I shivered and shook, breath frosting. The Lady of the Forest covered her face again. I said, ‘We can only haul Argo a short way, even with Ruvio. And we are about to move through mountains. The ship must stay.’
‘The ship can stay, but the Spirit of the Ship must be taken,’ Mielikki insisted. ‘It’s only a small part; your carpenters can remove it. It will always be useful to you, Merlin; wraith-ships can be summoned. And besides: you might need to use its spirit again.’
The words were very meaningful. ‘Might I? Why?’
‘The fierce eyes that watched you have fled. She left the ship almost as soon as we came ashore. She fled on the wing.’
‘As a raven,’ I breathed. When Mielikki didn’t respond I asked outright. ‘As a raven?’
‘A dark bird. She is very angry; and she is very dangerous.’
‘And she hates me. I know.’
‘She is afraid of you. She is afraid of Jason.’
Mielikki’s words were tantalising.
Afraid of us? Hating me? That girl from my past? If Mielikki could know this much, she must know more. I begged her to tell me more. All she said was, ‘I am not like the one who sailed with Argo in Jason’s day. That one—’
‘Hera. A goddess.’
‘That one, by whatever name, was stronger than me. She could enter the Spirit of the Ship. She played a game with the men who rowed Argo. Older guardians were more respectful of this ship, and I will respect her too. But, Merlin, I can only glimpse the shadows that move, this way, that way, across the threshold. If I could tell you more about Fierce Eyes, then I would. If you abandon me, I can’t help you. If you won’t sail me, carry me with you. The land beyond the threshold goes in many directions. I’m useful.’
* * *
I left Argo and sought out Jason. He listened carefully to what I told him and together we again estimated the sailing time to the ocean, then along the western coast, through the narrow straits, the clashing rocks, and across the island-studded ocean to Thessalon, Artemisium, or anywhere on that coast where we might put ashore and make our way inland to intercept Brennos.
We would be with the flow of the Daan, not rowing against it, we agreed, but it would still be best to go by horse. We had seven horses, not including Ruvio, and Ruvio could haul a loaded wagon easily.
Everything indicated that a land journey was the most practical. But I was concerned for Argo, and, to my surprise, so was Jason.
‘If we abandon her, she’s right: she might fall into the wrong hands. She might even be broken up for winter fuel. And I hadn’t known we would have to return this freezing Lady to her homeland.’
He folded his arms on the table where the crude map of our journey was still spread out. Rubobostes was singing loudly as he added wood to the fire in the enclosure, and beyond the gate the horses were being cantered through their paces under the watchful eyes of the Cymbrii.
‘I agree,’ he said at length. ‘We’ll hide her well. In the woods, there. We’ll return and sail her again. That makes a lot of sense. Bring Argo’s heart if you must, but cut it lean when you cut it from the ship. Wood is heavy and we’re not going to be riding across some summer pasture.’
He tapped the map with a finger, thinking hard.
It took me a moment to realise I had been dismissed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Blood Rage
The hounds sniffed me out again. I was huddled in a new hollow, cold and confused, my arm still aching where the slingshot had struck it, my joints stiff with the sudden surge of age that my body had taken.
Gelard nosed up to me, wetly, its breath reeking of meat. I was ready to shout abuse at Niiv, the beast’s designated handler, but it was Urtha himself who leaned down through my feeble screen of branches and leaves and grinned at me.
‘So there you are.’
‘Go away. I need time to myself.’
‘Your lover is sulking. She’s frantic, looking for you.’
‘She’s not my lover!’ I shouted furiously at the warlord, before realising I was being teased.
‘Too skinny, eh?’ he laughed, then pushed through the foliage to step down into the hollow.
‘Too dangerous.’
The dogs panted and watched until ordered to sit and be quiet, an instruction which they promptly obeyed. ‘But she’s got under your skin, all right. I can tell that.’
‘Deeper than my skin,’ I confided, and Urtha nodded as if he understood what I meant. He sighed.
