The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (7 page)

His companions nodded as he spoke, all of them sharing the sudden melancholy.

After a moment I prompted him: “And you were waiting to see me … because—?”

“I intend to part company with this hostel, which might be a dangerous thing. But I sense that you are in danger, as is that king you work for, and his family and his nobles.”

“Are you trying to tell me that the Realm of Shadow Heroes plans to raid the fortress for a second time?”

Pendragon looked confused. “It’s strange to say this, but it doesn’t feel like it. And yet it has to be the case. When Taurovinda was raided before, the armies gathered at the fords, practised at arms, made themselves fit for the fight, exercised the horses and gathered provisions. This time we are summoned to gather in these grim hostels, but there is no mention of armed conflict. We are simply waiting, though Morndryd has scouted the land behind and there are forces of men moving through the valleys. But they are not coming to the river.

“This inn is where the Unborn are gathering. We are all very uncertain, some more than others. We were content on our island, the Island at the Edge of Dawn. Good plains for the wild hunt; good forests for the tangled hunt. Good valleys and hills. Good water. Groves where the vision of magic was comforting and sometimes enthralling. When the level of the sea drops occasionally, it reveals a causeway, and at those times I have taken the opportunity to cross and enter the realm of Taurovinda. It is the privilege of the Unborn to be able to tour the land in which they will live. You have seen me on several occasions when that privilege was granted. But always, the word from the whispering shrine at the heart of the Island was to ride abroad and hear and listen to the wind and rain, and note the concerns of the living. To make the journey brief. To come home again.

“This time we were urged to come to these inns and wait. Boats came to take us from the Edge of Dawn. Our questions, usually answered clearly, are simply ignored. This is a not a raid. This is something different, something greater, sinister, not at all noble. An invasion? If so, it will be of an unexpected nature.”

I became aware of the clamour in the hall again, the noisy jollity, the angry exchanges, the coughing and choking of men indulging too fiercely in this waiting time.

“Is there a source behind this sinister, not noble, action? Does the danger come from a single person?”

Pendragon shook his head. His companions seemed equally uncertain. “The answer to that lies beyond this shadow land. Which is why I wish to cross from this place. But if I lose you in the effort … Merlin.”

He used my name with a hesitancy that suggested it meant more to him than just the fact of remembering how I had introduced myself. From the first moment I had encountered this bright-spirited, bright-eyed warlord, we had both known that we would meet again, though in a more solid, more earthly way, and a long time in the future.

Indeed, Pendragon went on to conclude: “If I lose you at this time, look for me in the years to come. Look ahead if you can, if you dare risk it. There is an unsettled feeling in the land where your good king rules. One day that world will pass to another king.” He leaned forward and gave me a smile, saying quietly, “And when I take it, I would like it to be free of what corrupts it.”

I left the hostel and joined Ullanna and Niiv. A while later, Pendragon and his four companions thundered across the bridge, heads low, cloaks flying. The ghostly grey cloud that seemed to reach for them might have been the smoke from the fires, but I saw an angry face there, and five wide-winged birds rose above the riders, beating their way east, following the fleeing Unborn.

Chapter Seven

The Shade of Jason’s Son

The Hostel of the Red Shield Riders was two days’ ride away, through difficult country. The river at the ford here was wild; we approached through a narrow defile, clattering over loose rocks, stumbling on the driftwood that had been deposited there when the river had flooded. A boulder-littered bank faced the rapids and the grim lodge that stretched from the scrubby woodland that crowded the far bank.

The entrance was a double door in the shape of a woman, her arms outstretched, hands resting on the heads of two rearing hounds. Each entry was between a hound and the woman. She was carved from dark wood, was bare-breasted, her legs covered with a long skirt. Her eyes were gaping holes, dark as night. The hounds seemed to be reaching to rip her, but she held them away from her.

“An unusual door,” Ullanna observed dryly. “But it reminds me of something.”

I had had the same feeling. An older image was represented by this sophisticated carving, and it had nothing to do with the world of Urtha, or any world that had preceded him. But which?

This was the hostel from which the careless daughter of the king had fled in confusion as she realised she had broken taboo, but had also been filled with a sense of change for the good.

