Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) Read Online Free PDF Page B

and creatures as happened in the dreamtime, but being sung
through
. I can’t describe it.
    The other side is easier: I never had a good voice. I was always gravelly, you remember? The groaning background, Daddy used to say. But suddenly when I sang I seemed to have an effect on people. Whatever I sang, wherever I was, whatever the country.
    I silenced the chief (and his family!) of the Memoragaspeople – the thunder people – out behind the Mann Ranges. They were singing to the sleeping rains and asked me to join in. I was already flowing with them, they seemed to be singing through me, and when I sang it was dizzying, it was like falling, then flying. Suddenly I was the only voice. They were entranced and puzzled, watching me in silence. I seemed to fly among them, and there were so many of them, and the land shifted and changed, the light, the colour, the warmth. I was travelling
through
the song, some silly ditty from childhood, ‘Frère Jacques’ maybe, I’ve now lost the words, I just remember how the world dropped away when I sang, and how my song went through those watching people.
    In the morning I felt hung over, though I hadn’t been drinking. There was so much excitement outside my private space that I got up, quite naked, and peered out.
    Flynn was there, crouching with the chief and looking at water flowing from below their painted rock. There had never been a spring there, now there was new water, very cold, rich in calcium and magnesium – Flynn did the analysis – a new spring, which had come during the night.
    My song, they said, had called the sleeping water to their hunt trail. They were amazed at the new spring. They made me bathe in it. They all wanted to wash me. I sat in the muddy stream for an hour, while I was anointed and sung to, and questioned, and played to with kazoo and bark drum. They put eucalyptus leaves on my head and insisted on daubing me with the image,in yellow ochre, of a gerbil, a creature that seems to find water everywhere. It was their totem creature.
    The only truly embarrassing moment was needing to go to the toilet. Everything that I
didn’t
want, they
valued
, collecting it and burying it below a small stone.
    After that I got frightened. I was singing to people, singing anything, any rubbish, and it was affecting them profoundly. There was a touch of magic in my voice and I had no conception of it, only the knowledge that it worked. Flynn was both apprehensive and loving. He was never exploitative, although we did earn a few meals in the lean times by my singing in small town bars. I think he knew there was a spirit in me, he simply had no idea what it was and had no idea how to use it. We went into the desert for five years, built separate shacks, and entered our own Otherworlds. We’d meet on occasion to eat a ceremonial meal (of whatever we could find, or obtain), and spend a few hours on the mat, but most importantly we talked about our dreams. We’d end each visit by going to the small stream and bathing, then follow our separate lines again.
    That was ten years ago. It was a hard time for me, a time in which I came close to death on several occasions. But with the song in me, this song, this magic, I always came back.
    Then Flynn drowned – a terrible accident. I ran twelve miles to the billabong when I was told the news, and dragged his body from the muddy pool. He’d been dead when he was found, so they’d left him there. He was bloated with water, naked and fat, his skin fishbelly-white. He was quite dead. But I crouched on him andsang to him and the water started to ooze from him, came out of his mouth, his ears, his eyes, nose, out of his pores, his arse, even out of his cock. The water drained from him, a steady sweat, a steady flow in the cold dawn, and soon there was room in his body for the air again. He started to breathe and his body danced below me. The air went in, his eyes opened and stared at me, and I stopped the song.
    If he was frightened