Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (35 page)

Tig was astride him. Twilight gleamed on white bone and the knife cut savagely into yielding flesh. The pain was sudden, then there was no pain. The boy sawed frantically at the living head. His elfin eyes said it all: ‘I want to eat you. I want to suck out your strange dreams …’

A moment later he was yelping, a whipped dog. He was dragged to his feet. The woman held him firmly, gripping the wrist that held the bone knife. And a gentler pair of hands than the boy’s cradled Wyn’s head; fingers
pinched at the deep cut. ‘I need a needle. Anything. A fish bone. Anything …’

The voice was one he knew. The man who held him bent to him and whispered, ‘It has been a long hunt. You are a wily and elusive animal. But I have you now …’

Wyn-rajathuk went into his dreams in peace, no longer afraid. The last he heard was a single word, a word which filled him with joy.

‘Father …’

Wide eyes, in a sharp, angry face, watched from between the bars of the makeshift stockade; the boy’s skin gleamed yellow with the light from the fire in the enclosure. His fingers curled around the wood. His teeth sparkled, his lips drawn back in a determined gesture of challenge.

I shall escape. I will eat your bones
.

Tallis came close, unafraid. Tig made no move but his slanted eyes narrowed slightly, small points of brilliance following her approach. When the woman crouched down and raised the first of her masks, Tig laughed, spat, then shook the bars of his prison with surprising strength.

He faced the Hollower. He stared contemptuously at Gaberlungi and laughed at the Silvering. But he became subdued when Tallis placed Falkenna across her features so that she watched the boy with the cold eyes and sharp face of a bird.

‘Why did you try to kill Wyn-rajathuk?’ she asked through the feathered wood.

He roared out his answer (he had not understood the question) in violent words of his own tongue. Tallis heard “Wyn” and “Morthen”, but apart from that she was lost. One expression was repeated over and over again:
Wyn baag na yith! Wyn baag na yith!

When Tig was quiet again, Tallis said the same words back to him. He watched her, curious at first, then amused. Reaching through the bars he touched the
flight of a bird
, poked a finger gently through the mask’s mouth to the unknown and uncertain region beyond. Tallis tasted the sting of urine and salt on the finger tip, but she allowed the tentative probe to enter her mouth. The boy seemed pleased by this moment of trust.

Tallis removed the mask, touched the wet fingertip with one of her own and watched as Tig became an animal, prowling the confined space of the corral, batting his head against the ground and wailing as if with grief.

Abruptly he was back, facing Tallis. He beat the palm of his left hand against his left eye until it began to weep. He spoke words in his fragmented, chthonic tongue. Tallis listened in silence, aware only of the distress in the boy’s voice, a sense of regret, interspersed with moments of intense frustration.

‘I can’t help you,’ she said, and the eyes narrowed again, watching her lips as they moved to make what were to him quite threatening and occult sounds. ‘I
need
the man you want to kill. And I know what
you
have to do, so I have to stop you. Your new magic must wait. You must wait to pick through his dreams; I need to pick through them first myself.’

As if he understood, Tig shook his head. He tugged his long hair forward, twisted it into a rope and held it diagonally across his face, bisecting his features across the nose and the left eye. He took dirt from the ground and
smeared the features of his left side. It was a slow, deliberate, threatening motion.

Tallis took a finger-length doll from the group which she wore around her shoulders and pushed it into the ground, twisting it: a watching wood.

‘My eyes will always watch you –’ she said, and picked up the heavy burden of masks as she stood.

Tig laughed and lifted his skins to expose genitals that were tiny and bone white, roaring loudly as he did so.

The boy had escaped by morning. There was blood on one of the points of the palisade. The watching-wood, which Tallis had buried, was broken in half, laid on the ground and surrounded by a circle of snail shells. The shells were perforated. They had come from Morthen’s ritual head-dress. During the night of his escape, Tig had entered the long-house, where Morthen slept close to her dying father, and stolen the webbing which she had so carefully fashioned.

It was his way of stating power. He could have killed Wynne-Jones at that time, if he had wanted, but Tallis’s own power had subdued him just sufficiently.

Defiance, then. But Tallis had threatened him and the fear was in the boy. The fear of birds, an old magic which Tig had not yet overcome.

A flight of cranes passed over the settlement as Tallis circled the broken remains of her watching-wood. She glanced up, into the dawn sky. One of the birds began to struggle on the wing, struck by a sling stone launched from an unseen hunter at the forest edge. It fell slowly, neck twisted back. Tallis heard the distant growl of a dog. The cranes veered to the north and there was silence again.

The crane-hunter stepped into the clear land which surrounded the settlement of the Tuthanach. Tallis
crouched down and the strange figure, carrying its limp prey over its shoulder, moved swiftly to the east. The man had a crane’s bill strapped, as a penis-sheath, to his groin. Skulls, feathers and the shrivelled carcases of small birds decorated his neck and limbs. His feet were clad in reed boots. He was a marsh hunter too. His marsh hound followed him. The penis-sheath caught the new sun like a lance. Shortly before he entered the wood again, the crane-hunter removed this triumphal, ritual garb, making it easier for him to run the forest, in search of a place to build his fire.

The hounds – scrawny, blunt-nosed animals – began to howl, greeting the new day. Smoke was urged from embers, then flame. The sun was a pale glow, low over the forest, subdued by autumn mist. Tallis heard Scathach’s voice, and elsewhere a woman coughing. A child wailed and a man laughed.

At once the silent enclosure was alive with sound. A man stepped through the weatherworn skins that kept the winter from one of the round lodges and shrugged on his heavy fur cloak, raising a hand to Tallis, a greeting, and watching her curiously as he walked to the earthworks, to crouch in dawn shadow and pass his soil.

