The Hadassah Covenant

by Robert Holdstock

  The stone was twice my height, a grey slab deeply and intricately carved with scenes from the past. The face that watched us was leafy and gnarled, the eyes at a curious slant. These were eyes that could see the shadows of the past and already I sensed its curiosity about Jason.

  We were kept in the outer circle for a long while, repeating a short charm as instructed and inhaling the fumes from one of the fires. The priest performed one of the sing-chant rituals that are so common in northern lands, and scarified his skin. After a while he came back to us, grinning through broken teeth and dark beard. He picked up his skin drum and began to beat it rapidly with a piece of bone.

  ‘He’s very curious about you. Ask to see whatever it is you want.’

  Jason and I stepped forward into the second circle, looked up at the watching face. Around us, the beat of the drum became a frantic, rhythmic tattoo, exaggeratedly loud, that seemed to make the whole grove shake. I was dizzy with the smoke. The trees seem to revolve around us, only Skogen staying still. This was the dream-trance, the crude magic of the shamans. At my prompting, Jason called out in a slurred and anxious voice, ‘The death of my sons. Show me the death of my sons.’ The request etched his face with pain, I saw.

  For a moment the grove continued to thunder. Then abruptly it was still and silent.

  I stared at Skogen, at the wide, stone eyes.

  I heard the sound of men running, the stink of burning wood, the screaming of children and the clash of metal blades …

  Jason cried out, ‘Oh gods! I remember that stink of blood and burning leaves! The witch is here!’

  The grove seemed to draw in on itself and a strange fire dazzled my eyes …

  * * *

  We had fought our way through the palace grounds and seven of us survived to enter the building, storming its halls and corridors, finally facing the unnatural flames at its heart. I recognised their supernatural nature and hesitated, but before I could say a word Jason had leapt through the fire. Close on his heels, I followed him, slipping and sliding on the polished marble floor that stretched to Medea’s private chambers. The other argonauts, those who had survived the earlier fighting, burst through the flames behind me, round shields held at arm’s length before their faces, swords extended.

  After that, things happened so fast I had retained only a fragment of memory of the moments before the dreadful deed we would witness.

  ‘Antiokus!’ Jason shouted in warning. ‘Look to your left!’

  I turned in time to parry the javelin thrust from one of Medea’s guards. The wide blade struck my arm a glancing blow and the man slipped forward on to my sword. As he fell, his ram’s-skull helmet grazed my cheek, which was not a good omen. Jason and the others were already running along the narrowing, blue-walled corridor in pursuit of the fleeing woman and the boys she dragged with her. I fled after them, watched by the sinister dark eyes of golden rams, painted along the length of the passage. The boys were shouting, alarmed and confused by what was happening.

  A rank of warriors, lightly armoured, helmeted and with wide shields, barred our way and Jason flung himself into the fray, fighting with a frenzy that I would more normally have associated with the tribes of the keltoi in the west. We broke through, scattering the grim-faced men, leaving Tisaminas and Castor to finish the slaughter.

  Medea had fled to the Bull Sanctuary, and as Jason led us towards the bronze-barred gate, now closed and locked by the desperate woman, so we realised our mistake.

  Behind us, across the narrow passage, a stone slab fell and trapped us. Ahead of us, the towering bull effigy, before which Medea stood triumphant, split in two, revealing itself as a doorway. There, outside, was the road to the north. A chariot and six horsemen were waiting, the animals impatient and frightened as their riders struggled to control them. I recognised the armoured charioteer as Cretantes, Medea’s confidant and adviser from her homeland.

  The poor little boys struggled in her grasp, suddenly aware that their fate was destined to be a greater terror in their mother’s arms than the one she had told them to expect from their father.

  Jason flung himself against the bars of the sanctuary, begging the black-shrouded woman to release the boys.

  ‘Too late. Too late!’ she cried from behind her black veil. ‘My blood can’t save them from the ravages of your blood. You betrayed the ones you love, Jason. You betrayed us brutally with that woman!’

  ‘You burned her alive!’

