The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex

by Robert Holdstock

  The five fords that crossed the river were all in the west, however, and at each of them now stood a hostel, its doors open, seemingly inviting.

  I went first to the Hostel at the Ford of the Overwhelming Gift.

  Ullanna at once pulled back, as frightened as her mare. Despite its name, the hostel was a grim place, fashioned of oak, a great heavy lintel above the low door. The pillars that stood to each side of the entrance were carved into the grimacing features of goats, standing on their hind legs, heads locked together at the horns, seemingly impaling the image of a woman’s scowling face. A rickety walkway reached from the nearer bank to the muddy island on which the eerie building had risen. Broken swords hung from the eaves, clattering in the brisk breeze. The roof was high, made of poles, unthatched. Smoke drifted from the gaps between these crudely fashioned struts.

  A deep howling noise came from the open door. It set the horses to a nervous disposition and managed even to raise the hairs on the back of my own neck.

  Niiv huddled in the saddle, hood drawn low over her face, keeping close to me.

  On the bridge watching us was a tall man in a dark red cloak, fair hair hanging to his shoulders. His face was clean-shaven. He was young, bright-eyed, carried no weapon, but held the reins of a powerful black horse.

  I recognised the ghostly form of Pendragon. He was a ghost who haunted my dreams. He was a man, as yet unborn, who had visited my life on several occasions, though only fleetingly.

  He beckoned to me and I dismounted, entrusting the reins to Niiv. As I stepped across the narrow bridge, keeping my balance carefully, Pendragon turned, tethered his own steed, and ducked to enter the moaning inn.

  I followed him.

  The moment I stooped through the door into the hostel, I felt the disorientating effect of Ghostland. The narrow corridor seemed to widen and stretch away from me a vast distance. The moaning resolved into the low din of voices, the unearthly sound of laughter. The inn seemed to rock below my feet. The air was heavy with woodsmoke and the smells of roasting meats. The resonating sounds of metal on metal, like the beating of the vast bronze bells I had heard in the east, became recognisable as the striking of iron blades. There was feasting and competition at work in this hostel.

  Rooms opened on both sides of the corridor. Pendragon had disappeared into the belly of the inn.

  I searched the rooms.

  In the first room I saw seven men in plaid cloaks, seated moodily and watching me. Each had balanced a broad-bladed axe across his knees. A copper cauldron was settled over a smouldering fire between them, and I could see the wood and bone hafts of weapons rising above the lip. They scowled at me as I peered into their chamber.

  In another room I saw four much-scarred-faced men, naked to the waist, their chests marked in green dye with the features of wolves. Each had a silver torque around his neck and a circlet of boar’s tusks around his head, tying back fair hair. They seemed afraid and confused, watching me with a curious expression, but making no move to beckon me to join them. They were seated around a large chequered board, across which were scattered small figures carved from bone and dark wood. Each in turn moved a figure with the point of his sword. There seemed to be no reason, no rule to the game, but at each move the others cried out in despair, angrily watching for the next prod of the blade.

  In a third room there was a great open fire, and the carcass of a small ox being slowly turned on a spit by an old man, who turned his toothless face towards me, revealing that his eyes were as empty as his mouth. He grinned and nodded as he sensed me standing there. Two young men, wearing plaid kilts and bone breastplates, were leaping across the roasting animal from opposite directions, and clashing short swords as they somersaulted in midair. The action was not a fight, merely a game, and their bare arms were spotted red from the spitting fat. There is something disturbingly familiar about this, I remember thinking.

  In a fourth room, more of a hall than a room, I found Pendragon again, and his small retinue, and here I ceased my exploration of the hostel.

