The Iron Grail

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘A need for the dead,’ I said. ‘I need a vehicle.’

  ‘You’ll have your choice of those. But these aren’t ordinary dead, Merlin. They no longer belong to us.’

  He watched me, wondering if I knew to what he referred: that the corpses in the marsh were the property of gods, the earth, or the night-stalking warlord Araun, who gathered the spirits of those who had betrayed their own lives. These were mostly adulterers, matricides, hostages from other clans who had been deserted and men who had shirked battle-combat.

  ‘Besides all that,’ he added, ‘this place has been used from before our clan ever came here. There are some very old corpses in those pools.’

  ‘I’m just going to…’ how could I put it to the anxious man? ‘borrow one. For a while. I’ll take the consequences.

  ‘You certainly will,’ the once-druid said emphatically. ‘I resign my charge of watching over you against anything other than a worldly man with an iron sword.’

  ‘I ask for no more,’ I reassured the wan-faced warrior-priest.

  The raised wooden walkway on which we crouched was as corrupt as the battlements of the hill fort, battered by winter, weakened by rain, half sinking into the mire. I walked out along it with the greatest care. It branched twice, running into the willow groves, but I kept always to the left. Behind me, Cathabach had lit a torch. Its small flickering glow was comforting in this stinking, silent darkness.

  The platform I finally reached had also been ravaged by the winds, but there was enough planking left to sit upon. Around me, in the darkness, creatures moved and scurried, splashed and chattered. They had come to think of this killing ground as their own again. The tarred and leathered coracles were all half submerged, the homes of eels and rats. The willows loomed eerily in the slender light, drooping giants, the fronds of their branches gathering in the bones of three thousand years of water sacrifice.

  I have written elsewhere about the painful and frightening process by which Morndun is called, and the dead can be addressed and used as guides. The last time I had resorted to this particularly unpleasant form of travel had been by the Daan river, before the great assault on Delphi, in Greek Land. I was still haunted and hounded in my sleep by the sights and voices I had aroused during that desperate mission.

  I felt sick, now, as I summoned the dead.

  They struggled. The first thing I felt was their tussle against the ropes and hazel pegs that had forced them into the mire. Most were rotten, bones dissolved, only the grimace of their jaws remaining. Still they screamed, the shadows of their souls, the thin shards of light left in the bleached bones, fighting to return.

  I needed someone more complete.

  I felt the flexing of a wronged man, his hands bound behind him, his throat opened by the blade, his lungs packed with mud.

  He thrashed like a small fish out of water, several feet below the reeds. He turned on to his back, sat up, pushed and strained to reach the surface, and distantly I saw the reed-bed shift and part as he managed to struggle into a kneeling position, sunken eyes blinking to grab the moonlight, leathery skin holding his bones together.

  He was neat and trimmed, his beard cut elegantly, his nails manicured, the patterns on his body those of a noble man, a prince.

  I was not ready for this! he raged in my head. I was betrayed. I was tricked. My nine years had not been served!

  Nine years and the king is drowned, I remembered, though that was a practice from many generations before Urtha’s. So this man was more than a prince; he was a young king who had been selected for midwinter sacrifice before his time. His anger was tangible, terrible, persuasive … useful.

  ‘I need your help,’ I whispered to him.

  My brother has caused me to be put in this place. He rides with the priests at moonrise; he sheds blood on the tall stones with them. He has betrayed me.

  How could I tell him that that betrayal had been long since forgotten? As he lay in anger in the mire, his brother was staked down somewhere else, a victim, almost certainly, of his presumption. I had not been there to witness it, of course; but I had witnessed such betrayals on many occasions.

  ‘I need your help,’ I repeated. His form rose to its feet, shambling in the murky darkness, glistening with water, hunched with anger.

  A voice behind me rasped, I will help you if you take me to my children.

