(vi)

The clatter of a pot in the kitchen of the house disturbed Tallis’s reverie. She didn’t know how long she had been standing at the gate, staring across the silent land, but it was dawn, now, and the sky was rich with colour over Shadoxhurst village.

Her body felt fresh and energetic, almost excited, and she ran to the back door, bursting into the kitchen. The action was so sudden, so startling, that her mother dropped the pan of water she was carrying to the stove.

‘Good God Almighty, child! You’ve taken ten years off my life!’

Tallis made an apologetic face, then stepped round the great spill of water to pick up the copper pan. Her mother was up earlier than usual. She was still in her dressing gown, her hair held inside a red head-scarf. She wore no make-up and her eyes were bleary as they watched the girl.

‘What on earth have you been doing?’ her mother asked, drawing her robe tighter. She took the pan from Tallis and passed her one of the ragged and smelly floorcloths.

‘I stayed up all night,’ Tallis said. She got down on her knees and started to help soak up the cold water.

Her mother regarded her cautiously. ‘You’ve not been to bed?’

‘I wasn’t tired,’ Tallis lied. ‘It’s Sunday, anyway –’

‘And we’re going to Gloucester, to the Cathedral, and then to Aunt May’s.’

Tallis had forgotten the annual outing to Aunt May and Uncle Edward’s. It was a visit she did not relish. The house always smelled of cigarette smoke and sour beer. The kitchen was usually full of washing, hanging on lines strung across from wall to wall; and though the bread they served for tea was always crusty, the only spread they ever used was lumpy, yellow mayonnaise. Her cousin Simon, who also went to visit on these occasions, called it ‘sick spread’.

They cleared up the mess. Tallis could hear her father moving about in the bathroom. She wished he was here too when she spoke for the first time about the strange and wonderful thing that had happened. But then, as she watched her mother draw fresh water for the eggs and set it to boil, she was glad of these few moments alone.

‘Mummy?’

‘You’d better go and wash. You look as if you’ve been dragged through a wood by your ankles. Pass me some eggs, first.’

Tallis passed the eggs, shaking each one to make sure there was no rattling sound, the sure sign of a beak, according to Simon.

‘Would you be angry if Harry came home again?’ she asked eventually.

Her mother didn’t falter as she placed eggs in water. ‘Why do you ask a silly thing like that?’

Tallis was silent for a moment. ‘You used to argue with him a lot.’

Her mother glanced down, frowning; an uneasy look. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You and Harry didn’t like each other.’

‘That’s not true,’ the woman said sharply. ‘Anyway, you’re far too young to remember Harry.’

‘I remember him very well.’

‘You remember him leaving because that was a sad time. But you don’t remember anything else. You certainly can’t remember any rows.’

‘I do,’ Tallis insisted quietly. ‘They used to make Daddy very sad.’

‘And you’re making me very angry,’ her mother said. ‘Cut some bread, if you want to be useful.’

Tallis walked to the breadbin and drew out the huge cob with its burned crust. She started to scrape the charred top, but the action had no heart in it. She was never able to talk to her mother about important things, and that made her sad. She felt tears rise to her eyes and she sniffed loudly. The sound drew a puzzled, slightly regretful glance from her mother.

‘What’s the sniffing for? I don’t want to eat bread you’ve sniffed over.’

‘Harry spoke to me,’ Tallis said, her eyes very watery as she watched the stern woman. Margaret Keeton slowly scraped butter from the solid lump, but her eyes lingered on her daughter’s sad face.

‘When did he speak to you?’

‘Last night. He called to me. I called back. He said he had lost me for ever, and I called back that I was close and would come and find him. He sounded very lonely, very frightened … I think he’s lost in the wood, and making contact with me …’

‘Making contact how?’

‘Through the ways of the wood,’ Tallis mumbled.

‘What ways of the wood?’

‘Dreams. And feelings.’ She was hesitant to talk about the masked women and the clear and vivid visions, she occasionally received. ‘And in stories. There are clues in the stories I make up. Granddad understood,’ she added as an afterthought.

