The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (15 page)

I was waist-deep in the wide pool, below the high rocky overhangs of the sanctuary, watching the water fall in cascades on two sides. The pool boiled where the fall struck the surface. The sky above was a brilliant circle of azure, framed by the arms of summer trees. Where the pool was not framed by the silver cascades, the undergrowth was a tight mass of wood and fern, and ten faces watched me as I marked my creation.

Ten
rajathuks,
my guardians, my inspiration, all waiting for me to finalise the building of my boat.

I painted eyes on the round craft.
Silvering
: the eyes of a fish, to take her up rivers safely;
Falkenna
: the eyes of a hawk, because I wished the boat to
fly
across the water;
Cunhaval
the hound, because she would nose her way into hidden lands and secret waters.

My
Voyager
was also made under the watchful gaze of Skogen, the shadow of forests, and I had been inspired by Sinisalo: the child in the land. I had summoned Gaberlungi to put adventure into the craft, great stories, a fate of adventure waiting for her. And the greatest of the
rajathuks, Hollower
, set a charm on the vessel that would allow her to move through unseen rivers, and to go deep into the world, downwards into the earth itself, to become a craft of many realms.

For myself, I carved a small image of a man out of wood, my own captain, and hid the crude figure behind one of the wicker struts.

I remembered clambering aboard and taking up the paddle, turning several times, laughing as I fought to get control of the skin-covered frame. Then the deep current reached up a hand and tugged me, drawing me away from the pool, over the shallows and into the stream that wound away from my valley.

As I spun one last time, still unsure of the balance of the vessel, I saw that seven of the
rajathuks
had vanished. Three remained, their bark masks long and mournful, watching me through narrowed eyes.

“You were not necessary!” I called to them. “I’ll come back when I need you.”

Lament
was the first to withdraw, then
Moondream.
Last of all, the skull-mask of
Morndun
: the ghost in the land.

“I don’t need you,” I called again, but now, looking back, I felt that moment of uncertainty.

You must mark your boat with all the masks. That way, protection will be with you always.

My mother’s words. The words of all the mothers who were saying farewell to their children. Did the others obey, I wondered now? Did the others find a way to bring sorrow, the moon, and death into their vessels?

You were not necessary. I’ll come back when I need you.…

Arrogance! Pure arrogance. And yet I had meant the words genuinely. I could not see the point of Death and Lamentation at this early time, let alone the Dreaming of the Moon, but I had not intended to dismiss their importance. I was full of life, and my spinning coracle had a life of its own, and was testing me severely as I struggled to control her, the river gripping the hollow craft, the overhanging willow and alder branches acting like flails as I picked up speed, plunging into the embrace of their fronds, pushing away from the mud, laughing as the land took me, as I was carried away from my home, to begin my life on the Path.

How could I have known that I was fated to lose the vessel, wandering aimlessly for years before finding the Path and taking to my new life on foot and the backs of whatever animals could support me? I was unprepared.

*   *   *

The intensity of the memory passed away, and again I was in the Spirit of the Ship, smelling summer and Northland’s winter mixed together, the warm, still presence of the Lady of the northern forests both a comforting and disconcerting presence beside me. Her lynx was purring, but ever attentive, ever alert.

But though the stark visual images faded, an echo of despair and fear remained, constructed perhaps by my own mind, a mind inadvertently and unwelcomely opened to its origins.

I had never been able to control that simple boat, that bowl in wicker, oak, and leather that had run the rivers despite my efforts, and obeyed me only in the still waters of the shallows and pools that we encountered on our journey.

A storm had struck, a winter nightmare, ice blowing in the air, leafless trees showing that they were anything but lifeless as they thrashed the river, reached to grab my frightened, freezing form in its vulnerable, spinning bowl.

I heaved to the shore and tethered the coracle, crouching in the lee of an overhang, crying, huddled, watching a dark wall of snow approach on the wind from the west, always trying to see through the darkness, back to the north, where my mother’s fire burned in the valley that was my home, and my father’s paintings, deep in the womb of the gorge, would be as fresh and vibrant as the day he had made them, before he himself had entered the earth, along the winding guts of that other mother, never to return.

