Mythago Wood - 1 (19 page)

I loved her more intensely than I would have believed possible. Just to say
her name, Guiwenneth, made my head spin. When she whispered my name, and teased
me with passionate words in her own tongue, I felt an ache in my chest, and
happiness that was almost overwhelming.

We worked on the house, keeping it tidy, rearranging the kitchen to make it
more acceptable to Guiwenneth, who enjoyed preparing food as much as I did. She
hung hawthorn and birch twigs over every door and window: to keep out ghosts. We
moved my father's furniture out of the study, and Guiwenneth created a sort of
private nest for herself in that oak-infested room. The forest, having grasped
the house so firmly through this one chamber, now seemed to rest. I had half
expected that each night more massive roots and trunks would surge through the
plaster and the brickwork, until nothing but the occasional window and roof tile
could be seen of Oak Lodge among the branches of a tangle of trees. The saplings
in the garden and fields grew taller. We worked vigorously clearing them from
the garden itself, but they crowded round the fencing and beyond the gate,
creating a sort of orchard around us. Now, to get to the main woodland, we had
to pick our way through that orchard, stamping out footpaths. This enclosing
limb of forest was two hundred yards wide, and on either side was open land. The
house rose from the middle of the trees, its roof overgrown with tendrils of the
oak that had emerged through the study. The whole area was strangely quiet,
uncannily still. Silent, that is, save for the laughter and activity of the two
people who inhabited the garden glade.

I loved watching Guiwenneth work. She fashioned clothes out of every item of
Christian's wardrobe she could find. She would have worn shirts and trousers
until they rotted on her, but every day we washed ourselves, and every third day
our dirty garments, and slowly Guiwenneth's forest smell vanished. She seemed
slightly uncomfortable with this, and in this way was unlike the Celtic people
of her time, who were fastidiously clean, using soap, which the Romans did not,
and regarding the invading legions as quite filthy! I liked her when she smelled
faintly of Lifebuoy soap and perspiration; she took every opportunity to squeeze
the sap of leaves and plants on to her skin, however.

Within two weeks her command of English was so good that only occasionally
did she give herself away with some awkward conjunction, or startling misuse of
a word. She insisted that I attempt to acquire some Brythonic, but I proved to.
be no linguist, finding even the simplest of words impossible to wrap my tongue,
palate and lips around. It made her laugh, but it also irritated her. I soon
understood why. English, for all its sophistication, its content of other
languages, its expressiveness, was not a
natural
language to Guiwenneth.
There were things that she could not express in English. Mostly feelings, they
were nevertheless of intense importance to her. To tell me she loved me in
English was fine, and I shivered each time she used those magic words. But to
her, true meaning came in saying 'M'n care pinuth', using her own words to
express her love. I never felt as overwhelmed with feeling when she spoke that
foreign phrase, though, and here was the simple problem: she needed to see and
sense me responding to
her
words of love, but I could only respond to
words that meant very little to her.

Just once, in those two months of the summer - when I could not have
conceived of greater happiness, nor have imagined the tragedy that was gaining
on us by the hour -just once I tried to get her to move away from the house, to
come with me to the bigger towns. With great reluctance, she wrapped one of my
jackets around her, belting it at the waist as she belted everything. Looking
like the most magnificently pretty of scarecrows, her feet bare but for some
home-made leather sandals, she started to walk with me along the track to the
main road.

We held hands. The air was hot and still. Guiwenneth's breathing grew more
laboured, her look more wild. Suddenly she clenched my hand as if in pain, and
drew a sharp breath. I looked at her and she was staring at me, almost pleading
with me. Her expression was confused, a mixture of need - the need to please me
- and fear.

And equally suddenly she had slapped both hands to her head and screamed,
beginning to back away from me.

'It's all right, Guin!' I yelled, and made after her, but she had begun to
cry, turning and running back towards the tall wall of young oaks that marked
the orchard.

Only when she was standing within their shade did she calm down. Tearfully,
she reached for me, and just hugged me, very hard, and very long. She whispered
something in her own language, and then said, 'I'm sorry, Steven. It hurts.'

'That's okay. It's okay,' I soothed; and hugged her. She was shaking badly,
and later I learned that it had been a physical pain, a shooting pain through
her whole body, as if she were being punished for straying so far from the
mother wood.

In the evening, after sundown, but at a time when the world outside was still
quite bright, I found Guiwenneth in the cage of oak, the deserted study where
the wildwoods grew. She was curled up in the embrace of the thickest trunk,
which forked as it sprouted from below the floor, and formed a cradle for her.
She stirred as I stepped into the cold, gloomy room. My breath frosted. The
branches, with their broad leaves, quivered and trembled, even when I was still.
They were aware of me, unhappy with my presence in the room.

'Guin?'

'Steven . . .' she murmured, and sat up, reaching her hand for me. She was
dishevelled and had been crying. Her long, luxurious hair was tangled and
twisted about the sharp bark of the tree, and she laughed as she tugged the wild
strands loose. Then we kissed and I squeezed into the tight fork of the trunk,
and we sat there, shivering slightly.

'It's always so cold in here.'

She wrapped her arms around me, rubbed her hands vigorously up and down my
back. 'Is that better?'

'It's good just to be with you. I'm sorry you're upset.'