‘Did he, indeed. Well I don’t. All I understand is that Harry went away, to do something very dangerous … he never told us what … and he never came back again, and that was years ago. Your father thinks he’s dead and I agree. Do you seriously believe that if he were still alive he wouldn’t have sent a letter to us?’

Tallis stared at her mother. How could she tell the woman what was on her mind? That Harry was not in England, probably not in the world as anyone understood the world … he was beyond the world. He was in the forbidden place, and he needed help. He had made contact in some magical, unimaginable way, and that contact had been with his half-sister … there were no letter boxes in the otherworld. In heaven …

‘I didn’t dream it,’ Tallis said. ‘He really did call to me.’

Her mother shrugged, then smiled. She placed the butter knife on its plate and leaned down towards her daughter. After a moment she shook her head. ‘You’re an odd one and no mistaking. But I don’t know what I’d do without you. Give me a hug.’

Tallis obliged. Her mother’s embrace was uncertain at first, then became more urgent. Her hair, below the scarf, smelled of shampoo.

Drawing back slightly, Margaret kissed her daughter’s upturned nose; then she smiled.

‘Do you really remember me rowing with Harry?’

‘I don’t remember what about,’ Tallis whispered. ‘But I always thought he made you angry.’

Her mother nodded. ‘He did. But I can’t explain it. You were very young. I had a difficult time with you. When you were born, I mean. It upset me for a long time afterwards. I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t anybody else of course,’ she smiled at the slight joke, and Tallis smiled too. ‘But I lost something …’

‘A marble?’

‘A marble,’ her mother agreed. ‘Or perhaps two. I was very angry. I can’t remember how it felt, now, but I can see myself – as if I was outside myself. I was very unreasonable. And Harry … well, with his talk of ghosts, and lost lands, he just managed to rub me up the wrong way –’

Harry had known too!

‘– And Jim … Daddy … always took his side. And why not, indeed? He was his father. Harry was the first born. When Harry went away, when he disappeared like that, I felt so upset about it that I found my marbles again.’

She leaned down once more and gave Tallis an affectionate squeeze. Tallis saw the moisture in her mother’s eyes, and the drip on the end of her nose.

‘Unfortunately,’ Margaret Keeton whispered, ‘at the same time your father lost one or two of his.’

‘I remember that too,’ Tallis said. Then brightly, ‘But you’re happy now …’

But her mother shook her head, then wiped her eyes with her knuckles. She smiled, picked up the butter knife and began to work at the pat from the fridge.

‘One day,’ she said. ‘One day it will come right again. We are both happy. And we are especially happy with you. And if you want to go and look for Harry in the woods, then please do. Just don’t talk to strangers. Don’t go near the water. And if you hear people talking, either run away or hide. And be back here before tea-time every day or it’ll be you, young madam …’ She waved the knife in mock warning. ‘It’ll be you who will be calling for help!’

‘And if I bring Harry home?’

Her mother smiled, then crossed her heart. ‘No more rows,’ she said. ‘On my word of honour.’

* * *

It was a particularly unpleasant visit to Aunt May and Uncle Edward. Uncle Edward had discovered a brown cigarette paper which, he told them at great length, improved immeasurably the taste of the rough tobacco that he could afford. He and James Keeton had sat and smoked for over an hour. The small parlour had become heavy and thick with the aroma.

In the car going home Tallis heard her father say that he couldn’t stand this annual visit. He complained in exactly the terms that Tallis herself might have complained.

But it was a duty done.

At home again, Tallis asked for an hour to play. ‘Are you going out to find Harry?’ her father enquired with a smile. She had told him about the encounter with Harry the night before, and he had explored the alley with her and made his own chalk mark on the brick wall, a little encouragement for Harry to communicate again.

Tallis realized that he wasn’t taking her fully seriously.

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to wait for the proper time.’

‘Well … don’t go too far. And keep your eyes open.’