  This was a wide hall, with benches and tables and a host of men of all types, some bearing weapons, some not, some cloaked, some not, some with cropped hair, others with the high horse-tail style, others with their heads half shaved here, a quarter shaved there, and such a tapestry of tattoos in such a palette of colours that it was hard to distinguish man from pattern. The noise was a din; the throng was at ease. There were clay jars of wine, and wooden barrels of honeyed ale at each table, and the men ladled the liquor into horns or cups and were very drunk. Six or seven heavily cloaked figures carried wide trays of pink-roasted pig joints and spitted fowl.

  Only Pendragon and his four men were sober and without food at their table.

  I sat with them, but having ridden for some time was hungry and thirsty, so availed myself of flesh and wine, a sour brew with a strong aftertaste of pine resin: a Greekland fermentation, I was sure. Even the Dead, it seemed, sent to the south for their pleasures.

  “Drink that and you might stay here forever,” Pendragon growled at me.

  “I’ve been to Ghostland before and escaped,” I replied. “And I’ve been to Greekland taverns and wondered if I’d ever see the next day, let alone the end of the world.”

  “Eat that, and the underworld pigs will claim you for your own,” murmured one of his companions as I tooth-stripped a cut of loin.

  “I’ve eaten in a thousand forbidden places,” I retorted. “Nothing can hold me, except the need for more.”

  “You expect to see the end of the world?” asked a second man. He was young, lightly bearded. He seemed genuinely curious about me, as did a third man, seated next to him, who might have been his twin.

  “My world has ended a thousand times,” I told him enigmatically. “A broken heart, a broken hope, a broken joy. But if you yourself have the same capacity for forgetting as I can summon, then thank whichever god protects you. Memory lost is a life begun again.”

  “That’s a sour and very sorry way to live,” said the fourth of Pendragon’s retinue critically, an older man, his eyes bloodshot, his breathing laboured. “But who am I to say a word against you? I haven’t yet lived. My time is to come. I just hope it comes soon.”

  I asked him his name. Like Pendragon, he had only heard his name in dreams. Morndryd. The name sent a shiver through me. I was puzzled why he should appear in full mature years, rather than youthful like the rest of his band. But this was a curiosity to which, at the moment, I had no time to devote.

  Hunger and thirst satisfied, I asked Pendragon about the hostel, and the men I had seen in the other rooms.

  “There are seven in one, very unhappy men—”

  “Unhappy indeed. And for good reason. They are seven cousins, all sons of a king and his brothers who will resist an armed invasion from the east. The eastern army will be a formidable threat, legions of men equipped with weapons beyond imagining. In order to set an example, they will slaughter those seven men when they are still children. The reason they brood and are angry is because they are aware, in their dreams, that they will never become the men whose bodies they inhabit as they wait for life.”

  “And who are the four men playing at the chequer-board?”

  “They are the four sons of Bricriu, who will possess their own land within two generations. They are compulsive gamblers. They have fallen foul of a druid, also waiting for his birth, who might have foretold their fate, and he has set them the task that you see: to play the game nineteen times nineteen times nineteen moon cycles. The result of the last game will declare their future, but they have lost count. To play too many games, or too few, will be devastating for them.”

  “That’s a complicated number of moons.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And who are the combatants leaping across the roasting ox?”

  Pendragon shrugged. “They are a mystery to me. To everyone here. They don’t seem to belong. They are possessed by the youthful spirit of a different age. The le
aping is compulsive. When they are exhausted, they sleep for several days; they then feed voraciously on the ox. When the carcass is stripped, a new ox is put on the spit and the leaping begins again. They carry a secret; that at least is my suspicion. But not even they are aware from where that secret originates.”

  I didn’t tell him that their activity seemed very familiar to me. They were bull-leaping, but in a place where such a practice did not belong.

  Then I told Pendragon that I had heard he was waiting for me. I asked him what he expected of me. His answer surprised me. I had not expected so depressed a response. He spoke in the formal way, as if he were a Speaker for the Future, rather than a king in waiting.

