The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex

by Robert Holdstock

  But though the stark visual images faded, an echo of despair and fear remained, constructed perhaps by my own mind, a mind inadvertently and unwelcomely opened to its origins.

  I had never been able to control that simple boat, that bowl in wicker, oak, and leather that had run the rivers despite my efforts, and obeyed me only in the still waters of the shallows and pools that we encountered on our journey.

  A storm had struck, a winter nightmare, ice blowing in the air, leafless trees showing that they were anything but lifeless as they thrashed the river, reached to grab my frightened, freezing form in its vulnerable, spinning bowl.

  I heaved to the shore and tethered the coracle, crouching in the lee of an overhang, crying, huddled, watching a dark wall of snow approach on the wind from the west, always trying to see through the darkness, back to the north, where my mother’s fire burned in the valley that was my home, and my father’s paintings, deep in the womb of the gorge, would be as fresh and vibrant as the day he had made them, before he himself had entered the earth, along the winding guts of that other mother, never to return.

  The snow began to swirl, innocent and gentle at first, then like insects, frozen insects, creatures from story-lore, the memories of the older people who had explored the land around our valley.

  The little vessel was bobbing violently on the river. I had not tied it with a knot, merely wound the tether round a trunk and wedged the free end into the split between two branches. She would not hold against the storm.

  Now I struggled with the laces on my boots, but my fingers were clumsy, the leather strings slipped and coiled away from me. In frustration I began to cry; then my fingers were so numbed that I gave up the effort and lay back, my cloak over my face, my tears turning from desperation to anger, from loneliness to fear.

  I heard the movement close to me and froze, thinking that an animal was nosing towards me. Then—the gentle fumbling of knowing hands at my skin boots; deft fingers laced me up, tugged the leather tight. I uncovered my face and looked down, and saw a cowled shape, a small shape, and when the cowl was lifted, two fierce and wonderful eyes met my gaze.

  And a smile that mocked as well as welcomed.

  “You really should have paid more attention,” Fierce Eyes said.

  “I cannot tie knots. I can not tie knots. I will not be ashamed of the fact. I will fashion shoes that don’t need them.”

  She snuggled up to me, drawing her cloak tightly around her body, but reaching quickly to squeeze my hand. The snow raged at us, settling on our noses.

  “I didn’t expect this,” she said.

  “Neither did I. What are you doing here?”

  “What are you?”

  “I drew the boat to shore. The river is too high.”

  “I lost mine. It turned over and threw me into the water. I tried to hold her, but she was taken from me. So now I walk.”

  I looked at the small boat and thought of trying to row it with two of us, but the thought was not sustained. Our lives had been suddenly taken away from us; everything we had known was now gone. Fierce Eyes and I were not the only ones. There were others. I had begun to forget about them. I had begun to forget about this girl, who had teased and tormented me, loved me and amused me for so many years, the slow years in the valley, when time passed around us, but not within us. That long, playful, and challenging childhood that filled our heads with dreams of what was to come, and carved powers as yet untested on the bones that cranked and worked our cold, pale bodies.

  Her presence here was like the best of gifts, and I leaned into her warmth. Again our fingers entwined. I felt her shaking. I thought she was nervous of this tentative touch, but after a moment I realised she was crying, and I remained silent, stiff … still touching.

  Then the bough broke!

  The winter alder cracked along its central trunk, and my ineffective tethering began to unravel.

  “My boat!” I yelled, scrambling to my feet. Fierce Eyes saw the problem, and as I flung myself towards the unwinding rope, she slipped down the bank to try to hold the coracle itself.

