The Hadassah Covenant

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘I don’t suppose Orpheus ever had this trouble,’ the glum Hibernian muttered. I reminded him of Orpheus’ fate, ripped apart by the women of Lemnia and thrown into the river.

  ‘That’s true,’ Elkavar nodded sagely. ‘It’s the fate of musicians to occasionally fall out of favour. Perhaps I’m lucky after all. But I miss my singing.’ He looked at me darkly. ‘How about your own?’

  I broke the news to him that Poseidon had stolen my voice as well; or rather, I was aware for not the first time in my life that to enter these underearthly realms was to lose most of my abilities with charm. I had always survived such journeys into the underworld, but the visitation had the effect of blocking me from my skills. I had never questioned this fact, just acknowledged it.

  Earlier, I had tried to ‘sing’ to summon Medea again, and discovered the absence of harmony. I had also tried to summon the hound, the hawk and the fish, without success. To have been able to sniff further down the passages would have been useful, but like a scroll that has been locked away in a clay vase, I could not reach below my flesh to the patterned clues and guides that normally would have helped me.

  ‘You’re just a man,’ Elkavar said, disappointment heavy in his voice. ‘Just an ordinary man.’

  ‘Well, for the moment. When we reach land again,’ I added sarcastically, ‘I’ll be the same monster I was before.’

  ‘I do hope so.’

  But now a thought occurred to Elkavar. ‘The scuttlebutt among the argonauts is that you can fly and swim, and run and things like that, as an animal, as it were. Indeed, didn’t I find you in that sacking, in that ruined house, looking more bird and dog than man? You’d been doing it, then, you’d been shifting. Don’t tell me I’m wrong, now. I know shifters, and I know shifters, and some wear the marks of the beast on their faces all their lives, and others just smell of it. And, my friend, when I found you so distressed, you smelled of bird shit and dog breath.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But you did. And the scuttlebutt—’

  ‘I know about the scuttlebutt. And you’re right. I have often flown as a hawk. It’s demanding, but useful. But in answer to your question, I’ve tried everything I’m aware of—bird, hound, fish, child … I’ve even tried to become the root of one of those trees there…’

  Above us, the vault of our world was a tangled, eerie mass of root and fibre, tendrils of the upper world draped like shrouds across the sky. Elkavar stared at the vault for a moment then looked at me as if I were mad.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The roots of the forest connect the world. We are enclosed in a net of forest.’

  ‘I see. I didn’t know. But to get back to what I was saying, the scuttlebutt among the argonauts is that you have more up your sheepskin sleeve than you’re letting on.’

  Who had he been talking to? Or was he just wonderfully intuitive? I guessed the answer was:Urtha. I had confided a great deal in Urtha, and the Cornovidian and this Hibernian, despite a history of warring against each other, certainly had become friends during our river journey.

  ‘What exactly has Urtha told you?’

  Elkavar looked slightly embarrassed. ‘That you are haunted by ten faces from childhood; that they are present on your bones; that your bones can open worlds; ten worlds, and if I’m not much mistaken, you open them in the form of birds, and dogs…’

  I stopped him with a finger raised, alarmed by his knowledge of me, not angry about it, just reluctant to think too hard about the life inside my flesh that I was increasingly using, against my generations-long better judgement.

  ‘And your point?’

  ‘What else is down there, Merlin? There must be something that can be summoned to help us find the way. If not a hound … how about a bat? A worm would be too slow.’

  I silenced him again. I was tired of his persistence, his nagging at me. And he was right. Ten shifters, as he called them, were indeed in my power.

  I reached for the one I was always reluctant to use. The only one that could work in this underworld.

  Morndun.

  The ghost in the land …

  * * *

  I had forgotten how much it hurt to raise the ghost.

