The Hollowing (33 page)

The centaur bolted suddenly, disappearing among the rocks and calling out as it entered the forest. The
Argo
was rocked and the waters thrashed. Sarin cried out and hid her eyes as the serpentine tail of the lake creature wrapped suddenly and sinuously around the broken hull of the vessel, knocking men and women from the deck, snapping the oars like matchwood. The creature’s head emerged and the argonauts shrieked. The
Argo
buckled, cracked, the sail spar shattered. As men and women dived for the unlikely safety of the lake the creature rolled, taking the
Argo
with it, vanishing suddenly amidst a storm and explosion of blue water.

Then one by one the swimmers heading for the shore screamed and were gone, the last being the shade of Aeneus himself who made it to the shore and was standing when the open-mawed beast flung itself suddenly through the shallows and dragged him back. Others had swum for the hollowing. Richard watched them reach the grey water and slowly vanish, emerging no doubt into the middle of a wild sea, to face a terrible drowning.

The hunters had gone, merging stealthily with the wood. The horned woman came up to the gully and gave the head of Orpheus to Sarin. Then she kissed the other woman, touched a rough-skinned hand to Richard’s beard, before wading into the water and walking steadily into obscurity.

“Will I be safe?”

Sarin’s words pulsed on the wind. Richard had a scent, though; it was coming on the rain. He crouched and brushed the water against his nose, smelling, lapping at it. The woman touched him, the ridges of her fingers sliding over his bristling skin. Her odour was strong, and the head of Orpheus was a faint sound as its final songs sang in the jelly of its skull, though no sound came from its mouth. The wind turned, the breeze stroked and curled, the rain shifted, the scents and touches of nature embraced Richard, and the stink-trail suddenly touched him in his heart.

He straightened and cried out.
It was her!
He sniffed hard, then breathed slowly and deeply, waving his hands through the drizzling rain, touching the play of aromas. She was signalling to him. She had touched his heart once before, now she called to him. The scent-trail rose from his groin to his throat and he cried her name.
Helen!

Frightened, the dark-skinned woman scampered away from him, into the Hollow, through the rain-lashed grass and into the longhouse. Richard followed, a part of him wanting to see that she was safe. Then he closed the gates, howled his pleasure, and moved with the scent into the overhang below the cliff, huddling there until the night came, the rain eased, the wind dropped, and the stink-trail hardened, gusting from the hole in the ground, below the running creatures …

Bosky

The paintings flowed; they were not paintings at all. They were alive, they were vital, they were shadow herds, moving in a great, steaming mass across the rock, across the face of the world, thundering across the grasslands.

He rose to his feet, turning as the huge shapes drummed and billowed past him, and he ran with them, following the broken ground, his face wet with the rank foam that sprayed from their stretched mouths, their lolling tongues. He drew a new strength from the power of the great beasts and grasped at the thick and heavy hair that streamed from their dark hides. He followed the movement of the sun as it glinted on the curved horns and was carried by the power of the herd. Smaller creatures ran too, white-backed, grey-flanked, high-horned, slender-legged. He pranced with them on the rumbling earth, then loped with grey wolves that raced across the grassland, all moving towards the great cavern. The world was vibrant, the earth a deep and resonant drumbeat, the air thick with mud and spray, the sky darkened by huge backs. He ran with them, the scent-trail strong in his nostrils despite the dung and sweat and animal breath of the running herds.

When the earth of the hollow closed around him it was cold. The sounds of the herds became faint. He plunged through darkness into the coiling passages of the world underground, squirming and crawling through the narrow spaces, every finger alive to the smooth, damp rock, the slick stone, his body like that of a snake as he pulled himself deeper through the dark. The earth around him still thundered and shook as the herds of bison and gazelle found their own paths down into the odd world, not of dreams, or the real, but a place between the two. Water fell, hard and cold, from a high ledge in a great dark cavern, into a second system of passages, and he slipped down, following the flow, hands briefly brushing marbled human figures, his eyes glimpsing the stony faces, his nostrils flaring as he again responded to the scents of the wood that lay at the far end of the cave system, and the sweet and beckoning woman who waited for him there.

