The Hadassah Covenant

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘Mielikki is my spirit-mother,’ the girl reminded me. ‘Which is why you’ll never have me killed. I am her child. She would never let me come to danger.’

  She had been in the Spirit of the Ship! Mielikki had protected her. Why was I so surprised? Forest Lady and young shamanka were of a single heart. It was only natural that Mielikki would wrap her cloak around her kin.

  But what had Niiv seen? And how much would she tell me?

  ‘I don’t know this knife-eyed woman,’ I shouted. ‘Did you hear her name?’

  ‘I only glimpsed her. She was like cloud shadow. But she was predatory. Terrifying. I hope she didn’t see me. And you do know her. I can tell.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. But for the moment, leave me alone!’

  ‘No!’

  I turned away from her. She screamed at me: who is she, then?

  She screamed my name, then crossed her arms, dropped her head and wailed bitter curses, which bounced off my skin, green acorns striking the hide of a mule.

  What to do?

  * * *

  Jason was running towards me, sword in hand, alarmed at the sound of shouting. I could see Elkavar and Conan the Cymbrian trotting cautiously in the same direction, looking nervously at the black-robed girl standing on the slope above me.

  ‘What is it, Merlin? What help do you need?’

  ‘None,’ I called to him. He looked at Niiv and the sword flashed in his hand. She shouted in fury and indignation, turned and vanished down the other side of the rampart.

  I looked at Jason, saw the curiosity and concern in his strong features. He was waiting for me to speak to him, but I could think of nothing else but where has she gone? Where is she hiding? It can’t possibly be true …

  And I could not tell Jason what was in my heart. Not yet. Not yet.

  ‘Keep that girl away from me!

  He said pointedly, ‘Permanently?’

  ‘No. Not permanently. I wouldn’t try harming her. She has a powerful friend in Argo.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Hollow Hill

  I needed to find Fierce Eyes. I needed to know the face behind that veil. But where to look? Where had she gone when she had slipped ashore? How to call her to me? This time I took precautions.

  I must have made a strange sight in my filthy sheepskin jacket and baggy woollen trousers, long hair unkempt, running, running to the edge of the woodland, then along it, avoiding those watching wolves, smelling and searching for some path, some passage, any hole or nook in the forest through which the woman might have slipped after her escape from the ship.

  I ran and walked for several hours, towards the south, along the side of the wide road that Brennos’s army had ploughed through the land. I came to a stone-walled house, its roof fallen in, its door ripped off for use as firewood, no doubt. It had long since been ransacked and abandoned, but there was a pile of coarse sacking in one corner and I drew this around me as I hunkered down and summoned my skills in dream travelling. I entered the Death Sleep.

  First I flew. I am most adept at flying as a hawk. I soared and swooped, rose above the land, saw the spread of forest, the huge clearing with its smouldering fire and patterns of enclosures, the glitter of the river, the rolling hills to the north, the rising mountains to the south where soon Jason would have to ride hard and fast. I called for Fierce Eyes, for the girl from the waterfall. I hovered on the wind, calling, waiting …

  And she answered my call. Suddenly! She came out of the sun, a broad-winged raptor, claws out, dropping on me with a screech of fury. I stooped to avoid her, but her wing struck me. She turned and came for me again, savage eyes, bright eyes studying me, curved beak slightly open and ready to tear out my throat.

  I dropped again and flew fast down to the forest. She followed for a few terrifying breaths, then turned effortlessly on the wing, rising back against the sun, and in so doing became lost to me.

  I summoned the hound next. I nosed my way through the woodland, through thicket and along cold, leaf-clogged streams. I howled for her. Again she heard me and came to me in hound form, but again she surprised me.

  She growled from a high rock. As I looked up, catching the star-gleam in her eyes, the flaring of nostrils, the opening of the muzzle, so she leapt on to me. I bounded backwards. She fell hard, struggled to her feet, then came for me in two elegant and powerful bounds. We struggled and snarled, claws taking their toll, canines bloody but managing to tear only thick-furred hide, not throats.

