The Broken Kings

by Robert Holdstock

  In other words, we were close to the new river, the silver arm of the Winding One that had cut Urtha’s heart from his fortress.

  We rested in this place, exhausted from the walk. The moon rose over us, more than half-full. The stones on the mounds of the dead began to sing; to me, at least. The moonshadow that grazed the inscribed circles and spirals set up a song, inaudible to Urtha and Jason, but as clear to me as some sounds are to hounds. I watched as the shadows of the spirals deepened with the movement of the bright half-disc. I listened as the melody deepened, became extended, rose in pitch then became a long moan, fading as shadow consumed all.

  Niiv, I believe, also heard something of this ancient song. She huddled by me, one foot resting on mine, a tentative touch of companionship, a signal of love.

  Her eyes, though, were on the monuments, and her frown suggested curiosity.

  “Can you hear the music?” I asked her.

  “I hear something. Something strange. These stones have strange ways.”

  We sat in contemplative silence for a few moments, and she asked, “Are they prisons? Or palaces?”

  “Places of the dead. Gateways. Entrances.”

  “But prisons or palaces?”

  “The dead come back here.”

  “Prisons or palaces?”

  “I don’t know. What do you feel, Niiv? Prisons or palaces?”

  She hunched over her knees, her gaze catching mine. “I’m not sure there’s a difference. No matter how grand, no matter how sprawling, there are always walls to turn you back. From what I’ve learned of Jason, of Medea, of that whole, hot southern world, with its marbled rooms and circular corridors, no, I’m not sure there’s a difference. Now where I come from: the land itself is a palace. I could walk the snow and the forests for a year and never find a wall.” She tapped her foot on mine again. “And you know this: by the Lady of Snow herself, your world is larger than imagining. Your palace is the world itself. No walls, just a return to the starting point. Where did you start from, Merlin? I never asked you.…”

  “A deep gorge, wooded, full of caves, full of images, a place where several rivers came together; a place where valleys stretched away in different directions. A place where men had visited and stayed. I’m old. But where I come from, the people who raised me were not as old as the first people of the valleys, where songs and visions were learned.”

  Niiv stared at me, a half smile on her lips, the stars alive in her pale eyes. “Will you go back there? At the end?”

  “Of course.”

  “So that place is your tomb.”

  “My palace. My prison. Yes. I’ll go back there. Not yet, though.”

  “I’ll find you there,” she said quietly, mischievously. “I know I’m just a passing fancy in your life.”

  “More than that—”

  She dismissed the comment with a laugh. “No, no. I know you too well. I know too much about you. A passing fancy. But I’ll find you there, when you finally cast aside the packhorse, the back pack, the walking staff, the illusion of virility. The Path itself. When you go home to paint your animal memory on the wall of the cave: look for me. I’ll make an arrangement with Mielikki. A thousand years from now? I’ll surprise you with a kiss! We’ll step into the mountainside together.”

  I drew Niiv close to me. She huddled into my embrace, and we fidgeted with clothing, so that we could touch and warm each other, not that we needed warming on this humid autumnal night.

  She was in a strange mood. I tried to divine it with ordinary feelings. I didn’t want to probe. She was sad. She was wistful. There was something … how can I put it? I try to remember that moment, now, after so many years have passed … she was: lonely.

  We slept then.

  I woke to the sound of grunting, the heaving strength of Rubobostes hauling up a stone that had been buried in one of the shallow mounds. He had freed it from the slipping earth, and let it fall back to the ground.

  A shadowy figure appeared behind him, peered at the exposed entrance, and nodded.

  The man dropped to a crawl and entered the mound. Rubobostes then heaved the huge stone upright, pushed it back into place, then stepped away, ran forward and gave it a mighty kick, wedging it firmly in the slope. He patted back some of the rough turf that had covered it, then made an odd sign to the monolith that towered above him.

  Before I could ask him what he was doing, he came over to me, nodding to Niiv, the girl visible only as a pale face swathed in my cloak, and dropped to a crouch.

