‘You don’t need a shield,’ he said with a smile, ‘because you are protected by my own. I hope you can row,’ he added quietly, as I gave him back the knife.
‘I expect I’ll learn soon enough. Are you going to name the ship?’
‘What do you think we’ve just been doing?’
‘That’s a complicated name we’ve given her. Twenty-seven in all …’
‘It will help to confuse the enemy.’
As supplies were put aboard the vessel, and a slipway to the river constructed out of logs, Guiwenneth found me and tugged me away from the river. She led me at a run through the tangled forest, saying only, ‘What have you done to Someone?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll show you.’
The Celt had hacked down small trees to make a glade. He had piled the trimmed trunks into a wigwam shape, with a gap so that he could enter. He sat inside, carving a statuette by the light of a single torch rammed into the soft earth.
‘Do you have an answer for me, Chris?’ he asked without looking up.
‘I have an answer for you. But it will be hard for you to understand.’
I glanced at Guiwenneth. ‘Find Issabeau …’
But Someone said, ‘Issabeau is here. She is in the forest. When I have finished the cat—’ he turned his carving slightly and I saw that its features were feline, ‘she will come back to me.’
And he was quite right. A while later the undergrowth was stirred by stealthy movement and the torchlight picked out two quick, green eyes. A moment later Issabeau stepped into the clearing, her stick-of-shapes held firmly in her right hand.
‘Do you have an answer for me?’ she asked. Someone stepped out of his dream lodge.
I made them hold hands, then reached out to take that loving grip in my own. Guiwenneth stood behind me, her arm around my waist.
‘I am an Outsider in this forest. Everything is new to me. But of one thing I am certain: and that is that you are the same children who met in the sea-cave – Issabeau – and in the idol glades – Someone. You do not recognise each other because Someone is far older in time, because time has passed, and in a way which will confuse things if I start to explain it. But as Guiwenneth is my witness, and by the power of hindsight that I carry with me, I now pronounce you versions of the same myth. You have already had the honeymoon. Now you must start to find a common path. What the future holds for you I can’t say. You have told me the early part of your story, but the end of your story is not yet resolved. Only Kylhuk can glimpse such events.’
They were looking at me blankly, then turned to gaze at each other, as if seeing each other for the first time, despite the fact that their relationship had been intimate for months. But somehow the difference in detail of that Celtic and mediaeval story had fallen away. They were not Issabeau and the Sea-Cave Boy, nor Mauvaine and Jack of the Glades, but Issabeau and Someone son of Somebody.
Guiwenneth and I left them to their embrace.
Besides, away by the river Gwyr was sounding his horn and there was something urgent about that doleful howl. We returned at once to find out what was happening.
Kylhuk had had a trance-dream, it seemed; omens had supported his vision; he had even drowned a dog with its rider and watched the way the fleas had jumped. He was in no doubt that the time was right.
The ship would be launched immediately, despite the darkness, to begin its journey towards the heart of the forest, where Mabon was imprisoned.
Nineteen
The simple ship had already been pushed out into the river, only the keel below its prow biting the mud of the bank; its aft was tethered to trees, which bent and creaked with the strain of holding the vessel still against the flow. A shaky ramp had been extended from the prow to the shore, and supplies were being carried aboard by torchlight. The oarsmen were at their stands below the deck, practising their stroke to the steady rhythm of a drum.
Kylhuk was standing impatiently at the water’s edge, the Fenlander beside him. Gwyr was already aboard; he stood in the stern, occasionally raising the carnyx and sounding the note that would summon all of the far-flung and the forlorn hopes who were attached to Legion.
‘Where have you been, slathan? I told you to be at hand at all times!’
Kylhuk’s fingers pinched my arm with irritation as he spoke, but he forced a smile as he waited for my answer.
‘I’ve been learning about two of your best and most trusted scouts,’ I replied evenly. ‘And I’ve been helping the course of love.’
This took him by surprise. ‘Love is a hard sort of thing,’ he said bitterly, the frown on his face deepening as he thought, no doubt, of Olwen. ‘You should not be wasting your time with it.’
Someone and Issabeau had gathered their belongings and with quick and furtive glances towards me were making their careful way up the ramp.