  And this time it was she who broke the struggle, hounding away along the stream, a quick glance backwards, then gone into the gloom of the wood.

  Below the sacking, in the ruined house, I licked my wounds.

  One thing I knew, now: wherever she was, she knew I was looking for her. And she was answering my calls.

  More hurt than tired, aware of being hungry—how long had I been here? I had lost track of time for the moment—I tried a softer form. The child I had once been, that part of us all that is sinisalo, the child in the land, the child that never goes away but always walks with the man or woman the child becomes.

  I sent my ghostly child back through the wood, running until he came to the stream where the hounds had fought. The rivulet ran into the Daan, its shallow flow taking it through the area where the army had camped, close to the king’s enclosure where Brennos had addressed his warlords. But I went deeper into the wood, until I found a place where the stream curved round a small hill. Here, a rocky outcrop concealed a narrow, sheltering cave. I called for the Other and perhaps she had been waiting for me.

  I watched from across the brook, and she emerged from the overhang, a small girl, skin-clothed, wild-haired, armed with a sling, which was loaded with a smooth oval pebble. As I started to rise from where I was crouching in the undergrowth, she slung the stone and ran. The stone struck my shoulder painfully. I followed after her for a while as she darted from glade to hollow, over rock and under fallen tree, scampering from thicket to muddy stream, always ahead of me.

  This was no game. There was no laughter, no taunting, no sense of pleasure.

  After a while I gave up the ghost and let the child in the land return to me through my dream.

  * * *

  It was night and there was a man standing in the broken door of the house, looking round. Startled, I gave myself away and the man’s head turned to see me in the moonlight. I managed to throw back the sacking and draw my iron sword, struggling to stand.

  ‘So there you are,’ Elkavar said. ‘Put it away. Scaithach’s smile! but you’re a hard man to find. Fortunately, you haven’t washed for a while.’

  He tugged on a leather leash and Maglerd appeared, barking twice at me in recognition and welcome.

  Hound-nosed again.

  ‘I’m glad to see you, Elkavar. But why have you been trying to find me?’

  ‘Because I’ve understood a little of what and who you are, and who you’re looking for, and I’ve found something I think you should see.’

  * * *

  What I had failed to discern, perhaps because she knew how to blind me to her traces, Elkavar had discovered by instinct and that Hibernian-born talent of his for finding the ways-under, even though on his own admission he was equally adept at getting lost once the ways-under had been located.

  He had nosed out a narrow passage in what appeared to be an outcrop of rock from a small hill which rose deep in the wood. Indeed, from the moment we had beached the ship, he had been convinced there was a way-under somewhere close.

  ‘I have a feeling for these things,’ he reminded me. ‘Though I have no sense of direction, as you know.’

  He had tried and failed to find it. Then tried again; and found it. As soon as I saw it, I recognised the mound where I had encountered Fierce Eyes in hound form.

  It was soon clear that this hill was old, and made by human hand, though the narrow mouth was roughly hewn.

  It led down into the earth, quite steeply at first. Elkavar was very s
atisfied. ‘The brughs of my own land are of superior workmanship, but then the people who lived in my land in the days of the Danaans were the most skilled in the world at shaping the face of a stone.’

  I know, I thought to myself. I remember.

  The passage wound intricately for a while and then divided, beyond an arching gate of petrified oak, between human earth and the spirit land. It didn’t reach far into the underworld, we discovered. The light there was gloomy on a heavy, silent lake, full of frogs, haven of silent wading birds, a place that stank of marsh gas. Occasionally, dead water splashed dully against slippery rocks as some creature surfaced or prowled at the edge.

  I saw no ghosts and decided that this was an abandoned place, a blind road to the underworld.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ I said, disappointed.

  ‘Is that right?’ he teased.

  I looked again, then urged him to tell me more.

  ‘Well, for a start, lakes like this, lakes like the one where we met, in the Northland, they change as you walk around them. If you’re not looking for it you don’t see it. That great lake in Pohjola is one of the gathering places for these ways-under, as perhaps you knew.’

