The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (24 page)

A day later we reached the bleaker, ruined harbour that guarded the river leading to the Bull Palace.

Once, the river-approach from the sea to the great palace had been awe-inspiring. Towering figures had lined the banks. The tombs and shrines of the kings of the land and their powerful consorts had shone white and gold. Guard stations and trading stations, sprawling forges and tanning sheds had mixed with pleasure gardens and the beckoning fragrances of honey-traps, where music played and the sounds of revelry were a delight to the sea-worn ears of the traveller.

Most impressively, four great bulls had once bestrode the river, one of bronze, one formed from accretions of obsidian, one carved from cedar wood, and one shaped from gleaming marble. Their massive heads had been lowered, the horns horizontal, a clever mechanism in each of the heads making the huge tongue lap slowly up and down into the water, so that each ship that sailed to Ak’Gnossos had to adjust its stroke to miss these dangerous rhythms.

It was part of the bull game, Tairon remembered, part of the private humour of the sea-lords and kings who had owned the surface of the land for generations, coexisting mostly peacefully with the two primal forces that had warred with each other for possession of the island’s deeper realms.

Tairon had been a child during that fabulous time, and memory was now an echo; now, however, he stared at the bleak remains as Argo moved against the flow of the crystal waters, between the corrupt and fading edifices of that age.

Of the obsidian bull bridge, only the curved horns remained, rising forlornly from the river. We passed through them without interruption. Of the wood bull, a charred mass on the western shore suggested its fate. The marble creature was recognisable only by its eyes, the horns broken off, the once-savage features smoothed and shaped by wind and rain.

The bronze bull was drowning, its muzzle above the river, greened and corroded, a great hoof stretched onto one of the banks, a twisted horn rammed into the trees on the other side. Argo’s keel scraped the dead metal as we crossed the statue, a scream, an echo, a despairing cry of memory. And at that moment we saw the palace, and were astonished at the sight.

The land was sucking it down, reclaiming the shaped clay as it was reclaiming the whole of the created world of men. The high walls were sloping towards the south, half-consumed, the foundations, close to us, being torn from the earth. Away from us, the buildings and chambers, the courtyards and watchtowers, all had already been wrapped about by the folds of rock and soil. Trees of all kinds were growing up the angled walls, branches clutching at every nook and cranny, helping to drag the vast royal residence back to nature.

Birds flocked and wheeled over the silent structure. The sun caught the brilliance of the painted walls, as if the consuming earth was pleased at least to allow these vibrant hues, these flower colours, to remain intact as the snake swallowed her prey.

Ak’Gnossos was vast and wide, but the mouth of the island was wider. Even as Argo was moored and the Argonauts leapt ashore to explore the passages and chambers of the sinking palace, so the ground trembled below our feet and stones fell from on high; a further swallowing; the prey dragged deeper in that gulping moment between the long, quiet periods of breathing.

I descended a steep, stepped ramp into the gloom of a chamber that had always been deep, and was now deeper in the earth. The clever construction of the building allowed for shafts of light to pick out details on the walls, small pools of illumination in the otherwise complete dark. Everywhere was the
labrys,
the double-headed axe, some carved in the wall, some carved from stone, a few of corrupting bronze. Sea creatures of all descriptions were painted in these passages and hollow rooms, and the profiled heads of youths and girls watched by the staring eyes of land creatures, their features incomplete. Sometimes I could hear the calls of other Argonauts, heralding their finds, calling out in awe. Their voices carried along the gloomy corridors, echoing through the wells of light.

The smell of rank stone suddenly gave way to the sharp odour of the ocean. We were a long way inland, but the salt air was unmistakable, as was the sound of surf surging against a beach. That sound excited me. I began to understand the nature of Ak’Gnossos and hurried towards the hidden sea.

As I did so, I became aware of someone running ahead of me.

The way to the beach was blocked by a massive gate, its central column a double axe of immense height and breadth, the blades curling down to the floor to allow a double entrance inside the sharpened edges. The haft was a tree, twisted many times around its own core. Within the dulled bronze of the blades I could see the patterns of the night sky, the stars and constellations picked out in detail, now greened by the tarnish and fading.

