For a while there was nothing but the drum of the rain, but the hound that had bayed in the distance grew closer, its cry a mournful sound at first, then more of an angry challenge to some hunted beast. Helen had folded into a tight ball, her arms around her head, as if blocking the sound, but after a while she looked up, drawn and misty eyed, a grim set to her features. Richard grew concerned and asked her why she was frightened, and she replied quite simply, “Trickster.”
She wouldn’t talk further, not for the moment. Richard established only that, although she was hunting Trickster, she could not be sure whether or not he had risen from the earth in the wood at her own instigation. The Jack that dogged their steps, the shapechanging relic of pre-Celtic myth that shadowed them like a lie, was probably Alex’s creation, imbued with the darker side of the frightened boy, who was protecting himself so intensely against the products of his own imagination.
She could not be sure. She had expected to encounter Trickster in its Amerindian form, yet this Jack was quintessentially European. This, however, might be the trick that Trickster was playing on her, hiding himself from her in confusing guise while he waited for the moment to destroy her, as he had destroyed …
At this point she slumped again, then looked up sharply at Richard, reaching for her bow and quiver. She said, “It’s an odd story, and I can only explain it in the simplest of terms.”
“Good. Then I’ll understand it.”
“Five hundred years ago, Trickster destroyed my family; it didn’t end at that time. The destruction has continued down the family line to the present day. And I’m going to stop it. Or die trying. And that’s my story.”
She brushed aside Richard’s question, his concern, his offer to come with her. Heavily dressed in weatherproof jacket and leggings, her head protected beneath a hood, she tested the bow, selected six arrows, and went out into the rain, walking fast towards the awful baying of the giant dog.
If it was Coyote, she would have a fight on her hands.
When two hours had passed, and the sound of the dog had been swallowed either by distance or death, Richard followed Helen through the wood, calling for her. Emerging onto open land, where tall, wild grass was being crushed by the heavy rain, he saw her distantly, coming back towards the stone shelter. Stray light, penetrating the thunderclouds, caught on her rain-drenched waterproof. Her head was down, she was walking normally. As she came close Richard could see that she was unwounded.
Back in the shelter she ate food and tried to dry her saturated hair.
“Coyote?” Richard asked.
She shook her head. “I let it go. It was what Lytton calls a wild-hound, an early form of dog. You see them regularly. They’re solitary animals, more inclined to help than hinder. All for food, of course.” She smiled distractedly. “The story of the dogs’ downfall.”
After a while she relaxed. In her absence Richard had built a ditch around the squalid shelter; the floor was dry, and it felt warm with the small fire that smouldered at its centre. Richard asked her what had happened five hundred years ago, and why she felt she could end the curse today, in 1967.
“Because I carry the curse in my head,” she said. “As do all my family. Trickster is in here.” She tapped her skull. “And he shares his spirit between all the minds of my family. There’s only one of him, and if I can just entice him out … if I can just make him come out of the shadows…”
She was in a dreamy state, her eyes closed, her body swaying. For a moment she sang, but so softly that Richard strained to hear the words, then realised they were in an older tongue than his. When the song had finished she began to speak, eyes open but watching the long-gone, her voice rhythmical. The story was entrancing, chanted by the speaker as the rain lashed down.
Richard established afterwards that it was more than a family story, passed down from generation to generation: it was literally a family dream, and the dream of a family that had been regularly attacked, abused, and destroyed by Coyote. When he came to record the story he could not recapture the sense of time and land that she had elicited in his mind, the rhythm of a lost land, reflected in the rhythm of her words.
The first dream is still with me, though I haven’t dreamt it for years, now.
When we are children, the past is closer. It passes through the lands in our heads more easily.
Young Grandfather, who was named Three Crows Flying, was a fine hunter, and later a flier with eagles, which we would call shaman. He was born in the time before horses, when the great plains were covered with grass, and the best hunters were the fastest runners, or the most skilled at setting hidden nets and blind-alleys of wood for a single buffalo.