There were guards here. As I left Ullanna on the shore to ride across the shallows, picking my way carefully through the weed-slick boulders, they emerged from the gloom, two men of mean eye, heavily built. They wore loose mail shirts and patchwork trousers. Kirtles stitched from strips of leather protected their loins. They carried oval shields, unmarked and heavy, and a brace of javelins.

As I clambered onto dry land, one came forward and casually took the bridle of my horse. He muttered a few words to me, watching me carefully. He repeated them, frowning. I entered the spirit of the language for a few moments, and recognised a northern dialect. He was asking me if I was “newly dead” or “another bloody ghost waiting for its flesh.”

I replied that I was neither, but that a man was waiting for me inside the hostel. His question, though, suggested that traffic through this inn was two-way.

They allowed me passage into the gloomy interior, and again I found myself in a maze of corridors, with small miserable rooms opening on either side. Distantly, the sounds were of chaos, the clamour of voices and the din of argument. I followed one of the guards towards the light. I led my horse, which tugged nervously as we walked through the narrow corridor towards the open garden at the heart of the hostel. Here, to my surprise, I found a sunlit square that belonged in Greek Land, not in Alba, a place of olive and pine trees, and small houses, whitened with lime, roofed with red clay tiles. The air buzzed and hummed with a different summer. The chaos was behind us. Groups of men and women sat in the shade, drowsily talking, some drinking, a few tending to fires. In the shade of an apple tree, his shield leaning against his knees as he sat, was a young man I recognised, older now by several years and very hard of look. His right eye had taken a slashing blow, and the hair above the scar was white. He was missing a finger of his left hand. His legs and arms were ridged with veins. His clothing was simple, a loose, patterned shirt, knee-length trousers, sandals. But behind him, as he sat ill at ease, were stacked his weapons.

He was expecting me; that much was certain. The moment I entered the square he saw me, half smiled, then waited for me to tether my horse, and come and sit in the shade.

And talking of “shades,” Orgetorix had hardly greeted me before he said, “Yes, you’re right. I’m only the shade of the man you knew. You, I’m sure, are Antiokus. You were present when I tried to kill my father. The event is like a dream to me. I see everything through a dark dream. That’s because the living man of whom I’m the shadow communicates to me. I feel his pain. I feel his scars. I feel how lost he is. I grow with him, and change with him, but I’m the shade. I call him my bone-blood-brother. I exist only as long as he is lost.”

Orgetorix in spirit shape, it seemed, was as melancholy as the young warrior who had roamed the hills and valleys of Greek Land.

I should perhaps write a few words about what had happened to Orgetorix. He was the eldest of Jason’s two sons by Medea, many centuries before, born after the quest for the Golden Fleece. Named Thesokorus, he was nicknamed “little bull-leaper.” His brother Kinos was nicknamed “little dreamer.” When Jason betrayed Medea for another woman, Medea—an enchantress of savage power—slaughtered her two sons in front of her lover. Jason was devastated, never recovered, and eventually died of grief because of the loss. In fact, Medea had used trickery and illusion to present only an apparent execution. The two boys were spirited away into Greek Land. And then—and this was the ingenious part—she spirited them away into Time itself: into the future; into the very time in which this tale is set. The boys were separated, but Medea created a “ghost brother” for each of them, though this cost her dearly in life and power. Eventually the ghosts went their own ways. Kinos died under tragic circumstances, but Thesokorus, now known as King of Killers, after he had fallen in with Celtic mercenaries prowling the lands around the river Daan, was found by his father. They fought in the shadow of the oracle at Dodona, in Greek Land, and Orgetorix rejected the older man, having horribly wounded him.

And how had Jason himself returned to life so far in the future that he could meet his time-flung sons?

Well, a conspiracy between old lovers saw to that: a ship (Argo, of course) and me. And it was when I helped resurrect the Greek hero from his resting place, below Argo’s decks, at the bottom of a Northland lake, that I met the divine and dreadful Niiv, the persistent presence in my life, in my mind, and below my furs. (And under my skin!) But enough of that for the moment.