I passed through the gate. The ocean heaved against a bleak, stony shore, where marble statues leaned or had already fallen. A three-quarter moon was bright in the night, moonshadow everywhere.

“Where are you?” I called.

“I’m here,” Niiv replied, slipping from behind a statue, almost invisible save for her pale features. She approached me tentatively, then scampered close and put her arms round me.

She was breathless with excitement.

“This place doesn’t exist,” she said in a voice charged with understanding. “It’s all illusion.”

“Of sorts. Yes. But how do you know? What have you been doing?” I felt my pulse race.

“I
looked.
There was no harm in it, was there? I wasn’t looking at
you.
”

“You silly little fool!” I grabbed her again, turned her head in the moonlight. Silver light softened her features, but her hair glinted grey. She had aged. She had spent her precious life on establishing a truth that she should have known I would already have discerned.

“Don’t waste what you have!” I said to her for the hundredth time. She was an exasperating lover!

Indignantly, she pulled away. “When my father died, in the North, in the snow, cold, alone, abandoned by his spirits, he bequeathed his charm to me. He meant me to
use
it, Merlin. Why else leave it to me?”

She had done this so often before. I could almost have cried for her. It was so unnecessary for her to squander life simply because she had a talent for the Otherworld and for vision.

“You are half a year older, Niiv. Because of what you looked at!”

“I don’t feel it,” she argued.

“Half a year that I won’t have with you.” Added to all the other lost days, lost moons.

“Nonsense. You will have me to the end.”

“Why are you so stubborn?”

“Why are
you
so ungrateful?”

I hugged her. She was still consumed with pleasure at having broken the wall of unreality.

“What do you think has happened here?” she asked after a moment. I had used a little of my own power to touch in the details, but little was needed. Though
we
rowed, Argo was setting the course. She had brought us here for a purpose. No doubt she was waiting to surface from this subterranean dream of an ocean. I was certain now that Argo was ready to take us to where the tragedy had begun. She was taking us on a tour of her past, and Time would flow differently whilst we were in the embrace of the island.

But I said this to Niiv: “Will you promise me not to ‘look’ until I ask you to? It isn’t necessary. If I need your help, I’ll always ask for it.”

“You say that.” She pouted, beginning to argue again. “But you never do.”

“Not true. I’ve asked you for help many times.”

“Not for anything serious. You don’t use me, you don’t
teach
me.” It always came back to that: teach me, let me touch the “charm” that’s carved on your bones. “When my father died, he didn’t leave me his spirit just to
live
with it and then
die
with it. He expected me to be practical.”

“But you’re not strong with it, Niiv. It wastes you too much, especially if you waste the skill. You once looked into my own future, remember? I can mark the wrinkles around your eyes; I can pinch the softening skin on your arms—all the result of
that
stupidity. I never expected to love you like I do—”

“Love me? Hah! You fight me off all the time.”

This was not true. She knew it in her heart, so I didn’t argue the point. I wondered, though, how much she understood the nagging pain I was feeling, a pain that was growing. In the moonlight she was fresh; she was alluring; I wanted us to make love right there and then. This is what I always adored about the woman, these times of anger and the times of joy that followed the anger, without the interruption of the world around us; most particularly without Urtha entering our small house unannounced and cheerfully apologising as he drew back, loudly joking with his
uthiin
outside as he waited for me to emerge and blister his ears with irritation.

Oh yes, Niiv was in my heart. She was not the first—Medea had been the first, though memory was misty—and she would not be the last. But she was the only woman I had ever known whom I wished to keep distant from me because I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.

She dabbed at my eyes with a finger, looked curiously at the glisten. “Well, well. The man bleeds salty love.” She quickly licked the finger. “Magic,” she teased. “Even in your tears there must be magic, so I’ll thank you for my daily feast. Here’s my own contribution.”

