Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (52 page)

‘Old Silent Tree … do you remember? When this happened you said that I should call on the spirit of the wood. That I should summon the spirit of the oak. You are here. I am here. Our spirits are together. But you must show me what to do next.’

He came close to Tallis, his red hair curling from below the fur hood, his eyes wide and searching. The scars on his left cheek seeped a pale blood. He kissed Tallis on the lips, then watched her eyes.

He said, ‘My brother carved you well. You are more than a grandmother. You are the spirit of my dead sister. You are the spirit of woman in this frozen land. My brother carved you well. If only you could speak. I am marked by the wolf. How can I be both wolf and bird? You could tell me. You would have understood …’

He returned to the tent. Later, the woman came through the driving snow, staggering before the howling wind, huddled in upon herself. Her sons came after her. The three of them fell to their knees before Tallis.

‘Mother …’ the woman greeted.

‘Old Silent Tree,’ murmured Dreamer, knowingly.

‘Old
dead
woman,’ sneered Fierce Eyes.

The woman said, ‘My youngest son made you. Your spirit is in the wood. Now my dead son’s spirit cries to join with you. Together you can return to us from the frozen forbidden place. My dreaming son had found the way.’

Dreamer came up to Tallis. ‘You will be the fire burning in Bird Spirit Land. Your flame will break the spell.’

Fierce Eyes scowled. ‘Get this over with. If we follow
south fast we can survive. Then you can tell this story until you die, brother. But if we don’t go soon we will go nowhere but into ice.’

Dreamer came up to Tallis and tugged and twisted her from the frozen ground. He carried her in his arms, through the raging storm, into the freezing place within the tent. Somehow they had kept a fire smouldering here. They lay Tallis across the dull flame. Fierce Eyes blew upon the embers until they flared. Tallis felt the nip of warmth. The fire drove the water from her. She sizzled and singed, then the fire began to take a hold and flames leapt across her skin. The three of the family warmed their hands. It seemed to Tallis that she had smouldered for a long time before finally the fire had taken hold.

The woman took her dead son’s bone knife and held it in front of Tallis. On her side, Tallis watched the sadness in the woman’s face. She drew the antler necklace from her neck, unslung three fragments of tine. She picked up the sheet-white leg of her murdered boy and warmed it by the fire. Then she flayed the white skin from the flesh, drawing it carefully back, a silky, glistening sheet of human rag. As it came away from the cold flesh, so she cut it into strips, and she wrapped each strip of skin around a piece of bone. When the horn was robed she threaded back the leather of the necklace and gave it to Dreamer, who put it round his neck and tucked this frail memory of the broken boy into his furs.

The woman gave the knife to Fierce Eyes, who held it up, a grin of delight on his gaunt, ageing features. The polished bone caught the light. He held it like a sword, perhaps imagining the gutting and the killing he could perform with this weapon which had once been used to carve the image of a woman in the land.

His mother said, ‘It was fashioned from the bone of a
drowned beast in the water. When you are old, it must be returned to the water. It belongs to the realm of beasts.’

‘I will do it,’ Fierce Eyes said.

Dreamer watched him, smiling through the pain of hunger and cold. He held a hand to his chest where he carried his brother’s memory. The fire ate deeper into Tallis.

The woman used long needles of bone to stitch the parts of her son together again. The brothers dropped their gaze as the gruesome task was done. The body was incomplete. White bone through grey flesh made a lifeless puppet. The mother cradled it in her arms. Then she placed it on the flames.

Fierce Eyes went out into the storm and returned with the grandmother’s grizzled skull, the hair frozen into spikes which he broke off and cast on to the fire, where they sizzled, cooled, then flared. The skull was placed among the bones of Arak, and through the heat and the smoke Tallis watched the watching eyes, three cold people from an ancient day, remembering and honouring the dead.

Soon she was aware that the snow had stopped. The crude hides of the tent ceased to billow and bulge. The fire below her ceased to gust and roar. Fierce Eyes went outside and came back excited. He found a lure, tested its strength, then went outside. Dreamer went too. The woman pulled back the flap of the tent and Tallis, dying, saw a pale sun in the fields of snow. Fierce Eyes was whirling the lure around his head. It made a rhythmic sound, a pulse in the still air. Soon it began to create the steady whine that she had come to associate with this strange instrument. Dreamer stood beside his brother, watching the heavens. There were specks of black, coming closer.

