The Hadassah Covenant

by Robert Holdstock

  I would have to go down among them.

  * * *

  And after three ‘days’ of education and preparation, I finally felt ready to do just that. With Jouhkan’s help, I made a passage through the ice, then stripped naked, swallowed the small sedja I had fashioned from a fish bone, and slid feet-first down the tunnel.

  Prepared for the spirits that inhabited the water, I was not prepared for the water itself, and the cold was not just shocking it was almost predatory. I screamed as I plunged downwards, wasting breath for a moment, convinced that a thousand teeth were ripping my flesh. I watched as my body grew extensions of ice. It was all I could do to remember my purpose here as I hung, suspended in the lake, among the slowly turning shapes of shamans and priests, their bodies eerily illuminated from above, where the ice was alive with torchlight. Below, there was a stranger glow, but even my young man’s body was being defeated by the pure, hellish chill.

  So I summoned a little magic, ageing a little, but warmed myself and swam as deep as I could, below the level of the shamans. I summoned what sight I could and scanned the depths. There were ruins below me, or what looked like ruins, probably Enaaki’s hiding place, and faces that watched me, pulling back into the shadows as they caught my gaze. I saw the glitter of gold, the gleam of bronze and the sheen of iron, a wasteland of trophies, offerings and secrets cast into the lake over the ages. And the masts and prows of ships that had sunk here and lay at all angles, weed-covered and broken, ransacked for their timbers.

  A sudden swirling around me and lean, translucent faces peered hard at me, elemental water guardians rising from where they prowled over the sunken dead. They seemed distressed by my presence so deep, but didn’t try to fight me. I had prepared for this descent for three days, offering more than just a meal of entrails to the entities below. I had sung and chanted in the groves, and I followed carefully the instructions of the young shaman who had taken pity on me, and made a personal drum, whittled birch bark, and scratched my name on stones, which I had dropped through the ice into the deeps.

  Now I felt a certain confidence, and at last I put a name to my quest.

  Air bubbling from my lungs, I called to the old ship, the grave ship, the ship that screamed …

  ‘Argo!’ I called, and the sound spread down into the lake, booming through the swirls and eddies of the deeps.

  ‘Argo! Answer me!’

  I looked hard for the signs of her below. I called again, swimming deeper, then called twice more. I began to lose track of time. The voytazi kept track of me, I noticed, a vortex of eyes, mouths and bony fingers, keeping at a distance.

  Too cold to feel panic, I began to entertain the grim thought that perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps she had not come here after all but lay elsewhere in the deeps, in another lake or a hidden sea, guarding her captain’s remains.

  But then: that whispering voice with which I had become so familiar in my time with Jason, during the long journey through the heart of the world, before we had returned to Iolkos, the voice of sentience that was the ship herself:

  ‘Leave us in peace. Go up. Leave us to sleep.’

  ‘Argo?’

  The water below me pulsed. The lake seemed angry. I could see a shattered vessel, dark and indistinct, its hull fringed by twisted branches that reached out like tendrils. The branches of the sacred oak that formed her keel, I realised—she had kept on growing!

  ‘Argo! Is Jason alive?’

  Before I could speak further, invisible hands caught me. I was dragged up towards the ice, flung vigorously against the roof, a dizzying blow. I heard laughter. My tormentors sank down, swimming quickly like eels. For a while I stayed where I was, bobbing gently among the bloated dead, then my lungs began to burst. My control had gone and I was on the verge of drowning. I tried to summon warmth, but failed. I scrabbled along the underside of the ice, increasingly desperate, then saw a hook probing down, fishing close to a corpse. I pushed the dead man aside and clung on to that welcome curve of bone. The upwards passage was almost too narrow for my shoulders, but someone above knew I was a living being, and hauled and hauled until at last my head gasped above the surface. Niiv came running to me with a heavy cloak. In the glimmering dawn, and by the light of torches, I saw tears in her eyes.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ she said angrily. ‘I told you to prepare better!’

