The Bone Forest by Robert Holdstock Page A

firmly buttoned to the throat, despite the humidity, and holding a small wooden shield on the side of his face nearest the disturbance.
    It was maddening to be so lost, and to be so desperate to find a shrine that, over the years, he had found with no difficulty.
    By a stream he washed his face and cleaned his boots, which were heavy with clay from a tree-crowded mire into which he had stumbled. His lungs were tight with pollen and the damp, heavy air. His mouth was foul. His eyes stung with dust, tiny seeds, and the endless slanting, slashing light from above the dense foliage cover.
    The stream was a blessing. He didn't recognize it, although the ruins of a building on its far bank, a building in Norman style, high earth defenses, compact and economic use of stone, reminded him of a place he had seen three years before. He knew from experience that the mythagoscapes changed subtly, and that they could be brought into existence by different minds and therefore with slightly different features. If this building was a corrupting form of the river station—from a story-cycle told in the courts of William Rufus—which he had recorded before, then the Horse Shrine lay behind him.
    He had come too far.
    There was no use in using a compass in this wood. All magnetic poles shifted and changed, and north could be seen to turn a full three hundred and sixty degrees in the stepping of four paces in a straight line. Nor was there any guarantee that the perspective of the wood had not changed; hour by hour the primal landscape altered its relationship with its own internal architecture. It was as if the whole forest was turning, a whirlpool, a spinning galaxy, turning around the voyager, confusing senses, direction and time. And the further inward one journeyed, the more that place laughed, played tricks, like old Drummer Fox, casting a glamour upon the eyes of the naive beholder.
    No. There was no guarantee of anything, here. All Huxley knew was that he was lost. And being lost, yet being comforted by this encounter with the river-station of the piratical
Gylla
, from the eleventh-century story, he felt suddenly confident. He had nothing to use but his judgment. And he had something of great value to lose: his friend of many years standing…
    So he summoned his courage and returned along the trail.
The sound of a horse screaming finally allowed me to locate the shrine, but on arrival at the wide glade I found only desertion and shambles. Something has been here and almost utterly destroyed the place. The monstrous bone effigy of a horse, with its attendant skeletal drivers, is shattered, the bone parts spread throughout the glade and the wood around. They are overgrown, some even moss-covered, as if they have lain like this for many years. Yet I know this place was intact just a few days ago.
    The stone temple remains. There are withered leather sacks inside it, some decayed form of food offering, fragments of clay, two wristlets of carved, yellowing ivory pieces resembling crude equines, and carved, I imagine, from horses' teeth. There is also a fresh painting on the gray stone of the outside of the place, a mark, like no animal or hieroglyph that I have encountered. It is complex, of course symbolic, and utterly meaningless. Depicted in a mixture of charcoal and orange ocher, it is tantalizing. My sketch, over the page, does not do it justice.
    No sign of the horse that screamed.
    Light going, night coming. No sign of Ash, and no movement around. This place is dead. Eerie. I shall make a single foray in a wide circle, then return here for the night.
    He finished writing and packed the book away in his rucksack. With a nervous glance around he entered the dense woodland again, and ducked below the branches, hesitating as he orientated himself, then striking away from the glade by measured paces, constantly stopping and listening.
    He had intended to walk a wide circle, but after a few minutes the abrupt and noisy flight of dark