The Broken Kings Read online

  I said nothing. Medea was exhausted, every movement of face and limbs testifying to frailness and fragility. I was helpless to explore the extent to which this was an act; on this side of the river, my abilities in insight were cramped, closed down.

  I was suspicious of her, and it was certainly the case that she had lied to me in a very similar and persuasive way, the last time in this very land of the dead, on this side of the river, in a valley that echoed and appeared to be the image of our place of growing up. How badly I had fallen under her spell! But of course, it had happened before. With each new encounter with Medea, so I remembered a little more of those early centuries, when we had been close as friends, as lovers, and as seekers, prowling the Path around the world in awe and wonder at what we were discovering.

  It was an uncomfortable thought. I was bound to Medea because she, having squandered her enchantment, ageing rapidly, could remember so much more than I could. I, who had hoarded my magic and stayed young, was paying the cost by being denied my own long life.

  Only by ageing would I understand and experience the pain and pleasure of the encounters and experiences, the adventures and wild pursuits that had been my life for several thousands of years. Like a head-damaged veteran of some terrible war, able to remember only a few years, sometimes only a few days at a time, I was closed off from myself. In some remote part of the eastern world, where clay tablets were used to record the actions of kings and the deeds of heroes, the sentences of criminals and the wealth of brides, perhaps there was more being written about my life than I could dream in a hundred years. My life was clay. I remembered so little.

  Medea knew this, and there was a look about her, enticing and seductive, that told me she was aware of that knowledge.

  “Help me, Merlin. Will you help me?”

  “What exactly is it you want, Medea?”

  “To have Thesokorus reconciled with his father. To have reconciliation between Jason and me. Hard, I know. A hard thing to do. Which is why I can’t do it alone.”

  I watched her for a while. She was so difficult to read. I wished I could entice her across the river where she would need stronger defences to stop me searching her spirit.

  “Of the two proposals, which is the more important?”

  It was worth a try, but Medea could have seen that obvious question from the Moon itself. “Thesokorus to be reconciled with Jason,” she said. “But I will try with every sinew in my body to become part of the family again. But first: father and son.”

  “Where is Thesokorus now? The real man.”

  “I don’t know. Close. Not in Ghostland. But hiding. If you find him, you may tell him everything I’ve said.”

  After a moment, I agreed. Then I asked her to help me in return. “What is happening along this river? Why have these hostels appeared? They signal some dramatic change. The priests in Taurovinda are in no doubt of it.”

  “I don’t know. And that is the truth. But there’s no denying that something is about to happen. It’s been coming for some time now. The islands are deserted. The ocean is obscured by mist, but strange ships can sometimes be seen. The deep forests are in winter. There are immense storms over the mountains. Something is shaping the land. There is a shaping force at work. I feel it’s ‘old,’ Merlin—old like us. If I can find out more, I promise on my son’s life, I’ll tell you.”

  She saw my cynical look, smiled, and shrugged. “I have nothing else with which to swear to you, so take it or leave it. I will help you. Please help me.”

  * * *

  I am neither strong nor wise. Neither now, as I write this, nor then, when Medea watched me with eyes that never aged, and thought of me with a mind that remembered our time together as lovers. She must have seen that I wanted her, but that I was frightened of renewed intimacy. But I was unable to resist.

  When the ram’s fleece slipped from her shoulders, I entered a dream. We held each other for a long time. I remember crying. I remember her soothing words. We were playful. We made love to each other in the Greeklanders’ way. I thought my heart would burst with the strain.

  Later, when I surfaced from shallow sleep, in great discomfort, I expected to find that all had been a trick, that she had teased me and stolen from me, as Niiv was always attempting to tease and steal from me. I expected to wake cold, alone, and once again the fool that is the man who won’t give in to the natural tide of Time.

  But there she was, a small, sagging, sad figure, curled in her skin, sleeping gently. There were dried tears on her cheeks. She was murmuring as she breathed. She was drawn in on herself like a frightened child.

