The Broken Kings

by Robert Holdstock

  Durandond had acted with wisdom, even thought the act must have seemed cowardly. But I knew something that this shadow of the king might not have known: that what Durandond had put in place was a new clan kingdom, and a kingdom based around the land, not the citadel. Yes, Taurovinda was central to the land. But greed was not central to the stronghold.

  Such a simple change. And yet it meant that one day Pendragon would inhabit the territory, with his own gutsy and lusty spirit.

  Do these things matter to you who perhaps read this long after the events? I have no way of telling. All I can tell you is that in those days, these things mattered.

  * * *

  Watching through Morndun’s mask, I understood that Durandond was remembering the time of the fall with some anguish. He had died, I was certain, with thoughts of his father on his mind. He sat on the bench in his tomb, slumped forward on his knees, looking around at the goods in his mortuary house, his gaze lingering longest on the shield and helmet positioned at the head of the bound and sleeping corpse. A mask of tarnished silver covered the face, but Durandond’s thick white hair still lay spread on the wood of the bier.

  After centuries, this mortuary house was still spacious, the rot visible only in certain hangings, and in the tarnishing of the metal, and in the form of the bones of his five hunting hounds, curled at his feet. The wooden bier, strong layers of oak, and the oak pillars holding up the heavy ceiling were still intact.

  Durandond had not been buried with his wife and children, which surprised me, but then I was not aware of any fate that his family might have suffered.

  “Eventually we came to the sea,” Durandond went on. “We were scattered along the coast, and sent messengers between our forces. The last to arrive was Vercindond of the Vedilici. An enclosure was constructed for the five kings and their families; a second was constructed to contain the wagons with the honoured dead, those that we had managed to raise from the earth before the Rieve swept across us. A hundred carts were placed in circles within that enclosure, and it was guarded night and day.

  “We set to the task of building boats. So many boats! They lay like an ancient fleet along the strands below the cliffs. Some were designed for horses, some for the wagons, some for supplies. There is a skill in building ships, but we had built them for the river Rein, not for this unpredictable grey sea.

  “By the summer, though, we had boats enough to cross to the land we knew as Alba. We did not anticipate a friendly reception. Those first weeks after our landings were bloody and furious. The people used chariots and horses in ways that astonished us. They seemed to have mastered the power of stones, great rocks flew at us. Their priests were more warrior than healers. They did us damage.

  “But we forced our way west. We were a great force against the occasional war band from the older inhabitants of Alba. We took over their mortuary grounds for camps and fortified them. We drove them this way and that. Many of them retreated into the deep valleys and dense forests, out of sight, but not out of our thinking. They watched us constantly as we scoured our new land for the right places to settle.

  “And one by one my foster brothers found a place to stop, consider, then to make a decision to settle. First Orogoth, then Cailum. A moon later, Vercindond had a vision of his fortress to the east and turned back the way we had come. Radagos went deeper into the west, and though messages came from him for some days, there was a moment when they ceased, and our young Speaker scryed that he had stumbled into the Otherworld, and been consumed by it. A dreadful fate.

  “As for me,” the shade glanced at me, frowning. “I found your hill. The hill as green as the cloak I gave you. I swear that it grew before my eyes, one mist-shrouded morning when I stood with Evian, my wife, lost in the wild land, unable to sleep, feeling the pinch of cold and hunger. We seemed to be heading towards a great lake, or sea, some expanse of water scattered with islets just visible through the fog. I remember saying, ‘We will never find a place to start again.’

  “‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘We can stay right here if you want. The mist will clear. It feels firm below our feet. I can hear the belling of stags. This land is rich. And I’m tired of wandering. Make a decision.’

  “There was an uncompromising sort of challenge in her voice, the first time I’d heard it. She was tired and finding me tiresome. I didn’t know it, but our firstborn was already flexing his muscles inside her.

