The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (39 page)

“And the other boat,” he went on, staring along the river. “Why two boats? Who’s crossing in the second? What’s she up to?”

“There’s one way to find out, and that’s to cross. Your safest course is to stay here and defend against whatever might come through those Hostel gates in time to come.”

Rubobostes growled at my suggestion, standing up, still holding the rope. “Don’t listen to him, Jason. The second boat was meant for me, but it slipped away. I’m the one who must stay here. Are you taking Argo farther up the river?”

I realised the question was addressed to me. “Yes. She can take us below the fortress.”

“Then eventually she’ll need her captain,” the Dacian responded, turning to look over his shoulder at the Greeklander. “The boat won’t take two of us. I’ll wait here for you. Pick me up on the way out. And if you find my horse? I’ll be in your service for the rest of my life should you find my Ruvio, my good horse. I miss the beast.”

Jason glanced at me as he shrugged his pack off his shoulders and tossed it down to the Dacian, to sling into the boat.

“What’s she up to?” he whispered again.

Should I tell him about his son? I had only Pendragon’s account of Orgetorix being in the land, looking for his father. If boy and man were to meet, then it should be under circumstances that were not controlled by me, or any other person, though Medea, I was sure, was taking a guiding hand.

Even now I cannot understand why I took the decision not to tell Jason about the presence, close to him, of his eldest son, a once-favoured boy now grown to a man, who had dealt brutally with his father in the recent past, unaware of the true circumstances of his existence in this modern age. It seemed that vengeance was still strong in the younger man’s mind. He had pursued Jason across half a world, half a world from the oracle at Dodona, in Greek Land, where they had last faced each other.

Then again: perhaps he was pursuing his mother.

This was an outcome I would leave to whatever “fates” were miming the story of Jason and his bull-leaping son.

“Rubobostes is right,” is all I said, and with a shrug Jason clambered into Medea’s boat. The Dacian heaved and sent the craft across the river. Jason used a small oar to keep it moving even as Nantosuelta swept him out of sight downstream, taking him to darkness and the Otherworld.

As soon as he had gone, I found a piece of wood, stripped off the bark, and sat down, leaning against a tree, to carve a charm pattern. I hadn’t done this for ages, and it was cathartic and engrossing. I suppose I drifted into some form of reverie, half-aware of what I was doing, half-drifting through memory.

At some point in this detached state I heard Kymon, who had been scavenging, slip down the hill and sit down next to Niiv. The woman had been keeping a distance from me, watching me, but absorbed in thoughts of her own.

“What’s he doing?” I heard the king’s son ask. “What’s he doing down there, Niiv?”

“Carving on a piece of wood.”

“Why?”

“I get the feeling,” Niiv replied after a moment, “that when he’s finished carving … we’ll all be going west.”

There was silence for a while. Then Kymon said, “Good. I will go in no other direction. And when I get there…”

He brooded. Sullen.

“When you get there?” the Northlander persisted.

“It doesn’t matter what I find in that world when I get there. I’m taking that world back.”

“Will that world be surprised to see you?” the girl teased.

“It knows I’m coming.”

Later, he walked down the slope to the river’s edge, his moonshadow falling across me. I looked up at him and met his steady gaze. His face had hardened, or was that just a trick of the light?

“Are you awake? Or drifting in some dream?”

“I’m awake.”

His gaze never wavered. “My father once told me that I could never be a king as a man unless I accepted being broken as a child. Now I know what he meant. Ambition tempered with anger, petulance, and the jealous play of childhood lead to strong kings and weak kingdoms. Ambition must always be tempered with wise council. An understanding that can only come with age.”

“So you’ve found out you’ll not be a great king, just for the moment.”

“Just a man in the shadow of great kings. Among great men. More than that is not for me to judge.”

“You’ve been dreaming? This is a vision?”

“I’ve been thinking. No more than that. I’ll trust visions to you. To men like you. But don’t give me visions of my own life ahead, or of Munda’s.”

