The Iron Grail

by Robert Holdstock

  He led me to the shelter of a slouching stone. A woman in black dress, her dark hair streaked with white, lay curled there, shivering. Ambaros had covered her with a blanket. Her cheeks were so dry that she had the look of a corpse. I could hear the hollow echo of her stomach, the feeble pulse of her heart, the crow-call that was summoning her.

  ‘She’s very ill,’ Ambaros said as he knelt beside her. He took her hand and massaged it, as if this act of touching might stimulate life in a body that was shedding life with every passing flight of cranes.

  What could I do? Knowing Ambaros as I did, knowing of his strengths in combat and his strength of heart, his dedication to his family, I touched this dying Mother with a little strength of her own. In doing so I realised that she belonged in Ghostland, not in Urtha’s world. She had crossed the divide—Nantosuelta—and now could never return.

  ‘I remember you,’ she whispered. She reached a hand to stroke my whiskered cheeks. ‘You’re the man who brought their father to see them. You are their father’s friend.’

  She must have known this already; else why pursue me from the land that sustained her to a realm that would kill her?

  ‘I brought Urtha to see them. He and I have travelled together to Greek Land. He avenged the death of Aylamunda and his son Urien.’

  ‘I’m glad of that,’ the modron whispered.

  Ambaros too seemed pleased, the slightest nod of his head as he watched me without expression signalling that he was content to hear of the triumph of his son-in-law.

  The Mother raised her hands, palms towards me. She said, ‘For a while they were safe in the borderland between the river and the land of shadows. But they are no longer safe. The Warped Man, Dealing Death, is closing in. He is searching for Urtha’s children. He is hungry for them.

  ‘Merlin! There is a storm in Ghostland that none of us can understand. Something terrible is happening. Nothing is right in that strange realm! But Urtha’s children are both key and cure. You have old bones and old charm; my sister saw this when you came to the meadow with their father, before he went to Greek Land. You can take them from a broken haven to safety. Hurry. Hurry.’

  Suddenly her lips pressed against mine. I felt the moisture of life on her tongue. Her eyes blazed with death. Her fingers scratched urgency through my stinking sheepskin coat. ‘Leave me here,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll make my own way back.’ Then the light faded from eyes that had seen wonders. A cooling carcass curled into my arms, skin and bone glad to say goodbye to the ghost that had held this fragile doll together for the journey to find me.

  I kissed her gently, this time on the brow. I closed her eyes. I folded her carefully.

  Ambaros asked, ‘Dead?’

  ‘Very dead. But then, she was dead already, I realise.’

  ‘Let’s get on with it. Can you get those children out of Ghostland?’

  ‘Will you help?’

  He laughed sourly. He was appalled at the question.

  I felt ashamed.

  ‘Get me a horse,’ I said to him.

  ‘Find your own damned horse. Do you think horses grow on trees?’

  ‘Then first help me bury this woman. She said to leave her here.’

  ‘That is something that must be done. Under one of the cairns. The present owners won’t object, and if they do, they can face me in Ghostland with their argument!’

  * * *

  That response was exactly what made me admire this man. In one way I truly envied Ambaros: he cut to the quick; he had no time for nonsense. In other ways I didn’t envy him at all: he was old, he was tired, he was weak in heart and limb, he had a narrow view of a world that was exhaustingly complex (he was hardly alone in this, of course; he didn’t walk the path that I walked). And yet, he could make sense of small affairs. For all my journeying around the wider world, all I could do was accrue memory; insight, it seemed to me, came from concentrating on the near-at-hand.

  Ambaros, Urtha’s father, Urtha’s mentor, Urtha’s scourge and challenge, the nightmare voice in Urtha’s dreams, could whisper words that made sense, see strategy that made sense, understand situations where sense had taken a walk … but in a narrow range.

  For all my broader range, I could make less sense of the world than Ambaros. I felt drawn to him, to the necessity that now drove him—to bring Kymon and Munda out of Ghostland—in a way that I had rarely experienced before.

