The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex

by Robert Holdstock

  Rubobostes was in his twenty-fifth summer, though he looked older because of his size and hirsute wildness. Ruvio had been the same age, then, until he was lost. An astonishing age. Dacians bred beasts to last, it seemed.

  “I’m sorry about your mother. Your suckling mother.”

  “I never knew her,” Rubobostes said with a shrug. “Her face was tattooed on Ruvio’s right flank. Sometimes I would cut away the hair to see that face. She was in profile. She looked very strong. That is all I had of her. I’m sorry to have lost the horse.”

  * * *

  We were in open water, dangerous waters. There was scant breeze, and though the sail was up, we had eight at the oars, rowing lazily and carefully over a sea that caught the full fire of the setting sun. There were islands to the east, but they were no more than black smears on the horizon. Talienze was at the prow, his youthful familiar, Colcu, with him. I had noticed that the closer we came to Crete, the more tense were the muscles in the Speaker’s face, the more anxious his glances. Kymon seemed relaxed, playing game after game of chance with the other kryptoii (occasionally including Colcu). In fact, these were not so much games as a sort of training. They were making rules of silence, laws of secrecy, plans of silent campaign. It was boyish, but it suggested stronger motives.

  Talienze intrigued me, though. He and Jason had not spoken a word together, not in all the long days of the voyage. Everyone else had at least exchanged a greeting, or offered to share a task. Not those two.

  In fact, just once Jason referred to the exile from Armorica who had become so important at the hall of Vortingoros.

  “What do you make of him, Merlin?”

  “Very hidden. Very quiet. He’s becoming anxious.”

  “He’s coming close to home, I think. It’s just a feeling. But he has closer ties with this part of the world than the rest of us. Except for Tairon.”

  “And yourself, of course.”

  “Me? I’m from Achaea. Greek Land.”

  “Are you going home?” I asked quickly, and the mercenary frowned. I was thinking of his earlier comment that he was astonished we were going “back” to that island.

  “No. Not at all. Not home. But I’m returning. I can’t deny that.” He paused for a long time, staring out to sea, clutching the rigging, riding the shifting of the ship. Then said, “But why, how, when, whatever … the memory has gone. The memory is stolen.” And then he looked at me sharply, a half smile of irony on his lips. “At least: it is being denied me for the moment. Argo is ensuring that.”

  “You and Argo have a past that goes a lot deeper, a lot closer, than I’d realised.”

  “I think you’re right,” was Jason’s final comment before he moved to his oar-station to relieve Tairon.

  * * *

  The glow of the sun split the sea horizon to the east. A flock of dark-headed gulls chose to settle and fuss about our mast and rails, spreading their wings and rising as if without effort before landing again, with screeching interest at this solitary vessel. A dark mass rose before us, mountains still in night, though they began to catch the fire of the dawn. A great arm of land was reaching out to embrace us to the left. And Talienze shouted, “The land is here! Steer east, steer round the headland.”

  Bollullos was instantly at the rail and flinging in the sounding rope. “Rocks! Rising fast. Back oar!”

  Activity, mayhem. Argo was slowed. (She could have slowed herself! She was fickle when it came to sailing with men on board.) As the light grew stronger, we saw the shadow of the ship on the ocean floor, the movement of sea creatures, and the strewn shapes of sunken masonry.

  We were in the shallows, and close to breaking on the hidden reef.

  Jason reminded us all, by his actions, of what a great captain he had once been. He spat instructions to the oarsmen, took a hand at the steering oar, whilst using Rubobostes’s great strength, and with Talienze and Tairon scouring the water for hazards, seen and unseen, he guided us round and back to safety, then steered a course about the headland, in the lee of the towering cliffs, and into the safer harbour, below what Tairon instantly recognised as the Cave of Akirotiri.

  We flung down the sea anchor, shipped oars, and waited for the full of the day to make our situation clear.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Queller

  From the cave above the harbour, Queller watched the arrival of the painted ship and its strange crew. She stepped back into the shadows, hugged the cold stone wall, nervous now, and trying to remember. Remember! There was something familiar about the ship.

