Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (7 page)

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you going to wear it?’

‘One day, I expect.’

He placed the mask against his face and peered at the girl through the tiny eyeholes. He made low, mysterious grumbling sounds and Tallis laughed. ‘You can hardly see anything,’ he said, lowering the bark face.

‘It’s the Hollower,’ she said.

‘It’s the what?’

‘The Hollower. That’s the mask’s name.’

‘What’s a Hollower?’

‘I don’t know. Something that watches holloways, I suppose. Something that guards the tracks between different worlds.’

‘Gobbledegook,’ said her father, though he sounded kindly. ‘But I’m impressed that you know about holloways. There are several around the farm, you know. We walked along one today …’

‘But they’re just
tracks
,’ she interrupted impatiently.

‘Very
old
tracks, though. One of them runs through Stretley Stones meadow. Stretley, you see? It’s an old word for street. The stones probably mark a crossroads.’ He leaned forward towards her. ‘Men and women dressed in skins and carrying clubs used to walk along them. Why, some of them probably stopped right here, where the house now stands, to eat a haunch or two of uncooked cow.’

Tallis pulled a face. It seemed to her that the notion of eating raw meat was silly. Her father wasn’t a very convincing storyteller.

‘They’re still just old roads,’ she said. ‘But some of them …’ she lowered her voice dramatically. ‘Some of
them led away deep into the land, and wound around the woods, and suddenly
disappeared
. The old people used to mark those places with tall stones, or great pillars of wood carved into the likeness of a favoured animal, pillars made out of whole trees …’

‘Did they indeed?’ her father said, watching his daughter as she prowled about the room, hands raised, body tensed, as if she was stalking an animal.

‘Yes. Indeed they did. These days we can still see the stones, out in the fields and on the hills, but the old gates have been lost. But hundreds of years ago, when you were still young –’

‘Thanks very much.’

‘
Thousands
of years ago, those places were forbidden to anyone except the Hollowers. Because they led to the kingdoms of the dead … And only a
few
ordinary people could go there. Only heroes. Knights in armour went there. They always took their dogs, enormous hunting dogs, and they pursued the great beasts of the Underworld, the giant elks whose antlers could scythe down trees, the huge, horned pigs, the belly-rumbling bears, the man-wolves which walked on their hind legs and could disguise themselves as dead trees.

‘But sometimes, when one of the hunters tried to get back to his own Castle, he couldn’t find the holloway, or the stones, or the wood, or the cave … and he became trapped there, and ever more ghostly, until his clothes were like ragged grave-shrouds on his body, and his swords and daggers were red with rust. But if a man had a good
friend
, then the good friend would go and rescue him.
If
…’ she added with a final dramatic flourish, raising the wooden mask to her face and imitating her father’s jokey growl, ‘
if
… the Hollower would allow it …’

Eight years old and she had shamed his ‘raw haunch of
cow’. James Keeton stared at his daughter in astonishment.

‘Where on earth did you get all that from? Gaunt?’

‘It just came to me,’ she stated honestly.

She was without doubt her grandfather’s girl. Her father smiled and conceded defeat.

‘Did you enjoy the walk today?’ he asked by way of changing the subject.

She stared at him, then nodded. ‘Why didn’t you come with me? Into the wood?’

Her father just shrugged. ‘I’m too old to go gallivanting around in woodland. Anyway, there was a KEEP OUT sign up. Can you imagine what would happen to my business if I was prosecuted for trespassing?’

‘But the
house
was there. You came all that way to see the house, and then gave up! Why?’

Keeton smiled awkwardly. ‘KEEP OUT signs mean what they say.’

‘Who put the sign up?’

‘I have
no
idea. The Ryhope estate, I expect.’

‘Why didn’t they rescue the house? Why did they just leave it? All overgrown, all run down. But it still has furniture in it. A table, a cooker, a desk … even pictures on the wall.’

Her father stared at her, frowning slightly. He was clearly astonished by what she was telling him.

‘Why would they do that?’ Tallis persisted. ‘Why would they just leave the house to be overgrown?’

