Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) (25 page)
Reading the reports five thousand years away, Farrel had at first thought this to be a typical piece of forest-fearing, with the settlement on the wrong side of that forest being linked to those same dark forces. He had dismissed them aloud.
Now he realised he shouldn’t have dismissed them at all.
There was something wholly unnatural about the people of crog-Tutha. He had travelled more than five thousand years through time and expected surprises – but he had not anticipated being so totally mystified. This was not the simple life of a primitive people – it was something out of the dark corners of the supernatural!
No-one up-time would believe him, he was sure of that.
FIFTH TRANSMISSION – SEVENTH DAY (EXTRACT)
… and as I filled the grave back in, Tig appeared at the edge of the wood. He ran up the hill and crouched over the mound, watching fascinated as I covered the body of the Tuthanach. I get the feeling that Tig, when he vanishes, is never far away. I always have an acutely uncomfortable feeling of being watched, and I suspect that wherever I go Tig is never far behind. What do I represent to him, I wonder? He is afraid of me still, and still refuses to show me where Burton is buried (if indeed he
is
buried). There are too many mounds on the knoll to excavate them all on an off-chance, so I really do need the boy to open up a little more.
I sat for an hour or so, on a boulder, looking across the forest to where the great crog on Tara was in evidence as a winding spiral of black smoke. The encampment there, Tig tells me, is surrounded by a wooden post-fence and seems to be more hostile than the other crogs. He says they are raising earthworks behind the wooden walls; does that suggest the first dun is being raised on the site? Fascinating. I have no idea how Tig knows this. Tara lies four days to the south. Would he wander that far?
While I watched Tara Tig sat quietly, chewing moodily on the remnants of one of those hares. I didn’t ask him about Burton, or about anything. I hoped he would tell me of his own accord. His eyes suddenly grew wide and the bone dropped from his fingers. He was looking up at the knoll and I turned to see what had scared him.
It gave me quite a turn too, and I don’t blame Tig for scampering off.
One of the graves was moving, as if the body it contained were trying to force its way out. As if …? First the man’s hands poked through the ground, the fingers bloody and dirty. Then the earth fell away from where his head was rising up and his whole body followed. He stood upright, black with dirt, and earth fell from his ears and mouth. He spat violently and shook more vigorously, brushing soil from his chest and arms. I hid behind the boulder and watched as the strange apparition turned slowly round, looking upwards into the sky through eyes still caked with dirt. He was sexually aroused and the skin of his penis was lacerated and dripping blood profusely. I have the uncomfortable feeling that he had been copulating with the earth.
Several minutes of brushing and shaking exposed his skin again, cleared his eyes and nostrils and he seemed to get his bearings. He swept back his hair, which showed yellow through the mud, and ran off down the knoll, leaping the mounds and entering the woodlands with loud shrieks and painful crashes.
I followed him to a small stream, a tributary of the Boyne, and watched him crouching in the flow, washing and splashing, and emptying his bowels of a phenomenal amount of soil. He warbled bird song and laughed in abrupt, almost humourless bursts. He seemed to wash himself for hours, but finally crawled up onto the bank and sat quietly for a while, obviously sensing and enjoying the scenery around him. Then he rose to his feet, waded the stream, and vanished towards the crog.
That all occurred a few minutes ago and it means I shall not return there myself. I’m too puzzled and too frightened if you must know. I have my transmission equipment with me, but medication and field-link pack are still in the crog, which means I’m trapped here for a while, and must be careful not to injure myself.
When Farrel arrived back at the knoll Tig was crouched over one of the mounds, the only one to show a good grassy overlay, and poking at it. He saw Farrel approaching and ran away, leapt onto a boulder and slapped his hands together.
Farrel stared at him for a moment, then at the grave, and an icy unease crept into his mind. Oh no, he thought. Oh God, this is the moment.
The boy gibbered something incoherent.
Farrel asked, ‘Ee-eikBurton ’n cruig pad-cruig?’
Is Burton buried here?
… (Touching earth, feet on earth?)
‘Don’t know.’
