Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (Mythago Wood)

  GATE OF IVORY, GATE OF HORN

  ROBERT HOLDSTOCK

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Part One: In the Valley of the Crow

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Part Two: The Forlorn Hope

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Part Three: Legion of the Lost

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Part Four: The End of Wandering

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Coda

  Afterword: Imaging the world of myth

  Website

  Also by Robert Holdstock

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams;

  Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

  W.B. Yeats, from Fergus and the Druid

  … there are two gates through which dreams reach us.

  Those that come through the Ivory Gate cheat us with empty promises

  that never see fulfilment. Those that issue from the Gate of Horn

  inform the dreamer of the Truth.

  Homer, from The Odyssey, Book XIX

  PART ONE

  In the Valley of the Crow

  Prologue

  This morning, when I opened my eyes and saw the spring sky above me as I lay in the shallow boat, I realised that my long journey from the heart of the forest was over, and that I had come home again.

  Oak Lodge was there, across the meadow, empty and silent. And yet I could not step through the trees and go to the house, as if the wood, so difficult to enter from the outside except along the brook, was now reluctant to let me go. So for a while I walked back into that consuming gloom, following an old track and coming after an hour or so to the clearing my father had called the ‘Horse Shrine’, after the crumbling, ivy-covered statue of the animal that stood in that place, a wooden shield propped between its forelegs.

  Here, I decided that I must write down what had happened to me, to give an account of it, something that I might refer to later when the details will have faded, since I cannot believe that I will not be returning to the heartwoods again and again. Though I am tired and confused now, I shall keep going back. I have left someone behind and I intend to find her.

  And I will start this account with a truly haunting memory, the memory of a boy watching his mother dance furiously on the lowest branch of an oak. A day that ended a week of wonders. A day that shaped the boy for the rest of his life, although he couldn’t know it at the time.

  And because that day is no longer mine, though it once belonged to me, I shall tell of it briefly, and in a different voice.

  George Huxley was on his knees by Christian’s bed, his hand resting lightly on the boy’s shoulder. Chris woke quickly, aware of a pale, pre-dawn light on the man’s unshaven face. He could smell the waterproofing on his father’s cape, the leather of the bulky backpack, the polish on the heavy blackthorn staff.

  ‘I’m going into the wood again,’ the man said. ‘Just for a few days.’

  ‘Hunting shadows?’ the boy asked quietly.

  His father smiled. ‘Yes. Hunting shadows. Shadows of the past, strange and wonderful shadows of the past.’

  ‘Shadows in the wood.’

  ‘I’ll be gone for a few days only. Take care of things. I trust you to take care of things. Of your mother …’

  All night Chris had listened to his mother’s shouting, her sobbing, the crash of crockery, the bass grumble of his father’s voice.

  ‘Mummy’s upset,’ he whispered, and Huxley frowned. The man’s breath was cheesy, the black stubble along his lip flecked with crumbs. There was sadness in his pale eyes, the lids hooded, lines of discomfort on his brow, on his temples. A watery gaze, but a glance or two of affection, something that Chris’s brother, Steven – away, staying with an aunt – never received.

  ‘Don’t go away again,’ Chris whispered, but Huxley merely kissed the boy’s cheek.

  ‘I’ve left a note for you in the journal. The latest one. Read it, don’t get it sticky, don’t tear the pages. Do you understand? When you’ve read it, put it back on the shelf and lock the cabinet. Put the key in the drawer of the desk. Do you promise me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll be gone a few days. Just a few days. The torches you saw by the wood last night are important. Someone of great interest to me is very close to us. You’ll find his name in the journal, too.’

  ‘And the horse?’ Chris said. ‘I saw a grey horse. There was a girl on it, a girl with white hair. She was watching the house.’

  ‘Be careful of her,’ his father said. ‘If my ideas are right – she’s no girl. I shan’t be gone long, Chris. You must promise me to comfort your mother. She’s a bit … upset.’

  Chris remembered the desperate voice: Don’t go, George! You’ve only just come back. How do you think it is for me? To see you covered in mud and dung. And blood! Stinking like a farmyard! I’m going out of my mind, George! Don’t go to that bloody wood again … What do I tell the boys?

  ‘I’ll make her some breakfast,’ Chris said to reassure his father. ‘I’ll tell her everything’s all right.’

  ‘Good boy. I know I can depend on you.’

  ‘Daddy …?’

  ‘I have to go, Chris.’

  ‘How far do you go? Into the wood …?’

