The Hollowing (26 page)

At dusk he entered the overhang of the hollow itself and touched the cold stone walls, the fading colours of the running creatures. And it was then that he found the hollowstick. It had been placed at the deeper entrance to the cave, to mark its creator’s passage inwards. Its legs had been snapped, its body slightly chewed, perhaps by a fox or wild cat, but the black and silver lock of hair was still tied to the roughly painted face at the tip of the curve of willow that formed the body.

Old Man, Old Lake

He had almost finished rebuilding the last part of the longhouse roof when the central pole buckled and snapped and the whole wood slat and turf structure collapsed below his weight. With a cry more of frustration than pain, Richard tumbled into the grassy, earthy chaos, spat out dirt, sat up, and bellowed for the boy.

“Taaj!”

Above him, the sky was greying into winter. His ankle throbbed and he scrabbled for his stick, using it to haul himself up before hobbling out into the clearing. The sprain was almost healed, but each time he jarred the foot he spent a day suffering. It seemed to Richard that in the six months he had been back at the Hollow, not a day had passed without
something
biting him, fighting him, or tripping him.

Where
was
that boy? Hadn’t he heard the cry?

He rang the bells ferociously. The empty tin cans clattered together dully, and the stones inside them rattled. A system of rope pulleys connected with one set of cans at the cliff top, another at the lakeside. He tugged on the lake-bell several times, hoping that Taaj would hear, but he heard no answering shout.

It had been such a long morning. He had prepared the turfs with pegs for the holes he had so painstakingly gouged in the willow slats. He braced the walls and checked the attitude of each of the supporting poles. The roof should have gone on, over what had once been the Station’s community room at one end of the longhouse, as easily as the piece of a known jigsaw. But the central pole had been weak—he could see the black stain of the fungal growth—and several hundredweight of turf and Richard himself had proved too much.

Again he rang the clattering bell and bellowed the boy’s name. Then he remembered that Taaj had gone out on the lake, fishing. The boy had seen the movement of large fish during the morning and had returned to the Station excited and hungry. Something had been driving them into the lake—perhaps through the hollowing?—and they had thrashed on the surface, white bellies plump, fins flashing in the grey light. Their backs had been dark purple, like sloe berries. There had been blood-red streaks along the gills. The fish were half the length of an adult man, and one catch would last a fortnight, when smoked or salted.

“Catch the biggest,” he said as the boy ran to him, shouting excitedly. “In the meantime…”

“You must help me, Rishar! Come and help me.”

Taaj was jumping up and down, his brown eyes glowing with pleasure. He was holding the crude ladder on which Richard was precariously balanced, and his leaping action made the whole structure wobble alarmingly.

Richard looked down. “Easy. Easy! Why do you need
me
to come fishing?”

“I can catch the biggest, Rishar—but I don’t want to catch the spirit that drives them! Can’t you come onto the lake with me?”

“What spirit are you talking about?” Richard asked, and Taaj calmed down, looking apprehensively at the gully to the lake.

“Hold the ladder as I come down,” Richard said.

He sparred with the boy for a moment, touching the long hair, making flicking movements at Taaj’s feather earrings. The boy ducked and weaved, laughing, then followed his friend into the longhouse. They kept the rods and hooks here, and Richard picked out the best. “There. You’ll catch a whale with this lot.”

He noticed the second look of apprehension on Taaj’s face as the boy whispered, “I don’t want to be eaten by the spirit. I’m afraid, Rishar. I think I have less than the day’s fight in me.”

“Nonsense,” Richard said, again tousling the lad’s hair. “What spirit can get the better of
you?
”

All he could think of was the longhouse. He needed the roof. In the six months he had been here he had made Old Stone Hollow into a magic place again, with a protective wooden wall, reconstructed from the old palisade, totems, talismans, a working generator, a latrine, a fire-pit, and a longhouse to be proud of. He had rebuilt this lodge in stages, and today he would complete the turfing of the last room, a place for the hanging of furs, fish, and game. He had no time to go fishing. Besides, the boy had been on the lake a hundred times before: he was a superb fisherman.