  “He said to say good-bye.”

  “Tairon?”

  “Yes. He’s dying; he knows it. He said to thank you for looking for the root that might have stemmed the bleeding.” This was addressed to Niiv.

  “I couldn’t find it,” Niiv whispered sadly.

  “He told me to say that he’s going home. He was home for a brief while and he left home again, to help us all get here on Argo. But now he’ll find his way back through the maze.”

  “What maze?” Niiv asked.

  Rubobostes glanced round at the tomb. “That’s exactly what I asked him. He said he’s sure this particular sister is the entrance to a part of the labyrinth. If it is, he can work his way back to the island.”

  “And if it isn’t?”

  Rubobostes looked confused. “I didn’t think to ask him that.”

  The Dacian took his leave, to grab what sleep he could manage before dawn. Niiv sighed and settled back into me. Her last words that night were words of sympathy for our Cretan friend.

  Tairon will take no further part in this narrative. But I remembered Niiv’s observation as we had scurried back to Argo after the encounter with Tairon’s mother, and all the events of dream and the wild hunt associated with Queller: that she had seen, or thought she’d seen, Tairon standing in the crowds by the harbour.

  The maze-runner had made it home, I was certain. His story after that is his to tell and his alone.

  * * *

  Towards the end of the following day we began to feel a rhythm in the ground below us, waxing and waning, a peculiar sensation. The forest around us seemed to react as well. It was silent and tense, except that birds flew suddenly in wheeling curves before suddenly settling.

  “It’s coming from behind us,” Jason said.

  “No. From ahead.” Urtha was staring anxiously towards the setting sun.

  “No. There!” cried the Greeklander, and as we turned, so four small figures on breathless ponies came screaming towards us, legs kicking, hair streaming, each leading a handful of horses that bucked and bayed but followed in the race.

  Colcu and Maelfor slid triumphantly from the blankets that covered their own steeds’ backs. Sweating and grinning, they greeted us. “Only eighteen,” Maelfor said to the men, “but we were lucky to gain even these. Colcu saw the horses—”

  “But I didn’t see the guard,” Colcu confessed, though he, too, was amused, glancing at Kymon. “They ran us a good chase.”

  “Fortunately they were drunk,” Maelfor concluded. “Else this might have been worse.” He turned his neck to show the long red streak of a spear-thrust that had grazed his flesh rather than stuck into his spine.

  The riders and their animals were settled. They needed water more than anything, and there was a small stream close by.

  Then Bollullos said, “I can still feel the earth thumping.”

  It was a rhythm—or rather, an overlapping series of rhythms—such as could be heard on a ship, the drumbeat signalling the stroke rate for the oarsmen. Some of the beats were faster than others. The whole sensation was of mechanisms in the earth, earthsound, the heartbeat of invention.

  Jason and I exchanged a quick glance. “Shaper,” he said quietly.

  “Shaping Chambers,” I added.

  He nodded. “We’re nearly there.”

  PART FIVE

  THE BEAUTIFUL DEATH

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Dreams of Kings

  The forest was crowded wi
th spirits. This is how Niiv described them, but they were very earthly, fleshy ghosts, a legion of the Unborn from different times camped in groups along the ridge. On this side of the divide they were alive, and in need of food and warmth, and their fires burned and their meats roasted as dusk settled. There were fires as far as I could see.

  Sprawling along the eastern hill, they looked out over the wide, deceptively quiet flow of new Nantosuelta at the edge of the new Realm of the Shadows of Heroes. The sky to the west was a blazing streak of glowing ruby. The hostel we could see from here was dark, shadowed, already embraced by the drooping, thickening boughs of trees. Legion watched a land that belonged to them, in which they should have been waiting. But it was apparent, from the numbers we saw as we rode among them on our nervous, half-broken horses, that they, too, had felt the need to flee from the advance of the Realm.