  ‘Yes. And now you will burn in Hell! Nothing will change in you, Jason. Nothing can! If I could cut you out of the boys, and still let them live, then that is what I’d do. But I can’t. So say goodbye to your sons!’

  Jason’s howl was vulpine. ‘Antiokus! Use your magic!’

  ‘I can’t!’ I cried. ‘It isn’t there!’

  He flung his sword at the woman but the throw went wide. And at that moment, Medea did the terrible deed, moving so fast I saw only the merest glint of light on the blade with which she cut the throats of the twins. She turned away from us, covering their bodies with her robes, stooping to her work as Jason screamed. She wrapped and tied the heads in strips of her veil, tossing them to Cretantes, who put them in pouches at his waist. Then Medea dragged the bodies to the horses where they were flung over the blankets and tied into place.

  A moment later, the troop had gone, leaving dust swirling into the sanctuary, and the smell and sight of innocent blood, and two cruel Furies taunting the argonauts, trapped in Medea’s lair.

  Jason slumped, fingers still gripping the gate. He had battered himself unconscious against the bars of the temple; his eyes and face were bruised, his mouth raw. Orgominos was pushing against the stone door behind us, trying to find the lever that would release us from the trap. I felt helpless: all power in magic had drained from me from the moment I entered the palace, an impotence which astonished and confused me, and I assumed had occurred because Medea had used her own sorcery to ‘numb’ me for the moment of the deaths. Now I felt that familiar tingle below the flesh again, ability returning, saw at once how to open the door and persuaded it to do so. We dragged Jason’s body outside, through the fires, and into the fresh air.

  Medea’s surviving Colchean guards were nowhere to be seen. They had certainly slipped away to join her in her flight.

  ‘Find horses,’ I said to Orgominos. ‘Get the others, wounded or not.’

  Tisaminas crouched down beside me, lifted Jason’s battered head. Jason opened his eyes, then reached out to grab me by the shoulder. ‘Why didn’t you stop her?’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I warned you she was more powerful than me. I tried, Jason. With all my heart, I tried.’

  Jason’s look was grim, tearful, but he acknowledged my words. ‘I know you did. I’m sure you did. You’ve been a good friend. I know you would have tried.’ He groaned as he attempted to move. ‘Come on, help me up! Tisaminas, help me up. And fetch horses! We have to follow…’

  ‘The horses are on their way,’ I told him.

  ‘She will run to the north, Antiokus. I know the way she thinks. She’ll run to the shore, to the hidden harbour. We can catch her!’

  ‘We can certainly try,’ I said, though in my heart I knew that Medea had slipped away for ever. She had always outwitted Jason.

  As I watched the man struggle to regain his composure and organise his thoughts, I suddenly felt very sad. The sadness quickly became overwhelming. I might even have murmured aloud, ‘Oh no…’

  Jason sensed that something was wrong. Dark, moist eyes watched me through their pain.

  ‘Antiokus…’ he said softly. ‘If you think it’s vengeance that directs me, you’re wrong. It isn’t Medea I’m after. Not yet, at least. It’s my boys.’ He was shaking violently as he reached to embrace me. ‘I will need to grieve for them before anything. But she has taken their bodies! Antiokus—stranger to this land that you are, you are not so much a stranger here that you don’t understand this: how can I grieve over just their
memory? I must have my sons back. In my arms! They belong to me, not to her.’ His grip on my shoulders was crushing my flesh, his face close to my own. ‘My good friend … Antiokus. Don’t be sad. Help me!’

  I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t tell him what I was thinking. How could I tell him that it was time for me to move on, that I would soon have to leave him? He knew that something was upsetting me, and being Jason he was trying to instil courage in me. But he had misunderstood the cause of my sorrow, thinking I was angry that he would pursue Medea so soon after his loved ones had died.

  Orgominos rode up, with five horses on tethers.

  Bruised and battered, bewildered and clinging to his reason by the narrowest of grips, Jason drew away from me, flung himself on to one of them, called for us all, called for me in particular with a long, hard look, then led the pursuit of his fleeing wife, through the open gates of the palace.

  I rode with him, but for a few hours only.