At the best time of summer, the grasses were very high. When the buffalo came down to the tribal lands, they entered the grass like a man entering water, slowing down, wading carefully. At this time the herds would spread thinly. The calf and the cow would follow the bull, but the families would move widely, leaving great passages in the grass, the trails which the hunters followed.
No hunter would follow any trail that led to the setting sun, or the rising sun. Those buffalo had a special spirit.
The hunters would dance in the great flat place, where the herd had gathered and the grass was trampled, and by song, by dance, and sometimes by courting coup, they would select the high-grass trail to follow. They would run through the tunnel toward their prey on all fours, never allowed to stand high, because this would bring them above the grass, and make them vulnerable to the dark spirit that watched the herds from the distant rocks.
Young Grandfather became a fine hunter. If a buffalo turned back along its track, it was considered right for the hunter to lie down and let the beast walk over him. It was a painful and humiliating thing. But when this happened to Young Grandfather, to his surprise Coyote appeared at the edge of the grass track, disguised as a musk rat. “Next-Buffalo-Meal is walking away from you again. You can hunt him, now. He will not trample you. I have done this, and this is my gift. But don’t forget you owe me a name.”
“What name?” cried Young Grandfather.
Coyote revealed himself for what he was. “The name that was stolen from me at your birth. If you don’t yet know this, you soon will.”
Sometimes the hunters would take up their coup sticks and arrows, their feathered lances and stone skull-crackers, and run across the hills to dance war. On one occasion Young Grandfather had stumbled in a snake-hole, and his enemy was screaming above him and about to crack his skull. Coyote bit the enemy and the black stone club whistled like sling-shot, a skin’s thickness from Young Grandfather’s eyes. Young Grandfather used his granite club to break the enemy’s knees, then his jaw, then open his head to the crows. Coyote ran with him afterwards, disguised as a grey dog.
“I have saved your skull, and this is my gift for you. But don’t forget my name. You must remember that you owe me a name.”
The day came when Young Grandfather was growing old. Not so old that he couldn’t disturb his wives in their sleeping skins, but old enough that the paint ran in many furrows on his face. He wished to fly with eagles, so he went out to Coyote Rock, to remember his birth.
When he had been born, White Eagle, his father, had stepped from the lodge and stared around the wide land. Three crows had been flying towards a high rock and woods where the carcass of a coyote lay, gored by a buffalo. He took the child up to the rock. But the coyote was not quite dead yet, and it watched the man and the child as the crows settled and began to feast.
Coyote said, “I’m glad you’ve come with the new child, to give him my name, the name of the first thing you saw when your child was born.”
“I saw three crows, flying to eat,” White Eagle said. “The boy will be named after them.”
Coyote was furious and the picking crows flew up to escape the slashing claws. “He must take my name or my spirit cannot rest. I saw you come from the lodge. I saw you look up at me. You watched me haul myself to this place to die. The cr
ows were still in the north wind. You saw me first. He must take my name.”
“Never!” said White Eagle, and Young Grandfather was then named for the crows.
The coyote died, his spirit entering the woods as his bones bleached. And from here, over the years when the people passed this way on the hunt, he crept out to watch over the child, and then the man, who had not been named for him by words, but who was tied to Coyote by first sight.
Now, years later, the spirit of Coyote came out to sit with Young Grandfather, in his new paint on the old face, at his new age, searching for eagles. Coyote said, “I ran with you through the tall grass when you were a child who wished to be a man.”
“I remember you. You saved me from a trampling.”
“I remember you when you first went below the skin of your first wife. You were very clumsy.”
“I don’t remember you. And I had no complaints.”
“From the look of you, the grass-hunting time is finished, and the inside-the-skin time; and the skull-cracking time is finished too.”
