The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex

by Robert Holdstock

  Chapter Twenty

  Dream Hunt

  I ran for the street, hauling back the door and stepping out into the fierce sunshine. The older woman had scurried behind me, pushing the door closed again, shutting me out.

  Almost at once a crowd surged around the corner, pressing me back against the house.

  They were children of all ages, garlanded with flowers, grey-green herbs, and leaves, all dressed in pale green or bright yellow tunics, the boys with their faces painted an azure blue, the girls painted scarlet red. They flowed past me as a turbulent stream, shrill and insensate. Then there came a cry from behind them, and the whole crowd turned as one, with all the sudden speed of a shifting shoal of fish, and began to run back along the street. Then a horn sounded from elsewhere and again they turned as one, retracing their steps, streaming past me once more, a single mind, a single purpose, a stampede of celebration.

  And in the middle of them I saw suddenly an unpainted face, but a familiar shock of hair. Niiv was small, and many of the children were taller than she, but her features were as bright and as recognisable as a comet in the heavens. I plunged into the running throng, fought my way through the heave of small bodies as they crushed in their haste, wheeling round into a narrower street, following the horn call.

  I managed to grab Niiv by the shoulder. She turned in alarm and fury. Her eyes were intense with ecstasy. She stared at me, not knowing me, caught up in the madness. I held on to her, despite her struggles and screams, and eventually the last of the shoal had passed. The street was silent.

  Her eyes focused. The trance lifted. She came gently into my arms and rested her face against my chest.

  “That was so strange. Merlin! So strange.”

  “What have you done?” I whispered. “What have you let yourself do this time?”

  “Strange! Strange!” she repeated, holding me in a lover’s embrace, embracing my gaze with hers. She tried to kiss me. I drew back. Her grip hardened; then her hand reached for my cheek, tugging my face closer. She was feral and panting; cat-breath was strong on her lips and tongue, and she shuddered for a moment, finding the kiss she desired, for that moment, that stunning, urgent moment—before I flung her against the wall of the house.

  She growled now, slipping down to her haunches, disappointed and angry, watching me with eyes that might have said: I’ll have you, or might have said, How dare you!

  Again I rescued her, lifting her gently to her feet. “Tell me about strange. What was strange?”

  Softer then, she turned into my grasp, head on my breast. “The woman,” she said. “The quelling woman.”

  The name made me uncomfortable. In the word she used came a feeling I was used to. Her word reminded me of the feeling of the woman who had possessed the cave at Akirotiri, when we had first found harbour on the island, a few days ago.

  “It was so strange, Merlin,” Niiv repeated. Was she still in a trance?

  I asked her to describe what she had felt and seen, but she became tongue-tied, struggling to put into words an experience that had both shocked and thrilled her.

  I decided to take a quick look behind her eyes, a mere touch of her recent memory, nothing involving her future or her deeper feelings—just the encounter with the child-swarm. Her gaze grew canny as I passed it, as if she knew what I was doing, and then I was reeling!

  She was running, not in the winding streets of a town but along the winding paths of a forested mountain. She screamed as she ran, one of many, their howls and cries not those of humans but of wildcats. Wolves and dogs sometimes hunt in packs, but these were feline and furious—and huge, a pride more numerous than any I had ever witnessed before.

  They were strange in more ways than this: There was an element of wolverine about them as well—as if two creatures had bred together to form a fast, vicious, and monstrous chimera.

  Dozens of us (I felt as Niiv had felt) raced in a mass—a pack, a swarm, a single entity—through the nightwoods, up and down the moonlit mountain slope, following the scent of a single creature.

  And behind us, calling and singing to us, each call, each melodic vocal switch, causing us to turn, to pick up a new scent, closing, closing on our terrified prey.

  It was only as the confusion cleared that I became aware of the wild figure above us on the slopes of the mountain, a woman, ringlet hair flailing as she rode on the back of what appeared to be a gigantic wolf.

  Her arms rose and fell, an incomprehensible series of signals that accompanied her ululations and shrill shrieks, a chaos dance, a mad song inducing mad movement in the child-cat hunters.

  Ahead of us ran the terrified creature, and I touched it briefly, finding an echo of its panic-stricken thoughts as it fled from cave to tree, from narrow defile to the scant shelter of a ruined house, stone-tumbling down the hill.

  Part man, part beast, part bronze, this creature knew it was destined to die, but some mechanism within its flesh and metal kept it running. It seemed bound by twin instincts—to survive in the flesh, and to protect that which was forged from the hot ores in the shaping caves.

  In that brief contact, from within Niiv herself, I was made powerfully aware of the creature’s desire to find one of those “shaping caves”—for there it scented safety, a release from the relentless pursuit.

  But it was lost on the mountainside, and the wild woman and her wild beast could see him clearly; she made the hunting pack dance to her commands, and soon they were closing for the kill.

  (And yet, for a fleeting moment the woman’s wild calls ceased and she sat quite motionless on the wolf, staring down the slope, half illumined by the moon.

  Staring at me!

