The Broken Kings

  “There’s a lot of that pig that the flies won’t have reached,” Kymon called back, still searching through the artefacts.

  He became aware of Colcu’s silence. The taller boy was standing over the dead animal, staring down. “What is this?” Kymon heard him say aloud.

  Suddenly alarmed, Kymon swept an angry hand through the trinkets from the chamber and walked over to where the carcase lay stretched out.

  Open-bellied, its hindquarters hacked to supply the earlier feeding, the young boar was a gruesome sight, stiffening and distorting as heat and time tugged at its dignity. Colcu had thrown it down so that its head was against the rock, as if slouched against the wall.

  A child’s face, etched in white, watched them now from the tusk-drawn skull. A child!

  “Urskumug,” Kymon breathed. He started to shake. The pallid features of the human face seemed to leer at him. “Urskumug.”

  Colcu just stared at him, understanding nothing except that Kymon was in a rage of intuition, and was frightened.

  “We’re in danger,” Kymon said. Colcu stayed silent. And it was through that silence that the singing of the Wild Woman and the baying of her hybrid pack reached their hearing. It was still very distant. “We should leave this place and take our chances in the woods. It’ll be dark soon. We’re not safe here.”

  “I’m not sure I agree,” was Colcu’s retort, but he ran with Kymon to where the artefacts lay scattered. They gathered as many as they could carry in one crooked arm, then ran back to the cleft.

  Too late. The howling and wailing song were much closer.

  “We’re going to need a god’s help now,” said Colcu.

  “Not a god,” Kymon whispered, his eyes suddenly bright. “We need to make a sanctuary to Urskumug.”

  “Urskumug again. You say the name like a boy in a fever.”

  “We have to make his sanctuary! It’s just a chance.” He listened nervously to the first sounds of approach through the rock.

  “You have the stink of madness about you,” whispered Colcu.

  “Then you have a keen nose. This is madness. But what have we to lose? Give me the tusks. The boar’s tusks. And those spines from its neck!”

  Reluctantly Colcu unwound them from his belt. Kymon grabbed the trophies and ran to the honey child, dropping to his knees and fingering one of the faces of the stone plinth on which she stood. “No. Not here,” he said urgently. “This is Queller’s stone.”

  As if responding to the sound of the mistress’s name, Queller’s cat-hounds came pouring through the gap in the rock, howling, fangs bared, large eyes luminous with blood-lust. At the same time a torch was flung into the arena, and the grass began to burn fiercely.

  Colcu and Kymon reacted as if in combat, instinctively and furiously. They ran at their attackers, drawing their swords as they did so. Colcu seemed almost to fly as he somersaulted over two of the creatures, sword-blade flashing in the moonlight and firelight as he struck one down. He leaped back up at once and turned in the air, blade extended, doing fierce damage.

  Kymon was also adept at the feat of the five leaps. The earth might have been a blanket, throwing him up into the air. He was sprayed with blood twice, dropping to a crouch after the fifth leap, waiting for the pack to pounce.

  They had circled him, feral and furious. The stench in the arena was foul.

  Four of them attacked him all at once, and two catlike heads flew through the air. Then Colcu appeared out of nowhere, and Kymon found himself below two pumping, foul-smelling carcases.

  The fires were fanned by a wind. The two youths stood back to back, breathing hard, preparing for the next assault.

  It didn’t come. Kymon looked round, looked up. Rising there against the night sky, on top of the rock wall, came the sinister figure of Wild Creature Lady herself. Peering down, pale and silver, hard-eyed and dispassionate, Queller sat on her mount, arms outstretched, fingers spread. The strange, subduing tune ceased. Her gaze never left Kymon’s.

  Then she sang briefly.

  Her hunting creatures spread out widely, a steady encirclement, some sidling through the smouldering grass where the torch still burned.

  The moon emerged from behind a cloud, and the arena was alive with the gloss and glow of watching, waiting eyes.

  Kymon took his chance. He darted forward and grasped the burning torch where it lay. He smoothed the flames from the handle, then raced to the first cave, calling to Colcu, who needed no second urging.