The cold water carried him. It entered him, bathed him, washed him, clothed him. He slipped and slid, ducked and crawled where the cavern narrowed, ran blindly when it widened, shedding everything that was false upon him, a trail of clothes like skins, letting the stone air and rock spray form a miasma around his taut and sensitised flesh.

He was aware that time passed, but in the absolute dark he measured its passing by the flow of dreams and voices that ebbed and surged, touching his eyes, his heart, his laughter.

At last he crawled out of the earth, emerging through the rock and the turf, clinging to the swollen root of a massive tree. He had been following the root for many dreams, through the lower darkness, embracing its softer texture where it emerged from the icy stone in which it was embedded. The trunk of the tree extended above him, filling his whole view as he rose to his feet, naked and filthy. The colours of the interlocking masks were bright despite the gloom cast by the huge spread of the canopy. He stumbled and jumped across the spread of surface roots, then scampered into the brush at the edge of the Mask Tree’s vast glade, looking back at the faces carved there, old faces, weathered and stained, overlain with newer, brighter shapes. The more he looked the more he was able to see among the horned heads, the wide eyes, the oddly gaping mouths, the grins—a thousand masks etched and gouged on the black trunk of the oak, each one watching him from its own forgotten time.

The tree affected him strongly. Somewhere in the maze of faces a sweeter face watched him, a boy, an earnest child—but he couldn’t see the eyes, only sense them, and he curled down into the leaf litter, rubbed soil and crushed grass over his skin, smelled the ground and let the miasma strengthen.

*   *   *

After a while the vague sense of distress and loss that affected him in the glade passed away and he moved at ease through the wildwood, through the dappled light, gathering the scents of rose and wood anemone, bud and sap, gathering all of these to the miasma that flowed with him. The scent-trail which he still followed was strong, and he knew the woman was close. When the land dropped towards a moist hollow, filled with thorn and hazel thickets, he knew he had found her. The place was warm and hazy, the ground marshy, in shifting light as the taller trees that crowded and loomed over the dell moved to an unfelt breeze. A stream flowed at the bottom of the hollow, separating two banks, where briar and thistle grew densely, and as he looked from one bank to the other he saw her bower, a thickening in the copse of hawthorn and hazel, where grasses and dead branches had been woven into the thicket to create a protective wall, and a warm shelter.

He went to the stream and the miasma flowed around him, attracting more scents. The light from above made the fine mist in the hollow seem to glow. Through that bright, gently shifting veil, he watched the bower, and if he concentrated he could see her moving. She watched him too, but drew back into deep cover when their eyes met.

He couldn’t decide if he should approach or not, and he crouched by the stream, splashing at the water, letting the heavy stillness of the dell envelop him, learning from the faint sounds where the nests were above, and the warrens and passages through the earth and hollow boles around.

At last he crossed the stream, drawing the miasma with him like a cloak, and ascended the bank, through the briar and bramble that she had laid in lines and patches where the ground was more open. The hawthorn bower shook to her sudden movement and a dart penetrated his flesh painfully, then another, thin slivers of white wood tipped with a blue stain. He turned and scampered back to safety.

He constructed a warm, dry place in a thicket, making a bed of ferns covered with grass, a crude roof of dead wood and the broad leaves of sycamore. From here, each dawn, he watched the hawthorn bower.

At first light the grass-covered woman slipped through her own defences to the brook, to crouch, sing, and drink, her body tense, her head always cocked, her eyes and ears alert for danger. Her hair was black and streaked with more silver than his dream-memory of her recognised. It fell loosely around her face, where bright, dark eyes flashed and a full and sensuous mouth opened to sing or drink. She was always moist, and light sparkled on her body. She was adept at brushing small fish onto the bank, stunning them and storing them in a leaf pouch. She always carried the thin pipe with its poisoned darts and if he stirred she raised it threateningly.

His arm and neck itched infuriatingly where the fungal toxins had penetrated his skin.

Each dawn when she had finished she would return through the haze, the thick miasma of heat and scent, and it was his turn. She would watch him from cover, sometimes singing in her reedy voice.