“Listen.
You
catch the fish—
I’ll
gut the catch. I know how much you hate doing that job.”

Taaj went outside, slightly forlorn, Richard thought. He walked over to the river and undressed, and Richard followed, watching as the boy knelt down in the water.

He went back to the roof, for a while, but an hour later sought his mythago friend at the river, by the new gates.

Taaj was kneeling in the water, a girdle of flowers floating round his waist, a small piece of dark wood held in each hand, turned by his fingers as he sang a quiet, repetitive song. Richard crouched on his stick by the stream and watched the hunting ritual. It was so hard to date the lad to an historical time, but Richard believed he must have been from a mesolithic society, lake-dwelling hunter gatherers.

He was brooding on this point when Taaj “drowned” the flowers, then strained to relieve himself in the water. He came ashore and dressed quietly, fixing his lines, hooks and baits. He smiled at Richard, then ran silently through the gully to the lake.

*   *   *

That had been this time yesterday!

It almost took Richard’s breath away as he realised how long Taaj had been gone. All of yesterday afternoon, while Richard had prepared the turfs, then drunk potato mash to go with his dried meats, aware that the boy was away, but not concerned, because Taaj was always vanishing for a day or two at a time. Drunk, and full, and weary with work, he had slept a long night, and in the damp morning had set to the task of putting on the final roof. Only when he had suffered the mishap had he started to
need
Taaj. Only now did he become conscious that Taaj’s words had seemed strange, that the boy had been in a strange mood, that for the first time in their short relationship the boy had
asked
for something and Richard had refused him.

With a terrible feeling of foreboding he hobbled to the river, shouting for his young companion. His ankle niggled him, but the stick was a nuisance and he used it almost like an oar as he waded into the water, ducked below the branches, and squeezed through the gully between the “clashing rocks,” as he had named them.

Did you catch a fine fish? Are you sitting there, gutting it? To surprise me, to make me ruffle your head with pleasure? Oh God, don’t let it happen again—

He staggered out through the broken wood and boulders onto the reed-fringed shore, scrambling down to the water’s edge as he bit back his cry of distress. Then he stood for a while, shocked and sick, staring out towards the hollowing and the huge lake creature, the frozen moment, and the dying boy.

Slowly he edged to a water-slick boulder and leaned against it, squinting against the light on the lake, the glitter of the calm lake that must have recently been in a state of turbulent disorder as the battle had raged. He could imagine how the hunters must have thrashed, out there on the water, their struggle throwing waves across the rocks so that everything was wet, everything slick, with weed and broken rushes decorating the crusted oaks and the fallen willows, the gritty sandstone teeth of the shore.

“Taaj…” he called, but his voice was a mere whisper. Perhaps, even as he planned to help his friend, he knew that his betrayal would cost the life of the boy.

Again, “Taaj! Hold on! I’m going to help. Hold on—we’ll eat a fat slice of your friend for supper.”

If the boy heard, he gave no sign, not even a turn of his dark-haired head or a movement of his muscles, standing out so hard, so proud against his slim frame as he held the serpent through the jaw. It was like a blue-painted canvas, a scene from an ancient battle between a young David and the Goliath of the sea, a creature half fish, half reptile, its jaws stretched in a toothy rictus, its eyes slowly blinking, the frills and spines around its neck and gills waving, beating, slowly, like the oars of a galley. Reds and greens, and stripes of livid purple, pulsed on the coils of neck that tensed below the head, and in the small boat, Taaj knelt on one knee, the great harpoon upright, the stone point fixed in the throat of the serpent.

The tail of the beast was curled twice round the skiff, and once around the boy. Only the sting at the end of the tail moved, and it flexed in fury, suppressed and restless fury, and Richard, at the shore, intuited that somehow this battle had become a test of strength. Stalemate! The boy’s weapon was close to something vulnerable in the creature. But the beast would not release its grip.

I’m afraid, Rishar. I think I have less than the day’s fight in me—

Richard groaned, beat the rock with his bare hands, tugged at the cords of his plaited beard and hair, rent at the faded garments on his tanned chest.

