The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (47 page)

He comes closer.

Familiar. Old. Why do I know him?

Why remember him?

This labyrinth was a crude memory of the original chamber that had been scoured from the deep rocks of Crete. It was enclosing, confusing, stifling; it was sinister. But it did not possess the distorting power, the feeling of endlessness, or evoke the morbid sense of hopelessness I knew had been experienced in that original creation. Despite this, I knew I would be wrong to underestimate the powerful shade that was drawing me closer, spinning his trap.

Yes! That was precisely what Daidalos was doing; he was spinning this labyrinth as he moved, weaving the stone around us, winding us towards the centre. And it was a strong weave. I felt unskilled here. The smallest exercise of enchantment would have been a major effort. He had drawn on Ghostworld. He had garnered strengths over many years, fashioning them to his own needs, layering his shadow with the tricks and talents of the dead of ages.

And yet he was still anxious about me.

Why do I know him?

And why did I feel the same?

And then Medea walked towards me through the labyrinth. She came towards me out of the darkness, pale in complexion, sad in her look, walking as if in a dream.

For a moment I felt delight, then realized the painful truth: that she was dead. Though she glowed and gleamed, and came to me with brightness and affection, she was in that hinterland between life and death that the Greeklanders call the
ephemera.

Her arms reached out and took me into her embrace, a fleeting moment, a last cradle of affection. “I have to go.”

“What happened?”

“I have to go.”

“What
happened
?”

“I’m used up. Protecting my son has used me up. I’m in transition. I’m sorry. I will see you back where we began. I have a path to walk.”

I was surprised to find that she was warm to the touch. So small a woman, so slender. My arms embraced her, and she was like a ghost. She was crying, but then looked up at me, dark eyes full of the love we’d known in an age gone by, the frown, the creases of despair that now governed her face those of a woman who knows that her time is finished.

“We’ll find each other again,” she whispered. “Sooner or later.”

“Either sooner. Or later. But yes. We’ll find each other again.”

“In the meantime, you have your Niiv.”

“For a while. I’m sorry, Medea.”

“Sorry for what?”

“For the lost years. When we were young and the world was young.”

She sighed into my breast. She laughed quietly. “Our paths were different. Our paths parted. Trails take on different hills and different valleys. They all come back to the starting point. We didn’t miss years, you and I. We had many years. That was our problem, being as old and as interminable as we were born to be, two people who could escape the clutches of Time.…”

Looking up at me, she touched a finger to my face fondly. “It’s a shame we are not fully immortal. Our problem was that we had too many years to use, and too many lovers to use them on. We didn’t waste a moment. We felt the need to find different loves for different seasons. All of this in a span of Time that no one can understand. And now I’m dead; and you’re not. But you
will
be dead. One day. And we’ll find each other again, and perhaps understand what our purpose was.”

“Wanderers.”

“Wanderers.”

She tugged my hair, pulled my face down to hers, pressed her mouth against mine. A last kiss. Her lips were as moist, soft, as fragrant, and as yearning as a spring flower opening after rain. Everything in that kiss was the joy of remembering.

Then she whispered, “My son will kill his father, unless you intervene. They’re out there now, and Thesokorus is angry. Spend a little of your life, Merlin. Please. For me. For your sister. Out of love.”

She had gone from me as quickly as she had appeared in the gloom of the labyrinth. I stood there shaken and shaking, trying to suppress tears, tears for a woman whom once I’d loved and whom I had come to hate, and who had been a constant torment in my life. I could think of none of that now, none of the pain, none of the pursuit, only of that idyll of play and teasing, and affection, that had been our first years. The time of love and joy. So long ago that it might have been the play of gods unknown.

*   *   *

I became angry, then. A red rush of rage. I looked at the cold stone and saw only a man’s greed. Daidalos was walking home, and dragging a world with him. It occurred to me, as I hammered hands against that cold rock illusion, that the man, born in the past, born to understanding and brilliance on that remote island, could not cross the river.

It was a moment of inspiration. Nantosuelta, the often calm, sometimes raging flow of water that defined the edges of two worlds, would not let the man cross. He was incomplete, and the river knew it.