  George Huxley’s hand swept gently across his son’s unkempt hair. ‘Very far indeed. There’s a river at the very heart of Ryhope Wood, a river that flows from the beginning o
f the world. Strange ships sail there, and strange sailors watch me watching them. I’m learning so much, but I’ve only just begun. One day you’ll know. One day your brother Steven will understand as well …’

  He leaned forward and kissed his son, then rose and stepped away. At the door he murmured, ‘Don’t play with the white-haired girl, if she comes again. She isn’t a girl. She’s older by centuries than she seems. She’s dangerous. Promise me?’

  ‘I promise.’

  By sunrise his father had gone. Chris put on his clothes and made a pot of tea. His mother, dressed for some reason in her Sunday suit, was huddled by the dead fire, staring at the ashes. She didn’t respond when her son put the cup and saucer on the table and touched her shoulder. The boy walked quickly to the study and opened the bookcase, taking out a thick leather volume, his father’s latest journal. Turning it to the last written page, sitting by the window that looked onto the brooding edge of Ryhope Wood, he tried to understand a little more about what he had seen over the last few days.

  Huxley had written:

  I am as sure of this as I am sure of anything – which is to say, not sure at all. But my guess, on the evidence, is that the group which has ventured beyond the Horse Shrine and is gathering at the edge of the wood is of the Iron Age. I suspect aspects of classic Celtic questing, the searching for cauldrons, grails, swords, great pigs, emblems of magic and mystical attribute.

  I am tempted to think this may be a form of Kylhuk and his entourage of knights from King Arthur’s court, obsessed with the many strange and wonderful tasks he must accomplish to win the fair Olwen, or die at her father’s hands. To these questing men (and their ladies!) the edge of Ryhope is the edge of the world. What they seek lies either beyond that edge – in this world – or behind it, and they are lost, they have come too far.

  I must leave poor Jennifer again to go in search of them, but Christian is a sensible boy. He will ‘guard the fort’. I know he will exercise caution in all things, and make Oak Lodge safe for my return in a matter of days. He is not a curious boy; I trust him not to interfere in things he doesn’t understand.

  When Chris went back to the sitting room, his mother was no longer by the fire. He saw she had drunk the tea. He found her in the kitchen, bottling tomatoes. The front of her green tweed suit was splashed with juice. The red liquid squirted over the table as she pressed a lid into place and snapped down the iron lock of the preserving jar.

  Chris wanted to ask if she were all right, but the words wouldn’t come. His mother hummed to herself, increasingly drenched in the red juices. She should have been wearing an apron. She was bottling unscalded tomatoes; they would go rotten in a matter of days. She was doing nothing right and Chris felt like crying. His mother’s mouth and eyes looked bloody where she had wiped her hands across her lips and brow.

  ‘Go outside and play,’ she said suddenly, looking at her son. ‘You know how your father hates to have you under his feet when he’s working.’

  ‘Daddy’s in the wood … He’s gone into the wood.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ She turned away from him angrily. ‘Daddy’s working. And you should be playing. Go on, now. Go and do something constructive with your time. Make a model ship. You make good models. You’ll be an engineer one of these days. Off you go.’

  ‘Why are you in your Sunday clothes?’

  ‘Why do you think? It’s a special day. Now off you go.’

  What special day? he wanted to ask, but the words dried in his mouth. He reached out to her, hoping for a quick kiss, a warm pat on the cheek, that little smile that always reassured him, but she went on squashing fruit, her head shaking as if thoughts were tumbling inside her head.

  After a moment, Chris quickly left the house, drying his moist eyes on a sleeve, then kicking angrily at everything he could see before running to the stream which he and Steven called the sticklebrook.

  Here, last year, the two of them had launched HMS Voyager, a two-foot, single-sailed model ship that had swept into the wood so fast they had hardly had the strength to follow it and see it vanish. Lost for six months, the vessel had turned up again, almost as good as new, caught in the mud on the Shadoxhurst side of Ryhope.

  The return of the ship had thrilled his father and sent him into a fever of work and writing. Even now, Chris wasn’t sure whether the hours of questioning that early spring had meant approval or anger from the man whose moods and obsessions dominated the atmosphere in his home.

  By the millpond, later that day, Chris sat for an hour or more, hoping to see the furtive movement across the water that usually denoted the ‘Twigling’, an odd creature, disguised in the dull greens and browns of an outlaw, and with sticks and twigs tied about his head to make a crude and hideous wooden face. Today, all was still.

  He wanted Steve. His brother was full of dreams and full of stories. His imagination had fuelled the brothers’ games. Without Steve, Chris felt isolated. He longed for night, when the wood might again become alive with fire and voices, horses and garish human figures.