  I turned quickly. The lank-haired, corrupted figure of a woman leaned towards me, clinging to the edge of the platform. Hollows in her skull still sparkled faintly with the thread of life. The rope around her neck, biting into the sinews of her throat, did not constrict the ghostly voice. Behind her, a tall man swayed, watching me, hoping. His arms were bound behind him. The shaft of hazel wood that had been driven through his neck to fix him in the marsh stuck from his gizzard like a broken spear.

  I will help, he whispered. Can you free me? I came here as hostage. I was used as a slave. I was killed on a whim.

  ‘There is nothing I can do for you.’

  When the dead come awake, it is best to be blunt with them. They had little understanding of the realities of Time, and of how they could do nothing to change past events. Sometimes, of course, Time allowed for resurrection. That was why Jason was again in the world. But such extravagances were rare.

  I realised I was getting impatient with the thought of more of these rotting memories surfacing to moan at me. The leather-faced prince, his body preserved remarkably where he had been buried a thousand years ago, was exactly what I needed.

  I sent the others back to the mud, kicking the woman away from where she gripped the oak platform. As she sank back she wailed at me, but I hardened my heart as I had hardened it for ten thousand years.

  Cut me loose, the princely leatherskin demanded.

  ‘When you’ve helped me.’

  I’m tied to this place, he whispered.

  ‘You are a threshold I need to cross,’ I replied. ‘I am looking for a woman, dead and wandering. She will have been walking in circles, so she can’t be too far away.’

  The leatherskin was silent. I let him brood for a while. His mind was sludge, but there was a sharp point of memory that assisted his decision: that since he could never leave this place, there could be no real reward for him for helping me, not in terms of resurrection. But I had insight, memory, and one valuable gift to give him. He murmured: I will tell you my name. You will repeat that name. Make a mark somewhere that shows my name. Make it so that I cannot be forgotten. I must not be forgotten. Will you do this?

  ‘I will make every effort to make sure your name is never forgotten. First help me find the spirit of a woman, a queen in her country, called Aylamunda.’

  He had been walking towards me through the mire. Now I saw the gold band around his brow and the red and blue chevrons down the left side of his neck.

  A Trojan? Here, in Alba?

  Do you recognise me?

  ‘The siege of your city was a millennium ago. The story is told across the known world: the persistence of the Greeklanders, the savagery of your champion Hector, the cunning of the Greek commander Odysseus. Only a few of you escaped. How long did you wander?’

  Half my life. A sword blow from Achilles opened my skull to the air. I lost my wits; but when I healed and became strong again I raised a small army of mercenaries and sailed west. I came to this fabled island. The island of mists and the dead. My ship was burned and buried below the citadel I founded. Does it still exist, I wonder? I set out to explore the land, but I strayed too far north, out of safety, and it was my fate to fall into the wrong hands. Do you recognise me now?

  A citadel on Alba, founded by a Trojan? I knew of it. On a wide river in the south, dedicated to Llew. The stronghold had long since been swallowed by the earth.

  ‘Brutus. You fled with the noble Aeneas…’

  Aeneas. Aeneas. A good friend. I lost sight of him when I lost my wits. What was his fate, I wonder.

  To be renowned across the southern world, I thought
to myself, to found a dynasty, but I blocked those thoughts from this probing corpse. Brutus, ill-fated founder of a now ruined fortress on the shores of the river Taemisis, had brought knowledge and skill to this mist-shrouded island, but had been rewarded with a ritual death when he had strayed to the stone sanctuary that had long been built on the willow banks of Nantosuelta.

  Remember my name, Brutus’s ghostly whisper urged. And mark the place of my burial.

  ‘I shall,’ I promised him.

  He struggled against the ropes that bound his arms, then turned and stepped through the reeds, back to his resting place. He called to me to follow, and I stepped as Morndun, the ghost in the land, into the darkness of the world where the restless and uprooted wandered.

  * * *

  This was a night world, a realm of gloom, similar to the underworlds of the Greeklanders and Scythians. Nothing Elysian here, just full-leafed trees, swirling pools and crumbling rocks. There was movement everywhere, but it slipped, shade-like, into the dark clefts of cliffs and encompassing paths of the forest.

