Avilion (Mythago Wood 7) (28 page)

These were his guard. They rode ahead of him, or beside him, four men he trusted. They wore dull-coloured tartan kilts and heavy deerskin jackets. They favoured weapons that he could not use himself.

The youngest spoke again: ‘You need to be strong. We need to be strong for you. What is it?’

‘I’m haunted by the past. I can’t think why. There: is that enough show of weakness for you?’

‘Weakness? Where’s the weakness? What you took you took. What you take you take. What will be taken from you is what will be taken from you. You can do nothing about the first; the second is something you can decide upon. The third is the excitement!’

He looked at this young, brash man, held his gaze. ‘Bad poetry. But you’re right. I can’t remember your name.’

‘Peredur. Not a name to forget. Remember it well.’

Reflections

The wind was freshening. The shield hall was a place of bell chimes as they clashed. The shield of Diadora, immense and heavy though it was, began to move.

Yssobel looked at it directly. Its surface was like an ocean; rippling. There were patterns in its face, movement that flowed. She became entranced by it, unable to tear her gaze from the silvered aquamarine beauty of it.

‘Turn away!’

She reached to touch it, but a hard hand grasped hers and held it back.

‘Look away!’

As quickly as he had been there, Odysseus withdrew.

‘I thought you’d gone outside,’ Yssobel said.

‘Didn’t trust you not to look,’ he replied from behind her. ‘Have you seen all you need to see?’

‘I don’t know. A while longer?’

‘Why ask me? Take as long as you like. I have no immediate plans.’

There was a silence then.

Odysseus said quietly, ‘Ask for what you truly wish to see. I’ll give you a hint. It’s your mother. It doesn’t take much of a mind to understand that.’

‘Be quiet! Go away.’

‘The first, yes. The second, never.’

Yssobel waited until he had settled again, then called for Guiwenneth.

There was nothing of her but shadow. She walked through the camp, wrapped in her cloak, wrapped in her own arms. The moon was low; fires guttered in the light breeze. Men and women slept around the glow. She walked as a shadow.

Then, suddenly, an owl, white breasted, diamond-eyed, rose before her, wings spreading and folding as it flew from its roosting place. Such life in this death!

And as if the bird were the sound of new life, now she heard her daughter.

 

‘I’m coming to find you. I’m coming to bring you home.’

‘Yssobel?’ She looked around, alarmed, searching the dusk. ‘Don’t. Don’t. You never understood. Leave me alone. I am here to take care of an old wound, and if you interfere I’ll lose my life again.’

‘The resurrected man.’

Guiwenneth was suddenly aware that this was oracular contact. She stared at one of the fires. ‘Call him what you like. Love him as you like. I need time to find and kill him. Go away!’

‘I’m coming to find you.’

‘You will never manage that. Even if you did, it would be too late.’

‘I intend to take you home.’

The spectre of Guiwenneth laughed loudly. ‘There is no going home.’

‘You sang the Song of the Islands of the Lost when you left. You can unsing it.’

Guiwenneth turned slowly in a full circle, trying, perhaps, to get a glimpse of her daughter. She laughed. ‘How do you unsing?’

‘I don’t know, mother. But there must be a way.’

‘Leave me, daughter. Go back to where you belong. Find Odysseus and marry him.’

‘Odysseus is here. We found each other again. Marriage is not a prospect. Our paths will soon draw apart.’

‘A shame. A shame,’ this vision regretted. ‘He was a handsome boy.’

‘My father is missing you.’

Guiwenneth sighed and dragged her long hair around her face; in the mirror-shield she looked thoughtful and, for a moment, lost. Then the flash of hard-eyed green again. ‘Steven will cope. He always knew that our life together would be a fleeting one. He’s no fool, your father. Where are you?’

‘In a palace, watching you through the edge of vision. From the corner of my eye. You seem so sad, Gwin. And so angry.’

‘I’m here to do a deed, Yssi. If you wish to see anger, watch me in a while. This is a big army. Getting to its centre is hard. But when I get there . . .’ Guiwenneth paused, tightened into herself. ‘Leave me to my own devices! I miss you too; and Jack. But this is the end for me. Try to keep your paths together, you and the Greek.’

‘That, I know now, will be impossible.’

‘Then find life’s pleasure soon. Leave me, Yssobel. Leave me alone. Don’t follow me. Don’t waste your life.’

And as if Guiwenneth’s words could command the oracle, the Diadoran shield became just reflection and brightness. The image was gone.

Yssobel banged the surface with her fist, crying for a moment. Then that reassuring hand upon her shoulder, and when she stood, Odysseus was there.

‘I heard your side of a difficult conversation.’

She wiped the tears from her eyes, angry at herself. ‘My mother is stubborn. I must find this Legion.’

‘Shall I hold you for a moment? Or shall we get on?’

Meeting his gaze, she saw warmth that she remembered, softness in eyes that could narrow to a glitter of fury. Eyes that would see death. Eyes that would become blind to the fury of the man, when Troy would be breached.

‘Yes. Hold me. Hold me hard. Stay with me until I can find this night army.’

 

Was this the man she had known from the villa? Or had she created him, merely the memory of a man she’d loved, imbuing the ‘change’ with a faint memory of that love? The marks upon his body were the same as she remembered. The gentleness of his arms was as she remembered. The softness of his kiss was as she remembered. The sadness in him, the sense of being alone, was certainly that of the man who had been the Odysseus of her own days, before he had found the island where he would settle, where he would find the wife he loved - Penelope, as she had learned it from Steven - and father the son he would adore.

There were times when Yssobel despaired at being this half creature, half human; the red and green conflicting within her head and heart.