Young Grandfather shook his head as he thought of his wives. “Not the inside-the-skin time, but the others, yes. All finished. I wish to fly with eagles, and with crows, to see the tribe and their hunt-trails through other eyes. I wish to see the long-to-come through the eyes of other dreaming things. But something stops me.”
Coyote chuckled. “You have the name of crows, and not coyote. You have the wrong name. Your father was at fault and I killed him.”
“My father ran up onto high rocks and fell.”
“I pushed him. He gave you the wrong name. It’s not too late. Here I am.”
Young Grandfather had been expecting this. He knew from his father, from his grandfather too, that to take Coyote’s name would be to be in Coyote’s grasp, and Coyote was tricky. Sometimes his visions would be real. Sometimes they would be lies. It was the same with young women and old men. It was a dangerous thing to take Coyote’s name, and no matter how sincere Coyote sounded, sitting there on the spirit rock, with the sun setting and the feathers in his grey hair waving in the wind, Coyote could not be trusted.
Young Grandfather scratched in the earth on the rock and found the skull of the dead coyote. “You must come back into the eyes and the ears and the jaws of these bones,” he said to the spirit, “so that I can honour you, and take your name.”
Coyote hesitated. Was he being tricked? No, the old man was too eager to fly with eagles. On the grass below, the lodges were spread widely, and smoke rose from every teepee. Children were making games, their laughter thin on the late evening air. Coyote sighed and went into the skull, and Young Grandfather carried the bones reverently to the village. There were many drums in the night, and a great fire, and a tall ash-pole with the spirits carved upon it and the dead coyote was placed on the ground. When the drums stopped, Young Grandfather drove a buffalo horn through the skull, then buried the bones in the earth where a stream split and made an island.
“May your ghost stay there forever,” Young Grandfather taunted. “I will never take your name. Now at last I can fly with eagles.”
Coyote was furious. The buffalo bone, stuck through his skull, had made him insane. He danced on the island and screamed, but he was trapped.
But a time came when Young Grandfather’s youngest daughter came to the island at night to give birth. She had lost her way in the darkness, and Coyote had sung sweetly, and rustled the leaves on the trees to make it sound like a good shelter for her labour, so she had crossed the water. As she crouched and felt the weight of the child, Coyote whispered that she should tug the buffalo horn from the ground and lean on it. She did so, and Coyote was freed from his buffalo coffin. Coyote helped with the birth, still singing softly, but as the child put its head into the world Coyote pinched its cheeks to open its eyes. He jumped into the open eyes and entered through the bone. When the child slipped out onto the soft skins of its cradle, it grinned. “Now I have my name,” it whispered.
The mother was terrified to hear the new-born speak, but after a while she thought it must have been the pain in her loins and the cool of the wind making her dream, because soon after this the child began to cry, like any child.
But Coyote was now in the blood of the family, and already planning his revenge for Young Grandfather’s trickery.
The rain had stopped and they shook out the tent, preparing to move on. As they worked, Helen said, “We became the most wretched of families. We were known as the Mad Dog People, because nothing ever went right for us, and sometimes we killed each other in a fury of desperation.
“Coyote took the best of our hunters and made them crazy with potato whisky. He danced round the best of our warriors during battle and made them kill each other. Our children were sometimes born with the heads of dogs; the most beautiful of our women would mutilate themselves, or start to bay like hounds as soon as they were married. Coyote caused starvation, even when there was plentiful game and fish, interfering with nets, cutting lines, warning animals. He distracted fathers and warrior sons during war-party raids on other tribes, and left them with their skulls bashed open and the crows on their eyes. He brought disease and cancer. He struck children dumb, and our mothers blind. He dried up their milk. He caused fire in teepees, even in the rain. He appeared as a disembodied dog-skull, the jaws grinding, and when we saw that we knew that Coyote had come to claim another prize. For generations my family has been terrified of the dreamworld, where this malevolent shadow stalks us. We never know when he will strike.”
No one had known what to do. The old rituals were long-since forgotten, and the precise nature of the magic that Young Grandfather had used to torment Coyote in that time-before-horses had died with him.