  Life, which should quicken, suddenly slows to black cold. Ice creeps through the limbs, and despair begins to shriek inside the head. Time stretches endlessly, bleak, harrowing, wasted, a wasteland of days and years. The shadows that watch are the shadows of the lost. They shuffle, they cry, they abuse, they curse. Joints seize up; walking is difficult. You stumble through mud; there are no fresh smells, only rank decay. A mother calls, a father shouts, a brother wails, a sister calls from afar. These are the lost-from-life; alive, we can learn to live with grief, to focus on the day, and the days ahead. But to summon the ghost is to summon what has slipped away, never to be reclaimed.

  It hurts to raise that shade.

  So think of me: older by far than any corpse that lay in the black lake before me. To raise the ghost was to open gates to moments of happiness and pleasure that stretched back beyond the forming of hills themselves.

  I cried for a long time, huddled on the shore, the flesh hanging from me in rancid folds, jaws of ice chewing on my guts.

  Elkavar fled, to watch from a distance.

  I called for the dead and they rose from the lake, not many, some of them too long gone to do more than lift a head above the water. A few dragged themselves towards me, bent forward, hands clutching at chests, as always happens with the dead, staring at me through hollow eyes. The closer they came the more I could see how keen they were to hear my voice: was I here to take them back? How wrongfully they had died; how prematurely they had passed away. This young messenger was surely sent to lead them out again, out into the bright day, out into the quickening year …

  How quickly they shrank back in disappointment when I used the words, ‘I’m lost. I need a guide.’

  After a moment a voice called, ‘I fell at Plataea, fighting for the Spartans. Did we win the day? We tried so hard.’

  Then another voice, ‘I saw fire on the walls of Tiryns with my last eyes, before that spear struck me through the jaws. Did the city burn?’

  And another, ‘My friend Agamnos was in mortal combat with Hektor in the spring, at Troy. I was cut down from behind before I saw the outcome. Is Hektor dead?’

  I answered that Hektor was dead, but that I didn’t know the answers to the other questions.

  A calmer voice came from among these shuffling, watery shades. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘South. To the mouth of an oracle.’

  ‘In what land?’

  ‘Makedonia. The oracle at Arkamon.’

  A woman stepped forward, heavily cowled, arms crossed tightly over her stomach. ‘I am not long dead,’ she whispered. ‘And I still have strength. I know where you wish to go. Follow.’

  She stepped from the lake towards me, but suddenly crouched down at the pool’s edge, and with withered hands wrung the water from the lower part of her filthy clothes. She squeezed the water from sleeve and girdle, as if trying to shake off her shroud for just a little while. Then she came towards me again, and I thought she would walk past, head bent, but she stopped and looked up at me, haunted eyes in a shrunken face.

  ‘Is my husband happy?’ she asked in a ghostly whisper. The drawn flesh of her brow creased into a frown of anguish. She stared at me, a corpse regarding a corpse, but with such need to know the answer to her question I almost choked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

  Her grim gaze held me. ‘We had two sons. Bright boys. They went to war. For ever. It’s a hard thing. To die of grief. It’s a hard thing. To leave a good man. I hope he’s happy.’

  Her head dropped again and she began to walk, back along the path to a place where Elkavar and I had taken the wrong turn.

  We followed at a distance, not stopping for rest—this corpse never stopped—and soon our limbs were weary, and our senses dulled with tiredness. But she walke
d and walked, that slow, shambling ghost-gait, and we passed through forests and valleys, along the edge of streams and through the ruins of ancient towns, whose stone walls glowed with soft luminescence, though there was no moon to illuminate their heights.

  And then we smelled the earth again, and herbs and sun and summer.

  And fear! And blood!

  Between one step and the next I could hear the sound of a savage fight, the shrieking of men, the sharp ringing of sword on sword, the laughter of Furies.

  Our spectral guide stood for a moment, face lifted to the thin light from ahead of us.

  ‘Thank you,’ is all I could think to say. Still she stood, staring at that sun-gleam, that life-gleam, remembering. Then she slowly turned and walked back along the dark path.

  I watched her go until she was out of sight. Then woke from the Death Sleep, startling Elkavar who saw the ashen hue of my face suddenly flush bright with blood and life again.