  By the evening, he had walked as far as Shadoxhurst, playing on the village green for a while with friends from school, spending his meagre allowance on chocolate before heading back along the hedges towards the sprawling estate on which his parents had their lodge. The fields were waist high with barley, the seeds about to burst. It had been a fine summer and the harvest would begin two weeks earlier than usual.

  When he came to the sticklebrook, he followed it to the thistle field and the dense border of scrub wood and nettle that made Ryhope Wood so hard to enter. He saw an owl swoop in flight, and a hawk of some sort hovered above the trees, turned towards him. A deer moved furtively, red-brown flank just visible for a second, then gone. He started to walk towards home again, surrounded by a bosky and eerie silence that thrilled him.

  Suddenly, out of that silence, out of the wood, a white-haired girl rode towards him, cantering along the bank of the stream, leaning low in the saddle. As she passed the boy, she reached out to strike him on the head with a thin stick, strips of red rag and white feathers streaming from its shaft.

  She laughed as she achieved this deed. Then the horse reared up, leapt the stream, and she trotted back on the other side, the coup-stick held loosely in her left hand while the right tugged at the crude bridle, slowing down the impatient grey.

  Chris stared at her in astonishment. The ride had been so sudden, her appearance startling. Her face was so pale that she might have been a ghost, but there were thin dashes of colour at the edges of her cheek and he realised that she was painted. Her hair, too, was whitened with some paint or other; it was long and quite stiff, not flowing freely as she moved. Several braids had been wrung through these sculpted locks and tied with string or cord. One braid alone was decorated with leaves and feathers, and at this she tugged absently with the hand that held the crop as she gazed at her prey.

  She was wearing a short tunic of red-and-green check and cloth shoes. Her legs were otherwise bare; there was a glistening sheen of sweat on her throat and arms.

  This girl was centuries older than she looked, according to his father. But she seemed to Chris to be no older than some of the girls in the village, though there was something that he thought of as ‘boyish’ about her. He said to her, ‘Why did you hit me?’

  Instead of answering him, she shouted angrily at the wood behind him, and when Chris glanced round, he saw a tall man in a white cloak, standing with a black horse and gently stroking its muzzle. The man frowned, growled fierce, warning words at the girl, then pulled back into cover.

  The next thing Christian knew, the sweating grey was splashing through the brook, snorting loudly, and the girl was reaching down to grab him by the shirt. She hauled him up with astonishing strength, verbally abusing him in a way that suggested he might help himself a little, and he grabbed at the rough saddle and the coarse mane, somehow righting himself astride the beast’s back. Suddenly they were off at a heavy, painful canter through the fields
of barley, ploughing a trail that wound and wove towards the glowing sky where the sun was setting. The girl laughed and called out, kicking the young grey until it was galloping dangerously fast. Chris felt bruised by the saddle, but was more aware of the firm touch of the girl’s fingers around his waist, and of her breath, sweet like fresh fruit, as she cried with delight and urged the horse along.

  Her gaiety ended quite abruptly. She screamed, tugged so hard on the reins that the horse reared and the young riders fell heavily into the soft crop of corn. The girl was shaking, clearly in pain and very frightened. She tugged at her tunic to cover her legs, then twisted round to a kneeling position, breathing hard and shaking her head.

  Chris tried to touch her, but she pulled away. He could feel a bruise on his knee and blood in his mouth, but the girl was in much greater distress, though the reason defied his eyes and his understanding.

  Riders were coming across the cornfield, five of them, their faces painted a violent scarlet, white hair in spiky crests across their crowns, colourful cloaks streaming behind them. They rode in silence, spreading out to form a wide arc around the boy, long spears held loosely, points grazing the ears of the corn. The girl stood up and whistled for her pony. One of the oncoming men pulled up, shouted, the others swung round and dismounted quickly. The field of corn stooped to a sudden breeze that chilled Chris as he stood nervously, watching the events.

  With a sharp word, then a laugh at him, the girl swung onto her grey’s back and kicked towards the wood. One of the red-faced men slapped at the horse as it passed and his companions began to follow her. This one, though, beckoned to Chris, and the boy walked slowly towards him.

  Close up, the apparition was frightening. The red paint was cracked across cheek, brow, and chin, and looked like dripping blood where it had been rubbed into the full, curling moustaches. The horse was edgy, held by its reins but wanting to return to the trees. Below the full-flowing cloak the man wore a chain-link coat of dull grey metal and patched rust-coloured cloth trousers tied below the knee. A broad, intricately patterned scabbard was strapped to his left thigh, and the jutting pommel of the sword it enclosed was shaped like a dead man’s face, blind-eyed, long moustaches drooping around a gaping mouth.