‘I’m going up to Morndun Ridge. Perhaps Harry will contact me there.’

‘Where in the name of God is Morndun Ridge?’ Keeton asked, frowning.

‘Barrow Hill,’ Tallis explained.

‘You mean the earthworks?’

‘Yes.’

‘That field belongs to Judd Pott’nfer, and I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes if he catches you chasing his sheep.’

Tallis watched her father very hard, very angrily. When her stare, and her silence, made him look uncomfortable she announced with great control, ‘I have better things to do than chase sheep.’

* * *

It was a lovely evening, cool and clear, just beginning to fall towards dusk. Evensong was being tolled from the church at Shadoxhurst, the sound of the bell a faint and pleasant chime on the summer’s air. Tallis went down to the Wyndbrook, Hunter’s Brook, and moved slowly among the trees. She wondered whether she should take a chance and cross the unnamed field to Ryhope Wood. She longed to visit the ruined house again and she was often strongly tempted to risk that visit. But against that thought was the feeling that the house was something … something not of her. Whereas Morndun Ridge, like the alley, like Windy Cave Meadow, was a place of her own creation.

She had already concluded – during that interminably boring afternoon in the Gloucester suburbs – that the places which would be of importance to her were those places that she had made into her camps. Her interest in the ruined house in the wood was twofold: first, that it was the place from which Harry might have ventured into the otherworld, into Old Forbidden Place. And secondly, that it was the place where two men had studied the ‘mythagos’ of the forest. They had kept a record of them, according to her grandfather – and perhaps her vision too – and that record, that journal, might still be there. Clues, anyway, as to who and what these mythagos were. They had fascinated her grandfather, and her grandfather had passed on that fascination to Tallis.

She and he were two of a kind. She was his girl. That was a fact, firm and hard. Everybody knew it. What had begun for her grandfather was continuing for her; they shared a purpose. And although that purpose could not involve the search for her brother Harry – Grandfather Owen had died before Harry had disappeared for the second and final time – they were sharing a common experience. Tallis was now convinced that this experience was designed to show them the way into the strange wood, into the unnamed but forbidden place that had snared her brother and which seemed to exist within the same space as the world of Shadoxhurst, but could not be seen.

This evening, in the hope that Harry would call again, she made her way towards her camp on Morndun Ridge. But when she arrived at the Wyndbrook she crouched among the trees opposite Knowe Field, listening to the sounds of the water as she watched something that delighted the innocence in her: two fawns drinking from the still pool where the stream widened.

They were beautiful creatures, one slightly smaller than the other. When Tallis dropped into position, hiding behind a fallen tree to watch the animals, the taller and more nervous of the two perked up and stamped its feet. Its ears were pricked, its huge, dark eyes bright and alert. As its companion continued to drink, this more canny animal began to trot along the stream’s bank, then stopped and listened. Beyond them, the field stretched up to the ridge beside the wooded earthworks. The sky was a fabulous, evening blue as the sun began to set. Tallis could see dark birds walking along the bare part of the ridge, pecking at the ground. The evening was so clear that she felt she could see every detail of their bodies.

Below them, the deer had both reacted to a sound, even though Tallis had been stiff and silent.

Are you the children of my Broken Boy, she asked silently? Is he close by? Are you creatures from the storybooks and not of this world at all?

In that place, the stream among the summer trees, it was easy to forget that these simple creatures were part of the herd that grazed the edge-woods on the Ryhope estate. They could have come from any place in any time, from the fairylands of old, from the earth before humankind, from the dreams of a young girl who was now finding, in their dun-coloured bodies, a beauty that went beyond the animal in them, into the realm of the magic that they countenanced.

To Tallis’s left, a twig snapped. The air was split by the hissing sound of a stone, or a missile, some object thrown with great force.

She was overwhelmed by the suddenness of events.

