The Hadassah Covenant

  ‘Wait for me outside,’ the Cretan said briskly, taking up his sword. He turned from us and ran quietly into the darkness.

  * * *

  It was not long before Tairon came staggering from the mountain, breathless from the acrid fumes and with running. His lean features poured with sweat and he squeezed perspiration out of his lank, black hair.

  I waited patiently until he had recovered, and was disappointed when he shook his head.

  ‘I failed. I’d hoped to emerge with him at the other end, but I lost him, though I could hear him running. The only thing I noticed were the smells of honey and the breeze that blows in an oak forest. There’s a special odour to it. But that could be anywhere … couldn’t it?’

  He looked at me, then smiled as he saw the expression on my face.

  Tairon’s words were a revelation—a blind man had suddenly seen the light.

  Orgetorix was not here in Delphi. He was at the Oak Temple: Dodona! The sanctuary sacred to Zeus, where young Jason had travelled and begged for a branch of the sacred tree to build into the keel of Argo. Afterwards, his wish granted, that shrine had become Jason’s spiritual home. He would be as attached to it as any child to its mother. I doubted if he even knew it, but I had known it, when I had sailed with him, long years ago. The oak that had been crafted so carefully into the ship had claimed her captain as its son. There were a thousand spirits wandering inside Argo, and Jason was one of them.

  A fact Medea knew too well. She was leading him there, not away from her son, but to the confused and lost young man.

  She had confounded me, and blighted my vision; she had poisoned her son’s mind to his father, and performed feats of enchantment that were stripping the years from her faster than a hunter can paunch the entrails from a deer.

  She had tried to keep her son from his father; now she was certainly bringing them together. That she had done this was as clear to me as Elkavar’s shining, ready, uncomprehending face. What better way to rid herself of Jason, than to have his own son kill him?

  ‘He’s at Dodona!’ I said to Elkavar, and the Hibernian replied, ‘That means as much to me as that he’s on the moon. But whatever it means, just tell me when, and when not, to sing.’

  ‘Sing to your heart’s content,’ I said to him. ‘I have to go separately from you, now. Jason is in danger. I can’t afford to get lost again by going through the underworld, though you and Tairon may fare better. But for the moment at least, this is goodbye.’

  ‘Not for too long, I hope,’ the Hibernian murmured with a frown. ‘I was beginning to get used to you. And you are my best chance of getting back to my own country.’

  ‘I’m capable of becoming as lost as you, I assure you.’

  ‘And where exactly are you going now?’ Tairon asked curiously.

  ‘To find Argo and ask to sail in her again.’

  * * *

  Gwyrion was camped alone, a small fire burning, his weapons around him. He seemed nervous, too small a guard for so precious a burden. The ragged lump of Argo was in its cart, below the skins. The pale-featured figurehead lay exposed, face to the sky as if resting. The Cymbrian watched me through tired eyes as I approached him.

  ‘She’s not happy,’ he said to me in a dark voice. ‘It’s all I can do to pacify her. Jason must take her back soon to the north. This is not going right.’

  I agreed with him, then climbed into the cart, uncovered the heart of ancient wood and crouched before it.

  ‘Mielikki. Argo. Spirit of the Ship! I need to go to Dodona, where part of you still lives…’

  For a while there was cold silence, then the Spirit of Argo flowed out and embraced me. I was crouching among grey, hot rocks, yellow gorse and the gnarled trunks of olives. Mielikki was there, young and bright-faced, sitting in her summer guise a little way from me. She was unveiled, her fair hair tied in a topknot, her dress no more than a thin tunic. She sat cross-legged below a vast, spreading oak; beyond her, the hills were hazy with heat, green with bushes and woods, scented with herbs.

  ‘This place frightens me,’ she said. ‘I am not used to such warmth. Do you recognise it, Merlin? This is where a part of the ship came from, lifetimes ago. This tree. Isn’t she beautiful? So old, so old … you can see the scar where Jason cut her limb to make his ship.’