As if he had seen the edge of my vision, Kylhuk glanced their way, then looked back at me with a wry smile.
‘The course of love?’
‘The course of love!’
‘Well, well. I hadn’t realised. Are they in the Delightful Realm?’
‘Indeed. They might have been made for each other.’
‘Then for the moment,’ Kylhuk said agreeably, pinching my arm again as he stared at the romantic pair, ‘I’m all for love. Let’s hope it lasts. I am very fond of that husky-voiced trickster. Now – Christian! – fetch your weapons, your blankets, find Guiwenneth, get aboard. I want to get moving on the river while it’s still dark.’
‘Because Eletherion is on our tail?’
Kylhuk exchanged a brief, amused glance with the Fenlander before saying, ‘No, slathan. Because Eletherion has gone ahead of us. He has a quicker mind than I’d thought, and my Forlorn Hope – too busy journeying in their own Delightful Realm from what you tell me – have brought Legion to the river too far away from our final destination.’
To the sound of horns, high-pitched ululation and the sombre chanting of the knights left behind, the boat of shields heaved against the river, the water flashing as the oars struck and lifted, soon finding their rhythm: a silent, steady stroke that was at first unsettling and then became smooth, so that we seemed to drift through the overcrowding forest.
Kylhuk took us to the middle of the stream. Two men with torches leaned out on each side of the prow, watching ahead for trees or other boats. On the raised stern, two people marshalled the spirits of the night to guard our rear. One was an elderly man wrapped in a voluminous cloak of bearskin, the skull rising above his long grey hair. Around him the night boiled with movement, elementals summoned by him and kept under his control, sent darting to the forest to scent and sense for danger. The other was Issabeau, her face in its cat form, her eyes reflecting green in the torchlight as she sniffed and listened to the animal world. Someone sat close by, keeping a watchful and protective eye on her.
For the rest of us there was nothing to do but sit, or sleep, or love, and I found a place behind several crates where there was a degree of seclusion and wrapped myself inside Guiwenneth’s cloak, huddling snugly against the weary woman.
I woke at dawn. There was no sound except the gentle splash of water as the oars dipped. The slight forward surge of motion with every stroke was hardly noticeable. The mist-shrouded forest seemed to glide past us. A flight of cranes swooped over us as we lay, staring at the brightening sky, shivering with the damp.
We were on a river journey to the heart of the world, and already I felt as if we were in the deepest wilderness imaginable. At night, the forest echoed with cries and growls, sudden movement and the violent shaking of great trees. By day, only silence, each bend in the river bringing us further towards the source, but showing us nothing but the wall of wildwood. There were no rapids, no broken water, no sand banks … only fallen trunks and statues, sprawled and broken where they had toppled from their sanctuaries on the shore. And an occasional boat, drifting downstream, its occupants invariably wearing the blank express
ion of the newly born, their gaze fixed ahead, their awareness not yet wide enough to encompass the boat of shields that stroked so lazily past them.
We drifted through space and we drifted through time. Winter came and passed away in a matter of hours; thunderclouds blackened the horizon, a drenching rain shattered the river, drummed off the deck; then a hazy sun warmed us. The forest shed its leaves, then went into green budding life, then was rich with the colours of late summer. Days had passed, perhaps weeks. Guiwenneth’s cycle suggested more than two months, but again, how could I be sure? She was as much a part of this wilderness as the geese and cranes that flew above us, as the giant, ridge-backed salmon that occasionally broke the surface, swimming ahead of us, out of reach of the lines and hooks that Someone and the Fenlander cast in desperation for such a catch.
Every so often we passed a sanctuary, the forest cleared to make space for an idol, or a temple, sometimes rude constructions out of wood, sometimes shining marble, sometimes no more than a giant boulder, deeply carved with a symbol or rune that the sorcerers on the boat of shields anxiously tried to identify, their arguments becoming heated.