On the subject of Jason’s flesh-and-blood son: now, it seemed, he was having doubts about his decision—to abandon his father—and this shade was a party to that anguish.

At this time I had no idea where the living Orgetorix was. Somewhere in Alba, though.

“
Are
you Antiokus?” the shade asked again.

“Yes I am,” I confirmed. “I’m also known as Merlin, my nickname from childhood. I’ve had many names.”

“I seem to recall that you are very old. You don’t look old.”

“I’ve left more than a few traces, certainly. Wind and rain will have obscured them by now.”

He seemed amused by this, though only for a moment. “My bone-blood-brother is doing very much the same. His traces, unlike yours, still haunt the wind. He is hound-harassed; he is watched by eagles. He’s close. It won’t be long before he finds you. This place…” He looked around him at the small square, the low, cool houses. “I—he—waited here to visit a shrine. In a hot country. I sat below this tree. I was with companions. Rough men, but proud men. And that was when I saw you.” The shade looked hard at me. The memory was strong for him; and yet, the memory was coming from elsewhere. I was intrigued to know where.

I wondered, as we sat there, how much of this illusory place might be extended beyond the hostel. When I had indeed first set eyes upon Jason’s eldest son, he had been in Makedonia, waiting to ascend the hills with his small troupe of comrades, to consult an oracle where he would learn his true past. There were always truths and lies in shrines and oracles. Medea, his mother, had inhabited that oracle in Makedonia. Perhaps, again, she was watching over her son, waiting for him, waiting for me, waiting to guide him yet again.

What did we stand to lose by trying?

I said to him, “If this place is a true reflection of where I first saw you … the human you, I mean … then there is an oracle in the hills behind us.”

“I know. I was sent to take you there. I’ve been waiting for some time.”

“Take me there? To meet—?”

“My mother.”

“Ah.”

I was right.

As we untethered the horses, Thesokorus asked me, “Is the girl all right? She seemed upset, entering the hostel. But my mother’s influence is very strong. She came all the way through to this square. I tried to make her comfortable as I gave her the message to take to you.”

“The girl is fine. She’s the daughter of the king. She has a great deal of courage.”

*   *   *

Medea had created this hot and dry, heavenly scented piece of theatre, I was sure of it now. Orgetorix rode slowly up the winding path into the hills, stooping below the low-hanging branches of gnarled olives, clattering through the dry defiles, squeezing between the rocks with their intricately woven carvings, the clear signs that we were approaching an oracle.

Behind and below us, the small square shimmered in the lazy heat, the whitewashed walls of the buildings blurring into uniformity, though beyond them was the sprawling stretch of the hostel, a wide lodge bordering an almost unrecognisable river and the misty world of Urtha beyond. The hostel took on a different form when seen from Ghostland. It welcomed; it comforted.

As if he had been here before—and in his dreams, he had—Orgetorix rode slowly and without mistake to the outer enclosure of the oracle, following the wooded paths to the craggy wall of grey rock where the speaking cave could be found, behind its screen of heat-twisted oaks and olives. This was in every way a reflection of the Oracle in Makedonia, north of Greek Land. It had been called “the caught breath of time.” The wind whispered and called from the clefts in the rocks. I can think of no better way of putting the sound that summoned from the earth. Orgetorix seemed to enter a dream, passing me the reins of his horse and pushing me slightly away from him. “Go and hide in the rocks. Let me make the encounter. Quickly!”

He waited, still in a state of trance, as I withdrew to the overhang where, years before, I had listened to him ask about his fate, unaware that it was Medea who was answering him.

I tethered the horses and watched from the shadows. Orgetorix stepped towards the widest of the caves, leaning slightly as he peered into the darkness, his arms hanging limply and unthreateningly at his sides.

“Mother?”

He stood there for a long time, unmoving, the breeze catching his hair. I had expected he would repeat the call, but he stayed silent, unnervingly so, as if frozen, a creature caught suddenly by torchlight in the night, unable to make sense of the sudden brightness, mute-muscled with indecision.

Then he called again, almost a whisper, and this time I heard him say quietly, “He’s come. I found him and he’s come. Mother?”