  * * *

  At that time, in Iolkos, we could hardly believe what we had seen. Such an abominable murder! And yet we had had to believe. It had happened before our eyes.

  But now, in the grove of the skogen, Medea’s actions became transparent, and at last I saw the way we had been deceived. As the scenario unfurled I could not bear to watch Jason as he witnessed Medea’s conjuration, but I heard the thunder of his heart and the quickness of his breath as the truth at last came home to him.

  One nick to the throat on each boy, drawing blood as a powerful drug was passed into the flesh. The boys collapsed in seconds. Pig’s blood shocked our senses as it seemed to spurt from their necks. Medea stooped over their bodies and from beneath her skirts pulled heads made of wax and horsehair, wrapping them in strips of her veil. She threw them to Cretantes, then summoned her strength and dragged her sleeping sons to the horses, letting us see only their trailing legs.

  So fast, so clever, so persuasive!

  Jason’s heartbeat, as he relived the truth, was like the drumming of a war galley in full attack.

  * * *

  All day we had pursued Medea. Her chariot of oak and wicker sped across the hills, its wheels turned more by her will than by her horses. At some point she escaped the pursuit. We found ourselves chasing only her guards and her chariot, the charioteer a man in woman’s clothing. Medea had slipped away, with Cretantes and the boys, and run to a cove on the shore, where a small ship had taken her to the eastern ocean and into a territory that was at war with Iolkos.

  Oddly, I must have glimpsed this event from the hills above the sea, though I had not realised what I was seeing. But the skogen picked it out of my confusion and amplified the scene in its singing grove.

  The galley had eight oars, worked vigorously. The furled sail was black and gold, Medea’s colours, arrogantly displayed as if she knew, now, she was safe. Narrow-hulled, sitting low in the water, it slipped quickly towards the open sea, to the east, towards Rhodes, perhaps, or the ruined city of Troy. Medea sat, crying bitterly, her arms around her sons, who were now awake. They were squabbling, rubbing at the sore cuts on their necks, unaware that their mother was watching the headland and saying goodbye to a life she had come to love—until Jason’s betrayal of that love. She was a widow in heart, leaving behind a man dying of despair because of her fateful conjuration. Jason had paid the price of his treachery; Medea had condemned herself and her sons to a life in exile.

  The grove was filled with the sound of a man crying with rage.

  ‘Is this true?’ Jason demanded of me. ‘Is this true? Or just a trick?’

  ‘Everything you saw is true,’ I whispered and the man threw back his head and howled at the fading stars.

  ‘All those wasted years! All that time in mourning! And I should have been hunting her down. I gave up the chase too quickly—I should have been hunting her down!’

  His tears were of anger and frustration. His glance at me was bitter, as if somehow I was to blame.

  ‘All those wasted years, Antiokus! I could have had my sons by my side! May the goddess be damned for not telling me!’ he shouted.

  And with that last furious curse, Jason left the forest sanctuary.

  I stayed in the grove until the song-chant ritual of leaving was complete, then rode back to the lake with Jouhkan and an uncharacteristically silent Niiv.

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked Urtha when we came to the camp. He pointed out across the lake and I saw Jason standing on the broken ice at the prow of dead Argo, his arms raised to the ship as if trying to call her back. The ice was melting fast. It gleamed in the dawn. The frozen silence was giving way to the sound of running water. The ice itself creaked and cracked as it ‘gave up the ghost’.

  Later, Jason came to Urtha’s tent. I was eating, Niiv sitting silently and thoughtfully beside me, watching the fire. He asked permission to enter and Urtha waved him in. Jason had cut his ragged beard down to a stubble and had tied his long hair into a single plait that reached down his back almost to the waist. He had found a pair of red, Roman trousers, tight around the thigh and cut above the knees, and a pair of grey fur boots. He still wore the black sheepskin cloak in which he had spent the last years of his life in Iolkos.

  His eyes were sad as he stared at me. He dropped to a crouch and warmed his hands at the wood fire.

  ‘The ship is dead. Argo is dead. The goddess has left her.’

  ‘I know. The effort of resurrection was too much.’

  ‘I take back what I said in the grove, Antiokus. Everything! Perhaps Medea had blinded the goddess as much as she had blinded us.’