  “As the fog cleared, we saw the illusion of water was just dew on the plain, and the hill was there, forested, bare-topped, stretching away from us, but steep from our point of view. We were looking at it from the east, and in my mind’s eye I could see the shimmer of gates and walls.

  “On the top of the hill a bull was grazing. The grass there was bright. The bull was white. I had never seen a bull like it. By evening, four of us had crept up through the wooded flanks of Taurovinda and captured the beast. It was immense, and it gored one of us badly. But we caught him and tethered him, and then we took possession of the ground. The next morning, as trees were felled to make a roadway, I drove the first stake of the palisade wall into the earth. I felt it open the hill below me. I sent down roots and here they’ll stay.

  “I sleep below that mark.”

  * * *

  I let the spirit pause for a while. As with Tairon’s mother, time spent in this resurrected state was short. Immediately after death: the ephemera, or the “twilight time.” Long after death, the “returning dream.” But like all dreams, this time of imagining would quickly corrupt into chaos.

  Eventually I prompted him. “You took a fifth part of what you call the Daidalon. The others also took a fifth part?”

  “Yes. The Daidalon. A man, brought to the Rein as a curiosity many generations before my birth. He had been captured on a southern island, in the southern ocean, by mercenary traders, men more used to dealing in gold-dust, weapons, and the skins of sheep, I was told. Daidalon was their name for him. He had been traded as a weapon in himself. My ancestors thought of him as a trickster. He was dragged between the citadels and made to perform.”

  Durandond looked up at me. “This was before my time, long before my time. But some of what he created still hung in the great halls of our kingdoms. Carvings, masks, discs, and monstrous, tiny forms, attached to wings. Sometimes when a storm raged outside the hall, the winged statues would actually struggle to fly. This was not just the wind on the delicate frames, the butterfly wings. They truly seemed to struggle to escape the leather thongs that suspended them. They had life in them.”

  “And this Daidalon?”

  Durandond pointed to the casket in the corner of his mortuary house. “A fifth of the part of him was kept in there. The heart and lungs of the man. That’s what I was told. The heart and lungs of the man. Made out of gold, beaten thin, two layers with a code inside them. But they were taken soon after my death.”

  Made out of gold.

  I urged Durandond to recall everything he had been taught as a child about the Daidalon. He sighed. The spirit was weary. The house was becoming gloomy, earth closing in, the smell of dank suggesting that not everything was as pristine in this mortuary as perhaps it looked. Durandond was becoming agitated. He needed to reinhabit the corpse; to return to whatever island in the Realm of the Shadows of Heroes he rode with vigour. He was, after all, no more than one of the Dead, though he was not party to the vengeance that the Dead seemed to be wreaking on this land that he had claimed as his own.

  Which was perhaps why he kept apart.

  But this presence of memory was fading fast.

  “When he died, in one of the citadels, he began to show what lay beneath. Flesh and bone, yes, but struts and tendons made of metal. And organs that were not blood-filled but metal-sheened. Bronze and silver and gold and copper; and there was amber in him; and hard stone that gleamed with colour when looked at in different ways, though it seemed at a glance to be as pure as ice. And other stones, shaped carefully, that bled rich colours, from scarlet to the blue
of a summer sky; from twilight green to the dark purple that oozes from belladonna.

  “The skin and flesh were just the mask. Some god, some forge of the gods, had filled the carcase of this man with moving parts.

  “My ancestors cut him up and divided the parts. Five parts. Each had its own power: small gold discs from the eyes that opened a whole new world to those who knew how to look through them. His hands were bronze bones, but they could summon elemental forces that no Speaker could manage. The gold and silver plate that they found in his skull brought dreams and visions that have no meaning, but induced madness. In his tongue there was a golden comb that vibrated with sound, the sound of languages that no Speaker could comprehend. Some of the languages were in song form, so I’m told. When the comb sang—and it took only a touch of the metal to make it sing for a moon or more—the night sky changed.”

