The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex

by Robert Holdstock

  “I have to wait for three of my men to return—your cedar-wood beasts killed the other two! I have no ill feelings about that. They knew we were entering dangerous terrain. But while I wait for them, if you wish to visit Argo, as I said before: you are my guest. And hers. When I have my crew together, we’ll leave. With you or without you, if you can’t be persuaded.”

  Jason and Tisaminas began the long walk down the mountainside, to the track that ran by the river; to the river that opened to the sea, where the ship was beached.

  Shaper watched them go. Then he made his way ahead of them, by the maze, to where the sea was breaking hard, in hard wind, against the rough shore, and Argo, below her tethers and canvas covers, was shuddering with the coming storm.

  She was aware of him at once. He felt her call.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Wedding Gift

  She was aware of him at once. He felt her call. The sea was wild by the time he reached her. The Argonauts were huddled in a wide circle around a glowing fire, below one of the canopies. For a moment Shaper entertained the idea of joining them, but they were in their cups and argumentative, miserable with the conditions that prevailed. He climbed the rope ladder as quietly as he could, dropped into the hold among the bales and barrels and the spare oars and sailcloth. He knew just where to go, and he approached the threshold cautiously.

  To his surprise, there was no one waiting for him. There should have been a guide. Athena, or her mother, Hera. A small part of the Greeklanders’ goddess should have been hovering at the edge of the Spirit of the Ship. Instead, he faced a sun-baked, stony landscape, a hot wind driving dust into his eyes. Scrubby trees and parched vegetation were scattered among the stones. There was the fragrant smell of strange herbs on the air, and the distant tinkle of bells, probably attached to the necks of animals. Horns were sounding, their droning low and sustained and seemingly without pattern. Shaper was unnerved by this. He enjoyed pattern. He was fearful of the random structure of nature and the chaos that was created by men who tried to imitate the natural world.

  He called now to the ship, summoning the spirit by the name he had given her when he himself had been her captain. She didn’t reply. He called again, this time to Argo. And after a while she came to him through the dazzling heat, a blurred image at first, then sharper as the haze flowed away from her body.

  She came as a small, nervous child, dressed in archaic clothing, face smudged with the desert, hair crudely tied into flails of dust-lightened auburn. Her eyes were green and fierce, her hands very small. She held a water flask and a straight bone knife. But she was apprehensive. He thought she seemed sad.

  She sensed that he was confused.

  “Who did you expect to see?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. The Greeklander goddess, perhaps. Or my kolossoi.”

  “Your kolossoi is there. Behind you. You didn’t make her to last.”

  Shaper turned. The small and exquisite bronze-and-wood statue sat upon a chair of rock, leaning slightly, hands folded between her knees, head lowered as if she were in a brief slumber, or slumped in despair. The bright bronze, interweaving with the hard polished wood, was as vibrant as when she had stepped into the vessel. But Shaper knew at once that she was dead. She had never truly been alive. She was simply a device, a mechanism whose discs—she was replete with discs, all of them tiny, all of them designed to spin within and against each other—would have kept a record of the life of the ship. As they spun and spoke to each other, so he had conceived that the symbols would rearrange themselves, to become meaningful, to become a history.

  He had been too ambitious, clearly. He had not read the sky discs from his son Raptor well enough. He had not understood the nature of the code.

  “I tried,” he said.

  “She was wonderful,” said the fierce-eyed girl, “while she lasted.”

  “While she lasted? Were you here when she was here?”

  “I’m always here,” the girl said quietly. Again, that flash of desperation and sadness in her eyes. “I love my captains. All of them. What am I without them? I’ve loved them all. I was never anything other than a barque without them.”

  “Like lovers,” Shaper said. “But you’re too young to have had lovers.”

  She laughed. “Not that young at all. When the boy made me, the boy who couldn’t tie his laces, when he spun in the river, nearly drowning, when that first boy made me, I was already old. It was just that I had never had the wood and leather of the hull to occupy.”

