Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) (3 page)

‘With the path …’

‘Yes.’

Rebecca sighed, stretching out across the rug, dry and warm, her hands behind her head as she stared at the black beams of the ceiling.

‘To go away is to see more clearly, Eveline said, but she was trapped. She wrote to me – just once – she said she loved me but for my own sake, stay away.
We get blinded in this place
, she said.
We take too much for granted. We don’t see how trapped we are, how used we are. All that protects us is that we are afraid to talk about it. But who’s trying to stop us talking about it?
’

‘You never talked about Broceliande to Flynn?’

‘A little. I didn’t find it easy.’

When I first arrived in your home, I didn’t believe in the people on the path. I thought you were all crazy, dancing around at midnight, describing thin air as if there were human figures in it. I used to watch you from the garden. I was watching you the night Seb danced into the frightened people, the week before he died. You thought I was in bed asleep, but I never slept in the middle night; I was too frightened. There were too many prowlings and breathings, too many noises, and I was new to the house, and my new father still scared me a bit, even though I had no reason to be frightened.

I’d seen other children playing with the ghosts – do
you remember Thierry? What a crazy boy. Always shouting, always calling to them: ‘Tell me your story! Tell me your story!’ And Suzi. Always nattering away, happy with all the people, always urging them to stay, having a
real
relationship with them. And all I could see were my new friends, and my new brothers, addressing the emptiness. But I’d also heard adults talking about their own childhoods, and the way they’d followed the people on the path, and some of the terrible and wonderful things that had happened to them shortly afterwards. So I was intrigued. I assumed it was just because I didn’t know how to
look
. My eyes were wrong, which is why I started to rub them, and screw them up. It was so painful. I became so obsessed with seeing that I became crazy. When I finally cut the eyelids to let in more light – remember that? – I was finally taken in hand. I still have the scars, but they’re lost in the skin-lines now, thank God.

I suppose Eveline knew that I was trying to see the things which she herself had once seen, and long become blind to. She locked me in my room at night, although she always came back two or three times to cuddle me. The one night she didn’t come and check on me was the night when you followed Seb dancing up the path inside
three
ghosts, although I didn’t know this at the time. Eveline was ill, remember? And I managed to get out through the window when I heard Seb disturb you. He was always outside. I don’t think he ever slept. It was as if he’d got some magical energy that kept him hunting, hunting the spirits.

I ran along behind you, hiding in the tree-line when
the moon came out, and heard Sebastian shouting something like, ‘This is the best ever. I can hear their hearts!’ You were hanging back; you always said you’d never go inside one of these ghosts. You were probably wise. I could only see you walking slowly and nervously, and little Seb twisting and laughing. The moon went in, everything was dark, and that’s when I saw
my
person on the path.

He was right at the point where the track leaves Broceliande, where the tangle of rose-briar and hawthorn thins, that marshy area, with the aspens and broken oaks … He was standing there, holding a horse by the reins. Then he stepped forward, and I could see that the horse was heavily packed and that the man, who was young and lightly bearded, had some strange bagpipes over his shoulder. There was a stringed instrument on the side of the packhorse, a piece of curved and decorated wood and a small soundbox. I didn’t recognise it, and I never heard it played, but that this ghost, this shimmering man, was a musician was all that I could think of.

He drew back into the woods as you and Sebastian came running back to the farmhouse. He watched you carefully, and you didn’t see him. That’s odd, isn’t it? Usually the ghosts are unaware of us.

When you’d gone, he led the horse forward up the path, hurrying slightly, although he was moving slowly, like a slowed film, but the haste was conveyed clearly. He knew I was behind him, following. I had never seen anything like it. I was enchanted. The glimmer, like
fairy glamour, flowed from his edges. It filled the night air, and I tried to touch it, but felt nothing.

I caught up with him. I felt so alive, suddenly I forgot about my eyes, which were still hurting from the way I’d slashed the skin. I can recognise now that I was aroused, that my body was aroused by imagination, by the experience of seeing a troubadour, a ghostly one, but a sort of dream recreated on that autumn night. I was thrilled by the encounter, and desperately wanted to hear him sing. So I entered him, and copied Sebastian, turning and swirling inside the dewy ghost.

There was nothing but rage. It was terrifying. I was caught in a whirlpool of fear, of anger. The man was escaping. He was frightened of something, and secretive. The rage in him seemed to crush me. Every squirt of blood in his veins was the rushing of a waterfall; his heart was thundering. I was deafened by this man’s retreat from some terrible encounter, or so it felt. I was strangling, gasping for breath, turning desperately to find fresh air as he carried me with him, up to the hill. It was like being buried alive.

