Authors: Robert Holdstock
But as Richard began to follow he heard movements in the grove, and a fleeting sound, high-pitched and human, the sound of pain. He dropped his pack, watched where Helen was going so as not to lose her again, then stepped between two trees into the flower and grass of this dell. The bird cries increased in agitation, the sound of their wings became louder as they took to flight.
A hump at the side of the dell resolved into the figure of a man, back arched up from the enclosing earth, arms spread to his sides. He was dead, Richard thought, and as he drew closer, peering down, he could see how the earth itself was open around his torso, and strands and tendrils of vine and sucker were swathed around him, dragging the corpse back into the body of the wood. His face was scarred with flat fungal growth, his hair, which was fair and long, seemed to be rooting into the bracken. There was a dull gleam of metal around the body’s neck and chequered red and yellow showed through the weeds on the torso, the remains of its shirt. The man’s mouth was open and Richard glimpsed furtive movements in the hole. The eyes were closed, tightly, an expression of great pain. He could see no wound.
There was a sudden step behind him and he started with fright. Helen grabbed him by the shoulder. “Get the hell out of here.
Fast.
”
“He’s dead. Another Hood, I think.”
“Another Hood nothing. Quickly, Richard. Get away from here.”
Behind him the dead man, perhaps still dying, uttered a high, slow moan and shifted slightly in the sucking earth.
Helen was back on the track. “Did he see you?”
“No. His eyes are closed. He’s dying.”
“He’s being born! Come on, let’s put distance between us. If he sees you he’ll fix on you. It’s a Jack, and I don’t like his colours. He’s bad news.”
Being born?
Richard stumbled away from the dell, recasting the image of the corpse in his mind. Not being sucked into the earth then, but pushed out of it, the grey and green fungal growth being absorbed into the skin, not absorbing the decaying flesh.
“A Jack? As in Beanstalk?”
“As in Giant Killer,” Helen called back stiffly. “Didn’t Lytton show you Huxley’s diaries?”
But before Richard could recapture a sudden memory of the dead man’s writings, a more concerning thought struck him:
his pack!
He turned back and ran to where he had dropped the bulky backpack. Snatching it up he turned to follow Helen again, into the thinner forest, away from this icy womb. He caught a glimpse as he rose of a shape, man-sized and stooped, standing deeply in the shadows of the grove watching him. It leaned an arm against a tree-bole, breathing hard. Light caught its eyes, which were narrowed, sinister, and staring.
Richard was in no doubt that it had seen him.
* * *
Huxley had written:
13th May ’28. A Jack has come to the edgewood and watched the house. The boys are at school, and Jennifer in town. It seemed unsure at first, then, like all mythagos, it came towards me as far as the gate. I might have hoped to see a goose below its arm, the glint of a golden egg, but this particular echo of folk myth was hungry, bloody, and heavily armed with whatever it had been able to find in the wood: this meant crude spears, a heavy club, two knives in its belt. Its clothing was reminiscent of Northern British Roman, the leather kirtle and short trousers especially, although it was warmed by a heavy sheep skin round its shoulders. There was something of Hercules about the Jack in this form. Its long hair and wild eyes made it seem less intelligent than the tricky customer I have come to expect.
And later, in summer 1930:
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick … Jack change shape! In the Oak Ash zone I encountered a Celtic bard, a gentle creature who carried a complex set of bone pipes, elbow pipes of a very early design, and indeed his own story was linked with their first invention and use in magic. He told me four tales:
And one of them:
Finally, a Jack tale—I have called it “Jack His Father”—close to the “core legend,” I think. Jack is a shapechanger. His name in the story is Cungetorix, son of the clan chief Mananborus, who was an historical figure. This early legend contains only an ingredient or two of the later folk-tale about the Beanstalk that it will become in the telling.
All of this Helen whispered to Richard as they rested in good, thick cover, catching their breath after an hour of running and weaving through the forest, away from the source of the Jack.
She went on, “Jack His Father is one of the very few tales that George Huxley was able to interpret from his encounters in Ryhope. Mostly he saw mythagos as glimpses, or brief and incomprehensible meetings. But Jack His Father is a tale of the British trickster, so it interests me—and it means our pursuer is not to be messed with…”
“Can you summarise the tale? I suppose it would be useful to know what we’re up against.”
