The Iron Grail

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘Medusa,’ Jason muttered. ‘This gets stranger by the moment.’

  ‘But you are the ship that has taken an Age to get here,’ Elkavar breathed. ‘I’d hardly dared think that Argo would be the beginning of my release.’

  We all looked to Jason as Elkavar spoke these words. Jason had engineered the release of the blind seer Phineus from the tormenting harpies. But he had had the assistance of argonauts Zetes and Calais, the fleet sons of the Thracian Boreas, who had chased the demons as far as the Sky Floating Isle and cut off their tail feathers, marooning them.

  We soon discovered that we could not penetrate more than a shadow’s length into the stone-lined passages of these sidhs, as Elkavar called them. When we tried to set a net to catch the elementals, after Elkavar had repaired his pipes and begun to play, they were quicker than we could act, doing their damage despite the amazing speed with which Atalanta despatched her arrows at them.

  It was Rubobostes who came to our rescue. He had understood the problem, despite his doubts about Elkavar’s mortal existence, and with Ruvio had dragged the huge carved pipes from the beach to the hill top and the woodland clearing.

  ‘All we need now is a bag big enough to blow these things, and if instinct serves me right, we’ll blast the elementals so far back into those mounds that they’ll take a season to return. By that time we can have released the bagpipe-man from his curse…’

  The words were said with the implication that this would be to release a greater curse on to us.

  He added, ‘There’s a legend among my own people that is very similar to this situation, which is why it came to mind. I can’t remember the details, though an amount of sorcery was involved. We’re a little short on sorcery these days, it seems, so we’ll just have to improvise.’

  Elkavar had fashioned each new wind-bag from the animal skin pouches in which his food had been brought, using bone needles and twine made from strands of ivy, softened by chewing, for stitching. The meat and skin must have come from somewhere, and Urtha was called up from the ship. He and several marauders from among the old argonauts scoured the far side of the island, eventually returning with a pile of uncured hides stacked on Ruvio’s back.

  ‘Odd people,’ was how he described the community they had discovered. He was speaking with difficulty, slurring his words. ‘They seem dedicated to no other purpose than to supply food and drink for passing ships; there’s no harbour over there; they lower packages of supplies down a sheer cliff and haul back up, by exchange, whatever it is that they need for themselves. About forty of them are women, and twenty men; no children. When they’re not making food they’re making love. They’re all very fit and young; it’s close to paradise except that none of them speak, only using fingers and gestures. Though they seem to get by very well with just fingers and gestures.’

  ‘Did you see many ships?’ I asked.

  ‘Three very large, heading west; and a fourth still receiving supplies.’

  Urtha too had received supplies, from the smell on his breath and the odours emanating from the others; they were extremely drunk.

  Two days later, as the wind-bag approached completion and the tall pipes were inserted and bound in place, the absurdity of the situation began to infect us. Though Jason went very quiet, Niiv laughed as I had never seen her laugh before, Urtha and Tisaminas sharing the amusement. Rubobostes seemed furious that the mood of hilarity had begun to overwhelm his vision, and when he proposed feeding his majestic and unnatural steed on long grass, to make it pass more wind and thus help to inflate the bag, it was more than most of us could endure.

  I wish I could record a more sophisticated resolution to Elkavar’s plight, but the fact is, at dusk on the third day of our labours, giant musical pipes, played by squeezing a wind-filled leather bag of huge dimension, flattened by straps under the pull of the Dacian’s indefatigable horse, blasted a wailing gale into each of the mounds, a noise so abominable, so raucous, so shattering, that the building in which Elkavar had sheltered developed cracks in the stone, parts of the cliff above the bay fell on to the beach, and a group of adventuring men, two women, and one horse, were blown off their feet by the shock of it; and by the resulting odour.

  After that, all was silence.

  Though for a while only.

  When Elkavar then sounded an appropriate melody on his own set of man-sized pipes, the new goat’s-skin wind-bag squeezed between his elbow and his ribs, the sorcery that had trapped him in this place fell away, and though nothing appeared to change, save that the entrances to the mounds closed up, as if Time had healed them, and the stone building collapsed into rubble, the Hibernian was free; free to pass beyond the beach and back to Ocean. The elementals had fled downwards. The game with him was ended.