Then, just at the last, just as I thought I was going to die, I heard the sound of pipes. He wasn’t playing them, he was
remembering
them. He was singing to himself in his own language, remembering the skirling notes of the pipes he carried, and I shared that thought, that moment of internal music. I touched an ancient music. I was treated to such an old song, and a song filled with such despair …

I became haunted by that music, just as Sebastian had been haunted by his own encounter. I couldn’t sing it. It
made no sense. It made sense only in my head; I could jig to it, I could twirl to it, but it was inexpressible, except in dreams.

How old was I? I can’t remember, now. Fifteen, maybe. I spent the holiday weeks of the next two years among the stones at Carnac, hating the tourists, the wretched families who came to picnic, to photograph, but not to listen. I was listening for the dreamsongs of that time, for the old tunes, for some clue to the magic that was now in me. But I realised that even that ancient earth wasn’t old enough. To articulate the music that flowed inside me not so much like blood, more like … like a benign but omnipresent parasitic worm, invading my spaces, pulling back when it hurt me, growing inside me but as I say,
inexpressible
, because it was pure feeling, eroding me, fighting me, but carefully … to find out how to exorcise that music, to get rid of the ghost that something in Broceliande had driven into me, I had to go further back.

Which is why I went to Australia, to the place of songlines, and songtrails, and a way of singing that you would never understand, because it isn’t singing at all, nor singing up the world of rocks and creatures as happened in the dreamtime, but being sung
through
. I can’t describe it.

The other side is easier: I never had a good voice. I was always gravelly, you remember? The groaning background, Daddy used to say. But suddenly when I sang I seemed to have an effect on people. Whatever I sang, wherever I was, whatever the country.

I silenced the chief (and his family!) of the Memoragas
people – the thunder people – out behind the Mann Ranges. They were singing to the sleeping rains and asked me to join in. I was already flowing with them, they seemed to be singing through me, and when I sang it was dizzying, it was like falling, then flying. Suddenly I was the only voice. They were entranced and puzzled, watching me in silence. I seemed to fly among them, and there were so many of them, and the land shifted and changed, the light, the colour, the warmth. I was travelling
through
the song, some silly ditty from childhood, ‘Frère Jacques’ maybe, I’ve now lost the words, I just remember how the world dropped away when I sang, and how my song went through those watching people.

In the morning I felt hung over, though I hadn’t been drinking. There was so much excitement outside my private space that I got up, quite naked, and peered out.

Flynn was there, crouching with the chief and looking at water flowing from below their painted rock. There had never been a spring there, now there was new water, very cold, rich in calcium and magnesium – Flynn did the analysis – a new spring, which had come during the night.

My song, they said, had called the sleeping water to their hunt trail. They were amazed at the new spring. They made me bathe in it. They all wanted to wash me. I sat in the muddy stream for an hour, while I was anointed and sung to, and questioned, and played to with kazoo and bark drum. They put eucalyptus leaves on my head and insisted on daubing me with the image,
in yellow ochre, of a gerbil, a creature that seems to find water everywhere. It was their totem creature.

The only truly embarrassing moment was needing to go to the toilet. Everything that I
didn’t
want, they
valued
, collecting it and burying it below a small stone.

After that I got frightened. I was singing to people, singing anything, any rubbish, and it was affecting them profoundly. There was a touch of magic in my voice and I had no conception of it, only the knowledge that it worked. Flynn was both apprehensive and loving. He was never exploitative, although we did earn a few meals in the lean times by my singing in small town bars. I think he knew there was a spirit in me, he simply had no idea what it was and had no idea how to use it. We went into the desert for five years, built separate shacks, and entered our own Otherworlds. We’d meet on occasion to eat a ceremonial meal (of whatever we could find, or obtain), and spend a few hours on the mat, but most importantly we talked about our dreams. We’d end each visit by going to the small stream and bathing, then follow our separate lines again.

That was ten years ago. It was a hard time for me, a time in which I came close to death on several occasions. But with the song in me, this song, this magic, I always came back.

Then Flynn drowned – a terrible accident. I ran twelve miles to the billabong when I was told the news, and dragged his body from the muddy pool. He’d been dead when he was found, so they’d left him there. He was bloated with water, naked and fat, his skin fishbelly-white. He was quite dead. But I crouched on him and
sang to him and the water started to ooze from him, came out of his mouth, his ears, his eyes, nose, out of his pores, his arse, even out of his cock. The water drained from him, a steady sweat, a steady flow in the cold dawn, and soon there was room in his body for the air again. He started to breathe and his body danced below me. The air went in, his eyes opened and stared at me, and I stopped the song.

