The Broken Kings

  “And you?”

  “I’ll find Argo again. She hasn’t left us, not yet. She knows ways into the hill. Durandond will be there. And then we can find a way to take on Shaper. Or whatever it is that Shaper has created within your boundaries.”

  Urtha shivered, shaking his head. He didn’t meet my eye. “You intend to raise Durandond from the dead, then.”

  “I have no choice.”

  “We call him the sleeping king.”

  “I know. I’ve lived in Taurovinda for a long time. I know how you think of Durandond.”

  “To disturb him has always been thought of as unwise. There are prophecies about it. The bards have poems about it. They hardly ever speak them.”

  “It seems to me,” I pointed out, “that your sleeping king has already been rudely awakened.” I put my hand on his arm, and the frowning king paused in his slow walk through the camp. I said, “I never told you this, but I met Durandond when he was a reckless youth.”

  Surprised, Urtha simply raised his eyebrows, waiting for explanation.

  “Yes. He came to me for an insight into his future. I didn’t give it to him. Well, no more than that he would find a hill and make the hill his citadel. Which he did.”

  Urtha smiled. “Taurovinda! But he came from a land of exiles. He came with a thousand champions, a thousand women, a thousand children, and a thousand wagons, piled high with the ancestors of his land. That’s what we learn. That’s all we know. Shafts were dug into the hill, and the ancestors and then Durandond himself were buried there. Cathabach’s sanctuary, the orchard, hides the entrances. Nothing must disturb them, or Taurovinda’s walls will slide out onto the plain, and the bones of the hill will be exposed. That’s what we learn. That’s what we know.”

  Behind us, Bedavor called my name. He was standing by the tent, beckoning to me. Pendragon was leading his horse away from the river.

  My last words to Urtha were, “You’ll soon know more.”

  Bedavor had a horse for me as well, and I rode through the forest with Pendragon, his “sword-healer,” and four of his companions riding behind us, until we came to the edge of a shallow reed-fringed lake. At its centre, a tall heron perched on the prow of a small sunken boat. The wood looked rotten. The proud bird, suddenly aware of us, launched itself into a slow and sinuous flight, circling the mere before gliding into the clutches of the woods.

  Pendragon was searching around on the ground. He picked up four small stones, passing two of them to me. There was the hint of a smile on his face. “Can you hit that wreck, do you think? Without using trickery, I mean.”

  “I resent the implication that I would cheat.”

  He laughed. “You’ll be no damned good to a king in the future unless you’re prepared to cheat, my friend. Watch this!”

  He flung a stone. It caught the sunken boat on the prow. A second bird appeared from nowhere, flapping away in dismay. It must have been nesting out of sight. I flung one of the stones he’d given me. It curved to the left and missed by a man’s length.

  “This way is interesting,” he said, and skipped the stone over the surface of the water. Five skips and it fell short.

  I skipped my own stone. It struck the water seven times, then hit the boat just above the surface of the pool.

  “Our lives in two throws of a stone.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said as Pendragon grinned at me, searching my face, looking me up and down.

  “Of course you do. I’ve had my dalliance with the land that will one day be mine. Now I shall go to sleep until called back through birth. A single throw. You will skip across the years, touching here, touching there, until one day you find me.”

  “You seem very confident that we’re destined to meet in the future.”

  He tapped his head. “Dreams. Have them all time. Seen you many times. That’s why I sought you out, several years ago, when you first came to Alba on that lovely ship.”

  He looked gloomy for a moment, his gaze across the mere. The surface rippled with a breeze, and behind us the horses snorted restlessly. “One dream was more like a waking dream. Right here, right where we’re standing. It was misty and cold. We were moving east to wait for you. There was a band of mercenaries who had the same idea and we were keeping a close eye on them. Bedavor and the others were sleeping. It was towards dusk. Out of nowhere a small boat came suddenly gliding across the pool, turning away from me. Two women in the strangest dress I’ve ever seen, brightly coloured, flashing with blue stones and the gold of metal, were rowing steadily, their eyes on me. A third sat with her back to me. Her cloak was green and fringed with red. Her hair below the green cowl was the colour of bright red copper. She was singing: an eerie voice, but quite beautiful; and the song, though I didn’t understand the words, was haunting and thrilling at the same time. It set my skin crawling. As they vanished into the mist, she glanced over her shoulder, and then I noticed a man’s arm draped over the side of the craft, his fingers just touching the water. And they were gone.”

