The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex

by Robert Holdstock

  The boat turned at its own pace, lulling him quiet, progressing to Ghostland in its own time, in its own way.

  Lying back, gazing up at the stars, Jason smiled as he surrendered to the river. Then he laughed out loud. The heavens moved around his gaze, a restless farm of images, but he could not see the “archer”—the Centaur! Chiron. This river was too far north, he knew.

  Nevertheless, he invoked his old friend:

  “I tried, Chiron. All my life I tried. And for most of my life I succeeded. You gave me good advice. Can you send a horse for me now?”

  Nothing stirred in the night sky.

  Chiron had told him that should he ever need help, he need only look to the heavens. “There I am,” the self-proclaimed “centaur” had teased his young charge, indicating the constellation known as the Man-Horse Hunter. “That’s where I get my strength.”

  “That’s a goat, not a horse.”

  Chiron was amused. “The goat dances in Cornus! Over there.”

  Jason was dismissive of this elemental magic. “You see shapes where I see directions. I see stars that one day I’ll need to sail by. Useful signals. That’s all I see.”

  “Well, yes. But sailing is about more than ships and seas—at least, when it comes to being a king. You don’t need to believe in the heavens. But you ought to understand how others believe in them.…

  “And hopefully not to confuse goats and horses.”

  Jason had laughed at that. “I’ll try not to. So those stars are a man and a horse, an archer on four legs.”

  “It’s a man who holds close his animal nature. Wit and strength, Jason, young Jason … wit and strength.”

  What was the river doing? The water flowed past him, but the boat was still, caught, as it were, in an eddy, its low prow pointed towards the narrow darkness between thrusting willows, whose night arms reached to embrace him. Fires burned beyond that dark crevice of gloom. And there was movement there.

  Jason wanted to leap into the river and swim. But the fight was out of him, and he lay quite still, alive in starlight, embraced by the river, ready for life, death, vengeance, or release. Anything.

  He thought of his father, Aeson, and of his childhood, and his growing years when he had been sent north, to that country of horses and wild riders, to die or survive, taken into the care of Chiron. Foul-breathed Chiron. Moon-howling, self-immolating Chiron. Chiron—supposedly a Dacian—who spent so much of his day strapped to his dust-grey steed, grey with dust himself, disguised with leaves and dressed in the drab colours of his plains-roaming people, that he might easily have been confused with a centaur.

  Even Chiron joked that when he dismounted, he had to tear the skin of his thighs from the horse’s hide.

  The man had been saved from death by Aeson at the battle of Xenopylas—no poet had been there to record it—and had in turn saved the king, who had never forgotten that saving grip and the rescuing grasp of the horseman as they’d fled the field, never abandoned the memory, kept contact and sent favours to the wild man in return for a single horse every summer, a gift appreciated.

  Chiron had trained Jason in everything he needed, but most especially in the use of his wits and cunning. “There is a difference between a foot soldier who fears the sudden thrust of a spear through his guts and a king who fears an omen. The first strides forward to meet the fear, survives or not; the second lets fear root him to the spot. Easy to chop down.”

  As he floated gently in the middle of the Winding One, Jason laughed again and cried out to the stars, to the memory of his old friend: “Grant me at least that I proved that point, old horse! Never rooted, always restless!”

  The boat nudged the gravel of the bank, between the drooping fronds of the willows. The second craft was there as well, but waterlogged, its lowest strakes hacked by an axe.

  Jason scrambled ashore, drawing the boat behind him, securing it. Around him, the land was alive with sound, not of voices, but the low droning of beasts and the heavy movement of machines. There was no brightness in this night air.

  He had had no expectations of what he would find on this side of Nantosuelta, except that Medea would be close. He unbuckled his sword belt, wrapping the leather around the sheath and carrying the weapon in a way that would make it hard to use. He found moist leaves and wiped the mud from his boots. He wondered whether or not to remove one of them, to walk one-booted into whatever was waiting for him.

  For a while he was caught on this new shore: he stared at the scuttled craft, wondering who had been its occupant. He gazed at the distant fire on the land, listened to the world that was beyond his comprehension.

