The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (35 page)

A last, lingering glance at Kymon and it was gone, out onto the mountain.

Where Colcu and Kymon stood, stunned by the speed of arrival and departure of this ancient apparition, the crystal container lay smashed. Urskumug had kicked it over when it had run for the wall. The honey child lay in the shattered glass, a crumpled figure, coated with the sweet sticky product of the bee.

“It did that deliberately,” Colcu said quietly. “I saw it.”

“Why? Why break the tomb?”

Before Colcu could reply, a voice spoke to them from the channel in the rock. “I think it means we should take her with us.”

The youths were startled for a moment as they stared at the apparition that stood there, face like the moon, body clothed in dark material, but clothed in a familiar way.

“Merlin?” Kymon asked cautiously. And then with a great sigh of relief: “Merlin!”

*   *   *

I had found them. And they were alive. And Kymon was proud of his makeshift sanctuary, and I would not let him know that, when I had realised what he was doing, I had given a good shout to the Oldest Animal myself. That had hurt! Deep in the bones.

I let Moondream slip away.

Kymon grinned as he saw my true face. “How far are we from the ship?” he asked.

“A long walk. Wrap the girl in my cloak.”

“The girl? This girl? She’ll start to stink.”

“Not for days. She’s well covered. But flies will be a problem, feeding on the honey. Quickly. We have someone else to find before we can go back to the harbour.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Cloak of Forests

Segomas and the boy were not where I had left them, in a grove cloaked by silent forest, a still wood, sleeping quietly in the temporary absence of the mask-wearer who had summoned it.

Kymon noticed my sudden alarm. We stood on scrubby hillside, looking into the valley, to the pale, mist-shrouded east.

“I left them here.…”

“Who?”

“Segomas. The oak man. And your young friend Maelfor.”

“Maelfor is alive?” Kymon asked. His eyes had brightened. “He fell a long way.”

“He fell into safety.”

What had happened to Skogen? I turned a full circle where I stood, drawing in the land. But younger, sharper eyes than mine found it. Colcu’s! He was laughing and pointing down the side of the hill, where the woodland, I could now see, shimmered in an unnatural way. At the edge of the wood stood a boy and a man, and the boy was beckoning to us.

The survivors of the
kryptoii
skidded and slid through the tangle of tight undergrowth, down the slope to greet their old friend. I followed in a more dignified, but less hasty manner.

Skogen had simply “slipped” down the hill, finding a more natural and easier resting place. I should have remembered this about the masks. Leave them, without sending them back, and they find their own place of safety: Morndun slipping deeper into the underworld; Sinisalo seeking out the company of children; Moondream finding night and the mysterious pull of Luna herself. And so on: the hound to the moon-gazing pack; the fish to the waters where it spawned; the eagle to the eyrie where it could survey the circle of the world through its twice-sharp eyes.

Segomas drew back into the shadows; the boys huddled.

And a second surprise was waiting for us. Urtha and Morvodumnos stepped out of the gloom. They were both ragged and thorn-cut. There was so much leaf matter in their hair, they might have been participating at one of the Speakers’ evergrove rituals. Kymon hardly recognised his father for a moment, then flung himself into the man’s embrace.

Urtha was on his knees, brawny arms round the chattering boy. Kymon was both relieved to see his father and anxious to tell of his own strange experience, the words tumbling from his lips, incoherent and childish, bright with passion if confusing in the detail.

Urtha, I was able to glean from Segomas, had found a haven from pursuit—the pursuit, no doubt, of Queller’s night creatures—in a small cavern, just beside the brook that flowed through the valley. We had all been drawn to this region, a part of the island that was certainly patrolled by Queller, but which retained a memory of the Shaping Man. We had all encountered the quelling force; we had been lucky to survive. The loss of the boys was a tragedy, that of Talienze a puzzle that would probably never be resolved. They had been unlucky in the chase.

Segomas was forlorn. He stood now in the brightness of the woodland edge, his back to the bare land. I went up to him and saw sap glistening in his eyes.

Though there was a tawny tinge to his skin, he seemed almost human. There was even the suggestion of a beard on his face, an echo of the man growing back through the bark as the hard oak was softened by Skogen.

