‘What way under?’ I asked her impulsively.
‘I don’t know what you call them, but you used one once to reach Greek Land. Ways through the underworld. Ways through to the Otherworld. Ways to pass across lands without being seen. Ways home.’
She had a triumphant look about her. I could almost hear the cauldron bubbling, the words screaming to be heard: you and I together, Merlin. What a force we’d be. Your age and knowledge, my youthfulness and energy, a couple in love who could shape mountains: make forests flow around us like cloaks of green.
Her triumphant look, however, was because though she had told me the truth, she had disguised it, and did not expect me to guess it. She was teasing me again. But it was so apparent, now.
The druids, guided by the elemental fortuna, had found their way home, but risen to the earth again in Ghostland! And that would have been a very difficult circumstance for them, to say the least.
‘So they came up in the Otherworld,’ I mused.
She frowned, outraged. ‘I didn’t say that! Why do you say that? Have you been looking inside me? You always tell me not to do that!’
I was surprised by her outburst. ‘You mentioned the Otherworld. Ghostland is close. Fortuna is a tricky elemental. Just the sort of trick it would play.’
‘Fortuna?’
‘Tukhea, then.’
‘How do you know?’ she wailed, eyes wide, angry. ‘You’ve been looking inside me!’
‘It had to be a chancer from Greek Land. An elemental. There are five I know of from Greek Land but only tukhea sits on a man’s shoulders and walks with him through the world. The others just lurk, waiting in caves and woods and such. They dish out luck the way these High Kings dish out slices of a cooked pig’s haunch.’
‘Reluctantly.’
‘Not at all. Randomly, perhaps. But also when appropriate.’
‘You know too much.’
‘I’m old. And experienced. Your own words.’
‘I never used such words,’ she objected furiously and correctly; I had only been imagining the workings of her mind.
But she added, ‘It’s true, though. You know too much. There are no surprises left for you.’
‘There certainly are. You were a surprise.’
‘Yes,’ she said cannily. ‘Because I was born as something different from what I became. Yes. I can understand why you are cautious of me.
‘Mielikki, your guardian, would not be pleased to hear you revealing your birthmarks quite so easily.’
‘My birthmarks?’ Your secrets.
‘No. I won’t. You have secrets from me; I’ll have secrets from you.’
‘That’s another birthmark. Shown to me as easily as if you’d lifted your skirts and beckoned to me. Say nothing, Niiv. Be like Manandoun. Wise counsel is best kept with open eyes and closed mouth.’
‘That sort of saying is as old as the hills.’
‘Older than mountains. And I don’t argue with mountains when I’m in a hurry to go somewhere.’
‘So you don’t want to know what happened here.’
‘I do. I do very much. What you now know affects others. Niiv: you need to protect yourself from yourself, but if you can’t help prying, then there’s no point in hiding the truth.’
She crossed her arms, staring at me coldly, rocking back on her haunches; thinking hard. ‘Is that one of your own birthmarks?’
‘Yes it is,’ I lied. ‘A little given for a little taken.’
‘You think I’m naive. You think I have no judgement.’
‘I think you’re naive. I think your judgement is forming. Slowly. I think you’re dangerous. That last is a birthmark. Now: what happened to Munda? Quickly. I have to find a wolf and go out hunting, when all I really want to do is sit and think.’
* * *
Though the Wolf-heads had transformed into the fleet animals that had become their fedishi (chosen shapes) after death, since they were carrying Munda, flesh and crimson blood, white bone and grey Pallor, they could not travel fast though they had certainly travelled faster than the hounds that Urtha had set on their trail.
I had a good chance of intercepting them before they reached Nantosuelta; they would, I imagined, make for the Ford of the Miscast Spear; that of the Last Farewell would deny them a crossing. A third ford in the area, that of the famous Overwhelming Gift, would also have denied them, since they were anything but heroes.