We put into the bank only once, at a shrine to Freyja, one of the northern goddesses whose weeping, falcon-faced statue in rough stone dominated the shore. A spring of clear, fresh water bubbled from the cliff behind the ring of stones and the weathered statues of wolves and wild pigs and we drank greedily. Someone had heard that this goddess wept tears of gold, but we found only mossy rock and rotting wood. Issabeau took on the shape of a monkey and scaled the cliff, then stood guard against the wilderness beyond as all of the twenty-seven came ashore in groups, to drink and wash, to touch the earth.
But after a while the spring turned suddenly sour and the sky darkened. The ground around the stones started to shake rhythmically, as if at a gigantic approach. Issabeau found her eagle’s wings, came down to the shrine, alarmed and unashamedly in retreat. ‘A falcon flies this way!’ she said. We flung ourselves back along the ramp of our boat of shields and cast off.
Though we stared at the shrine for several minutes, we could not tell what or who had arrived there, and had soon left the place behind.
I took my turn at the oars and my back strengthened, my arms thickened, my mind deadened. Increasingly, we sailed through deep, cloying banks of mist, emerging to new locations, a river subtly changed. Reeds and rushes crowded the banks, then crumbling cliffs, their fractured ledges home to desperate thorns. But always we came back to the forest, meandering through the silent walls of summer green.
One dusk, Gwyr’s cry of alarm roused me from lassitude and I joined the others at the starboard rail, staring at the indistinct shape of a giant, walking parallel to our course, away in the woods. We could make out its head and shoulders above us, a cape of patterned furs. It carried a staff. A deep, resonant booming was its voice, the words indistinct as it called to a second walker, on the other side of the river. This one was female, long hair flowing like golden water around a pale, pudgy face as she loomed hugely towards our boat, peering down at us, before turning deeper into the forest, her grumbling words like thunder. This stalking pair dogged our passage for a few hours, through the night, then, shortly before dawn, the male stepped across the river ahead of us, the wind from his swirling cloak of skins rocking us in the water, and the two of them disappeared into the wilderness.
We all became slightly mad.
Gwyr played his bronze horn in a rhythmic but melancholy way. Issabeau and Guiwenneth sang in a shrill, harmonizing duet, in a private, nonsense language that they had invented, laughing hysterically at some of the ululating trills they accomplished as Someone and I sat bemused and idle during our resting period. A grizzle-bearded hero from Finland, Vainomoi by name, constructed a six-note reed pipe and became quite accomplished on it. A crinkle-faced, weather-tanned, wolf-skinned shaman whittled a kazoo out of a long bone which he had tugged from a gigantic skeleton half submerged in the river.
And under the direction of Kylhuk, the rest of us made drums.
This combined voice, wind and percussion then commenced, under my guidance, to create a version of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that would have had the composer jittering in his grave. We became crazy. The sounds filled the space of the river, sent whole flocks of crows circling into the night sky. The stroke of the oars changed to reflect the dancing around the many blazing torches that illuminated the upper deck.
At dawn we were still playing, entranced, tranced out, lost in time, lost in space, the beat of the drum filling our heads, our legs moving effortlessly as we circled and twirled, arms outstretched, moving slowly through the fires, chanting and stepping out to the monotonous, all-consuming four-note rhythm.
A shadow had appeared ahead of us, but none of us had seen it at that time.
The shadow grew, and if we began to see it, we could not accommodate it in the dream vision.
The boat of shields pulled onwards, up the river. The shadow reared, grew tall, grew more distinct.
We were dancing in a circle, like the Greeks, my arms around the delightful Guiwenneth and the pungently animal jarag, who had taken to this ritual formation with exuberant delight, grinning, singing and breathing on me at every possible moment.
‘Good dance! Good dance! We dance this way on river shore before collect fish and shell. Good dance!’
I had never known the prehistoric hunter so vociferous.
Opposite me, the impeccably trimmed and dressed Gwyr was squashed between Kylhuk, who was half naked and very drunk, and Issabeau who was in a dreamy state, her face a fluid film of animal features, all vying for control over the darkly beautiful human.
When the circle juddered to an awkward stop, I looked up. Gwyr had ceased dancing and was staring beyond me, his face a depiction of pure astonishment. Slowly the music faded away. The oars struck relentlessly as the boat surged forward, but on the upper deck there was only silence as we turned to stare at the massive tree that had at last loomed large in our awareness.
