The Broken Kings

by Robert Holdstock

  A wail, then laughter. A clash of bronze on bronze. Shouts and reprovals. Laughter again. I was in a funnel of sound, and I realised I was in a palace; and understanding this, I began to look more closely at the towering effigies that lined the corridor, the armoured gods and robed goddesses, shaped from stone the colour of vibrant copper or the green of tarnished copper. Their heads all stretched forward, some looking down, some to one side or the other, some trying to glimpse the sky beyond the high ceiling.

  At once, I knew where I was.

  This was Medea’s cedarwood-and-green-marble palace, built for her in Iolkos by Jason during the year after they had returned from the Quest of the Golden Fleece.

  “Do you remember me?” a small voice asked from behind me, and I turned quickly, startled. A girl stood there. She had dark eyes, a sly smile, a green cloak wrapped around her body. Raven-black hair, tied into a long elaborate plait, was pinned to her shoulder, before falling free to her waist. “Well?”

  A shiver of memory, but: “No. I don’t. Should I?”

  “You sailed with me, Merlin,” she said with a sly look. “To Colchis. You must remember me. We sailed to Colchis for the fleece. With Jason and his half-human rogues.”

  Again, a shiver of memory. “You mean half-divine.” Most of Jason’s original crew had been summoned from the half world between earth and the heavens.

  The girl laughed. “I mean half-human. The divine half didn’t stink. The divine half didn’t need to wash.” She hesitated. “But a mercenary is a mercenary whether he’s the bastard offspring of a god or not.”

  “They were brave men. That was a dangerous and well-completed quest. We captured what we sought.”

  She laughed sourly. “And you eat too many lotuses.”

  “Who are you?”

  She put a finger to her lips. “You were very quiet, taking your turns at the oar, hunting, watching, listening, gathering. Did you think I didn’t know you? Did you think I didn’t know who you were … or rather … what you are?”

  “Who are you?”

  She smiled and reached out to take my hand. “A clue: a wild hag was there before me, something out of the mountains of an island to the south of Greek Land. A goddess of the Wild. It took some doing, I can tell you, to arrange for her undoing, to send her back to where she belonged. Jason managed that! Before her? A nymph. Before the nymph? Another screeching guardian, from the mountains in the east. Baabla. She was more eagle than woman. Her home was an eyrie on top of a tower that had tried to reach for the stars. Come on, Merlin. You must recognize me now.”

  I acknowledged that I did. “Yes. Athena. Our guardian on Argo.”

  She slowly clapped her hands together three times, the mocking sound. “Well done. Though sometimes it was my mother, Hera, who smiled down at you.”

  “But you’re just a girl.”

  “Just an echo,” she corrected. “When Athena left the ship, this small shadow remained. There are shadows of all her guardians—save for that wild woman: she who quells. What a fright! Some of the shadows are so old, they are barely whispers. We all now live in our fading worlds. We sleep and play and dream. But not very much of any of those things. Too old, too far gone. That is all I am. Echo, shadow, whisper, dream. But now Argo wishes me to show you a scene you won’t remember. She’s called me back. You were elsewhere when these events occurred, practising magic, though you would return in a few seasons to be with Jason again.”

  She ran past me, beckoning me to follow. The palace echoed and rang with the noises from its halls and depths. The light on the different shades of marble made the corridor seem alive.

  She led me to the festival sanctuary, a wide hall, ceiling high above us, walled with the trunks of massive cedars. The way to the centre was a maze of granite rocks, some of them towering the height of a ship’s mast. Medea had created the sanctuary at Colchis, but instead of a fissured cavern enclosing the trees and boulders, this place still gleamed with amber-green marble.

  Rising in the very centre of the hall, six times a man’s height, was the white stone ram, upright on its hind legs, forelegs stretched before it and holding the wide basin of a copper vessel. Its ruby eyes looked to the sides; its horns were threaded with gold. The ram’s mouth gaped. A drizzle of molten bronze poured from the furnace in its head to be collected in the basin.

