The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex

by Robert Holdstock

  “Wanderers.”

  She tugged my hair, pulled my face down to hers, pressed her mouth against mine. A last kiss. Her lips were as moist, soft, as fragrant, and as yearning as a spring flower opening after rain. Everything in that kiss was the joy of remembering.

  Then she whispered, “My son will kill his father, unless you intervene. They’re out there now, and Thesokorus is angry. Spend a little of your life, Merlin. Please. For me. For your sister. Out of love.”

  She had gone from me as quickly as she had appeared in the gloom of the labyrinth. I stood there shaken and shaking, trying to suppress tears, tears for a woman whom once I’d loved and whom I had come to hate, and who had been a constant torment in my life. I could think of none of that now, none of the pain, none of the pursuit, only of that idyll of play and teasing, and affection, that had been our first years. The time of love and joy. So long ago that it might have been the play of gods unknown.

  * * *

  I became angry, then. A red rush of rage. I looked at the cold stone and saw only a man’s greed. Daidalos was walking home, and dragging a world with him. It occurred to me, as I hammered hands against that cold rock illusion, that the man, born in the past, born to understanding and brilliance on that remote island, could not cross the river.

  It was a moment of inspiration. Nantosuelta, the often calm, sometimes raging flow of water that defined the edges of two worlds, would not let the man cross. He was incomplete, and the river knew it.

  And yet, he had savaged a land. Urtha’s land. The land of my friend, and of my friend’s family. The Dead had come willingly with him. They were legion, lining the banks of the new river. The Unborn were restless, unhappy at this unhappy outcome.

  Daidalos had power. He had sucked power from the Otherworld. He had shrouded himself in the strength of ghosts.

  Well. At that moment, in the blaze of fury, losing my sister from the beginning of Time, my lover, thinking of Niiv, who could not tame Time as could I, who would not last the distance in the days that I wished her to stay with me: in that moment I decided to age.

  This is how it felt.

  My bones seemed to shatter inside my flesh as the charm was scraped from them. My blood congealed in my heart, but flowed from my skin. My hands became red, and I cried tears of blood, unable to hold back the flow of anger. I shattered the labyrinth, shattered the stone, exposed the man who stood at its centre.

  For a moment Daidalos was shocked. I stepped towards him. He looked strong. He gleamed. His eyes were hollows. His face coated with dark hair, his arms, naked, bruised and powerful. He began to weave again.

  Stone formed around me.

  I shattered the stone.

  Stepping away from me, for a second time I sensed his confusion and fear. I picked up a shard of rock and ran at him. I struck him and brought him down, straddled him and struck at him again.

  “Brutal. Brutal,” he gasped with a laugh. “But in the valley, your friend Jason is about to die. Don’t you wish to see it?”

  And rage was gone. I looked around. This was not the edge of the river, it was not the mountainside where Daidalos had been ensnared by Jason, lifetimes in the past. This was a place in Greek Land. We were on the slopes of the valley of the oracle at Dodona, and below me, beyond the bleeding creature who lay so compliantly at my feet, as if waiting for me to make one move so that he could counter it with equal strength, there, by the stream, Jason was backing away from his eldest son. Thesokorus, the bull-leaper, the man who had come to be known as King of Killers.

  “What am I witnessing?” I whispered to the man.

  “A touch of vengeance before I find a way to get back to my own home.”

  I let the stone fall. I felt ashamed. I could not at that moment understand from where this sudden rage had come, nor why this half man, half machine, had allowed me to beat him without defending against the blows. Perhaps he knew that I was mourning the passing of an old friend, one who had become a haunting enemy. I looked at Daidalos. He did not seem to be enjoying the situation. Rather, he was waiting for events to unfold.

  For a third time I realised how confused he was. But now, something else: fear.