  We took him on board our unexpectedly nervous ship, our reluctant vessel, an Argo who was suddenly whispering caution. Like any traveller, her experiences with the many worlds she had seen had still not given her full confidence in this new one. Jason and Urtha, heady and half blinded with the strange brew of adventure, took turns to reassure her. She did not punish them for their lies.

  Meanwhile, we made sure our sleek-hulled friend was well provisioned from the community that had serviced the glade and its erstwhile captive, then cast off, following the ghostly fleet.

  Chasing the Warped Man.

  * * *

  This was a strange ocean. No sooner had we left the Isle of the Wailing Man behind than another island began to loom upon us, its sheer green slopes split by a fall of water that surged into the sea, throwing up a haze of spume and mist. Elkavar urged us to sail south.

  ‘The Warped Man told me of this place. The Island of the Stripped Dogs. Look, there!’

  We had come in sight of a strand backed by dunes and low hills, with several paths leading inwards. The creatures that raced along the sand, barking at us, were gruesome, a pack of them, once fine hounds now stripped of their skins.

  This was another wailing island, though this time the sound that rose and fell as it shifted with the wind was the sound of a thousand dogs baying and whining. As Argo moved slowly round the coast, we could see the great sail erected on its highest point, a sheet of skins stitched together, the hollow eyes and mouths of the boneless heads opening and closing with the gusts, emitting the most forlorn of cries.

  Niiv was entranced. She shimmered in the same way as Munda, when the girl had been possessed by imbas forasnai. She was hearing something more than this preternatural howling; I realised she could hear a song within the sound.

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful!’ she cried. ‘Merlin, come and listen.’

  ‘What are they singing?’

  I suspected that she was not using charm to hear the hound-song. It would have been too great an irony if, as my own powers faded, hers remained. I suspected she was born for such a task.

  Indeed, she said, ‘I have heard the song of reindeer and snow wolf, I have heard lynx and lark and eagle. But this lament is the most beautiful. Can’t you hear it? This is so old. I’ve only ever heard fragments of it, each time a dog howls at the moon. But this is the whole song.’

  ‘What are they lamenting?’

  She took my hand and pressed it. ‘These are hounds from the first coming of people. These are the lost; they never knew the leash nor the warmth of fire. These were the old dogs who watched their young cubs taken and tamed. Now they wish they had not nervously hugged the forest edges, but had come close to the fire and shared the warmth and the songs of people. This is their own island. We should land and play with them for a while. They have seen play, but never known it. It would be a kind thing to do.’

  Rubobostes’ grimace seemed to say it all: play with those skinless, blood-matted creatures, slavering at the edge of the strand? Thank you, but no.

  I was more aware of Niiv’s deliberate look at me, the pressure of her fingers on my own. Play for a while. It would be a kind thing to do.

  As if suddenly aware that I ha
d grown cold against her, she loosened her grip, smiled sadly and said, ‘There is something else in the song. I can’t quite make it out. There’s a low moan like a voice intoning a warning, or a direction … something about the Father Calling Place. It will rise over our horizon, but it is unsafe for more than one man to land on it.’

  Rubobostes had been listening to the exchange without fully understanding Niiv’s meaning. When I translated for him, his brow furrowed and his eyes quickened.

  ‘This is another trick,’ he said. ‘Not the girl, but what the girl has heard. Leashes? We’ve all been tied around the neck, and someone is gently tugging us along.’

  I could not have agreed with him more, of course, and told him so. But I needed to speak to the ship.

  Jason, despite Mielikki’s hate for him, and Argo’s disappointment in his actions, was as proprietary as ever, blocking my way as I tried to approach the birchwood face of the goddess. The ship rocked as the wind tossed us, the sail cracking, whip-like, as it caught and strained below the strengthening breeze.

  ‘What has Mielikki said to you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Concerning what?’

  ‘Concerning these islands. This voyage.’

  ‘Nothing. She’s silent and angry.’