If he was frightened of me before, he was terrified of me then!

It was the moment when my time with Flynn became fatally defined. I mean in terms of its intimacy, its … longevity? We were dying together from that moment on. But only because our time together was now defined by the
song
. He hadn’t known he was dead. But when people come up to you to congratulate you on being alive again you tend to get the idea that something weird has happened. Flynn was as muscular and lean as the desert where we lived; every part of his mind was trimmed to the bone. He had no time for doubt. He heard the story – that he’d had a stroke and fallen into the drowning pool – he heard the story of the songlady bringing him back to life, he knew that our friends in the wanderlands, the desert, weren’t liars; and he accepted.

At that moment he was a dead man alive again; at that moment my song was magic. At that moment he was at a distance from me, because his own curiosity now extended not to the land which we loved, nor to the past which we were trying to recreate in our minds,
but to me, to a French woman, born near the forest of Paimpont, orphaned when fourteen years old, now a
possessor
of magic, not just an explorer of magic tradition.

The old ‘bosker’, Conrad, came to the farmhouse shortly after dawn, a dark figure moving effortlessly along the path, the early sun catching on his small, silver spectacles. Martin had been unable to sleep, his mind full of Rebecca’s story and the idea that to dance inside the ghostly figures from Broceliande was to become possessed by some shadow of the past. Rebecca slept soundly in the bed behind him. Martin peered down as Conrad rummaged in the long grass by the hedges and found two eggs, which he inspected and pocketed. He was wearing a wide-brimmed leather hat – he had made it himself – and a long, grey overcoat which flapped around him as he moved. He carried two short wooden staffs, slung on his back like rifles.

Seeing Martin at the bedroom window he waved, then let himself in to the warm kitchen below. Martin came downstairs. The old man stood, hat in his hands, white hair combed back into a long pigtail, tied with grass-twine. He was looking around sadly.

‘I watched Eveline as she went to her cold home, the other day,’ he said. ‘I was by the wood. I didn’t want to intrude by the fires.’

‘I wish you had. You’d have been very welcome.’

‘I’m going to miss her. She was just a girl when I came here first, but she helped me build my houses in the forest. She always let me have eggs – and bread, sometimes. I traded foxes, after your father died. She couldn’t bear to kill them, but they have to be controlled.’

‘I understand,’ Martin said quickly, feeling uncomfortable. ‘But please stop controlling them from now. I’m more than happy to let you have eggs whenever you want.’

As Martin picked a dozen of the larger eggs from a wicker basket, placing them carefully in Conrad’s sack, the old man said carefully, ‘You’re a fox lover, then?’

‘Always have been.’

‘So am I at heart. But trade is trade.’

Martin offered the remains of yesterday’s heavy loaf and a farm cheese that was now over-ripe. The old bosker seemed delighted.

‘Would you like some breakfast?’ Martin asked him.

‘I ate in the forest at first dew. Thanks all the same.’

Conrad seemed to relax. He pulled on his hat and lifted the pack to his shoulder. He was staring at Martin curiously, grey eyes bright in the weather-etched face. ‘Are you still frightened of me, Martin?’

‘Good God no.’

‘You used to be—’

‘Kids are always frightened of hermits.
And
you were once an enemy soldier, left behind by the war. We used
to make up terrible stories about what you did in the woods.’

‘A living demon, eh?’ Conrad laughed. ‘Yes, I remember. I used to listen – I could hear you all from a long distance. It’s a talent I seem to have developed since coming here,’ – he sounded wry – ‘Sometimes your fantasies amused me, sometimes – not often – they made me sad. I was a long way from my first home, and harmless to everything inedible, which included children—’

‘Ah yes, but we didn’t think so.’

‘All except Rebecca, your special friend Rebecca.’ Conrad winked. ‘
She
wasn’t afraid of me. Anyway, I would watch you children chasing the ghosts from the forest as they walked the path. I couldn’t see them, of course, no adult could. But I could hear them. It was an extraordinary experience. It still is. Which is chiefly why I came to see you. There’s something I want to show you …’

‘Shall I wake Rebecca?’

The old man glanced back. ‘No. This is for you alone.’

