Mythago Wood - 1 (24 page)

Keeton began to experience the formation of pre-mythagos. He became jumpy
during the fourth day, starting with shock, hissing for silence, crouching and
searching the woodland. I explained to him how to distinguish between real
movement and the hallucinatory forms of the pre-mythagos, but after the terrors
of the first few days he was not at ease, and didn't become so until much later.
As for real mythago forms, we heard one on that easy first day, but saw none.

Or is that true?

We had come to a place marked on my father's map as 'Stone Falls', a place he
had often referred to. The river -our tiny sticklebrook - had widened to about
ten feet, and was a crystal torrent of water, swirling through the thin woodland
that crowded banks more sandy than muddy. The place felt open, a delightful site
for a camp, and indeed we found the signs of such an encampment, traces of rope,
the marks where fastenings had been driven into trees. But there were no tracks,
no signs of fire, and though my spirits leapt at the thought of being on
Christian's trail, I had to acknowledge that the site had been constructed by a
mythago, at some time long in the past.

Away from the river the land sloped steeply upwards, a rising woodland of
thin trees, mostly beech. They sprouted from an earth that was strewn with great
boulders and jagged promontories of dark rock. The map had shown a track over
this rise of ground, cutting off a meander in the river, where the bank was
marked as 'dangerous passage'.

We rested, then moved away from the river and through the beechwood, pulling
ourselves up the steep slopes by hanging on to the slender trunks of the trees.
Each outcrop of stone was like a cave, and there were traces of animal life
outside many of them.

It was hard going. The river dropped away below us, in sight and sound. The
silence of the wood enveloped us totally. Keeton was labouring with his sore
shoulder, his face so red that the ferocious burn didn't show at all.

We crossed the mossy rocks on the ridge and began to descend to the river on
the other side. A great stone was leaning at a sharp angle from the slope. It
looked - and Keeton remarked upon the fact as well - like a standing stone that
had slipped. We skidded and ran towards it, fetching up sharp and hard against
its smooth side. Keeton was breathless.

'How
about
this!' he exclaimed, running his finger around the design
that had been deeply chipped into the rock. It was the face of a wolf against a
diamond background; weather had blurred the finer detail. 'Is someone buried
here, I wonder?'

He stepped round the rock, still leaning against it. I glanced about me and
realized that there were at least ten such stones, although smaller, rising from
the underbrush of the beechwood.

'It's a cemetery,' I murmured.

Keeton was standing below the imposing monument, staring up at it. From
somewhere on the slope came the sound of wood cracking, and the noisy tumbling
of a stone down towards the river.

Then the ground shook slightly. I glanced about apprehensively, wondering if
something was approaching. Keeton's cry of, 'Oh Christ!' jerked my attention
back to him, and I saw him madly scrambling towards me. It took me a second to
realize what was happening.

The great stone was beginning to move, slowly toppling forwards.

Keeton got clear. The monolith slipped majestically over, crashed through two
slender young trees and slid heavily down the slope for about forty yards,
leaving a great gaping hole behind it.

We edged forward to the pit and cautiously peered in. At the bottom of the
hole, just visible through the packed earth, were the bones of a man, still clad
in armour. The skull, which stared up at us, had been cracked open by a blow. A
slender, pointed helmet, of green but bright metal, had been placed above the
head. The warrior's arms were crossed on the flattened breastplate. The metal
looked polished, even though it had tarnished. Keeton thought it was bronze.

As we stood staring reverently down at the corpse, earth fell from the
breastplate, and the skeleton began to move. Keeton cried out in shock, and I
felt every organ in my body twist with fright. But it was just a snake, a
brightly coloured adder, it came sliding from the ribcage, below the
breastplate, and tried to ascend the earthy slope of the grave.

That brief movement had totally unnerved the two of us.

'God Almighty,' was all Keeton said, save to add, 'Let's get out of here.'

'It's only a skeleton,' I said. 'It can't harm us.'

'Somebody
buried him,' Keeton pointed out correctly.

We grabbed our packs and slipped and slid our way down the slope, to the more
protective trees of the riverside. I laughed when we got back to what felt like
safety, but Keeton stared back through the crowded trees, up towards the stone
ridge where the megalith lay.