It was as if Taaj had known of his fate. He had sensed it! That the fish would be driven from another world by a creature that was from the realm of monsters. He had
known
his destiny lay in a bitter fight to the death, perhaps one of many, and he had sensed that he was unequal to the task. He had asked his friend, the old man of Spirit Rock, Rishar, the screaming, dreaming, frantic, frightened
Rishar,
to come with him, just in case of danger.

Out on the water the monster foamed bloodily, the lake shifted, the skiff bobbed and Taaj pushed harder against the jaw, felt the muscular tail of the beast tighten, squeeze more life from him. The hollowing was a haze of white and grey—shapes moved there, out of vision, a disturbance against the dark tree-line of the opposite shore.

I have less than the day’s fight in me—

A day, then—
the
day—a full day to defeat the serpent, according to the story that had “birthed” Taaj from the forgotten womb of a human mind, and already the brave boy had used up most of it. There were minutes left. Richard had only one hope of helping, and that meant using Lytton’s boat, the old longship, and the harpoons he had kept there, and which were still strong in shaft and point. The vessel, with its death’s-head prow, was moored close by, the sail furled. There was a good breeze. The boat could circle widely and come upon the serpent from the farther side.

Stripped to his trousers, all thoughts of pain long gone, Richard boarded the sleek longship and tugged the rigging that held the white sail, catching its ends as it fell and holding them at arms’ stretch, body braced behind a rail of oak, leaning back to take the strain as the breeze filled the canvas, billowed the sail, nudged the dark hull across the water. A wave rippled out, covered the sparkling grey, tossed the skiff, and the serpent foamed bloodily again, thrashed its body as much as it could, but then stiffened. The wood of the skiff creaked as the muscles tightened, as the coil slid round Taaj’s braced body, scales grating at his skin, but he held his own harpoon firmly, pushed against the creature, and brought mortality closer by the sliding of an inch of stone through bone, and an inch of flesh, to a heart in the skull, to the brain itself.

I can’t lose this boy. Not this boy too. His fishing is too good. I should have learned his story. I should have been ready to listen, and then I would have been ready for this.

The longship glided through the icy waters, Richard braced, leaning back, muscles taut as he held the edges of the full sail, tugging to guide the low hull, watching the shoreline as it slid across the high prow, slipping across his vision with just the
lap
and
slap
of the lake and the rumbling protest of the nearing beast to remind him of movement and goal.

“Hold on, my lad—these Vikings built for speed, not subtlety.”

I can’t lose him. I don’t even know his culture. He’s such a good fisher. He hunts so well. He sings raucously, and it reminds me of Lacan. I know he is comfortable with stone. He seems unfamiliar with metals, can launch a spear from a hollow pebble held in his palm, is frightened of the moon when it’s full, talks of his sister with affection, seems to understand me. I can talk to him, although his words are meaningless. He can talk to me, though all I do is shout.

The carcass of a fish floated past, rolling in the lake, blind eyes seeing Richard, harpoon scar bleeding still. Streaks of bright purple ran along its side as far as the wide tail-fins—the dorsal fins were flecked with black. It was plump and no doubt the boy could claim the killing, but this creature of the sea had been driven here by a serpent from hell, and it would be some time yet before the catch hung out to dry …

He had rounded the hollowing, caught the strong breeze, shifted his stance, and now built up speed again, coming in on a hard tack, prow cutting the water—

clop—swish, clop—swish, clop—

The voice of the lake urged him on, waters parting, breaking, and the mast creaking with the strain, the canvas flapping when he let the tension drop, but strong again when the wind took it, tugging him forward, off balance, until he braced and the boat surged beneath his feet, listing on the water, then righting, and closing on the fisherman and his weakening attacker—

Another boy called to him, a voice from another time. “I’m going fishing, Daddy. Will you come? Will you come with me?”

He had had so many other things to do in his lifelong pursuit of doing nothing. “Have a good catch. A trout for each of us, please. I’ll help gut the fish. Your mother would run screaming—”

“I’m fishing for perch. We can’t really eat them. It’s just to see them, really. It’s fun…”