  * * *

  From where was I watching? Who was showing this to me? The thought was a fleeting flight of panic before I recognised the fierce-eyed girl to whom Daidalos was talking. This was my own childhood love! This was the child who had haunted me, and taunted me. This was Medea in her earliest form. My first small ship, that Voyager, had drawn for her first guardian on the very spirit of the tantalising child who had been both my nemesis and my delight, my first love and my first enemy.

  In a time before gods, who else to be guardian of a ship than someone close to the captain’s heart?

  Now! Now I began to understand! And I watched as Daidalos, this poor, forlorn Shaping Man, stepped into the trap that Jason had set for him.

  * * *

  “Have you missed me?” Argo asked through this first guardian.

  “Yes, I have,” Shaper replied. “I’ve missed you very much indeed. I was so curious about you. You are one of the several wonders of my life. My sons…” He paused, staring at the girl. For a moment it seemed strange to be talking to this ancient echo, this young-old form, this ghost, this child, this memory … but he was rational. He knew that he was in the presence of a creature, a spirit if you like, that was as real here as was the sun-scorched rock around him. What, after all, was Time? Merely a moment of existence in any state of being. Time flowed, flowed here and there, and could break into the present, from past or future, at any moment. What controlled that seepage, that sudden intrusion, was one of the many mysteries he had been attempting to decipher from the star-cast discs that arrived from the Middle Realm, where his own voyager, his son, his hawk, his Raptor, had finally landed.

  Argo, as ancient and childlike as she seemed, was still a ship! And the ship carried Time. And the ship carried memory. And she was a part of Shaper’s memory, and he a part of hers.

  “My sons were wonders to me,” he went on, finishing the thought, thinking of their birth. “Twins. But birds from two different flocks. I knew it the moment I saw them.”

  “I know.”

  “Their mother did not survive the birth.”

  “I know.”

  “Yes. I’ve told you all of this before.”

  “To you, though, I was just a curiosity.”

  “More than that,” Shaper insisted, uncomfortable with the sudden frown, the sudden change of mood.

  “Just a curiosity,” Argo whispered. There was a moment’s anger in her eyes, then that uncertainty again. “I was made in such a way that I loved my captains. They each became a part of me. I was loyal to them all. Even when they sailed me into the extremes of nature, or to the underworld, I always trusted them, I always obeyed them. It’s how the boy made me: to be loyal. To love.” Her eyes were misting.

  Shaper was silent. Something was very wrong.

  The girl turned and ran away, calling through her tears, “You shouldn’t have come. Your time with me is in the past. I’m loyal to Jason now. You shouldn’t have come!”

  The land around him dissolved into darkness. He felt cold wind on his face, the icy touch of sea-spray.

  Turning back to the threshold, he fell heavily on to his side. His hands were bound behind him; his feet were bound. His body rocked—the ship was at sea, in a storm. He could see the heavy night sky above him, thick clouds edged with moonlight.

  Two men stood over him, peering down. In the hold, others sat huddled, miserable. The sail billowed, catching wind and rain as the vessel ploughed through violent wa
ves.

  He tried to speak, but no words emerged. His tongue was thick, his sight beginning to blur.

  “Make sure he’s kept warm,” said Jason to his close companion, the man called Tisaminas.

  “How long to Iolkos?”

  “Another two days at most, even with this weather.”

  “We should feed him. He’s been trussed like this for two days.”

  “He’ll survive. Medea’s drug will keep him calm now. Keep him trussed. I don’t trust his hands. There’s metal in them.”

  The drug took its effect on Shaper. He drew inwards and downwards, feeling the bitter poison as it coursed through the channels in his body. Numbness and then a dreamless sleep ensued. His last thoughts were:

  Two days. She kept me talking for two days, even though it seemed like moments. Long enough for Jason to get back to the beach and capture me.

  She has betrayed me. Argo! My Argo! That explains her anguish. She betrayed me using the very mechanism that I had installed inside her. Betrayed me. For her new captain. She has killed me.…

  And the last words he heard were the words of the sea pirates.