Farrel sensed the lie. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled at the soil and after a moment he found himself staring at black hair, the back of Burton’s head. ‘Thank God,’ cried Farrel, and grinned at the boy.
What should he do though? It might be dangerous to move the man – the best thing would be to leave Burton alone until the strange process had finished and he resurrected himself in the ‘natural’ way.
But Farrel found he could not resist examining his colleague in the same way as he had examined the
Tuthanach earlier. He scraped back the earth from Burton’s head and shoulders.
A funny smell.
For a moment his hands hesitated; he stared silently and motionlessly at the body beneath him. The skin was grey, cold – that was, by all accounts, normal. But there was something wrong, something indefinable, something not quite right.
He reached down and turned Burton’s head sideways. Earth poured from empty sockets, worms fell from the gaping, toothy mouth. Where skin remained it was taut and shrunken. Putrefaction rose from the rotting brains through the holes in the skull, driving Farrel to his feet with a terrible cry.
Sweeping back the earth from the torso he found the thigh bone fragment that had been driven into Burton’s heart as he lay there, thrusting through the rib cage from behind, ripping skin and flesh and cracking bone. The clenched fists of his colleague took on a new significance. He had died in agony.
For a moment Farrel screamed abuse at Tig for what he had done, then his anger drained away. There was something in the boy’s eyes, something in his expression … Farrel felt instantly terrified. He reached out towards Tig and shook his head.
‘I’m sorry, Tig. Burton called you a beast … I understand …’
‘Not once. Many times,’ said Tig. ‘I hated Burton. I gave Burton everything he had earned.’
Tentatively Farrel touched the boy’s shoulder and when Tig did not flinch he secured the grip and smiled.
‘Burton was not my friend … but he was known to me and he was important to me. I was upset to see him dead. Forgive me, Tig. I didn’t mean what I said.’
‘I didn’t understand what you said.’
Farrel, guiltily, realised he had shouted in English. He laughed quietly, almost thankfully. He wouldn’t have wanted the boy to hear what he had called him. He needed sleep too much and the boy was potentially very lethal.
He walked back to Burton’s body and covered it over. A few feet away another mound began to move and Farrel and Tig ran out of sight and watched.
SIXTH TRANSMISSION – EIGHTH DAY
Burton is dead. Tig killed him, perhaps some months ago. I am terrified of Tig now and don’t dare question him further about Burton. If only I knew where Burton’s equipment was hidden. Tig knows, I’m sure of it. He has hidden it. I pray that in the same way that he indicated Burton’s grave to me (uncompromisingly) he will lead me to Burton’s records. Burton understood what I have been watching, he must have done – he participated.
Meanwhile I am back in the cave and Tig, now, is in full control. I sleep fitfully and in snatches – terrified of him striking when my defences are down. I woke, last night, to find him crouching over me, peering at my sleeping face. I dare not ask him to refrain from startling me like this. My head hurts and my heart is in pain, as if
in anticipation of a long-bone shaft being driven through it.
I can’t get my field-link equipment. The crog is active again. Over the last day many Tuthanach have risen from the earth and returned to their homes – men, women, children, they return with bountiful energy and begin to lead a life no different from the Ceinarc or the Tagda – what
were
they doing in the earth? What have they gained? What was the purpose of it all?
SEVENTH TRANSMISSION – TENTH DAY
The trickle of Tuthanach returning to their crog has ceased. They are all home. I remain in the cave, uncertain, insecure. Tig hunts on my behalf, but no longer eats with me. He has become very affectionate, but behind the kindness is a repressed anger that I truly fear. Sometimes he stands in the cave entrance and shrieks with laughter. The garble of words he yells refers to Burton and to me, and I hear ‘stone legs’ and ‘twisting head’, two favourite Tuthanach insults. He invariably ends his tirade of abuse by defecating in the cave mouth and elaborately holding his nose and backing away. And a few hours later he brings me a hare or a brace of fat doves, some gift, some appeasement for his show of fury. A bizarre boy and not – I now realise – backward at all, but in some way insane. Listen to me! Do I understand the meaning of my own words any more? What do I mean –
insane?
