Mythago Wood - 1 (11 page)

'If you feel sick,' Keeton called back, his voice a grating rasp in my ears,
'use the leather bag beside you, would you mind?'

'I feel fine,' I said back, and felt for the reassuring container. The plane
was buffeted by a cross wind and part of me seemed to rise within my chest
cavity before catching up with its companion organs. I clutched the bag more
tightly, felt the sting of sharp saliva in my mouth, that awful cold feeling
that precedes nausea. And as quietly, and as quickly, as possible - and
humiliated totally - I gave in to the violent need to empty my stomach.

Keeton laughed loudly. 'Waste of rations,' he said.

'I feel better for being rid of them.'

And then Keeton said, 'Good God, what's that?'

I looked forward, over his shoulder, and saw the dark beginnings of Ryhope
Wood on the horizon. A great cloud seemed to hang above that part of the land,
an eerie darkness as if a storm were raging above the forest. And yet the skies
were quite clear, cloud
could
be seen, as sparse and summery as that
above the whole of the west of England. The sombre pall seemed to ebb upwards
from the wildwoods themselves, and as we approached the vast expanse of the
forest, that darkness nagged at our own moods, darkening us, filling us with
something approaching dread. Keeton voiced it, banking the tiny plane to the
right, to skirt the edge of the wood. I looked down and saw Oak Lodge, a
grey-roofed, miserable huddle of a building, its entire grounds looking black,
morose, the sapling growth spread thickly towards the house's extension where
the study was located.

The forest itself looked tangled, dense and hostile; I could see away across
the foliage tops, and they were unbroken, a sea of grey green, rippling in the
wind, looking almost organic, a single entity, breathing and shifting restlessly
beneath the unwelcome aerial gaze.

Keeton flew at a distance from Ryhope Wood, around the perimeter and it
seemed to me that the expanse of primal woodland was not as vast as it had first
appeared. I observed the trickle of the sticklebrook, a winding, quite erratic
flow of grey-brown water, occasionally sparkling in the sun. It was possible to
see the stream's journey into the wood for some way, before the tree tops closed
over it.

At once the plane was taken by a storm-wind of appalling strength. It was
flung upwards, almost tilting nose over tail as Keeton struggled at the controls
trying to right the vehicle. Strange golden light streamed from wingtip and
propellor blur, as if we flew through a rainbow. The plane was struck from the
right, and pushed hard towards the edge of the forest, back towards open land.
Around the cabin a ghostly, banshee-like wailing began. It was so deafeningly
loud that Keeton's cries of rage and fear, coming to me through the radio
headphones, were almost inaudible.

As we left the confines of the woodland, so a relative calm reappeared, the
plane straightened, dropped slightly, then banked as Harry Keeton turned back
for a second attempt to fly over the forest.

He was quite silent. I wanted to speak, but found my tongue tied as I fixed
my gaze on the wall of gloom ahead of us.

Again, that wind!

The plane lurched and looped over the first few hundred yards of woodland,
and the light that began to enshroud us grew more intense, crawling along the
wings and playing, like tiny shreds of lightning, over the cabin itself. The
screaming reached an intensity that made me cry out, and the plane was buffeted
so hard that I felt sure it would be broken, shredded like a child's model.

Looking down through the eerie light, I saw clearings, glades, a river
flowing ... it was the briefest of visions of a woodland almost totally obscured
by the supernatural forces that guarded it.

It zipped up, bouncing across copses, farmhouses; running scared almost, away
from Ryhope Wood.

When at last Keeton was calm, he took the plane up to a thousand feet and
stared thoughtfully into the far distance, where the woodland was on the
horizon, a gloom-covered place which had defeated his best efforts to explore
it.

'I don't know what the devil caused that,' he said to me, his voice a
whisper. 'But right now I'd prefer not to think about it. We're losing fuel.
There must be a tank rupture. Hang on to your seat. . .'

And the plane skipped and darted southwards, to the landing field, where
Keeton unloaded the cameras and left me to my own devices; he was badly shaken
and seemed quite keen to be away from me.

My love affair with Guiwenneth of the Greenwood began the following day,
unexpectedly, dramatically . . .

I had not returned home from the airfield at Muckles-tone until mid-evening,
and I was tired, shaken, and very ready for bed. I slept through the alarm,
waking abruptly at eleven-thirty in the morning. It was a bright, if overcast
day, and after a snatched breakfast I walked out across the fields, and turned
to regard the woodland from a vantage point some half mile distant.