  ‘I was about to bury you,’ he muttered brightly and with some relief. ‘I’ve spent the last little while terrified out of my life. You make a convincing corpse!’

  * * *

  As Brennos’s great army had swept slowly down through the mountains, towards the plains to the north of Thessaly, war bands had ridden to east and west, prowling the country for spoils, forage and adventure. There was no controlling them. As long as they returned to the main body of the army, there was little Brennos or his commanders could do.

  This band, two hundred or so, had sniffed out the oracle at Arkamon, ridden up the passes, through the woods, and poured over the rocks to confront the small, determined band of kilted soldiers dispatched to protect this isolated sanctuary. Older men for the most, this protecting force carried spears and heavy swords, wore iron cuirasses and greaves, and yellow helmets that curled forward at the top.

  They were not winning the day.

  I estimated a hundred raiders were involved in the combat, stripped naked to the waist, their red-green trousers belted tightly. They had painted their faces white to match their hair. A black stripe ran across each man’s torso, from heart to groin. They were almost laughing as they fought, whirling and kicking, leaping from rock to rock, slashing at the defenders with a speed and ferocity that was dizzying. Impaled on a spear, they crawled away, or stood, arms raised, sword in hand, shouting noisy challenge to their assassin, falling on him with a death rage that finished one or both of them quickly.

  Just inside the wood I could see the glint of spear points, and the shuffling of horses. These were chariots, waiting for the outcome.

  If I had been inclined to move down through the fray, and cross to the woodland, Elkavar made the wiser decision. ‘They’re all marked the same, if you notice. This is a big raiding party, all from the same clan—Tectosages, I think—and you and I are as different from them as those poor bastards with the funny hats. They’re in no mood to start checking our credentials. These are the swordsmen. But there are spearmen up in the woods. They’re called gaesatae, and they can throw four spears in the time it takes you to clap your hands.’

  The stench was stomach-turning. The noise like the feeding frenzy of gulls. I glanced to where I had hidden once before and listened to this oracle, that concealed cave in the cliff, and saw a figure watching, furtively, from that same sanctuary. And distantly, slumped in the saddle, six dark-cloaked men on heavy horses, watching the affray from safety.

  One of the raiding band, a tall man, young and lithe, one of the few to be wearing a bronze torque necklet, suddenly somersaulted over the thin, desperate rank of Makedonians, and jumped to the rocks that led to the main entrance to the oracle, where Elkavar and I watched. But as this man came bounding up the path towards us, so the tall, dark figure slipped from his hiding place in the crevice, coming up behind the Celt and quickly impaling him on a spear. The man arched backwards, face a grimace of pain, fell back and twitched.

  I recognised his killer at once. Orgetorix!

  Jason’s son looked quickly round, then made to move back into hiding. But his action had been seen from below. A warrior came leaping towards him, sword ready to strike, the sound of his approach lost in the din of the skirmish. He was moments from the kill. I grabbed a spear from Elkavar, raised it, gave it wings and flung it.

  Orgetorix saw my action, saw the spear come towards him, was frozen with the surprise of it and more surprised when the shaft tickled his neck. He turned quickly to see the weapon embedded between his attacker’s jaws, as the man flew backwards, squirming and struggling with the shaft. Then the young man bolted: not back to his previous cover, but up to the oracle, through the narrow gap between the rocks, and into the fragrant space where Elkavar and I crouched, watching the mayhem.

  Orgetorix said nothing for a moment, though his quick, fierce frown as he met my gaze suggested instantly that he recognised me.

  He looked at Elkavar, looked him up and down, saw all the signs of a man who might be from among Brennos’s gathering and asked, ‘Are you defending this place? Or attacking it?’

  Elkavar almost understood the other man’s words, but not quite, so I intervened.

  ‘This is Elkavar of Hibernia. I am…’ what else could I say? ‘Antiokus … the name you once called me as you chased me with a catapult in your mother’s palace. I’m known as Merlin, now. And we’re neither defending nor attacking this sanctuary. But I’m afraid the sanctuary is lost.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re right.’ He glanced at the fighting. ‘This place is very special to me. But those bastards want their spoils, and there’s nothing I can do.’ He paused for a moment, then studied me again. ‘A catapult? In my mother’s palace?’