  Something so familiar about the ship.

  It couldn’t be. It can’t be. So long ago … so long ago …

  There was something familiar about the ship. But that ship—

  No! It can’t be!

  —was long lost, long gone. Time, tide, and the turning of stars and sun and moon, surely by now they had swallowed her up, made reef-wrack of her planks, sea-rot of her decks, and mast, and sail, and that hideous, hateful, grinning, smiling, bitch-headed, bitch-breasted, siren-singing guardian!

  No!

  Not that ship, not now, not after so many turns of the sky. Not after so many turns of triumph.

  She crept forward, trying to quell her fear. The ship bobbed in the bay among the skeletons of other ships. The tide rushed and faded, the hulk moved on the swell, her small and pitiful crew gazing upwards, scouring the cliffs, pink, blank faces, curious and fear-filled, uncertain, but anxious to be ashore.

  Queller caught the stink of one of them and again drew back into the shadows.

  Not him. Not again. It can’t be him. Fawn and Vine! Quell the beat of my heart! Not him. Long dead. Long dead. Not him. Not him.

  Again she invoked Fawn and Vine, the Bull and the Labra, but there was no answer from these old forces, though they lay throughout the island, quietly aware.

  She pulled back from the cave, ran briskly through the labyrinth, emerging in the storm-cave in the mountains, among the broken statues and scattered bronzes that had been brought here to appease the storm in the time of the Shaper. She looked out across the woods and the fields; she listened to the rushing of water, the flutter of wings, the rustle of the vines as they spread and reached, snagging and tugging at each other in their urge to grow more densely. She listened to the bees. She smelled the potency of the herbs and flowers on which they gorged. She trembled as the earth itself slowly swallowed all that was rotten: a snake ingesting its prey.

  Again she passed below the earth, this time coming to the southern shore, high on the hill, looking out across the vast expanse of aquamarine, sensing only the surge and swell of the great ocean.

  And back through the earth once more, emerging this time at the head of a dark valley. There were always storm clouds here, swirling silently. The bleak valley threatened her, even though its occupant had long since disappeared. The water that flowed from the valley was ice-cold and sour. The trees that grew from the steep sides of the gorge were mangled, blackened, living on the stone-wood, the petrified remains of the forest that had once grown here. Shaper’s valley.

  Now Queller’s valley. She had fought hard for the place. She hurried to the nearby stone ruins.

  The honey child was still in her sanctuary. Queller ran quickly around the crumbling walls, glancing inside to see the girl. Her heart calmed a little. The honey child was watching her. Everything was safe here. Nothing had been disturbed. Nothing had passed up the valley.

  The honey child was smiling. She was so pretty. Queller waved to her and called, “I can’t talk now. But I’ll come soon.”

  She slipped back into the cave, traversed the labyrinth, closing rock, opening rock, and came again to the cliff mouth overlooking the northern haven.

  The ship was moored, men finding their footing on the weed-slick rocks, offloading equipment. A small group were threading their way up one of the old paths, their eyes on the slippery slope, their attention directed towards safety.

  Three others were com
ing towards the wide, low cave. One of them looked shifty, brighter-eyed and more canny than the others. He looked wrong. He was young, but he was heavy with age. Terrible with age.

  Queller slipped back into the darkness. This was very bad. Very bad indeed.

  She would have to think. There was only one place to go to think this through, and so, like a silver shade, she slipped into the underworld, abandoning the cold cavern.

  But she had left an echo there, an echo of her fear and surprise, of her concern and her loneliness, an echo inaudible to a man like Urtha, who was with me as we entered the cavern, but an echo that rang in the head of a man “terrible with age” louder than one of the huge bronze timbals that had sounded in Medea’s skinning-fleshing sanctuary.

