Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) by Robert Holdstock Page B

almost at the top of the field, where it flattened out before dropping towards Ryhope.
    She could see the line of the land, hard against the glare of the blue-grey sky behind.
    A black spread of enormous wings rose suddenly against that sky. Tallis gasped and dropped to her knees, her heard pounding.
    They were not wings. They were antlers, a broad and terrifying sweep of dark and ancient horn. The huge beast stepped on to the horizon and stared down at her, its forelegs braced apart, the breath pouring from its flaringnostrils. Tallis could not take her eyes from those antlers: immense, horizontal bone blades, ten times wider than a red deer’s: like scimitars, curved up at the ends, hooked and pointed along their length.
    The Great Elk towered above the land, higher than a house, its eyes larger than rocks, its whole shape fantastic, unreal …
    As Tallis watched, so its features blurred, changed. It had been a vision; the vision faded and a real view of the great hart replaced it. Yes. This was Broken Boy. The cracked tine showed clearly against the grey sky; its antlers, perennial, unreal, were broad, but that abominable hugeness of a moment before had gone away and this was the strange beast, the undead stag, facing her down the hill. Watching her. And perhaps wondering whether it should charge and kick, or butt, or impale, or leave her for the innocent she was.
    Yet it could smell the sour smell of guts and blood, and its offspring was dead. Tallis
knew
that it knew. Her face blanched with fear. It looked beyond her, to the wooded stream. Perhaps it saw the ghost of its child. Perhaps it was waiting for the spoor of the killer. Perhaps it was waiting for the smell of the fire smoke, and the fire flesh, the flesh consumed, its ghost-born eaten by the hunter with the stag fur.
    ‘It wasn’t me,’ Tallis whispered. ‘I had nothing to do with it. I love you, Broken Boy. I was named for you. I need to mark you. Before I can go for Harry, I need to mark you. But I don’t know how …’
    She stood up and walked towards the beast. It let her approach to within an arm’s length, then it threw back its head and roared. The sound made Tallis scream. She stepped back, tripped, and fell to the ground. Looking up, braced on her elbows, she watched Broken Boy pace, limping, down towards her, straddle her, tossing its headso that the black rags of skin, hanging from its antlers, flapped on the bone.
    The stink of its body was sickening; it was a corpse; it was dung; it was the wood; it was the underworld. The air was heavy with its stench and liquid dribbled from its maw as it looked down, snorting, sensing, thinking …
    Tallis lay below its legs and felt suddenly at peace. She relaxed her body, lay back on the earth, arms by her sides, staring up at the silhouette of the stag against the evening sky. Her body hummed with sensation. She thrilled in her chest, in her stomach. The stag’s saliva caressed her face. Its eyes gleamed as it blinked and stooped closer, to peer at this, its namesake, its fancy …
    ‘It wasn’t me,’ Tallis whispered again. ‘There is a hunter in the woods. Beware of him. He will kill your other ghost-born …’
    Such an odd expression. And yet, when she said the words, they sounded right, She might have had them in her mind for all of her life. Broken Boy’s
ghost-born
. Yes. His ghost-born. Mothered among the herds that roamed the Ryhope Estate; fathered from the underworld: but solid flesh and blood, and good to eat for the hunter who had come to the land.
    ‘I will find him and stop him,’ Tallis said as the stag loomed above, silent, watching …
    ‘I will kill him …’
    The stag raised its head. It looked towards the dark wood that was its true home, and Tallis reached out a hand to touch the mud-matted hide of its hoof. It raised its leg and shook off the touch, then backed away, an oddly ungainly motion.
    Tallis sat up, then stood. Her clothes were wet; the wetness on her face