The snow began to swirl, innocent and gentle at first, then like insects, frozen insects, creatures from story-lore, the memories of the older people who had explored the land around our valley.

The little vessel was bobbing violently on the river. I had not tied it with a knot, merely wound the tether round a trunk and wedged the free end into the split between two branches. She would not hold against the storm.

Now I struggled with the laces on my boots, but my fingers were clumsy, the leather strings slipped and coiled away from me. In frustration I began to cry; then my fingers were so numbed that I gave up the effort and lay back, my cloak over my face, my tears turning from desperation to anger, from loneliness to fear.

I heard the movement close to me and froze, thinking that an animal was nosing towards me. Then—the gentle fumbling of knowing hands at my skin boots; deft fingers laced me up, tugged the leather tight. I uncovered my face and looked down, and saw a cowled shape, a small shape, and when the cowl was lifted, two fierce and wonderful eyes met my gaze.

And a smile that mocked as well as welcomed.

“You really should have paid more attention,” Fierce Eyes said.

“I cannot tie knots. I can
not
tie knots. I will not be ashamed of the fact. I will fashion shoes that don’t need them.”

She snuggled up to me, drawing her cloak tightly around her body, but reaching quickly to squeeze my hand. The snow raged at us, settling on our noses.

“I didn’t expect this,” she said.

“Neither did I. What are you doing here?”

“What are you?”

“I drew the boat to shore. The river is too high.”

“I lost mine. It turned over and threw me into the water. I tried to hold her, but she was taken from me. So now I walk.”

I looked at the small boat and thought of trying to row it with two of us, but the thought was not sustained. Our lives had been suddenly taken away from us; everything we had known was now gone. Fierce Eyes and I were not the only ones. There were others. I had begun to forget about them. I had begun to forget about this girl, who had teased and tormented me, loved me and amused me for so many years, the slow years in the valley, when time passed around us, but not within us. That long, playful, and challenging childhood that filled our heads with dreams of what was to come, and carved powers as yet untested on the bones that cranked and worked our cold, pale bodies.

Her presence here was like the best of gifts, and I leaned into her warmth. Again our fingers entwined. I felt her shaking. I thought she was nervous of this tentative touch, but after a moment I realised she was crying, and I remained silent, stiff … still touching.

Then the bough broke!

The winter alder cracked along its central trunk, and my ineffective tethering began to unravel.

“My boat!” I yelled, scrambling to my feet. Fierce Eyes saw the problem, and as I flung myself towards the unwinding rope, she slipped down the bank to try to hold the coracle itself.

She screamed and tumbled, shocking me for a moment. In that instant the rope withdrew from the tree, like a snake slithering effortlessly into its hole in the grassland. Fierce Eyes had plunged into the river. Her head was under the water, her hand above it. Through the snow it was hard to see what was happening, but the coracle spun suddenly into the middle of the water, winding the tether around itself. I saw my friend’s hand grab the end of the rope, then rise like a nymph from the depths, soaked and shrieking. She grasped the edge of the vessel and clung onto it, turning a pale, terrified face towards me as the river, the storm, the night, and unseen hands drew her away from me again, allowing distance and snow-battered darkness to take her, leaving me with nothing but her cry on the wind, a cry that might have been my name.

*   *   *

In such simple dramas, on such cold, insignificant nights, are great histories set in motion, fates set on their path. How could I have known it? All I knew, for a long time after that dreadful loss, was the sound of my own terror and abandonment.

*   *   *

Now, too, there was something terrified and abandoned about Argo. She was a miserable ship. She was living with a secret, and holding that secret embedded in her hull of oak and birch. The secret was a guilty one. And like a child she was as keen to let the fact be known as she was to keep the fact concealed.

*   *   *

I struggled to disentangle myself from the close embrace of Mielikki. The Lady of the Northlands drew back; the spell of communication was broken. Her lynx crouched and hissed at me; its breath was foul. Mielikki hushed it and it backed away from me at a crouch, disturbed, protective, wild.