  I could see, then, the wide oak, canopy so full, was scarred a hundred times, a hundred Jasons who had taken their fill of this special wood when their prayers had been answered.

  So almost without asking, I had already been allowed through the ship to Dodona. She had treated me kindly.

  As if sensing my thought, the Forest Lady said hungrily, ‘Yes. You’re there. And the army has not reached it yet. It is unsundered, but almost deserted. You can search safely for Jason, but promise me, Merlin—that when you’ve found what you’ve come for, you will take me home. I must go home. Who will take me home?’

  She was pleading, her fair face creased with anxiety.

  ‘I will take you home,’ I said to her. ‘Jason and I both. I promise you on my great age.’

  ‘And with the unreliability of youth? I must go home,’ Lady Forest hissed at me again. ‘This place is too strange. I am out of my world. Where is the girl? Where is that impetuous girl?’

  ‘I left her by the ocean. She expects me to return to her. I don’t anticipate fulfilling her wish, though I don’t think she’ll follow me, now. But like you, I feel frightened of something.’

  Mielikki shuddered and looked around.

  ‘Yes. Fierce Eyes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes. She’s somewhere close. I smell her. She has murder in mind. Come back to me when you’re finished, Merlin. And if you do see that girl, tell her to come to me. Remind her she belongs to me.’

  * * *

  Murder in mind?

  Medea had moved through and over the world with impunity. What a shock it must have been to sniff the wind, one morning, one winter, and smell Jason’s stench again: the lake-wracked man, dragged up from the deeps, tied to his rotten ship by weed and rags. Had she seen his dead eyes open? Had she heard the gurgling of water in his lungs, the spilling of the water from those lungs, the surge of air and life back into his frozen corpse?

  What feverish, frightening dreams she must have had that night!

  Cold face, fish-belly white, the black-grey hair matted around his skull; eyes opening to her in that dream.

  You killed my sons. The lake has given me back. The hunt is on again, Medea. The hunt is on again!

  Her dreams only, I imagine. But after all that time, living in a world empty of what she loved, chasing the years, watching each winter give way to spring, counting the summers, counting the passing of the lives of those around her, running, running, hiding in the shadows, waiting for that moment, that wonderful, blissful moment …

  When one of her sons stepped, blinking, out of the cave in Arkamon, little ghost-brother by his side …

  When the other woke in some damp dell in the heart of Alba …

  To whom did she go first, I wondered (as I searched for her at Dodona, running through the valley, sniffing the air, using what was marked on my bones to stop her blinding me again). Whose hair did she first stroke, invisibly, secretly, a wraith in their lives, a dream in their lives, sucking their life, their pleasure, their innocence, a mother more ancient than the caves they lived in; a mother, greedily drinking their new experience?

  Did she clutch them in her dreams? Did she dance as if they knew her, holding their ghosts to her breast, singing of her triumph? My boys. My boys. And daddy’s far, far away, pike-chewed, ice-clad, dissolved in the lake.

  Did she ever hear Jason’s scream from that lake?

  My sons! Give me back my sons!

  Was she deaf to the fact that Jason had never died? Argo, brave Argo, faithful Argo, had never let the ghost depart from his mortal body. Had she heard those cries? Perhaps it had never occurred to her to listen.

  Lazy!

  She was just like me. Of course she was
. We had grown up together, we had learned together, we were the lazy ones, she in her way, I in mine. I had loved her in another time; it was all I could do to keep the memory of that love at bay.

  But it lay there, in my spirit-haunted head, like the most thrilling of memories, waiting to come back when the clouds dispersed and the sun came out.

  I countered the feeling with the single thought: in all her life, no matter what forgotten life she had had with me, she had loved Jason more, and loved her sons more than Jason. She had left the Path for love; she had stayed away from the Path for hate.

  And that was right. Whatever she had done, she had found a moment of true happiness. Whatever she had become, she was only living out the consequences of that moment of bliss.

  * * *

  A moment of bliss. In ten thousand years of living.

  * * *

  ‘Do you understand, then?’ I heard her say, her voice a shock to me in the stillness of the grove. ‘Do you understand at last? Did you never feel such a thing yourself? You must have done!’