“I have to leave you,” he said. “I have to find what remains of me.”

He was trembling. Behind me, Urtha was laughing and the youths talking excitedly. They might have been sitting in the king’s enclosure in Taurovinda, at the end of a day’s hunting, for all their relaxation.

“Segomas,” I said to the Coritanian gently, “you died, or were executed, in Greek Land. This is
not
Greek Land. And you died, or were executed, at a time that has not yet come into existence. Do you understand? Argo and this island have played a fine set of tricks with us. When we leave this place, we will soon go back to where we belong, but that place is unborn as yet. Your death is still to come. You can’t find your remains here. They
aren’t
here. It would be a senseless quest.”

“I’m here,” he insisted. “I had a dream while you were away. I heard the battle that raged in Delphi that time. I saw my fate. You were right. I was reduced to a cloak of skin and a cruel skull-mask. It hangs in a shrine here, with fifteen of my friends. They brought us here as tribute, in exchange for something. The dream was very clear. If I have to wait a few years, I’ll wait. But this is where I was brought, and it’s from here that I can return home to my proper grave.”

He was insistent and strong. The sap glistened on his mouth as well, and on his brow.

It occurred to me then how many aspects of the masks I didn’t fully understand. Not just that they would find a place of comfort, if abandoned, but that they had qualities and abilities beyond that which could be summoned by the user at the time: in this case me.

Skogen is a forest that casts a shadow through time, and not just to the past but to the future, too. The “cloak of forests” had detected Segomas in the future of this land, somewhere in a cleft in the hills, a gap in the rock, a painted room, a stone building filled with burning herbs and flesh, some future sanctuary.

So Segomas would stay and Segomas would wait.

Like his name, I suspected, he would eventually be “victorious” in his small, sad quest.

Chapter Twenty-six

A Creature Caught in Amber

The island was behind us, a memory as dark and obscure as had been the westernmost mountains, the last sight of the land, all colour draining from their slopes, just shadow marking their rise above the sea. Crete, the island of old lore and invention at war, vanished as fast as the setting sun, as wind and ocean favoured Argo and impelled us north and west.

There was a moment—Tairon felt it, as did I—when the strange forces that had governed our expedition to Shaper’s Land left us. Time was reestablished. The future had been clawed back. The Echonian world that Queller had created, and which Argo had used to show us certain events, was consumed by the very ordinariness of sea-surge and the hard breeze that was to mark our long journey home. To Alba.

We were a quiet crew, a much diminished crew, glad of kind winds and a lack of storms, so that we were able to make the Pillars of Herakles. Here we rigged sail and caught the northerlies, taking us along the dangerous coast of Iberia. And it was here that for the first time we formed a council to press Jason on events he had claimed not to remember.

It was clear, to me at least, that Argo had removed the barrier of obscurity from part of the events in Jason’s past with her. From the moment we had passed the Stochaides, off the coast of Gaul, Jason’s demeanour had changed. He had become troubled and thoughtful. He had taken more time at the steering oar than was necessary, and his gaze—whilst attentive to the sea—had been distant and personal.

Argo herself had remained aloof; the goddess, haglike, scowling, would not respond to requests for conversation.

*   *   *

I had tried, without success, to explain the twists of Time that Queller and Argo had settled upon us during our stay on Crete. Tairon understood to an extent—a labyrinth-runner, and a man used to mazes, it was natural that he should have at least a feel for the maze that we had just left. But it was beyond Urtha’s capacity to comprehend how Segomas, for example, would now live through hundreds of years until, distantly, he would be born; and grown; and dispatched to a foreign fight; and despatched cruelly; and slung, still alive, in a Cretan grove, to be flayed and his organs eaten, the skin dried and made into a cloak, one of many layers, the others being his companions-in-arms, also captured; and how he would be discovered by the oak-image of his carcase that had been made by an estranged and exiled spirit from the very beginnings of the island where he, Segomas, would finally find his otherworldly peace.