Animals came to drink, and he learned to snare hares, the occasional, incautious fowl, a heron, and on one occasion a small pig. Without fire, the flesh was chewy, that of the hare strong and bloody, but exquisitely reviving.

The days in the dell were long, the moist warmth stifling at times. There was a silence and a stillness about the place, broken only by the brook and the restless murmur of birds. The nests of herons woke him each dawn with the clattering of their bills. Huge crows cawed and cackled from a colony nearby, and somewhere in a thicket deer were living. He could hear the male bark, the doe cough. But he never saw them, though their air flowed into the dell and mingled with the miasma of odours that formed each dawn above the brook.

Each dusk he returned to the Mask Tree and sat among the sprawling roots, staring up at the ancient faces. There were many things that tickled memories in his head, such familiarity, but no words or names came to him, only images of strange men, strange creatures, hints of stories, and the occasional thought of a bright boy running through tall grass, holding something wooden above his head that suddenly escaped him and soared into the sky, an unflapping bird.

He felt sad sometimes, but the sadness lifted as night shadow made the tree faces invisible, and only the monstrous black bole faced him. At this time he would stand against the trunk, his body almost enfolded by one of the deep channels in the thick bark. If he listened hard, if he blocked from his mind the chatter of nightjars, the rustle of voles and weasels, the furtive movement of cats and pigs, the flutter of nestlings, he could hear songs in the tree, but the words meant nothing. When he himself sang he sang with words that shaped the tune, and stirred feelings in his chest and stomach, yet meant nothing to the mind above—he had ears and eyes and thoughts only for the woman in the hawthorn bower.

One dawn, the scent miasma had changed. It stirred him deeply. It was sour-sweet, exciting, and he ran along the brook, splashing furiously, circling through the underbrush before crossing the brook and staring expectantly at the bower.

The leaves moved, eyes watched. The new scent flowed down the bank, encompassing him. His body reacted with pleasure and he closed his eyes for a long moment. But the bower remained shut. He whooped, called and sang, then returned to his shelter. When he was back, and out of harm’s way, the bower opened and she came down to drink.

He watched her hungrily, silently. There was something different about her. She had tied her hair into a single frond at the back. Her breasts were naked and she washed them carefully. Her legs and waist were still thick with grass, but when she turned to run back up the bank, he saw that her buttocks were naked too, and without the usual caking of mud. When she stooped to enter the bower the breath caught in his throat before he could
whoop
his call. Sweat suddenly beaded his skin.

As he watched the strutting of birds by the brook, and later two hares on their hind legs, boxing and rolling in the grass, memories surfaced from the edge of dreams of men dancing by the light of high, roaring fires, which gave brilliance, by reflection, to the colours of cloaks and the gold of masks and helmets. As the dream dissolved he went to scavenge for leaves and feathers, to make himself the ritual garments of display, a primal urge impelling him to decorate himself.

All day he constructed his display. He used thin splinters of tough grass to sew leaves of birch down each of his arms, and of oak across his chest, and of shining beech, emerald green, down the fronts of his legs. He was careful to pierce only the surface skin and not draw blood, which would add the wrong scent to the miasma.

He selected long heron feathers for his chin, working them through the long, thick hairs of his dark beard so that they hung like a white fringe. Black crow tail feathers formed a fringe across the base of his belly. He used chalk and light clay on the exposed skin of his body, then dabbed the purple and red juices of sloe and belladonna to make eyes on the clay-white.

Instinct told him that this would make a good impression.

Finally he used a mixture of resin, sap, and clay to stiffen his long hair, raising it into a crest that spanned his head from ear to ear. It took a long time, and it was almost dusk before he was ready. When he moved at last to the brook, the first of night had descended. A bright moon made the water gleam, the leaves on his body shine, his whitened skin glow. As he crawled to the brook, watching the hawthorn bower, he saw the leaves rustle and part, and he stood up slowly, arms stretched, legs apart. When the bower window remained open he grinned and wiggled his hips, then did a slow turn, and so began his first dance.