Tallis heard cries. Bird cries. The birds returned,
invaded Bird Spirit Land and flocked and swarmed above the funeral pyre.

Fierce Eyes and his mother used nets to catch them, stamping on their heads as they struggled in the loose, confining space. When they had killed twenty they laughed together. Other birds stood on Tallis, pecked at her, pecked at the charred flesh of the youngest son.

The hunters of birds piled their catch and the moment of elation passed as the woman came into the tent space to watch the death flight of her youngest born. In the beaks of birds, he went to whatever place would entertain his spirit. As each black creature fluttered and flapped away into the greying sky, she watched it, tears in her eyes.

‘Goodbye Arak,’ she whispered with each of them. ‘Goodbye Asha …’

It was night. The fire had burned low. Tallis was charred wood, hardening, still aware through this gate into the first forest of what was occurring around her. Dreamer came to the fire and brushed among the ashes. He lifted Tallis in his hand, the small fragment of coal that she had become. He kissed her, held her to the breast where the skin of the youngest son was warmed by his own skin, and the horn of the stag kept the life and the memory of the youngest son alive.

She watched from the burned wood. The shards of horn stood out starkly against the snow-cloud sky.
(An image from another life: lying below Broken Boy, looking up at the summer sky through the broken reaches of the creature’s antlers. It had been a sexual feeling. An intense feeling. A recognition of the link between herself and Harry …)

Dreamer went out into the still night, wading through the snow. If there was a moon it was behind clouds,
causing brightness without form, a glow in the heavens, life struggling to pierce the confusing fog. Birds came and flapped around the body. He remained still and one of them settled on his shoulder, hopped to his head and reached a yellow beak to peck at his eyes.

The bird pecked and pecked.

The boy’s blood flowed and he was blinded.

Tallis fell to the snow.

The spirit in the boy lifted from the bones, from the flesh, through the furs. The man was there. Tallis remembered the way he had looked. He gleamed blue-yellow in the night. He was naked and there was no longer a burn upon his face, but he was the brother she remembered. He was gaunt. She could see Dreamer through his insubstantial form.

Dreamer spoke to her, but the words were in a different voice from the boy’s.

‘We all have our own ways out of the first forest,’ Harry said. ‘I was trapped. You trapped me. Now you have released me. Thank you. I shall not be far away. I shall find you again. You are not dead. You have simply journeyed. I shall not be far away.’

There was the sudden sound of wings. The elemental presence seemed to shrink. It rose into the air and was dark against the moongleam through the clouds. Dreamer sang a shaman song, a chant of journeying, a celebration of release into the spirit world.

Crow-Harry circled, came close to the charcoal shard that was his sister, winked, then rose and was gone, flying to the south, to home, to warmth, to freedom.

Dreamer fell to his knees, blind, bleeding, journeying on wings of song.

But he was smiling.

He flailed around on the snow. He found Tallis and lifted her. He kissed her blackened face. He hugged her
charred body. He stared at her through eyes that saw the shadows of many lands. He had absorbed Arak, and could see the shadows of forests. So he was vision maker, now, as well as memory. Fierce Eyes, with his bone knife and sense of triumph, would lead them safely to the warm. There would be stories told. The family would never be forgotten. All the world would know what had happened here.

Arak journeyed to the forbidden places of the earth
.

But after he had been lost he was brought home again
.

Goodbye, he said to Tallis.

The woman was packed up. Dead birds, plucked and dried, were slung from her belt. The cold would keep them good. They would eat the carrion of the carrion eaters as they journeyed south, out of the forbidden place. Fierce Eyes was impatient. He began to walk away. His mother, his woman, followed.

Dreamer summoned them back.

He took the tiny bones of the stillborn girl from where they had been buried in the ice. Sightless, seeing all, he placed them by the bones of his brother. He had the remains of the wolf. He found a fragment of his grandmother. He placed berries from his hidden pouch beside these shards of life. He put the skull of a bird on top of it all, then impaled the heart of his father on the beak of the bird. He piled up snow and covered the remains. All this happened in the area of the tent, the warm place that had been their haven. He pressed the snow to make a mound, a burial mound. Fierce Eyes and his mother made a wall of snow around the mound.