  I’d suspected exactly that, especially when Elkavar himself had appeared. It probably explained why so many dream-journeys, so many talisman-hunts, could arrive there. But that great ice-lake had seemed very different from this stinking pond below the small mound by the Daan.

  ‘If you continue round the shore,’ the Hibernian continued, ‘there’s a wild wood, and a clear path through it. And someone has been there recently. They’ve tried to hide the way from other eyes. I sat there and smelled the air coming back through the wood. I think it goes south. Sometimes it smells scented, like those herbs we love from the southern seas. Sometimes there’s just a hint of blood…’

  ‘Blood?’ My heart raced. I watched Elkavar carefully. ‘Blood and what else?’

  ‘A smell. Like burning.’

  ‘Fierce Eyes! So that’s where she’s gone! She must have nosed out the path while I was flying in time with Niiv hanging on my neck. Elkavar, you’re a hero.’

  ‘No hero,’ he said modestly. ‘I was born with the ability to find these passages. Though as I’ve said before, I can as easily get lost in them. But that and singing are about the only things I’m good at. I’ll wait for you here.’

  I had just started to walk on, round the dark lake, when a thought occurred to me. ‘How quickly can you learn a tune?’

  ‘As quickly as you can sing it,’ he replied with confidence. He had clambered up one of the grim, grey rocks, where the dark gnarled trunks of winter thorn reached out to the starless vault. The lake swelled gently, but as I sang the song I wanted him to play on his pipes, so its surface erupted, shedding black forms on the wing, which circled for a few moments, a cloud of activity that finally settled back with a soft splashing to return the lake to silence.

  Elkavar laughed, ‘If you can do that, think what I can do…’

  He blew up the bag for the pipes and squeezed it firmly; the drone set the lake alive again, but again it settled, and remained so as he thumbed the pipes and produced the melancholy tune to a song that I had once heard a mother singing softly to her children, as they drifted into sleep, rocked in her arms.

  ‘What were the words again?’

  I told him, and he sang them gently, the pipes mellow and warm, almost sad.

  I am the exile,

  returning, returning,

  to the Hollow Hills,

  to the Shining Ones,

  I am the exile

  who is walking home.

  The lake shuddered. The gloom seemed to deepen across the water and the trees trembled, as if a storm was coming. A cold breeze blew against me. But everything in this eerie place was silent, then.

  Elkavar intuited my feelings and sang again. The notes and the words seemed to drift as if sleepwalking, across the edge of the lake to the dark gap in the trees where Fierce Eyes had gone.

  Silence again, save for the lapping of lake water on the shore and the gentle breathing of the wood.

  And suddenly she was there, a tall, dark figure in the darkness, veiled in the night, standing like a statue at the mouth of the path, watching me.

  I walked towards her. The Invocation, sung by the Hibernian, had called her back from her journey, turned her round almost certainly out of curiosity, of fond but hurtful memory. And I was quite certain, now, who watched me from behind the veil.

  I stood before her, close enough to reach out and touch her, not close enough to kiss. She kept me at that distance. I could see her face behind the veil, year-worn, far more than year-worn, but beautiful, not part of this world, untouchable, and like me, lost in time yet bound to it.

  Medea! Daughter of Aeëtes. Priestess of the Ram. Of none of this! Because she was older than this by uncountable generations. She and I were part of the same heart, that ancient, ever-beating heart.

  ‘Who are you?’ she breathed. ‘Who are you, to know my secret song? You sail with Rottenbones…’

  I had believed Medea dead. The oracle at Arkamon had told her son she gave too much to hide you. ‘She died in great pain.’

  Of course she did. I saw it now. She died for seven centuries. I’d been blinded by my own refusal to use the talents I possessed. The oracle had spoken the truth—a guarded truth.

  Medea hadn’t died. Medea had lived through time. Medea had walked the Path, and I hadn’t recognised her when our own paths had crossed. I hadn’t recognised the girl who’d been my childhood friend.