  I walked until my limbs ached, skirting the wide, silent meres and crossing the sluggish, icy streams that drained the moonless hills. The spirit of Brutus walked behind me in silence, ghost-limbs freed from their bondage, reaching out occasionally to tug at my clothes, to make me stop and stare at the lumbering shape of an animal, or the forlorn figure of a woman.

  He had seen the red-eared bull on many occasions. It had often crossed the crystal flow of Nantosuelta, sometimes alone, sometimes led by a small band of white-haired, silver-armoured riders.

  I tried to keep track of time in this bleak, lightless world, but the measure was hard. There was no rest, no sleep, no food, no drink. It was exactly what I had expected: a wandering, a steady walk through shallow valleys and round whispering woods. Perhaps two days and nights, perhaps three, walking a circle, a small reflection of the Path I walked all my life.

  And we found the bull.

  It was walking steadily to the south, head lowered, huge horns scything the long grass, towering above me in the night. The ground vibrated like distant thunder with each step it took. Its massive white body was covered with bushes and stunted trees, gnarled growths from its heaving flanks, tangled up with the flailing ropes that bound the shrouded remains of sacrificial victims. They lolled and dangled like children’s puppets as the beast moved on its ponderous way. Behind it, arms crossed over their chests, a straggling group of ten or twelve people followed, heads lowered like the bull’s. These were those of the lost and forgotten who had died during a time when the Donn was stepping through the land, and had followed the beast.

  When I called for Aylamunda, one of the forlorn figures raised its head and looked towards me. Bright eyes in a sad face met my own, a hand quickly brushed away the lank, greying hair. She wouldn’t have recognised me. We had never met. But there was the merest flicker of hope in her snow-white features, as if she was aware that her time of wandering would now come to an end.

  The Donn suddenly stopped in its tracks, shaking its shoulders and stroking the ground with its left hoof. Its huge head turned to look at me, breath misting from its nostrils, the sound of its breathing like a massive pair of bellows in Wayland’s forge. It lumbered round, approached me, lowered its head until the miasma of its breath enveloped me. Eyes the size of shields blinked, blocking out my ethereal reflection.

  Then the head went up and it bellowed, turned back along its path, back towards the river where it flowed through this Stygian limbo.

  I was shaking, both with relief and with the effort of this search. I loathed travelling in Morndun; it was exactly like walking with Death. But I had persevered, and now with Brutus still behind me I followed the bull until we returned to the place where the Trojan had met his end. The bull and Aylamunda and the others went on towards the roots of the fortress, soon lost to my view.

  I crossed back to the night world of Urtha’s land and whispered to the shifting reeds, where Brutus had returned, ‘I’ll keep my promise,’ as I stretched my stiff and aching limbs.

  It was almost dawn. I could hear Cathabach calling for me from the far end of the walkway into the marsh, where he waited for me. There was no anxiety or urgency in his voice. He had probably called to me all the time I had been away, keeping the connection between us.

  I stumbled back to where he crouched, hunched in his cloak on dry ground. He greeted me with a smile of relief and a small skin of cool, honeyed ale. He offered no food. The meat and oatcake he had brought for me had proved too tempting during his vigil, even though I had been gone for only one night, as it turned out. It was not important. He seemed very satisfied with what I had seen during my journey. What I had learned meant that he could now complete the funeral arrangements in the most appropriate manner.

  ‘Her spirit is home. And the boat is being built,’ he added cryptically. ‘The processional way is ready. The pyre will be ready shortly.’

  We went back to the groves.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Thunder Feat

  As far as anyone from Taurovinda was aware, the double ring of stones on the rise of ground overlooking the river had been standing for all time. A ceremonial way, now hidden below the long grass, had wound across the Plain of MaegCatha from the Bull Gate of the hill fort to the stones; a shorter path then led from the sanctuary to the river itself. The stones had been encircled, now, by a high fence of willow, though their decorated tops showed above the barricade, and the fence was open to the water.