  I walked away from him in this illusory landscape, down the hill to where father and son faced each other in the Greeklander way, preparing to do combat, but uncertain as to the moment at which to commence the fight. Each leaned forward on his left knee, right hands held loosely on the hilt of their swords, fingers outstretched, not yet gripping the leather-bound ivory, not yet pulling the iron from its scabbard, to make the assault.

  As I approached, I heard their conversation. It was the son who was speaking.

  “I thought I’d killed you at Dodona. I smelled your shit, your blood. You couldn’t have survived that strike.”

  I’d witnessed the contest. It was after the Great Quest had failed to sack Delphi, and the Celtic armies were dispersing in dismay. Father and son had found each other in the valley of another oracle, and the encounter had not been warm.

  “I survived,” Jason said cautiously. “I see you’ve inherited the same tendency. Unless those scars on your face and arms are for decoration.”

  “My life has been short, but not without its difficulties. That’s neither here nor there. That strike I gave you went deep.”

  “Not deep enough. Not in the flesh, at least. It wounded me, though. All I had done was come to find you again, you and your brother. My two sons by Medea.”

  “I didn’t believe you then, how would you expect me to believe you now?”

  Jason’s grin was grim. “I have no answer to that. I want only for a final voyage in Argo, with Thesokorus at my side. Leaping over bulls, if he wishes.”

  “I no longer recognise that name. I am Orgetorix.”

  “My son, nevertheless, under any name.”

  “And Kinos? What about my brother.”

  “Dead. I’ll say it bluntly. He didn’t have your metal. He had a mind that was wonderful, imagination that was intriguing, but when it came to character, he was not a killer of anything, and certainly not of kings. He was broken from the moment he first learned to think. Thinking broke him because his dreaming broke him. Do you remember how we called him ‘little dreamer’? He broke himself in the underworld, in a place of his own dreaming. And not even his mother could help him.”

  Thesokorus reached down and stroked fingers against the moist earth by the stream. He was breathing hard, and I noticed that he was shaking, one hand on the earth, the other on his sword. He looked up at Jason, his face narrowed and hard, older by years than the years that had been shaping him. “Tell me about my mother. I saw her moments ago, and she was nothing but a ghost. Did you kill her?”

  “No.”

  “Then who killed her?”

  “Time killed her,” Jason responded without pause. “And you. And Kinos. And me. And places and times, and events and circumstances that none of us were privy to. She had lived a long life. I was just a flutter in her breast, a moment’s touch of desire and fondness. She had more time for the man you call Merlin. She was Merlin’s sister, I know now. And they are older than forests.”

  “I am not that man’s child.”

  “No. You’re not.”

  “She had children by other men?”

  “I never thought to ask the question.”

  “But! Let me get this clear. I am your son. Medea is my mother. Was my mother. I am shaped by you. I must live and eventually die by the way you shaped me.”

  “Yes, you must. And now I have a question for you.”

  “Ask it.”

  “Concerning the life that is left to you, a span that is longer than the life left to me, or certainly I hope so, though your scars and intemperance give me some cause for concern.…”

  “What about that life?”

  “Will you live it with rage or without rage; with affection or with notions of vengeance? I betrayed your mother. I don’t deny it. I paid a high cost. Higher than you�
�ll ever knew, because before I could speak to you, my guts were bleeding, my shit spilling out, your knife the cause. None of that matters now. I have a new chance, a brief chance, and if I could find now those gods that once gave me the strength and confidence to live my life in the only way that life should be lived…”

  “What way is that?” asked Thesokorus quickly.

  “Life upon life. Upon life. Upon life! Until there is no longer life!”

  Thesokorus beat his fist against the earth, but with enthusiasm. He met his father’s gaze again. “I like that thought. I like it very much. The one thing in my life that has been missing since I surfaced from such a strange dream, of being sacrificed and hidden … the one thing I have missed is what my brother, by your words, had in abundance: dreams, and purpose. I have had action. Scars prove it. Battles! Scars prove it. I scarred my father. My father’s scar proves it. I have missed my father all my life. But I can’t think of you as my father. I can only think of you as Jason.”

