Mythago Wood - 1 (27 page)

Two days after leaving the
shamiga
we found the ruined stone tower,
the 'broch', the same structure that Keeton had photographed from his plane. It
stood back from the river and was much overgrown. We hovered in the underbrush
and stared across the clearing at the imposing grey walls, the window slits, the
vine and creeper that were slowly smothering the building.

Keeton said, 'What do you think it is? A watchtower? A folly?'

The tower had no top. Its doorway was square and lined with heavy blocks of
stone. The lintel was intricately carved.

'I have no idea.'

We stepped towards the place and noticed at once how the ground was churned
and trodden, the clear tracks of horses. There were signs of two fires. And most
obvious of all, the deeper, broader marks of some large creature, obliterating
the earlier tracks.

'They were here!' I said, my heart racing. At last I had a
tangible
sign
of how close to Christian we were. He had been held up. He was two days or less
ahead of me.

'Look at this!' Keeton called suddenly, and I walked back to the low doorway.
I stepped out through the tangle of briar and vine and saw that he had hacked
away the plant life from the lintel, to expose the carving more clearly.

It was a panoramic scene, of forest and fire. At each side of the lintel,
trees were shown, all growing from a single, snake-like root that stretched
across the stone. From the root dangled eight blind, human heads. The woodland
was shown crowding towards a central fire. Standing in the middle of the fire
was a naked human man, his form pecked out in detail, save for the face. The
erect phallus was disproportionately large; the figure's arms were held above
the head, grasping a sword and a shield.

'Hercules,' ventured Keeton. 'Like the chalk giant at Cerne Abbas. You know,
that hillside figure.'

It was as good a guess as any.

My first thought about the ruined stone broch was that it had been
constructed thousands of years ago and had been consumed by the woodland in much
the same way as Oak Lodge was being engulfed. But we had come so
far
into
this strange landscape, already many miles further from the edge than was
physically possible, so how could the broch have been erected by human hand?
There remained the possibility that as the forest expanded so the distortion of
time within it expanded . . .

Keeton said the words that I knew to be true: "The whole building is a
mythago. And yet it means nothing to me . . .'

And indeed, the broch marked the outskirts of an eerie and haunting landscape
of such legendary, lost buildings.

The forest felt no different, but as we followed animal paths and natural
ridges through the bright undergrowth, so we could see the walls and gardens of
these ruined, abandoned structures. We saw an ornately gabled house, its windows
empty, its roof half-collapsed. There was a Tudor building of exquisite design,
its walls grey-green with mossy growth, its timbers corroded and crumbling. In
its garden, statues rose like white marble wraiths, faces peering at us from the
tangle of ivy and rose, arms outstretched, fingers pointing.

In one place the wood itself changed subtly, becoming darker, more pungent.
The heavy predominance of deciduous trees altered dramatically. Now a sparsely
foliaged pine-forest covered the descending slope of the land.

The air felt rarefied, sharp with the odour of the trees. And we came at once
upon a tall wooden house, its windows, shuttered, its tiled roof bright. A great
wolf lay curled in the glade that surrounded it: a bare garden, not grassy but
heavy with pine needles, and dry as a bone. The wolf smelled us and rose to its
feet, raising its muzzle and emitting a haunting, terrifying cry.

We retreated into the thin pinewoods and retraced our steps, away from this
old Germanic location within the forest.

It was towards the end of that day, however, that we emerged from the wood
and confronted the most astonishing and memorable of these mythagos. We had
glimpsed it through the thinning trees: high towers, crenellated walls; a dark,
brooding stone presence in the near distance.

It was a castle out of the wildest dreams of faerie, a gloomy, overgrown
fortress from the time of Knights, when chivalry had been more romantic than
cruel. Twelfth century, I thought, or perhaps a century earlier. It made no
difference. This was the image of the stronghold from times after the sacking
and abandonment of the great Keeps, when many of the castles had fallen into
ruin, and some had become lost in the more remote forests of Europe. The land
around it was grassy, well-grazed by a small flock of scrawny grey sheep. As we
walked from the cover towards the stagnant waters of the moat, so these animals
scattered, bleating angrily.