  “We are aware, we who will one day ride, roam, and rule the land, that we are in a place of waiting. We are all aware that our dreams mean nothing. We have never been born; we are simply the spirits of life and lives that will one day occupy this territory, the forests and plains, the gorges, valleys, the sea channels, the rivers, that high hill with its ancient escarpments, its fallen walls ready to reconstruct.

  “And we will build on the dead, and on what the dead have left behind.

  “We are shadows without history. We live among shadows which brood, breed, and bewail the unfairness of their ancestors. We are hostages, we Unborn, in the Realm of Revenge. To you, those of you who live with your druid tales of how wonderful the world after death will be, be aware, there is nothing comforting about the land of ghosts. Life is as brutal after death as it is before. I do not say to you that the pleasures of forgotten life no longer exist. They do. But when both Dead and yet-to-be-born are ageless, there is no compassion. We have no change in life, no aging, no testing-ground on which to develop the satisfaction and fulfilment that leads to eventual calm, to that moment which we envy—as we watch the world beyond the river—that moment of passing-on. The moment of sublime release.

  “The short life of a man, ending his days of hunting, leads to the long life of the ghost, endlessly hunting.”

  His companions nodded as he spoke, all of them sharing the sudden melancholy.

  After a moment I prompted him: “And you were waiting to see me … because—?”

  “I intend to part company with this hostel, which might be a dangerous thing. But I sense that you are in danger, as is that king you work for, and his family and his nobles.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that the Realm of Shadow Heroes plans to raid the fortress for a second time?”

  Pendragon looked confused. “It’s strange to say this, but it doesn’t feel like it. And yet it has to be the case. When Taurovinda was raided before, the armies gathered at the fords, practised at arms, made themselves fit for the fight, exercised the horses and gathered provisions. This time we are summoned to gather in these grim hostels, but there is no mention of armed conflict. We are simply waiting, though Morndryd has scouted the land behind and there are forces of men moving through the valleys. But they are not coming to the river.

  “This inn is where the Unborn are gathering. We are all very uncertain, some more than others. We were content on our island, the Island at the Edge of Dawn. Good plains for the wild hunt; good forests for the tangled hunt. Good valleys and hills. Good water. Groves where the vision of magic was comforting and sometimes enthralling. When the level of the sea drops occasionally, it reveals a causeway, and at those times I have taken the opportunity to cross and enter the realm of Taurovinda. It is the privilege of the Unborn to be able to tour the land in which they will live. You have seen me on several occasions when that privilege was granted. But always, the word from the whispering shrine at the heart of the Island was to ride abroad and hear and listen to the wind and rain, and note the concerns of the living. To make the journey brief. To come home again.

  “This time we were urged to come to these inns and wait. Boats came to take us from the Edge of Dawn. Our questions, usually answered clearly, are simply ignored. This is a not a raid. This is something different, something greater, sinister, not at all noble. An invasion? If so, it will be of an unexpected nature.”

  I became aware of the clamour in the hall again, the noisy jollity, the angry exchanges, the coughing and choking of men indulging too fiercely in this waiting time.

  “Is there a source behind this sinister, not noble, action? Does the danger come from a single person?”

  Pendragon shook his head. His companions seemed equally uncertain. “The answer to that lies beyond this shadow land. Which is why I wish to cross from this place. But if I lose you in the effort … Merlin.”

  He used my name with a hesitancy that suggested it meant more to him than just the fact of remembering how I had introduced myself. From the first moment I had encountered this bright-spirited, bright-eyed warlord, we had both known that we would meet again, though in a more solid, more earthly way, and a long time in the future.

  Indeed, Pendragon went on to conclude: “If I lose you at this time, look for me in the years to come. Look ahead if you can, if you dare risk it. There is an unsettled feeling in the land where your good king rules. One day that world will pass to another king.” He leaned forward and gave me a smile, saying quietly, “And when I take it, I would like it to be free of what corrupts it.”