  ‘Most likely.’

  ‘But the ship is still useful. When the ice melts, we’ll tow Argo to the shore and rebuild her. And if we can find a decent trunk of oak in this wretched land, and lay a new keel, perhaps we can call the goddess back.’

  ‘That’s a good thought,’ I offered.

  ‘Yes. But if not, we’ll have to sail without her.’

  It had already occurred to me that Argo could be rebuilt under the protection of one of the local goddesses, unrefined and unpredictable though they were. I kept the thought to myself for the moment because Jason was still watching me, the furrow between his eyes deepening.

  ‘How did you know?’ he asked at last. ‘How did you find out about Kinos and Thesokorus?’

  I told him that I had found only Thesokorus, the ‘little bull leaper’, as Jason had called him for his adventurous spirit. Of the ‘little dreamer’, Kinos, I’d heard only a riddle.

  ‘Thesokorus. He’ll be so grown, now,’ Jason mused.

  ‘He’s known by another name.’

  ‘Names don’t matter. Did you see him? Does he take after me?’

  I had been anticipating this moment with some apprehension. Not so much because of the truth of what had happened to his beloved boys, but because of what Jason would now have to learn about himself.

  I knew about Thesokorus because I had passed by an oracle and heard a series of questions from a son about his father.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In Makedonia

  From where I sat, in the shade of an oak at the edge of the town square, I could see the hazy hills and the sparkle of sunlight on the marble gates that marked the entrance to the sanctuary of the oracle.

  I had been here for eight days, waiting for the sounding of the bronze horn from the high slopes above this white-walled Makedonian town. The oracle was under the protection of the god Poseidon; the oracle herself was capricious and unreliable and it was rumoured she was a shade of Persephone, who walked the dark corridors of Hades. No human medium was used to express the voice of this goddess; the voice came directly from the cave where, when it suited her, she rose from the gloom. She was nameless, never addresssed directly, known only as the ‘caught breath of Time’; and she came and vanished from her caverns like a breeze on a still summer’s day.

  I had heard stories of visitors waiting a year or more until they were called to consult her, and I had already decided to move o
n along my path in a day or so, since my main purpose here was curiosity rather than consultation. I had time enough on my hands to visit the strangest of places in the world, should I hear of them.

  The town was small and was already crowded with groups of Romans, Makedonians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Scythians and Illyrians, most of whom had pitched their camps outside the walls and now idly wandered its narrow streets in search of wine, olives and the succulent mutton that was produced in the clay ovens throughout the day. The visitors were bored, listless, irritable and offensive to each other, but at least they seemed at ease with the local population.

  Unlike the small group who sat edgily in the shade of three twisted olive trees, across the square from where I spent my hours in thought.

  There were six of them. They were nervous, suspicious and defensive. I had recognised them at once as what the Greeklanders called keltoi, a warrior band from the northern countries, Hercynia, Hyperborea, Gaul Land and the like. To the locals, to the Romans especially, they were barbarians. I knew better. I had encountered many of their tribes on my journeys and I knew of their reputation for fairness, chivalry, single combat and complete adherence to a set of laws and codes that at once made them the most welcoming of hosts, and the most uncompromising of enemies.

  Watching them, I couldn’t tell from which part of the wilderness of forest, marsh and mountain to the north they came. Not from among the clans of Alba or Gaul in the west, I was sure of that. Their kilts, trousers and short cloaks were dyed blue and red, their hair tied in topknots with colourfully beaded string, since they were not at war. Their moustaches were long, covering their mouths, the drooping tips stiffened into points with animal fat and reaching below their chins. They walked with an arrogant bearing, staring menacingly and lingeringly at any passer-by.

  At all times one of them stood guard, holding his patterned oval shield in front of him, his spear resting lightly against his shoulder. The others sat in the shade of the olive trees, drinking wine from clay flagons and eating copious quantities of fruit, meat and olives. This was having a devastating effect on their digestions. Their horses were tethered close by, much to the annoyance of the townspeople, who felt these northerners should have camped outside the walls like all the other visitors.