  They made the entrance as the pack clawed at their heels, plunged into the darkness, waited for the assault. But the glowing eyes stayed outside. This place still had Shaper’s power within it.

  It was the chamber of paintings. The images seemed to writhe, shadow movements from the dying flame of the torch.

  “Thank you for that leap,” Colcu said. “I owe you one leap.”

  “I’ll be claiming it, be sure of that,” the younger boy said breathlessly, and with a smile. Colcu looked back into the depths of the chamber.

  “I’m not going down there. Life is too short to risk an eternal walk. A Tairon walk.”

  “I agree,” said Kymon as he started to search the chamber’s walls.

  When he had been here before he had seen the way each of the niches had been dedicated to a different animal. He was certain he had seen drawings of a boar.

  “Be quick,” Colcu said. “Whatever you have in mind, do it quickly. Our friendly fire is guttering its last.”

  Kymon held the torch very still. It was a crude affair, and the flame was small, the light a tiny relief from the blackness. He moved around the chamber with caution, gaze intent on the images. Bulls, horses, cats, hounds … at last he found the boar, three of them, overlapping and ferocious in their illustration.

  He fumbled at his belt and produced the souvenirs cut from their last meal, tusks and spine, and placed them in the niche.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Colcu asked.

  “Of course not. But what makes a sanctuary? Something dedicated by priests with ritual and secret knowledge? Or something needed by the heart? Urskumug told me I could summon him if needed.”

  “We need something.”

  Kymon called for Urskumug. He knelt before the three boars and reminded Urskumug of his promise, during the Moon Hunt. At the entrance to the chamber the pack howled. A few feral faces started to peer inside, cautious, nervous, testing the threshold. They became bolder.

  “Urskumug!” Kymon finally cried in desperation and anger. The torch was flickering. Even as Kymon’s anguished shout died away into the silence of the tomb, the fire flared briefly and died.

  But at that moment, the chamber shook. There was the sound of laboured breathing from the deep recesses. A snorting sound, a grunt: a boar-sound.

  As the beast emerged from the tunnel, its flanks threw Colcu against one wall and Kymon against the other. Its spiny hide was as sharp as a sword blade, and both youths were grazed badly. The massive animal stalked past them on all fours, ignoring them, head lowered.

  The pack fled before it. It rose onto its hind legs as it reached the arena and stared hard at Queller. Beast and Beast Woman exchanged a long, impassive gaze. Then, astonishingly, Lady of the Wild Creatures backed away across the rock, eyes alive with anger and frustration. With a flailing shake of her head, she had suddenly gone, and her creatures slunk back through the passage, to the land beyond.

  As Kymon emerged cautiously from the cave, Urskumug turned briefly to glance down at him. The human face, chalk-white and angry, gave no sign of recognising the young Cornovidian.

  “Thank you,” Kymon said. “I’m astonished you heard my call. But thank you.”

  Still no response. Urskumug looked away, stared at the small dead boar by the entrance. Kymon felt his heart race, uncertain about Urskumug’s response to its slaughtered kin. But the great beast dropped back to all fours and bounded across the smouldering grass to leap up the rock wall, landing with a single jump on the very spot
where Queller had watched proceedings. It turned its snout up and sniffed the air, then looked into the distance.

  A last, lingering glance at Kymon and it was gone, out onto the mountain.

  Where Colcu and Kymon stood, stunned by the speed of arrival and departure of this ancient apparition, the crystal container lay smashed. Urskumug had kicked it over when it had run for the wall. The honey child lay in the shattered glass, a crumpled figure, coated with the sweet sticky product of the bee.

  “It did that deliberately,” Colcu said quietly. “I saw it.”

  “Why? Why break the tomb?”

  Before Colcu could reply, a voice spoke to them from the channel in the rock. “I think it means we should take her with us.”

  The youths were startled for a moment as they stared at the apparition that stood there, face like the moon, body clothed in dark material, but clothed in a familiar way.