I summoned the wolf again; and armed with what Niiv had gone on to tell me, I ran in the hope of rescuing Munda.
* * *
I caught up with them in the forest, not far from the river, but far enough to force them to confront the chase, turning to stand their ground. The girl was huddled below the broken bough of an oak. The two wolves slavered and snarled at me, legs braced apart, forming a defensive line on the far side of the small, overgrown glade. I challenged them at once: I should have recognised you earlier. It’s to my shame that I didn’t. Give the girl back. Urtha has suffered enough losses.
They bayed; laughter. He sent us on a long trail in a wilderness of ice. It’s not in our hearts to forgive him for that.
Then attack the man, not his daughter.
If we were attacking the man, what better way to do it than to steal his child?
You made the long journey home. You must have learned a great deal.
We made a long journey, the wolf replied. It did not bring us home.
I was about to continue the argument when, to my astonishment, Munda made a gesture of impatience, throwing a large stone at one of the wolves. For a heartbeat I thought she was urging me to stop talking and reach for her. But her words gave the lie to that naive judgement.
‘Hurry,’ she shouted. ‘Get rid of it! We have to cross before my father gets here and catches us. Hurry!’
The Wolf-heads drew back a little as I lurched forward, shocked by the girl’s words. I realised then that she hadn’t recognised me. Of course! From her point of view her two companions were merely being stalked by a wolf.
One of them said to me, Little Dreamer wants to play with her again. Her brother doesn’t want to play. He sent us to fetch her, and the girl is travelling willingly. She will come to no harm, not for the rest of her life; a very long life in the palace that Little Dreamer has built.
Again, there was a sense of wry humour in the words.
A moment later one of the Wolf-heads leapt at me, and in the moment of the struggle, as we thrashed in the long grass, the other had bolted to the girl, who flung herself on its back, hair flying, clinging to the unkempt but sleek animal as it loped away, and they were gone.
When I travel as the wolf, or any other animal, I am a shadow inside the beast; I had claws and jaws and found the strength to rip my assailant. The fedishi faded as he died; he was the older of the two druids, as I’d suspected, but he gave me a look through his beard that suggested he was at peace. Then I realised that he had bitten through a ligament in my arm. The look on his maw was one of triumph. In the fury of the encounter I had not felt the wound.
Munda was now beyond me. In a short while she would cross back to Ghostland, believing that she belonged there and was welcome there, a dreadful misapprehension.
How was I to break this news to Urtha? I thought long and hard as I limped home, shedding the wolf when I came to the marshes, west of the dark hill, tying a strip of the softened bark of a white willow, around the wounded arm.
What could I now say to the man?
* * *
Urtha was waiting for me in his hall, in a grim but less distressed mood. Kymon and Ullanna were doing their best to comfort him; his retinue sat around the room in half battle-harness, talking quietly.
He could tell at once that I’d failed. He’d also sent his best riders on the fastest horses, but clearly, he surmised, their chase would also be fruitless.
I told him truthfully what the Wolf-heads had told me, that she was going to play with the boy, Little Dreamer; that she would be safe. I didn?
??t mention her strange words: hurry, before my father catches us. I didn’t believe it was the girl talking. I judged that to repeat the instruction would only hurt the chieftain more.
‘And what of Argo? Will she help us cross? Cathabach has told me you’ve been to ask her.’
‘She’s thinking about it,’ I replied carefully. ‘She’s a weary ship, and weary of Jason.’
He said nothing for a moment, then sighed, resolve hardening. ‘Well, then we must find another way to get into Ghostland.’
* * *
One of the women from the well was waiting outside the king’s enclosure, cloak wrapped around her, hood drawn over her head. Cathabach wanted to see me urgently, she told me. He was in the orchard.
I found the man waiting in his cloak of feathers, standing in his arched and thatched bower at the heart of the nemeton. The argonauts who sheltered in the apple grove were not in sight, already in dusk’s shadows.