“I’m not a
fate
 … to ‘mime’ your life, to act out what you must do. I thought you knew that.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand what you mean. You talk in riddles, Merlin. That’s what I expect of minds that play with Time. My father’s words also. Good luck to you. But none of that matters now. My father and I have chosen to cross the river separately. That much is broken. But Colcu, my great friend, has also chosen to ride separately from me. To help me in my own country. So that much is
forged.
Most important of all, my grandmother and my mother still lie in that land. Did you know that an owl circles my grandmother’s grave?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And that a bull rises from the earth to protect my mother’s?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Wisdom and strength. Even though they’re dead, they will be a force to be reckoned with.”

“Mothers always are.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“No. Not at all.”

“I’m talking like a child. Obvious things.”

“Not always obvious, I assure you, even to dying men. Did your father also tell you to think clearly, to listen with attention, and never to act in haste?”

“Probably. I don’t remember. Except for the bit about haste. What he said was: there is always a time to act with anger; but that time is never when you are angry.”

I tossed the charm-stick into the river and watched it float away into the night. “I know those words. Another man, a king, once said them to his own son. Your father couldn’t have known him, though.”

“Who was he?”

“He was called Odysseus. A Greeklander, from Jason’s time. Have you heard of him?”

Kymon thought for a moment, then answered in the affirmative. “He fought the sea after fighting the Trojans. I remember now. An inventive man. His great warhorse was made of wood. He rode against the city walls and broke them down. And he claimed men were the equal of gods. He was punished for arrogance. The sea abducted him to be a sea-slave for a lifetime. There was an angry god in the sea. But eventually, out of pity, he granted Odysseus a single cycle of the Moon to be with his wife, before he was taken back to the sea. That’s the story Cathabach told me.”

What should I add of that old story for this proud boy? Should I inspire him with an account of how Odysseus had claimed back his home during that brief gift of time? Of his coldly calculated slaughter of the lesser men who had arrived in his absence, bees to a flower, to seduce Penelope, his ever-mourning wife? One moon-cycle granted with his wife after a lifetime lost.

And she hadn’t known that he was already dead when Poseidon—the abducting god—gave him that brief release. Love transcended death. The wife herself was already dying when they met for that moon. I expect they met again later in Hades.

But during this time in his land he cleared that land of the imposters, encouraged his son to be a great king, and brought a blush back to the pale cheeks of a woman who had thought herself abandoned. So much achieved in so few days.

How much of the story could truly influence a growing mind, an ambition being tempered with caution, eyes wide open, heart racing, words ringing in ears that were now, like the man he was becoming, prepared to hear? A young man with an eagle’s mind, prepared to embrace the notion of restraint.

I do not know what had happened to Kymon since we had left Crete. But his thoughts of Munda were changing. For a second time that night I chose to hold back a comment for the simple reason that I did not think it was my role to play.

Kymon withdrew and Niiv slid down to be with me, squirming to get inside my cloak, breathing gently as we waited. The hand that engaged with mine was cold. She was shivering. I suppose we slept.

We awoke at first light, saturated with dew, the river obscured by heavy mist. Argo’s hull was rising from the water close by, her keel furrowing into the mud as if she were approaching at full stroke. But she came gently, cutting the earth, nosing up beside us in silence, propelled by unseen hands, vast and draped with weeds, planks creaking, the sly eye on her keel, azure blue, framed in scarlet, watching us as she crept closer to nudge us from our sleep. She leaned and sighed, towering over us, shedding her cold tears; the water refreshed us. Kymon came slipping and sliding down the ridge.

Get aboard and hurry!

I invent the words, though I am sure they were whispered to me. Everything about Argo suggested the haste of this invitation. I called for Caiwain.

Again, the ship seemed to whisper to me:
Leave them.

Kymon had run down the slope and somersaulted into the hull, then leaned over to help Niiv walk up the planks before drawing her over in an ungainly way. I heard their laughter as they tumbled out of sight onto the benches.

Then two heads popped over the rails—one dark, one fair, both bright with youth.

“Come on, Merlin.” The boy’s voice.

Hands reached for me and hauled me in. Bones grated in my lower back. Mielikki scowled from the stern. Or perhaps it was suppressed laughter. Argo slipped back into the Winding One and the fog closed over us.