  Rooted to the spot.

  Enough of that!

  He made himself comfortable, used the cold water to refresh his skin, then ascended the narrow path between the trees until he came to a structure in stone and wood that framed the distant fire. Not a temple, not a sanctuary, but a small and welcome hostel, hollow, in that he could walk through it to the land beyond, but secure, in that it gave protection from the stars, the rain; a shelter, with dark rooms leading off from its rough-hewn walls.

  He came to the far exit. Urtha’s land stretched out before him, glowing with fires, mysterious with movement. Jason was briefly disorientated: it seemed that mountains rose before him, but he could see clouds and stars through the slopes. The mountains faded, and there were the hills, the woods, the fires.

  If he had intended to walk out into the open of the night, he hesitated, and in that moment of caution a voice whispered from behind him:

  “Step back. Don’t cross.”

  The voice had been Medea’s. He saw her now, black-clad and pale-faced. Like a wraith, she slipped into one of the openings, and he heard her running.

  He followed, finding himself in a dank corridor, the flagstones slippery, the walls stinking with slime that seemed to ooze from the fissures between the rocks.

  “Is this the passageway to Hades? Where are you taking me?”

  Ahead of him, the woman’s footfall sounded hesitant. Then her laugh came, low and brief. “Not to Hades. I would have thought you’d have enough of Hell.”

  She was off again. For an instant Jason glanced back at the still-lingering light at the end of the passage. But tugged by tiredness and helplessness and not a little curiosity, he slipped and slid on down the road, steadying himself with his hands, breathing the air that, though tainted, at least seemed to flow towards him. He became a creature similar to a bat, seeing by sound and smell rather than by eyes.

  “Where are you taking me? Is this your idea of vengeance?”

  Again, that pause in the darkness. Again the low, sour laugh. “No, Jason. No. Not vengeance. I no longer have the capacity for such poison. A jar of wine, unused for many years, breaks in the winter and spills its soured contents. Anger is like that. Better to throw the clay jar far away before it breaks.”

  “Well … thank you for the lesson in temperance. But where in the name of Cthonos and his pale, blind sons are you taking me?”

  “Here! Open your eyes.”

  “My eyes are already open.”

  “Try again.”

  She was standing by a tall narrow window. Daylight illuminated one side of her face as she stood with her back to the wall. The sudden light was harsh, stark; it burned the age from her, softened her skin, her gaze.

  “I remember this place well,” Jason said. “Your private room, looking out over the harbour.”

  “Looking down at Argo, at your drinking friends. At the way you wasted your years with me.”

  “This is not Iolkos. This is a dream.”

  “Clever, clever. I made this place to keep me warm. When the Otherworld of these barbarians spread across a king’s land to the river, I came with it. I had no choice.”

  “You were dragged here? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I was uprooted. The land flowed east. I had always lived at the edge of Ghostland. I came forward with that sudden growth.”

&nb
sp; “Uprooted…,” Jason echoed quietly, and they both laughed.

  Medea whispered, “Yes. Not for the first time, eh?”

  “Not for the first time.”

  He walked over to the window. Medea smelled of a fragrance he recognised, with its hint of rose and cinnamon, and the musk of an animal. This is how she had oiled her body when he had met her in Colchis, before they had become lovers. As if to keep him waiting, to frustrate him in his ambitions, she had then worn nothing by way of scent except the odour of a ram. Foul and filthy, he had embraced it without question, knowing that she had been testing him.

  In Iolkos, again she was rosewater and musk. And for a while he had basked in a paradise for his senses.

  In this nowhere-place, this edge of the Otherworld, Jason stared at the empty harbour below with a sense of nostalgia. Argo had been moored there for many years. He had used her almost as a second home, her deck covered with canvas, the quayside littered with barrels and ropes and crates and jars. And yet she had been a restless vessel. Many times he had gone to find her at night, only to discover that she had slipped her ropes and prowled out onto the ocean.