  “You think this was a dream of your death,” I suggested.

  “I’m certain of it.”

  “Perhaps it was a dream of your transport from Ghostland to new life.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” he murmured with a frown. “But such strange women. Where did they come from? Everything about them was wrong.” He glanced and me and smiled in a resigned sort of way. “Not the time or the place to ask such questions, I suppose.”

  “Wise thinking.”

  “Back to skipping stones,” Pendragon went on as we walked back to Bedavor. “You’ve skipped across the centuries, leaving ripples. But you haven’t hit the mark yet. You’ll make your mark with me. I know in my heart and in my deepest dreams that you and I will be busy, one day, minding each other’s business. So—” He gripped my arm strongly. “—keep a lot of what you call charm in reserve for me. You have a reputation for not squandering your abilities. In years to come, I don’t want you old and frail and easy prey to rogues and the wiles of women such as your delightful Niiv.”

  “Too late for that,” I muttered under my breath.

  If he heard me, he didn’t show it. As we swung ourselves into the saddle, turning for the ridge, the legion, and Nantosuelta, he said, “I can take Urtha, Kymon, one, perhaps two of his companions. The rest will have to take their chances with other returning bands. It’s not passing through the hostel that will be difficult; it will be protecting them on the other side.”

  “Kymon comes with me,” I responded. I already had plans for Kymon. “Take Colcu?”

  “Agreed. And Jason? What about Jason? While you’ve been away, a young man has been asking about him.” We broke into a hard canter, sensing the swift coming of night.

  “How young a man?” I called. Pendragon’s cloak streamed behind him. His voice was harsh. Other thoughts were occupying him now.

  “Travel-weary. Skirmish-marked. Killer of Kings, I think he said his name was. Or King of Killers. A Greeklander. An arrogant bastard. Could hardly understand a word he said.”

  “Orgetorix?”

  “Something that sounded like that. Yes,” he shouted back. “He’s come to kill Jason. Better warn Jason.”

  Pendragon and his sword-healer were far ahead of me, and the sky was lowering.

  And in the confusion that was the edge of Ghostland, Jason’s surviving son was prowling.

  During the night, bands of Unborn returned to the Shadow Realm, noisily crossing the river and riding quickly through the open doors of the Hostels. The legion was ripped in two. But fires remained on the ridge, a determined army of men, women, and children who were prepared to risk their future lives to stop the expansion of the Shadow Realm into land that had been shaped by their ancestors, and was theirs to shape in generations to come.

  At some point in that night, Pendragon and his retinue crossed as well. Urtha and Bollullos, Colcu and Morvodumnos rode among them. I had masked them with a simple charm drawn from Cunhaval, the sp
irit of the hound in the world. It was the best I could think of. To any watching eyes, it would have seemed as if Pendragon rode with his men and dogs. The illusion would have been easily penetrated, but these future champions rode with vital urgency.

  Caiwain and Vortingoros’s men would come with me.

  With Niiv clinging onto my arm (she was nervous, upset that I’d disappeared from the camp for so long), I went in search of Jason. The ridge was a confusion of bright fire, illumination from across the river, and total darkness. The surface of Nantosuelta gleamed like rippling gold.

  Kymon followed us, silent and surly. I could tell he was eager to the point of frustration to return to his land, to find his sister. I had persuaded him that to journey on Argo would bring him closer to the girl and his stepmother. I hoped I was right.