But she was green now, and so was this man-myth. And he was holding her with compassion and understanding:

I heard your side of what must have been a difficult conversation.

She realised she loved him, even if he was not the man who had danced with her by the fire, even of he was not the same young Greek who had brooded, future-pining, in the cave in Serpent Pass.

She had no hesitation. She invited his love. He welcomed it.

 

And after, he said, ‘I watched you when you thumped that shield, when you cried. So I ask you: will you watch me now?’

Yssobel agreed readily, tying her hair into Jack’s silver clasp, stepping back again into one of the dangling shields and laughing as she set off a chain of ringing. Odysseus clothed himself, and sighed. ‘My life is a reflection. And I’ve done none of it yet! Palaces, palaces, walls, shields. Wherever I go I see myself reflected!’

‘In my own eyes, you are reflected with affection.’

He gave Yssobel a knowing smile. ‘So I gather. But alas.’

‘Alas ...’

‘Stay with me for a few moments more. One more glance.

There is a question I need to ask - and then we’ll try to find Legion. This, for the moment, is your time, not mine. But please watch me as I’ve watched you. I need to know you’re there.’

‘I’ll be here,’ she said quietly.

 

She watched him as he crouched by the giant shield, his head bowed, his voice a whisper. And she heard the name. Penelope. He was seeking hope, hope in the woman who would be his homeward cause after the great war against Troy. This was ill-advised, but Greeks were Greeks, and Odysseus was a canny man, and no doubt he was building this painful vision into his strategy. Whatever he was seeing, it made him angry. Judging by his bodily actions beside the shield, he was killing men. Then he was whispering love.

My life is a reflection . . .

No sooner than having loved one woman with all his body and all his strength, he was loving another in dream and anticipation. Yssobel didn’t find this easy, but she guarded his back. This had been her promise. And she took the clasp from her hair:

Avilion is what we make of it.

And looked at it, and used it as a charm of hope. Hope that she would return with her mother to the home where her mother belonged.

 

It rises. It rises. It turns face about, turning back, taken aback by the call from Yssobel.

The resurrected man gathers his commanders. ‘We go back.’

‘Back where?’

‘There is something I have to do. We go back.’

‘Time is taking us to a great confrontation. That’s what we do. We cannot disobey the journey.’

Christian turned on the man who had spoken. He drew his blade, pushed it hard into the man’s body. As the man sank, so Christian engaged the gaze of all the other men under his command. ‘We turn back. Do we turn back? I say we turn back. There is something I have to confront. Are any of you prepared to argue?’

‘We are Legion,’ said one of the other men. ‘But if you say we turn back, then we turn back. As long as we can return to serve Time and its demands. Will you agree to that?’

‘I agree to that.’

There was general approval for the strategy.

 

They found Uzana in the room of monsters. She was holding an apple, eaten to the core, standing in front of the gaping, tooth-terrifying mouth of a huge reptile, staring at it.

‘These are such strange beasts,’ she said as Yssobel approached. ‘There is life in them, and no life at all. This one could have snapped me in half in a heart’s beat. It clearly doesn’t want the remains of my apple.’

She tossed the core into the creature’s maw, wiped her fingers on her skirt and looked around, all curiosity and innocence.

‘If these beasts existed, I’m glad not to have lived in their world. The size of them!’

‘Where’s Narine?’

She focused again. ‘Narine? She’s found a room of oracles. She’s trying to find Legion for you. There’s a hard time to come, she thinks, and I agree. She’s also trying to find Arthur.’

She grinned. ‘If he’s in a bad mood, we’re all in trouble.’

A bird was sitting on his chest; dark-feathered, not pecking, curious. It flew off at the very moment when he opened his eyes, flying straight into the trunk of a tree, falling, then flying on; bruised but not life-abandoned.

Arthur sat up. The air was sweet with the smell of the lake. His wound was blood-congealed; painful. There was life in him, life he had thought taken. He was among the trees; his men were asleep by the lake.

He rose unsteadily, groaning with the discomfort of the deep strike that Morthdred had inflicted upon him. He realised suddenly that he was naked.

This was very puzzling.

He walked down to the lake’s edge and kicked Bydavere. His close companion snorted out of sleep, looked up, then sat up, startled. ‘Where in the name of the Good God have you just come from? We sent you off in the barge. With the women.’

‘Clearly not. Give me something to cover myself. I’m freezing.’

‘I don’t understand it. How can you be here when we dispatched you to Avilion?’

‘Clothes! Give me clothes.’

‘A cloak?’

‘Good thinking,’ he agreed, with a cold, narrowed look at the other man. ‘I don’t imagine reeds and rushes would do it.’

Covered and warmed in Bydavere’s cloak, Arthur crouched among his companions; they ate frugally. They all seemed nervous. They discussed the situation.

‘We put somebody on the barge,’ Bydavere said. ‘A body that looked like you, same copper-coloured hair.’

‘How heavy?’

‘Quite light. Now you mention it.’

Arthur was neither angry nor amused. He shook his head. ‘Bydavere: my death has been stolen from me. By whom I don’t know. I don’t understand it. And I dreamed a whispered voice: I never knew why I would steal the armour, just that I would have to do it. Let me steal this little time inside your skin. Strange words. But they have left me with life. What shall I do? Take revenge or show gratitude?’

Bydavere sank back on his haunches, his face a mask of confusion. He scratched at his lank hair. ‘I know you value my advice, Arthur. But I confess that this is a difficult one.’

‘I’d be grateful just to be alive again,’ said Emereth. ‘Though, of course, this could be a death trick. You look quick, which is to say, not dead. Which is a good thing. But possibly you’re not. Though if you’re not, then quite what you are is a difficult thought to think with.’