Her attention, distracted for that moment, failed to locate the source of the sound; a second later, when she looked back at the stream, it was to witness the agony of the taller, more cautious fawn, as it kicked in the air. It was half in, half out of the stream, struggling to stand again from the water. An arrow had pierced its eye and cracked through the back of its skull, forming an ugly and terrifying blemish on its screaming beauty.

The animal made the sound of a child, crying out for its parents. Its companion had already bolted. Tallis noticed its sleek shape moving among the trees, further along the stream. She felt instantly sick. The blood that poured from the wound in the deer below her had begun to swirl in the crystal water. It staggered to its feet, then collapsed on to its forelegs, as if kneeling in honour of some icon. It turned its head slightly and its tongue appeared, touching the water into which it slowly and gracefully subsided.

Tallis was about to run from her hiding place, to go to the dead animal, when a part of the woodland floor before her rose, straightened, stretched out to become, to her astonished eyes, the full figure of a man wearing the skin of a stag.

He had been crouching within her field of vision all the time and she had not noticed him. No doubt it was he who had shot the arrow and that too she had failed to see, but he was carrying a bow that was stretched and already had a second arrow nocked and ready. Indeed, as Tallis saw him, she gasped …

And instantly he had turned, staring at her through the flapping mask of the stag’s facial hide that covered his own face.

Tallis felt wind on her cheek. When she ducked and looked round she saw the arrow quivering in the tree behind her, its flights cut from white feathers, its shaft painted in green and red stripes.

The man watched the place where she crouched. When she lifted her head slightly he saw her, held up a hand, fingers spread. It was a small hand, delicate fingers. In the instant before he turned to run to the stream Tallis formed the impression that he was young and unlikely to attack her further. His head and shoulders were covered by the stag’s hide, and the antlers had been cut down to two stubby projections. He had watched her through the dead holes of the eyes, but the eyes of the man had been bright, catching the sun’s dying light. His legs had been clad in hide boots, reaching to the knee and tied with crossed leather. A sheathed knife was strapped to the outside of his right leg.

These head and lower leg coverings apart, he was quite naked. His body was slender, tautly muscled, very pale. It contrasted astonishingly with the body of her father, who was the only other man whom Tallis had seen naked. Where her father was darkly haired, heavily built, large in stomach and leg, this strange apparition was in all ways slighter and lighter; a boy, perhaps and yet the contours of his body were the contours of a man, the lines that defined the muscles held hard, the mark of an athlete.

All of these thoughts, all of the sensations, were contained within a moment.

The stag-youth was upon the fallen fawn, dismembering it, slitting its belly so that the streaming entrails, glistening purple sludge, drained from the corpse into the water.

A knife cut, then a second, and the mass of guts had fallen away. The stag-youth slung the body across his shoulders and picked up his bow. He ran along the stream, bent low, and disappeared into the concealing darkness of the woods further along the Wyndbrook.

For a while there was a stunned, uncanny silence. Tallis watched the stained water. She kept thinking: Hunter’s Brook. I named it years ago. I named it for this very moment …

Then she saw the movement of the smaller fawn as it came back to the place of death and quickly sniffed the air.

Tallis stood. The animal saw her and bolted, gambolling away from the steam, up the field to the stark ridge where the carrion birds pecked for worms. Tallis followed it, wading across the stream and calling to the creature.

‘It wasn’t me! Wait! If you’re Broken Boy’s I want to be able to give you my scent! Wait!’

She ran up the hill stumbling and grabbing at the tight grass. The fawn vanished over the ridge, bob tail high, hind legs kicking in sadness and determined escape.

Tallis did not give up the pursuit. She was almost at the top of the field, where it flattened out before dropping towards Ryhope.

She could see the line of the land, hard against the glare of the blue-grey sky behind.

A black spread of enormous wings rose suddenly against that sky. Tallis gasped and dropped to her knees, her heard pounding.

They were not wings. They were antlers, a broad and terrifying sweep of dark and ancient horn. The huge beast stepped on to the horizon and stared down at her, its forelegs braced apart, the breath pouring from its flaring nostrils. Tallis could not take her eyes from those antlers: immense, horizontal bone blades, ten times wider than a red deer’s: like scimitars, curved up at the ends, hooked and pointed along their length.

