Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) (23 page)

Thorn stood in the dark street, a tall figure, his horns of wood black against the sky. There was a strong smell of earth about him. He moved towards Thomas, leaf-clothes rustling.

‘The work is unfinished, Thomas.’

‘I’m afraid for my life. Too many people know what I’m doing.’

‘Only the finishing of the face matters. Your fear is of no consequence. You agreed to work for me. You must go to the church. Now.’

‘But if I’m caught!’

‘Then another will be found. Go back to the work, Thomas. Open my eyes properly. It
must
be done.’

He turned from Thorn and sighed. There was something wrong with Beth and it worried him, but the persuasive power of the night figure was too strong to counter, and he began to walk wearily towards the church. Soon the village was invisible behind him. Soon the church was a sharp relief against the night sky. The Watchman’s fire burned high, and the autumn night was sweet with the smell of woodsmoke. The Watchman himself seemed to be dancing, or so Thomas thought at first. He strained to see better and soon realised that John had fallen asleep and set light to his clothing. He was brushing and beating at his leggings, his grunts of alarm like the evening call of a boar.

The moment’s humour passed and a sudden anger took Thomas. Thorn’s words were like sharp stab wounds to his pride: his fear was of no consequence. Only the work of carving mattered. He would be caught and it would be of no consequence. He would swing, slowly strangling, from the castle gallows and it would be of no consequence. Another would be found!

‘No!’ he said aloud. ‘No. I will
not
work for Thorn tonight. Tonight is
my
night. Damn Thorn. Damn the face. Tomorrow I will open its eyes, but not now.’

And with a last glance at the Watchman, who had extinguished the fire and settled down again, he turned back to the village.

*

But as he approached his house, aware of the glow of the fire through the small window, his anger changed to a sudden dread. He began to feel sick. He wanted to cry out, to alert the village. A voice in his head urged him to turn and go back to the night wood. His house, once so welcoming, threatened him deeply. It seemed surrounded by an aura, detached from the real world.

He walked slowly to the small window. He could hear the crackle and spit of the flames. Wood smoke was sweet in the air. Somewhere, at the village bounds, two dogs barked.

The feeling of apprehension in him grew, a strangling weed that made him dizzy. But he looked through the window. And he did not faint, nor cry out, at what he saw within, though a part of his spirit, part of his life, flew away from him then, abandoning him, making him wither and age; making him die a little.

Thorn stood with his back to the fire. His mask of autumn leaves and spiky wood was bright and eerie – dark hair curled from beneath the mask. His arms were wound around with creeper and twine, and twigs of oak, elm and lime were laced upon this binding. Save for these few fragments of nature’s clothing he was naked. The black hair on his body gave him the appearance of a burned oak stump, gnarled and weathered by the years. His manhood was a smooth, dark branch, cut to the length of firewood.

Beth was on her knees before him, her weight taken on her elbows. Her skirts were on the floor beside her. The yellow flames cast a flickering glow upon her plump, pale flesh, and Thomas half closed his eyes in
despair. He managed to stifle his scream of anguish, but he could not stop himself from watching.

And he uttered no sound, despite the pain, as Thorn dropped down upon the waiting woman.

As he ran to the church the Watchman woke, then stood up, picking up his heavy staff. Thomas Wyatt knocked him down, then drew a flaming wood brand from the brazier. Tool-bag on his shoulder he entered the church, and held the fire high. The ladder was against the balcony. Pale features peered down at him and the ladder began to move. But Simon, the miller’s son, was not quite quick enough. Casting the burning wood aside, Thomas leapt for the scaffold and began to ascend.

‘I was just looking, Thomas,’ Simon cried, then tried to fling the ladder back. Thomas clutched at the balcony, then hauled himself to safety. He said no word to Simon, who backed against the wall where the loose stone was fitted.

‘You mustn’t touch him, Thomas!’

In the darkness, Simon’s eyes were gleaming orbs of fear. Thomas took him by the shoulders and flung him to the balcony, then used a stone to strike him.

‘No, Thomas! No!’

The younger man had toppled over the balcony. He held on for dear life, fingers straining to hold his weight.

‘Tricked!’ screamed Thomas. ‘All a trick! Duped! Cuckolded! All of you knew. All of you
knew
!’

‘No, Thomas. In the Name of God, it wasn’t like that!’