  I tried to wake her, but she mumbled through her drowsiness, tightening her body further.

  Though sleep helps solve riddles, it is also a haven from despair. Except at dawn. At dawn, dogs fly into the dream, ravaging the peace.

  I kissed her very gently. Would she wake now? No. She was lost. I left the cave, riding down through the quickening light, back to the hostel and then away.

  * * *

  I came quickly back to Ullanna and her band of shaven-scalped companions. It was dawn; the air was fresh. Three of the retinue were sitting on their ponies, arms crossed, eyes closed, snatching a moment of sleep. Two others were crouched at the bank of the river, backsides over the water, chatting and laughing. Ullanna herself was slumped over the back of her oak-brown mare, head on the animal’s neck, flicking the reins from side to side. When she saw me approach, she straightened up, kicked the mare into a canter, and came over to me.

  She was not happy.

  “Niiv has gone back to the fort. I sent two of my riders with her. Something upset her.”

  “That was foolish of her.”

  Ullanna was more angry than I’d realised: “Do you know how long we’ve been waiting for you?”

  “No.”

  “Three days! Do you know what we’ve been eating?”

  “Wild geese? Salmon?”

  She slapped the leather reins across her legs, a furious gesture that suggested more frustration than anger. “We’ve eaten nothing! The hunting here is dead. No birds, no fish, no game, and the grass stinks! There is something wrong, Merlin. Everything looks the same, but it’s not. It’s dead. And for a long way back towards the hill. I agreed to wait for you, but you’ve returned now. So come or stay, that’s up to you. But we’re off! Riders! To horseback!” she shouted.

  Sleepers awoke, others mounted up, and with a flurry of hooves, a bird screech of cries—they seemed less anguished than their leader—the wild band had begun their gallop to the east, looking behind them all the time, as if careful to watch for what might be following, or perhaps to watch what they were leaving behind.

  I followed in their tracks, but kept a slower pace.

  When I caught up with them, later that night, they were camped among ruins, a fire burning. A nearby spring flowed gently into a well, and Ullanna was crouched there, scooping the water, filling a makeshift trough for the horses.

  The women were singing; small game was turning on the spits. Perhaps we had reached the edge of the dead zone.

  Ullanna saw me and beckoned me over, motioning me to crouch. She scooped a bowl of fresh water but held it before her, staring at it. “What’s going on, Merlin? What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She sighed, a weary sound, a sad breath. “I haven’t been in his life for very long; I don’t want to lose him. I haven’t been in this country very long; I don’t want to lose it. If I seemed angry, it’s because of just that: I don’t want to lose what I’ve come to love. Urtha. This country.” She looked round at me. “What have you been seeing in the last season or so? Nothing is right.”

  “Echoes of a past,” I replied truthfully. “Faces out of the well. Memories. And not all of them belong here.”

  “Something is shaping change,” she murmured grimly.

  I was startled as she used similar words to Medea’s.

  “Yes.”

  “W
hat do you think it might be? What do your faces from the well tell you?”

  “Clues. Observations. No answers. But I’m coming to believe that it has a lot to do with Jason. I can’t explain it, just a feeling in the human part of my gut.”

  “Jason,” she repeated, shaking her head. “Time is askew. But then: hasn’t it always been? Here—” She passed me a filled leather cup, then scooped from the spring herself. “In my country, to drink water from the well is a sign of welcome to strangers, since water tastes the same everywhere. And we drink it also to remember a good life, and old and new friends.” She sat back on her haunches. “It seems to me you’ve been encountering a few old friends. I have, too. Here!” She tapped her head. “But the new is more important.”

  Her eyes shone in the firelight as she looked at me, and there was a thin but welcome smile on her lips. We touched the edges of our crude cups together.

  I didn’t know what was going through Ullanna’s mind. She was Scythian. I was Ancient.