Dreamer placed Tallis on the snow, facing south, facing home.

Then he sniffed the air, took his brother’s arm, and allowed himself to be led away.

Somewhere, in an unknown region, his spirit, his lost ghost, flew above dark forests.

The long winter came to an end. Tallis sank through the snow, nestled among the bones. The snow melted. Tundra covered the land. Animals walked there, the vibration of their passing stirring Tallis from her earthly sleep. Small plants grew upon the tundra, and then the seeds buried with the bones hatched.

Thorns and holly grew where Tallis lay, absorbing the marrow of the wolf and the crow, sucking the sad life of the stillborn infant, tapping the memories of Old Silent Tree and the grandmother skull that nestled by it. Out of the earth came a scrubland, and this scrubland grew and became a wood. The first tree in the wood had been holly, wrapped around with ivy. Shaded by prouder trees, Tallis waited in the stillness, watching the movements of summer through gleaming green and spiky leaves.

The Daurog formed. The holly shuddered. Sap drained in strange directions. Leaves curled to form flesh; branches twisted to shape bones. The holly tree shrank, then burst out again, swelling into the shape of a woman. It detached itself from the thicket and reached rose-thorn fingers into the hard earth. It moved aside the earth and found the petrified wood that was the heart in the forest. Black, because it had been burned a thousand years ago; it still showed the shape of the face impressed upon it. The Daurog opened her belly and placed the stone inside. At once it began to hatch. Warm, seeing through holly-eyes, heart beating like the frantic flutter of a bird, Tallis went with Holly-jack, deeper into the forest.

She was alone. After many days there was a movement behind her and she turned to see a strange-shaped man, crouching, watching. He wore necklets of forest fruit; his skin was a confusion of leaves; rushes grew from his scalp.
Tallis-Holly recognized the Daurog shaman. He stood and came towards her. Leaves rustled. He lay down, smiling, his serpent’s member twisting, rising. Holly-Tallis felt impelled to straddle the force of magic, and knelt above the grinning wood and let him enter, let him feed upon her and fertilize the growth of birds.

She went with him through the forest. He danced in moonlit dells, shivered in thickets, pranced at the edge of the wood, grinned at travellers from the green of the bush. There were others with him, gathered on his journey: a leader, and two warriors, and a woman. All their leaves were different. They passed silently and swiftly through the rankest, wettest wood, feeding on the soft fungus of the bark of trees, sucking at the dampness in the rotting litter, chewing the lichen from mossy, greying stones.

When they came to the river they stopped. Tallis-Holly watched and soon three riders passed from the human world, an old man, a young man, a woman with a face like stone. Tallis smiled. Holly-Tallis followed with the others. The encounter came at dusk.

At some point during the evening, Tallis-Holly went to the crouching wary form of the woman, and watched herself watching the Daurog, and saw the fear and the tiredness in her eyes. She could not tell the human who she was, but she remembered the feeling of affinity; she tried to indicate that affinity, a finger pointed to holly and to human flesh, but the blank look remained in that fur-wrapped, pale-faced Tallis. The feeling between the two females was strong, however, and Tallis-Holly smiled to recognize it.

They shared food. Holly-Tallis gave birth to birds. The pain was very great. Released, she joined the others. They went up the river together. At a great marsh Holly sailed with the other Daurog in a battered craft, entering
the mist for days, helping to propel the ancient boat across the stinking, shrouded waters. She had felt sad watching as Tallis had slipped behind her, a figure on the shore, watching with concern but without understanding, since she had failed to place her Moondream mask across her face, and thus could not see the woman in the land.

Winter came and the Daurog shed their leaves. The wolf emerged, sometimes the bird, and Holly-Tallis huddled, alone and unloved, her evergreen skin a challenge and an irritation to the others.

Soon they came to a place of ruins. The wolfish appetites surged. The Scarag attacked. One of them turned on Holly-Tallis and she fled up the path to the gate, passing a woman she knew well, remembering her earlier shock at this unexpected encounter. She watched from the gate as Tallis killed and discarded the Scarag. She hid in the silent, stony rooms and watched Tallis secretly when the woman came into the castle, dragging with her the body of a man.