Mythago Wood - 1 (26 page)

On that far day, during the life of this people, the Outsider came to the
bare hill behind the stones that stood in a ring around the magic place called
Veruambas. The Outsider thrust his spear into the earth, and squatted down
beside it, watching the place of stones for many hours. The people gathered
outside the great circle, and then came inside the ditch. The circle was four
hundred paces across. The ditch around it had been sunk to five man heights. The
stones were all animals, which had once been men, and each had a stone-talker,
who whispered the prayers of the priests to them.

The youngest of the three sons of the Chieftain Aubriagas was sent up the
hill to study the Outsider. He came back, breathless and bleeding from a wound
to his neck. The Outsider, he said, was like a beast, clad in leggings and
jerkin of bear hide, with a great bear's skull for a helmet, and boots made of
ashwood and leather.

The second youngest son of Aubriagas was sent up the hill. He returned,
bruised about the face and shoulders. The Outsider, he said, carried forty
spears and seven shields. About his belt hung the shrivelled heads of five great
warriors, all of them chieftains, none of them with the eyes left in the skulls.
Behind the hill, camped out of sight, he had an entourage of twenty warriors,
each a champion, all of them frightened of their leader.

Then the eldest of the brothers was sent to study the Outsider. He came back
with his head held in his hands. The head spoke briefly before the Outsider on
the hill rattled his heaviest shield.

This is what the head said:

The Outsider rattled his heaviest war-shield and the head of the eldest
brother cried, casting forlorn glances at the one he loved. Then a wild dog was
brought, and the head was tied to its back. It was sent to the Outsider, who
pricked out the eyes and tied the skull to his belt.

For ten days and nights the Outsider walked around the stone shrine, always
out of reach of arrows. The ten best warriors were sent to speak to him and came
back with their heads in their hands, weeping, to say goodbye to their wives and
children. In this way, all the wild dogs were sent from the shrine, carrying the
combat trophies of the alien.

The wolf stones in the great circle were daubed with wolf blood and the
speakers whispered the names of
Gulgaroth
and
Olgarog,
the great
Wolf Gods from the time of the wildwoods.

The deer stones were painted with the patterns of the stags and the speakers
called for
Munnos
and
Clumug,
the stags who walk with the hearts
of men.

And on the great boar stone the carcass of a boar that had killed ten men was
placed, and its heart blood smeared on the ground. The speaker for this stone,
who was the oldest and wisest of the speakers, called for
Urshacam
to
appear, and destroy the Outsider.

On the dawn of the eleventh night, the bones of the strangers who guarded the
gates rose and ran, screeching, into the boggy woods. There were eight of them,
ghastly white, and still wearing the garments from the time of their sacrifice.
The ghosts of these strangers fled in the form of black crows, and so the shrine
was unguarded.

Now, from the wolf stone came the great spirits of the wolves, huge shapes,
grey and fierce, leaping through the fires and across the great ditch. They were
followed by the horned beasts of old, the stags which ran on their hind legs.
They too went through the smoke of the fires, and their cries were frightening
to hear. They were dim shapes in the mist on that cold morning. They could not
kill the Outsider, and they fled back to the ghost caves in the earth.

Finally, the boar spirit squeezed from the pores of the stone and grunted,
sniffing the morning air, lapping at the dew that had formed on the wild grass
around the stone. The boar was twice the height of a man. Its tusks were as
sharp as a chieftain's dagger, and the spread of a full-grown man's arms. It
watched as the Outsider ran swiftly around the circle, spears and shields held
so easily in his hands. Then it ran towards the north gate of the circle.

In that dawn, in the mist, the Outsider cried out for the first time, and
though he stood his ground, the spirit of the Urshacam terrified him. Using
amethysts for eyes, he sent the head of the eldest son of Aubriagas back to the
shrine, where the tribes were huddled in their hide tents, to tell them that all
he required was their strongest spear, their sweetest ox, freshly slaughtered,
their oldest clay flagon of wine, and their fairest daughter. Then he would go.

All of these things were sent, but the daughter - fairer, it was thought,
than the fabled Swithoran - returned, having been rejected by the Outsider as
ugly. (She was not at all unhappy about this.) Others were sent, but though they
were beautiful in all the various ways of women, all were rejected by the
Outsider.

At last the young Warrior-shaman Ebbrega gathered twigs and branches of oak,
elder and hawthorn and fashioned the bones of a girl. He fleshed them with the
rotten leaves and litter from the sties, the hard droppings of hare and sheep.
All this he covered with scented flowers from the woodland glades, blue, pink
and white, the colours of true beauty. He brought her to life with love, and
when she sat before him, naked and cold, he dressed her in a fine white tunic,
and braided her hair. When Aubriagas and the other elders saw her they could not
speak. She was beautiful in a way they had never seen, and it stilled their
tongues. When she cried, Ebbrega saw what he had done and tried to take her for
his own, but the chieftain restrained him and the girl was taken. She was called
Muarthan,
which means
loving one made from fear.
She went to the
Outsider and gave him an oak leaf, shaped from thin bronze. The Outsider lost
his reason and loved her. What happened to them after does riot concern the life
of this people, except to say that Ebbrega never ceased to search for the child
he had made, and searches still.

Kushar finished the tale and opened her eyes. She smiled at me briefly, then
shifted her body into a more comfortable position. Keeton looked glum, his chin
resting on his knees, his gaze vacant and bored. As the girl stopped speaking he
looked up, glanced at me and said, 'All over?'

'I've got to write it down,' I said. I had managed to take notes only on the
first third of the tale, becoming too absorbed in the unfolding images, too
fascinated by what Kushar had been saying. Keeton noticed the excitement in my
voice, and the girl cocked her head and looked at me, puzzled. She too had seen
that her story had affected me strongly. Around us, the
shamiga
were
drifting away from the torches. The evening was finished, for them.
Understanding was just beginning for me, however, and I tried to keep Kushar
with us.