  Oh yes: Jason.

  Well, it’s true; when my path had crossed with young Jason’s, as he rebuilt Argo before questing for the Golden Fleece and my forgotten lover Medea, yes, then I had felt a deepening of insight; my life had grown; I had learned some lessons. Gods, I had fallen under Jason’s spell. I can’t deny it. But a man such as Jason is one of a rare breed. It is more an honour than a dishonour to have spent or wasted time with them. In fact, honour is the wrong word. The word is privilege. Few men, few women emerge from the dry stew of human mediocrity to flavour the world in a way that can never be forgotten.

  Jason did it. And if Urtha had come close, somehow I felt, even now, even at that time, that he was the genesis of something greater.

  Ambaros would be forgotten, Urtha too, I expected; but they were two gusts of the wild wind that would one day create a great storm of memory, as a storm had created Alexander, Radegast, Ramses, Diana, Agamemnon, Odysseus, all of them so much more than whispers on the wind of time.

  * * *

  When we had laid the Mother in her shallow grave I went to the reed-fringed river and called for the small barge that had carried me back to Alba. She was a spirit echo of Argo herself, a shadow from Argo’s past, loaned to me by the ship and her guardian goddess to help me escape from Greek Land.

  She slipped from hiding, among drooping willow fronds on the far side of Nantosuelta, and nosed towards the shallows by the groves. Ambaros was astonished, but silently so, standing behind me, his hand absently scratching at his cheek.

  The little boat was filled with furs and woollens, her prow painted yellow and carved with the features of a swan. The purple-painted glyphs that fringed the hull like a frieze suggested she had come from the island known as Krete, from a time before the sudden drowning of that land and its people, a millennium or so ago. She was just one part of the Spirit of Argo, sufficient to have brought me here by river, stream and under the world to avoid the sea crossing.

  Now I offered her the chance to leave me, to return to Argo.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ her small voice whispered in my head. I thanked her. I would be riding with Ambaros to the edge of Ghostland. Would she meet me there? I might still have need of her.

  She agreed.

  So Ambaros and I left the river’s edge, left the groves and rode away from Taurovinda, to the west, to the gorges, and to the Ford of the Last Farewell, where the Dead crossed on their way to the Otherworld.

  I expected him to ask me further news about his son-in-law, but he was discreet, as was the custom, explaining that, ‘News of a king, brought in the king’s absence, must first be given to the king’s eldest son, that’s the way we do things here. If there is no son, then the news is given to his wife; if no wife, only then to the parents.’ He hesitated for a moment, then glanced at me as we rode side by side. ‘But I dearly needed to know if Urtha had survived his quest. I broke taboo.’

  ‘As I said, he survived, he triumphed, though he took a savage wound. He’s coming home slowly.’

  Ambaros raised his hand. ‘And as I said, that’s enough to put my heart at peace. Thank you. The rest is for Kymon, if you find him, and after that I’ll hear the full story. But now: what of Jason? Your resurrected Greeklander friend looking for his time-lost grown up sons. Did he succeed as well?’

  We exchanged a glance and he smiled when he saw my questioning look. How had he known about Jason’s new lease of life? It should have been obvious.

  ‘Urtha told me what you’d done for Jason the last time you were here: bringing that ship to the surface of a lake with his body still on bo
ard. And about his sons being still alive after seven hundred years, after their mother summoned Cronos and hid them in the future.’ He grinned broadly, shaking his head. ‘Merlin, I’ve told some high tales and broad sagas in my time, I’ve bragged with the best of them at Beltane and winter feasts, and talked of my deeds, on several occasions, for all the night. But this story leaves me breathless.’

  It had left me breathless too, when I had finally summoned an image of what had truly occurred in the palace in Iolkos, seven centuries ago.

  One nick to the throat of each boy, drawing blood as a powerful drug was passed into the flesh. The boys collapsed in moments. Pig’s blood shocked our senses as it seemed to spurt from their necks. Medea stooped over their bodies and from beneath her skirts pulled heads made of wax and horsehair, wrapping them in strips of her veil. She threw them to Cretantes, beyond the open door, then summoned her strength and dragged her sleeping sons to the horses, throwing them into the cart, letting us see only their trailing legs.