  She was standing behind me. When I turned, it was to take her in my arms, an action compelled by memories still hidden from me. But her body was like rock. There was no love left between us. Or if there was, she was not willing to let it be felt. I looked at her face, so beautiful despite the greed of Time, her hair still like polished copper; into her eyes, so lovely, so clever; her breath like summer fruit; our fingers intertwined briefly. A beauty that had not faded … lost in time … almost untouchable.

  ‘Did you never stray?’ Medea asked me, brushing my lips with hers.

  ‘No. I left the Path. I found a few friendships. I watched the world from a distance. I never strayed in the way that you have strayed.’

  ‘And do you remember how it was between us? Long ago, in the wildwood, in the bright clearings?’

  She was strong. She would certainly know that I remembered a part of it. We were both awakening from a long sleep of years, discovering that we were not alone, that there were others like us in the world, and that we had shared life. But I said quite bluntly: ‘No.’

  She seemed almost saddened by that, but went on, ‘I’ve let myself remember … just a little. It’s there if you look. What a long life we’ve both had. We were together so briefly, Merlin. Oh yes, I know it’s you, now. I didn’t want to believe it, but I do believe it. But I cannot believe you never strayed from the Path.’ She looked at me curiously. ‘What a lonely man you must have been. You’ve lived so little. Some might call that: wasted. I feel sad for you.’

  Like Niiv, Medea was scratching at my defences, though in more expert fashion than the Pohjolan waif, I sensed. But she knew what I knew, that neither of us could reveal ourselves when the contact was this close.

  To detach myself from her powerful and fragrant charm, I thought of Jason.

  ‘You’ve poisoned your son’s mind against his father.’

  ‘Of course! Both of them!’ She laughed, looking at me as if I should have known better.

  ‘Thesokorus hates Jason for no other reason than that you hate him. Is that how you use your charm? Your itching bones? By taking away the lives of your precious children?’

  Grief flashed across her face, I swear it; a look of such pain, such anguish. And then she was hard again, bitter-eyed and watching me with that same angry intensity.

  ‘Precious, Merlin? Yes. They are precious. And why are they precious? Did you ever ask yourself that question? How many precious children do you think I’ve had? Do you think these were the only two?’

  The world stopped still around me as I thought of Niiv, and her half-child—perhaps half imagined; and Meerga, her ancestor, and that wretched half-child that had been conceived and lived into old age, but always under the influence of the guardian spirit I had placed upon her senses. And of how I had always known that I could not risk again giving life to any child who would continue to live on in the ordinary world.

  Medea had been bound by that same knowledge and she quickly saw that I understood. Were there tears in her eyes? She whispered, ‘I lost count of the children that I had to send from my body. Can you imagine that? But I named each one before I let them go. I am haunted by them, Merlin!’

  For the first time there was tenderness in the way she used my nickname.

  ‘But I couldn’t give them life; it would not have been fair to them. You know what I mean. You must do. Then again, perhaps you don’t, lost in your own selfish world. Of all my children, only those two seemed to be of Jason and only Jason, when I looked at them, when they were inside me. I gave them birth. I was lucky with them. They are Jason’s children. They have only a shadow of myself inside them. There is no danger in shadows. And I loved them. I sacrificed so much to be sure that we could have a normal life for as long as he and my children could live a normal life, in Iolkos! I expected to see them die, I always knew I would see them die. But that would not happen for years. I loved him as I had once loved you … all that time ago. We have forgotten so much, Merlin. But so rare, isn’t it? So rare, to find such love…’

  Yes, I said, giving in to her. Or did I only think the words? I can’t remember. I was remembering too much of Medea before she had vanished from my world, lost in time.

  ‘And he betrayed me,’ she shouted, though more in pain than anger. ‘He abandoned me for that other woman, Glauce. He left me. And he would have taken the boys, my children. Tell me, Merlin: what was I supposed to do?’