  There was the distant sound of a mechanism, hidden within this vast stone effigy, lifting the cooled bronze back to the furnace, where it would again become the “spit of the god.”

  Medea, though she had embraced some of the Greeklander ways, had never abandoned her inherited status as Priestess of the Ram.

  The rattle of tambours and the incoherent wailing of women, a barrage of sad song that ended with a sudden high-pitched harmonious scream, told me that a ceremony had just come to an end. Medea and Jason emerged through the rocks, hand in hand. Medea was clad in the black-and-green robes of Colchis, her skirts voluminous, a great bell of cloth falling from her waist, her breasts covered with a long, wide leather bib, patterned in black and gold and probably made from hardened ram’s hide. The lower part of her face was concealed behind a bead-veil of deep-blue lapis lazuli; her black hair was woven around a tall, thin cone of cedar wood. Jason, by contrast, was wearing the simple woollen tunic of a farmer, patterned, certainly, but not in any regal way. His legs were bare. He wore a single sandal. An amulet in the form of a small blue crystal ship was slung around his neck on a golden necklace.

  But he was trim, his beard shaved to a few lines around his strong features, his hair drawn back in five tight braids, clamped to his skull. He was bright of eye, smiling and content. He was the Jason I had first met: young, brash, greedy, and confident.

  I followed them out of the Hall of the Ram. Medea at one point turned slightly, as though listening.

  Was she aware of me? She would have known that I was a few days’ ride away, visiting an oracle. But did she sense this echo from the future?

  The shadow of Athena, this sprite of a child, skipped along beside me. “You seem uncomfortable with me,” she intuited.

  “No. Just confused.”

  “That I’m a child? All gods were children once. All gods were infants once. All gods were two greater gods humping and heaving once. The advantage of gods is that they can journey back and forwards in their lives. You can almost do that. Can’t you? You’re less of a man than most.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She laughed at her own mistake. “I meant: you’re more of something else, something strange, something of Time.”

  “Yes. I am. Where are we going?”

  “To watch them—” She giggled. “—to watch them … embrace? Is that a nice way to say it?”

  I stopped in my tracks. “That’s too private.”

  “You don’t want to watch it?”

  “No.”

  “Nonsense! You watch all the time. I know you, you young-old man. You never hesitate to watch if you think you can learn something. I do the same, even when I’m real and not a shadow.” She added with a teasing laugh, “I hadn’t realised you were so coy, Merlin.”

  Nor had I.

  It wasn’t coyness, of course, that had made me hesitate. It was remembered love for Medea. My love for Medea. But this echo-Athena tugged at my hand and off we went, along the corridor and towards the private chambers of the Colchis priestess and her hungry Greeklander conquest.

  Medea’s retinue of experienced women and light-bearded youths flapped and flitted around and performed the usual functions, filling bowls with water, small gold chalices with wine, arranging the musty fabric of the drapes that stretched around the bed: a broken tent, strips of coloured cloth, containing the arena within.

  Naked, Medea was beautiful; the sight of her, the memory of her, were hammer-blows inside my head. She was so pale in contrast to Jason’s dark and thickly hirsute form. When they embraced, when the first kiss had finished, he turned away from me, settling Medea onto the bed, but Medea
’s eyes found mine as she watched across his shoulder, and her lips signalled that she knew I was there. She returned my gaze from the depths of the past, and for a moment the look was fond; and then the fierceness of the wolf was there again, and she nestled into the sea captain, spreading her body as he sprawled, a strong yet ungainly man, across her.

  * * *

  Why had she brought me to this intimate place and this private moment? What was Athena up to? The girl touched a finger to her lips. “It’s the conversation that follows. Argo wants you to hear it.”

  * * *

  Jason reached for a cup of wine and drained it. A breeze blew through the chamber, cool and welcome. Medea lay against his chest, stroking his thigh, singing softly.

  “At the next full moon,” he said, running his hand through her hair, “I will sail Argo anywhere on the ocean that is necessary to find you the gift of your dreams. A wedding gift. Anywhere at all that lies within a two-week voyage. I couldn’t bear to be away from you longer.”