  She screamed and tumbled, shocking me for a moment. In that instant the rope withdrew from the tree, like a snake slithering effortlessly into its hole in the grassland. Fierce Eyes had plunged into the river. Her head was under the water, her hand above it. Through the snow it was hard to see what was happening, but the coracle spun suddenly into the middle of the water, winding the tether around itself. I saw my friend’s hand grab the end of the rope, then rise like a nymph from the depths, soaked and shrieking. She grasped the edge of the vessel and clung onto it, turning a pale, terrified face towards me as the river, the storm, the night, and unseen hands drew her away from me again, allowing distance and snow-battered darkness to take her, leaving me with nothing but her cry on the wind, a cry that might have been my name.

  * * *

  In such simple dramas, on such cold, insignificant nights, are great histories set in motion, fates set on their path. How could I have known it? All I knew, for a long time after that dreadful loss, was the sound of my own terror and abandonment.

  * * *

  Now, too, there was something terrified and abandoned about Argo. She was a miserable ship. She was living with a secret, and holding that secret embedded in her hull of oak and birch. The secret was a guilty one. And like a child she was as keen to let the fact be known as she was to keep the fact concealed.

  * * *

  I struggled to disentangle myself from the close embrace of Mielikki. The Lady of the Northlands drew back; the spell of communication was broken. Her lynx crouched and hissed at me; its breath was foul. Mielikki hushed it and it backed away from me at a crouch, disturbed, protective, wild.

  Mielikki drew back the veil that covered her face. This was the first time I had seen her uncovered, except as the fierce crone carved in wood that oversaw the ship. A face of astounding beauty regarded me with interest and sympathy. Her eyes were elfin, as I’d expected, but her skin was as pallid as milk, just the finest blush at her cheeks. Her features could have been shaped from snow, even her lips, full and sensuous, were bloodless, yet ripe with life.

  “I was carved differently,” she said, with an amused nod towards the entrance to this spirit land, beyond which the wooden effigy scowled. “The people who wanted a figurehead for their boat carved me from fear, not love.”

  “Yes. Clearly.”

  “I am not the strongest of Argo’s guardians. Before me there was a Greek Land goddess—”

  “Athena. Yes.”

  “One of her names. One of her names only. She casts a long shadow back through time, and the time of the ship. She drowned with Jason after that long voyage, after his death from despair. A part of her, anyway. A small part, a fragment of life, a fragment of his protecting spirit, drowned in the Northlands with her favourite captain. Both ship and guardian can have favourites, and Jason was certainly the one she favoured most. She had others. Before Jason, a man called Acrathonas; before him, in raw times, rough times, a man of great courage, great fury called Argeo Kottus; before him, a woman of pale countenance but strong will. She is remembered as Gean’anandora. There were many in between. The first was you, the boy captain, the inspired shaper. The first shaper. The first shaper of many.”

  Shaper. That word again. That name again.

  “Argo is disturbed,” I said. “She’s a very strong ship. She is not letting me know exactly what it is that is distressing her.”

  “You could use your talents and crack her hull, her protection like a seagull cracks a shell.”

  “I could. I won’t. It would be too costly and too dangerous for me. Besides, I will not ask for anything she doesn’t wish to tell me.”

  “A betrayal is catching up with her,” Mielikki said quietly. “A moment in her life when she acted against the instructions, and loyalties, of the man who made her the ship she has become, the great ship founded on the small boat that you once fashioned from wicker and skin.”
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  “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know. She is not ready to reveal it. But she is here, in Alba, because of what she did. And I am certain that she wishes you to sail with her again. You are not safe in Taurovinda. No one is safe in Taurovinda. You are all looking in the wrong place for the source of the trouble that will soon swamp the land.”

  This cryptic conversation was infuriating. I tried to slip into Mielikki’s mind, but a lynx bared its teeth, and the ephemeral form of the beauty from the ice wastes of Pohjola proved to be an empty vessel. Most of this goddess, this tree and snow spirit, was still close to the northern lights where she had been born from the frozen earth. There was very little to unfurl in the spirit guardians that accompanied Argo.

  Mielikki was not amused by my probing, but not angry. “I can’t help you,” she insisted. “I can be Argo’s voice—that’s all I can be—but this ship is in mourning.”