And yet, he had savaged a land. Urtha’s land. The land of my friend, and of my friend’s family. The Dead had come willingly with him. They were legion, lining the banks of the new river. The Unborn were restless, unhappy at this unhappy outcome.

Daidalos had power. He had sucked power from the Otherworld. He had shrouded himself in the strength of ghosts.

Well. At that moment, in the blaze of fury, losing my sister from the beginning of Time, my lover, thinking of Niiv, who could not tame Time as could I, who would not last the distance in the days that I wished her to stay with me: in that moment I decided to age.

This is how it felt.

My bones seemed to shatter inside my flesh as the charm was scraped from them. My blood congealed in my heart, but flowed from my skin. My hands became red, and I cried tears of blood, unable to hold back the flow of anger. I shattered the labyrinth, shattered the stone, exposed the man who stood at its centre.

For a moment Daidalos was shocked. I stepped towards him. He looked strong. He gleamed. His eyes were hollows. His face coated with dark hair, his arms, naked, bruised and powerful. He began to weave again.

Stone formed around me.

I shattered the stone.

Stepping away from me, for a second time I sensed his confusion and fear. I picked up a shard of rock and ran at him. I struck him and brought him down, straddled him and struck at him again.

“Brutal. Brutal,” he gasped with a laugh. “But in the valley, your friend Jason is about to die. Don’t you wish to see it?”

And rage was gone. I looked around. This was not the edge of the river, it was not the mountainside where Daidalos had been ensnared by Jason, lifetimes in the past. This was a place in Greek Land. We were on the slopes of the valley of the oracle at Dodona, and below me, beyond the bleeding creature who lay so compliantly at my feet, as if waiting for me to make one move so that he could counter it with equal strength, there, by the stream, Jason was backing away from his eldest son. Thesokorus, the bull-leaper, the man who had come to be known as King of Killers.

“What am I witnessing?” I whispered to the man.

“A touch of vengeance before I find a way to get back to my own home.”

I let the stone fall. I felt ashamed. I could not at that moment understand from where this sudden rage had come, nor why this half man, half machine, had allowed me to beat him without defending against the blows. Perhaps he knew that I was mourning the passing of an old friend, one who had become a haunting enemy. I looked at Daidalos. He did not seem to be enjoying the situation. Rather, he was waiting for events to unfold.

For a third time I realised how confused he was. But now, something else: fear.

I walked away from him in this illusory landscape, down the hill to where father and son faced each other in the Greeklander way, preparing to do combat, but uncertain as to the moment at which to commence the fight. Each leaned forward on his left knee, right hands held loosely on the hilt of their swords, fingers outstretched, not yet gripping the leather-bound ivory, not yet pulling the iron from its scabbard, to make the assault.

As I approached, I heard their conversation. It was the son who was speaking.

“I thought I’d killed you at Dodona. I smelled your shit, your blood. You couldn’t have survived that strike.”

I’d witnessed the contest. It was after the Great Quest had failed to sack Delphi, and the Celtic armies were dispersing in dismay. Father and son had found each other in the valley of another oracle, and the encounter had not been warm.

“I survived,” Jason said cautiously. “I see you’ve inherited the same tendency. Unless those scars on your face and arms are for decoration.”

“My life has been short, but not without its difficulties. That’s neither here nor there. That strike I gave you went deep.”

“Not deep enough. Not in the flesh, at least. It wounded me, though. All I had done was come to find you again, you and your brother. My two sons by Medea.”

“I didn’t believe you then, how would you expect me to believe you now?”

Jason’s grin was grim. “I have no answer to that. I want only for a final voyage in Argo, with Thesokorus at my side. Leaping over bulls, if he wishes.”

“I no longer recognise that name. I am Orgetorix.”

“My son, nevertheless, under any name.”

“And Kinos? What about my brother.”