  “What did you have in mind?” she asked, slightly teasingly. “Not another ram’s fleece, I hope. One ship’s hold full of rams’ fleeces will last a long time.”

  He laughed. “We’ve made good trade of them, all but the temple fleece.” Colchis had been abundant with the skins, packed with the particles of gold sieved from mountain streams. Jason and his Argonauts had gathered fifty before their escape from Colchis, and they had traded them for weeks as they had worked their way back along the rivers, south of Hyperborea, before reemerging into the Ceraunian Sea at the Stochaides.

  “No,” he went on. “I was thinking of a place in the east, the land of Zorastria. They do strange magic there.”

  Medea was adamant. “No! That doesn’t appeal at all. I’ve had enough of rune-stones and spell-stones. Too heavy to carry.”

  “Very well: closer to home, on the shores at Ilium. The Chariot with which fair, fleet Achilles dragged the body of Hektor for seven days and seven nights around the walls of Troy. It can still be seen, manifesting on the plain, driven furiously by the shade of the hero, the corpse still attached by leather. To touch the corpse as it flies past allows access to the underworld for a brief period of time. I will take my crew and wait in the darkness for the furious car and its screaming driver to appear, and snare him.”

  “No,” said Medea. “Leave the ghosts to their routine. It’s all they’ve got left. Besides, which underworld will be accessed? There are so many, and that of Achilles is not one which I wish to embrace. Think again.”

  “To the east, then. To the Stochaides again. There is a long shore, there, a wild, golden strand, with dense forest and hills behind. I have heard that every so often a manifestation occurs: of a great city of huts and tents, a gathering of peoples from different worlds and times, a chaotic place of noise and ceremony. Each dawn the people of the city come down to the ocean to bathe and make offerings to Poseidon. They use small charm boxes to communicate across great distances with their ancestors; some say with their descendants from many centuries in the future. I will take my crew and Argo and bring back a charm box.”

  “Communicating over distances is hard,” Medea acknowledged, “and costly. It drains deeply. But I have no great desire to communicate with my ancestors. My descendants? They are legion, I imagine. As are yours. What else have you and your loyal band contrived for me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She laughed provocatively, kissing his chin. “These aren’t your ideas, Jason. You have no ideas of your own. Greed alone leads you to adventure. Someone among your crew is a little more thoughtful, and you’ve been picking his imagination as a crow picks at a carcase.”

  Jason smiled, acknowledging defeat. “Tisaminas. He seems to know everything about the world. And Merlin, too. He came up with several ideas. He’s a well-travelled man.”

  Medea was intrigued by this. “Tell me something that Merlin suggested.”

  “He talks of mountains in the west, hard to access because of the forest that encloses them. Deep valleys run through the hills, and serpentine caves reach into the depths of the earth from those valleys. He told me of paintings within those long earth chambers. They exist in darkness, but come alive when light is taken into their sanctuaries. To possess the paintings, and the animals they portray, is to possess the spirit of the animal itself. They run through time. A strong spirit links them, from the earliest of the beasts to the last of the beast: horse, bison, wolf, ursine, feline. The last of the beasts is in the unknowable future. I will gladly cut out one of those paintings from the rock for you.”

  “Leave them where they are,” Medea said. She had gone pale, quite alarmed, features creased into a frown of discomfiture. She sat away from Jason, remembering: a dream, silently surfacing, teasing at the very edge of her recollection.

  “Leave them alone,” she whispered again. “They do not belong in any time but their own time.”

  “You know them, then,” Jason stated, curious.

  “Of them. Of them. I know of them, and they must not be moved.”

  Before he could speak further, Medea’s mood had become light. “I don’t need a wedding gift, Jason. It’s gift enough that you rescued me from Colchis and brought me here. I don’t need anything else.”

  “I insist. There must be something I can fetch for you that will mark the moment of love between us.”

  “Then I know what it is.” She leaned forward and ran a finger round his chin. “Bring me a cup of sand from your favourite shore, a shore where you beached and found happiness and adventure. A place to which you would want to return, this time with me. Bring me that cup of sand. It’s all I need.”

