Avilion (Mythago Wood 7) Read Free Page A

secrets of whatever aspect of life, the stars or nature had obsessed them.
    These were his father’s words, more or less, but they had fired Jack’s young mind. Answers, yes. But what questions to ask?
    Finally only two remained: what is the outer world like? How do I get there?
    He was here now. He stepped tentatively into the enchanter’s cave and looked around. Cracked and shattered glass-fronted cases of weapons, tools, exquisitely patterned bowls and fired-clay beakers lined one wall. Clusters of spears, rusting swords and wooden weapons were stacked in the corners. Several shields, oval and bright with design, were hanging from hooks on another wall. Skin clothing, cloaks, long colourful tunics and bone armour were piled in a tangled and musty mass in a recess by the chimney breast. Huxley’s office was a cramped museum, filled with the chill of survival, the rage of territory, the warrior, the hunter, the clay-shaper, the little songs of life: a wardrobe of the past.
    Jack smiled. He was more than familiar with many of these exhibits, if not these exact ones. For all of his short life he had encountered weapons, domestic items and clothing very similar to these fragments collected by his grandfather. And he had seen them used.
    A broad, heavy desk and chair were at the centre of the room and Jack imagined the man working there, bent over his journal, obsessed with the terrors and wonders to be found within the edge of Ryhope Wood.
    Jack’s father had suggested that before he do anything else, should he arrive safely at the ‘old family home’ (said with a laugh), he should go to the main bedroom, where he might find, in a drawer or cupboard if the place had not been ransacked, a photograph of the ‘man’ himself.
    The stairs were creaky and Jack went up slowly, following a sketched map of the house. The ceiling in the bedroom was dull with time, the bed enormous, covered with bedding that was not rotten, but rank and damp. Wardrobes and chests of drawers lined the walls. They were mostly full of clothes, objects wrapped in paper, boxes of implements, and albums. He had opened several of these out of curiosity, recognising his father from the black and white pictures in one album he found, when he glanced up and saw the brooding face of a lightly bearded man, framed on the wall.
    The picture was covered with filthy glass, but the moment he rubbed the dust away he saw an image very like the sketch he carried: broad-chinned, high-browed, eyes narrowed and the skin around them lined, thin lips neither scowling nor smiling.
    And the gaze, though straight, was clearly focused elsewhere. This was a portrait of a man who seemed indifferent to everything around him.
    ‘Hello, George,’ Jack said.
    He stared at the face, stared into its eyes, talked to it, engaged with it, memorised it. There was a moment, as he stood there, when something downstairs shuddered. He realised he was standing above the man’s old study.
    ‘Goodbye, George. Time to try to raise you.’
    Jack went downstairs again, out of the house and across the garden. When he was in the gloom, feeling that familiar and welcome tug of the earth at the soles of his feet, reaching a hand between trees for the comfort of the murmuring he could feel there, he shouted, ‘Grandfather! George!’
    Comfortable though he was with tracks and rivers and open spaces. Jack was equally at home in the tighter, tangled womb-like copses and spinneys that formed so frequently and so suddenly, even though they were often the forming-places of mythagos.
    He repeated his call, perhaps his summons. He waited; and called a third time.
    He decided that that would do for a start.
    Jack went upstairs again, prowling, searching, memorising for his father, and completed his second task before the dusk began to darken the house.
    ‘A book,’ his father had said. ‘There’s a book somewhere in my room, probably in a pile with other books. If it’s still there. The whole house