  I left the hostel and joined Ullanna and Niiv. A while later, Pendragon and his four companions thundered across the bridge, heads low, cloaks flying. The ghostly grey cloud that seemed to reach for them might have been the smoke from the fires, but I saw an angry face there, and five wide-winged birds rose above the riders, beating their way east, following the fleeing Unborn.

  Chapter Seven

  The Shade of Jason’s Son

  The Hostel of the Red Shield Riders was two days’ ride away, through difficult country. The river at the ford here was wild; we approached through a narrow defile, clattering over loose rocks, stumbling on the driftwood that had been deposited there when the river had flooded. A boulder-littered bank faced the rapids and the grim lodge that stretched from the scrubby woodland that crowded the far bank.

  The entrance was a double door in the shape of a woman, her arms outstretched, hands resting on the heads of two rearing hounds. Each entry was between a hound and the woman. She was carved from dark wood, was bare-breasted, her legs covered with a long skirt. Her eyes were gaping holes, dark as night. The hounds seemed to be reaching to rip her, but she held them away from her.

  “An unusual door,” Ullanna observed dryly. “But it reminds me of something.”

  I had had the same feeling. An older image was represented by this sophisticated carving, and it had nothing to do with the world of Urtha, or any world that had preceded him. But which?

  This was the hostel from which the careless daughter of the king had fled in confusion as she realised she had broken taboo, but had also been filled with a sense of change for the good.

  There were guards here. As I left Ullanna on the shore to ride across the shallows, picking my way carefully through the weed-slick boulders, they emerged from the gloom, two men of mean eye, heavily built. They wore loose mail shirts and patchwork trousers. Kirtles stitched from strips of leather protected their loins. They carried oval shields, unmarked and heavy, and a brace of javelins.

  As I clambered onto dry land, one came forward and casually took the bridle of my horse. He muttered a few words to me, watching me carefully. He repeated them, frowning. I entered the spirit of the language for a few moments, and recognised a northern dialect. He was asking me if I was “newly dead” or “another bloody ghost waiting for its flesh.”

  I replied that I was neither, but that a man was waiting for me inside the hostel. His question, though, suggested that traffic through this inn was two-way.

  They allowed me passage into the gloomy interior, and again I found myself in a maze of corridors, with small miserable rooms opening on either side. Distantly, the sounds were of chaos, the clamour of voices and the din of argument. I followed one of the guards towards the light. I l
ed my horse, which tugged nervously as we walked through the narrow corridor towards the open garden at the heart of the hostel. Here, to my surprise, I found a sunlit square that belonged in Greek Land, not in Alba, a place of olive and pine trees, and small houses, whitened with lime, roofed with red clay tiles. The air buzzed and hummed with a different summer. The chaos was behind us. Groups of men and women sat in the shade, drowsily talking, some drinking, a few tending to fires. In the shade of an apple tree, his shield leaning against his knees as he sat, was a young man I recognised, older now by several years and very hard of look. His right eye had taken a slashing blow, and the hair above the scar was white. He was missing a finger of his left hand. His legs and arms were ridged with veins. His clothing was simple, a loose, patterned shirt, knee-length trousers, sandals. But behind him, as he sat ill at ease, were stacked his weapons.

  He was expecting me; that much was certain. The moment I entered the square he saw me, half smiled, then waited for me to tether my horse, and come and sit in the shade.

  And talking of “shades,” Orgetorix had hardly greeted me before he said, “Yes, you’re right. I’m only the shade of the man you knew. You, I’m sure, are Antiokus. You were present when I tried to kill my father. The event is like a dream to me. I see everything through a dark dream. That’s because the living man of whom I’m the shadow communicates to me. I feel his pain. I feel his scars. I feel how lost he is. I grow with him, and change with him, but I’m the shade. I call him my bone-blood-brother. I exist only as long as he is lost.”

  Orgetorix in spirit shape, it seemed, was as melancholy as the young warrior who had roamed the hills and valleys of Greek Land.