Is my behaviour sane? Tig is more than just a boy. I suspect he was chosen for
his role – Tig-never-touch-woman-never-touch-earth; the only Tuthanach not to touch earth in the strange way I have described … why? Why Tig? Or should I ask, why
one Tuthanach?
What was he watching for? What are they asking of him now? What role does he fill?
Tig seems aware of some finality in his role. On his most recent visit he came with a large chunk of meat – deer, I think. Tears filled his eyes as he passed the joint to me and accepted a small portion back. We ate in silence. As he chewed he watched me, and tears flooded down his cheeks. ‘Farrel, my friend, my dear friend,’ he said, over and over. The warmth was immense. The Tuthanach have no way of expressing magnificent friendship and he struggled to voice his feelings and I eventually had to stop him. I had understood. ‘Farrel and Tig are the only ones not to touch earth,’ he said. ‘Tig can’t, but Farrel …’
Time and time again he began that sentence, staring at me. Each time he said it I was filled with his intensity, and with my own anxiety. The thought is terrifying, truly terrifying.
Then the anger from the boy, the shrieking. He raced out into the dusk and vanished swiftly. I face another night alone, more than half afraid to close my eyes … not just Tig, though that is certainly a part of it, but the past … my past. I am haunted by memories and faces; they fill my dreams, and I can sense my own time in everything I smell or see here. It is insecurity that makes me rue the warmth of civilisation, and I shall not bend to any great desire to return; but it hurts, sometimes. Sometimes it really hurts.
*
Three days after the seventh transmission two Tuthanach males came to the cave and crouched in its entrance watching Farrel. They were both middle-aged, dark-haired, and their skin was decorated with green and blue dye: circles around their eyes, lines across their cheeks, elaborate patterns on their breasts and bellies. They looked angry. Farrel remained quite still, trying to hide his fear.
Then Tig came slipping into the cave, boisterous and noisy as ever. Farrel tried to piece together something from the boy’s excited gabble, but all he could make out were words for ‘woman’ and the insult ‘stone legs’.
A tension grew in the pit of Farrel’s stomach and wild thoughts filled his mind. What was Tig up to?
The next thing he knew he was being chased from the cave by the two men. Tig grinned at him, and winked elaborately. ‘Soul curers,’ he said, pointing to them. ‘Make soul good for this Farrel. Make this Farrel’s soul ready for earth.’ And he patted his loins.
Farrel felt terrified.
They took him to the crog and led him inside the skin wall, past the fire pit and to a smaller circle of skins around which were grouped several women and children. He was led to a small tent and pushed to the ground. Making no attempt to speak to him, nor demonstrating any puzzlement over him, the men left. After a while one of the younger women got up and walked across to him.
By that time, realising that his sexual need was far more intense than he had admitted to himself for the last few days, Farrel was lost in thoughts of his past.
He saw the Tuthanach woman through a blur of remembered faces, saturated bodies and irritatingly noisy beds. He smelled her through an imagined veil of perfumes, cigarette smoke and the salty and erotic smell of sweat. He felt pain as he remembered these things, a real pain, unlocalised. The woman had crouched before him, her wool skirt drawn up above her knees so that she displayed her white and grossly fat thighs to Farrel’s casual gaze. He tried not to think too hard about what he saw.
Then she extended her hand and cocked her head to one side, smiling broadly, letting him see that only two of her teeth were missing.
Farrel took her hand, pressed the cool, firm fingers and noticed how the woman’s palm was sweating like his. The past surged into his mind; agony:
A girl he had known for years as a friend. He had been taking his leave of her small, two-roomed apartment, conscious that his wife would start to worry soon. With his usual calculated shyness he had reached out and shaken her hand again, playing at being nervous. ‘I don’t like all this hand shaking,’ she had said, in a way that made him realise that she had wanted to say it on previous occasions. ‘I’d much rather have a cuddle.’ So he had cuddled her, and she had not let him draw away. She was tall and lean and felt awkward against his stocky, muscular body. But it had been a long moment, and a good one
.