Conrad might always have been a part of Broceliande. He was as eternal, as familiar, indeed as elusive, usually, as the strange ruins that could be found just inside the forest’s skirts. But he had not been born here, nor come into existence here. In his own words, ‘There comes a moment in every person’s life, I now realise, when as they are marching forward they become aware that in fact they are running away. At that moment, home is
where you are standing, and this place, this gloomy edgewood, became my second home.’

His army column had been marching past Broceliande. Conrad was sixteen, not particularly frightened, not particularly lonely. He was just a soldier in a column, moving forward towards the coast. There were not enough trucks to transport all the troops, in those early winter months of 1944, and so like Caesar’s legions they tramped the rough roads to the west, sometimes aware that a watery sun was leading them on.

‘But I had no faith, no real belief. My father had always talked of duty, and of family, but his words, sincere though they were, were of no comfort to me. I wonder sometimes if there can be any greater pain than realising that you are no longer part of a family that once was your whole life.

‘As we marched past Broceliande my First Home broke into shattered memories. Everything simply fell apart. I hated where I had come from. I loathed that savage war. I despised the principles that drove it. I was not alone in this, of course, but the forest took me and me alone.

‘I deserted quickly. I used a strip of oilskin to wrap my weapons and bury them; the rifle was a bolt-action Lee Enfield, more like twenty pounds in weight than nine, or so it seemed, and I was glad of the freedom from this burden.

‘That first day, I walked a wide circle, walking to the limit of what I felt I needed. That circle, I discovered later, was more than two miles across.’

This disc of land had become Conrad’s Second Home.
He walked its circumference five times, first entering the dark forest, then emerging and skirting the villages, crossing the fields and the farmlands before entering the woods again. All of this was done at night because he was in fear of his life, now, and his uniform would certainly have been an invitation to murder.

In all the long years since then he had never once stepped outside the circle, as he had defined it during those February days. ‘I belong here. I made it right that I belonged here. I became accepted, eventually welcomed. I don’t belong across the circle, but I’ve lived long enough, and circled hard enough, to make this small land
my
land. My home.’

Now Conrad led the way into that small land and into the forest, following a wide, winding path that was tall with wet, webbed grass and purple thistle. He stopped occasionally to listen. The air was moist, almost stifling.

His first house was a shack constructed out of corrugated iron, wooden panels and old doors. It was covered with black oilskins. Around it, on a picket fence, hung thirty or so carcases of grey squirrels, in various states of decomposition. Two foxes’ heads on poles were a grim reminder of Conrad’s main usefulness to the farms around the wood.

‘Come in, come in,’ the bosker said with a chuckle, glancing back at Martin. ‘Into the place which terrified you once upon a time.’

Martin pulled aside the oilskin door, ducked through
the small entrance space into Conrad’s living quarters. The floor had been hollowed out and lined with sandbags and turves. His bed was at one end, in a stream of light from the only window, a gap below the metal eaves. His fire was at the other end of the small room, built out of bricks, with an iron chimney to the outside world. The walls were hung with skins and furs; hooks and leather ties dangled from the ceiling, ready for hanging game. He had a chair and a table, and a small chest on which stood two tiny, framed and faded photographs, one of a shy, fair-haired girl, holding a cat, the other of two people sitting on a garden chair, a couple who looked out of the frame with solemn expression.

As Conrad stored his new supplies, Martin noticed that above the bed were five crude paintings, all of the girl, all from different angles: one of each profile, her full face laughing, her face looking coy, a discreet nude, they had been executed in crayon on smoothed and chalk-whitened wood.

Light spilled suddenly into the shack. Conrad had pulled back the doorflap, waiting quietly for Martin to finish his inspection.

‘Just a ghost,’ the old man said, and Martin felt embarrassed, stepping quickly away from the portraits.

‘I’m sorry. That was an intrusion. I was too curious.’

‘No intrusion at all. She’s long gone, now. Long changed. But she keeps me in touch with my younger spirit.’

They continued inwards, the track narrowing and becoming more difficult, the oaks crowding from the sides.

‘Be careful,’ Conrad called, as he smacked at wet briar to clear the route. ‘This is the way the ghosts come. If I say get off the path, do so immediately. They sometimes move very quietly.’

‘What does it matter?’ Martin called back. ‘I can’t see them or hear them any more. I’m too old. They can’t harm me …’

Conrad’s voice as he moved ahead was steely. ‘They can harm you. Just do as I say. For Eveline’s sake, for your mother’s sake.’

The path spilled out into a clearing below the spreading branches of three massive beeches. The ground here was soft and golden brown, streaked through with the green of fern. Here, Conrad had his second home, a hemisphere of bent willow branches, covered with hides.