Tallis picked up her broken doll and returned to the long-house, stepping down into the earth and ducking beneath the wooden lintel with its deeply incised charms. Light streamed into this place from two smoke holes in the heavy turf roof. Everywhere her gaze was confused with the stacks of furs, skins, poles, clay jars and bowls, frames for weaving, and totemic objects. Strands of shells, small stones, bones, root vegetables and dried bird-flesh hung from the blackened cross beams, rattling and shifting in the gusting breezes that crept in from the outside.

Human shapes moved through this gloomy clutter, gathering around the central fire where clay pots of water were slowly warming at the edge of the renewing embers. Ash streamed into the streaks of pale light. In the shadows the fur-clad women were stooped, shambling shapes, their alertness demonstrated only by the sparkle of dark eyes, watching the tall, strange woman from the Otherworld: Tallis.

She walked over to the far corner where Scathach and his half-sister, Morthen, were keeping vigil over the battered body of their father.

The old man should have been dying. Already the wounds to his face and neck were swollen and stinking with infection. Tallis had found curative herbs, unknown to the Tuthanach, and Scathach had demonstrated his considerable skills as a surgeon in cleaning and preparing the wounds for healing. But the conditions of this culture were so basic that by rights Tig’s attack should have been mortal.

A deeper strength kept Wynne-Jones in the land of the living. Scathach talked to him, and during the days which followed Tallis, too, whispered her story to the unconscious man, urging him to return to consciousness, to retrace his steps from the spiral path that led into the vibrant, bone-filled earth.

On the third day of his living death, Wynne-Jones turned on to his side and began to paw and kick the air. It puzzled Scathach for a while, then Morthen understood. Tallis had sensed it from the beginning. He was running like a dog, like a hunting dog dreaming of the chase. He was deep in the wood, running on a wild track, seeking water. Towards evening, when the hounds of the Tuthanach cried at hidden ghosts, Wyn-rajathuk too opened his lips and whimpered.

The next day he began to make swimming motions with his body and his mouth opened and closed. He was a fish, swimming in crystal waters. He swam for two days. Tallis watched him through the Silvering but caught only a hint of the cold river where his spirit journeyed.

At last he was a bird. His head jerked, his eyes opened. His fingers parted; a wing, feathered. Wherever he soared, wherever he flew, in the long-house he remained stretched on the rush matting, only the sounds from his throat and the twitching of his muscles identifying the nature of his flight.

‘A stork,’ Morthen said. ‘This is the final part of his journey between the two worlds.’

‘But is he leaving us or coming home?’ Tallis asked quietly. ‘In which direction is he travelling?’

She couldn’t get close to Scathach, not in spirit, although when she sat with him he often reached out and took her hand in his cool fingers. But his mind was far away, perhaps pursuing the animal guide that led his father through the underworld. His eyes remained fixed on Wynne-Jones. His breathing was slow and deep. He sipped water from a leather pouch, but ate nothing.

Tallis tugged a bone comb through his tangled curls. He let her make the gesture and murmured ‘thank you’. He was a hunched, sad shape, all the physical power in him, the strength that had complemented her own for so many years, all of that energy pouring through his dark gaze in the direction of the dying man.

Tallis told herself that this spiritual distance was a temporary thing, that the man she loved would return soon. But an increasing feeling of melancholy over the first few days made her tense and unsociable towards the Tuthanach; she was beginning to grieve for a loss which had not yet happened.

Wyn-rajathuk’s daughter saw this and it drew her close. The girl and the woman – opposites in so many ways – became friends. Tallis had been sharing space in the women’s lodge, but her height (she was six feet tall by her reckoning) and her fair-haired, aquiline looks were such a contrast to the smaller, darker clan women that she was held in a mixture of awe and fear. She wore her tattered wolfskins for two days, then agreed to wear the woollen and otter-fur clothing of the clan. The women relaxed more with her, although Tallis entertained powerful and wistful memories of childhood, when dresses had felt as billowing and uncertain upon her unformed body as this loose fitting weave.

When she left the enclosure she immediately changed back to her travelling garb. This alteration of appearance at the gate became an odd ritual, and a delightful one to the younger men. But Tallis was
injathuk
– the masks she carried were clear enough evidence of this – and all such workers with the voice of the earth were expected to behave strangely, and to have their private rituals of communication with the sky.

She was left alone, therefore, and free to explore the dense woodland that led, in one direction at least, to the river where she and Scathach had first emerged into the realm of the Tuthanach. There were tracks everywhere, mostly overgrown, many of them marked by animal skulls or feathered poles. So many great old trees had fallen that no path was clear enough to run along and Tallis found it wearying to clamber over so many rotting, mossy corpses, seeking the glades where yellow green light illuminated a clearing.

In such dells, invariably, the Tuthanach had built forest rajathuks. In the mortuary enclosure, on the blackthorn hill, there was a cluster of the great statues, but in the wood each was represented many times and each had its
own tangled, silent clearing, its edges hung with skins, pouches, clay pots and the bones of animals: votive offerings, Tallis imagined.

She soon realized that the blackened totems were of the same genesis as her masks. The details were different and often hard to see against the glare of the sky as she craned upwards, towards the axe-hewn features. Different, yet uncannily recognizable … as if drawn from the same imagination. Falkenna and Silvering especially were similar to her own child-fashioned bark masks.

The most haunted glade of all contained the Hollower. It grinned at her; she could see traces of the red tongue against the white ochre face. Here, the trees were hung with the dismembered bodies of humans, although for a while Tallis could see no skulls, only long bones and rib cages, which looked oddly forlorn, impaled on broken branches. White rag was everywhere, and thick twines of human hair. The ground was lumpy; the skulls were below the earth. There was a terrible stench of rotten flesh here, and in the canopy above the birds hopped and flapped but were never to be heard giving voice to song.