‘Ullanna’s the same. When I’m in a blood rage I’m aware of her, close by, keeping quiet. Then suddenly her hands are on my face, or my shoulders, and the blood rage subsides. Then she sits with me and banters on about the tundra, whatever the fuck that is, and the hunting, and the winters in the hills, waiting for war against some stinking band of horsemen I’ve never heard of, and repeats the sort of jokes they tell each other to while away the time, the women, who are as wild and wicked as the men, if not wilder. And I laugh, Merlin. She makes me laugh. And if one part of what she claims to have done in her life on horse and with spear and sword is true, then she could silence a poet in my household every night for a full cycle of the moon! I like her. I like her very much. She makes me laugh.’
‘Well, that’s good. Isn’t it?’
He looked at me sharply, almost painfully. ‘I can’t afford to laugh, Merlin. I need that blood rage. Nothing can continue until Cunomaglos is silent on the hard earth, open-breasted, crow-feasted. Do you understand? Aylamunda is in my heart. She shouts to me in my sleep. In my sleep. I put my arms around her. Do you understand?’
I told him that I did. For the first time in a long time Urtha had shaved his cheeks, trimmed his beard, and cut his neck hair short. It was a smart look. The hair on his crown was stiffened slightly, ready for the application of limewater, to make that odd spine of spikes that these warriors considered an appropriate design for battle.
This young man looked clean and handsome, and there was a sparkle in his eyes that told less of hate than of interest.
He was not ready to lose hate, however. And he was at risk of losing it.
As if he had intuited my sudden awareness, he repeated, ‘I need the blood rage.’
He was asking me to help him. To help keep him angry. To keep reminding him that his wife and son had been abandoned, slaughtered, were to be avenged.
I nodded agreement, and he seemed satisfied.
‘I need the blood rage.’
‘I know you do. And Cunomaglos will encounter it. Jason will hold your spears. I’ll tend to your wounds. We’ll both abuse Cunomaglos.’
‘Only while he’s alive.’
‘But of course.’
‘When he’s dead, the abuse is all mine!’
‘Of course.’
‘Thank you.’ He turned to me again and grinned, once more teasing. ‘So she’s got under your skin, then?’ he repeated, prodding my shoulder. ‘A little bit of Niiv in the young-old man’s heart?’
‘Deeper than that. It’s not my heart that worries me. There’s a blade of ice in my heart, and I can use it well.’
Again: I was opening my mind to this brazen, brash young Celt.
‘Ah,’ he said, slapping his hands together. ‘Of course. Those bones. Those old, carved bones of yours. She got that deep, eh?’
‘Yes. She did. And I don’t see why you are so amused.’
‘Perhaps because I don’t understand. In fact, I’ve been meaning to ask you for some time. About your bones. If I understand you correctly, your bones are patterned with spells and magic and enchantment and various recipes for all that woodbark, leaf-mould, red-ochre shit the druids pretend to know about and usually don’t, though I have to say it often works…’
‘My bones are marked with charm, yes.’
‘Charm! Yes, of course. Well, what I wondered was: when you die, and all of this ugly flesh rots away,’ he patted my cheek and pinched my arm, ‘this ugly, ageing flesh, scavenged by rats and wild dogs, and carr
ion birds, and all the rest, all those creatures that aren’t too fussy about the meat they eat, and just the bones are left, just the magic bones, poor old dead Merlin’s bones…’
‘What are you trying to say, Urtha?’
‘Well, will they be of use to someone like me? If I kept them for personal use?’
I stared at him. Was he joking? Was he serious? I was beginning to realise that with Urtha, a substantial part of life was a game. The difficulty was, a substantial part of life was also to be taken deadly seriously.
‘Why are you asking me this, Urtha? Are you planning to kill me? If so, think again. There’s a curse built into the magic I hide below my flesh.’
Urtha was delighted at the idea. ‘Could you build such a curse into me? That would be wonderful. To die honourably is one thing, but too often we die with a spear in the back. A curse that stalks the killer would be a wonderful gift. I leave you to decide, of course.’
‘Why are you asking me all this?’ I demanded again, increasingly irritable with this inquisitive intermission in Urtha’s blood rage. ‘Are you trying to cheer me up? If so, go away. I have other things to think about. And the last thing I need is for you to start considering my skeleton as trophy should I catch the wrong arrow.’