He realised he was excited and the Tuthanach woman was pleased. Her breath was sour as she leaned across him, her left hand gripping him gently between the legs; she kissed each cheek and then the tip of his nose. Then she rose and tugged him to his feet, pulled him into the tent and slipped off her clothes.
She picked up a stone chip, artificially smoothed by all appearances, and made marks on it with a piece of flint. Farrel watched her as he undressed. Her breasts were full and plump at the ends, flat and sac-like where they grew from her body. He hated that. She smelled of animal grease and smoke (as did he) and of something else, something pungent and sexual and offensive. Spitting on the stone she grinned at Farrel and passed it to him, indicating that he should do the same. As he spat he saw the crude phallus she’d drawn on the rock. With her thumb she rubbed the spittle into the sandstone, and laughed as she lay back on the skin-covered floor. She patted her belly with the fragment. She still said nothing.
As Farrel climbed onto her recumbent body and tried to find her he noticed that she popped the stone into her mouth and swallowed it.
They made love for about ten minutes. At the end of it she was obviously disappointed, and Farrel for no reason that he could identify felt like crying.
EIGHTH TRANSMISSION – FIFTEENTH DAY
It has begun. Newgrange, I mean – the building has begun. Yesterday I crept around the crog and went to
the hills overlooking the Boyne, where the cemetery is located. There was much activity down by the river, men and women gathering water-rolled granite boulders for the facing of the mound; they carry these, one per person, in a great chain up the hillside and the piles grow large. Earth is being excavated from several sites ready for the tumulus. Several small tombs on the site have been demolished for the earth and rock they can offer. The past no longer matters. Only the great tumulus seems to concern them now. The first massive orthostats have been dragged to the site, and an artist is working on what can only be the small lintel that will lie above the passage entrance. The work, especially the art, will take many months. The air is filled with the sharp sounds of repeated picking blows as symbols and designs are carved on the dressed rocks, ready for incorporation into the tomb. The speed with which they work is fantastic, but the job they face is enormous. Who will be buried here? Who will be honoured?
I walked closer to the activity, managing to remain undetected behind some trees, and watched the artists at work. Imagine my surprise when I discovered Tig directing the symbol-carving operations! Some thirty men, all old, all frail, were crouched beside or above their slabs and each worked on specifications laid down by the darting, probing, shouting form of the boy.
I watched fascinated for a while, until the sun, beating bright and hot upon my naked back, drove me away to a shadier place. Tig must have caught sight of me because, as I crept down the hill towards the slopes rising to the
unbuilt mound of Knowth, he came racing after me, calling my name.
‘It will be a huge mound,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘A great temple.’
‘A temple to whom, Tig?’
But he just laughed and slapped his hands together. ‘They have all forgotten the symbols of the earth, and the wind, and fire and water,’ he babbled happily. ‘This is why I was left behind, to remember, to teach them …’ He was obviously delighted about it. ‘Soon this Tig shall no longer be Tig-never-touch-woman.’
‘Will this Tig touch earth?’ I asked him.
He fell moody, but brightened suddenly and grinned. ‘This Tig never touch earth always … but this Farrel … this Farrel will touch earth soon … this Farrel will understand and learn the symbols.’
‘This Tig might kill me,’ I said carefully. ‘Like he killed that Burton.’
He slapped his genitals repeatedly, not hard, but apparently quite painfully for he winced visibly. ‘If this Tig kills this Farrel may legs turn to stone.’
And at that moment … I felt the compulsion, the fascination to discover, the intrigue, filling me like some uncontrollable ecstasy, like a psychological magnet pulling me down towards the earth. Tig danced happily about … had he seen my possession? He ran off, then, shouting back over his shoulder, ‘This Farrel knows where to go.’
I am torn between desire to know, and fear of knowing. I keep seeing Burton’s rotted corpse, lying there, denied that same knowledge by a thin shaft of bone
and a vengeful child. But I also remember the pull of the earth, the feel of magic and glory, the glimpse (for glimpse is what it was) of some great power lying beneath the grass …
I will have to make my choice soon.