  She had been a sad ship all those years, but she had stayed loyal. Each dawn, she was there again, a little fresher on her decks, the wind from the open sea still fragrant in her sail.

  Now Jason glanced at Medea, who was watching him closely. “Who crossed in the other boat?”

  She shook her head. She wouldn’t answer. “Why were you laughing as you crossed? What memory brought that unusual sound to your voice?”

  “You were watching me?”

  “Of course I was watching you. I’ve been watching you since you returned from the dead.”

  “Not a comforting thought.”

  “I don’t mention it to give you comfort. What made you laugh?”

  “What made me laugh…,” he repeated, then shrugged, leaning on the marble sill and staring into the false light of his past. “I was thinking about how very clever I’d been as a youth, and how quickly that wit was stolen from me. I was thinking of Chiron. And my father, Aeson; you never knew him. Only that bastard of an uncle of mine who killed him.”

  “Peleas. Yes. The man who teased you into searching for the fleece. But without him, you and I would never have met.”

  Jason’s laugh was so spontaneous, he almost choked. “Well, romantic though that sounds, it couldn’t have been for the worse, all things considered.”

  “Sour man. Sour mind.”

  “Yes. The murder of his sons does that to a father.”

  “I didn’t kill our sons. I took them away from you.”

  “You took them away from their world. You killed them as you killed me. Spite spoke through your hands, not protection.”

  “Spite blinded me to the needs of my sons. I don’t disagree with you, Jason. It was a shocking thing to do, to displace them so far in the future. Though I kept with them, I stayed with them. I watched over them … as best I could. It exhausted me. I have no time left now; days at the most.”

  “Don’t look for pity or forgiveness from me, you witch.”

  “I don’t. I’m not.”

  Suddenly angry, Jason spat on the floor before Medea. “Watched over them? The last I saw of Kinos, my little dreamer, he was dead from his own madness, stretched on a bier in a childish, Shadeborn palace of his own creation.”

  “I was there. Remember? He had followed me to this place, this northern Ghostland. I was there. I saw him die.”

  “You were a shadow, hugging shadows, too ashamed to confront me, too dead to shed a tear.”

  “Oh, I shed tears, Jason. Don’t ever doubt that! To watch your youngest son die so wretchedly is not a play to be visited twice.”

  The silence that hung so heavily, then, seemed to whisper another name: the eldest boy, Thesokorus. The little bull-leaper.

  Jason whispered, “Who was in the other boat?”

  “Yes,” Medea said knowingly. “Yes, it was.”

  “Thesokorus? He’s here?”

  “Thesokorus is close.”

  “The last time I met him was near an oracle, in Greek Land. Dodona. He had been hunting me. He opened my guts with a single blow and left me for dead. The wound still hurts. But then, you know that: you’ve been watching me since my resurrection.”

  “Are you afraid he’s come to finish the task?”

  Jason smiled thinly, wearily. “I’m not afraid of anything. I’m rooted to the spot. I’m taking no further part in my own actions. So strike your bronze shields and summon your shade-magic.”

  “Sad man. Sour man.” Medea came over to him. “You poor ‘Shade’ of a man.”

  Her skin was old, but her eyes and her lips were young. She kissed Jason on each cheek, then on his own lips, touching his face with fingers that shook slightly. She held his gaze with hers.

  “The last time I saw you,” she whispered, “which was not so long ago: you were full of life again. I remember hearing your words, as you guided Argo out onto the river, to seek, to find, to strive for the last years of your life.…”

  “You were watching. Of course.”

  “Always watching,” she teased. “Let me remind you of what you said:

  “I have ten years, Merlin, and I won’t waste them. Ten years at least, ten good years to sail this good ship on strange waters and find strange places to …

  “… and you paused. And you laughed when Merlin suggested: ‘To loot?’

  “Yes. Loot. It’s what I do best. Ten years, Merlin. Listen out for my story. Now get off my ship, unless you want to join the adventure.”

  Jason nodded, remembering. And he said, “Merlin expressed the wish that I would find what I was looking for. I answered that I was looking for nothing; but that I hoped ‘Nothing’ wasn’t looking for me.”

