Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (44 page)

Through the eyes of the mask Tallis watched the shadows move. All Scathach could see was the forest and what appeared to be the flickering of light filtering through the thinning canopy. But Tallis saw human shapes. They hid against the thicker boles of oaks and elm, then moved away, following the autumnal leaf shadow, avoiding entering the lancing beams of grey light from above.

And they came close to the wall of flint where Wynne-Jones waited, breathless with anticipation.

‘Do you know what they are?’ his son asked.

‘I’ve only ever seen them from a distance,’ the old man whispered. ‘I’ve heard them, though. Everyone has heard them. But I’ve never been this close before …’

There were five of the creatures. One seemed bolder than the others and came so close that it began to enter the realm of ordinary vision. Distantly, the sound of movement in the river suggested that a sixth was coming to join its companions. The wood began to fill with an eerie chattering sound, almost birdlike. There was a human quality, too, to the noise, as if several women were clicking their tongues at great speed. Odd whistles made birds flutter nervously. Tallis could see how invisible feet kicked up the leaf litter, broke and trampled bracken. It was a movement so subtle that it seemed to occur from the corner of her eye. A movement, then
nothing; but the signs of the creatures’ passing still quivered and calmed.

The nearest of the mythagos came into view, stepping away from the tree shadow, standing at the edge of the forest light. Scathach gasped and reached for his spear. Wynne-Jones put out a restraining hand, eyes fixed on the slender creature that stood before them.

‘Daurog,’ he whispered. ‘Green Man. Becoming Scarag … winter aspect … be careful. Be very careful …’

‘It’s a Green Jack,’ Tallis said, amazed. ‘I remember seeing them in churches, carved in stone. Old men of the forest. Leaf-heads.’

‘It’s an earlier form than you’ve seen carved in churches,’ the old man counselled her. ‘There is nothing jolly or medieval about the Daurog. These are
old
, and they were made in the mind at a time of great fear. In their winter aspect they are exceptionally dangerous …’

‘Green Jack,’ Tallis said to herself, and as if the sound of the fanciful name from folklore had attracted its attention it took a quick, awkward step forward, sinewy body cracking like old wood underfoot. It stared at her, bristling … rustling … It had stepped into a strand of light which played off the darkening face but caught the remnants of the leafy green which swathed the skull, the shoulders and the upper torso.

Its fingers were long, many-jointed; twig-like. What Tallis had taken for a forked beard she could see, now, were curved tusks of wood growing from each side of the round, wet mouth. The tusks branched, one limb reaching up to the leafy mass on the head, the other reaching down, becoming tendrillar, tendrils curling round the torso and the arms, then down the spindly legs, supplying lobate oak-leaves as a covering for the scored, scoured, bark-like flesh below. The creature’s member swayed as
it moved, a thin, thorned length of tendril that flexed like a worm between the rustling thighs.

It was carrying a three-pointed spear in one hand and a rough cloth sack in the other. As it watched Tallis it began to sniff. Flat nostrils opened in the bark of its face. It was growing rotten, this thing, this Daurog, and was shedding summer’s growth. The face was something like a skull, but the contours were wrong. The bone swelled and curved in the wrong places; the angles were unfamiliar. The eyes were very close together. The Daurog didn’t appear to blink, and streams of sap ran from the edges of the eyes. When it opened its mouth a slow drip of slime curled from the wet void; the mouth-tusks glistened. The teeth it exposed were greened with mould, and sharpened.

It sniffed the air again, then focused on Tallis, leaned towards her, made another awkward, hesitant step forward; sniffed again and exhaled, a sound like a breeze, a sound of puzzlement. Wynne-Jones reached out and clutched Tallis’s arm. The pig sizzled on the flames, spitting fat, startling the Daurog for a moment.

‘It smells your blood,’ the old man said. ‘It lives on sap, but it smells your blood.’

‘And not yours?’

‘It’s male. And I’m old and you’re young. It smells the exudates from your body: blood, sweat, filth …’

‘
What?
’

‘And mind-sap too, I think. It smells your mind. It can probably see the way you are manipulating the wood …’

Tallis glanced at Wynne-Jones, frowning. Me?