  So fast, so clever, so persuasive! A brilliant trick to which I had been blinded. She fled into exile, and though Jason searched the land from coast to coast and mountain to island, he found no trace of them, and ended his days a sad and furious man.

  Because what she had done next had been astonishing. It was a use of her power that I would never dare to summon.

  When the act was done, she had settled down to wait for time to pass …

  ‘Did he find his sons?’

  ‘He found one of them,’ I answered. ‘The elder, deep in Greek Land close to an ancient oracle. The young man had taken the name Orgetorix.’

  Ambaros whistled with surprise. ‘King of killers? That’s a strong name. Did he live up to it?’

  ‘From what I saw of him, very much so.’

  He nodded his head and smiled. ‘I’m glad. So Jason has one of his boys back.’

  ‘Therein lies a tragedy. Orgetorix had such hate in his heart, put there by his mother, that he rejected Jason, tried to kill him. I watched the whole thing. Jason was shocked and distraught. He accused me of betraying him because I hadn’t told him everything I knew about his son.’

  I still shuddered to think of that look in Jason’s eyes as he hunched, gaping and bloody, the look of contempt for me, the vengeful look; and his words murmured as he fought to stave off death: Dread the dawn when you wake to find me crouching over you. Dread that dawn.

  And he would be following me to Alba, now, because that was where Medea had hidden her younger son, Kinos, nicknamed Little Dreamer.

  When I told Ambaros this, he laughed.

  ‘Well, that will take a lot of searching. This may be what you call an island, but the land is vast. There are not just the Five Kingdoms. A multitude of petty kingdoms lie to the north of us, and as many to the south and to the west, beyond Ghostland. And they are all afflicted with marshes, boglands, forests, mountains, valleys and rockstrewn plains. The Lords Gog and Magog, as tall as trees, could go into hiding and never be found.’

  ‘Little Dreamer will have left a trail,’ I assured Ambaros.

  His look at me was strange, though he was half-smiling.

  ‘I am in awe of you,’ he said later, as we rested for the night in a cove of rocks, sheltered by the overhanging branches of an elm to which we had tied our cloaks as a windbreak. ‘In awe! And yet I feel comfortable with you, not at all afraid of what you can do with just the flick of your finger and thumb. Perhaps it’s because you look younger than my own son.’

  ‘He’s battle-weary. I’m just travel-weary.’

  ‘But where you travel, things begin to happen. It’s as if that guardian of the exiles was waiting for you. How did she know you were here? How did she know when you would pass along the river, past the Ford of the Last Farewell? She tried to follow you at once, but you went into hiding. She’s been searching for you ever since, and finally she found me in the settlement in the gorge, and I brought her to Taurovinda. Just as you’d arrived! Someone is stitching our lives together, I think.’

  I told him about the Three of Awful Boding.

  ‘Strange again: they never appear except to kings and their consorts. Sometimes to a king’s champion.’

  And of the small band of rain-ghostly men who had told me of Ambaros’s presence in the groves.

  ‘Yes, I thought we were being followed. There was a large war band as well, the sort that drove us from the fortress for the second time. Something is stirring up because of you, Merlin. Something that is putting the lives of the exiles in danger.’

  I doubted very much that whatever was occurring across the living flow of Nantosuelta had anything to do with me and told him so.

  Three are returning who are a threat to you. A fourth is already here and hiding.

  There would be answers, but for the moment I felt as much in the dark as he.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Exiles in Ghostland

  I waited at the Ford of the Last Farewell for a full day, with Ambaros and his small retinue of men, acquired as we passed through the camp of the exiles, the exiles, the deep valley where the survivors from Taurovinda had hidden after the raid.

