt as to her love for him, nor her loyalty, and try as he did, on one occasion, he simply could not arouse in himself any sense of jealousy for the outback-traveller, reaching through space and time for his once-love, the Live Alone Lady as he called Rebecca.

Rebecca had written to Flynn, describing the odd way in which Daniel sang despite profound deafness and the way in which he seemed aware despite his blindness. Perhaps she had been seeking some intuition or insight that she remembered from her outback-travelling days.

She was rewarded with a letter, certainly helpful, but far from what she expected.

Jesus, Beck, your letter frightens the fucking life out of me. God knows how long since you wrote it. Time never meant a great deal here, but I guess you’re in the summer when this is happening, as you describe it, and that’s a solid strand of time or so ago, so I guess you’ve walked the line a good way since then
.

But don’t you remember anything that happened around you on the songlines here?

Jesus! If this boy, your Daniel, is singing, then he’s taking! So the first thing to do, Beck, is stop singing. Christ, I wish our times were crossing, but we’re adrift by months, and that makes me concerned
.

Beck, stop singing. Remember the Three Lady
Macbeths, as you nicknamed them? Well, there’s a lot to remember in what those three ladies were all about. I can’t get to you, Beck, or else I would, and you know I would. I’m hurt inside, and I miss you, but you wouldn’t be my old Live Alone Lady if you weren’t sure that what you were doing was the right thing, and I guess you’ve found a new line or two to travel, maybe those old teeth-from-the-earth stones you always told me about, and the dreamtime songs of the Celts, or whoever the hell it was that lived there at the time
.

Beck, when a Man Walking reaches a songline, he sits down for a rub or two, and chews some sweet wood, and listens to the wind, then listens to the song, and maybe sings up a little of the old line. But the song is big in the air, and it’s too big to take away, so he maybe sings a bit of it, and chews off a bit before he crosses, but there’s plenty left to get inside the next Man Walking
.

But a Lady Macbeth is out to take the song that was born. She’ll walk around a puddle, walk through a hut, walk around a sit-down place, and when she sings the song, someone loses the song. Because that’s what she’s all about, a gatherer, a collector. What she does with the song only the Dream knows, but I’ve seen children stripped of music, and a young man lose the song that he’d been born with, and an old lady, in rags and with sticks, walking out across the dry places, full, fed and bloated on what she’d taken and making patterns on the land that only the tribe could see. So you beware, Beck. I don’t like the sound of this Deaf Son Singing of
yours and this Other guy or no, song is soul, and where the soul is lacking, the taking game is strong
.

I send my love to you, Beck. God knows I miss you, and for more than just the jumping up and down, although, Jesus! those were good nights in the old hut, you truly are magnificent, and never to be forgotten, especially for your spirit. But I know you’ll come back if the lines turn right for us again. In the meantime, God Bless and keep you, and that lucky bastard who sleeps next to you. And keep writing. I need to know you’re OK
.

Martin folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope. Rebecca had Daniel in her lap, and was rocking slightly as she watched the news on the TV. The boy waved his hands in the air, sightless eyes on the ceiling, a glistening of liquid on his chin. He seemed to be reaching for something, but it was simply a reflex action. Rebecca glanced across the kitchen to where Martin was tapping the letter against the table.

‘I don’t mind talking about it, if that’s what you want.’

‘The letter?’

‘Are you upset by it?’

‘
Upset
by it! Not at all. You know me better than that. It’s these “Lady Macbeths”. I don’t understand the references to “Lady Macbeths” …’