His hammer was heavy. He swung it high. Simon’s left hand vanished and the man’s scream of pain was deafening. ‘She had no other way!’ he cried hysterically. ‘No, Thomas! No! She chose it! She
chose
it! Thorn’s gift to you both.’

The hammer swung. Crushed fingers left bloody marks upon the balcony. Simon crashed to the floor below and was still.

‘All of you knew!’ Thomas Wyatt cried. He wrenched the loose stone away. Thorn watched him from the blackness through his half-opened eyes. Thomas could see every feature, every line. The mouth stretched in a mocking grin. The eyes narrowed, the nostrils flared.

‘Fool. Fool!’ whispered the stone man. ‘But you cannot stop me now.’

Thomas slapped his hand against the face. The blow stung his flesh. He reached for his chisel, placed the sharp tool against one of the narrow eyes.

‘NO!’ screeched Thorn. His face twisted and turned. The stone of the church shuddered and groaned. Thomas hesitated. A green glow came from the features of the deity. The eyes were wide with fear, the lips drawn back below the mask. Thomas raised his hammer.

‘NO!’ screamed the head again. Arms reached from the wall. The light expanded. Thomas backed off, terrified by the spectre which had appeared there, a ghastly green version of Thorn himself, a creature half ghost, half stone, tied to the wall of the church, but reaching out from the cold rock, reaching for Thomas Wyatt, reaching to kill him.

Thomas raised the chisel, raised the hammer. He ran
back to the face of Thorn and with a single, vicious blow, drove a gouging furrow through the right eye.

The church shuddered. A block of stone fell from the high wall, striking Thomas on the shoulder. The whole balcony vibrated with Thorn’s pain and anger.

Again he struck. The left eye cracked, a great split in the stone. Dampness oozed from the wound. The scream from the wall was deafening. Below the balcony, yellow light glimmered. The Watchman, staring up to where Thomas performed his deed of vengeance.

Then a crack appeared down the whole side of the church. The entire gallery where Thomas had worked dropped by a man’s height, and Thomas was flung to the balcony. He struggled to keep his balance, then went over the wall, scrabbling at the air. Thorn’s stone-scream was a nightmare sound. Air was cool on the mason’s skin. A stone pedestal broke his fall. Broke his back.

The village woke to the sound of the priest’s terrible scream. He stumbled from the mason’s house, hands clutching at his eyes, trying to staunch the flow of blood. He scrabbled at the wood mask, stripping away the thorn, the oak, the crisp brown leaves, exposing dark hair, a thin dark beard.

The priest – Thorn’s priest – turned blind eyes to the church. Naked, he began to stagger and stumble towards the hill. Behind him, the villagers followed, torches burning in the night.

Thomas lay across the marble pillar, a few feet from
the ground. There was no sensation in his body, though his lungs expanded to draw air into his chest. He lay like a sacrificial victim, arms above his head, legs limp. The Watchman circled him in silence. The church was still.

Soon the priest approached him, hands stretched out before him. The pierced orbs of his eyes glistened as he leaned close to Thomas Wyatt.

‘Are you dying, then?’

‘I died a few minutes ago,’ Thomas whispered. The priest’s hands on his face were gentle. Blood dripped from the savaged eyes.

‘Another will come,’ Thorn said. ‘There are many of us. The work will be completed. No church will stand that is not a shrine to the true faith. The spirit of Christ will find few havens in England.’

‘Beth …’ Thomas whispered. He could feel the bird of life struggling to escape him. The Watchman’s torch was already dimming.

Thorn raised Thomas’s head, a finger across the dry lips. ‘You should not have seen,’ said the priest. ‘It was a gift for a gift. Our skills, the way of ritual, of fertility, for your skill with stone. Another will come to replace me. Another will be found to finish your work. But there will be no child for you, now. No child for Beth.’

‘What have I done?’ Thomas whispered. ‘By all that’s holy, what have I done?’

From above him, from a thousand miles away, came the ring of chisel on stone.

‘Hurry,’ he heard Thorn call into the night. ‘Hurry!’