She continued to try and warm me. Her breath was sweet, her eyes large and
moist. She snatched a kiss, then rested her lips against the angle of my jaw,
and I knew she was thinking hard about something that disturbed her deeply.
Around us, the silent forest watched, enclosing us with its supernatural
iciness.

'I can't leave here,' she said.

'I know. We won't try again.'

'I do,' she said softly. 'I'll lose you.'

'You won't. I love you too much.'

'I love you very much too. And I'll lose you. It's coming, Steven. I can feel
it. Terrible loss.'

'Nonsense.'

'I can't leave here. I can't go beyond this place, this wood. I belong here.
It won't let me go.'

'We'll stay together. I'll write a book about us. We'll hunt wild pig.'

'My world is small,' she said. 'I can run across my world in days. I stand on
a hill and I see a place that is beyond my grasp. My world is tiny compared to
yours. You will want to go away, northwards, to the cold place. Southwards to
the sun. You will want to go west, to the wild lands. You won't stay here
forever, but I have to. They won't let me go.'

'Why are you so worried? If I go away it'll only be for a day or two. To
Gloucester, London. You'll be safe. I shan't leave you. I
couldn't
leave
you, Guin. My God, if only you could feel what I feel. I've never been so happy
in my life. What I feel for you terrifies me, sometimes, it's so strong.'

It grew dark outside, but she spoke of the fear she felt as we sat, frozen
stiff, embracing, embraced by our friend, the oak.

'We will not always be together,' she said.

'Impossible.'

She bit her lip, then brushed her nose against mine, coming as close as
possible. 'I'm from that other land, Steven. If you don't go from me, then one
day I may go from you. But you are strong enough to bear the loss.'

'What are you saying, Guin? Life is just beginning.'

'You are not thinking. You don't want to think!' She was angry. 'I am wood
and rock, Steven, not flesh and bone. I am not like you. The wood protects me,
rules me. I can't express it properly. I don't have the words. For a time, now,
we can be together. But not forever.'

'I'm not going to lose you, Guin. Nothing will stand in the way of us,
nothing, not the wood, not my wretched brother, not that beast thing, that
Urscumug.'

She hugged me again, and in the faintest of voices, almost as if she knew she
was asking something that was impossible, she said, 'Look after me.'

Look after me!

It made me smile, at the time.
Me
look after her? It was all I could
do to keep her in sight when we hunted the edgewoods. In pursuit of a hare, or
wild piglet, a major factor contributing to the logistics of success was my
tendency to perspire and gasp myself close to death when running. Guiwenneth was
swift, fit and deadly. She never showed any sign of irritation at my failure to
reflect her own stamina in mine. She accepted a failed hunt with a shrug and a
smile. She never boasted a successful hunt, although, in contrast, I always felt
delighted and smug when we were able to supplement our diet with the product of
our forest strategy and hunter's skill.

Look after me.
Such a simple statement, and it had made me smile. Yes, I
could see that in matters of love, she was as vulnerable as me. But I could
think of her only as a powerful presence in my life. I looked to Guiwenneth for
the lead in almost everything, and it neither shames me, nor embarrasses me to
state that. She could run half a mile through undergrowth and slit the throat of
a forty-pound wild pig with hardly any effort; I was more orderly and organized
than her and brought to her life a degree of comfort that she had not known
before.

To each their own. Skills used unselfishly make for cooperation. In six weeks
of living with, and deeply loving Guiwenneth, I had learned how easy it was to
look to her for the lead, for she was an expert in survival, a hunter, an
individual in every way, who had chosen to combine her life essence with mine,
and in that I basked.

Look after me!

If only I had. If only I could have learned her language, and learned, thus,
the terrible fear that haunted this most beautiful and innocent of girls.

'What is your earliest memory, Guin?'

We were walking in the late afternoon, skirting the wood to the south,
between the trees and Ryhope. It was cloudy, but warm. The depression of the day
before had passed, and as is the way with young lovers, somehow the anxiety and
pain of what we had talked about so briefly had brought us closer, and made us
more cheerful. Hand in hand we kicked through long grass, picked carefully
between the sprawling, fly-infested pats of cow dung, and walked always with the
Norman tower of St Michael's church in the distance.

'Guin? Is that too tough a question?'

'What question, Steven?' She glanced at me, dark eyes gleaming, mouth touched
with a smile. In her way she was teasing me, and before I could restate my
query, she broke from me and raced - all flapping white shirt and baggy flannels
- to the woodland edge and peered inside.

Raising a finger to her lips as I approached, she murmured, 'Quiet . . .
quiet . . . oh, by the God Cernunnos. . .!'

My heart began to beat faster. I peered into the darkness of the wood,
seeking among the tangled growth for whatever she had seen.

By the God Cernunnos?

The words were like pinches and punches to my mind, teasing strokes, and
slowly I became aware that Guiwen-neth was in a very playful mood.

'By the God Cernunnos!' I repeated, and she laughed and began to run along
the track. I chased her. She had listened to the way I blasphemed and adapted
such blasphemy to the beliefs of her own age. Normally she would never have
expressed surprise with such a religious oath. It would have been a reference to
animal dung, or death.

I caught her - and therefore she had intended me to catch her - and we
wrestled on the warm grass, struggling and twisting until one of us gave in.
Soft hair tickled my face as she leaned to kiss me.

'So answer my question,' I said.