  I could understand. Argo would reveal the source of her distress slowly. But for the moment, she was keen to warn me away from Taurovinda.

  “I know you have been here for a long time,” I said to her through the Northland’s Lady. “So you know that Ghostland is rising across the river; there are places, hostels, where the Dead are gathering to feast before the fight. Tell me anything, anything at all you can to help us protect ourselves. There are Unborn in that gathering, but they have always been less aggressive than the Dead. What is happening, Argo? What can you tell me? Anything that will help.”

  After a while Mielikki whispered, “No one is safe in Urtha’s land. The Broken Kings made sure of that. Because of their fathers, Urtha’s land is set to slip into twilight. There is nothing you can do.”

  “The broken kings?”

  “Each of them innocent. Each of them guilty. I can only tell you one name: Durandond. He was the founder of Taurovinda. Argo is aware of him, below the hill. She thinks that you remember him.”

  * * *

  Durandond! And his companions.

  How quickly memory came back. How simple the opening of inner eyes that had been closed, not for reasons of fear, but for reasons of boredom. Why, with all that had happened to me over the ages, would I remember five reckless youths, five simple gifts, five disappointed and angry young men? Why would I bother with the snarls, sneers, and complaints of brash champions, offended and wounded at the blunt predictions of their futures?

  I had made a living telling the truth by foresight, and been skinned on many occasions when my physical reaction had been slower than my wit, escaping wrath. But those five boys, visiting me in my home “close to home,” the small cave and clearing where I often relaxed and recuperated after walking the Path for two or three generations … they had vanished from memory as swiftly as their chariots had carried them home to disaster.

  But I had always remembered Durandond. A broken king? I would have to find out more about him.

  It was clear to me that I had engaged with the shuddering ship as much as she would allow for the moment. I reminded her, through her protectress, that Urtha and his son were returning from the eastern tribal lands of the Coritani. A final, charged response came through from my old friend.

  Keep them there! Don’t let them return. Abandon the fortress.

  I didn’t hesitate. Though I wished to ask a hundred questions, I drew back from this hinterland, this summer threshold within the ship. I waded back through the rain-rotting bilges, climbed up to the oar-deck and over the side, slipping back into the reedy mud and stepping to the firm earth of the bank.

  Argo watched me forlornly. It was late in the day, growing dark, the air heavy with moisture. The river, farther away, rippled with movement, nothing more than ducks.

  I called for Jason and was answered by the wind rustling the reeds. As I came closer to the woods, I called again. Argo was behind me now, and hidden in the shadows. Had her crew somehow crept back on board the listless ship?

  A sudden movement caught my eye, and Jason appeared. He was still standing like a living corpse—lank, blank, sallow of countenance, and incurious—even though his gaze was on mine. Behind him I could see Rubobostes, the Dacian. I wanted so much to see those scowling features break into his famous laugh. But he was inanimate of mood, just alive in the flesh.

  A further surprise followed: stepping towards me, lean and dark, his eyes bright, was the Cretan Tairon, another of Jason’s second crew of Argonauts, from the time of the raid on Delphi.

  Tairon was a hunter of labyrinths. He had been born on Crete, the very home of labyrinths. He was strange in ways that made me believe he was older than his age. He, like Jason and the others, had the same air of detachment from reality about him; he was distant in mind, though clearly present in physical form. It was just … those eyes! He was closer to waking than the others.

  I had seen it before, of course. There is a brightness that suggests awareness, even in a corpse. There is a sparkle that tells of “watching.” Though Tairon was asleep, like the rest of the crew, there was a spirit within him that was motivating him to contact me.

  I said to him, “I thought you’d gone home after the adventure at Delphi.”

  “So did I,” the bright-eyed man answered solemnly.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I became lost again. Argo found me. Argo asked me back. I can help in the events that need to be accomplished.”

  He was silent for a moment, frowning as he stared at me, as if trying to remember something. Then he continued: “I can advise on the events that were once accomplished.”