  In remote times past, the procession of the dead had begun on the hill and made its way to the river, passing through the rings, first resting in the heart of the circle before the butchery of the corpse and the ritual washing of the knives. The ceremonies that celebrated the first budding of spring, or the ripening of corn in autumn, had begun at the river and danced to the summit of the hill, where the marriages of man with earth and woman with tree had been consummated.

  Now, however, the funeral procession would begin at the banks of Nantosuelta, where a crudely fashioned, shallow boat was moored, moving side to side in the flow like a sluggish fish. This flimsy craft had been filled with branches, bright flowers, yellowing leaves and ornately ribboned and tied bundles of grass, on which were placed the two halves of Urtha’s lunula. It took a moment for me to realise that these bundles were shaped into the figure of a woman, lying in repose on the colourful bed of nature, her head at the stern of the ritual ship, the golden half moon on her chest.

  A small hand sneaked into my own. Munda looked up at me, smiling.

  ‘I can hear her singing,’ she said. ‘Or is it a dream?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘But she is close to you, now. She’ll soon go to her proper place, across the river.’

  The girl cocked her head, struggling with a thought, then asked the question. ‘You’re very old,’ she began.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Did you ever love anybody?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, wondering where this was leading.

  ‘What did you do when they died? You don’t seem to belong anywhere. How did you bury them? How do you visit them?’

  I didn’t know how to answer her. There had been so many short encounters in my life: I had left so many women behind; I had seen a few die, and grieved for them, some greatly so. But I made a point of never returning to where I had known such affection. It was too hard to stare at the time-ruined remains of a place that once I had known well.

  The only real love I had known was still half in shadow, and hiding in the land of shadows. Medea, the enchantress of Colchis, Jason’s once-wife. She was close to me again, afraid, uncertain, defensive and defiant, I was sure.

  She would have had aged: unlike me, she had used her Time-given powers to protect herself and the sons she loved. But she would still be beautiful.

  ‘You’re crying,’ the girl beside me whispered. Her hand tightened on mine. ‘Don’t cry. I’ve seen it for you, Merl
in. Nothing is hidden—I’ve seen it constant; I’ve seen it joyful. Not yet, but one day in time to come. Everything will be all right.’

  For a moment I was too stunned to react. Then I gripped her by the shoulders and shook her gently but forcefully. ‘Never do that!’ I admonished her. ‘It’s a dangerous thing, to see into a friend’s future.’

  ‘I couldn’t help it!’ she said in alarm, eyes widening as she looked up at me. ‘I didn’t look for it. The sights just come. Why is that wrong?’

  It would have taken too long to explain. As she had said the words I had been powerfully and unwelcomely reminded of Niiv, the Northlands enchantress, waving a dead swan at me, shouting defiantly: I have seen you wear forests like a cloak.

  Niiv had prowled and probed my future and used her knowledge in a sinister and devious way. Now she was coming back to Alba. Urtha had seen her in the sea-mist; and the swans were confirmation!

  I was uneasy to say the least.

  The last thing I needed was a brace of visionaries prying ahead into my time on the earth.

  I reassured the girl and left her sitting by the prow of the boat, singing quietly as she stared at the grass effigy.

  Ullanna and her entourage—now extended—rode noisily and colourfully from the north later that day, arriving at the other side of the river, driving before them over thirty head of whites and browns, plump cattle that had grazed widely in the years of the Desertion. They had two deer slung on a white pony, and had found five wild horses, which kicked and reared as they were led to the water’s edge and penned in crude corrals. Seven new men were in the troop, leather-armoured, without helmets, heavily armed and coarse-feathered. But they seemed in awe of Ullanna and obeyed her every direction.

  The Scythian woman could see that the funeral had not yet occurred. She raised a hand to me, in greeting and farewell, then kicked away again, towards the woodland, Conan and Gwyrion with her, always anxious for more hectic adventure. The rest of the troop set up camp across the river, to watch over their plunder and wait for the invitation to cross to the groves and discuss payment for their services.