‘I don’t know … I just don’t know. Really! I have no idea. I have to admit, it seems very strange …’

He went over to the window and leaned heavily on the sill, looking out into the clear evening. Tallis followed him, thoughtful, then determined.

‘Did Harry go to that house? Is that where Harry went? Is that where you think he died?’

Keeton drew a deep breath, then let it expire slowly. ‘I don’t know, Tallis. I don’t know anything any more. He seems to have told you far more than he ever told me.’

She thought back to the evening when Harry had said goodbye to her. ‘I told you everything I remember. He was going away, he said, but he would be very close. He was going somewhere strange. Someone had shot him with an arrow … that’s all I remember. And he was crying. That too.’

Her father turned and dropped to a crouch, hugging her. His eyes were wet. ‘Harry didn’t say goodbye to us. Only to you. Do you know something? That has been hurting me more than anything, all these years.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t expect to be gone very long.’

‘He was dying,’ James Keeton said. ‘He must have thought he was protecting my feelings by not saying goodbye. He was dying …’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just do. There was something about him, those last few weeks … something resigned.’

When Tallis thought about Harry, she couldn’t imagine him as dead and cold in the ground. She shook her head. ‘I’m sure he’s still alive. He’s just lost, that’s all. I’m sure he’ll come home to us.’

Her father said kindly, ‘No, darling. He’s in heaven now. We shall all have to come to terms with the fact.’

‘Just because he’s in heaven,’ Tallis protested, ‘doesn’t mean to say he’s dead.’

Her father straightened up again, smiling and resting his hand on her shoulder. ‘It must be a wonderful world in there …’ he tapped her head. ‘Full of giant elks, and knights in armour, and dark castles. A hundred years ago they’d have burned you as a witch …’

‘But I’m not a witch.’

‘I don’t suppose any of them were. Come on. Supper
time. And you can tell us another story before you go to bed.’

He laughed as they walked from the room. ‘It’s usually the parents who get pestered to tell the bedtime stories to their offspring, not the other way round.’

‘I’ve got a good one,’ Tallis said. ‘It’s about a man whose son goes for a walk in the woods, and the man is so certain that his son has been eaten by wolves that he can no longer see the boy, even though he’s right there, in the house.’

‘Cheeky little devil,’ her father said, tugging her hair before racing her down to the parlour.

(iv)

Some of the tension in the house faded, after that. James Keeton seemed a little brighter, more cheerful, and Tallis imagined this was because he had finally expressed his feelings about Harry to her. She remained puzzled by his apprehensive behaviour outside the wood, but her mother said simply, ‘He thought he
needed
to see the place where Harry went; now he realizes he doesn’t
want
to.’

It was a confusing and unsatisfactory explanation, but it was all she got.

Nevertheless, Tallis herself felt considerably more at ease, now, and after school she continued to explore and to name the territory around the farm. She also developed her skills in carving the masks and small wooden dolls which had become an obsession. She was continually aware of the fleeting figures which pursued her when she journeyed across the meadows, but they no longer startled her, nor worried her. Whenever she was close to the enclosed pasture known as Stretley Stones, her peripheral vision seemed to have a life of its own, a flowing, quivering world of movement that could never be
observed directly, but which hinted at strange human shapes, and lurking animal forms.

And there were sounds: singing, from the field known as The Stumps, but whose secret name now became Sad Song Meadow. Tallis never saw the source of the singing, and after a while stopped searching for it.

More dramatically, one day, sitting and daydreaming in the field by Fox Water, she woke to find herself in the mouth of a wide, windy cave, staring out across a lush, dense forest towards high mountains where a blazing wall of fire and smoke could be glimpsed distantly. The strange dream lasted for a second only, and thereafter she was aware of the windy cave only fleetingly, the merest touch of an alien breeze on an otherwise perfectly still, hot day.

