Earlier this week, Dan Coxon joined us to tell us all about the latest anthology he’s been working on; a collection of short stories set in the world of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, HEARTWOOD: A MYTHAGO ANTHOLOGY.

Today, we’re thrilled to be able to share an excerpt from the upcoming collection – from Adrian Tchaikovsky’s contribution Paved with Gold. Before we dive into that, though, here’s the official blurb:

As the pre-mythagos in each of our heads will naturally vary according to our experience, so the wood would manifest differently were new people to spend time among its trees. What then might we see?
Commemorating the 40th anniversary of Robert Holdstock’s seminal fantasy novel Mythago Wood (winner of the World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award), Heartwood for the first time opens Holdstock’s world to other writers. From new tales of Ryhope and Oak Lodge to strange encounters with mythagos further afield, this groundbreaking anthology revisits the old pathways and cuts new tracks through the undergrowth, drawing ever closer to the mysteries of Lavondyss—the Old Forbidden Place at the heart of the wood.

Heartwood: A Mythago Anthology  is due for release this month – you can pre-order your copy from PS Publishing

Paved with Gold (extract)

Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Omar,” said Sid on the ninth day, “it isn’t working.”

It hadn’t stopped raining all the time we’d been in the wood. By then there was just Sid and Helen and me. Everyone else had squelched off, the long backpack-laden walk to the dilapidated branch line station where two trains a day would get you to Basingstoke. The diametric opposite of where we’d been trying to get to.

In. Inwards. That dream place, our shared goal. But we’d had barely a sniff of it. Sid claimed he’d seen some activity. Some of the pre-formation visual distortions. It wasn’t us he was trying to convince, though. It was himself.

We packed up our sodden tents, ankle-deep in mud. There had been eight of us, and only we three had lasted. If we’d achieved anything, that would make us the stoic faithful. But we hadn’t and so we were just suckers.

We stopped by a pub on our way to the station. The landlord made us sit in the smoking area because it was that or leave an inch-thick layer of leaf mould across his nice floor.

“The wood’s not old enough,” said Helen. “There’s no continuity.”

Sid stared into his pint.

“I’m going to try that place in Scotland,” she said. “Where they reintroduced the wolves. Only I heard that they didn’t. It’s wolves from the deep wood, come out again.” The tremor in her voice was that of the fanatical believer.

“Sid?” she prompted, and he shook his head.

“Got to sign on, Tuesday, haven’t I?” he said mournfully. And then: “This is it, for me. Eight bloody years. Not a sniff. I can’t kid myself anymore.”

We expostulated and cajoled, but he just sank deeper into his pint and his bleak mood. He couldn’t afford the train fares and the camping gear. He wanted to reconnect with his kids. He didn’t believe. It came out at last. Sid had been a New Ager and a Wiccan and a lot of other things in his quest for meaning. The wood, the search for the deep mythscapes, had just been one more failed religion.

He went home. We all did. Maybe Helen went to Scotland. I never saw either of them again, but Sid did call.

That came three weeks later, just as I was finishing a run on a building site. My phone buzzed at an hour to midnight, when I had a five in the morning start. 

Sid’s hoarse, low voice: “You remember Monica?”

“Sid—”

“No, listen mate. She called. She’s got a prospect.” 

I wanted to tell him I wasn’t interested. Or tell him he was right. It was nonsense. Years of sneaking onto private land, camping out, getting arrested for trespass. And for what?

For a chance at the numinous. For a connection with something, in a world increasingly devoid of it. Something more than reality TV and social media. For that, we suffered discomfort and ridicule.

“She asked for you,” Sid told me. “A new approach, she says. Probably it’s nothing.” And, deep in his voice, the jag of regret, that his faith had rusted. That he’d decided he didn’t believe.

I didn’t turn up on site the next morning. I went to meet Monica instead.

We met in a poky little coffee place in Spitalfields. Not odd in itself. London made itself easy to get to; you had to meet somewhere. When my bus pulled up I was already expecting a proposed expedition to some place out in the country that I’d not be able to reach, a demand to bring kit I didn’t have, to make a contribution I couldn’t afford. There are two types of questors in my experience. Most of us are people like Sid and me. People who’ve got little to nothing, edged out by the world. People who want to travel in because there’s nothing out here. There are still a few of the old sort, though, gentlefolk of leisure dabbling in the sciences. H was like that, from what I’d read in those shoddy photocopies of his journals. H, with his old house next to the old wood. It was all just there for him. The disaffected academic and his sons, born to the myth-life. But that elder generation of questors had faded away as the academic landscape shifted towards more business-focused goals. Monica was one of the few of that breed I’d ever talked with, an Oxbridge monomaniac who’d talk your ear off about the theory of it all as if anybody really knew. 