  I had no response to that. My talents had failed me in the realm of Enaaki—or perhaps because of the power of Argo herself—and the lesson was a sobering one.

  * * *

  A while later, warmed and revived from my lazy, arrogantly ill-prepared excursion downwards, I lay on the ice, close to a hook hole, and again called to Argo, begging her to respond.

  ‘It’s Antiokus. You must remember me. I was with you when you sailed on the quest for the fleece of gold. Jason, please hear me. Your sons are not dead! Listen to me. Your sons are alive! Argo, tell him what I’ve said.’

  I kept trying. I have no idea how long I lay there, staring down through the hole, which was already beginning to melt at its edges as the sluggish sun crept, worm-like, above the southern horizon. Pike-faced voytazi taunted me, flashing their toothy grins then disappearing, teasing me with the threat to drag me down.

  ‘Argo!’ I persevered. ‘You must believe me! The world has changed in a very strange way. But the news is good for Jason. Argo! Answer me!’

  And then at last the voice, again, whispering to me from the icy depths.

  ‘He does not wish to return. His life ended when Medea killed his boys.’

  ‘I know,’ I said to her. ‘I was there. I saw what she did. But it was only a pretence. What she did was an illusion. The blood on their bodies was just illusion.’

  I felt the ice shake beneath me, as if the whole lake below had pulsed with shock.

  There was only silence from Argo, but I intuited that she was puzzled, and that my words were seeping through the wood of her hull and into Jason.

  I said it again: ‘Jason: Your sons are still alive. They have grown into men. You can find them. Come back to us!’

  A moment later, the ice below me bucked. Then cracked open with a sound like a whiplash, a great split exposing the pure water below.

  I stood, slithered and crawled my way back to the margin of the lake where the circle of torches blazed in the hands of the visitors.

  * * *

  She was coming up. In that second when the ice had opened, before I had fled for safety, I had seen Argo’s shadow start to rise, branches like craggy fronds reaching from the shattered hull.

  To the north, the lights in the heavens streamed almost as far as the zenith. The winter night was passing faster now. The frost-white trees were beginning to show colour. The rising of Argo was coinciding with the first true passage into dawn. Even as we stood, the brightness grew stronger over the bleak forest to the south, dawn fire rising in a steady arc.

  And then she struck the ice. The surface of the lake exploded upwards, a fountain of glittering shards falling around the dark hull as the old ship, mast-shattered and weed-wracked, nosed up from the deeps, the tall prow draining water, rising with solemnity, almost dignity, branches snapping off like oars, until it had half stretched out from the lake … then falling back, the stern coming up, the crouching figure of the goddess draped in long-fronded weed, the whole boat shuddering like a waking beast on the cold water, then settling and becoming still.

  Hanging from the mast in a web of ropes and weeds was the shape of a man, his head stretched back as if he had died screaming to the heavens. Water came out of his open mouth. Dawn light caught the living glitter of his eyes. Even from the edge of the lake I sensed that he was watching me.

  ‘I knew you would survive…’ I whispered to him. He wouldn’t have heard, of course. He wasn’t dead, but he was in deep cold.

  But something was wrong with Argo. She was too still, now, too quiet for the vibrant, urgent ship. When she had been launched she had strained at the ropes. M
ore than sixty men had been needed to hold her on the slipway. She had writhed and wrestled to get free, to find the ocean, and when she had finally been released she had struck the water of the harbour with such speed and energy that she had sunk for a moment before surfacing and turning to open water. The argonauts had been hard-pressed to get aboard her, swimming out and crawling up the ropes to find their benches and their oars, to slow the impatient ship and turn her back to the docks.

  She had been such a strong ship. So alive! But now …

  I walked out across the ice again, Niiv and Urtha with me carrying torches. The oak ship creaked as she warmed. Jason’s body gently swung where he was suspended. I touched the slippery planks, walked round to the prow and stared at the blue-painted eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ Niiv asked quietly.

  ‘She’s dead. The ship is dead.’