Truthfully, I, too, found the whole thought a little confusing, so how these other men could comprehend the play-of-centuries was never a question that needed to be asked: they simply couldn’t. And as for Queller’s conjuring with the multiple echoes of land and events that coexist in any one place … well, it was best we left the concept unquestioned and not discussed.

Argo had led us towards an understanding of why Urtha’s land had been subsumed by Ghostland.

The question now? How had Shaper come to be in Ghostland itself, a Shade Place, yes, but of haunted shores, hunt-howling forests, iron-bloodied plains, and rafter-ringing hostels in which he did not belong?

Jason watched me from the huddle of men who surrounded him. The weather was poor, a steady rain falling into Argo, running off our sheepskin covers. We were not watertight. We were miserable as Argo found passage north. Bollullos at the oar scowled as he kept the ship steady. Rubobostes waited his turn. Kymon crouched with his father below a canopy slung between the rails, each of them thinking of Munda: the one with hopes for a fatherly reunion; the other, from the scowl on his face, with thoughts of subjugation.

“What did you do with the Shaping Man?” I asked Jason.

He looked up at me, the greying hair plastered to his face, the grizzle in his beard saturated and dripping water. But that intensity of gaze! It had never deserted him. And it was a gaze that was now inflamed by memory, the memory of a second great adventure.

“It’s not what Jason did,” he said, oddly referring to himself in the third person. “It was the witch. She had scoured him, scourged him, broken him, drawn the essence of his bone. She had consumed him as a dragonfly consumes a smaller member of its kind, eating him from the head downwards. And the more she ate, the more she hated. The more she consumed, the more fury consumed her. And why?”

“Why?” Urtha asked when a long silence had passed from Jason’s last, enigmatic statement.

Jason stared at the king for a long time, thinking hard. A sour smile touched his lips. Then he glanced at me.

“Because that man knew how to hide his talent. And Medea ate nothing of his heart. She learned nothing. All he would say to her was: ‘Brightness falls from the air.’ She knew he referred to the bronze discs that were flung from somewhere nearer than the stars, but he would never explain what they were or from where they had come. She became frantic. She clawed her own breast with impatience. She was betrayed by impatience. She destroyed the wedding gift because that man, or whatever nature of being he was, dispatched himself—in terms of his abilities, at least—before my good, dread wife could find a hole in his defences and tug out the tough tendon of his invention.

“She spat him out, cast him out, rejected him. His guts, chewed and undigested, she spat on the floor. The bones, after she had cracked them between her jaws, she then pounded into flour and cast them to the wind. I don’t speak literally, of course—”

“Of course.”

“But I remember how she kissed his eyes before she plunged her nails into them. And I remember how he laughed.”

“She learned nothing from him?”

“Nothing of consequence.”

“And so she killed him.”

“No,” Jason said quickly. “Not at all. She gave him back to me.” He frowned at the memory, shaking his head. Then he laughed quietly. “Yes. She gave back the gift. I didn’t realise it at the time, but that was the end of us, the end of the union. Love had long since fled. She abandoned me as quickly as she abandoned Shaper. I didn’t see it at the time. He had been her plaything. I was still entranced by her, and welcomed inside her. I hadn’t noticed how her taste had turned sour. Or if I did, I put it down to Moon-change, or some such transience. It was only later when, abandoned by her, I’d found a brief happiness with Glauce, that she turned the dagger on the table, to point to me, to insinuate that I was the wrongdoer. And went on to kill everything I loved—my sons, my beautiful sons. I was her plaything, too. But by then, she was tiring of the game.”

*   *   *

We trussed him up in canvas (
Jason continued
), this broken man, Daidalos, half metal, half flesh, star-crazed, dreaming-strange, the discarded flesh of enchantment, the discarded gift of love, crying in strange tongues, des
cry
ing misfortune for the wolf-hearted sailors who were now taking him away from Iolkos for trade. We had heard of strange countries, unusual wealth, far to the north, where five rivers rose, two flowing east and west, two north and south, and one that beguiled.

This was the second great adventure with Argo.

But Shaper foretold disaster for us, summoning the vision of his magic. He didn’t reckon with the callousness of men. We found him amusing. We hoped others, strangers, would be more beguiled.