  When Jason didn’t respond, Thesokorus gave a wry little sigh, then said, “But now I think Jason is enough for me. You found men and women, heroes and half-gods, and formed them into a crew for that little ship, you, a man, no more than a man, and you tamed Herakles, and Theseus, and Atalanta, and you found the fleece of gold! And I grew up with those stories, and those stories are all I have of you. Oceans, rivers, creatures, rocks that clash, spaces that open in the cliffs and draw you in. And all of that with the constant presence not of gods, advising those heroes, but of a man who had no direction except forward. You found my mother by going forward. You came home to Iolkos by going forward. And you found rivers and streams, and hauled that ship over dry land, and you knew yourself, and you knew your direction. You knew a simple truth: that a small stream, if followed, must always end in Ocean, and by following the coast of Ocean, you can always find the shore from which you had once set sail.”

  He paused for a moment, still dragging his fingers through the earth. Then he shook his head. “What was it that happened to me that these simple truths were denied to me, when they would have been so important to me? Why am I a wanderer, like that strange friend of yours, Merlin?”

  “You are what you are because what happened, happened. I betrayed Medea for another woman. In her fury, she took her sons by me and killed them. Or so I thought. In fact, she flung you into the future, and in so doing, brought herself close to death herself. Fury never makes fools of the wise; it makes fools of fools. Medea and I were fools, though there is no denying our lust. Why were we fools? Because love was never mentioned. She wanted children. She created many, spared only two. I will tell you this, Thesokorus. I will never, I doubt any man or woman will ever, understand what was going through that woman’s mind when she abandoned you to time, in hate for me, in fury at me.”

  Were they aware of me, standing just a few paces away? It seemed they were wrapped in their own world.

  For a few moments I couldn’t tell whether they were about to strike at each other. Certainly Thesokorus was still as tense as a cat about to spring.

  Then slowly both men straightened. I glanced round to see Daidalos watching from the top of the slope. Light glinted on him as he turned quickly away, a disappointed man.

  Jason unbuckled his sword belt and slung it over his shoulder. His son did the same. Both men nodded to each other, each without smiling. Then they went to the water’s edge, crouching down, and after a moment sitting down, side by side, staring into the distance in silence.

  I left them alone.

  * * *

  With a roar like thunder, the land again transformed, but not back to that half-seen vision of Crete; this was the eastern edge of Urtha’s realm, and Nantosuelta flowed violently past, curling round this bulge of land from south to north. The army from Ghostland was spread out in the forest, restless spirits on restless horses, waiting for the way to cross to the realm of the Coritoni, where only the Unborn had been allowed to travel. It was dusk here. Fires burned on the hillside across from where I stood. A grim hostel rose before me, the rear door a narrow wedge-shaped space framed by massive lengths of round oak. The carving of an elk’s head glared from below the eaves, spade-shaped antlers stretching five men’s lengths in each direction; the muzzle of the beast was not elk: it was snarling wolf.

  Beyond it, moored, was my Argo, in the last true form she had taken: part Greek Land, part Northland, fine oak and hard spruce lashed together, fit for high Ocean as we had discovered.

  Daidalos had clearly used his garnered influence to ready his army for the crossing, getting them to hammer on shields, shouting out their war cries from whatever age they had come, and hurling a storm of sling-shot onto the opposite banks; I doubted their iron arrows could cross the water.

  The fear was: if they couldn’t cross either, they would turn back and finish the pillaging of Urtha’s land that they had begun in their dash to go east.

  “Daidalos!” I shouted then. “Daidalos!”

  There was no reply from around me, so I entered the hostel. It was a massive space, almost as dark as night, polished metal shields hanging on wickerwork partitions, reflecting the dim light that crept through the eaves, and the shadowy movement of those who moved about the hall.

  “Daidalos!”

  A shield was struck by iron, then a second, and the hall rang with the sound. As it faded, I sensed the presence of the man.