  ‘I need to know what she knows. At the next island where we make landfall, only one of us can go ashore.’

  Jason smiled coldly, scenting the aroma of what he loved: the unknown and danger. His look suggested: what of it? I am the captain; I step ashore.

  Urtha, understanding what was being said, murmured, ‘If only one of us can go ashore, then Merlin knows more than we do, and he alone should go.’

  Urtha, as I would come to discover with increasing frequency and affection, was as pragmatic as he was proud.

  But he asked me pointedly, ‘Why do you need to talk to the ship?’

  ‘Reassurance.’

  ‘Reassurance? You? Now I am worried. Hey, Greeklander! Stand back from that lovely face. Let the man have his reassurance.’

  Jason’s hostile gaze never left my own, but he was aware that Urtha’s words, sounding friendly, were not meant lightly.

  If Jason hesitated, it was for a moment only, long enough to notice, too quick to offer insult. He stepped aside.

  Mielikki called me down to the Spirit of the Ship, huddled in the stern below her grim visage. At this threshold the breeze was tinged with winter frost. As ever, the Northland Lady was missing her home.

  My question to the goddess was simple: Niiv had understood a great deal about the last island, facts that seemed to me to beyond what should have been apparent to her; perhaps the goddess knew more. This ocean had no real business being here, not, at least, in the form in which we were seeing it. If not Mielikki, then perhaps Argo herself was aware of what lay ahead. And why my charm had deserted me.

  ‘There is a smell of Time in the ocean,’ Argo told me through her incumbent. ‘But new hands have played with the form of the land that floats here. I don’t understand why your charm has been taken from you. Your enchantment is designed to work in a charmless world, perhaps. But if Fierce Eyes is here, then charm has deserted her too. You are two of a kind. All she will have is her guile.’

  ‘Are we sailing into a trap?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. Though whose trap—that of Fierce Eyes, or this spectral Warped Man—I cannot tell. I can’t get a clear idea. There are too many ghosts, an abundance of ghosts, evident from their memories in the ocean. They follow us like spouting, chattering fish, though they have no form. But you are approaching the Island of the Wicker Men; and beyond that is the Island of the Stone Giants; beyond that, the Island of the Iron Grail. Beyond that, all is warped to the old wood of my eyes.’

  ‘Is someone “warping” you?’ I asked anxiously, and certainly naively.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Nothing like that. Only that I have seen this situation too many times before. My hull has been repaired so many times; I have plunged, under good and courageous captains, into seas every bit as strange as this one. It is familiarity that makes me weary. I am half blinded by the knowledge of just knowing what next to expect.’

  I had never known her so forthcoming.

  ‘I tell you this, Merlin, because I know you will come to understand. You are no more than a ship yourself. Wood outlasts men. Age never shows until it shows, and then it comes with harrowing decay. You have lasted for millennia; you will rot in moments, though I hope this doesn’t happen yet. When it comes to your rotting, I will carry you in comfort to a place that not even you can imagine. I will be your bier, your pyre and your grave. You will be the last captain of this ship. But not for a long time yet. There is too much to do, as far as you are concerned.

  ‘And since you are the strangest captain I will have known, I can also tell you that for all of you who row at the benches, everything is lost, and everything is to be gained. The Island of the Iron Grail has nothing to plunder. But it will show you everything.’

  She went quiet, then, an oracle that had given all it was prepared to give.

  ‘Are you reassured?’ Urtha asked me as I left the Spirit of the Ship and returned to my bench, gripping the wet binding of my oar with two blistered hands.

  ‘I don’t know what I am,’ is all I could think to reply at the time. ‘But our ship is in a black mood.’

  Islands appeared before us as if Ocean herself was raising them in our path. We rowed hard around bleak crags, caught the breeze where we could and tacked past rough and jagged shores and coasts that were crowded with the strangest of creatures: giant horses that chased each other, as if being raced by men, but bloodily biting any flank that became vulnerable; an island where men and women poured to the shore, laughing and playing the sort of games that appealed hugely to Urtha. It was all we could do to hold him back, but at last he remembered the old story: that any man who beached there would start to laugh and play without mind, without reason.