I expected she’d say that we needed to go to some stretch of woods out in North Wales where there were still three old oaks, and could I bring a minivan and a satellite receiver and a pony? Except it wasn’t like that. Not at all. And neither was she. The smartly suited academic I remembered was decidedly more out at the elbows. A few reversals, I thought, maybe a bubble or two invested in. Someone’s family money had dried up. At least she bought the pints. 

For the first half-hour we were cagey with one another. You get like that. Everyone wants to look like the one on the point of breaking through, getting in. We’re such a catalogue of failures otherwise. We talked about the expeditions we’d been on. I tried to seem as though I’d been right on the brink, instead of sodden and miserable and nowhere at all. Probably she was doing the same. We bemoaned the ravaging of the countryside in the name of agriculture and urban expansion, how much land was levelled and butchered for grouse shoots, landscaped estates or golf courses. Then Monica stopped messing about and said, “I got in.”

I didn’t believe her. I wanted to. “Where?” Imaging some antique stretch of trees that had somehow evaded notice.

She held my gaze and said: “Here.”

Not the coffee bar, obviously. But London, she said. Or not even London specifically, but the city.

I scoffed. Because the ancient natural landscape was where we hunted. H’s journal, the gospel text, made that clear.

She pointed out that myths weren’t natural things. They were interactions between the landscape and the human mind. Half the myth-forms H described were younger than London.

“It’s continuity,” she said. “It’s what we don’t have in most of our forests, because everything was felled for charcoal and warships. Because foreign species are better for the timber trade. But the city, it’s been here for two thousand years, interacting with people, forming its own myths. I’ve got a whole reading list for you. Urban researchers who’ve found analogues for everything H ever describes. Because I’ve gone in. Problematically. But in.”

At that point someone sat down at our table. A tall, broad-shouldered man with short fair hair and sharp cheekbones. 

“Sorry I’m late, darling,” he said smoothly, and fixed me with a quizzical look. “This him, then?”

“Rees,” Monica said. “This is Omar. Nomad89 on the boards. He’s been in the rural game for years. You wanted a new perspective. This is him.”

Rees stared as though he was on the point of asking me where I came from and not taking “Bradford” for an answer. Then Monica came back with a new round and he decided he was all charm.

“You’re exactly the chap,” he told me. “You’ve been on the edge of things for a while. Ever seen one? What’s your closest?”

“Four-day hike at the Cumbrae Ridge stones site,” I said. “A Hood form. Not the archer type, but at a stream crossing.”

“Really? You go toe to toe with him? Bit of the old quarterstaff?” And he was scoffing, but honestly he was right to. It had been long ago, and I’d told the tale so often, embellished and built it up so much, that I couldn’t tell you what I’d really seen. 

“What even is this?” I asked. I didn’t like Rees, and I didn’t like the deal. I felt like an Arctic explorer being told that some hipster’s glamping was just as rugged as anything I’d ever done. “City mythscapes?”

“Look,” Rees said, speaking over whatever Monica was about to say. “Goes against the grain, I know. But makes perfect sense. Cities are concentrations of human fears and ambitions, no? You’ve heard of urban myths? Why not urban mythagos?” He laughed at himself genially. “Glib, yes, but they exist. Stationary and mobile forms both. And while you lot have been pitching your tents in every stone circle and stretch of trees from Land’s End to John O’Groats, there’s a whole tradition of urban explorer whose parkour or free-running suddenly landed them all sorts of weird places. They never heard of us and didn’t know what they were seeing. Monica and me, we picked up on it, found their communities and put two and two together. That people have been running into the edge of a deeper urban mythscape forever, just never quite knowing what it was.”

“We never guessed, because of the H manuscript’s emphasis on the wild,” Monica put in. “People forget that cities are wilds, too. Human wilds. Just as complex and haunted and alienating, to an outsider. Omar, I know you’ve been bouncing off the deep woods for years. Not enough old-growth forest left, the landscape ploughed over and managed until the connection to the old is lost. But here in the city the renewal and rebuilding doesn’t erase anything because it’s a part of the city’s own mythscape. How things are supposed to be.”
“But . . .” I couldn’t imagine it. The deep woods made sense to me because they were unseen, untouched. A city was constantly being handled by the modern mind, so surely . . . Then I thought of the year I’d spent on the streets, and how surreal and lonely that had quickly become. How you could be more alone in a city than you ever were in the wilds, surrounded by people but unable to connect.