Christian was the Outsider, then. The stranger who is too strong to subdue,
too alien, too powerful. The Outsider must have been an image of terror to very
many communities. There was a difference between
strangers
and the
Outsiders. Strangers, travellers from other communities, needed the assistance
of the tribes. They could be helped, or sacrificed, according to whim. Indeed,
the story that Kushar had just told had referred to the bones of the strangers
who guarded the gates into the great circle, which was surely Avebury, in
Wiltshire.

But the Outsider was different. He was terrifying because he was
unrecognizable, incomprehensible. He used unfamiliar weapons; he spoke a totally
foreign tongue; his behaviour did not conform; his attitude to love and honour
were very different from what was familiar. And it was that alien quality that
made him destructive and without compassion in the eyes of the community.

And Christian had indeed now become destructive and compassionless.

He had taken Guiwenneth because that is what he had dedicated his life to
achieving. He no longer loved her, was no longer strongly under the effect of
her, but he had taken her. What had he said? 'I care about the having of her. I
have hunted too far, too long, to worry about the finer aspects of love.'

The story that Kushar had told was fascinating, for there were so many
ingredients I could recognize: the girl made from the wild, nature sent to
subdue the unnatural; the symbol of the oak leaf, the talisman which I still
wore; the creator of the girl reluctant to part with her; the Outsider himself
terrified of one thing only, the spirit of the boar, Urshacam: the Urscumug! And
his willingness to accept the tribute of cattle, wine and girl and return to his
'own strange realm', as Christian was now making for the very heart of Ryhope
Wood.

What had happened in the tale afterwards, I wondered, and perhaps I would
never know. The girl, the life-speaker, seemed attuned only to the folk memories
of her people; events, stories, passed down by word of mouth, changing, perhaps,
with each telling, which is why they insisted on the strange rule of silence
during the recounting, frightened of the truth slipping away because of the
responses of the listeners.

Clearly, much truth had already gone from the story. Heads that talked, girls
made from wild flowers and dung . . . perhaps all that had happened was that a
band of warriors from another culture had threatened the community at Avebury
and had been appeased with cattle, wine and marriage to one of the daughters of
a minor chief. But the myth of the Outsider was still terrifying, and the sheer
anxiety of encompassing the unknown was a persistent and deep-rooted concern.

'I'm hunting
uth guerig,'
I said, and Kushar shrugged.

'Of course. It will be a long and difficult pursuit.'

'How long ago did he kill the girl?'

Two days. But perhaps it was not the Outsider himself. His warriors guard his
retreat through the wildwoods, to
Lavondyss. Uth guerig
himself may be a
week or more ahead of you.'

'What is
Lavondyss?'

'The realm beyond the fire. The place where the spirits of men are not tied
to the seasons.'

'Do the
shamiga
know of the boar-like beast? The Urscumug?'

Kushar shivered, wrapping her thin arms around her body. "The beast is
close. Two days ago it was heard in the stag glen, near to the broch.'

Two days ago the Urscumug had been in the area! That almost certainly meant
that Christian had been close by as well. Whatever he was doing, wherever he was
going, he was
not
as far ahead of me as I'd thought.

'The Urshacam,' she went on, 'was the first outsider. It walked the great
valleys of ice; it watched the tall trees sprout from the barren ground; it
guarded the woodlands against our people, and the people before us, and the
people who came to the land after us. It is an ever-living beast. It draws
nourishment from the earth and sun. It was once a man, and with others was sent
to live in exile in the ice valleys of this land. Magic had changed them all to
the appearance of beasts. Magic made them ever-living. Many of my people have
died because the Urshacam and his kin were angry.'

The Urscumug. The first Outsider. What had my father written in his journal?
I
am anxious to find the primary image . . . I suspect that the legend of the
Urscumug was powerful enough to carry through all the Neolithic and on into the
second millennium b.c., perhaps even later. Wynne-Jones thinks the Urscumug may
pre-date even the Neolithic.

The trouble with the
shamiga
was that their life-speaker could not
spin tales to order. During my father's contact with them, references to
Urshacam
had not occurred. But clearly the primary mythago, the first of the
legendary characters that had so fascinated my father, came from the Ice Age
itself. It had been created in the minds of the flint-workers and
hunter-gatherers of that cold time, as they struggled to keep the forests back,
following the retreating cold northwards, settling the fertile vales and dales
that were so gradually exposed over the generations-long spring.

Then, without another word, Kushar slipped away from me, and the two torches
were extinguished. It was late, and the
shamiga
had all gone to their low
huts, although a few of them had dragged hides to the fireside and were sleeping
there. Keeton and I erected our tiny tent and crawled in.

During the night an owl cried loudly, an irritating, haunting call. The river
was an endless sound, breaking and splashing over the stepping stones which the
shamiga
guarded.

In the morning they were gone. Their huts were deserted. A dog, or a jackal,
had worried at the grave of the two youngsters. The fire still smouldered.

'Where the hell are they?' Keeton murmured, as we stood by the river and
stretched, after splashing our faces. They had left us several strips of meat,
carefully wrapped in thin linen. It was an odd and unexpected departure. This place seemed to
be the community home, and I should have thought that some of them would have
remained. The river was high; the stepping stones were below the surface. Keeton
stared at them and said, 'I think there are more stones than yesterday.'

I followed his gaze. Was he right? With the river swollen by rains somewhere
behind us, were there suddenly three times the number of stones than the day
before?

'Pure imagination,' I said, shivering slightly. I shrugged on my pack.

'I'm not so sure,' Keeton said as he followed me along the river shore,
deeper into the woodland.