The Iron Grail Read online

  Jason grabbed my arm in sudden anger. ‘Why didn’t you see this? Antiokus! Blood of the gods, you can see Time itself! For an age on either side of this living moment. Why didn’t you see what this dire-hearted witch would do?’

  Did he think I had betrayed him? I had been too busy enjoying the pleasures of flesh and wine. But when I looked at him now I realised that he was capable of losing even simple reason in his anger. His head looked fit to burst with anguish and outrage.

  ‘I wasn’t looking,’ I confessed uneasily. ‘I should have been looking…’

  Jason stared at me for a moment, then used his knife to scrape the dried tears from his cheeks, taking his gaze away from me. The passion and lust he had once felt for Medea had shrivelled years ago, at exactly the same time as his elder son, Thesokorus, had uttered his first words. The boy was known as the ‘little bull leaper’. By his third spring the child had learned to hold himself vertical on the horns of the stone bull in Jason and Medea’s courtyard. How he loved the boy! And he loved Kinos too, the ‘little dreamer’; Kinos, whose childish visions were full of haunting, memorable charm, insights and part-sights into the future.

  This family, with all their skills, born and gods-given, could have reshaped the heavens. They could have moved stars. They could have shaped events—had the Fates dining at their table, discussing terms.

  But Medea’s haunting, earthy charm had faded from the bowels of the cold-hearted man.

  Even so, his passion for the pristine, prim and vacuous Glauce had seemed unlikely and out of character. He had loved the woman, I was certain, but naively, for her innocence rather than for her challenge. He was hurting deeply, but not because of Glauce’s extinction; all he could think of, now, was that Medea had his sons.

  And his sons were precious to him.

  ‘She won’t kill them,’ he muttered as the fires roared and the guards stood, brazen, solid, facing us, waiting for our attack. ‘Will she? She wouldn’t dare! Hera’s heart, Antiokus! They’re from her own womb. She wouldn’t dare put the blade to them…?’

  Tisaminas was eager to get to the fight. He slapped his sword three times against his shield, then once against his right thigh, deliberately grazing the skin.

  ‘There is not a moment to lose, Jason! We must not think too much before we run at these ram-helmeted blade-fodder!’

  ‘I know! I know all that!’ Jason shouted at him. ‘Get the boys away from her. Spare nothing and no one until you have the boys in your arms. Cut the witch to shreds if you must, but get those children from her amber-rattling clutches!’

  Again he looked at me closely, pain-filled eyes as watery and bloodshot as an old man’s.

  ‘Will she? Will she kill them?’

  ‘She is older than you think,’ I said to him. ‘Her heart is made of different sinew from yours. Her blood is a different hue of red when it spills from her veins. Her song of summoning brings shadows from a deeper clay below our feet.’

  ‘That much I know. That much I found out during the nights after I brought her back from her sanctuary in Colchis.

  ‘Mighty Zeus, strike her down,’ he whispered then. ‘Protecting Hera, blind the snake-sharp eyes. Strike my left arm from my shoulder if you must, but strike the woman down before she can harm my sons…’

  With this last cry he drew his blade, struck his shield five times and with a roar of rage led the charge at the moon-masked guard.

  We pushed and cleaved our way towards the palace. Argastus took an arrow in the throat, killing him instantly, but his grey shade fairly howled from his body, curling around the killer, blinding the Colchean. I was on the archer in a moment. In the shock of this shadowy assistance, all the archers quickly died beneath our swords, though Theseus went down wounded. Those men had been the main danger, and Jason left Anteon and Haphestos to finish the job in the gardens, leading Tisaminas, myself and the others to the flaming wall which Medea had caused to spring from the ground.

  She stood, now, behind the fire, taunting her husband with eerie chants and laughter. She was a tall, sinister shape in a black robe that rattled with metal leaves, bone amulets and polished amber blades. Only her eyes were visible above the black veil across her face, below the fringe of gold thread that hung from her headdress.

  A flaming ball was suddenly flung towards us, spitting fat as it burned. The charred flowers in its hair still held their shape. Jason screamed and held his shield before his face, as if he could deny the gruesome trophy. Then he leapt the wall of Colchean fire, pursuing the shrieking woman.