  First, Tisaminas. “If we can’t trust his hands, we should cut them off.”

  Then Jason. He hesitated, before grunting his agreement. “Very well. Cut off the hands. But carefully. Keep them fresh so Medea can sew them back on. Medea wants all of him for her gift. She’ll need all of him if she’s to have her fun with him.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Memory of Wood

  It was snowing hard, yet the land was not quite a featureless white. I could see the shadowed edges of the silent woods nearby. The only sound in this “winterscape” was a woman’s laughter. Clad in white fur, throwing snowballs at her prancing familiar, the lynx, Mielikki was almost invisible.

  When she saw me, she made her way towards me, stepping through the deep drifts, her breath frosting. I was still in the hinterland, on Argo’s side of the threshold.

  Mielikki was in her pale, beautiful form, the enchanting woman of middle years.

  “Did you get your answer?” she asked me.

  “Some of it. Some of the answer. Argo betrayed one of her captains, the man we know as Daidalos. That betrayal is haunting her.”

  The goddess was thoughtful. “Yes. She loves her captains.”

  “I knew that. I’ve always known that. That was the way I made her, when I was a child, when I first shaped the vessel. She reminded me of the fact.”

  “And so: what else is there to find?”

  What else indeed?

  I shrugged, beginning to feel the bite of the chill beneath my clothing. “I need to know what happened next. How did Daidalos end up in the Otherworld of Alba? Alba is a long way from Shaper’s home.”

  “You could take a look…,” Mielikki teased me. “Use a little of that hidden charm.”

  I was surprised by this uncharacteristic playfulness. Had she been colluding with Niiv? Both women were from the same frozen, northern homeland. Niiv, however, could not gain entry to the Spirit of the Ship. She was protected by the Lady of the Forest, but not intimate with her. It was more likely that the goddess, like all guardians of the ship, had become aware of the play, the passion and the dissension between the various members of Argo’s crew. And I couldn’t deny that she was entitled to a little fun herself.

  Take a look into the past? Use a little of my charm? Why? Argo, step by step, was educating me.

  But I replied to her taunt, “I’ll probably have to. But I’m too cold here.… I have to go. This snow—it’s a surprise.”

  “Not welcome?”

  “Not welcome.”

  “I was homesick,” she explained with a pale smile, holding out her hand to catch the falling flakes. Snow sparked in her features. “I miss the North. I miss the ice.”

  “Yes. I know you do. And I’ll make sure you return there as soon as we can. But for the moment, I’m hungry. And I miss the sun. I miss warmth. I miss being drowsy.”

  Again she acknowledged my words with an understanding and gentle look in her eyes. “Off you go, then.”

  Even a goddess could be shaped by events, by circumstances. Foul or playful: her decision. Why should she need to be predictable?

  I crossed the threshold, back into the ship’s more earthly embrace, there to find Jason crouched before me, watching me closely as I emerged from the trance. He seemed startled.

  “I’ll never get used to that,” he said.

  “To what?”

  “To the way you transform from flat wood to fat flesh. But never mind that. Two of the boys have come back alone, following the river. No sign of Talienze and the others. No sign of Urtha. Come and see.”

  * * *

  I hadn’t remembered their names. No doubt I’d heard them at some time since our departure from Alba, but they were just two of the group of youths who had eagerly put their backs into the rowing, and otherwise sat quietly, part of the kryptoii that Kymon and Colcu had formed.

  Bollullos had drawn back the sacking covers. The water-bloated features were as smooth as masks. Flesh pale, hair sodden, and their eyes watched blindly from behind swollen lids.

  “They’ve been attacked by animals,” Bollullos said. “Gut-clawed. Gnawed. But that was after they died. They died from snakebite. Look…”

  He turned one of the corpses over. The boy’s shirt was torn open. Two black fang marks were clearly revealed, enclosed within a pattern of cuts made with a knife. At first glance the cuts seemed random, but only because death and water had distorted them. In fact, they were revealed as a crude representation of wolves on their hind legs, facing each other, forelegs reaching above the area of the reptile’s strike.