  She had seen, or sensed me in the pack, and she was angry.

  Then she had ridden on, leaving behind only that sense of curiosity and profound irritation.)

  All of this in an instant and then I was back, and Niiv was watching me with hunger and delight.

  “You saw it! You saw it! Wasn’t it strange?”

  “You have drawn attention to us,” I told her. “And I suspect it’s unwelcome attention.”

  She pouted at me, as usual, defiance alive in her expression. “Are you going to tell me again that I’ve gone too far?”

  “No point in telling you. You never listen.”

  She slumped back against the wall. “I didn’t look forward, Merlin. I didn’t go to the unborn future.”

  “You looked, though, and sometimes that’s enough.”

  She was gloomy for a moment before asking, “Do you have any idea what it means? All that chasing? That strange creature?”

  “I’m beginning to get one. But Argo is only opening up slowly.”

  “Why is that, do you think?”

  “She’s a ship. She has a truth to tell. We must let her tell it in ship-time.”

  Beside us, the door to Tairon’s house opened and the tall Cretan stepped out into the street, blinking at the bright light. There were tears in his eyes and on his cheeks.

  “My mother is dead,” he said quietly when he saw me. “She was already dead when I arrived, but still living in the hinterland and still able to recognise me. And she has told me of events here that make it dangerous for us to stay. We should return to the ship and be on our guard.”

  I told him that I couldn’t have agreed more, then asked about the “events” to which his mother had referred.

  “There was a war here,” he said, though his expression was vague. “The land has been transformed by Wild Creature Lady. She has almost won the war and is again the voice of day, moon, and season. She is reclaiming everything that had been lost and is hunting down the last survivors of those who had worshipped the Shaper. The Daidalon.”

  He hesitated before glancing at me again. “My mother told me that something wonderful had been happening here, something that had been continuing from long before she was born, something so new, it was as if the stars themselves had sent envoys to greet us and tell us of new wonders. But the Daida
lon was stolen and the Wild and the Old has returned. Snake Lady, Dove Lady, Earth Lady Who Nourishes; my mother’s names for her. I knew of her, of course. I knew of the Shaper. The Daidalon. But I was just a child when I passed through the Shaping Chamber into the labyrinth and was lost. I’d had no idea of the turmoil that was occurring.

  “She said that for generations this land had been the source of creations from the imagination of a man just like ourselves, and not of the earth or the mountains or Wild Lady. His shaping was new. The war occurred out of sight of us, by night and in shadows, but it was vicious and brutal and bloody, and was shaping us without our knowing.

  “It almost ended when the Daidalon was stolen, but it is still not finished.”

  Now he looked at me, his expression that of a man who has suspicions and yet a curiosity that needed satisfying.

  “The ship has a secret, Merlin. Argo knows something. Something about all of this.”

  He was imagining that I was complicit in that secret knowledge. I was not (at that moment) and was careful to allay his suspicions. Niiv listened intently to our exchange.

  He went on, “Time is all wrong here. We are not in the right time. And it is Argo that has brought us to this place, this wrong place, we seem agreed on that. Either you or Jason must get her to speak to us through that grotesque creature from the far north.”

  “I’m not grotesque!” Niiv objected, stunned by Tairon’s reference.

  “He means the goddess,” I pointed out. She giggled. “Oh.”

  But it would not be through Mielikki, Lady of the North, that Argo would reveal what she knew.

  * * *

  Tairon’s foreboding proved accurate. As we approached the river harbour and its expansive area of quays, we became aware of the murmuring silence. Crowds had gathered on each side of the river, peering hard at the ship, our Argo. Rubobostes was at the steering oar, Jason at the prow. They had cut their moorings from the quayside and were holding fast in midstream. The hill that rose beyond the town was bright with the white tunics of children, all of them standing on the winding paths, watching like seabirds.

  The air was full of whispering. Sometimes the crowd would shuffle restlessly, and a low ripple of conversation would break the stillness.

  At the top of Argo’s mast, a black-and-bloodred flag drooped in the heavy air; Jason’s signal that all was not well.

  “How do we get through this lot?” Niiv asked me in a nervous whisper, clutching my arm. Tairon was looking up at the roofs, searching for a way to take us over the heads of this silent but threatening gathering.

  “We’re cut off,” he said. Alas, his voice was a little too loud. Heads turned towards us, then in ranks, as silent and as menacing as the child-swarm, the gathering by the river started to swing towards us, eyes watching, voices beginning to hum tunelessly: although not so tunelessly that I couldn’t recognise the eerie melody that Wild Lady had shrieked from her wolf-back, in the mountain dream, glimpsed so recently through Niiv.

  Though no one moved towards us, we were clearly being focused upon, and that could only mean danger.

  So I summoned the one creature that would scatter these forlorn yet frightening townsfolk: the bull!