She soon established that there were three of the cowled, female figures which seemed to haunt the edge of her vision, hovering in the denser woodland thickets, watching her through painted wooden masks. Tallis began to get an idea that the strange things happened to her whenever one of these women was close by. When White Mask was hovering her mind filled with fragments of stories and the land seemed to speak to her of lost battles and wild rides. When the woman with the green mask was around she got ideas for carving, and about carving, and saw odd shadows on the land. The third figure, whose mask was white, green and red, made Tallis think of her own ‘Hollower’; this figure she associated with such strange glimpses as the windy cave and the sad song.

It made little sense beyond the idea of being ‘haunted’, and for a while she was not concerned by it. But she fashioned masks to copy those of the ‘storyteller’ and the ‘carver’. As she did so, so names came to her …

The white mask she called
Gaberlungi
, an odd name, but one which made her smile as she said it. Gaberlungi was
memory of the land
, and sometimes when she wore
or carried the crudely fashioned oak-bark the stories crowded and jostled her mind with such intensity that she could concentrate on nothing else. The third mask, made from hazel and painted green, she called
Skogen
, but this, too, had a second name,
shadow of the forest
. It was a landscape mask; when she held it to her face, the cloud shadow on the land seemed different: it cast patterns that might have been the shadows of higher hills and older forests.

Over the years she became an expert at the craft; she worked masks from different wood, became skilful at trimming down the bark and cutting the holes for eyes and mouth. She developed, or purloined, a number of tools to make the crafting easier, even using differently-shaped heavy stones as hammers, chippers and gougers.

To the first three she added four more.
Lament
was the simplest; a few days after carving this from willow bark she heard the first of several songs from the field called The Stumps; she was also aware of the haunting presence of the female ‘hollower’, her white and red mask catching the grey light of an overcast day as she watched Tallis from the hedges. Lament was a sad mask, its mouth sullen, its eyes tearful; its colour was grey.

More exciting, more intriguing to her, were the three journey masks which she was inspired to carve.
Falkenna
had a second name:
the flight of a bird into an unknown region
. She disliked carrion birds, but was fascinated by the small hawks which preyed above the grass verges of the country roads. So Falkenna was painted in such a way as to suggest a hawk.

Then there was the
Silvering
. Patterned with the dead features of a fish, painted in coloured circles, this mask had a quieter name, a name associated with an unconscious image:
the movement of a salmon into the rivers of an unknown region
.

Finally there was
Cunhaval: the running of a hunting dog through the forest tracks of an unknown region
. She used snips of fur from the family dog to fringe the elder wood.

She had made seven masks and ten dolls; she had invented several stories and named most of the fields, streams and woods around the farm. She had her hideouts, and an association with the ghosts that hovered at their edges. She was happy. She was still very anxious to return to the ruins of Oak Lodge, but the field between the wood and her farm, and the stream that bordered it, still defied her efforts to discover their secret names.

But all of this was a game to her, a part of growing up, and whilst she approached the game with the utmost seriousness, she had never given a thought to the consequences of what she was doing … or of what was being done to her.

All that changed shortly before her twelfth birthday, an event, an encounter, which disturbed her deeply.

On a bright and stiflingly hot July morning, she smelled woodsmoke as she walked through her garden. Woodsmoke, and something else. She smelled winter. It was a scent so familiar it was unmistakable, and she followed the trace to the narrow alley between the brick machine sheds, where she had her garden camp. She had not used this camp for a while and the alley was gloomy and choked with nettles. At its far end it was blocked by the filthy glass of one of the greenhouses that backed on to the sheds.

She was about to force her away along the passage when Mr Gaunt appeared in the garden, coming from one of the orchards. He stopped and suspiciously sniffed the air.

‘Have you been playing with fire, young madam?’ he asked quickly.

‘No,’ Tallis said. ‘Not at all.’

He came right up to her, his brown overalls heavy with the smell of freshly dug earth. He wore these overalls in all weathers and must have been roasting in them on a hot day like today. His forearms were bare and burned brown, covered with a thick down of white hair. His face was very lean – he was well named – but flushed with bright red blood-vessels that seemed to trace a path to his thin hairline. Great beads of sweat rolled across the craggy contours of his face; but his eyes sparkled, a mixture of kindness and mischief.