  Poor Argo. She had sailed so far with her precious cargo. She had taken Jason to the deepest grave she could find, a place of memory and magic. She had not expected to rise again, but my voice, my message, had set the heart in the oak at work once more and she had striven to return to the surface. The effort, it seemed, had been too much, and she had perished even as she passed life back to the captain.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I didn’t know how hard it would be for you.’

  Urtha called, ‘The dead man is moaning. He’s not a dead man at all. I’ve seen this happen before…’

  Jason’s head had dropped and he was beginning to thrash in the web of ropes. Urtha was fascinated. ‘When a man drowns in a winter lake he stops breathing, but sometimes the spirit stays with him. It happened to an enemy of mine. A remarkable thing. He was drowned for a night and a day after our fight at the edge of a mere, but suddenly floated to the surface and opened his eyes.’

  ‘Did you become friends after that?’ Niiv asked him.

  Urtha looked at her, confused. ‘Friends?’

  ‘It was an omen. An omen of friendship.’

  ‘Was it? I had no idea. I took his head. I’ve still got it.’

  ‘Help me with him,’ I said sharply, cutting across Urtha’s reminiscences. We hauled ourselves on to the deck, slipping on the slimy surface, clinging to the net that held my old friend. Urtha used his bronze knife to slash the weeds and hemp and Jason slipped into my arms with a further rush of water from his lungs and the howl of the new born.

  A sled had been hauled across to Argo, and Urtha and I gently lowered Jason down to the waiting Pohjoli, who wrapped him in skins and hauled him back to the shore, to the reviving warmth of a tent and a furiously burning birch-wood fire.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jason

  The ice was melting. Dawn had struck and torches were only needed for journeys into the deeper forest. Around the lake the scenes of activity were becoming more animated. As the world began to wake so, it seemed, did the passions and humour of the visitors to this northern place. Argo remained silent and alone in her basin in the ice.

  Jason came in and out of consciousness for several days, his words rambling and incoherent, his mood occasionally violent. The crushing wound on his chest had started to bleed again and was bathed and tended by the Pohjoli, who had lichens and plant and bark extracts for every sort of wound, it seemed.

  I waited patiently, and after five rests was told that Jason wanted to see me.

  He had trimmed his beard but his hair hung long, the grey and black combed out straight. The scars on his face looked pale, but he was otherwise as burnished as when I’d last seen him alive, in Iolkos. And those dark eyes, those quizzical, canny eyes, were as sharp as ever. His hands shook as he grasped mine, the fingers still weak. His smile was as beguiling and ambiguous as ever, but he seemed genuinely glad that I was there.

  ‘Antiokus. Young Antiokus…’

  ‘I’m known as Merlin now.’

  ‘Antiokus, Merlin … what does it matter? It’s you. And how is it that you haven’t aged in the twenty years since you deserted me?’

  ‘I have. I wear it well.’

  ‘You certainly do. Not me, alas. Why did you leave me? Why did you desert me? I was so angry! I needed you so badly.’

  ‘I always told you,’ I said to him, still holding his hands in an embrace, ‘that I am destined to move on a path that circles the world.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I know,’ he said impatiently. ‘And every cavern and valley that leads down into the underworld…’

  ‘I spent longer with you than I should have. But when the company is good, and the adventure is good, and the food is good, and…’ I glanced across the tent. A young woman sat there, wrapped in black furs, watching us quietly and sleepily. ‘When everything is good, and everything was always very good with you, Jason…’

  ‘It was, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. And when it’s that good … I allow myself a little leeway. But eventually, I am always called back.’

  He grinned again, his breath still cold, as if there were still ice in his lungs, but his eyes blazed with new life as he watched me. ‘That was a great voyage, that river voyage after we had stolen the Golden Fleece. Wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. A great voyage.’

  ‘What strange and wonderful encounters we had. What strange kingdoms we found. Did you ever see Heracles again?’

  ‘No, though I’ve heard a great deal about him since. He’s never out of trouble.’

  ‘I wish you had stayed longer with us. You should have stayed! I truly missed you after that witch killed my sons—’

  He broke off abruptly, frowning, repeated the words, ‘My sons…’ then turned and sat down heavily on the wooden bench.

