The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex

by Robert Holdstock

  I descended a steep, stepped ramp into the gloom of a chamber that had always been deep, and was now deeper in the earth. The clever construction of the building allowed for shafts of light to pick out details on the walls, small pools of illumination in the otherwise complete dark. Everywhere was the labrys, the double-headed axe, some carved in the wall, some carved from stone, a few of corrupting bronze. Sea creatures of all descriptions were painted in these passages and hollow rooms, and the profiled heads of youths and girls watched by the staring eyes of land creatures, their features incomplete. Sometimes I could hear the calls of other Argonauts, heralding their finds, calling out in awe. Their voices carried along the gloomy corridors, echoing through the wells of light.

  The smell of rank stone suddenly gave way to the sharp odour of the ocean. We were a long way inland, but the salt air was unmistakable, as was the sound of surf surging against a beach. That sound excited me. I began to understand the nature of Ak’Gnossos and hurried towards the hidden sea.

  As I did so, I became aware of someone running ahead of me.

  The way to the beach was blocked by a massive gate, its central column a double axe of immense height and breadth, the blades curling down to the floor to allow a double entrance inside the sharpened edges. The haft was a tree, twisted many times around its own core. Within the dulled bronze of the blades I could see the patterns of the night sky, the stars and constellations picked out in detail, now greened by the tarnish and fading.

  I passed through the gate. The ocean heaved against a bleak, stony shore, where marble statues leaned or had already fallen. A three-quarter moon was bright in the night, moonshadow everywhere.

  “Where are you?” I called.

  “I’m here,” Niiv replied, slipping from behind a statue, almost invisible save for her pale features. She approached me tentatively, then scampered close and put her arms round me.

  She was breathless with excitement.

  “This place doesn’t exist,” she said in a voice charged with understanding. “It’s all illusion.”

  “Of sorts. Yes. But how do you know? What have you been doing?” I felt my pulse race.

  “I looked. There was no harm in it, was there? I wasn’t looking at you.”

  “You silly little fool!” I grabbed her again, turned her head in the moonlight. Silver light softened her features, but her hair glinted grey. She had aged. She had spent her precious life on establishing a truth that she should have known I would already have discerned.

  “Don’t waste what you have!” I said to her for the hundredth time. She was an exasperating lover!

  Indignantly, she pulled away. “When my father died, in the North, in the snow, cold, alone, abandoned by his spirits, he bequeathed his charm to me. He meant me to use it, Merlin. Why else leave it to me?”

  She had done this so often before. I could almost have cried for her. It was so unnecessary for her to squander life simply because she had a talent for the Otherworld and for vision.

  “You are half a year older, Niiv. Because of what you looked at!”

  “I don’t feel it,” she argued.

  “Half a year that I won’t have with you.” Added to all the other lost days, lost moons.

  “Nonsense. You will have me to the end.”

  “Why are you so stubborn?”

  “Why are you so ungrateful?”

  I hugged her. She was still consumed with pleasure at having broken the wall of unreality.

  “What do you think has happened here?” she asked after a moment. I had used a little of my own power to touch in the details, but little was needed. Though we rowed, Argo was setting the course. She had brought us here for a purpose. No doubt she was waiting to surface from this subterranean dream of an ocean. I was certain now that Argo was ready to take us to where the tragedy had begun. She was taking us on a tour of her past, and Time would flow differently whilst we were in the embrace of the island.

  But I said this to Niiv: “Will you promise me not to ‘look’ until I ask you to? It isn’t necessary. If I need your help, I’ll always ask for it.”

  “You say that.” She pouted, beginning to argue again. “But you never do.”

  “Not true. I’ve asked you for help many times.”

  “Not for anything serious. You don’t use me, you don’t teach me.” It always came back to that: teach me, let me touch the “charm” that’s carved on your bones. “When my father died, he didn’t leave me his spirit just to live with it and then die with it. He expected me to be practical.”

  “But you’re not strong with it, Niiv. It wastes you too much, especially if you waste the skill. You once looked into my own future, remember? I can mark the wrinkles around your eyes; I can pinch the softening skin on your arms—all the result of that stupidity. I never expected to love you like I do—”

  “Love me? Hah! You fight me off all the time.”

  This was not true. She knew it in her heart, so I didn’t argue the point. I wondered, though, how much she understood the nagging pain I was feeling, a pain that was growing. In the moonlight she was fresh; she was alluring; I wanted us to make love right there and then. This is what I always adored about the woman, these times of anger and the times of joy that followed the anger, without the interruption of the world around us; most particularly without Urtha entering our small house unannounced and cheerfully apologising as he drew back, loudly joking with his uthiin outside as he waited for me to emerge and blister his ears with irritation.

  Oh yes, Niiv was in my heart. She was not the first—Medea had been the first, though memory was misty—and she would not be the last. But she was the only woman I had ever known whom I wished to keep distant from me because I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.

  She dabbed at my eyes with a finger, looked curiously at the glisten. “Well, well. The man bleeds salty love.” She quickly licked the finger. “Magic,” she teased. “Even in your tears there must be magic, so I’ll thank you for my daily feast. Here’s my own contribution.”

  She reached up and kissed me. Then, with astonishing strength, she drew me to the cold beach, close to the night surge of the water. Her hands were like imps, her fingers the sharp thorns of their weapons. I bled beneath her loving touch. She found a way to press our bodies close inside a tent of our own clothes.

