WOOD-LAND: A NOVEL (EXTRACT)

PART 1

“On the bank of the river he saw a tall tree: from roots to crown one half was aflame and the other green with leaves.”

The Mabinogion

A wise man once wrote that nothing ever begins and that the threads of a story can always be traced back to another tale, but somebody had to be first, didn’t they? Every story must have the proverbial big bang of inception because if it didn’t, then that story is still waiting to be told. Like the one about the old woman who kept a spoonbill in her cupboard. You haven’t heard that one before.

This particular story begins with a single drop of water. A drop of water that was the straw that broke the camel’s back in the reservoir. You wouldn’t have seen it coming because there was no way to single it out from all the other drops of water falling from the sky, but that’s how it happened. The reservoir – the very one the water board had been saying was running low just a few months prior – could hold its nerve no longer. It even had a name: Llyn Trawsfynydd. In English, that translates to ‘The Lake Across The Mountain’, which is about as lazy as you can ever get, but the Welsh liked to call a spade a spade if nothing else.

What wasn’t lazy was the speed at which the water left the mountain. 1.4 billion cubic feet of it to be exact. Within the hour, the gushing water revealed a landscape the world had long forgotten about. Flooded farmlands, dry stone walls, historic farmhouses, antique ploughs and a road network that were all submerged when the valley was damned, came back to life - or at least breathed a sigh of relief.

For its part, the water went wherever it wanted, blasting everything in its path for over 12 miles in all directions. People died. Entire communities were wiped out. Those who didn’t drown immediately, were homeless in seconds. With no time to gather so much as a wallet or a phone, men, women and children, their cats and dogs all found themselves swept away in the tsunami. Some were dumped on roads, some in fields, some had no idea where they were. For some, it was even the furthest they had ever been from home. Death and destruction came on very swift wings to this otherwise quiet community and left no stone unturned.

Later in the day, if you were of a mind, you could have seen helicopters flying around the fields in search of the stranded but from the sky it was hard to see through the debris of sofas, tables, cars, bricks and trees. The rescue mission would last days and the clean up even longer. When night came, it was like a night of hundreds of years ago because there was no power.

It’s funny how things can change in less than heartbeat.

The destruction was reported on the news for days, weeks and locally, for months as the news channels mined every last climate and human tragedy from the event. Fingers were pointed, though nothing ever came of it because nothing ever does.

But some stories went unreported. Truth be told, one story in particular went untold because nobody thought it was important at the time and who knows, maybe it wasn’t. In the grand scheme of things, nobody even knew the story because it was about something insignificant, discovered by somebody nobody took any notice of, in a place nobody ever writes about in the middle of a geography much of the world finds hard to pronounce and, well... every story has to start somewhere.

Betws-y-Coed is as good a place as any for a ground zero.

The village of Betws-y-Coed sits in the Conwy Valley at the confluence of four rivers — the Conwy, the Llugwy, the Lledr, and the Machno. It’s a place defined over centuries by convergence, by water coming together, by the land funnelling things inward. The last time somebody bothered counting, the population was 476, give or take a few who might have been away in the neighbouring village. For those interested in such things, the name roughly translates as “prayer-house of the wood” probably because a long time ago, a Celtic Christian community built a monastery on the site in the late sixth century, thus turning it into a place of worship that predates even its own name. Nobody worships there anymore. Much like the rest of us, they pray for cheaper petrol and food so they an get on with their lives in relative comfort.

The village is also surrounded by a forest. On paper, Gwydir Forest Park is mountain lakes, waterfalls, bluebell trails. In reality, it just made the people that live there feel ‘watched’.

The day after the flood, the only pub in the village - Pont y Pair Inn - was packed with refugees. Money had poured in from the surrounding areas to help. The inn keeper (we’ll call him that because it sounds better than ‘landlord’), Trefor Jones, was more than happy to receive this grand windfall of cash and distribute it (more or less) as food and drink to those who had chosen to make a temporary home there. Whilst the flood hadn’t touched the village due to it being far enough away, it was one of the nearest places that people felt familiar enough with to at least feel close to home.

The rivers that met there had risen for sure – they couldn’t fail not to – but it was barely noticeable as the rivers did their job and took the water elsewhere to be dealt with.

Pont y Pair was more than a pit-stop for weary travellers though. The name was taken from the locale which is a chain of waterfalls and a sixteenth century packhorse bridge called the same. Being as we’ve started explaining as we go along, let’s continue: Pont y Pair translates as ‘Bridge of the Cauldron’. One look at it would tel you why as the River Llugwy foams and gushes beneath it, getting worse with every rain fall.

All of which happened so often, the locals paid scant attention to it and on this particular day when there was more than usual going on in the village nobody stopped to look at it once, never mind twice.

Nobody aside from Cerys Jones, daughter of the inn keeper, who, bored of all the adult talk in her house, had come outside where she felt more at home anyway.

There was little enough to do at the best of times in the village but today was worse than usual. She contented herself on the bridge, throwing sticks into the water she had collected on the way. It was hardly a game of Pooh-Sticks. You threw a stick off the bridge and it simply disappeared to another world never to be seen again.

Usually.

This afternoon, a small pile of wood had gathered on the rocks under the bridge. It had no form but it didn’t look natural either. To Cerys’ eye, it looked like it was something that warranted further investigation no matter how many times she had been told not to go down to the water.

So far as her parents knew, Cerys was a good girl. She had never been reprimanded at school, the villagers liked her, and she helped out around the pub without being asked. For a ten year old, it was more than they could have wished for, especially as an only child. Brown hair, fair complexion and perhaps a little bit on the small side for her age, there was nothing remarkable about her at all, except that if you were to say she was light-fingered in the extreme, it would be quite an understatement.

Under her bed in a number of shoe boxes was all kinds of ephemera. Wallets stripped of their cash, jewellery – none of which was so expensive as to raise an alarm – and the odd watch, sat among her favourite items of a brooch in the design of a diamond butterfly (possibly fake) and an odd torc bracelet with a dragon head at each end.

Right at this very moment though, she was very much in the mood to add a piece of wood to her collection. It just looked ‘interesting’ as she would later recount if anybody ever asked her. There was no traffic today, everybody seemed to be in her house and it had also stopped raining, not that it had been raining hard in the first place. She climbed up onto the wall of the bridge and dropped down on the other side, sure footed as a mountain goat. She wasn’t stupid. If she slipped on the rocks, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time, but there was always a chance it could be your last. Slowly, slowly, she crept down the rocks until she had was almost at the waters edge and the pile of sticks was at her feet.

With her hands on her hips, she simply stood there for a while and looked at them. There were plenty of other sticks down here but this pile was different. Some of them appeared to be joined together. In fact, the closer she looked, the more they all seemed to be joined together, but what a mess to try and make sense of. She poked at it with her foot and some of the wood moved. She kicked it again, a little harder and this time displaced the sticks enough that she could see, buried in the middle of the mess, a more round piece of wood. It wasn’t a perfect globe, more like a mis-shapen football kind of size but it quickly became very interesting indeed.

Was that eyes and a nose she could see? It was. The makings of a mouth too. Which meant only one thing - she was looking at a wooden head. Throwing any caution she might have had into the river, she crouched in front of it and began inspecting the wood. After a few minutes, she stood up having solved the puzzle and announced her discovery out loud.

“Bloody hell. It’s a marionette.”

Not meaning to have said it quite so loud, she glanced around but she was still alone.

What to do now?