  Tisaminas was pale with fear as we followed. We fought our way into the palace, and raced along the echoing, green-marbled corridors. Suddenly Medea was running ahead of us, Kinos and Thesokorus held by the hands. The boys were laughing as they ran, but their laughter was not natural. They acted as if this was all a game, but they were confused and nervous.

  By trickery and confusion, Medea led us like goats to the slaughter.

  She had fled to the Bull Sanctuary, not her own temple of the Ram, and as Jason led us towards the bronze-barred gate, now closed and locked by the desperate woman, so we realised our mistake.

  Behind us, across the narrow passage, a stone slab fell and trapped us. Ahead of us, the towering horned effigy, before which Medea stood triumphant, split in two, revealing itself as a doorway. There, outside, was the road to the north. A cart and six horsemen were waiting, the animals impatient and frightened as their riders struggled to control them. I recognised the armoured charioteer as Cretantes, Medea’s confidant and adviser from her homeland.

  The boys struggled in her grasp, howling. Perhaps they were suddenly aware that this was not a game at all, and that in their mother’s arms they faced a more terrible fate than in their father’s, though she had led them to expect otherwise.

  Jason flung himself against the bars of the sanctuary, begging the black-shrouded woman to release the screaming boys.

  ‘Too late. Too late!’ she cried from behind her black veil. ‘My blood can’t save them from the ravages of your blood. You betrayed the ones you love, Jason. You betrayed us brutally with that woman!’

  ‘You burned her alive!’

  ‘Yes. And now you will freeze in eternity! In gloom! Not even your heart and the hearts of your argonauts will be sufficient meat for the dark feast of despair that lies ahead of you. Nothing will change in you, Jason. Nothing can! You are a warped man. You deal in death. If I could cut your flesh out of the boys, if I could do that and still let them live, then that is what I’d do. But I can’t. So say goodbye to your sons!’

  Jason’s howl of pain was vulpine. He shouted, ‘Antiokus! Use your magic!’

  ‘I can’t!’ I cried. ‘Nothing is there! This is a tomb, Jason. My talent is paralysed…’

  He had no time for my confusion, my excuses. He flung his long sword at the woman but the throw went wide, the blade embedding itself in the god-bull’s cedar pizzle.

  And at that moment, Medea did the terrible deed, moving so fast I saw only the merest glint of light on the blade with which she cut the throats of the twins. She turned away from us, covering their bodies with her robes, stooping to her work with manic vigour as Jason howled again. She wrapped and tied the heads in strips of her veil, tossing them to Cretantes, who put them in pouches slung from his waist. Then Medea dragged the bodies to the horses. They were flung into the cart and covered with blankets.

  A moment later, the troop had gone, leaving dust swirling into the sanctuary, with the smell and sight of innocent blood two cruel Furies taunting the argonauts, trapped in Medea’s lair.

  Jason slumped to his knees, fingers still gripping the gate. He had battered himself unconscious against the bars of the temple; his eyes and face were bruised, his mouth raw. One of our companions was pushing against the stone door behind us, trying to find the lever that would release us from the trap. I felt helpless: all power in magic had drained from me from the moment I entered the palace, an impotence which astonished an
d confused me, and I assumed had occurred because Medea had used her own sorcery to ‘numb’ me ready for the moment of the deaths.

  Now again I felt that familiar tingle below the flesh, ability returning, saw at once how to open the door. And persuaded it to do so. We dragged Jason’s body outside, through the fires and into the fresh air.

  No guards were to be seen save the slain. Someone went for horses.

  Tisaminas crouched down beside me, lifting Jason’s battered head and wiping the blood from his brow. Jason opened is eyes, then reached out to grab me by the shoulder. ‘Antiokus…?’ he whispered. ‘Why didn’t you stop her? There is more enchantment in your veins than blood!’

  ‘I warned you she could be more powerful than me. I tried, Jason. With all my heart, I tried.’