‘I wasn’t being serious,’ Urtha said softly, half smiling, then looking away. ‘I was simply curious. Like you, I have other things on my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about my boys, and Munda, and what comes after me now that…’
He stopped speaking, scratching at his newly trimmed whiskers. He was thinking of Kymon. And I was sure he was thinking how things had changed, now, how his concerns for the future had been based on a false dream. He had imagined a squabble between his sons, developing into a war that would divide the ancestral land. Fear of that had driven his passage north. The event could no longer occur, since one of his sons was dead. His fears for the future had come through that mouth from Hel which the Greeklanders called the Ivory Gate.
Nevertheless, those dreams that came through the Ivory Gate—by tradition, lies, falsehoods, deceptions—usually had a twist about them. Nothing was ever as it seemed. Urtha might one day have a third son by another woman; or young Urien, dog-feasted, might come back from the dead. Nothing could be discounted. Only Time herself could answer for the truth or falsity of dreams, and I was not in any mood to enter into a costly bargain with Time for a glimpse of Urtha’s future.
My skin was loose, my beard showed flecks of grey, my eyes were tired, my self was sorry for itself, and all because of bright-smiling, smile-caressing Niiv. Like a worm, she had burrowed down to my bones and grazed the pulp of magic; like a wolf, she had howled her triumph after the feast; like a cat, she had realised her mistake and watched me carefully, with cat-wide, cautious eyes. And with all of this hovering over me, I was not, now, in a generous frame of mind.
And besides, I was only guessing.
‘Why have you come to find me?’
Urtha struggled to his feet, brushed the winter decay from his trousers, snapped the mastiffs into silent obedience again, and helped me up, a firm hand on my wrist. He looked me in the eye. ‘Because I’ve found something. I wanted someone else to see it. Come on, let me show you.’
We struggled out of the hollow. I took hold of Gelard, Urtha wound Maglerd’s leash around his wrist, and we ran with the hounds through the sparse trees. There was a warm and fragrant scent of wood smoke on the air, and the sound of building. I glimpsed activity among the argonauts. They were preparing for the long haul in pursuit of Brennos and the horde.
The dogs led us to the steep bank down to the grey flow of the Daan. In the high sun, in this crisp day, the water gleamed. The dogs struggled and whimpered, looking nervously to the west.
‘They have a nose for death,’ Urtha said, and after a few minutes’ trotting along the ridge above the water, we came to the open grave where two grey-faced corpses lay in awkward rigor, bodies turned down. There were no weapons with them. Each half-exposed back showed blood. The dirt had been clawed from them, no doubt by Urtha’s hounds. It was hard to see clearly.
Urtha said, ‘These were two fine men. They were my friends. They were my uthiin. They betrayed me. And Cunomaglos betrayed them in turn.’
He reached down and tugged at the split fabric of one of their shirts. ‘Stabbed in the back.’
‘Who were they?’ I asked.
‘I know them, but I’ll not tell you their names.’ He threw a handful of cold turf on to each of them. ‘They deserve to rot with the beasts. I’ll remember them, though. They were once friends. And I’ll remember them for the good fights and the wild rides. Cunomaglos has done this. I imagine he doubted these two men’s solidarity. He was right. I can imagine they had grave doubts about what they were doing.’ Urtha looked at me, steely-eyed. ‘That leaves nine. Nine in all.’
‘A lot of men to challenge.’
‘I’ll only challenge one, Merlin. Dog Face himself. If I lose, that’s an end to it. If I win? That’s when the difficulty begins. They’ll come for me one at a time. They’ll be fresh and fierce. By about the sixth I’ll be quite tired. It won’t be easy.’
I squeezed his shoulder like an old friend, hiding my smile. ‘Well, at least you have arrogance on your side, and that will help.’
He nodded. ‘I do hope so. But the first is all that matters.’
* * *
‘Merlin. Merlin!’
There are times when I feel like a tree, rooted to the ground amidst a swirling flock of chattering crows; they nestle and fight in my branches, flap and feed, and I can do nothing to chase them away.