Carrying loudly across the rolling grasslands the
crack
of transmission was almost indistinguishable from that
crack
which follows the splitting of the great boulders, the megaliths of the tomb-builders who had lived in this land for seven hundred years. The man, riding on a stocky, black horse, appeared as if out of nowhere. He was well wrapped in skins and fur leggings, and wore his hair in tight, shoulder-length plaits. His beard and moustaches were curled and stiff with some reddish paste. His saddlebags were anachronistic in this third millennium before Christ, but were at least fashioned crudely out of leather; their geometrical bulkiness was unavoidable since the equipment they contained was essential for the man’s ultimate return to his own age. Like the horse, the leather bags and what they
contained would be destroyed as soon as they had served their purpose. Of that there was no doubt in the man’s mind at all; but his conviction was for the wrong reason. He had no intention of ever returning to his own time. He was going to remain here, among the people of the Boyne valley with whom he had become so involved – in an academic sense – during the short span of his life.

His name was John Farrel. He was nearly thirty years old and in this time of earth and stone he expected to be able to live another ten years.

As he came through the transmission field he turned his horse and peered into the blur that was the future. It started to fade and the last air of another time leaked five thousand years into its past, bringing with it a sour smell – the smell of machines, of artificial scent, of synthetic clothes; the odour, the stench, of successful adaptation.

Cold winds, the winter’s last voice before the sudden warmth of spring, carried the smell of the future away, dispersed it across a land wider than Farrel had ever known. Machine, perfume, plastic, drained into the earth, were sucked down and away, lost from the grassy crispness of this age of rock and blood.

Farrel rode up the small hillock that lay immediately in front of the transmission field, turned again as he reached the summit, and peered down into the valley. The river Boyne wound across the landscape, a silver thread meandering eccentrically between the low hills until it passed out of view. Farrel’s mind’s eye felt, for a moment, the lack of the sprawl of red brick dwellings that would one day supersede those ragged forestlands
of the wider curve. For a moment he thought he saw a car flashing along a main road: sunlight on speeding chrome. The illusion was just the gleam of fragmentary sunlight on the spread wings of a gull, riding the winds above the river, back to the sea.

Where the transmission field was slowly dissolving, the river was a blur, the land a green haze that came more and more into focus. Wind caught Farrel’s hair, cooled the sweat on his cheeks and made him blink. The grass beneath him seemed to whisper; the wind itself talked in an incoherent murmur. It droned, distantly. Grey clouds swept across the pale sun and shadows fled across the valley, were chased away by brightness. The transmission field finally faded and was gone.

For a moment, then, Farrel imagined he saw a woman’s face, round and ageing; blonde hair perfectly styled, but eye-shadow blurred and smeared with tears and bitter, bitter anger.
Why you? Why you? Why you?

Her remembered words were only the gusting winds and the animal sounds of his horse, restless and anxious to be given free rein across this wild land.

How loud the silence after hysteria, he thought. He had not known how haunting another’s heartbreak could be.
You’ll never come back! Don’t lie to me, you’ll never come back. I know you too well, John. This is your way out, your means of escape. My God, you must really hate me. You must really hate us all!

Last words, lost in the roar of street traffic. The stairs had trembled beneath him. The outer door had slammed, an explosion finishing them forever.

I’m here now. I’m here. I got away from them, from all of them, and they think – most of them think – that I’m going back when my job is done. But I’m not! I’m not going back! I’m here and I got away from everything, and I’m not going back!

The ghosts of the future faded, then, following the transmission field forward across the centuries. The land about Farrel came sharply into focus. His mind cleared. He breathed deeply, and though for a second he felt the urge to cry, he stifled that urge and looked around him, staring at the unadulterated landscape.

Small mounds were scattered in clusters down the hillside and concentrated along the river itself (thus being nearer to the river goddess, or so Burton had implied in his last transmission). The oldest tumulus was possibly no more than two hundred years of age. The youngest? Farrel searched among them: four hundred yards away there was a mound, perhaps twice his height, perhaps fifty feet in diameter. It had a kerb of grey stones which separated the dull greenness of the hillside from the dark earth mound, not yet fully covered with its own field of grass. A grave, perhaps no more than half a year old; new, with the cremated remains inside it still heavy with the smell of burning.

He felt dizzy with excitement as he associated this new tomb with the low grassy bump that it would become during the next five thousand years, a tomb so crumbled and weathered that only the discovery of its fractured kerb-stones would identify it. A handful of carbon fragments, preserved in a natural cist between two of the chamber stones and identified as human
remains, would raise a thousand questions in the minds of those who were fascinated by this enigmatic neolithic culture. And a year ago those splinters of charred bone might have been alive, walking this very countryside.