She reached up and kissed me. Then, with astonishing strength, she drew me to the cold beach, close to the night surge of the water. Her hands were like imps, her fingers the sharp thorns of their weapons. I bled beneath her loving touch. She found a way to press our bodies close inside a tent of our own clothes.

I could hear Urtha calling for me; Jason, too. But Niiv’s strenuous breathing was a balm to those unwanted and searching cries from above, from the halls and staterooms of the swallowed palace.

*   *   *

Suddenly, in the night as we lay quietly, half-asleep, there was the smell of honey. Someone slipped across the beach and peered down at us. Ephemeral and elemental, the woman cocked her head this way and that, touching ghostly fingers to our faces, withdrawing like a sudden breeze as we both stirred to take a closer look.

“Who was that?” Niiv asked, shivering slightly.

“I don’t know. But she was watching us when we came into the harbour.”

“The illusory harbour,” Niiv said pointedly. “An illusion within an illusion?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why don’t you look? I’m not allowed to! Makes me too flabby and old,” she mocked.

“Shut up.”

“You should look!”

I was watching the shadows, but the elemental had slipped away. Her scent trail led into a cleft in the rocks on the shore, and I suspected that a labyrinth wound its serpentine way from that small entrance place.

“I recognise the smell, but can’t place it,” the girl said.

“Honey.”

“Oh yes. Honey. Like the smell in the jar, but sweeter; the jar with the … things at the bottom.”

“The heads. You know they were heads.”

“Four of them!” She shuddered then looked up at me. “Why would anybody want to keep heads in honey?”

“It makes them last longer. I’ll keep
all
of you in honey when you’re dead, if you like; take you out for a lick every new moon. Honey keeps a body supple, too.”

She didn’t like the tease. She was staring out across the brightening ocean. Dawn was rising, the stars fading. The new light caught the unexpected anguish on her face. “When I
am
gone,” she said, “I want to go ‘home’.” She looked at me, suddenly melancholy. Home to where my father lies. You
will
make sure that happens … Won’t you?”

“It won’t be for a long time yet.”

“But it will happen.” She hunched up, throwing a pebble into the foaming surge of the ocean on the dark beach. “And you said it yourself: I squander time as if it were water from the well. When I go, I want to sit next to my father, and his father, in Tapiola’s Cold Cave. It’s my right as
shamanka.
Don’t let anyone prevent it, just because I’m a woman.”

I put my arm around her. “Nobody will argue with me. And meanwhile, I’ll squander for us both. You must simply resist the temptation to show how strong you are.”

The moment of sadness passed. Dawn began to glow. Niiv sniffed the air. The smell of honey had gone. Now there was the pervading odour of a man’s sweat. We looked round to see Urtha, Jason, and Rubobostes standing behind us, all of them grinning hugely.

“Don’t mind us,” Urtha said. “But when you’re dressed you might explain what’s happening.”

The spectral encounter with the honey sprite, and the unexpected moment of reflection on death, had made us forget that were sitting by the water’s edge, naked and cool in the rising light. If it bothered Niiv, she didn’t show it. She stood and stretched, magnificent, slim, and as pale as the Moon, save for the dark hair that framed her face and shoulders. She turned then, and stepped into the cold water, shivering as she entered more deeply and stooped to freshen her skin.

“I hope this is safe,” she called to her four admirers before launching herself into the waves.

So do I, I thought, but she swam safely and came to shore, and by that time most of the other Argonauts had slipped and probed their way through the strange palace, and found the beach and the buried sea.

*   *   *

“You’re talking in riddles again!” Urtha protested as I briefly paused for breath during my attempt to explain my understanding of our situation. “Riddles! This is the third or fourth time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re here, glad of your knowledge.…” He tapped me on the shoulder with the haft of his eating knife. He had been stabbing impatiently at the stony beach as I’d talked. “But nothing you say makes sense. Oolering men? Hollowings? Echonian Lands? Does anyone else understand this drivel?”

Bollullos and Rubobostes shrugged, shaking their heads. Niiv chuckled. “I do.”