  “Who are you?” he asked from his hiding place.

  “I’m the boy who built Argo. I built the first little boat. When you fitted her out, in your island harbour where you had your Shaping Chambers, you would have experienced the Spirit of the Ship. All her captains have their echoes there, and so I would have been there.”

  But why did I know him?

  Daidalos prowled this gloomy hostel. Sometimes a silvered shield caught the gleam of bronze, sometimes the pale reflection of his face.

  He was silent for a long time. Then he said, as if he had heard my question, “You put a small image on that boat. The image of a man, the receptacle of your own captaincy. You built a boat and you built a sailor.”

  I hadn’t remembered. But it came back to me now. Of course! The little figure, what the Greeklanders called kolossoi. A life in wood or metal. My small figure had been roughly hewn from the fallen branch of an oak, whittled to perfection (or so I’d thought, being only a few years old at the time), polished with oil, painted vibrantly, hidden after that, in a small secret compartment in the back of the crude, simple vessel.

  Now I understood. It was as if insight into that other world “where charm rules rather than learned knowledge” was flooding me with understanding.

  “I made you,” I whispered, still struggling to understand the process by which that tiny figure had matured into the man and then this creature.

  “Every time she was rebuilt, I grew stronger,” he said, as if again sensing my question. “I stayed with Argo until I was strong enough to leave, to make my way in the new world. I found an island, perfect for my dreams, perfect to develop and refine my skills. And later, when I was exploring the Middle Realm and fighting unnatural forces, Argo came back and I made her even stronger. Only to have her pirated by the man who should be dead by now, as dead as the woman who just departed. But that’s now a task for another time.”

  “You helped build Argo. Do you believe she wants such vengeance?”

  “I have no love for that ship. She betrayed me.”

  “And grieved about it.”

  “By aiding my abduction, she helped kill my children. Only Raptor survived. He was already beyond the boundary of sky. But Argo has been helpful since then. She is trying to make amends.”

  I said nothing in response to that. I couldn’t read the meaning. And Daidalos, this reborn man, was still challenging me, perhaps because of his anger at my coarse and primitive assault upon him.

  “When I find the other part of this—” He raised half of the gold lunula amulet. Munda’s half; I could see it
clearly reflected in a shield, Daidalos’s shadow looming behind it. “—I shall cross and open the way for the army. I will take an army with me across the world and back to my mountains. With their help, I’ll destroy the Woman of Wild Creatures who made my life so hard.”

  “And everything in your path.”

  “It won’t be that wide a path.”

  “You are rotten to the bone with vengeance.”

  “On the contrary. I am bright with new creation. I’m missing only the fifth part. Four were enough to let me cross the first shore of the river. But I could only exercise a slight influence farther east. I made oak idols out of two hundred warriors; I summoned the Oldest Animals. I even stole the spirit of a man, a slave from the south, to bring back newly fallen discs from the island, when I heard the whisper from Argo that she would be voyaging there—”

  Talienze! So that had been his function.… Possessed by Shaper without his awareness.

  “—I knew, then, that I had the same range of strengths, but only in a very small measure.”

  “He would not have been able to bring back new discs. Your stolen spirit, Talienze. You know that in your heart—or in the space where your heart should be. You know the fact.”

  There was silence again. “Raptor is still in the Middle Realm.”

  “There’s no Middle Realm. It exists only because you desire it to. You created it just as you created the discs, flying down to your mountainside, with their gibberish and those facts among the markings that you longed to know and have confirmed.”

  Something struck one of the shields, sending it crashing to the floor and spinning even as the striking object itself spun around it. A second flying disc passed so close to me that I had to bend with a swiftness that my body hated. I was feeling old. This one also struck a shield, fell at my feet and I picked it up. It was hot and inscribed with patterns and symbols.

  I could feel Shaper’s confusion, as tangible as sweat.

  “You see?” he said uncertainly. “Even here the boy can reach me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the origin of those discs was not from me.”