  ‘You were just a child. Your aim was good, though.’

  What a look he gave me. For a moment he was running through those marbled corridors, pursuing the shadow of bird and hound—a little trickery to avoid those small clay pellets!—laughing with the tease of it as I vanished, and with the surprise of it when I loomed up behind him, with the small triumphs that I’d allowed him as he caught me.

  But the memory was too fleeting. I could see it fade from his eyes, though his interest in me burned on. It was more important to attend to the business of slaughter.

  The last of the Makedonians fell below the swift blades of the war band. The bodies were looted and trophied, then flung face down. Blood-smeared men poured into the cavern and began to search the passages, coming very close to where the three of us were hiding.

  There was not a great deal to loot. The oracle at Arkamon had not been in great demand. It had had a strange reputation for all the centuries I’d known of it, which is why, whenever I had been able, I detoured from the Path to come and see it.

  This was not a place of pilgrimage so much as of last chance. The voice of the oracle had come and gone at a whim; it had no great reputation. It was unusual in that fact, and curiosity had often brought me here, and it was through curiosity that I had found Orgetorix.

  Who sat here now, watching his special place be looted by half-naked, half-crazed, bragging warriors of the Tectosages, men who were increasingly irritated to find nothing but walls of rock painted with ghostly images of animals, stinking passages that led down into an even more rank and unwelcoming earthly bowel, and a few items of gold and silver that were plucked from the alcoves where they had been carefully placed, stuffed into sacks and taken away.

  With their departure, the world outside settled into crow-feast and silence. The Tectosages’ dead had been gathered up and carried away. The Makedonian dead had been left where they lay and would soon begin to rot.

  There was nothing the three of us could do, so we slipped out of the cave and found our way back to the ransacked village. There were crows here too, but Orgetorix’s friends as well, holding his horse. They had stayed clear of the raid; they had kept quiet during the pillaging of the village. They had been with Orgetorix too long to question his instructions: do not participate in the raid on this oracle!

 
; One of them, though, recognised me. He leaned forward in the saddle as we gathered in the square and said, ‘You were here before. You were sitting over there, watching and waiting.’

  Now Orgetorix too put a face to his suspicions. ‘That’s right. The scruffy man, with his two scrawny horses. You sat eating olives and goat’s cheese, watching us. You followed me up to the oracle. The oracle knew you were there.’

  In the middle of a murdered village, Elkavar and I were surrounded by seven men on horseback, all of them, fortunately, more quizzical than threatening, but one of them, Jason’s son, watching me with an intensity that was almost burning.

  ‘I don’t deny it,’ I said to him. Elkavar was looking edgy. His elbow-pipes kept making nervous little wails.

  Orgetorix asked me, ‘Who was my mother?’

  I looked him straight in the eye, those dark eyes, those eyes that had once shone with laughter as he had scampered through the palace among the guards, playing his games of hide-and-seek, Little Dreamer following, Jason prowling, Antiokus, Jason’s friend, calling out: we can see you!

  ‘Your mother was Medea.’

  He considered that answer for a long time, without expression, perhaps because he had not expected me to know; perhaps because he had been unsure himself.

  But from his horse, looking down at me, he asked, ‘Then who was my father?’

  ‘Do you want me to answer: Rottenbones?’

  The answer startled him. His horse reared up and backed away, distressed. He reached forward to calm the animal, still staring at me.

  ‘What was my father’s name?’ he asked carefully.

  And I told him: ‘Jason, son of Aeson. He was a man who voyaged half the known world to claim back a land stolen from him; and a man who loved his sons—’

  ‘And betrayed those sons. And betrayed their mother. And betrayed everything. Rottenbones! A terrible name, but the right name for a man as hateful as my father.’ Curious, he asked: ‘Say his other name again? Let me hear it…’