  I drank that echo and digested it. I could not see the woman’s face, but her silent chatter and her restless, nervous flutter were as distinct as the paintings on the cavern’s walls.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Raptor Rising

  Before that, however, for a long while we stood on Argo’s nervous deck, away from the quays, riding the swell, examining the harbour.

  Tairon was puzzled. “This is certainly the harbour at Akirotiri,” he said, “But it’s deserted. This is one of the great harbours of the island. You can see that just by looking around you.”

  Enclosed by rising cliffs, protected by a double barrier of sea walls, the quays themselves lined by a tumble of buildings, from sprawling warehouses to clustered dwellings, all painted in vivid colours, the place indeed seemed rich.

  Those colours! Vibrant greens, blues of every hue, from aquamarine to lavender, rosy pinks, and dawn-blushing orange … the exotic brilliance that surrounded the choppy waters was in stark contrast to the brooding mountain that clasped the haven.

  “That is the Akirotirian Cave,” Tairon reminded us, pointing to the low, wide mouth, halfway up one of the steep slopes. “It’s the cave where Kronos shot the arrow that struck Zeus as he swam towards Greek Land. Zeus used the arrow as a mast, tying his shirt to it as a sail. There are more caves on Crete than can be imagined, and all were created to celebrate or begin a life. Dyctea is the greatest of them all, deep inland, almost impossible to find. That same Zeus was first formed there, spilling from its womb covered with hair, but already fully shaped as a man.”

  The maze-runner stared around him, uncomprehending and disturbed. “This place should not be so abandoned. What’s going on?” he mused.

  “We won’t find out just by sitting here,” Jason said loudly from behind us. He had been listening to the conversation. “Let’s berth, sort out the ship, find what supplies we can, and get a team or two up to the high ground. Pretty colours, and freshly painted, too. Deserted? Then there’s a reason. I think we’ll find food supplies if we look carefully.”

  There was general agreement. Everyone was hungry, but the rationing of fresh water was a greater incentive to strike land. The mast was lowered into place, and the starboard oars run out. The sea anchor was hauled aboard and with deft, gentle strokes, and with Bollullos at the steering oar, the crew brought Argo into the curling grasp of the double wall.

  We turned the ship and moored her so that she faced the open sea, at the very edge of the town. If we needed a fast escape, this would be the only place from which to effect the manoeuvre.

  The boys were given the task of cleaning the vessel. The Greeklanders attended to repairs, to the cracked oars, the ripped sail, and the torn and cracked hands of those of us who had become callused as we had heaved across the ocean, from Alba to this warm, unwelcoming place.

  Jason led a small group up to the westernmost edge of the cliffs, to survey the lie of the land. With Urtha and Tairon, I ascended the steep path to the cave.

  And it was here, crouched below the confusion of images painted and scratched upon the rough walls, that I caught the echo from the woman who had been watching us all along.

  * * *

  A torch held before him, Urtha was staring at the decorations. They showed birds in flight, and other animals, stretched out as if being wind-dried; and there were odd designs related to ships and sails, and symbols that might have represented engineering structures. The walls were awash with them, overlapping and disordered.

  “These are all very strange,” Urtha observed, somewhat unnecessarily. “I’ve seen nothing like them. They’re human, but not quite. Animal, but not quite. Very strange faces. So strange in the face, so striking in the eyes, almost canine. And so long and thin. They don’t seem to be proportioned right. Though that said, when I look at Rubobostes, more horse than man, I’m not sure that there is anything that can’t be achieved in the womb.”

  He prowled about the deeper part of the cave, stooping occasionally to peer along the narrow shaft that led away from the mouth. Tairon watched him from the entrance. The maze-runner was very disturbed by something, but in answer to my gentle question, he remained impassive, motionless, staring not into the shadows but into his own past, I suspected.

  “It’s gloomy down there,” Urtha said. “But I see glinting: metal perhaps, or that stuff that glows in dark, that funny stone. I saw it on the way to Delphi.”

  “Phosphor.”

  “The tunnel goes a long way, by the looks of it. But it’s narrow. Too narrow for a grown man.”