  But together, we drank water from the well.

  PART TWO

  GREATER, MORE NOBLE, MORE TERRIBLE

  Chapter Eight

  Night Hunting

  While I was investigating the rumours from the hostels, Urtha and a retinue that included his proud son, Kymon, made their way east through the forest, to the land of the Coritani. Here, close to the river Nantosuelta as she approached the wide sea, rose the high-walled fortress of the king, Vortingoros, a smaller hill than Taurovinda, but still prominent and austere.

  The Coritani had been at peace with their neighbour in the west for several years. Vortingoros, as a child, had been fostered for a time in Taurovinda, with Urtha’s father. He was two years older than Urtha, and over those seasons they had shared in the king’s enclosure, and hunting at the edge of the Plain of the Battle Crow, they had “counted coup” equally, which meant touching the opponent in otherwise potentially deadly combat, rather than inflicting a wound. Despite this likely humiliation for the older boy, they had found a close friendship that survived into their adult lives. It was lost over a dispute concerning cattle found grazing loose along the river that linked their territories, and which might have belonged to either kingdom. The war, no more than a series of skirmishes, had continued for two years and cost several lives. But the friendship was won again, after a settlement by combat of champions and the exchange of shields, horses, and slaves of equal value. This time it had lasted.

  Now, however, the country of the Coritani was in a state of apprehension verging on fear.

  When the warlord Brennos had called for the finest warriors of the clan kingdoms to come and assist in a great vengeance raid on the oracle at Delphi, in Greek Land, Vortingoros’s champions had responded almost to the man, as had many of Urtha’s. They had crossed the sea to find the gathering of the army on the river Daan, ready to move south, scourging and scouring all the lands they found on their way. The Great Quest, as it had been known, had eventually triumphed, only to discover that Delphi was barren of the treasure they had anticipated plundering. Most had returned home, disillusioned and damaged by fighting.

  But their initial departure, when hope was a song of joy, led to changes in both lands that were frightening and confusing, in Urtha’s case, tragic.

  Urtha returned to find his country blighted: deserted, ravaged, and destroyed, his fortress sacked and burned, many of his friends—and one of his sons—dead.

  For the Coritani, the change had been as bleak, but far more strange.

  All wildlife vanished from the woods, all fish from the rivers and streams; only the birds remained, in increasingly dense flocks. The taste of crow is foul, but even a child could soon shoot an arrow and strike this carrion-seeker on its wing. This abandonment by nature was curious enough on its own.

  But then, after the champions and lesser warriors had ridden or rowed to the east, to cross the ocean and land near the mouth of the river Rein, so wooden images of the departed began to appear in the groves. They howled for a few nights, terrible sounds that kept the Speakers from entering those sacred places, after which they dispersed, in the darkness, across the territory—some to the water’s edge, some to the fringes of the woods, some to narrow gorges, others to the heights of cliffs. There they knelt on one knee, oak weapons clutched against their bodies, and became cold, hard tree once again.

  Each effigy was perfect in its representation of the man who had gone to the raid on Delphi.

  Urtha had known a little of this, and had been intrigued by it. Now, as he and his group emerged to within sight of the steep western rise of the fortress, his curiosity was teased again.

  The effigies that peered from the undergrowth, ivy-clad by now, and some half-toppled, had been daubed and cut with crosses or spirals, decked with wreaths of dead flowers, or covered with ragged red shawls. Following along the willow-fringed river, the same thing was true. There were fewer statues here, and the crows and others birds had daubed them in their own particular way, great white streaks running down the once-proud features.

  Even so, these kneeling men had been fashioned further by frantic, clumsy hands.

  Urtha’s first thought was that they had been turned into memorials of the dead men, and that families came to remember them.