‘Olwen’s Hands!’ Kylhuk breathed in amazement. ‘So that’s where he is. I had no idea … no idea how vast!’
‘It’s drawing us towards it,’ the jarag said, leaning over the bow and staring at the water. The river flowed past us away from the tree, but we were caught in a deeper current drawing us forward and the oars were struck, the effort of rowing being wasted.
Still the tree rose ahead of us, its dark trunk a writhing mass of faces, shapes and glowing fires, its girth blocking the horizon, its height and wide, spreading branches smothering the dawn sky.
‘Divine Son of the Mother! The bitch didn’t mean her bastard to escape from this!’
The words were again the astonished words of Kylhuk, a strong man again, eyes wide, sobering fast.
Then Issabeau shouted out, ‘By the Good God! What is that?’
But we had all seen the swirl of water, the great whirling maelstrom that was sucking us towards its deadly mouth.
Kylhuk shouted, ‘Back oar! Can you hear me below? Back oar now! Or the pool will suck us in! Get the rhythm! Back oar!’
With a clatter of wood and the uncertain beat of the stroke-drum, the oarsmen tried to find a reverse stroke. Several oars splintered, the boat lurched, the water thrashed as blades struck in confusion, the ship of shields beginning to twist and turn as it was sucked towards the pool.
‘Drag it back!’ Kylhuk screamed angrily, dropping from upper to lower deck. The drum had stopped. The oars trailed deeply in the water. We clung to the rails, the mast, even the flimsy hutches for support as our progress towards the swirling water below the bulging roots of this towering growth was slowed.
Again the boat of shields lurched, throwing several men over the side. The shields clattered against the hull, some detaching and falling away, taking their protection with them. The defences were weakened. Then the prow dipped, the hull reeled drunkenly, slewing to the starboard. The ever-determined jarag and two others leapt into the white water hold
ing ropes, and tried to swim to the bone-strewn bank to find stones or trees around which to tie the tethers. They were sucked out of sight, whipped down into the deep like leaves in a storm drain …
The end came so suddenly I have little clear recollection: the ship broke in two, splintering across the hull and pitching everyone else on the upper deck into the swirling river. I remember seeing Kylhuk flying backwards, his face contorted with pain; I remember Guiwenneth grabbing for me, her saturated hair wound around her face, her eyes full of despair in the instant before she was flung from me and lost into the river. Someone grunted loudly, somersaulted as a spar struck him, and vanished in a plume of blood. I went under the water. The current had taken my feet and I was dragged down so fast that within seconds I was in the silent realm of the dead, my lungs bursting as I held my breath, my arms flailing as I sought feebly for anything on which to gain a hold.
Then my vision darkened. A corpse swirled past me, gape-mouthed, fish-white, dull-eyed. Issabeau’s black hair floated in my vision, the woman turning almost peacefully, her arms across her chest, her eyes closed. She had resigned herself to death.
I reached for her but she was caught in the spiralling flow and spun away from me, and at that moment I too began to resign myself to the cold and to breathing out for a final time, my mind suddenly clear and calm—
When a force like a vice pressed into my head. A finger the size of a baby’s arm blocked the vision from one eye. Something huge had risen up below me and grasped me in its hand!
I felt myself pulled up, then freed from the water, letting go of the stale breath and sucking in air gratefully and with a sobbing cry of relief. A second powerful hand was on my arm. A mass of dripping weeds blinked at me, eyes in the river wrack, a grinning mouth …
Elidyr!
Then he grunted with effort, heaved and flung me onto the bank, literally that: lifted me and threw me. A branch broke my flight and bruised my arm. I fell to the turf, next to the groaning bodies of Guiwenneth and Issabeau. A moment later the ground shook as Someone thumped down, his face twisted with pain, his soaking hair red with his own blood. Guiwenneth crawled towards me and slumped over me, her mouth on my cheek, her fingers digging into my flesh. She was still only half conscious. As I sat up, cradling the woman carefully, I saw Kylhuk some yards away. He was on all fours, retching up water and shaking his head. The jarag was beside him, slowly getting to his feet and staring at the weed-draped giant who had just hurled him to the shoreline.