Following his solemn gaze I saw the unmistakable flash of light on green
metal. After a second it vanished.

I am haunted by these edge of vision images. S explained them to me, but I
had no idea of how distracting they could be. Figures, groups, even animals. I
see them, sometimes, very clearly. Frightening visions. He says I am beginning
to shape them, and they do not exist, to try and concentrate only on the forward
vision until I am used to them.

Tonight, wolves have sniffed at us from across the river. Five in all, great
beasts, rancid to smell, so confident. They made no sound. They were quite real.
Padded off silently back towards the edgewoods.

We have walked, now, for five days. A total of sixty hours by my reckoning.
My watch is broken for no reason that I can fathom. Steven came without. But
sixty hours is about right, and that means eighty or ninety miles
at least.
We
have not yet reached the place where my photographs showed figures/buildings. We
looked at the photographs by torch-light. We could have walked through the wood
twenty times over, and we are still at the edge.

I am frightened. But this is certainly a ghost wood. And if S is right in
everything he tells me, then the avatar and the city will be here too, and the
damage can be undone. God watch me, guide me!

I read the words through again, while Keeton slept silently close by. The
fire was low, no more than a flickering flame, and I pushed two more pieces of
wood upon it. Sparks flew into the night. In the darkness around us there was
stealthy sound, clear and unnerving against the perpetual rush of the
sticklebrook.

I watched Keeton's slumbering form, then gently replaced the small notebook
in the sealed pocket of his haversack.

So Keeton's relationship with Ryhope Wood - the ghostwood, as he called it -
was more than a companion-out-of-curiosity to me. He had been in such a wood
before, and more had happened to him there than he had told me.

Had he encountered a mythago form in
that
woodland? An avatar, the
earthly form of a God? And what damage did he mean? His burnmark?

How dearly I would have liked to have talked to him about it. But I couldn't
reveal that I had read his diary, and he had mentioned the ghostwood in France
only briefly. I hoped that in time he would entrust me with whatever secret he
carried, whether dread, or guilt, or revenge.

We broke camp an hour after first light, having been disturbed by wild
animals, probably wolves. Looking at the map we carried, it was uncanny to
recognize how far we had
not
come, how close to the edge of the woodland
we remained. We had walked for so many days, and yet had hardly begun our
journey. Keeton was having great difficulty in accepting the changing
relationship of space and time. For my part, I wondered what the wildwoods
themselves would do to us.

For these, as yet, were not the wildwoods. The cemetery, Keeton told me, had
been an area of ancient coppice. Ryhope Wood, growing wild, had returned to a
natural form at its edges, but the signs of man were everywhere abundant. Keeton
showed me what he meant: that the large, standard oak we passed below had
self-seeded and grown to its majestic-size without being affected by man, but
close by was a beech that had been neatly lopped ten feet from the ground,
albeit hundreds of years before, and the resulting cluster of new shoots that
had grown from this pollard had thickened to give the several immense trunk-like
limbs that reached skywards, and cast such gloom across the underwood.

But had the coppicing been performed by man or mythago?

And perhaps, too, we were passing through the genesis zone of Guiwenneth
herself. How many Guiwenneth mech Penn Evs were there? Guiwenneth, daughter of
the Chief. How many wandered this expansive forest? It was a world of mind and
earth, a realm outside of real laws of space and time, a giant world, with room
enough for a thousand such girls, each the product of a human mind, drawn from
the towns and villages around the estate where Ryhope Wood grew.

How I missed her. How right Keeton was to refer to the fury bubbling just
below. There were times when an uncontrollable rage overcame me, and I could
hardly bear to be with the other man, stalking ahead into the brush, striking at
anything and everything, shaking with rage at what my brother had done to us.

It had been days since the attack, and he would be miles ahead of us. I
should not have delayed! I had so little chance of finding her, now. The
woodland was a gigantic landscape, a primal place, endlessly wide.

The depressions passed. And halfway through that sixth day's trek I found
evidence of Christian in a form I had not expected, evidence which made it clear
that he was not so far ahead of us after all.

