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GATE OF IVORY, GATE OF HORN

ROBERT HOLDSTOCK

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written. ’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

Contents

Title Page

Gateway Introduction

Contents

Part One: In the Valley of the Crow

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Part Two: The Forlorn Hope

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Part Three: Legion of the Lost

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Part Four: The End of Wandering

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Coda

Afterword: Imaging the world of myth

Website

Also by Robert Holdstock

Acknowledgments

Dedication

About the Author

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams;

Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

W. B. Yeats, from Fergus and the Druid

… there are two gates through which dreams reach us.

Those that come through the Ivory Gate cheat us with empty promises

that never see fulfilment. Those that issue from the Gate of Horn

inform the dreamer of the Truth.

Homer, from The Odyssey, Book XIX

PART ONE

In the Valley of the Crow

Prologue

This morning, when I opened my eyes and saw the spring sky above me as I lay in the shallow boat, I realised that my long journey from the heart of the forest was over, and that I had come home again.

Oak Lodge was there, across the meadow, empty and silent. And yet I could not step through the trees and go to the house, as if the wood, so difficult to enter from the outside except along the brook, was now reluctant to let me go. So for a while I walked back into that consuming gloom, following an old track and coming after an hour or so to the clearing my father had called the ‘Horse Shrine’, after the crumbling, ivy-covered statue of the animal that stood in that place, a wooden shield propped between its forelegs.

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