  My own power had been strangled. Medea had exercised her own charm upon me, stifling my inner sight and my ability with enchantment. How she had managed this was beyond me. It would be seven hundred years before I would find the answer.

  Jason’s look was grim, but he acknowledged my words. ‘I know you did. I’m sure you did. You’ve been a good friend. I know you would have tried.’ He groaned as he tried to move. ‘Come on, help me up! Tisaminas, help me up. And fetch horses! We have to follow…’

  ‘The horses are on their way,’ I told him.

  ‘She will run to the north, Antiokus. I know the way she thinks. She’ll run to the coast, to the hidden harbour behind the mourning rocks. We can catch her!’

  ‘We can certainly try,’ I said, though in my heart I knew that Medea had slipped away for ever. She had always outwitted Jason.

  * * *

  I had not been in Iolkos on that final, fateful day when a spar from the rotting Argo, where the rotting man lay ageing and raging against Medea, fell and broke his skull. Hera found me, as she had found all the argonauts. I was walking my long path round the world, too far away in the snows of the north to return. But the others came back and lined the headlands above the harbour. They circled firebrands in farewell as the proud ship gracefully sailed into the moon and Time. Even the shade of sad Orpheus was there, allowed to return for this final farewell. And Heracles too, dark and brooding, plucked from his own manic adventures by the wily goddess, even he was there, casting his torch wistfully from the heights as the old ship passed below.

  As if pursuing me, it was to the Northlands that Argo brought the hero. She sank into the depths of a lake, near Tuonela, in the bleak land called Pohjola. I always knew he was buried there. I often passed that way, out of respect for my old friend, staying for a while, trying not to hear the screams of the shade of Jason, still mourning his sons.

  All this would one day change when I discovered the clever conjuration that Medea had performed for us.

  PART ONE:

  Hardship and a Long Sigh

  CHAPTER THREE

  Old Ghosts

  I had been reliving the far past for half the morning, lost in my dreams, walking lost times as I walked the boundaries of the deserted fort. My reverie was abruptly interrupted by a sudden shower of rain, sleeting across the grass within the walls. It seemed to drive in through the Riannon Gate, very cold and very wet. A figure moved through the rain, insubstantial, defined by the shower, a man leading a horse by the reins, followed soon by others, entering the enclosure cautiously. And nervously.

  The leader suddenly ran as if to pass me by where I now crouched in the lee of a collapsed house. His men jogged after him, their horses struggling in the downpour. I could see through their forms to the ramparts opposite; they were rain-ghosts, clad in long cloaks, leather tunics over knee-length trousers. Their horses were large and exquisitely harnessed.

  The leader suddenly stopped and glanced in my direction, then walked towards me, a watery shade, gaining features. Behind him his retinue mounted up and slouched forward across their saddles, watching.

  There was something familiar about him, sufficiently so for the hair on my neck to prickle. His eyes, his bearing: they reminded me of Urtha, High King of the Cornovidi and true owner of this abandoned place. Then again, many people reminded me of Urtha: the look of such an extended family could grin at me from behind every stronghold wall.

  ‘Are you the enchanter? The old man who walks in circles talking to himself?’ He laughed as he said this.

  ‘I walk a circular path around the world. It takes fifty years to make one circuit, sometimes longer. I talk to myself because I like what I have to say.’

  ‘What madness would make a man do such a thing? Walking, walking.’

  ‘The madness of my birth. It’s the undertaking I was tasked with at my birth.’

  ‘What do you achieve?’

  ‘Achieve? Greater understanding of things that are normally confusing; more memories than I know what to do with; greater skills than I have the time to practise; but a great deal of practice in the sort of interference that can shape kingdoms.’

  ‘I could do with a man like you,’ the ghost said appreciatively, grinning as he scratched the stubble on his face. Then he peered closely. ‘I was expecting someone older. You’re no older than me.’

  ‘Looks can deceive.’

  ‘That they can. That they can indeed. Deception can kill more certainly than an iron blade. I’ll remember your face; remember mine. Now, go to the river. Quickly. Someone has been following you for days. You move fast and in mysterious ways. Your help is needed.’