  I tried to recognise which hostel was which as we rose through the opposite woods, but they had grown grotesque and deformed with time, extensions of both hill and forest, their once-clear carvings now twisted into cracked grimaces, splintered faces, and malformed limbs. That said, light gleamed in their recesses.

  And under all, that dull set of booming beats, some fast, some slow. We felt it in our feet and in our heads; and Nantosuelta signalled it in the subtle waves and disturbances on her surface, fracturing the light of torches and of the twilight into a display of colour that danced across her width. By the time the sun had gone, we had passed two more hostels.

  I searched for Pendragon. Kymon and Colcu cantered ahead, also calling. Eventually I heard my name shouted and rode up to the tall dark-haired man who stood before a circular tent. I recognised him, but failed to remember his name.

  “Bedavor,” he obliged. “I am Pendragon’s shield-carrier and sword-healer.”

  “Ah, yes. I remember you.”

  “Then remember me well,” the dark-bearded man said with a smile. “We’ve taken so many blows in this world, away from our own realm, that we’re likely to be born so scarred as to be unrecognisable.”

  I understood what he meant. The curse of the Unborn, exploring the world that would be theirs one day, was to carry into their true life all scars and breakages of bone that occurred during these premature voyages.

  I slipped from the uncomfortable position on my small horse and ducked into the tent. Urtha started to come after me, but Pendragon’s shield-carrier put out a gentle hand to stop him. I glanced back at the encounter.

  “He means no disrespect to you,” Bedavor said to the king, “but it would be best if you said nothing and asked nothing. This is a dangerous time for some of us.”

  Urtha agreed, though he seemed perplexed. Kymon made to follow his father, but he was held back, as was Bollullos, who glared so hard at Bedavor that I felt their stares would shatter like heated rock. But Urtha’s man stepped back. It was Jason who stooped to enter the Spartan interior of the tent, tugging at his grizzled beard as his sharp eyes scoured the interior.

  Pendragon was seated on skins, at the head of a small circle of his companions. Their shields and arms were a clutter at the centre of their conference, and each had a plate of meats and a clay cup beside him. Those with their backs to me were looking round curiously, hard-faced and unwelcoming. There were two spaces in this circle, and I took the one opposite the war chief himself. Jason hunkered down uncomfortably to my right, setting his own sword, still sheathed, on the pile. He nodded in a perfunctory way to Pendragon, a Greeklander as far from his birth in the past as was his host from his birth in the future. Urtha crouched on his haunches by the entrance, drawing his ragged cloak around his shoulders as if to conceal himself, aware, I was sure, that he was in the presence of an unborn king of his own line.

  The companions were cut raw, blood-scabbed and dishevelled. They were not a contented band. The man whom I remembered as Boros was missing two fingers on his sword hand, and he fidgeted with the bloody, knot-tied stubs as he stared at me, much as a child fusses distractedly with a broken toy. I wondered if he was already aware of the broken childhood that he would now face in generations to come, after his wailing eruption into the world.

  I was surprised to learn that these wounds had been taken in defence of Argo against the dhiiv arrigi. Pendragon’s horsemen had seemed to rout the Outcasts with ease. In fact, that skirmish had been the last of several. In Urtha’s absence, when more than two hundred of the ragged mercenaries had gathered and begun to pillage the villages of the Coritani, Pendragon had decided to take a hand. Vortingoros had barricaded himself in his enclosure.

  “I know what debt you owe to the High King,” Pendragon addressed Urtha through the circle, “so I thought I would help with the repayment.”

  “Thank you,” Urtha said quietly.

  “How they knew you were returning, I don’t know. But they did, and they waited for you at various points along the river. Bit by bit we cut down their numbers. But,” and he looked at me rather mournfully, “we’ve lost too many of our own. I have had several dreams of my time as king, and the good companions, my horse knights, who will ride with me. In each dream that retinue is smaller. Too many will be stillborn. It brings home to us that we’ve been reckless. That to experience life before birth was folly.”