He said, ‘Of course. You are creating life every second. Mythago-genesis. You are very alive, very active … you just travel too fast to see the end result. It begins with a fluttering in the mould and rot of the leaf litter.
You
only recognize it when it rises in bodily form, like the Daurog
itself. But the Daurog can probably see the smallest activity. It seems frightened. It is trying to understand us. Stay very still.’

Slowly the Daurog placed its spear and sack upon the ground. It circled the small clearing warily, catching the light and jerking as it did so, moving quickly into shadow. As it walked so browning leaves fell from its body. When it came slightly up-breeze of Tallis she noticed the appalling stench that emanated from its form: marsh gas and the smell of death which she remembered from her time in the mortuary house.

But the old Daurog came closer. Its companions hovered in the borders of light and shadow, hidden against the oaks. Their chattering, clicking conversation had diminished. Scathach stretched forward and rested his hand on his spear. The Daurog was nervous and eyed the human warrior cautiously. It stepped slowly towards Tallis, crouched with much rustling and snapping of sinews and reached a long, tapering twig-finger to touch her hand. Its nail was a rose thorn; she allowed it to scratch at her skin, making a faint red mark. The Daurog sniffed its own finger, then licked at the glistening nail. Tallis thought a lizard had emerged from the creature’s mouth to bite at the thorn, then realized she had seen its tongue. The Daurog seemed pleased by what it had tasted. It spoke words; they were high-pitched and meaningless: bird chatter; the creak of a branch; more chatter; the rustle of leaves in wind.

Tallis realized with a start that the Daurog’s body was alive with woodlice, some of them as large as leaves themselves.

The creature rose and backed away. The leaves on its back were being shed in lines and a skeleton of furry creeper and black, gnarled wood was showing through. It picked up its spear and its sack, then called to the
shadows. Its companions emerged and approached the small fire, but stayed warily at a distance, more afraid of the flame than of the humans who had kindled it, Tallis decided.

Two of the Daurog were young females, one with skin made of holly leaves, the other silver birch. Their eyes were smaller than the males’, sunk deep below forehead ridges of vine. The branch-tusks from their mouths were a silvery grey. They wore ‘jewellery’ of sloe and hawthorn berries, blues and reds hanging from thorny crowns.

The two males were young also, one skinned in willow, the other hazel. Their tusks were gnarled and they differed from the older Daurog in one remarkable and savage aspect: ridges of long, black spikes grew from the fronts of their bodies; the central, vertical line of thorns ran down on to the twisting, restless sex organs that hung from their rotund bellies.

At last the sixth member of the group arrived, and Tallis almost smiled as she recognized the type.

Not a cloak of feathers, but a skin-cloak of every leaf imaginable. Broad limes on his head, a beard of holly, tufts of pear, shoulders of whitebeam, a chest of browning oak and elm, belly of ivy and brilliant yellow autumn sycamore.

Dogrose wound about his arms; red berries hung in lazy bunches. His legs were impaled with a thousand needles of pine and hemlock; hemlock cones and crabapple were strapped to his waist. From his head grew a fan of spikes of rush.

It surprised Tallis to see, as her eyesight penetrated the mask of leaf and wood, that this shaman was young, as young, perhaps, as Willow-jack and Jack-hazel. He carried a sharpened staff and five decaying, woody heads had been impaled upon it. He waved the staff and the dead branch-tusks of the several heads clattered.

‘It’s known as Ghost of the Tree,’ Wynne-Jones whispered. ‘A shamanistic function.’

Tallis smiled again. ‘I’d noticed,’ she whispered back.

‘Skogen reflected this ancient form. Your mask. My totem …’

‘Everything is older than we think.’

The Daurog group now crouched at a cautious and respectful distance from the fire. The elder among them opened his sack and spilled berries of many different kinds on to the ground. There were nuts, too, and acorns. He looked at Tallis. Tallis cut several strips from the sizzling joints of the wild pig and reached forward to toss them closer to the Daurog. Ghost of the Tree moved forward in an awkward crouching fashion, watching the humans suspiciously. He picked up a piece of the flesh, sniffed it and tossed it down. He pointed to two discarded bones and Scathach threw them over. The shaman
broke
the bones with his bare hands, and used the jagged edges to scratch at his bark. He passed one fragment to Oak, the elder.