  I found Jason at the river’s edge, wrapped in a dark cloak, a pack of supplies slung over his shoulder. Rubobostes was crouching on the bank, holding a small shallow craft by a rope tether. A simple rowing boat, very primitive, its sides were painted with luminescent green and blue, fishes and trees caught in an intimate embrace, a narrow band of decoration that I instantly recognised as the sight of it opened memory.

  This was Medea’s craft; the pattern—using powdered, night-glowing rocks she had found in the valley where we had grown up—was how she had decorated her own first boat, while all I had done with mine was to use chalk to scratch lines and spirals. Fierce Eyes had been disparagingly amused by my small talent in art.

  Did Jason sense the source of this frail vessel? As I approached him, he turned to look at me, and confirmed that he did.

  She had been standing among the trees, watching him. She had been wearing the robes of the Priestess of the Ram, but the head-veil was lowered now, exposing her face. She was holding two small, identical boats by tethers, restraining them against the tug of the river; but shortly after Jason had arrived at the far bank, she let one of them go. It slipped away, turning on the water, soon lost in the night save for that glimmer of phosphorescence. The other vessel, when she released it, came straight across to Jason and Rubobostes, as if charmed: which of course, it was.

  Rubobostes had caught it by the trailing tether.

  “She’s still watching me. I can feel it,” Jason said. His mood was bleak and uncertain. “What does she want? This is a lure, and I’m her prey. I’m sure of it.”

  I said nothing. If I had expressed a view, it would have been that from personal experience nothing was ever predictable with Medea. The truth might have been the very opposite of his fear. And I remembered my last conversation with her, when she had seemed so mellow.

  “And the other boat,” he went on, staring along the river. “Why two boats? Who’s crossing in the second? What’s she up to?”

  “There’s one way to find out, and that’s to cross. Your safest course is to stay here and defend against whatever might come through those Hostel gates in time to come.”

  Rubobostes growled at my suggestion, standing up, still holding the rope. “Don’t listen to him, Jason. The second boat was meant for me, but it slipped away. I’m the one who must stay here. Are you taking Argo farther up the river?”

  I realised the question was addressed to me. “Yes. She can take us below the fortress.”

  “Then eventually she’ll need her captain,” the Dacian responded, turning to look over his shoulder at the Greeklander. “The boat won’t take two of us. I’ll wait here for you. Pick me up on the way out. And if you find my horse? I’ll be in your service for the rest of my life should you find my Ruvio, my good horse. I miss the beast.”

  Jason glanced at me as he shrugged his pack off his shoulders and tossed it down to the Dacian, to sling into the boat.

  “What’s she up to?” he whispered again.

  Should I tell him about his son? I had only Pendragon’s account of Orgetorix being in the land, looking for his father. If boy and man were to meet, then it should be under circumstances that were not controlled by me, or any other person, though Medea, I was sure, was taking a guiding hand.

  Even now I cannot understand why I took the decision not to tell Jason about the presence, close to him, of his eldest son, a once-favoured boy now grown to a man, who had dealt brutally with his father in the recent past, unaware of the true circumstances of his existence in this modern age. It seemed that vengeance was still strong in the younger man’s mind. He had pursued Jason across half a world, half a world from the oracle at Dodona, in Greek Land, where they had last faced each other.

  Then again: perhaps he was pursuing his mother.

  This was an outcome I would leave to whatever “fates” were miming the story of Jason and his bull-leaping son.

  “Rubobostes is right,” is all I said, and with a shrug Jason clambered into Medea’s boat. The Dacian heaved and sent the craft across the river. Jason used a small oar to keep it moving even as Nantosuelta swept him out of sight downstream, taking him to darkness and the Otherworld.

  As soon as he had gone, I found a piece of wood, stripped off the bark, and sat down, leaning against a tree, to carve a charm pattern. I hadn’t done this for ages, and it was cathartic and engrossing. I suppose I drifted into some form of reverie, half-aware of what I was doing, half-drifting through memory.

  At some point in this detached state I heard Kymon, who had been scavenging, slip down the hill and sit down next to Niiv. The woman had been keeping a distance from me, watching me, but absorbed in thoughts of her own.