  “How,” I asked him quietly, “do you know that the fifth part was stolen?”

  “It happened during the twilight moment, shortly after I had died, when I still saw the world around me. I was making ready to ride to the river, to the Hostel of the Fine Red and Silver Horses, to select my steed for the other world. The mortuary house had been prepared at the end of a shaft, deep below, but I was still on the high platform, covered in my cloak and shield, in front of the doors to my hall. Speaker for the Land came furtively to where the grave gifts were being gathered. It was night. Though I was guarded by the High Woman and my surviving sons and their hounds, he must have entranced them. He opened the casket and removed the gold. He tied a cord to it and slung it round his neck. There was nothing I could do.”

  “How was it shaped? The heart and lungs.”

  “Like a crescent moon,” Durandond said. “The blood and breath of the man.”

  * * *

  I let him rest then. The spirit was not just weary; it was expended. Apprehension filled the mortuary house. Perhaps it was protected against whatever possessed the hill, but this long-dead king was aware that his founding nation was in great danger. Whether he knew, in that spirit-sense, that Ghostland had already claimed his kingdom, I didn’t know. I had disturbed a rest that was already disturbed. I would disturb it no longer.

  I dismissed Morndun and summoned Cunhaval the hound, and with Cunhaval’s aid scrabbled my way along the winding shaft, back to the surface.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Discarded Dreams

  I was weary by the time I reached the upper chamber of Durandond’s burial shaft. I could feel the fresh air from above and took two deep breaths.

  The next thing I knew, a small shape had launched itself at me from one of the corners, and draped her arms around my neck.

  “Did you find him? Did you speak to him? Did you raise him from the dead?”

  Niiv was nothing if not exuberantly curious.

  “Yes. I did.”

  In the darkness, all I could see was a strange glow from her eyes, a hint of light coming from deep within her. Her breath was sweet. She brushed her lips on mine, a cursory acknowledgement of being glad to see me, before she persisted, “Did you use Morndun? To raise him?”

  “Of course I did. And it hurts to do so.”

  “Teach me how to hurt like that. Teach me the death mask.”

  “You never give up.”

  “I’ll always give in!”

  Again she kissed me, but now she felt the tiredness in my bones and ceased her unsubtle fingering of my weary carcase in search of any pattern, inscribed on the hidden ivory, that might give her that extra little bit of “charm.”

  “You need to sleep,” she said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Did you get answers? The answers you were looking for?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “May I share them?”

  “Yes, you may.”

  “But not now!” she insisted, to my surprise. “Time for that later.” She was fussing at me, concerned for me. “Get some food; get some sleep. The hounds don’t seem to worry about us moving around the orchard, just as long as we stay inside the fence.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You didn’t really subdue the metal monstrosities, did you!” She was teasing me in the dark. Her voice gave her away.

  “Didn’t have to. They were set to stop you leaving the orchard, not the lodge. And they didn’t see me coming in because I’m good at that sort of thing. But they’re powerful. All of Shaper’s creations are powerful.”

  “He transformed the land.”

  “He transformed himself!”

  “Can you do that?” We had started to crawl up the shaft.

  “No. The summoning of the shadow-masks and possession of beasts—my talents—are not the same.”

  “He’s more potent than you. Is that what you think?”

  Her question caused me to shiver. Indeed, what did I think? I had never experienced anything like this Daidalos. For some time now I had been wondering whether or not he was one of the original nine who were sent to walk the Path. The nine children selected for a task whose design and outcome were facts withheld from them. I didn’t remember him from childhood. And I was sure that only Medea and I had failed, as yet, to return to that starting place; to return home after all the millennia. Daidalos, then, was perhaps from a second home. The past was almost as mysterious as the unknown, unfathomable future. More profound and wiser minds than mine had shaped the world, then, and I was perhaps a far smaller rock in the mountain than I’d realised at that time.

  “He’s … different to me,” I replied to the eager Niiv. “He draws his strength from a place I don’t understand.”