Helen took a long drink from her water bottle, listened to the wood for a moment, then leaned forward, arms around her knees.
“Very briefly: It’s a tale of mutual trickery and Jack’s revenge. While Jack is out in the fields, sowing wheat, a raiding party attacks and slaughters his father and three brothers, taking their heads. Jack doesn’t know this, but when the raiders come for him, he knows he’s in trouble. He bargains for his life with three seeds which he claims are magic: one will grow into a house in which there will always be a feast cooking; the second will grow into a boat fit to sail over any magic lake. The third is the seed of a tree which will grow so high that from its top a brave man can see the fabled Isle of Women. The warlord believes Jack and offers in exchange the prize of all the pigs captured in his raid; the best singing voice that Jack could wish to hear; and offers also to make Jack a better man than his father. Jack accepts; the seeds are revealed as wheat, to the warlord’s fury; but then Jack is given his father’s head: his father was the best pig captured in the raid; his voice sang sweetly as he begged for life; and since his father is dead, Jack is now the better man.
“But Jack invokes the Crow Goddess to exact revenge and she shapechanges him into his father’s gory head. Strong-winged geese carry the head to the warlord’s camp, where it first shapechanges into the feasting house, then the valiant ship, and finally grows into the giant tree. The warlord, being greedy for the Isle of Women, climbs to the top, but the Jack-in-the-tree keeps growing, snaps off at its base, and the warlord falls to his death on the rocks of the very isle he has coveted.”
Richard digested the tale. “So we’re on our guard against—what? A house, a ship, and a huge tree?”
“Against a shapechanger,” Helen said. “It’s how Ben Darby probably died. From now on, Richard, assume that nothing, however simple, is as it seems.”
Inside the Skin
Unnerved by the incident in the juniper grove, Helen ran through the beech forest like a deer, apparently unconcerned at the noise she made as she crashed through the choking underwood. She was an occasional figure in the distance, half-lit, tenuous, no more substantial than the flicker of a shadow, but it was enough for Richard to follow.
After an hour they stopped to rest by a fall of water in the cool protection of rocks, huddling into the moist shade. The sound of the fall made it difficult to hear whether or not the Jack was following and Richard went up onto the overhang, where the air was warmer. The wood was quite still and he listened hard, but the only movement was a furtive rustling close by that resolved into the figure of a tiny man, who watched, hesitated, then fled, uttering a bird-like cry.
When he reported this to Helen she dismissed the small man, but was concerned at the silence behind them. “Is it possible? He can’t have…”
“Can’t have what?”
“Overtaken us. Not already…”
“The Jack?”
She tugged apprehensively at her long hair as she stood above the waterfall and stared into the distance.
“He’s fast. I should have remembered that about him. He’s nimble Jack. He’ll wait for us, somewhere ahead, so be vigilant.”
They camped that night in a crumbling wooden building that had once been used as a shrine. It was in a clearing in the wood, and had begun to dissolve into itself, the dark thatch rotting. Carved beams supported a thin, stone lintel on which the traces of painted runes could still be discerned. Inside, there were stone heads and limbs, and the shattered remains of patterned urns. It was an easy enough place to barricade against roaming wildlife, and a low door in the back made a convenient escape route, should anyone try and enter. It had seemed unwise to sleep in so open and obvious a location, but Helen shrugged off Richard’s concern as soon as she was satisfied that this structure was not a manifestation of the Jack.
“It’s going to rain.”
And rain it did, for most of the night, and although the air became damp, the thatch was intact enough to keep them dry.
* * *
Richard woke early, startled by the dead, grey face, blank-eyed and gaping of mouth, that was staring at him. He shouted out in alarm and crawled across the floor as he emerged into full consciousness.
Helen, in her body web, was sifting through the pottery urns. She grinned as Richard finally calmed down and stared at her. She had placed the votive offering by him out of a sense of mischief, she confessed.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack!” he complained.
“Revenge, that’s all. That’s a powerful snore you have there, Mr. Bradley.”