The sun was low and we stepped into the shadow of the great walls, and began
a slow tour of the castle. We kept away from the treacherous slope that bordered
the moat. High, slitted windows had once given archers a wide view of sieging
forces, and when we remembered this we moved back towards the scrub wood. But we
neither saw nor heard the signs of any human presence inside the fort.

We stopped and stared at the tallest of the watch towers. From such a prison
maidens of myth like Rapunzel had let down their golden hair, a rope for
chivalrous knights to climb.

'A painful experience, no doubt,' Keeton reflected, and we laughed and walked
on.

Back into the sun, and we came to the gate. The drawbridge was up, but looked
rotten and decayed.

Keeton wanted to look inside, but I felt a vague apprehension. It was then
that I noticed the ropes, hanging from two of the crenellations on the wall.
Keeton, simultaneously, saw the signs of a fire on the sheep-grazed bank. We
looked around us and sure enough, the grassland was quite churned with
hoofprints.

It could only have been Christian. We were still following him. He had
preceded us to this castle, and had scaled the walls to plunder the inside.

Or had he?

Floating face down in the moat was a human shape. I became aware of it by
stages. It was naked. The dark hair and pale buttocks were greened with slime. A
thin patch of pink about the middle of the back, like a pale red algal growth,
informed me of the wound that had sent this Hawk to his doom.

I had hardly recovered from the frisson of apprehension that the sight of
this dead warrior elicited in me when I heard movement beyond the drawbridge.

'A horse,' Keeton said, and I heard the whickering of such a beast and
nodded.

'I suggest we make a strategic withdrawal,' I said.

But Keeton hesitated, staring at the wooden gate.

'Come on, Harry . . .'

'No. Wait ... I'd like to see inside

And even as he stepped forward, scanning the arrow slits above the gate,
there came the sound of wood creaking, and ropes singing with strain. The huge
drawbridge came crashing down. It struck the near bank just inches from Keeton's
startled figure, and the jarring shock in the earth made me bite my tongue.

'Christ!' was all Keeton said, and backed towards me, fumbling for the pistol
in his waist pocket. A figure on horseback was revealed in the high gateway. It
kicked its mount forward, and lowered its short, blue-pennanted lance.

We turned and ran for the woodland. The steed galloped after us, hooves loud
on the hard ground. The Knight cried out at us, his voice angry, his words
familiar yet meaningless, with a suggestion of French. I had had time to take in
only very little about him. He was fair-haired and thinly-bearded, and wore a
dark band around his head, although a heavy steel helmet was slung on the back
of his saddle. He was clad in a mail shirt and dark leather breeches. The horse
was black with three white hooves -

The horse snorted behind us, thumping heavily across the turf, nearer with
every stride. The Knight kicked and urged it faster. His mail shirt rattled, and
the bright helmet struck noisily against some metal part of his saddle. Glancing
back as we ran for cover, I could see how he leaned slightly to the left, the
lance held low, ready to be jerked up as it struck at our bodies.

But we plunged into the cool undergrowth seconds before the lance was struck
angrily against a towering blackthorn. He kicked his steed into the woodland,
leaning low across the beast's withers, and holding the lance carefully against
the flank. Keeton and I circled him, hugging bush and trunk, trying to avoid his
eyes.

After a moment or two he turned and went out into the dusk light again,
galloped up and down the length of the scrub for a few minutes, and then
dismounted.

Now I realized how truly huge this man was, at least six and a half feet
tall. He swung his double-edged sword and hacked his way through the thorn,
shouting all the time in his quasi-French.

Then there was a shot. Not from Keeton. It was a strange, muffled sound, and
the moist, mossy air was suddenly acrid with the smell of sulphur. The Knight
was flung back, but didn't fall. He stared in astonishment to our right, holding
the shoulder where the ball had made its glancing strike. I looked too. The
shadowy form of the cavalier who had shot at me by the mill-pond could just be
glimpsed. He was frantically re-priming his heavy matchlock rifle.