“We’ve made solid progress,” Rees said. “Mapped out some reliable pathways. There are deeper layers we’ve not been able to access, though. We need a new pair of eyes. What do you say?”

Later, Rees headed off to round up a couple of “the others” because, he assured us, “this was the big one, the main chance.” I finished the pint I’d been nursing, thinking furiously. I didn’t want to believe any of it. But if there was any chance that they were right then I didn’t want to be left behind, either.

Monica hadn’t wanted to fork over her journals for my perusal, but I’d kept on at her until she shared a copy. I read over her jargon and initialled sources in the week before we met up for our expedition. It was a lot to take in, even more to believe, every entry raising only more questions. I puzzled through excerpts such as:

. . . Mincing Lane to Addlefriars Street, but we hit the bounds of the Cathedral and ended up heading back out. Long, covered alley we thought was a path deeper into the underscape, then found modern litter. McDonald’s and Starbucks logos told us we were back on the surface layer. Expanded our map but the street names shift and we can’t connect to existing data points. It’s as H says of the wood. The inner landscape protects itself by subterfuge and misdirection. We must be prepared for more perilous barriers if we persevere . . .

. . . Found another iteration of the Cathedral form, R says from late Medieval, incomplete. Not resembling any actual local church, insofar as we can make out. Idealised version of the Great Project, the thing that people flocked to the city to work on, and that must have dominated a generation’s imagination as it slowly grew to dominate the skyline. Puts me in mind of PC’s “conspiracy of architects” suggestion, about a semi-Masonic past organisation connecting with the mythscape to guide the city’s development. But they are never finished. As though the construction itself outweighs the finished article. After all, a finished church is still there, in the real and the surface layer. It is only this partial stone hulk that recedes into the past and collective memory . . .

The thoroughfare through the old market area has a number of pathways leading away, mostly recursive or outwards. By careful readings—and by smell!—we found what appears to be a reliable inward course by navigating towards indications of livestock. This allowed us to penetrate into what I’ve called the “Rookery” region, a cluttered and threatening myth-space. Individual forms definitely coalesce out of the Murmur here. Molly Malone-style child pedlar glimpsed, and there was no mistaking the sinister figure that followed us for the last hour of our increasingly hurried journey, before the streets turned us around once more. A silhouette with tall hat, cane and cloak . . .

Penetrating the second-order mythscape using the water ingress BA proposed made us complacent. Fowler no longer with us. She had expressed the intention to seek out one of the “wild streets” that CM hypothesised, claiming they might carry one deeper without “wearing out our shoes” as she put it. The Ripper ambushed us as we found what seemed a promising ingress by way of the recurring theatre form. In scattering, R and I ended up heading outwards again, and found no way to re-enter the deeper levels. I have been watching the message boards for word but so far nothing. Unsure if Fowler is still in or has met a more permanent fate.

“So what happened to Fowler?” I asked Monica, when we met up the next week for our expedition. A rainy Monday morning, pre-dawn, with a district of theatres and tourist-tat emporia just a street away.

She shrugged. Fowler had never reported back, and the H journals had plenty of evidence that hostile mythagos could kill you. 

“The ‘Ripper’?”

Another shrug. “Or Spring-Heeled Jack. Or Sweeney Todd. The city generates a lot of malevolent myth-forms. Or one with many faces. The killer in the alley, out of the shadows.”

I tried a joke. “You reckon if you caught him you’d know who the real Jack was?”

Not a smile. “No more than you’d know who the real Robin Hood was from one of that class of mythago. Honestly, the “Ripper” doesn’t even cause a spike in the murder rate. Just the papers scaring a story up and then some fake letter a nut-job sends in, and hey presto, a new version of the old myth about how your neighbour who you don’t know could be a monster. There never was a Ripper, but that doesn’t mean the mythago isn’t out there.”

Heartwood: A Mythago Anthology  is due for release this month – you can pre-order your copy from PS Publishing

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Matter of Albion – Michael Moorcock

Editor’s Note – Dan Coxon

A Mythago Wood Glossary