The Great Elk towered above the land, higher than a house, its eyes larger than rocks, its whole shape fantastic, unreal …

As Tallis watched, so its features blurred, changed. It had been a vision; the vision faded and a real view of the great hart replaced it. Yes. This was Broken Boy. The cracked tine showed clearly against the grey sky; its antlers, perennial, unreal, were broad, but that abominable hugeness of a moment before had gone away and this was the strange beast, the undead stag, facing her down the hill. Watching her. And perhaps wondering whether it should charge and kick, or butt, or impale, or leave her for the innocent she was.

Yet it could smell the sour smell of guts and blood, and its offspring was dead. Tallis knew that it knew. Her face blanched with fear. It looked beyond her, to the wooded stream. Perhaps it saw the ghost of its child. Perhaps it was waiting for the spoor of the killer. Perhaps it was waiting for the smell of the fire smoke, and the fire flesh, the flesh consumed, its ghost-born eaten by the hunter with the stag fur.

‘It wasn’t me,’ Tallis whispered. ‘I had nothing to do with it. I love you, Broken Boy. I was named for you. I need to mark you. Before I can go for Harry, I need to mark you. But I don’t know how …’

She stood up and walked towards the beast. It let her approach to within an arm’s length, then it threw back its head and roared. The sound made Tallis scream. She stepped back, tripped, and fell to the ground. Looking up, braced on her elbows, she watched Broken Boy pace, limping, down towards her, straddle her, tossing its head so that the black rags of skin, hanging from its antlers, flapped on the bone.

The stink of its body was sickening; it was a corpse; it was dung; it was the wood; it was the underworld. The air was heavy with its stench and liquid dribbled from its maw as it looked down, snorting, sensing, thinking …

Tallis lay below its legs and felt suddenly at peace. She relaxed her body, lay back on the earth, arms by her sides, staring up at the silhouette of the stag against the evening sky. Her body hummed with sensation. She thrilled in her chest, in her stomach. The stag’s saliva caressed her face. Its eyes gleamed as it blinked and stooped closer, to peer at this, its namesake, its fancy …

‘It wasn’t me,’ Tallis whispered again. ‘There is a hunter in the woods. Beware of him. He will kill your other ghost-born …’

Such an odd expression. And yet, when she said the words, they sounded right, She might have had them in her mind for all of her life. Broken Boy’s ghost-born. Yes. His ghost-born. Mothered among the herds that roamed the Ryhope Estate; fathered from the underworld: but solid flesh and blood, and good to eat for the hunter who had come to the land.

‘I will find him and stop him,’ Tallis said as the stag loomed above, silent, watching …

‘I will kill him …’

The stag raised its head. It looked towards the dark wood that was its true home, and Tallis reached out a hand to touch the mud-matted hide of its hoof. It raised its leg and shook off the touch, then backed away, an oddly ungainly motion.

Tallis sat up, then stood. Her clothes were wet; the wetness on her face cooled as it dried. The smells in her nostrils became marked upon her. She adored them.

Broken Boy turned and cantered awkwardly to the ridge above the field. Tallis watched its tall, sinuous body as it walked a few paces to the west, towards the fading sun. The broken tine was a gap on its great head and she thought guiltily of the fragment that lay at home, hidden in her parents’ chest of treasures, part of the remembered childhood of their own precious offspring.

‘I can’t replace it,’ Tallis called. ‘If it hasn’t grown back then it wasn’t meant to grow back. What can I do? I can’t stick it back on. It’s mine, now. The tine belongs to me. You can’t be angry. Please don’t be angry.’

Broken Boy roared. The sound carried across the land. It drowned the sombre tone of the Shadoxhurst bell. It marked the end of the encounter.

The stag walked out of sight across the hill.

Tallis did not follow. Rather, she stood for a while, and only when darkness made the woods fade to black did she turn for home again.