  “Events?”

  “Argo’s past is a maze equal to any maze. I think that’s why she wants me here. A terrible event occurred to her. Don’t ask me what it was. I don’t know, though I have a suspicion. When I wake, you will have to remind me of this conversation. A small part of me remembers you, Merlin. I’m glad to see you. I’d thought time would have swept you into the future.”

  “I’ve found a rock. I’m hanging on.”

  “Cling fast. I’ll see you shortly.”

  The spirit flew from his gaze then, and he became as blank as Jason and the others. They stood there, these several sorry figures, ragged and hollow, waiting for me to leave.

  I left.

  * * *

  I got my bearings and paced back towards the forest. The horses were not tethered where I had left them. It seemed I had lost my horses. But my skills permitted me access to the animal world, and I could fly, swim, prowl, or gallop with a creature of my choice.

  I found one of the animals by flying to it as a crow. I turned the beast around with swooping aggression. It came back to me, harness drooping, mouth moist at the bit, eyes shameful.

  I forgave it at once.

  Whilst flying, however, I had seen Urtha, his retinue, and many others making their way back towards his tribal lands. They were following the trails to the dry river that separated Coritani from Cornovidi, to the two huge boulders known as the Stones of the Single Leap. So I knew where to go to intercept him. As soon as the horse was rested and fed, I would make haste to meet him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Kryptoii

  I kept to higher ground whenever I could, using a little insight to locate old and hidden tracks when the forest deepened. In two days I knew I was close to Urtha. I was also aware of being followed at a distance.

  Suspecting it was Jason who was shadowing me, perhaps on the horse I’d lost, I sent a winged spy to catch a glance. But as bird and pursuer encountered each other, so the woodland drew around the rider like a cloak, embracing and swallowing the figure, hiding him completely. The action was so sudden, it caught me by surprise, an alarming twisting of nature that I associated with those who possessed shape-changing talents rather than grizzled ex-mariners. Whoever pursued me, then, was someone more like me, but they approached from north and west, where Argo lay brooding.

  I put the puzzle from my mind. Argo’s words—stop them going back—were restless in my head. That sense of im
pending transformation was everywhere, and there were too many oddities and uncertainties in this otherwise ordinary world of sparring and warring tribes for me to embrace at this time.

  I was weary. I was forced to acknowledge the fact to myself. The call of the Path was becoming stronger. It would soon be time to move on my way, to pick up that old track again, to journey out of one world and into a new, a stranger one, a step back into the broader and deeper Time that governed my existence.

  I was reluctant to embrace that call.

  Niiv was in my blood now; thoughts of her, and feelings of comfort with her, were preoccupying forces. And there was Medea, too, that memory of love in my childhood. If I were to abandon Alba, I might abandon this renewed, if painful, encounter with the woman who had once been so important in my life.

  I rode on, confused and harried by uncertainty, not resting for my own sake, only for that of the animal.

  I caught up with Urtha within a day or so, at dusk. I was riding with the half moon behind me, coming from Coritanian territory into Urtha’s own land. Crossing a bare ridge, freed for a moment from the wildwood, I saw the spread of fires below me. Urtha had camped for the night in the dried river course that separated the two kingdoms. The fires burned between boulders and ragged trees, and tents were slung everywhere, twenty or more, in a wide circle around a broader enclosure, which I took to be that of the king and his retinue.

  I could hear, distantly, the raucous laughter of resting men, and the cheerful teasing of youths. If there was a scent of cooking on the air, the wind was denying me that pleasure.

  One of Urtha’s uthiin intercepted me, recognised me, and led me to the camp. Urtha came out to greet me. “Merlin! Casting a moon shadow, I see. I hope that’s a good omen. Come into my fortress!”

  I ducked below the skins of the tent. Several men sat there, some of whom I recognised. The rough ground was strewn with blankets. Urtha passed me a clay flagon of cold wine, his expression curious.