'It can't be the same man,' I said aloud, but the mythago turned towards me
and smiled, and even if it was a different genesis, it was the same form which I
had previously encountered.

The Knight walked out of the bosk and called his horse. He began to strip the
trappings from the animal. With a slap of his broad blade on its hindquarters,
he gave the horse its freedom.

The cavalier had vanished into the gloom. Once before he had tried to kill
me. Now he had saved me from a potentially murderous attack. Was he following
me?

As the uncanny thought occurred to me, Keeton drew my attention to the part
of the encroaching woodland from which we had first seen the castle. A figure
stood there, gleaming greenly in the fading light. Its face was ghastly and
drawn, but it was armoured, and was watching us. It had probably been following
us since our encounter at the Stone Falls.

Unnerved by this third apparition, Keeton led the way through the greenwood,
following the course we had set ourselves before. We were soon out of sight of
the great fortress, and from behind there came no obvious sound of pursuit.

We found the road on the fourth day after leaving the
shamiga.
Keeton
and I had separated, forcing our way through the tangled forest, seeking a boar
run, or stag track, anything to make the going easier. The river was away to our
left, dropping into a shallow gorge, where the bank was unmanageable.

Keeton's cry did not startle me because it was not anguished. I cut through
the thorn and bramble towards him, realizing at once that he was in a sort of
clearing.

I emerged from the underbrush on to an overgrown and decaying brick roadway,
about fifteen feet wide and with gutters on either side. The trees formed a sort
of arch across it, a tunnel of foliage, through which sunlight filtered.

'Good God,' I said, and Keeton, standing in the middle of this unlikely
track, agreed with me. He had shrugged off his pack, and was resting, hands on
hips.

'Roman, I think,' he said. Another guess, and in this case a good one.

We followed the road for a few minutes, glad of the freedom of movement after
so many hours picking our way through the forest. Around us, birds sang shrilly,
feeding, no doubt, on the flying insects that swarmed in the clear air.

Keeton was inclined to think of the road as a real structure, overtaken by
woodland, but we were surely too deep for that to have been the case.

Then what's the purpose of it? I don't have fantasies about lost roads, lost
tracks.'

But that wasn't the way it worked. At one time, a mysterious road, leading
beyond the known land, might have been a strong myth image; over the centuries
it degenerated, but I could remember my grandparents talking about 'fairy
tracks' that could only be seen on certain nights.

After a few hundred yards, Keeton stopped and indicated the bizarre totems
that had been placed on each side of the crumbling road. They had been
half-hidden in the underbrush, and I cleared the leaves from one, disturbed by
the sight which greeted me: a decaying human head, its jaw stretched open and an
animal's long-bone rammed through the mouth. It had been impaled upon three
sharpened stakes of wood. Across the road Keeton was holding his nose against
the stink of decay. 'This one's a woman,' he said. 'I get the feeling we're
being warned.'

Warned or not, we continued to walk. It may have been imagination, but a hush
enveloped the enclosing trees. There was movement in the branches, but no song.

We noticed other totems. They were tied to the low branches, sometimes strung
on bushes. They were in the form of rag creatures, little bags of coloured
cloth, with the crude representations of limbs drawn upon them. Some had been
impaled with bones and nails, and the whole unnerving presence of the offerings
was suggestive of witchcraft.

We passed below a brick archway which spanned the road, and scrambled over
the dead tree that had fallen beyond it. We found we had come into a cleared
space, a ruined garden, pillars and statues rising from a tangle of weeds, wild
flowers and a bramble thorn gone wild. Ahead of us was a villa of clear Roman
design.

The red tiled roof had partly fallen in. The walls, once white, were dulled
by time and the elements. The entrance door was open and we stepped into the
cold, eerie place. Some of the mosaic and marble flooring was intact. The
mosaics were exquisite, showing animals, hunters, scenes of country life, and
gods. We stepped carefully across them. Much of the floor space had already
collapsed into the hypocaust.