  When movement came on the other side it was nervous and fleeting, hesitant and illusory. But as soon as Ambaros and his men withdrew, the cloaked and cowled figure finally slipped from the woodland’s edge and scurried over the rocks towards the small inlet in the bank of the river. It was hard to see her across the wide flow of Nantosuelta—that waterway separating two worlds. A haze of mist hovered over this border between realms. But I saw how her cloak rippled with colour, making her meld with her background. She was grey as she paused by an outcrop of grey weathered rock, then green and dark as she came against the far trees, then like yellow reeds as she crouched down by the water and watched me.

  Her face was pale, almost featureless, save for her eyes, dark and wide as she studied me carefully.

  This was another of the Mothers who guarded Kymon and Munda. I tried to remember her. By her appearance, she was the youngest of the three.

  She did not invite me to cross Nantosuelta at that moment, though I could have made the crossing in the spirit boat, which waited patiently in the high reeds, her swan-prow just showing. But the Mother and I could not speak through the separating distance, this no-man’s water between worlds. So I summoned a bird. The darkness in the distance, above the deep forest of Ghostland, suggested the storm that was coming, but the crow seemed inappropriate for this urgent interchange. I summoned, instead, a skylark, the most vociferous of birds.

  The lark appeared above me, circled me, singing noisily, then took my simple message across the river to the woman.

  I’ve seen your sister. She sent me to you.

  The bird flew back with her reply.

  Are you the one who will guide Urtha and his children into their future?

  The question took me by surprise. Into their future? For the next few seasons, perhaps; but the Mother’s words contained more significance than my own limited aspirations for my friend, should he return alive.

  I sent the lark to tell her: I once came with Urtha across the river; I brought him to see his children before he went in search of vengeance against his foster brother. We came and went by a boat, not this one, but very similar. I can cross to you easily.

  The lark flew up and away, winging towards the storm-skies in the far hills. The cowled woman rose to her feet and beckoned to me, then turned and hurried back to cover.

  I called for the spirit boat and she bobbed towards me. I clambered in, settling on the cushions with their old and strange designs, and she drifted across the river without difficulty, nosing gently into the soft mud of the inlet.

  I was back in the hinterland of the Shadows of Heroes.

  I met the modron in the bosk of the wood. I could hardly see her; like a clever cat, she merged with her background. But that moon-pale face smiled at me, and the pool-dark eyes welcomed me.

  She asked me about her sister, who
had gone to find me, and seemed unsurprised when I broke the news that she was dead. Then she talked of Urtha’s children.

  ‘They were safe here for a long while,’ she whispered to me as we moved swiftly along the track. ‘There are many places at the edge of this land which are safe. That’s why they were brought here when they escaped the terrible raid. This is a place where we guard exiles, and have done so over the ages. They should always have been safe here, but recently there have been too many raiding bands, searching the edge. There is something deadly growing in the deep hills, spreading out, and all the signs are of danger.’

  ‘Are they searching for the children?’ I asked, panting as I followed her fleet form through the moist underwood along the twisting path.

  ‘We have reason to think so. Their names are called out at night, though from a great distance. So far we’ve managed to keep our hiding place secure. But the Dead are crossing the river and settling on the Thunder Hill, making it their own.’

  ‘I know. I’ve just come from there.’

  I had realised the first time I had entered it that the causewayed fortress, named for thunder, was shaped around a far older sanctuary. There were mounds within its high walls, contained within the orchard groves, which echoed so faintly they must have certainly been erected over the dead of a very distant past. Interesting, then, that the Shadows of Heroes were returning there.

  I was becoming curious.

  My train of thought was abruptly terminated as the young Mother suddenly stopped in her tracks in alarm. I bowled into her and her small hand clutched at mine, urging me to silence. Ahead of us was a sunlit clearing. A large creature suddenly bounded across that patch of gleaming light, a boar of some size, its razor spines raised high in alarm; others followed, making no sound. Birds were disturbed above us, a nervous fluttering in the branches. Then four cloaked riders passed across the glade, slumped in the saddle, long hair framing their faces, spears held at a low angle.