We had been following a deer track for nearly an hour along the river's edge.
The carpet of dog's mercury and bracken was thin, here, and the spoor of a small
stag was so obvious in the soft mud patches that a child could have followed it.
The trees crowded closer to the water. Their outer branches almost closed over
the river, forming an eerie, silent tunnel. Light shafted through the broken
foliage and formed a gloriously-lit underworld, into which we pursued our prey.'

The animal was smaller than I had expected, and was standing, proud and
alert, near to a spinney, where the river bank was wide and dry. Keeton had
trouble seeing the beast, it was so perfectly camouflaged against the dark wood
behind. I approached cautiously under cover, holding Keeton's pistol. I was too
hungry for fresh meat to care about the ignominity of this kill. I placed a
single shot, just above the animal's anus, and splinters of backbone perforated
the hide for two feet along the spine. The stag was maimed, and I fell upon it,
swiftly ending its agony. After butchering it as Guiwenneth had showed me, I
tossed a raw haunch to Keeton, with a smile, and told him to get a fire going.
Keeton was pale and disgusted. He jumped back from the blood-raw meat, then
looked at me startled. 'You've done this before.'

'Indeed I have. We'll feed well, for the moment. Keep several pounds of
cooked meat for tomorrow, and carry two joints, as much as we can manage.'

'And the rest?'

'Leave it. It'll keep the wolves off our backs for a while.'

'Will it, though?' he murmured, and gingerly picked up the deer haunch and
began to brush the leaf litter and dirt from it.

It was as he was gathering wood for the fire that Keeton gasped with horror
and called to me. He was standing beyond the spinney, staring at the ground. I
walked up to him, conscious, again, of an odour I confess I had noticed as soon
as I had gone stalking the deer: the decay of an animal of large size.

'It's Christian,' I said. 'He killed them.'

Two, three days dead,' said Keeton. 'I've seen corpses in France. They're
flexible, do you see?' He leaned down, still shaking, and moved the girl's
ankle. 'But beginning to swell. Damn. She was young . . . look at her . . .'

I cleared the brush from around the bodies. They were certainly young.
Lovers, I imagined, both quite naked, although the girl still had a necklace of
bone around her neck, and the boy had strands of leather around his calves, as
if the sandals that he had been wearing had been too crudely looted from his
corpse. The girl's fists were clenched. I reached out and the fingers unfurled
quite easily. In each hand she held a broken partridge feather, and I thought of
Christian's cloak, which had been fringed by such things.

'We should bury them,' Keeton said. I noticed that he had tears in his eyes.
His nose was wet. He reached down and moved the boy's hand into his lover's,
then turned, presumably to see where a good site for burial might be.

Trouble,' he whispered, and I turned too, and felt a sudden shock as I saw
the ring of angry-looking men around us. All but one - an older man in authority
- had a bow drawn, the arrow pointed either at myself or Keeton. One of them was
shaking, the bow trembling, the arrow wavering between my face and chest. Tears
marked this man's face in a great streak through the grey paint with which he
was decorated.

'He's going to shoot,' Keeton hissed, and before I could say, 'I know,' this
manifestly distressed man had loosed the arrow. In the same instant the older
man next to him had raised his staff, clipping the edge of the bow. The arrow
was nothing but a sudden, shocking sound, passing between Keeton and myself and
impacting with a tree, deeper in the woods.

The ring remained, the arrows pointed. The distressed man stood, crestfallen,
angry, his bow held limply by his side. His chief came forward, searching our
eyes with his, aware of the stone-bladed spear I held. He smelled sweet, a
strange phenomenon, sweet like apple, as if he had daubed his body with apple
juice. His hair was braided five times, and painted with blue and red whorls.

He looked between us at the bodies of the youngsters, then spoke to the men
around him. Bows were lowered, arrows unnocked. He could see that they had been
dead for days, but to check his point he ran a finger over the blade of my
spear, sniggered, then checked my sword, which impressed him, and Keeton's
knives, which puzzled him.

The two bodies were dragged out into the clear space by the river and bound
with twine. Two litters were made, crude affairs, and the corpses reverently
placed upon them. The band's leader crouched above the girl, staring at her
face. I heard him say, 'Uth guerig . . . uth guerig