  She was pulling lightly at the fabric of her dress where it draped her breasts, a mime of the way she had rent her dress in the echoing corridors of her palace, distraught to the point of suicide on discovering that Jason had left her. In all the long years, still the manner of her losing Jason tormented her.

  I had no answer to her question. I don’t imagine she wanted an answer to that question. I simply said, ‘But you took your children’s lives away from them. What life have they had? You hid them from yourself as well as from their father. And after all that, they still don’t see you. A pet gets more affection from its owner than Thesokorus ever receives from you.’

  ‘Cruel words,’ she said with a cold, pained look.

  ‘True words.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not true at all. I’d lived without them for a long time. It’s taken time to get used to them again. But I give them a mother’s comfort in their sleep. When they were younger, I gave them each the comfort of the shadow of their brother. For company. When the time is right, I’ll come into their waking lives and re-unite them. The time was almost right when you brought their father back.’

  ‘And so you poisoned their minds. To suit your own end.’

  She frowned and folded her arms across her chest, then looked down, as if contemplating a new reality. ‘What’s done is done,’ she whispered.

  ‘And you poisoned mine. I could have easily told Jason that you were here. But it seemed imperative that I shouldn’t. That was not my reasoning at work.’

  ‘Nor mine,’ she said, looking up at me significantly, a half-smile on her face. ‘You didn’t tell Jason because you felt truer to me than to him. You still do, Merlin. You’re just not letting yourself know it.’

  I could neither move nor speak. Medea gazed at me sadly, then stepped forward and embraced me briefly. Her lips lingered on mine before she pulled away.

  Her eyes shimmered. ‘You have a long way to go to catch up with me, Merlin. But will you try? When Jason is gone, everything will be clear for us. He and his son are stalking each other even now, in the valley below us. When it’s done, please try to find me. I shan’t be far from you.’

  Her pain and longing, and the sense of elusive love returning, had confused me, and I fell away from her even as she turned from me and also seemed to fall away, into the haze of heat over the grey rocks.

  I literally fell from her, losing my footing and plunging down the steep slope, slipping and rolling through the bushes until I came to the bottom of the hill, to find crows feeding on
human carrion, two naked Greeklanders, faces covered with helmets, bellies with blood.

  Water rushed over rocks and I crawled, bruised and bewildered, to drench my face in the cool flow. Because of the dead men who were draped across the stream, I didn’t drink, but my senses returned quickly. I rolled over and stared at the brilliance of the sky. And after a while, two dark figures peered down at me, one on each side of the bubbling river.

  Their interest in me lasted for just a moment. Perhaps they thought I was dead. I’d certainly decided not to move. Besides, they had other things on their minds, and I peered briefly into one of them.

  * * *

  Emerging from the mountain into the sunlight, he had recognised the sanctuary at once, by the shape of the hills and by the high, white walls, near the river, that surrounded the False Oak, where untrue hearts were drawn. He looked up the hill to the tumble of craggy grey rocks, and the huge tree that grew there. Somewhere on its gnarled bark his sign, the young Jason’s sign, had by now spread to a blur as the trunk had expanded with the generations.

  He had run through the twisting passages for an age. He was exhausted. Sweat ran freely from below the leather rim of his iron helmet. But he had never been in any doubt that Dodona lay ahead of him: he could smell the honeyed air; he could hear the rustle of the summer oak.

  Medea had vanished. He could not hear her or see her. She had slipped into her own ‘Ghostland’, though Jason knew she would probably be watching.

  Standing in the shadow of the cliff, he could see furtive movement in the distance. And three small, white horses, harnessing hanging loose, grazed nervously nearby. Otherwise, to his surprise, the whole area of the temple seemed deserted.

  He approached one of the ponies, caught the reins, then led it down through the trees towards the water and the silent buildings of the shrine. Again, he caught sight of movement ahead of him, a man leading a horse among the rocks, crossing and re-crossing the small river, as if searching, Jason thought. It was hard to make out his features, but like Jason he was armoured in the short trousers and leather kilt and cuirass of the invader. His dark hair was cropped and spiky.