Mielikki drew back the veil that covered her face. This was the first time I had seen her uncovered, except as the fierce crone carved in wood that oversaw the ship. A face of astounding beauty regarded me with interest and sympathy. Her eyes were elfin, as I’d expected, but her skin was as pallid as milk, just the finest blush at her cheeks. Her features could have been shaped from snow, even her lips, full and sensuous, were bloodless, yet ripe with life.

“I was carved differently,” she said, with an amused nod towards the entrance to this spirit land, beyond which the wooden effigy scowled. “The people who wanted a figurehead for their boat carved me from fear, not love.”

“Yes. Clearly.”

“I am not the strongest of Argo’s guardians. Before me there was a Greek Land goddess—”

“Athena. Yes.”

“One of her names. One of her names only. She casts a long shadow back through time, and the time of the ship. She drowned with Jason after that long voyage, after his death from despair. A part of her, anyway. A small part, a fragment of life, a fragment of his protecting spirit, drowned in the Northlands with her favourite captain. Both ship and guardian can have favourites, and Jason was certainly the one she favoured most. She had others. Before Jason, a man called Acrathonas; before him, in raw times, rough times, a man of great courage, great fury called Argeo Kottus; before him, a woman of pale countenance but strong will. She is remembered as Gean’anandora. There were many in between. The first was you, the boy captain, the inspired shaper. The first shaper. The first shaper of many.”

Shaper.
That word again. That name again.

“Argo is disturbed,” I said. “She’s a very strong ship. She is not letting me know exactly what it is that is distressing her.”

“You could use your talents and crack her hull, her protection like a seagull cracks a shell.”

“I could. I won’t. It would be too costly and too dangerous for me. Besides, I will not ask for anything she doesn’t wish to tell me.”

“A betrayal is catching up with her,” Mielikki said quietly. “A moment in her life when she acted against the instructions, and loyalties, of the man who made her the ship she has become, the great ship founded on the small boat that you once fashioned from wicker and skin.”

“Who was that?”

“I don’t know. She is not ready to reveal it. But she is here, in Alba, because of what she did. And I am certain that she wishes you to sail with her again. You are not safe in Taurovinda. No one is safe in Taurovinda. You are all looking in the wrong place for the source of the trouble that will soon swamp the land.”

This cryptic conversation was infuriating. I tried to slip into Mielikki’s mind, but a lynx bared its teeth, and the ephemeral form of the beauty from the ice wastes of Pohjola proved to be an empty vessel. Most of this goddess, this tree and snow spirit, was still close to the northern lights where she had been born from the frozen earth. There was very little to unfurl in the spirit guardians that accompanied Argo.

Mielikki was not amused by my probing, but not angry. “I can’t help you,” she insisted. “I can be Argo’s voice—that’s all I can be—but this ship is in mourning.”

I could understand. Argo would reveal the source of her distress slowly. But for the moment, she was keen to warn me away from Taurovinda.

“I know you have been here for a long time,” I said to her through the Northland’s Lady. “So you know that Ghostland is rising across the river; there are places, hostels, where the Dead are gathering to feast before the fight. Tell me anything, anything at all you can to help us protect ourselves. There are Unborn in that gathering, but they have always been less aggressive than the Dead. What is happening, Argo? What can you tell me? Anything that will help.”

After a while Mielikki whispered, “No one is safe in Urtha’s land. The Broken Kings made sure of that. Because of their fathers, Urtha’s land is set to slip into twilight. There is nothing you can do.”

“The broken kings?”

“Each of them innocent. Each of them guilty. I can only tell you one name: Durandond. He was the founder of Taurovinda. Argo is aware of him, below the hill. She thinks that you remember him.”

*   *   *

Durandond! And his companions.

How quickly memory came back. How simple the opening of inner eyes that had been closed, not for reasons of fear, but for reasons of boredom. Why, with all that had happened to me over the ages, would I remember five reckless youths, five simple gifts, five disappointed and angry young men? Why would I bother with the snarls, sneers, and complaints of brash champions, offended and wounded at the blunt predictions of their futures?