  The echo of the womanlike but not wholly human creature that had recently been here was still strong. I followed it through the shaft, and Urtha was quite right. The tunnel became no more than a crawling space, winding and branching, a network that curved around, knotted in and about its own dimensions, spreading out into the subterranean gloom. The walls closed in on me, and my breath caught in my lungs, suffocating me with a sudden panic.

  I broke the connection with the strong yet elusive memory, came back to find Urtha settling down on one knee, leaning back on his haunches, the flaring torch dipped before him. He was still staring into the bowels of the cavern.

  “Tairon went down the passage. I could hear him for a while, but now he’s vanished. Shall we go after him?”

  I didn’t think that would be a good idea. Tairon was a labyrinth-runner and if he could get lost—as he had done before—then even I could become dislocated if I wasn’t careful.

  But it would be a great loss to us if Tairon failed to come back.

  * * *

  We needn’t have worried. No sooner had Urtha and I returned to the deserted harbour, meeting up with the other groups that had set off to explore the immediate hinterland around the cove, than Tairon appeared, walking over the ridge of the cliff, clutching his small bag. He came to the path and joined us.

  The water was brisk, a swell beginning to form before a breeze from the west. Dusk was not far off. We exchanged information and observations, nothing much of consequence, certainly nothing that was more important than Tairon’s and my own feeling of entering a cave from which we had been watched, though Tairon was clearly holding something back.

  It was only when Urtha looked around for his son that he asked the question, What happened to the kryptoii?

  Rubobostes answered, “They went up there, along that narrow path, strung out like insects walking along a twig. That bald man, Talneeze, was leading them.”

  The path that he indicated would have taken them over the highest point of the hill overshadowing the harbour.

  “Talienze?”

  “That’s the one. Said he wanted to get the lie of the land. Said that the boys’ eyes were sharper than ours.”

  “I don’t trust him,” Niiv whispered in my ear. Her fingers gripped my arm meaningfully. “I don’t know who he is, that Speaker, I don’t know where he came from. And I don’t trust him.”

  Urtha heard these murmured words and agreed. “He behaved very strangely in the hall where Vortingoros made us welcome. He said he was from the South, an exile. But how far south? The shade of his skin is more like Tairon’s.”

  “I was thinking the same thing myself,” the displaced Cretean offered. “Bu
t his eyes are green and slightly yellow. A very unusual colour for this part of the world. That said,” the maze-runner added carefully, “from the moment we approached the sea channel to this island, the man seemed at home.”

  All of this took some understanding, but for the moment Urtha was more concerned for his son. He sent Bollullos and Cawain to climb the same path. They armed themselves and set off.

  We were hailed from a distance by one of the Greeklanders. Two others were rolling a fat clay pithos out from one of the buildings. When they reached us and hauled the vessel upright, they cut through the thick wax seal to reveal what looked like congealed yellow fat.

  It was solid honey.

  If several of the Argonauts looked a little disappointed that the treasure was not of a more liquid nature, the truth was this was an excellent addition to our occasional meals. Peering into the jar, Niiv added: “There are dark objects at the bottom. Could be fruit.”

  Better still.

  I noticed that she concentrated in that way signifying the rash use of her powers of charm. As she saw more deeply into the jar she suddenly jerked back, frowning quickly.

  “Is it fruit?” I asked her.

  “Nuts,” she replied as she moved to sit down on the quayside, slightly shaky.

  “What sort of nuts?” one of the Greeklanders asked.

  “Large ones,” was all she said, and the Greeklander suddenly understood.

  Better news was to come. A loud hail from the cliff top, towards dusk, announced the return of Bollullos and Caiwain. They were in the company of three of the young kryptoii. As they began to descend the treacherous path, Tairon noticed that the big man was carrying something around his shoulders. It was soon revealed to be a goat, still alive, tethered by the hooves. It was an odd-looking animal indeed, with horns that spiralled in strange ways, and a colour to its coat that seemed more in keeping with the bright hues of flowers than the dull disguise of a grazing animal.