Tallis rose and walked over to the pile of nuts and berries. Everything was here, dogwood, holly, cherry, buckthorn, sloe and even strawberry. She selected from among them, knowing that they could eat very little of this forest feast.

Trade having been done, they settled to take the meal, to eat, to indicate their good intentions. The Green Jacks were disturbed by the fire, but Wynne-Jones placed pieces of flint on their side of the flames. This symbolic gesture seemed to satisfy them.

Darkness, then a bright moon. The fire glowed and Wynne-Jones kept it fed. He and the old Daurog remained awake, watching each other across the small space. At one point the fuller figured female – Holly-jack – came up to Oak-elder, crouched, staring at Tallis, who
had been alerted from her drowse. She spoke to her leader in her woodland chatter. After a while she came over to Tallis and bent down to peer at the human. Tallis was conscious of an overpowering and putrid odour, of sap running in streams down the silvery branch-tusks, of young eyes, of young power. The female Daurog sniffed the air then whispered words. She came even closer and emitted a sound like laughter. She touched a finger to Tallis, then to herself, trying to communicate in some way.

Tallis touched her own fingers to the sharp holly on the female’s belly and something fluttered in the wood-flesh, causing the mythago pain. The black fungal mass of her sex quivered, and odd sounds came from the Green Jack’s hollow mouth, like whistling gasps.

And in her body, the struggling of wings …

Holly-jack drew away, moonlight on evergreen causing her to shine among her fading friends.

He recognized the mythago form (Wynne-Jones whispered to Tallis in the silence of the night) from stories he had heard about them. They were far older than the Tuthanach, probably engendered by the association with the first post-Ice Age forest of the Mesolithic period, ten thousand years or so before the birth of Christ. By Bronze Age times the ‘green man’ – Green Jack, or Hooded Robin, the medieval ‘wodehouse’ – had become a solitary forest figure, partially deified, reflected in and mingled with such elemental forms as Pan, and Dionysus, and vaguely remembered dryads. But to the Mesolithic hunter-nomads they formed a forest kingdom, a race of forest creatures, saviours, oracles, and tormentors all at the same time; they arose in the mythogenic unconscious both to explain nature’s hostility to the people’s actions, and to express the hope of survival against the unknown.

All he knew of the early Daurog myth was the creation myth. He summed it up for Tallis:

With the coming of the Sun a cave opened in the ice, as far down as the frozen earth. In the cave in the ice, lying on the frosted soil, were the bones of a man. The Sun began to warm the bones.

The man had eaten a wolf before he died, all other animals having fled the winter. The bones of the wolf lay with the bones of the man.

The wolf had eaten a bird before the man had hunted and killed it. The owl had been cold and slow and had been a poor meal for the wolf. The bones of the owl lay in the bones of the wolf in the bones of the man.

The owl had eaten a vole. Its tiny bones lay there too.

The vole had eaten seeds and nuts and because it sensed the long winter to come it had eaten a little of everything: acorns, hazels, haws, hips, sweet catkins, sour apples, sharp sloes, soft blackberries. The seeds of the forest lay among the bones of the vole and the owl and the wolf and the man.

The Sun warmed the bones, but it was the seeds which grew, feeding on the marrow in
all
the bones, which had cracked with the frost. The life that grew was half tree, half man. It had the speed of the wolf. It had the cunning of the vole. Like the owl, it could lose itself in the forest.

In spring its flesh was clothed in white flowers. In summer, oak leaves shivered on its body. In autumn, berries burst from its flesh. In winter it grew dark and fed on the sap in trees, or the blood of animals. Then spring again, and with the greening of the land the creature gave birth to birds before waiting in the deepest thicket for the call of the Men who were hunting and gathering from the forest. In spring, summer and autumn it grinned at them from the greenwood. Only in winter did it snap their necks to gorge upon their warm sap.

Each year the painful birth of birds brought more seeds, more bones, more wolves into the forest. Soon there were many of the Daurog. They copied the form and ways of Man, but saw how Man was clearing the forest and saw how this destruction released elemental spirits from the earth which had once been frozen.

So the Daurog spread out to mark the limit of the
heart of the wood
. No Man was allowed to enter into that heart and live. But outside the heart of the wood the Green Men brought berries and fertility in the form of birds to the villages and farms of the people.