  He was suddenly apprehensive. A horn sounded, somewhere in the distance, an eerie call, or warning. His ethereal steed tugged at the reins; his companions were anxiously staring towards the western gate, at the rear of the stronghold.

  ‘Get out of here now,’ he said to me, turning away. ‘The river, by the old sanctuary—wait for her.’

  He slipped into the rain, a glistening shape defined by water. ‘Who are you?’ I called after him, but he either didn’t hear or chose not to answer. I took a deeper look at him and felt that tingle of shock, deep in the bones, as I recognised the unfocused, misty spark of one of the Unborn. I left well enough alone at that point.

  I ran to the Riannon gate, the horse gate, and began to descend the causeways. Behind me I faintly heard the sound of men riding at the gallop—a raiding party surging into Taurovinda from the direction of the Land of the Shadows of Heroes.

  * * *

  The old sanctuary by the river was dedicated to Nantosuelta, the ‘winding one’, the spirit of springs and streams, wells and rivers like this wide flow that wound tightly around Taurovinda, and named for the spirit herself.

  This river was more than it seemed; willow-fringed, dense with rushes, alive with movement close to the shore, it might have been any river anywhere in the island. But Nantosuelta flowed from Ghostland, the Land of the Shadows of Heroes. It separated the land of the Cornovidi in the west from the Otherworld of their ancestors; its winding course also separated the Parisii, the Durotriges and the Seutones from their own Otherworlds. To row a boat along Nantosuelta was to always row at the edge of the world of the Dead. Urtha’s fortress of Taurovinda guarded five dangerous fords across the water, and the five deep valleys that led, westwards beyond the marshes, to Ghostland itself.

  The sanctuary lay among the evergroves, stunted, twisted trees that reared like petrified spirits from the rocks and cairns of older temples. Weathered grey rocks, crumbling piles of stones, there was a chaos to the place, but a sense of presence, of listening, that told me that here was a sanctuary which still pulsed with life.

  The rain hadn’t eased. I went to the edge of the river and searched the dense greenery for the woman the rain-ghost had suggested was waiting for me.

  When she finally arrived, she was not alone.

  ‘What in the name of Llud’s bastard sons have you done with my bastard son-in-law?’

  The voice that challenged me from the groves was deep, angry, resonant and recognisable.

  ‘Ambaros!’

  ‘Merlin! Is the bastard dead? Is he coming home
? Why did my daughter—the Good God grant her rest when rest comes due—why did she have to bond with a man whose dreams took him away from his duties?’

  ‘Your son-in-law fought a good and famous combat.’

  ‘I hope he took a head to prove it.’

  ‘A well-oiled head. He also took a wound.’

  ‘Mortal?’

  ‘Watch the east. If he shows, then you have your answer. He fought well, Ambaros, and avenged your daughter.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  Now he stepped towards me, casting aside his shield and spear, throwing back his cloak. Old and white-haired, but with eyes that were sharp as spear-points, this grand warrior, this man of Taurovinda, father of Urtha’s dead wife Aylamunda, embraced me like a long lost son.

  When his relief—the gesture was one of relief at finding me, that much was clear—when his relief was satisfied, he stepped back, looked me up and down and shook his head.

  ‘Dreadful. Filthy. A dog wears better clothes. You’ve been in seclusion too long. There are week-old wolf-cubs forty days’ ride from here, blind and helpless, who are smelling your scent and urging their mother to let them hunt you down.’

  ‘Thank you. You’ve aged a lot yourself.’

  ‘Age has less to do with it than water. Anyway, I can’t get any older. You can’t add white to white. I can only get stronger. When that strength goes, it will be in an instant. I’ll sing loudly as my head bowls along the ground. As long as it’s a clean cut, I don’t care about it. I care about this land and that fortress, where the Dead are gathering having evicted us yet again. And about my grandchildren. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Kymon and Munda?’

  ‘They’re the only grandchildren I have, Merlin, unless the ghosts of my three dead sons have been fornicating in the world of the living! Yes. Kymon and Munda. I don’t understand what is happening myself, but one of their guardians is here. One of the modronae. The Mothers. She’s dying. So let’s not waste time.’