“Dead. I’ll say it bluntly. He didn’t have your metal. He had a mind that was wonderful, imagination that was intriguing, but when it came to character, he was not a killer of anything, and certainly not of kings. He was broken from the moment he first learned to think. Thinking broke him because his dreaming broke him. Do you remember how we called him ‘little dreamer’? He broke himself in the underworld, in a place of his own dreaming. And not even his mother could help him.”

Thesokorus reached down and stroked fingers against the moist earth by the stream. He was breathing hard, and I noticed that he was shaking, one hand on the earth, the other on his sword. He looked up at Jason, his face narrowed and hard, older by years than the years that had been shaping him. “Tell me about my mother. I saw her moments ago, and she was nothing but a ghost. Did you kill her?”

“No.”

“Then who killed her?”

“
Time
killed her,” Jason responded without pause. “And you. And Kinos. And me. And places and times, and events and circumstances that none of us were privy to. She had lived a long life. I was just a flutter in her breast, a moment’s touch of desire and fondness. She had more time for the man you call Merlin. She was Merlin’s sister, I know now. And they are older than forests.”

“I am not that man’s child.”

“No. You’re not.”

“She had children by other men?”

“I never thought to ask the question.”

“But! Let me get this clear. I am your son. Medea is my mother.
Was
my mother. I am shaped by you. I must live and eventually die by the way you shaped me.”

“Yes, you must. And now I have a question for you.”

“Ask it.”

“Concerning the life that is left to you, a span that is longer than the life left to me, or certainly I hope so, though your scars and intemperance give me some cause for concern.…”

“What about that life?”

“Will you live it with rage or without rage; with affection or with notions of vengeance? I betrayed your mother. I don’t deny it. I paid a high cost. Higher than you’ll ever knew, because before I could speak to you, my guts were bleeding, my shit spilling out, your knife the cause. None of that matters now. I have a new chance, a brief chance, and if I could find now those gods that once gave me the strength and confidence to live my life in the only way that life should be lived…”

“What way is that?” asked Thesokorus quickly.

“Life upon life. Upon life. Upon
life
! Until there is no
longer
life!”

Thesokorus beat his fist against the earth, but with enthusiasm. He met his father’s gaze again. “I like that thought. I like it very much. The one thing in my life that has been missing since I surfaced from such a strange dream, of being sacrificed and hidden … the one thing I have missed is what my brother, by your words, had in abundance: dreams, and purpose. I have had action. Scars prove it. Battles! Scars prove it. I scarred my father. My father’s scar proves it. I have missed my father all my life. But I can’t think of you as my father. I can only think of you as Jason.”

When Jason didn’t respond, Thesokorus gave a wry little sigh, then said, “But now I think
Jason
is enough for me. You found men and women, heroes and half-gods, and formed them into a crew for that little ship, you, a man, no more than a man, and you tamed Herakles, and Theseus, and Atalanta, and you found the fleece of gold! And I grew up with those stories, and those stories are all I have of you. Oceans, rivers, creatures, rocks that clash, spaces that open in the cliffs and draw you in. And all of that with the constant presence not of gods, advising those heroes, but of a man who had no direction except forward. You found my mother by going forward. You came home to Iolkos by going forward. And you found rivers and streams, and hauled that ship over dry land, and you knew yourself, and you knew your direction. You knew a simple truth: that a small stream, if followed, must always end in Ocean, and by following the coast of Ocean, you can always find the shore from which you had once set sail.”

He paused for a moment, still dragging his fingers through the earth. Then he shook his head. “What was it that happened to me that these simple truths were denied to me, when they would have been so important to me? Why am I a wanderer, like that strange friend of yours, Merlin?”

“You are what you are because what happened, happened. I betrayed Medea for another woman. In her fury, she took her sons by me and killed them. Or so I thought. In fact, she flung you into the future, and in so doing, brought herself close to death herself. Fury never makes fools of the wise; it makes fools of fools. Medea and I were fools, though there is no denying our lust. Why were we fools? Because love was never mentioned. She wanted children. She created many, spared only two. I will tell you this, Thesokorus. I will never, I doubt any man or woman will ever, understand what was going through that woman’s mind when she abandoned you to time, in hate for me, in fury at me.”