  “Merlin?” Kymon asked cautiously. And then with a great sigh of relief: “Merlin!”

  * * *

  I had found them. And they were alive. And Kymon was proud of his makeshift sanctuary, and I would not let him know that, when I had realised what he was doing, I had given a good shout to the Oldest Animal myself. That had hurt! Deep in the bones.

  I let Moondream slip away.

  Kymon grinned as he saw my true face. “How far are we from the ship?” he asked.

  “A long walk. Wrap the girl in my cloak.”

  “The girl? This girl? She’ll start to stink.”

  “Not for days. She’s well covered. But flies will be a problem, feeding on the honey. Quickly. We have someone else to find before we can go back to the harbour.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Cloak of Forests

  Segomas and the boy were not where I had left them, in a grove cloaked by silent forest, a still wood, sleeping quietly in the temporary absence of the mask-wearer who had summoned it.

  Kymon noticed my sudden alarm. We stood on scrubby hillside, looking into the valley, to the pale, mist-shrouded east.

  “I left them here.…”

  “Who?”

  “Segomas. The oak man. And your young friend Maelfor.”

  “Maelfor is alive?” Kymon asked. His eyes had brightened. “He fell a long way.”

  “He fell into safety.”

  What had happened to Skogen? I turned a full circle where I stood, drawing in the land. But younger, sharper eyes than mine found it. Colcu’s! He was laughing and pointing down the side of the hill, where the woodland, I could now see, shimmered in an unnatural way. At the edge of the wood stood a boy and a man, and the boy was beckoning to us.

  The survivors of the kryptoii skidded and slid through the tangle of tight undergrowth, down the slope to greet their old friend. I followed in a more dignified, but less hasty manner.

  Skogen had simply “slipped” down the hill, finding a more natural and easier resting place. I should have remembered this about the masks. Leave them, without sending them back, and they find their own place of safety: Morndun slipping deeper into the underworld; Sinisalo seeking out the company of children; Moondream finding night and the mysterious pull of Luna herself. And so on: the hound to the moon-gazing pack; the fish to the waters where it spawned; the eagle to the eyrie where it could survey the circle of the world through its twice-sharp eyes.

  Segomas drew back into the shadows; the boys huddled.

  And a second surprise was waiting for us. Urtha and Morvodumnos stepped out of the gloom. They were both ragged and thorn-cut. There was so much leaf matter in their hair, they might have been participating at one of the Speakers’ evergrove rituals. Kymon hardly recognised his father for a moment, then flung himself into the man’s embrace.

  Urtha was on his knees, brawny arms round the chattering boy. Kymon was both relieved to see his father and anxious to tell of his own strange experience, the words tumbling from his lips, incoherent and childish, bright with passion if confusing in the detail.

  Urtha, I was able to glean from Segomas, had found a haven from pursuit—the pursuit, no doubt, of Queller’s night creatures—in a small cavern, just beside the brook that flowed through the valley. We had all been drawn to this region, a part of the island that was certainly patrolled by Queller, but which retained a memory of the Shaping Man. We had all encountered the quelling force; we had been lucky to survive. The loss of the boys was a tragedy, that of Talienze a puzzle that would probably never be resolved. They had been unlucky in the chase.

  Segomas was forlorn. He stood now in the brightness of the woodland edge, his back to the bare land. I went up to him and saw sap glistening in his eyes.

  Though there was a tawny tinge to his skin, he seemed almost human. There was even the suggestion of a beard on his face, an echo of the man growing back through the bark as the hard oak was softened by Skogen.

  “I have to leave you,” he said. “I have to find what remains of me.”

  He was trembling. Behind me, Urtha was laughing and the youths talking excitedly. They might have been sitting in the king’s enclosure in Taurovinda, at the end of a day’s hunting, for all their relaxation.

  “Segomas,” I said to the Coritanian gently, “you died, or were executed, in Greek Land. This is not Greek Land. And you died, or were executed, at a time that has not yet come into existence. Do you understand? Argo and this island have played a fine set of tricks with us. When we leave this place, we will soon go back to where we belong, but that place is unborn as yet. Your death is still to come. You can’t find your remains here. They aren’t here. It would be a senseless quest.”

