Avilion (Mythago Wood 7) Read Free

looked up and the older one, Eddie, asked, ‘What is it?’
    ‘It’s what we call a daurbrak.’
    ‘What’s it for?’
    ‘It’s a shield. It keeps a Green Man away if he comes at you. You put it in your mouth with the twigs pointing down. It confuses him. They’re called daurog. He doesn’t have very good eyesight, you see?’
    With a wave and a twinkle in his eye, Jack Huxley turned away and began walking briskly round the edge of Ryhope Wood. Looking back after a few seconds he called out, ‘There is a house here, you know. It’s just that you boys can’t see it.’

Oak Lodge
    The two boys had been right. No house stood outside the dense edge of trees. But Jack was an insider. He had lived all his life in the heart of Ryhope Wood, very far indeed from the sight and understanding of the people who lived outside. Now he searched the shadows of this forgotten forest, peering with expert eyes into the gloom, seeking form that was alien to the tangle of trunk and branch. Soon he saw it: a perpendicular wall of brick, forty paces or so in.
    Jack noticed something else. Where he stood, the earth was recently healed. He stabbed at the grass with his toe, drew his foot along the ground. There had been roots here - he could feel their echo. Until recently this had been on the line of the edge, twenty paces from where it brooded now.
    The wood was shrinking, drawing in her skirts.
    It was a strange thought, an unexpected one. Oak Lodge had once been even more thoroughly consumed, it seemed, but was now being given back to the land.
    He would have to ponder this later. Now he merged with the undergrowth, the part of him that was human giving way again to that part of him that had been generated in the womb of the forest. The part of him that was mythago: born of the wood. Wood haunter, as the boys had referred to it. The reference had startled him. Haunter was how he himself thought of the mythago side of his life - the green side, as his sister Yssobel called it, not the red-blood side.
    From the overgrown garden, in the embrace of oak and ash, through the tangle of briar and creeper, Jack peered at the tall house, with her three ivy-shrouded chimneys, her shattered windows, her grey brick walls. For a moment he thought he could hear the echoes of children running and laughing, the shouts of a mother to slow down and do something constructive, the grumble of a father’s voice complaining about the noise when he was trying to work.
    The house, in silence, was vibrant with imagined life. The echo passed away.
    Jack picked his way to the back door, which now leaned heavily off its hinges and was rotten. Pushing into the building through the kitchen, he was surprised to find that far from the musty, tree-invaded rooms that he had expected, the interior of the house was almost as if it had only just been locked up and left empty. The air was fresh and warm. There was nothing faded here, though the light was gloomy.
    How long had it been like this, he wondered? How long since the last occupant had crossed the garden towards the wood and disappeared inwards for all of time?
    This place would be his base. All his life he had longed to see the outer world, the world of his family’s origins, spreading away from Oak Lodge in a wide arc, over hills and along roads. The excitement he felt was intense, but he suppressed it for the moment.
    He would be especially intrigued to see the study. He had tried to imagine, whilst in the heartwood, what this grove of learning and understanding had been like. He had seen many sacred enclosures as he and Yssobel and his father explored the wood around their home: the remnants of ‘enchanter caves’, sanctuaries devoted to certain mysteries, and, in some of the more civilised ruins they had come across, a room where scrolls littered the floors or the walls were a confusion of hieroglyphs and signs. Those were places where long-gone minds had sought answers, with chalk or graphite, to the