Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) by Robert Holdstock Read Free Book Online

their passage from the heartwood. I hear the oars dipping, and the rustle of the sedges when it comes to the bank. I hear the murmur of voices, and on occasion the breathing of horses. The ghosts, which are invisible to me, follow the path by your farm, then up to the church and over the hill. The boat returns to the dark wood, after which there will often be nothing for months.
    ‘Over the lake is the heart of Broceliande but it is an older forest than the forest behind us. It doesn’t belong here.
    ‘My circle of land ends as far out onto the lake as I need to go to spear pike, perhaps twenty yards. I would never dare go further.’
    *
    I had lived in the wood for ten years before I found the lake or perhaps I should say before the
lake
found
me
. There was no sign of it when I first came here. I had probably walked across its edge fifty times since I first circumscribed my land. It had hidden from me, or
been
hidden from me, but one bitter winter morning I heard the sound of moorhens and gently splashing water. I was curious, aware that there should have been a grove of trees there. I pushed through the dense holly to find the lake very much as you see it now. It was covered with ice, though, almost to the edge itself, where the rushes were white with frost.
    This was the second event that convinced me of a source of magic at work, deeper in the forest. I’d already seen the strange behaviour of you children, at night on the path, your clear belief in ghosts and your parents’ reluctance to contradict you. More than that, when hunting deep in the wood I had occasionally heard the sound of a man crying out. The wailing came from a great distance, and quite soon I realised that the distance was further than I’d thought, since I discovered I could also hear the whispered words of children from a mile away. That crying voice haunted me, though. It drifted through the glades, seemed to flow down the paths through the wood, and was usually followed by a woman’s voice, laughing.
    So when this lake miraculously appeared, one morning, I could no longer deny that I’d stumbled into a placewhich, to put it mildly, was quite out of the ordinary. The strange way of speaking among the farmers and villagers now became more important. The traditions, the rituals that I had watched from the edgewood, all had seemed eccentric, perhaps just local habit; now they seemed to echo an older thought: the fires you put at the head of each grave, the procession of the twelve trees, the drowning of grass images, with the hair-filled puppet of a child inside … They’d never been sinister, but now they became more meaningful, although I’ve never really understood that meaning.
    I wasn’t aware, when all this was happening, of the association of Merlin with this forest. I hadn’t read Tennyson or Chrétien de Troyes, knew nothing of Thomas Mallory, or the
Vitae Merlinis
, or the other sources. The priest talked to me about all of them. He lent me books. But before that education I only knew that there was a vision of magic, somewhere across the lake, and that it was seeping from the forest, shrouded in the ghostly forms of the people on the path, and in that terrible moaning.
    You know how the seasons bring different scents, different feelings in the air? So it was with the wailing voice, as if there was a season for the agony, a certain day for the distress, an hour, just after dusk, when the moment of true desperation could be remembered and the air of the forest filled with the cry.
    On one such evening, when the pain of that voice had gone, I crept from my hunting lodge again and heard the wildwood speak, an odd echo, like a girl’s voice, but curiously slow. It seemed to breathe a word. I wasn’tsure, but I thought the word was ‘Fool’, and moments later the word was repeated. ‘Fool!’
    I waited, fascinated, and soon a girl from the village came running and twirling along the path. I knew her by sight, though she had never