I told him what Munda had revealed to me. He seemed surprised but not shocked. He asked me what Argo’s response had been to my request. My answer made him sigh.
‘It would have been hard enough persuading Urtha out of his foolish idea of a raid into Ghostland. Now it will be impossible. But for Urtha it will be impossible…’
His hesitation suggested he required a response and I agreed with him. ‘Impossible for him unless he has protection.’
‘But not impossible for him to go there?’
‘As we discussed, it’s not the getting in, it’s the getting out.’
Cathabach touched fingers to the new marks on his chest and cheeks. ‘I’ve prepared myself for his loss. When the king dies, his son rules, unless challenged. When a king is lost, the Speakers for Past, Land and Kings must guard the land for seven years. I am the new Speaker for Kings. The older man who had that honour has now retired from the ritual, and will be sent into his shaft in this orchard in due course. Not yet.’
Why was Cathabach telling me this? He got to the point. ‘A land without a king is a land that is vulnerable, as you have seen all too clearly. That cannot happen again. Merlin … I have seen you summon the shade of a man from his lake burial of generations ago. And if such things as kolossoi exist, temporary life, out of Time, then is it possible that you could reach into the depths of your enchantment and find a way of drawing such a spirit from Urtha: sending it in his place, guarding it, protecting it, bringing it home to be with the king again? Is there any way at all that Urtha can be sheltered with charm, with shadows, with the veneer of a ghost, to allow him to undertake the journey there and back in safety?’
Again he touched the cuts on his body, the dye still soaking into his skin. His gaze at me was strong and steady. ‘If there is to be a price to pay for it, a life to pay for it, then again it is the Speaker for Kings who must pay that price. The older man can be reinstated, to pass on the list and the achievements of our ancestors.’
I was impressed by the man’s courage. He had been Urtha’s closest friend in the retinue of the uthiin, the elite knights who rode with the king; he would always have given his life before the king’s in battle. Most men would. This more calculated offer of sacrifice was a rare quality in my experience. Cathabach had clearly arranged the hierarchical structure of Taurovinda to protect both figurehead and memory.
‘There are two ways in which it might be done,’ I told him. ‘Neither would call for your death. One of them would be a demanding piece of sorcery on my part. And I will willingly practise it. I have a great reserve of energy; it’s time I put it to use.’
I was almost as surprised by my words as Cathabach was pleased with them. I had spent millennia guarding against the wasting consequence of using my skills. The next few generations would be very different for me, though that was just the shadow of a self-prophecy at the time.
‘And the other way?’ the Speaker for Kings asked.
‘She’s thinking about it. Argo. She’s tired, but she might be prepared to give protection to a king. Lets wait and see what she does.’
* * *
As I left the orchard I heard a brief burst of laughter, two women sharing a moment of amusement. Sitting cross-legged, close to the wicker wall of the sanctuary, Atalanta and Ullanna were examining Ullanna’s bow and arrows. Each wore a heavy cloak, but the hoods were thrown back and they had tied their hair identically in a loose braid hanging from the right. Small clay cups and a half-emptied pigskin of fermented milk lay between them. Their conversation was soft, a struggle to understand each others dialect, but with much miming, much humour.
When they realised I was watching them they glanced at me and each, with affection, blew me a kiss. But they were making a point: go away, this is private.
I wonder what they talked about? Ullanna would have learned a great deal, the detail in the legends she had been taught as a child. Atalanta, no doubt, was being fed the stuff of dreams.
Ullanna was very subdued and very sad when I next saw her, returning to the enclosure around the king’s house. But it was a dreamy sort of sadness, as if she knew she had been granted a very special gift an enriching and wonderful gift, but the time for gifts was now finished.
PART FOUR
Argo in the Otherworld
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
from Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Shadows of Heroes
I was woken by the touch of winter on my nose. The air was frigid. The dew on the ground had crystallised; breath frosted. A winter’s dawn painted the sky with star-speckled magenta. Horses whickered and dogs shivered. Across the town, people rose into the chill, astonished at this intrusion of ice into the summer.