  ‘I was nicknamed Merlin,’ I said, hardly able to summon the words. ‘As children, we swam in a pool by a waterfall. You took pleasure in shooting fruit-tipped arrows at me. We had ten guardians; they still watch us, waiting for us to come of age, though I don’t know why.’

  She studied me carefully from behind the veil. I sensed her mind as the buzzing of insects—frightened, confused, intrigued, unwilling to accommodate the truth that was on the way.

  ‘I was called Antiokus when Jason first recruited men for Argo and sailed to sack your sanctuary at Colchis. I was on Argo. I was in the palace when you mimed the murders of your children.’

  With a scream of horrified recognition—breath reeking of blood and burning leaves—Medea tore away the veil and stared at me. She half believed, because she half knew the truth.

  But the look of recognition and sudden comprehension quickly passed, and anger took its place, deepening the tracks of tears and pain around her eyes, hardening the sculpture of her brow and mouth.

  ‘What is this?’ she hissed at me. ‘What trick? He will never see his sons! Tell him that. I’ve worked too hard to hide them. He will never see his sons! They are the only thing in my life that matters to me. They are growing strong. I’m proud of them.’

  ‘He’s close. He’ll find Thesokorus.’

  ‘Will he? I stopped him on Alba. I raised the dead on Alba. I helped waste the land to keep you back. And I can stop him here. I poisoned his mind on that ship. And I can stop him here.’

  She could not take her eyes from mine. I could hardly cope with the implications of what she was saying. I thought of the huge bull that had plunged from those wicker giants. The touch of Medea’s hand. And that frightening presence, that canny raven’s presence, in the giants’ heads as we had bobbed on the water, finding our courage. She had been that close. How much of that wasteland had been this woman’s doing, I wondered?

  I could not take my eyes from hers. The blur of grey images, the rotting accumulation of so many centuries, was beginning to sharpen: for us both. She shook her head, remembering. Memory was a flood, rushing back, cold and fresh. It hurt to watch her. She had been in Ghostland with me, not knowing who I was, what we had been in the long past, even as I was recoiling from Fierce Eyes, not understanding Fierce Eyes at all. I longed for her again, or perhaps for the childhood we had shared.

  She cut to the quick, speaking softly, delib
erately, breaking the spell.

  ‘This trick will not work. You are a clever man, Antiokus, a friend of that rotten man. But I see through the trick. You are not like me. I was always one alone. The others were false memories. I walked the Path alone. And Merlin … Merlin was just a gentle dream!’

  Why, then, were her lips trembling? Why was she cold? Because, of course, she too was beginning to understand.

  ‘I thought the same,’ I said. ‘I thought I was one alone; with only gentle dreams to make me feel there were others like me.’

  ‘No!’ she snarled. ‘This is a cruel deception. Somehow, you’ve picked my memory like a crow. But Rottenbones will never feel the touch of my children. I’ve waited too long to be with them again. Hecada! Hecada!’ she howled suddenly. ‘How is he here? How can he be here? The earth itself seems to turn against me!’

  And with that wild and wailing cry, that angry moment of desperation, she turned and ran, swallowed by the path and shadows.

  But the sound of her running suddenly stopped. I was still standing, staring after her, conscious of darkness, the stench of the pool, and the distant drone of Elkavar’s pipes as he quietly practised. I couldn’t see her, but she had come back, and called out to me.

  ‘How many guardians?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Tell me a name.’

  ‘Cunhaval. The hound that runs through the forest.’

  ‘Too easy to guess. Tell me another.’

  ‘Sinisalo. The child in the land. Like you and me.’

  ‘And another.’

  ‘Skogen. The shadow of unseen forests.’

  There was silence; then once more the sound of running.

  I went to follow, but again her voice came back, almost plaintive. ‘Leave me. Leave me, Merlin! Please. I can do you harm.’

  And I realised she had reached far deeper into her bones than I had. She had used more charm. She was far stronger in charm, and that was dangerous.

  * * *

  She was gone. I went back to Elkavar, who was waiting for me where the rocks met the water in this grey and silent underworld, his pipes slung casually over his shoulder, his face a mask of curiosity and mischief.