  ‘I’ve been dreaming something strange,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about the dream.’

  Face in hands, head shaking, he whispered, ‘Just a dream. A waking dream. A dream through the Ivory Gate, Antiokus … false and unwelcome.’

  ‘Describe it to me.’

  ‘Why? It was just a voice … a voice whispering to me that my sons are still alive. Such madness!’

  ‘What madness is that?’

  He glanced up at me, then smiled wanly. ‘The madness of an old man desperate to hold on to his past, I suppose.’

  ‘You’re not old,’ I said. ‘You don’t know what age is. When Argo took you from the harbour at Iolkos, and brought you here to die, you had seen less than fifty summers.’

  ‘It felt like ten thousand.’

  ‘That is a lot,’ I agreed with a smile. Probably more than my own, I thought.

  I’d lost count of my years, though there was a way to find out, should I choose to waste my time seeking out the deep gorge in the forests to the west, where I had been born and where the record of my life was stored.

  ‘And by the way,’ I added. ‘It was no dream.’

  ‘What was no dream?’

  ‘The voice. It was my voice. I called to you. Argo revived you…’ I thought sadly of the ship, still out on the lake. ‘Argo died bringing you back. And her body is in bad shape. But we can rebuild her; we can find a new spirit for her.’

  Jason was staring at me, his face almost blank, a child struggling with a new idea. All wisdom, all connivance was gone from his rugged features as his dream and my reality began to rattle at his mental bars.

  ‘My sons are dead. Medea cut off their heads before my eyes…’

  ‘I know. I was there, remember? It was my last day with you. I was thinking about my next journey, and my talent for insight had somehow been stolen from me once I’d entered the palace. I wasn’t watching closely…’

  ‘What are you saying?’ the warrior asked quietly. ‘Antiokus, what are you saying?’

  ‘It might be best if I showed you, Jason.’

  ‘Showed me what?’

  ‘How we were all deceived.’

  I hoped I could summon the vision. I had spent a long time preparing for it. It would cost me—I would age a little—but this was a man who had been my friend, and who had once saved my life whe
n my own talents had failed me. What he and Medea had done to each other was unforgivable, and perhaps that is why I had finally left him to his fate, all that time ago. But now that I knew the truth, I felt strongly that I owed it to Jason to tell him what I’d discovered. It would be worth a few days on my flesh to convince Jason that he had mourned in vain. Or so I thought.

  I was too young, at this time, to think through the consequences of such an action, of what the knowledge might do to the man.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘Get dressed. Warm clothes. Wipe your eyes. And follow me to the groves!’

  * * *

  Niiv was intrigued by what I was doing and insisted on accompanying us on the long journey through the heavy forest. Jouhkan came with us, and the youthful shaman who had helped me in my earlier preparations, and would now supervise my offering and ritual when we returned to the appropriate clearing. He wasn’t at all sure that I could achieve what I wanted, but if I did, then he too would have increased his skills.

  In the time I had been by the lake I had learned a great deal about the rajathuks, the wooden totems of this land. At one time or another I had met them all, though only four had been friends with me. My difficulty was that those friendships were so very long in my past! I had maintained my appearance and mind as a young man, and my memory was powerful. But Time is a terrible enemy of detail and accuracy.

  Those friends, now these idols, were very powerful sources of enchantment and vision, each specialised in a different way. The one who could help now was Skogen, the shadow of forgotten forests. It might be persuaded to draw out the memory of the tragedy in Iolkos from behind our eyes and present it in all its gory trickery again.

  A winding archway of hazel marked the final approach to the sanctuary of the Skogen. At its end we faced a wall of crude stone, covered with niches in which carved bones and animal skulls had been placed over the years. Our guide added something in a pouch to one of the niches on our behalf. We passed round the wall and into the grove where four circles of wooden pillars surrounded the stone effigy. Four torches cast a net of flickering shadows. Acrid smoke billowed from small fires around the grove.