‘Hunting lodge,’ he said quickly, skirting the clearing. ‘We’ve not far to go, now.’

Not far to go?

For an hour that seemed like ten, Conrad led them deeper into the wildwood, through half-lit dells and marshy, silent glades, down stone escarpments and over massive, mossy rocks which caught the shifting sun with a vibrant, emerald luminosity. Muddy watercourses wound through crushing woods of oak and holly; springs spilled from ragged ledges, misting in the thin light from the glistening canopy.

‘We’re lost. We must be lost.’

‘Not lost at all. Look!’

And suddenly they had come through the wood to the rush-fringed shore of a wide lake, and the bosker’s third
home – a series of tarpaulins, slung between trees, open to the water.

‘Fishing lodge,’ Conrad announced, stooping to enter the shelter and beckoning Martin to follow him.

The lodge was full of dried and drying fish, crude rods and nets, a harpoon and a further pile of skins, rabbit and fox; the cured hides of two small deer were stretched on frames and could be pulled across the open front to block the wind.

They sat, squeezed together, and watched the gentle water. Mallards and moorhens wriggled through the rushes, dipping and pecking below the lake. The forest was solid on the other side.

They come across in small boats, or sometimes on rafts,’ Conrad said after a while. ‘When I’m here at night, sometimes the water is covered with a low mist, and it swirls where the boat comes, the only visible sign of their passage from the heartwood. I hear the oars dipping, and the rustle of the sedges when it comes to the bank. I hear the murmur of voices, and on occasion the breathing of horses. The ghosts, which are invisible to me, follow the path by your farm, then up to the church and over the hill. The boat returns to the dark wood, after which there will often be nothing for months.

‘Over the lake is the heart of Broceliande but it is an older forest than the forest behind us. It doesn’t belong here.

‘My circle of land ends as far out onto the lake as I need to go to spear pike, perhaps twenty yards. I would never dare go further.’

*

I had lived in the wood for ten years before I found the lake or perhaps I should say before the
lake
found
me
. There was no sign of it when I first came here. I had probably walked across its edge fifty times since I first circumscribed my land. It had hidden from me, or
been
hidden from me, but one bitter winter morning I heard the sound of moorhens and gently splashing water. I was curious, aware that there should have been a grove of trees there. I pushed through the dense holly to find the lake very much as you see it now. It was covered with ice, though, almost to the edge itself, where the rushes were white with frost.

This was the second event that convinced me of a source of magic at work, deeper in the forest. I’d already seen the strange behaviour of you children, at night on the path, your clear belief in ghosts and your parents’ reluctance to contradict you. More than that, when hunting deep in the wood I had occasionally heard the sound of a man crying out. The wailing came from a great distance, and quite soon I realised that the distance was further than I’d thought, since I discovered I could also hear the whispered words of children from a mile away. That crying voice haunted me, though. It drifted through the glades, seemed to flow down the paths through the wood, and was usually followed by a woman’s voice, laughing.

So when this lake miraculously appeared, one morning, I could no longer deny that I’d stumbled into a place
which, to put it mildly, was quite out of the ordinary. The strange way of speaking among the farmers and villagers now became more important. The traditions, the rituals that I had watched from the edgewood, all had seemed eccentric, perhaps just local habit; now they seemed to echo an older thought: the fires you put at the head of each grave, the procession of the twelve trees, the drowning of grass images, with the hair-filled puppet of a child inside … They’d never been sinister, but now they became more meaningful, although I’ve never really understood that meaning.

I wasn’t aware, when all this was happening, of the association of Merlin with this forest. I hadn’t read Tennyson or Chrétien de Troyes, knew nothing of Thomas Mallory, or the
Vitae Merlinis
, or the other sources. The priest talked to me about all of them. He lent me books. But before that education I only knew that there was a vision of magic, somewhere across the lake, and that it was seeping from the forest, shrouded in the ghostly forms of the people on the path, and in that terrible moaning.

You know how the seasons bring different scents, different feelings in the air? So it was with the wailing voice, as if there was a season for the agony, a certain day for the distress, an hour, just after dusk, when the moment of true desperation could be remembered and the air of the forest filled with the cry.

On one such evening, when the pain of that voice had gone, I crept from my hunting lodge again and heard the wildwood speak, an odd echo, like a girl’s voice, but curiously slow. It seemed to breathe a word. I wasn’t
sure, but I thought the word was ‘Fool’, and moments later the word was repeated. ‘Fool!’