  “I know. I heard it all. By the Beard of the Ram! You were your old self again, that young man, less wit than ambition, more strength than care for his own safety, drawn to the unknown. I could have loved you again, right there and then.”

  They held each other; lost lovers remembering lost love.

  “The unknown consumes men like me,” Jason whispered. “We are born in that place. We can never know its limits. In the end, we disappear there.”

  Medea sighed, a small, sad sound as she held her face to his chest. “I knew that from the moment I met you. Do you imagine that I didn’t? I fled Colchis with you, on Argo, because I wanted to be a part of that unknown. To share it.”

  “I let you down,” he murmured after a moment.

  “No, Jason. Our paths were different. They always had been. All paths run together for a time. They always separate.” She brightened then, catching his gaze and smiling. “But when you left Taurovinda, only a few seasons ago, I still celebrated your new passion; when I watched from hiding; when you seemed so exhilarated with the thought of adventure.”

  Gently, Jason pressed his lips to Medea’s forehead. “Well. It didn’t last. I was looking for something that had gone. Long gone. I slowed down. And Argo slowed down, too. These Celts, Urtha, the king of this land, he and his Speakers talk of ‘wastelands.’ They talk of three wastelands that drained the kingdom over the generations. Well, I’ve come to know all about wastelands. It became a wasteland on that ship after a while. There was something desperate in Argo’s heart. An unhappy ship—she put us into hibernation, like winter foxes. Until we came back to Alba, and I found Merlin again.”

  “Argo brought you back here for a reason.”

  “It has something to do with that business on Crete, a thousand years ago, or whenever. Something to do with my wedding gift to you.”

  “It has everything to do with your wedding gift to me.”

  There was something in the way she looked at him: expectant, testing, waiting for him to respond. The light from the window seemed to flare, then darken, and his gaze was drawn again to the harbour below.

  A ship was moored there now, and he recognised Argo at once, but not Ar
go as he and the shipwrights had reconstructed her in Iolkos. This was an older ship, its hull painted in an intricate weave of blue and red, the shapes of the creatures of the sea familiar to him, the eyes that watched from the strakes familiar to him, the gleam of polished bronze bringing back an echo of the day he had pirated the vessel as she sailed close to his own sea-channel, killing her crew, abducting Argo to refashion her, to make the vessel he would need for the perilous journey in pursuit of the fleece, in his hunt for Medea.

  A figure was standing on the quayside, looking up at the small palace. The light on its face was golden, though the eyes were dark. The skins that clothed the man were grey and brown, the hides of wolves and goats, stitched together.

  And the quayside was no longer the familiar haven of Iolkos.

  “I recognise the place, but I don’t remember it.”

  “The harbour on Crete, where you came ashore as an angry man, challenged by your uncle to steal the ship before you searched for the fleece.”

  “Of course. But … then this is not your creation. This place is not yours.”

  Medea smiled thinly, barely covering her sadness and desperation at this final betrayal.

  “It’s his,” she agreed. “I have nothing left to offer. Not even protection. The flame is out. Yes, it’s his. The Shaping Man. He’s shaping the edge of the world as he remembers it. As he shapes, so he moves, and he must cross Nantosuelta. When he crosses the river, he will leave nothing but wasteland behind him.”

  Jason was almost amused. He glanced at the sky, searching for the dark wings of scavenging birds, waiting—as he knew they waited in this northern land—to drag the dead to their own Hell.

  “Argo brought me here to be killed.”

  “I don’t think so,” Medea whispered. “She loved her captains.”

  “What, then?”

  But before she could answer, if indeed she had an answer to offer, the world of the palace shifted and dissolved around them. The sweet smell of rose-oil was replaced by the sharp smell of pine and the crisp freshness of mountain air. They fell apart from each other, Jason sliding down the scrub-covered hillside, Medea tumbling after. The sky was an intense blue. He struck an immense grey rock, its scarred form rising from the hill like a petrified tree stump. Grey trees grew from where the rock had split. Their branches played like a dancer’s hands above him.