  One island, terraced and green with trees, was home to giant birds whose plumage was rich with reds and greens, usually a sign that they can be eaten. Atalanta had shot down three of them at a great distance before we realised that each was not just large, but almost as large as Argo. We anchored off-shore for a day, cutting up the meat and storing it, while the huntress defended us against the attacks of the angry flocks.

  But by then we had become low on meat, and this rich feast was welcome, Elkavar cooking strips of bird flesh in a fire created in an upturned shield. Elkavar was a wonderful cook. He had forgotten to remove the shield’s leather grips, and although they were demolished along with the meat, whoever ate them failed to notice.

  We came to an island where a long row of crouching wooden statues stared out to sea, warriors behind their shields. Urtha recognised them at once. He went ashore. As he approached each figure, so it rose and greeted him; men of oak and ash and elm, oiled and polished. These were the Coritani who had fallen in battle over the generations. Whenever they went to war they left such effigies behind in their homeland, a fragment of their spirit in each idol, a ritual that had been imposed on them in unhappier times, when their druids had been more powerful. Those who returned burned the effigy in celebration. Those who did not walked and sailed the effigies to this Otherworldly island, where they waited for such moments as this to send messages of greeting and love back to their families.

  Urtha told us this as he clambered aboard again. He spent the next little while memorising the words and thoughts of King Vortingoros’s dead.

  An island loomed into view a day later, a place of gentle hills inland and a warm, wide strand of soft sand gently touched by the surf. Dark-haired and beautiful women lined the water’s edge, waving to us, laughing delightfully. Their dress was strange, a figure-hugging robe of gleaming lace, dark grey with speckles of white. This time it was all we could do to stop Rubobostes leaping from Argo and swimming for a short spell of ‘rest and recreation’, as he termed it, an expression that made us laugh so much that it to
ok all our strength to haul him back to Argo’s safety. Niiv and Urtha knew what they were witnessing, and as we rowed Argo hard and fast away from the pleasant-looking island so Rubobostes became aware—as did we all—of the danger that had threatened. The strand faded and the sharp, sea-swept rocks of the true shore became clear; the women slithered on their bellies, fat and glistening, whiskered faces staring after us as they seal-cried their annoyance.

  ‘What in the world of bad dreams were they?’ the Dacian demanded.

  ‘Selkies,’ Urtha explained. ‘Seal-like creatures that can warp and develop into the human shape of women.’

  Rubobostes stared at him, bemused. ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘To attract their blood-lunch; they need blood to maintain the woman in the seal. The rest of the time they have to feed on fish. Didn’t you smell the stench of rotting fish?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rubobostes said in a forlorn voice. He returned his gaze to the island.

  ‘Didn’t that warn you of danger?’ Urtha asked him.

  ‘Danger? In my country, rotting fish is used to make a great delicacy. For a moment I felt at home.’

  The big man’s disappointment didn’t last long.

  Argo ploughed her way through a sea that rose against us, a defiant sea, crashing against our flanks, fighting against the sail. A landfall on which we had set our sights, where a gleam of green and white suggested a palace, seemed to come no closer as time passed. It was blurred, now, in a haze of sea-spray, but it was clear that it remained as far away as ever.

  Jason was frustrated, Urtha anxious. Even the argonauts whose lives were still tied to their stolen kolossoi seemed to despair as they crouched gloomily over their raised oars, or heaved at them when the wind shifted to blow against us and the sail was lowered.

  It was Urtha’s anxiety, however, that proved to be the source of both comfort and warning. Hylas and I translated where necessary. Hylas had a skill with languages.

  ‘This sea is strange, but I’ve heard of it before. We are not the first ship to sail it. These islands are like the holes in Elkavar’s pipes: they can be played differently to make new melodies. The ocean is using us to make the words that go with the tune. Nothing is as it seems, but everything is familiar. In a story my father Ambaros told me, the sea-reiver Maeldun came close to despair, searching these islands for some trace of the life he’d lost. At the end of his voyage, he found home. We are sailing towards home, but don’t expect to reach it easily.’