  “I’m here,” he insisted. “I had a dream while you were away. I heard the battle that raged in Delphi that time. I saw my fate. You were right. I was reduced to a cloak of skin and a cruel skull-mask. It hangs in a shrine here, with fifteen of my friends. They brought us here as tribute, in exchange for something. The dream was very clear. If I have to wait a few years, I’ll wait. But this is where I was brought, and it’s from here that I can return home to my proper grave.”

  He was insistent and strong. The sap glistened on his mouth as well, and on his brow.

  It occurred to me then how many aspects of the masks I didn’t fully understand. Not just that they would find a place of comfort, if abandoned, but that they had qualities and abilities beyond that which could be summoned by the user at the time: in this case me.

  Skogen is a forest that casts a shadow through time, and not just to the past but to the future, too. The “cloak of forests” had detected Segomas in the future of this land, somewhere in a cleft in the hills, a gap in the rock, a painted room, a stone building filled with burning herbs and flesh, some future sanctuary.

  So Segomas would stay and Segomas would wait.

  Like his name, I suspected, he would eventually be “victorious” in his small, sad quest.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  A Creature Caught in Amber

  The island was behind us, a memory as dark and obscure as had been the westernmost mountains, the last sight of the land, all colour draining from their slopes, just shadow marking their rise above the sea. Crete, the island of old lore and invention at war, vanished as fast as the setting sun, as wind and ocean favoured Argo and impelled us north and west.

  There was a moment—Tairon felt it, as did I—when the strange forces that had governed our expedition to Shaper’s Land left us. Time was reestablished. The future had been clawed back. The Echonian world that Queller had created, and which Argo had used to show us certain events, was consumed by the very ordinariness of sea-surge and the hard breeze that was to mark our long journey home. To Alba.

  We were a quiet crew, a much diminished crew, glad of kind winds and a lack of storms, so that we were able to make the Pillars of Herakles. Here we rigged sail and caught the northerlies, taking us along the dangerous coast of Iberia. And it was here that for the first time we formed a council to press Jason on events he had claimed not to remember.
r />   It was clear, to me at least, that Argo had removed the barrier of obscurity from part of the events in Jason’s past with her. From the moment we had passed the Stochaides, off the coast of Gaul, Jason’s demeanour had changed. He had become troubled and thoughtful. He had taken more time at the steering oar than was necessary, and his gaze—whilst attentive to the sea—had been distant and personal.

  Argo herself had remained aloof; the goddess, haglike, scowling, would not respond to requests for conversation.

  * * *

  I had tried, without success, to explain the twists of Time that Queller and Argo had settled upon us during our stay on Crete. Tairon understood to an extent—a labyrinth-runner, and a man used to mazes, it was natural that he should have at least a feel for the maze that we had just left. But it was beyond Urtha’s capacity to comprehend how Segomas, for example, would now live through hundreds of years until, distantly, he would be born; and grown; and dispatched to a foreign fight; and despatched cruelly; and slung, still alive, in a Cretan grove, to be flayed and his organs eaten, the skin dried and made into a cloak, one of many layers, the others being his companions-in-arms, also captured; and how he would be discovered by the oak-image of his carcase that had been made by an estranged and exiled spirit from the very beginnings of the island where he, Segomas, would finally find his otherworldly peace.

  Truthfully, I, too, found the whole thought a little confusing, so how these other men could comprehend the play-of-centuries was never a question that needed to be asked: they simply couldn’t. And as for Queller’s conjuring with the multiple echoes of land and events that coexist in any one place … well, it was best we left the concept unquestioned and not discussed.

  Argo had led us towards an understanding of why Urtha’s land had been subsumed by Ghostland.

  The question now? How had Shaper come to be in Ghostland itself, a Shade Place, yes, but of haunted shores, hunt-howling forests, iron-bloodied plains, and rafter-ringing hostels in which he did not belong?