  “What’s he doing?” I heard the king’s son ask. “What’s he doing down there, Niiv?”

  “Carving on a piece of wood.”

  “Why?”

  “I get the feeling,” Niiv replied after a moment, “that when he’s finished carving … we’ll all be going west.”

  There was silence for a while. Then Kymon said, “Good. I will go in no other direction. And when I get there…”

  He brooded. Sullen.

  “When you get there?” the Northlander persisted.

  “It doesn’t matter what I find in that world when I get there. I’m taking that world back.”

  “Will that world be surprised to see you?” the girl teased.

  “It knows I’m coming.”

  Later, he walked down the slope to the river’s edge, his moonshadow falling across me. I looked up at him and met his steady gaze. His face had hardened, or was that just a trick of the light?

  “Are you awake? Or drifting in some dream?”

  “I’m awake.”

  His gaze never wavered. “My father once told me that I could never be a king as a man unless I accepted being broken as a child. Now I know what he meant. Ambition tempered with anger, petulance, and the jealous play of childhood lead to strong kings and weak kingdoms. Ambition must always be tempered with wise council. An understanding that can only come with age.”

  “So you’ve found out you’ll not be a great king, just for the moment.”

  “Just a man in the shadow of great kings. Among great men. More than that is not for me to judge.”

  “You’ve been dreaming? This is a vision?”

  “I’ve been thinking. No more than that. I’ll trust visions to you. To men like you. But don’t give me visions of my own life ahead, or of Munda’s.”

  “I’m not a fate … to ‘mime’ your life, to act out what you must do. I thought you knew that.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t understand what you mean. You talk in riddles, Merlin. That’s what I expect of minds that play with Time. My father’s words also. Good luck to you. But none of that matters now. My father and I have chosen to cross the river separately. That much is broken. But Colcu, my great friend, has also chosen to ride separately from me. To help me in my own country. So that much is forged. Most important of all, my grandmother and my mother still lie in that land. Did you know that an owl circles my grandmother’s grave?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And that a bull rises from the earth to
protect my mother’s?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Wisdom and strength. Even though they’re dead, they will be a force to be reckoned with.”

  “Mothers always are.”

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “I’m talking like a child. Obvious things.”

  “Not always obvious, I assure you, even to dying men. Did your father also tell you to think clearly, to listen with attention, and never to act in haste?”

  “Probably. I don’t remember. Except for the bit about haste. What he said was: there is always a time to act with anger; but that time is never when you are angry.”

  I tossed the charm-stick into the river and watched it float away into the night. “I know those words. Another man, a king, once said them to his own son. Your father couldn’t have known him, though.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He was called Odysseus. A Greeklander, from Jason’s time. Have you heard of him?”

  Kymon thought for a moment, then answered in the affirmative. “He fought the sea after fighting the Trojans. I remember now. An inventive man. His great warhorse was made of wood. He rode against the city walls and broke them down. And he claimed men were the equal of gods. He was punished for arrogance. The sea abducted him to be a sea-slave for a lifetime. There was an angry god in the sea. But eventually, out of pity, he granted Odysseus a single cycle of the Moon to be with his wife, before he was taken back to the sea. That’s the story Cathabach told me.”

  What should I add of that old story for this proud boy? Should I inspire him with an account of how Odysseus had claimed back his home during that brief gift of time? Of his coldly calculated slaughter of the lesser men who had arrived in his absence, bees to a flower, to seduce Penelope, his ever-mourning wife? One moon-cycle granted with his wife after a lifetime lost.

  And she hadn’t known that he was already dead when Poseidon—the abducting god—gave him that brief release. Love transcended death. The wife herself was already dying when they met for that moon. I expect they met again later in Hades.

  But during this time in his land he cleared that land of the imposters, encouraged his son to be a great king, and brought a blush back to the pale cheeks of a woman who had thought herself abandoned. So much achieved in so few days.