“Do we row now?” Kymon asked as we huddled among the scattered cargo.

“I think we wait,” was all I could think to say.

“I’m hungry,” Niiv announced.

Kymon flung back the outer covering of the honey child. The body was beginning to make itself known, despite our best efforts to keep it cold. “Have some honey,” he said with a laugh.

Niiv scowled at him. “Wait until
your
belly starts to rumble.”

*   *   *

By evening, we were in Urtha’s land. And Urtha was there, too, and Jason, but we were at a distance from each other. It was Niiv who said it, as we peered from the river at the movements and mysteries of the new Otherworld:

“This feels like a swan dance. Where you all circle the winter field as the music plays, and you have to guess who your partner is. It’s a tradition in the North. Everybody wears a bird mask, and covers their hands with feathers. Hands are too revealing, even with only the light of torches. Every so often you pick someone and meet them in the middle. And you twirl and dance in the snow and then you find if you’ve got the right person. If you have, you stay at the centre. If you haven’t, you go back to the edge. And keep on circling. And it’s like a swan dance here. Isn’t it? It’s a dancing floor. But a dancing floor of war. Everything is at the edge at the moment. Now we must find the centre.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Passing Shadows

“There is something wrong here. I can smell it.” Niiv was looking alarmed.

“You can smell it? How do you smell wrongness?”

She looked at me sourly. “Rightness has a different fragrance.”

I couldn’t help laughing at that. But she was right.

Though the realm of the shadows of heroes had advanced across Nantosuelta, flowing into Urtha’s territory, consuming forest and plain, village, pasture, and fortress, the Otherworld had not fully possessed the place. It was an uneasy conquest, a defiant appearance, a raging presence. But the land had not been subsumed. It had merely been subdued. Along this stretch of Nantosuelta I had seen the growth of hostels, but they were still unformed, gathering their shape, bulging from the earth, but still struggling to rise and defend Ghostland.

“Shall we go ashore?” Niiv asked.

As if in answer, Argo pulled away from the shallows and continued upriver. Kymon now seemed to intuit what was happening. As we came to the bend in the river that marked the beginning of the evergroves, so he became more excited. “There! Look there. Our landing place!”

The evergroves! A sprawling place of mounds and magic, a wooded area that stretched along the river for as far as it was possible to walk in a day, and spread towards the fortress of Taurovinda, across the Plain of the Battle Crow. A thousand or more tombs, more pronounced than the Five Sisters, lay concealed within it, some so large and so old that they were covered by the woods themselves; others nestled in the groves, low stone entrances whispering with dawn and sighing with dusk.

Here resided the physical remains of those who rode wildly in Ghostland. Most of the tombs were mortuary houses; a few were “ways under.” I had always been most intrigued by those.

Now, though, it was the fleeting glimpse of a tall ageing man walking one of the many track-ways through the evergroves that caught my attention. He kept pace with Argo’s sluggish drift on the water. He was dappled with light and shade. He was neither here nor there. He was a dead man. And Kymon, delighted at first with the recognition of our friendly stalker, suddenly became gloomy.

“It’s Cathabach. But he never walked like that in life.”

At length, where a small shallow creek cut into the groves, Argo nosed through the trees and came quietly onto the mud. A small tumulus rose on each side of us. The shattered bones of the figures that had been erected to guard this place leaned down towards us, their clothing ragged, their skulls greened with moss, their postures that of drooping men; and yet they would have power, small power, to turn away intruders.

Cathabach stepped up onto one of the mounds, looking down at us. His sallow features suddenly flushed with crimson; his hollow eyes glinted. His flesh strengthened. I had not done this, but when I looked quickly at Niiv, she turned her head away.

For once in my acquaintance with her, I did not criticise her rash use of her small charm.

Kymon leapt from Argo and walked briskly to the old man, to Speaker for Kings; and without thought for what he knew was the case, that Cathabach was dead, he put his arms around the druid’s body, hugged him, then took his hand, knelt, kissed the cold fingers.