  The fang marks were a hand’s span apart. A big snake.

  When I pointed out the rough design, Niiv grasped the significance at once.

  “These are similar shapes to the entrances to the hostels, back in Alba, at the edge of Ghostland.”

  “Well remembered.”

  “This is curious,” Bollullos mused, scratching his beard and tracing the knife cuts with a brawny finger. “Very curious.”

  “Curious or not,” Jason said gruffly, “that man Talienze has taken them, and he has put them in danger. Merlin? Time to act.”

  His look meant business. He was sober, now, and still very much in the mood to argue. I didn’t want to argue.

  * * *

  There was something of death about Talienze; I had thought it from the moment I’d met him.

  I could either pursue him as Morndun, the ghost in the land, or as Skogen: the shadow of unseen forests. All forests were permanent, though their limbs died, rotted, and fell. All forests cast a shadow through the generations, and Talienze, if he were associated with death, would have left his shadow among them.

  Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more obvious it became: Talienze was not like me, not like Medea, not of the oldest of the world: but he was a servant of that world.

  He was constantly refashioned, given fresh life; a carving given a trim and a polish whenever its wood became soft and corrupt on the outside. The question, then, if I was right: Was he a creature of Shaper? Or of Queller? He might have been either.

  I would travel as Skogen, I decided. The shadow of unseen forests. The memory of wood.

  I summoned the mask, unable to stifle a cry, startled by the unexpected pain as the wood flowed into my face—that was something new! Then I summoned the form. And when I was shrouded in forest, I summoned the oak image of Segomas from Argo. The lost warrior crept quietly into one of my groves, found a place of security, and bound himself to the trunk of a tree. I could feel the pulse of his heart, the brew of his thoughts, the hope and fear at what he might find.

  A dead man (whose name meant “victorious”) in tow, I began my journey across this secretive island.

  * * *

  I flowed over the hills, following the course of rivers, touching the caves and walled enclosures that
appeared, suddenly and mysteriously, in some of the remotest of areas. Segomas had taken on a more human form, now, searching for his remains. He was lithe as he clambered over walls and ducked into the dark mouths of caverns.

  When we engaged with another forest, we felt empowered, as if the living woods were giving succour to this ghostly echo briefly coexisting alongside it, moving steadily onwards.

  We paused for a long while at the Dyctean cave. The scent of Queller was strong here, and there were echoes of younger creatures. Ahead, to the setting sun, stretched low hills, then grim mountains. But the youths could surely not have travelled so far in this short time.

  Skogen turned to the south, and we began to search these closer hills.

  Everywhere, fallen among the trees, slumped in forges, were the green, ruined giants, Shaper’s talosoi, the island’s guardians, from the time when he was strong. Their sad features were homes for birds and bats. Their outstretched hands were almost indistinguishable from the thick, mossy roots of trees. Had they all fallen together, I wondered, or had they fallen over time, each seeking out a place to die before collapsing with the groaning of forge-cast metal into their eternal slumber.

  Home to birds and bats. It was Segomos who sensed in one these leviathans a different form of life.

  Small, terrified life, hiding in the metal skull.

  I would have shed Skogen at that point, but Segomos asked me not to. I wrapped the forest around the broken giant, and Segomos descended into one of the eyes, acting with a lack of caution that no Argonaut would have dared.

  He emerged with one of the kryptoii, a boy called Maelfor, we found out. He was bleeding from the face and mouth, his clothes ragged, his hands filthy with earth and mould.

  I manifested my form in the small grove. He seemed anxious for a few moments, then, peering more closely, recognised me and relaxed. Relief, indeed, made him sink suddenly to a sitting position, his battered head cradled in his arms, tears flowing quite freely.

  When he had recovered a little, Segomos knelt down beside him. He’d found water, which he offered the lad in a piece of bowl-shaped bark; and grapes from the vineyard into which we had flowed. Ghostly though Skogen appeared, we could feed off the land through which we passed as shadow.