  I knew what he was saying. He and the surviving members of his companions—Bedavor, Boros, Gaiwan, a few others—would have to ride back through the Hostel of the Overwhelming Gift, if they could, and remain for the rest of their waiting time where no harm could be done to them. I could be certain of one thing: that this man, when he was finally born and grown, would not be reckless in his actions. Though he would carry many scars from his actions in Urtha’s time, folly would not be among them. He would be a circumspect king. No doubt he would be reckless in his dealings with women—there is no charm known that can cure a man of that—but he had positioned himself in Time to be a strong and powerful leader.

  I quite looked forward to encountering him again.

  “There’s a different sort of danger waiting for us back in the Realm,” Pendragon agreed. “Imprisonment. Abandonment. Desolation. If rumour is right, then for each of us there will be a ship that comes to fetch us to our new lives.” His gaze darkened, his eyes fixed on mine in their focus. “There’s something I need to show you. But later, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” I replied.

  “To practicalities: we all, here, have to return. But once there, we will fight to return the Shadow Realm to its proper boundaries. When my small retinue rides like fury back across Nantosuelta, we can take others with us, not many, but if you, Merlin, can spare a shade of charm to disguise them, then we can smuggle several of the king’s men into his own land.”

  He stared at me again. “Are you game for that?”

  “I can manage it,” I said, trying to think how I would do it.

  “Good. On another matter: Boros, Gaiwan, and I ventured back while you were away. You’ve been away a long time—I don’t know if you realise that. The Realm is half-asleep. It’s a strange land beyond the hostels, but at the centre, your fortress—” He glanced across the tent at Urtha. “—it’s a prison. A place of isolation. It’s like an island. There is a man there called Cathabach, who knows you.”

  “Cathabach is alive still?” Urtha shifted into a half crouch.

  “He was when we met him. And so are your wife and daughter. They are hiding below the hill. He has a message for you: that Munda’s dream was from the Gate of Ivory. A false dream, I believe he meant. He said that and gave me three other messages; for you to ‘hear, ponder, understand, and respond to.’ Cathabach’s words, not mine.

  “This is what he said:

  “A crooked dream has raised the Dead.

  “Vengeance and a longing for life drive their actions.

  “The son of a broken king is responsible for the crooked dream.”

  There was silence for a while; then Pendragon murmured something to the man on his right and his companions all st
ood and left the tent. As they left, so one of them touched me lightly on the shoulder, another signalling to Jason in the same way. We left the tent. Urtha remained behind.

  When he emerged he was quite pale, concerned but not distressed. “That was a strange encounter,” is all he said. “Pendragon promises to remember me through stories. And through his choice of name. It seems he dreams of his time to come.”

  “I know. I heard him say so.”

  “You did. Meanwhile, I have to return to my fortress. Will you cloak me with charm, Merlin? Can you do that?”

  “You know I can.”

  “Good. And what do you make of Cathabach’s rhyme?”

  We walked a short way from the tent, to a place where, through the woods, we could glimpse the far side of the river.

  I wanted to tell Urtha that the form of the words were suspiciously like those of a dead man, speaking from after the moment of his death. They were not in a style of speaking that I would have associated with Cathabach. But they had the ring of truth to them.

  “It’s about Durandond,” I said. “Durandond holds the key to this.”

  “Durandond? He’s been dead for generations.”

  “He’s now in the Otherworld. He’s in the Realm of the Shadows of Heroes. He was never there before. It hadn’t occurred to me until now, but when we went into Ghostland a few years ago, he wasn’t there. He was not among the Dead. He has always been below the hill, in the deep of Taurovinda.”

  “The founding king holds the answers? Answers to what has happened?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  We stared in silence at the crumbling façade of the hostel across the Winding One. It seemed to moan at us, almost beckoning us to risk, recklessly, a visit to its engorging depths.

  “What do we do?” Urtha asked quietly. “I’m at a loss for a strategic plan of campaign.”

  “You go back with Kymon and Pendragon. And as many of your uthiin as your descendant thinks is safe.”