Read Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) for Free Online Page A

since coming here,’ – he sounded wry – ‘Sometimes your fantasies amused me, sometimes – not often – they made me sad. I was a long way from my first home, and harmless to everything inedible, which included children—’
    ‘Ah yes, but we didn’t think so.’
    ‘All except Rebecca, your special friend Rebecca.’ Conrad winked. ‘
She
wasn’t afraid of me. Anyway, I would watch you children chasing the ghosts from the forest as they walked the path. I couldn’t see them, of course, no adult could. But I could hear them. It was an extraordinary experience. It still is. Which is chiefly why I came to see you. There’s something I want to show you …’
    ‘Shall I wake Rebecca?’
    The old man glanced back. ‘No. This is for you alone.’
    Conrad might always have been a part of Broceliande. He was as eternal, as familiar, indeed as elusive, usually, as the strange ruins that could be found just inside the forest’s skirts. But he had not been born here, nor come into existence here. In his own words, ‘There comes a moment in every person’s life, I now realise, when as they are marching forward they become aware that in fact they are running away. At that moment, home iswhere you are standing, and this place, this gloomy edgewood, became my second home.’
    His army column had been marching past Broceliande. Conrad was sixteen, not particularly frightened, not particularly lonely. He was just a soldier in a column, moving forward towards the coast. There were not enough trucks to transport all the troops, in those early winter months of 1944, and so like Caesar’s legions they tramped the rough roads to the west, sometimes aware that a watery sun was leading them on.
    ‘But I had no faith, no real belief. My father had always talked of duty, and of family, but his words, sincere though they were, were of no comfort to me. I wonder sometimes if there can be any greater pain than realising that you are no longer part of a family that once was your whole life.
    ‘As we marched past Broceliande my First Home broke into shattered memories. Everything simply fell apart. I hated where I had come from. I loathed that savage war. I despised the principles that drove it. I was not alone in this, of course, but the forest took me and me alone.
    ‘I deserted quickly. I used a strip of oilskin to wrap my weapons and bury them; the rifle was a bolt-action Lee Enfield, more like twenty pounds in weight than nine, or so it seemed, and I was glad of the freedom from this burden.
    ‘That first day, I walked a wide circle, walking to the limit of what I felt I needed. That circle, I discovered later, was more than two miles across.’
    This disc of land had become Conrad’s Second Home.He walked its circumference five times, first entering the dark forest, then emerging and skirting the villages, crossing the fields and the farmlands before entering the woods again. All of this was done at night because he was in fear of his life, now, and his uniform would certainly have been an invitation to murder.
    In all the long years since then he had never once stepped outside the circle, as he had defined it during those February days. ‘I belong here. I made it right that I belonged here. I became accepted, eventually welcomed. I don’t belong across the circle, but I’ve lived long enough, and circled hard enough, to make this small land
my
land. My home.’
    Now Conrad led the way into that small land and into the forest, following a wide, winding path that was tall with wet, webbed grass and purple thistle. He stopped occasionally to listen. The air was moist, almost stifling.
    His first house was a shack constructed out of corrugated iron, wooden panels and old doors. It was covered with black oilskins. Around it, on a picket fence, hung thirty or so carcases of grey squirrels, in various states of decomposition. Two foxes’ heads on poles were a grim reminder of Conrad’s main usefulness to the farms around the