Jason, Mielikki, Urtha … and now Niiv, challenging me from a mound at the edge of the camp, arms crossed, pale skin flushed, her frown making her seem to pout, though it was only her eyes that flashed such irritation.
‘Merlin! What have I done? You mustn’t ignore me. Is it true that you told Jason to kill me? Why?’
My anger returned. ‘Stay away from me. Latch on to Tairon; he’s as twisty as you.’
‘Twisty? What’s twisty?’ she screamed in frustration. ‘I don’t even understand you any more. What did I do to make you so angry?’
‘You know what you did! You stole knowledge from me! You weakened me!’
‘I did not steal from you,’ she shouted, wagging a finger for a moment as if addressing a child. ‘You were always in the saddle, always holding the reins. I just … I just jumped up behind you. And held on to you. I felt safe with you…’
She was pleading with me, trying to warm my heart. She thought I was simply angry with her. How could she know that I was terrified of her?
‘You charmed me,’ I countered. ‘And you stole from me.’
‘That’s not true. You’re a liar!’
‘I don’t need to lie when it comes to tricky whores like you.’
‘What? What did you call me? How dare you!’
‘Do you think I’ve not met your kind before? You carry a half-child. You’re the worst kind of witch! Do you imagine your many times great-grandmother Meerga wasn’t into the same game? I fucked her and she tricked me. She tricked me and I had her killed.’
Shocked for an instant, Niiv said grimly, ‘She died in the lake, trying to contact an ancestor. She didn’t take the right precautions and was taken by Enaaki. The same thing would have happened to you if I hadn’t warned you.’
‘She died on the lake. In a boat. Naked. Bruised around the neck. She paid the price of prying! Enaaki gobbled her remains. I ate the half-child. I took it back. I rowed back to shore.’
‘Liar … Liar!’
‘I know what you carry, Niiv. I know you have a half-child inside you. Don’t come near me. What more can I say to you? How much more can I give you?’
‘Everything! You can give me everything!’
I took unexpected pleasure in staring at her for a long time before saying, with calculated coldness: ‘Leave me alone, Niiv. I’m too old, too careful to let a frost-sprite like
you, a nothingness like you, a breeze in the storm of charm like you—too wise to let you trick me twice.’
‘Nothingness?’ she echoed, and for a moment she couldn’t speak, upset or outraged, it was hard to tell. ‘If I’d tricked you once, I’d be able to trick you again,’ she complained. ‘But I didn’t trick you once. And I promise I’ll never try. And I don’t believe you killed Meerga. And I don’t believe you want Jason to kill me. Tell me it isn’t true.’
How wonderful to see such beauty dancing to my tune. How like her ancestor Meerga she was, but without that woman’s bitter selfishness. Meerga had been carrion in my hands, though it had not been my own hands that had killed her. I couldn’t see Niiv with the same hawk’s eye.
‘Believe what you want,’ I taunted. ‘If Jason lets you live, just stay at the other end of the ship to me.’
‘This is all to do with that other one, the one who came ashore! Isn’t it? The one who smelled of blood and burning leaves.’
Blood and burning leaves?
Now it was my turn to be shocked. I’d heard the expression before. Perhaps Niiv took my sudden silence as disbelief. She elaborated, angrily:
‘The one who rattled with green-bright metal. Knife-eyes!’
‘Mielikki?’ I asked cautiously, though I didn’t mean the Forest Lady at all. ‘Mielikki has left the ship?’
‘Not her. The other one!’ she cried. ‘The one who went ashore while you were preparing to hawk-fly. She didn’t know I was watching. If you look for her you can’t see her. But it’s her, isn’t it? You’re hiding her; and you don’t want me to know.’
Niiv’s voice was like a howling wind. She stood at the centre of her own storm, angry and abandoned, intuitively jealous of an affectionate friendship from my past. The activity at the camp, and around Argo, might have been at the other end of the world.
Blood and burning leaves?
It couldn’t be!
I said to Niiv, ‘Were you hiding in the ship, then, when this knife-eyed woman went ashore?’
The Hadassah Covenant Page 23