  I brought him out of whatever Hades these Cretans had created, and he came—monstrous, red and black, hoof-pounding on the road, driving a path through the crowd. As he passed us, I drew him back, using words that I had thought I had long forgotten, but how quickly the simpler of the old charms return when needed! And those vibrant echoes of my younger years brought the bovine giant to a standstill, snorting and heaving as it peered down at me. I flung Niiv onto its back, and then Tairon scrambled for a purchase on its flank; I jumped for its horns as it dipped its head, braced between them, hanging on hard. The creature turned and pounded towards the river, slowing at the last moment to trot majestically to the water, ploughing through the clay jars and crates on the quayside. The alarmed crowd kept very far back.

  It was so easy, I could almost have laughed.

  As we slipped from the bull’s back, Niiv grabbed my arm, pointing into the crowds. “Look! Tairon’s twin!”

  I followed her gaze but saw nothing. Tairon was already in the water, and Niiv and I followed quickly.

  As we swam for Argo, the bull watched us from the quay, then turned to the north. With its head low, it suddenly charged into the distance, into obscurity: back to the realm of dreams.

  Jason hauled me aboard, then pulled Niiv from the water, but she scurried away from him as she sprawled onto the deck.

  As I wrung water from my hair, the old Argonaut pointed to where the bull had disappeared.

  “You did that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Easy charm. A quick moment from your talents. What did it cost you? A grey hair? A minute of life? Why don’t you help us more often?”

  He’d been drinking. He was aggressive.

  “I help when I can. I help when necessary. I would help more if absolutely necessary. I don’t squander my life.”

  “Your life? Your life? You can’t remember more than a fraction of it.…”

  I thought, then, of explaining the danger to me of small use of charm, that simple fact that I had never forgotten: that at any moment I would be precipitated into decay, time catching up with me, the old guardians abandoning me. I should have returned to my birthplace long ago, along with the others who had been sent on the Path—trail-walking, as Artemenesia had known it in her own legends. But I was still here, still young, still very much alive—and on “borrowed time,” an expression the Greeklanders were very fond of using.

  Borrowed time. That phrase should last for all eternity.

  For more cycles than I could now remember, I had clung to Time as a child clings to a favoured grandparent, indulged and loved, never criticised, always soothed. Yet always aware that night must fall, and the favoured parent will fade away.

  At any moment even the simplest exercise of my talents might break the spell. A wren, summoned to sit on a rafter and spy on a king and his daughter. Something as simple as that, something as easy as that, an act of charm that would only flicker in its effect on me, an unnoticeable moment of rot in my body—or as Niiv liked to say, and as Jason had just repeated: one more grey hair, one less breath—such a simple act might be my downfall.

  I was not just cautious in my use of charm. I was often terrified of using it.

  “Why are you angry?” I asked the man.

  “I’m not angry. Argo is angry.” He frowned, as if he had just grasped something he had previously missed. “When she’s in a mood, so am I.”

  “You were always her favourite captain.”

  He glowered at me. Tairon had stripped and was painstakingly spreading out his amber-coloured tunic to dry, to the amusement of Rubobostes. The Cretan was immune to such teasing. Niiv sat sullenly on the lowered mast, wringing out her new dress, watching me.

  “There’s something else,” Jason suddenly said. When I didn’t respond, he added, “The children are missing.”

  “Missing? When did they vanish?”

  “They didn’t vanish. They went with Talienze. Earlier. Urtha has gone looking for them. Talienze said they would be the most adept at discovering one of those ‘shaping chambers’ you’ve mentioned. A cave of creation. There’s one hidden in the hills behind this town. The Cave of Discs. But Urtha felt sudden pain; he felt danger. He’s very close to his son. He’s gone looking for them.”

  What was Talienze up to? It was a niggling thought, a quiet distraction. Talienze was one man in the company of five very agile and aggressive youths. He would be no match for them. But what was he up to?

  “And something else again,” Jason said wearily.

  “Yes?”

  “That figurehead. Old Scowling Woman—”

  “Mielikki! Be careful what you say in her hearing.”

  “The wooden witch,” he said with a sour grin. He was very much not in control of his mood.
r />   “What about her?”

  “She’s been moving. Just for a few moments at a time, but definitely alive. So has that wooden warrior. And the witch is whispering words. All I can make out is the name Merlin.”

  Argo wanted to talk to me, this time I was sure of it. I was being summoned at last.

  The boys or Argo: which should I pursue? With Urtha and his men on their heels, the boys could wait. I would find a way to spy on them later.

  “Keep your thoughts to yourself,” I murmured to Jason. He watched me suspiciously as I went to the ladder and descended into the Spirit of the Ship.

  PART FOUR

  THE DANCING FLOOR OF WAR

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The Wedding Promise

  As I stepped across the threshold into the Spirit of the Ship, I had expected to emerge onto the meadow, close to the woods. I had expected to find dreamy Mielikki, in her summer veils, standing waiting for me, the sharp-eared lynx sprawling at her feet.

  Instead I entered a marbled corridor, its floor slippery beneath my feet. Sounds boomed and rang in the passage. Light spilled from high windows on both sides. Voices murmured distantly. There was the sound of scurrying, as of men or women rushing about their business.

  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?”