A flight of starlings wheeled above his head, spiralling at the mercy of the winds. A lone magpie darted among them until the starlings turned on it, and then the bigger bird dropped away down the hill to vanish against the sheen of the river. The shrill bird song was a brief symphony of panic and Farrel reined his horse around so that he could look towards the distant forest and the rolling downs of what would one day be his home county.

From behind a low, rain- and wind-smoothed boulder, a boy was watching him.

For the first two nights Farrel and the boy slept in the spacious shelter afforded by a deep rock overhang and the entwined branches and roots of several stubby elms that
surrounded the cave. By the third day Farrel’s interest in the unexpectedly deserted crog began to outweigh his reluctance actually to camp in the decaying village. He remained uneasy. What if the Tuthanach returned during the night and took exception to a stranger setting himself down in their tents? Burton’s report had not indicated that this particular Boyne people was in any way warlike or violent, but this period of the neolithic was a time of great movement, populations succeeding populations, and axe and spear-head used for drastic and final ends. The megalithic tomb-builders of Brittany, especially, were familiar with this part of the Irish coast. In their massive coracles they hugged the south coast of England until the confused currents around Land’s End swept them round the Scillies and up into the warm flow of the Irish Sea. From there they up-oared and the shallow seas carried them automatically to the Irish coast north of Dublin, along just those picturesque beaches that had seen the original settlers putting into shore, seven or eight hundred years before.

In one of his transmissions, Burton had given a single, brief account of a small ‘rock-stealing’ party that had raided a crog further south, near Fourknocks (crog-Ceinarc). The raiders had killed and been killed, not by the Ceinarc, but by wolves.

Wolves were what Farrel feared most. In his own time wolf packs were quite timid and easily scared. In this age, however, their behaviour was altogether different – they were fierce, persistent and deadly. Better, he thought, to believe in the non-hostility of the Tuthanach than risk the teeth of such wolf packs. Provided he
kept clear of the rocks and stones in the territory of crog-Tutha, and in no way ‘stole’ them by carving his own soul spirit upon them, he imagined he would be safe.

He explained his plan to the boy, whose name was Ennik-tig-en’cruig (Tig-never touch woman-never touch earth). The boy put a hand to his testicles and inclined his head to the right. Uncertainty? Yes, Farrel realised – a shrug, but a shrug overlain with anxiety.

‘Would this Tig’s people kill us if they returned?’ he asked, hoping he had said what he meant to say … (Man-woman this Tig and this Farrel on the wind – tomorrow, more tomorrow man-woman close to this Tig this Farrel?)

Tig darted to the entrance of the overhang, peered out across the windy downs, looked up to where the branches of the elms waved and weaved across the drifting clouds. He spat violently upwards, came back to Farrel grinning.

‘Death (– wind –) has no room for this Tig. If this Farrel stranger will be my friend (– lover? – earth-turner? –) death will spit at this Farrel too.’

‘Did death make room for that Burton?’

Tig sat upright and stared deeply into Farrel’s eyes. For two days the boy had declined any knowledge of Burton, pretending (obviously pretending) not to understand. Now Farrel pushed his advantage home.

‘Does this Tig want this Farrel stranger as a friend? Then this Tig must tell this Farrel where that Burton lives or dies.’

Tig curled up into a ball, burying his head beneath his
arms. He wailed loudly. Farrel was about to ask again when Tig spoke:

‘That man-stranger Burton is touching earth. All Tuthanach are touching earth. Not this Tig. Not this Tig. Not this Tig.’

Farrel considered this carefully, not wishing to distress Tig to the point where the boy would leave. He knew that ‘touching earth’ was something immensely important to the Tuthanach, and he knew that Tig was forbidden his birthright of touching. He could not touch women, he could not touch earth. No love, no involvement with the land. No children for Tig, and no spring harvest as the result of his love for the earth. Poor Tig, denied the two most wonderful consummations of this early agricultural age. But why?

‘Where does that Burton touch earth?’ he asked.

The boy looked blank.

‘Where?’ pressed Farrel.

Tig again crawled to the cave entrance and spat into the wind. ‘This Tig is just a beast!’ he yelled. ‘That man-stranger Burton said this Tig is just a beast!’

And with a loud and painful shriek he vanished, running across the downs, a small skin-clad figure, clay-dyed hair sticking stiffly outwards, fat-greased body shimmering in the weak sunlight.