“I was snoring? That’s not like me.”
“More impressive than a tusker. Boar, not elephant, that is.” She cast an amused glance at him. “These are Urnfield. Lovely designs, excellent craftwork. The urns are full of stones painted as eyes”—she held out a handful of the oddities—“and shards of reflecting crystal, including some lovely amethyst and opal. I think this must be the shrine that the Hunter-Child Vishenengra sought, to win back sight for his family, blinded in a Kurgan raid. It’s a sort of
argonaut
adventure from all over Europe and West Asia, but going back five thousand years.”
Her certainty, her knowledge, was quite startling. How could she tell this from such a corrupted and shattered place? Helen reminded Richard that all things in Ryhope Wood were connected with legend, not just the heroes, be they Palaeolithic hunters or chivalrous knights, but also the structures and landscapes associated with the lost tales. At some time in the past, this crude shrine had been not
real
but mythic, a place of aspiration in the dreams of people, a place unreachable, unattainable except in story.
She had recognised the eyestones from a legend mentioned briefly in Huxley, circa 1940.
“This is a magic place, but I don’t remember how. The Guardian hides from visitors, watching through the eyes of the Dead…”
They looked as one at the stone heads, and Richard felt a sudden shiver of apprehension. Helen’s earlier tease suddenly seemed far less amusing.
“I suggest we get out of here,” Richard said, and she agreed.
They scrambled for their packs and Richard ducked out through the sloping doorway, stepping into the damp but bright glade and almost screaming with shock as a huge horse snorted in his face, then shook its head with a rattling of chains. It towered above him, black as coal, decorated with crescents of bronze, polished bone, and coloured ribbons, stamping restlessly on the ground as its rider held it back. The tip of the man’s lance was a broad and saw-toothed stone, tied firmly to the heavy haft with cord and now pressed painfully against Richard’s throat. Against the restless light through the canopy Richard could see that the warrior was partly armoured. His hair was cut short, spiked with chalk along the right side and worn in three long, feathered braids from the left.
Further movement at the edge of the glade announced the cautious arrival in the clearing of two more tall horsemen, leading their mounts from the scrub. The lance tip was prodded at Richard again, indicating that he should move to the side, and he complied quickly. Helen was silent, still in the shrine, but Richard was helpless against this huge man. He hoped she was ready for the attack, or already making good her escape through the small door at the rear of the structure.
The horse-lord’s two companions dropped to crouching positions, lances across their knees. They were both bare-armed, bodies protected with dull-coloured leather corselets. They wore heavy trousers and boots. Feathers and grasses, tied in bundles, decked them from braids to belts.
The horse-lord slipped down from his saddle blanket—there was no saddle as such, and no stirrups on the trappings—and stooped to enter the shrine. Suddenly afraid, Richard stepped forward, intending to call out, to draw the man’s attention away from Helen. A spear sliced the air across his eyes, and struck the door beam with tremendous force, quivering there. Both the other men were standing, and a second spear was drawn back and ready for flight. The two horses grazed the long, wet grass unconcerned.
Richard put up his hands in a gesture (he hoped) of supplication, but called anxiously, “Helen?”
From the shrine came the murmur of the man’s voice. Richard heard him say one word several times:
Kyrdu.
He talked on. The eye-stones were shifted, sifted, the pottery shards of the broken urns clattered about.
Where was Helen?
Richard looked around, scanning the edge of the wood for movement that might indicate her lurking, hiding presence, but there was nothing, just these wild men, now relaxed again, crouching down and staring across the clearing as their horses fed.
The horse-lord suddenly appeared from the shrine, bent low, then straightening and examining a handful of the stones and crystals. He was looking for treasures, no doubt. Under his arm he carried the stone head. Behind him, stepping out into the glade, came Helen. She glanced at Richard and motioned him to be quiet.
The warrior placed the eyestones in a pouch which he tied at his belt. He tossed the head across the clearing to one of his men, who reacted with total surprise, the momentum of the catch sending him sprawling backwards, to his friend’s great amusement. The head was then wrapped in cloth and slung over the grazing horse, which reared up and whinnied at the sudden weight.