  He was only half-right. Vortingoros gave him a fuller picture after he had welcomed his guests, fed them, given them strong, sweet wine salvaged from the wreck of an eastern trading ship driven ashore on the rough sea-coast of his kingdom, and treated them to songs and poetry from his oldest and most respected bard, a shaven-headed, clean-cheeked man called Talienze. Talienze was from across the grey sea, from somewhere in the south, and was a prisoner of Vortingoros’s who had traded death at the turning of winter for his talents, which were varied and often amusing.

  Talienze took a place on the bench behind Vortingoros, with the chieftain’s counsellors and the High Woman. Urtha noticed that as Vortingoros spoke, so the bard’s eyes were half-closed, his lips moving almost imperceptibly; he was perhaps memorising the conversation.

  “You have a fine son,” Vortingoros said, raising his wine bowl to the boy. “His eyes tell me that he has seen death, and also courted it. And won the courtship, of course, since here he is.”

  Urtha raised his own bowl. “The boy has had a hard time of it—”

  “I can speak for myself,” Kymon suddenly interjected, rising to his feet and glaring at his father. Though Urtha was surprised by this rudeness, he calmly looked up at his stiff-bodied son.

  “No. You cannot!”

  Torn between youthful anger and an understanding of his place, Kymon was unable to speak for a moment. At last he said, “I know I still have to face the challenge, but surely I have done enough, in the winning back of our own fortress, to be able to speak—”

  “No! You have not. Sit down.”

  Kymon hesitated just long enough to signal his disapproval of his father’s words, then sat, crossing his legs and leaning forward, his gaze on the sleeping mastiff at Vortingoros’s feet.

  Vortingoros contemplated Kymon for a moment, then nodded his head. “I am very keen to hear you speak for yourself, Kymon. But your father, my good friend, is right. Keep your counsel. You have a lot to say, I can see that, and no doubt a lot to offer. But at the right time, and in the right way.”

  “You are very courteous,” Kymon murmured.

  “Yes. And I have a nephew who is as blood-headed as you. He’s not here now, but you’ll be meeting him soon enough.” He leaned back in his chair. “I lost my own sons, all three of them. They were older than you, but not by much. They were killed when your brother Urien was killed. Do you remember him?”

  “Urien? Of course. He fought like a man and was hacked down; I was dragged to safety, whimpering, by dogs.”

  “Thank the Good God you were,” said Vortingoros. “You’ll have a long life, now.”

  “Not as a dog!”

  “Those dogs,” Urtha reprimanded his son, “were my
favourite hounds. One died trying to protect your brother from the killers; the other two saved you and your sister. Dogs? How dare you call them dogs. Hounds, boy! And brave as any champion. If I die tomorrow, those hounds become yours.”

  “I’ll welcome them,” Kymon agreed in a disgruntled tone. “They’re old, but I’ll welcome them.”

  There was a moment’s pause as father and son stared at each other.

  Kymon said, “I’ll be a hound as good and as fast and as fearless as your hound Maglerd, who saved me; and Uglerd, who saved Munda. I’ll be my father’s hound, and I’ll be proud of it.”

  Then Urtha said, with his own proud smile, “You’ll have your moment, Kymon. Too many moments. Long after I’ve gone.”

  “I long for that moment. Of having moments,” he quickly corrected. “Not of having you gone.”

  Vortingoros laughed, spilling wine from his bowl. “All this way—such a long journey—to have a family argument and reconciliation? Well, if that’s all you’ve come about, Urtha…”

  Peace was restored.

  * * *

  The discussion turned to the portents of change: those from the past, those being currently manifest.

  Vortingoros turned to one of his advisors, murmured something, and the man left the king’s lodge, returning moments later, dragging, with help, a low cart with a wooden effigy sprawled and twisted upon it. The figure was screaming in death, one hand clutching at its chest, the other bunched into a fist. It was the very image of a dying warrior in his death throes: eyes half-opened, mouth gaping, head thrown back, weapons still hanging from his belt and shoulders.

  “This is Morvran,” Vortingoros said in a low voice.