Then Alexander Lytton had visited the university where Helen and Dan were teaching, and she learned of his obsession with a strange wood in England. He had been looking for an expert on Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer societies. He found a woman and her husband who were specialists in that subject and who were living a nightmare. He had welcomed them to the team.
“So that’s all there is to it,” Helen murmured as she led Richard into open land, where a white-walled castle gleamed distantly. “If I can get Trickster to come out into the wood, to be made solid, then I can kill him. Dan tried. I think he’s failed. I’ll grieve for him in good time. I can’t think of anything, yet, except destroying the shadow.”
White Castle
From images of the ancient plains of North America, Richard suddenly stepped into the early Middle Ages, approaching the castle through patchy woodland, impressed by the height of the walls, suddenly aware that the purity of colour was not due to paint but to the white berries of a spreading thorn, grown so completely across the stone that it had covered the castle entirely.
The drawbridge had long since rotted. Across the scum-covered moat, a stagnant pool filled with decaying wood, a felled tree had been placed to make an awkward bridge. Inside, sheltering in the watchgate, Lytton and McCarthy huddled round a fire, McCarthy fussing with food on wooden skewers, Lytton smoking his black pipe and scrawling in his notebook. He glanced up as they arrived, grinning broadly. His rich Scots tones rang out to greet them. “Glad to see you! Did y’have a good journey?”
“Wet!” said Helen irritably.
“Indeed! We saw the storm from a distance. Have you any food, Helen? As you can see, we’re down to our last two dormice—tasty enough, but I’d kill for rare roast beef with all the trimmings.”
“Can’t help you with beef, but I’m happy to go hunting.”
“God bless you,” Lytton said with a second yellow-toothed smile. “I’d sing a song of luck for you, but I’m so damned hungry I haven’t the energy. I saw wild pigs in the woods, across the way, there.”
As Helen prepared her bow, and spoke softly with McCarthy, Lytton glanced at Richard. “You look as dishevelled outside as I feel inside. I wish I could say that your son was here, but he isn’t. This place is deserted. He’s dis
carded it. And nature, as you see from the walls, is regaining it, stone by stone, passage by passage, chamber by chamber. Explore it by all means, but this is a ghost place. First, sit down and tell me how close you feel to Alex. We must be close. McCarthy here feels his shadow, but the boy is damned good at keeping hidden.”
Richard told Lytton of his experiences with the “presence” of Alex, and the Scot mused and pondered, and smoked his vile pipe. “There’s something not right,” he said. “Something I’m missing. I thought I had your son clearly in my sights, but something must have happened. If you can bear to indulge me, tell me again about his death, about the man Keeton. You saw him suddenly on a road, near his home, a year after he had vanished … and he was only days older … Tell me again…”
Richard recapped the events of that long-gone autumn night in as much detail as he could remember, from the songs in his son’s adaptation of Gawain, to the state of James Keeton as he had stumbled from the Otherworld, half-naked and very frightened.
Keeton had gone somewhere “out of time,” Lytton mused. It had probably not been a form of fairyland—if that had been the case, his return still young would have meant time catching up with him. He would have aged a year suddenly. Keeton had been suspended from time, exactly like Alex, or at least, the Alex that could be sensed by McCarthy, probing the sylvan shadows, and Richard himself through his dreams.
“But damn!” Lytton said, leaning back against the wall of the watch-gate. “I’m missing something.”
“Time might well be playing tricks,” Richard offered, and for the first time told him of the Helen look-alike who had been at his house on the afternoon of Keeton’s return, leaving a message that had been incomprehensible. Under Lytton’s questioning he accepted that he could have been mistaken. “But when I mentioned it to Helen, when she came to visit me the other day, the thought seemed to disturb her.”
“Did it?”
“I’m not sure it was her. I don’t suppose I ever have been. But if it was Helen, then she visited me seven years before she’d even come to England…”