  “Far too easy,” Jason said dismissively. “I could do that in a day. Something else.”

  Exasperated, Medea took his face in her hands and kissed him. “Very well, then. Bring me a cup of ice-cold water from a lake where you have watched the reflection of the full moon as you drank. That will do for me. I will drink it and think of all the moons we will watch together in the years to come.”

  “Far too easy,” Jason insisted. “I have watched the moon in a hundred lakes. The nearest is only a half day’s walk into the hills. There must be something you want that will test me in getting it.” He was becoming angry.

  So was she.

  “Very well, then,” she said sharply. “Sail to the long island in the south, the land of mazes and honey. There is a man there who is treated as a god, a ‘shaping’ god. He creates mechanisms, and labyrinths with mechanisms, and works with fire in ways the Greeklanders have not discovered. I heard that Zeus himself returns to the land to ask this man for advice. His fame had even reached Colchis, but time and distance had warped the truth of his skills. All but the fact that he’s dangerous. I have a map of where he hides. I’ve always been intrigued by him, but never sure about him. But if he exists, I know where he exists, three days’ sail to the south. I’ll have him for my own purposes, to keep here, someone to unravel and learn from while you are away plundering. Does that suit you as a wedding gift to me?” she leaned forward and kissed him, almost mocking him.

  Jason’s eyes were alive with excitement at the prospect. “I’ll fetch this man, this shaper.”

  Medea laughed, shaking her head. She put a finger to his lips. “You’ll never find him, Jason. I’m teasing you! I wouldn’t have you put your life at risk, just for a wedding present.”

  “Tease me all you will. I’ll bring him to you, and you can create your own maze to contain him.”

  Suddenly Medea was startled. She grasped his face in her hands, tried to engage his restless look. The blood-hunt was on him. The sea-hunt. “No! I was teasing! I meant what I said. Just bring me sand and moonlit water. I don’t need more than that.”

  The man eased her fingers away from his cheeks, stood, and smiled. “I’ll bring that, too.”

  * * *

  When Medea had fled from Colchis, she had had time enough to take a few of her treasures.

 
With two of her servants she ransacked her private sanctuary, gathering a handful here, a handful there of the trinkets and amulets, the prizes and secrets of her long life. All these shards of her profession had been stuffed into three sacks and carried to Argo. One of the sacks had been caught in the rocks as the three women scampered towards the ship and the sweating, naked men who were pushing the vessel back into the sea.

  The servants were all shot down by arrows as men gathered on the cliff top, required by Medea’s adoptive father to stop the departure at all costs. He had no idea who she truly was, or where she had come from. But he had come to depend on her prophecies.

  Another sack was lost.

  The third sack was flung aboard by an Argonaut, just as Argo was taken by the tide, swinging free of the shore.

  Even then, halfway across the ocean, as Medea went about the brutal killing and dismembering of her “brother,” casting his pieces into the water to delay the pursuing ships—the boy’s father—as he gathered the carcase for its proper burial, so the third sack had slipped overboard. Only Tisaminas, with his quick wit and powerful lungs, had thought to rescue it, and though most of its contents had been spilled into the black depths, he brought back a small child’s weight of figures, shapes, and shards, in gold and bronze and stone, and Medea had grasped them gratefully.

  Not knowing what small treasure she had rescued, she guarded it fiercely. It would be a long journey later before she could install them in her new sanctuary, her temple, her Ram’s Chamber in Iolkos.

  And the small gold map of Crete was among those twenty-seven surviving dreams.

  Now she showed it to Jason. He strained to see the detail. The carving was minute, intricate. “It’s all there. All you need to know. Don’t ask me how I came upon this map. I dreamed of it, I summoned it, and it was brought to me. I was told that there are only three in the world. One is owned by the ‘shaping man’ himself. And one was owned by each of his sons. His sons died. The story goes that Icarus fell from the sky when his false wings failed him. He struck the land near Cyzicus, close to the Symplegades, the ‘clashing rocks.’ His brother, Raptor, ascended so high that he disappeared beyond the moon itself.”