The whole of the ceremonial way from hill to river was crusted with white. The evergroves were in their winter wrap. Nantosuelta had frozen upstream for as far as the eye could see.
Sitting aslant on the frozen surface was Argo; she leaned, ready to be pulled upright. The eye on her bow seemed to watch, from the distance, with amusement.
Rubobostes was amazed. Urtha was swearing, tightly wrapped in his heavy cloak as he stared at this winter landscape in astonishment. He was less distressed, now; more angry and determined. But Jason laughed.
‘She says yes,’ he murmured, wiping the gathering ice from his long beard.
‘Who says yes?’ Urtha demanded.
‘The old ship. She’s agreed. Don’t you think so … Antiokus?’
I acknowledged his words. Jason added, ‘You must have spoken to her well. But she has decided to make us work for our journey, Lord Urtha. She won’t make it easy for us.’
‘Your ship has done this? Turned warmth into winter?’
Jason acknowledged the king’s complaint. ‘You’ll work for your battle, it seems.’
‘We’ll have battle enough without your ship testing us,’ the Celt complained. Jason laughed so loudly it came close to insulting Urtha. The two men glared at each other, then lowered their lances. As the old Greeklander turned away, I swear he commented unflatteringly on the trustworthiness of goddesses.
I may be wrong.
It was of no importance to me. I was delighted to see my friend back from her much-needed rest. I knew exactly what Argo was doing: exhausted, she had none the less consented to a further adventure; but homesick, she had created the landscape that most comforted her. Argo, Urtha needed to be reminded, was not at this time the ship of the warm, wine-dark sea of Aegaea. Mielikki, the Forest Lady of the North, now shaped her taste, and snow and ice, and the menace of voytazi, were what excited her. Elemental voytazi, indeed, struck at the ice on the river, causing it to buckle and crack, the mean, pike-faced heads chattering and grinning as these fish creatures, summoned from the deep, came to sniff the air of their temporary domain.
They could consume a man in moments. More impressively, they could hold a man below the wat
er for a year, keeping him alive until they were ready to feed on his flesh.
To each goddess her own helpers; her own hounds; her own terrors. I had thought that beautiful, gentle Hera, daughter of Cronos, had had only benign helpers when she had guided Argo and Jason to the Golden Fleece; but her terrors, when she revealed them, were appalling, though no account of them has survived in the records of that famous voyage, save for my own.
What we needed now was Ruvio, the Dacian’s magisterial horse. Rubobostes and a small retinue rode west to find the creature, and later in the day returned, following the galloping stallion, who raced three times around the fort before coming to a head-shuddering stop before the outer gates. Five mares had galloped with him, red flanks shining, black manes flowing. Their breath frosted voluminously in the winter air. They were Otherworldly by their look, sleek and graceful, all of them pulsing with the beginning of new life, Ruvio’s seed at work in their wombs.
‘Can we take them too?’ Ullanna asked me in a whisper.
‘Not on Argo. But I imagine they’ll wait for Ruvio at Nantosuelta’s ford of farewell. They’ll follow us into Ghostland if they can.
‘Good,’ the Scythian said practically. ‘They’ll be useful. One more string to our bow.’
I laughed out loud. I liked the expression. It was novel. She often coined pithy images such as this. But her mood darkened when she was told she was to stay behind.
Kymon was stalking the length and breadth of Taurovinda in a deep sulk, his hand resting on his sword, his face more grim than the argonauts in the orchard. He too, was not to accompany his father on the expedition, and he was not happy about the fact. He and Manandoun were to take charge of the fortress, to entertain their guests, show hospitality to strangers and defend against intruders.
The boy was still ashamed of his failure, before his father’s return. Anxiety and irritation fought for control in the youthful, flushed features. He wanted the chase, but Urtha was adamant.