It was the first time I had seen, from the ground, the mysterious darkness
associated with Ryhope Wood. I wondered whether or not that appearance had
developed recently, or if I had been so embroiled, so enveloped by the aura of
the woodland that I had merely failed to notice its enigmatic state. I walked
back towards the house, slightly cold in just my sweater and slacks, but not
uncomfortable in these late spring, early summer days. On impulse I took a
stroll to the mill-pond, the site at which I had met Christian for the first
time in years, those scant months before.

On the far side of the pool, the dense woodland began: a wall of bracken,
rush and bramble, strung between thin, gnarled oak-trunks like a fence. There
was no way through, for the oaks themselves had grown from ground too marshy for
human transit.

I walked to the beginning of the marsh, leaning against a sloping trunk,
staring into the musty gloom of the edge wood.

And a man stepped out towards me!

He was one of the two raiders from a few nights before, the long haired man
wearing wide pantaloons. I saw now that his appearance was that of a Royalist
from the time of Cromwell, the mid-seventeenth century; he was naked to the
waist, save for two leather harnesses crossed on his chest, attached to which
were a powder horn, a leather pouch of lead balls, and a dagger. His hair was
richly curled, the curls extending even to his beard and moustaches.

The words he spoke to me sounded curt, almost angry, and yet he smiled as he
spoke them. They seemed foreign to me, and yet afterwards I was able to realize
that they were English, spoken with an accent akin to broad country. He had
said, 'You're the outsider's kin, that's all that matters . . .' but at the time
his words had been alien sounds.

The noise of the discharge was deafening, but all was swiftly lost in the
pain and confusion of the ball striking my head. I remember being thrust
backwards as if thrown, and the ice-cold waters of the pond gripping me and
sucking me down. For a moment, then, there was blackness, and when I came to my
senses again I was swallowing the foul mill-pond waters. I splashed and
struggled against the clinging mud, and the weeds and rushes which seemed to
wind about me. Somehow I surfaced and gulped air and water, choking violently.

Then I saw the gleaming haft of a decorated stick, and realized that I was
being offered a spear to grasp. A girl's voice called something incomprehensible
in all but sentiment, and I clung on to the cold wood gratefully, still more
drowned than alive.

I felt my body dragged from the clutches of the weeds. Strong hands.gripped
my shoulders and hauled me all the way out, and as I blinked water and mud from
my eyes I focused upon two bare knees, and the slim shape of my rescuer, leaning
towards me and forcing me down on to my stomach.

'I'm all right!' I spluttered.

'B'th towethoch!' she insisted, and the hands strongly massaged my back. I
felt water surfacing from my guts. I choked and vomited the mixture of chyme and
pond water, but at last felt able to sit upright, and I pushed her hands aside.

She backed off, still crouching, and as I rubbed the muck from my eyes I saw
her clearly for the first time. She was staring at me and grinning, almost
chuckling at my filth-ridden state.

'It's not funny,' I said, glancing anxiously beyond her at the forest, but my
assailant had gone. Thoughts of him faded quickly as I stared at Guiwenneth.

Her face was quite startling, pale-skinned, slightly freckled. Her hair was
brilliant auburn, and tumbled in unkempt, wind-swept masses about her shoulders.
I would have expected her eyes to be bright green, but they were a depthless
brown, and as she regarded me with amusement, I felt drawn to that gaze,
fascinated by every tiny line on her face, the perfect shape of her mouth, the
strands of wild red hair that lay across her forehead. Her tunic was short and
of cotton, dyed brown. Her arms and legs were thin, but the muscles were wiry; a
fine blonde down covered her calves and I noticed that her knees were badly
scarred. She wore open sandals of crude design.

The hands that had forced me down, and pumped water from my lungs so
powerfully, were small and delicate, the nails broken short. She wore black
leather wrist bands, and on the narrow, iron-studded belt around her waist she
carried a short sword in a dull grey sheath.

So this was the girl with whom Christian had become so helplessly, hopelessly
enamoured. Looking at her, experiencing a rapport with her that I had never
before encountered, the sense of her sexuality, of her humour, of her power, I
could well understand why.

She helped me to my feet. She was tall, almost as tall as me. She glanced
round, then patted me on the arm and led the way into the undergrowth, heading
in the direction of Oak Lodge. I pulled back, shaking my head, and she turned
and said something angrily.