  There was silence for a while as we found the grips and steps that led us up to the grove and the fallen stone and small light. Then Niiv whispered. “Take care, my Merlin. Be careful. I want to find you again after—after everything is finished.”

  * * *

  There had been a strange look in her eyes and a wistful note in her voice. Had I been aware of both these things at the time? I imagine so. Her words, ambiguous, haunted, gentle, had struck me like a dart. But I had brushed them off, as I would have brushed off the stab of an insect’s sting. Noticed, but not allowed to be notable.

  I remember thinking only that I did not want to leave the girl; that I did not want to lose her, not yet. And that yes, of course, I would be careful.

  She made her way into the shadows of the orchard. A breeze blustered for a moment, a whisper of nature that seemed to speak words: it was my imagination, of course. Wasn’t it? To hear the breeze whisper: Don’t go back to her.

  Whatever it is, it has transformed the hill.

  Cathabach’s words: but had they been said as warning? Or as guidance?

  The old shaft will take you down, Cathabach had said. The old shaft? It took me a moment only to intuit that he had meant the sacred well.

  I made my way through the stone maze. It was a small shock to discover the shrivelled, shrunken remains of the three young women who had guarded the place. Each was seated, arms folded, head thrown back, mouth gaping. They looked exactly as if the very spirit and air had been sucked from them in a single instant.

  I had descended into the hill by way of the well before. There is a feeling of drowning, then of intense cold. The walls contain you, the waters spin you, icy liquid forces itself into your lungs; the deep earth itself seems to be pulling at your feet.

  And then you are on a damp ledge, by a flowing river, illuminated by streaks of phosphorescence in the cavern walls. This is the place where the waters of Nantosuelta feed the labyrinthine currents of the hill, channels that flow between the rocks, and spill in several places onto the land as simple springs.

  Taurovinda had always been connected with Ghostland, and this watery, placental link was proof enough.

  Shaper had been here, though for how long, I couldn’t tell. Long enough, however, to have left his mark on the walls and ledges. His symbols were everywhere; the stone had been shaped into figures; he had played, her
e, played at animating the rock itself. Discarded discs, pressed from poor metal, lay scattered everywhere, but it seemed to me that for a while at least they had functioned.

  He had made Taurovinda into a Shaping Chamber. How long ago? Not that long. Perhaps he had probed here from the Otherworld over the years, before establishing his first foothold in Urtha’s land, across the river, an advance camp preparatory for the full invasion.

  He had listened to the life above him. He had viewed the land. He had directed his attention to the East, away from the setting sun. East. Home. His birthplace.

  His life, his mind, his fury resonated here, fresh in the ancient place of smoothed rock and flowing stream. Discarded dreams, echoes of new challenges, still sang from the surfaces. Wherever Shaper went, he left a trail of desire. I was reminded of the eerie afterpresence of Queller, in the cave above Akirotiri, another entity so old, so close to the embrace of earth and forest, that her scent lingered wherever she journeyed, like a distant cry caught on a spiralling wind, fading slowly, never to vanish completely.

  What are you doing? I asked of the slick faces marked on the cavern. Where are you going? I whispered to the freezing water. The earth rumbled, a mournful movement, the echo of a storm.

  I didn’t need to answer my own question. But I needed to find Shaper. And he was still at the river, at the ancient boundary. Why had he not crossed by now? Was he still searching for a way to extend the boundaries of Ghostland? What was holding him back, this man, this creation, who could reassemble his own being, his own life, from the machinery that he himself had fashioned from the ores of the earth and the dreams from the stars?

  Shivering in the cold of the underground, staring at the discarded bronze discs, the crude figures on their dulled surfaces alive with the phosphorescence, a thought arose: vengeance. And a name: Jason.

  And thinking of Jason, of the last moments I had seen him, crouched and anxious on the river’s edge, preparing to cross to Ghostland, I felt suddenly afraid for the man.