  I could hear Urtha calling for me; Jason, too. But Niiv’s strenuous breathing was a balm to those unwanted and searching cries from above, from the halls and staterooms of the swallowed palace.

  * * *

  Suddenly, in the night as we lay quietly, half-asleep, there was the smell of honey. Someone slipped across the beach and peered down at us. Ephemeral and elemental, the woman cocked her head this way and that, touching ghostly fingers to our faces, withdrawing like a sudden breeze as we both stirred to take a closer look.

  “Who was that?” Niiv asked, shivering slightly.

  “I don’t know. But she was watching us when we came into the harbour.”

  “The illusory harbour,” Niiv said pointedly. “An illusion within an illusion?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why don’t you look? I’m not allowed to! Makes me too flabby and old,” she mocked.

  “Shut up.”

  “You should look!”

  I was watching the shadows, but the elemental had slipped away. Her scent trail led into a cleft in the rocks on the shore, and I suspected that a labyrinth wound its serpentine way from that small entrance place.

  “I recognise the smell, but can’t place it,” the girl said.

  “Honey.”

  “Oh yes. Honey. Like the smell in the jar, but sweeter; the jar with the … things at the bottom.”

  “The heads. You know they were heads.”

  “Four of them!” She shuddered then looked up at me. “Why would anybody want to keep heads in honey?”

  “It makes them last longer. I’ll keep all of you in honey when you’re dead, if you like; take you
out for a lick every new moon. Honey keeps a body supple, too.”

  She didn’t like the tease. She was staring out across the brightening ocean. Dawn was rising, the stars fading. The new light caught the unexpected anguish on her face. “When I am gone,” she said, “I want to go ‘home’.” She looked at me, suddenly melancholy. Home to where my father lies. You will make sure that happens … Won’t you?”

  “It won’t be for a long time yet.”

  “But it will happen.” She hunched up, throwing a pebble into the foaming surge of the ocean on the dark beach. “And you said it yourself: I squander time as if it were water from the well. When I go, I want to sit next to my father, and his father, in Tapiola’s Cold Cave. It’s my right as shamanka. Don’t let anyone prevent it, just because I’m a woman.”

  I put my arm around her. “Nobody will argue with me. And meanwhile, I’ll squander for us both. You must simply resist the temptation to show how strong you are.”

  The moment of sadness passed. Dawn began to glow. Niiv sniffed the air. The smell of honey had gone. Now there was the pervading odour of a man’s sweat. We looked round to see Urtha, Jason, and Rubobostes standing behind us, all of them grinning hugely.

  “Don’t mind us,” Urtha said. “But when you’re dressed you might explain what’s happening.”

  The spectral encounter with the honey sprite, and the unexpected moment of reflection on death, had made us forget that were sitting by the water’s edge, naked and cool in the rising light. If it bothered Niiv, she didn’t show it. She stood and stretched, magnificent, slim, and as pale as the Moon, save for the dark hair that framed her face and shoulders. She turned then, and stepped into the cold water, shivering as she entered more deeply and stooped to freshen her skin.

  “I hope this is safe,” she called to her four admirers before launching herself into the waves.

  So do I, I thought, but she swam safely and came to shore, and by that time most of the other Argonauts had slipped and probed their way through the strange palace, and found the beach and the buried sea.

  * * *

  “You’re talking in riddles again!” Urtha protested as I briefly paused for breath during my attempt to explain my understanding of our situation. “Riddles! This is the third or fourth time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re here, glad of your knowledge.…” He tapped me on the shoulder with the haft of his eating knife. He had been stabbing impatiently at the stony beach as I’d talked. “But nothing you say makes sense. Oolering men? Hollowings? Echonian Lands? Does anyone else understand this drivel?”

  Bollullos and Rubobostes shrugged, shaking their heads. Niiv chuckled. “I do.”

  “You would,” Urtha growled.

  “I have an idea about it,” Tairon confirmed.

  Again, Urtha muttered, “You would.”

  Tairon had listened carefully, and with a rare half smile on his face, dark eyes absorbing me as he absorbed my words. Close behind him, Talienze had listened with equal intrigue.

  The youthful kryptoii were playing beach games in the unnatural light of the unnatural dawn, some sort of touch game, with much precocious somersaulting and leaping. It reminded me of the bull-leaping for which Greek Land and Crete were famous. And I had seen such leaping in the Hostel of the Overwhelming Gift, though the bull in that case was being roasted.

  We were missing two of the Greeklanders and Caiwan the Exile, left at the harbour with Argo.

  “I’m sorry, Merlin. Please continue.”

  Urtha’s outburst had relieved his growing frustration. My words had been as alien to him as this island itself. He looked abashed, but interested again, resuming his stabbing of the beach, though when I stared pointedly at him for a moment he stopped and sheathed the small knife.

  Cloak around his body, he was crouching on one knee, as was Bollullos. The rest were either crouched on haunches, or sprawled back on elbows, as if basking in a sun that—though present on the far horizon—was giving off no heat at all.

  There are parts of the world—they exist in great numbers—where the land has echoes. These might be valleys, small islands, plains, forests, or mountains. These echo lands—I had used an expression, Echonian, which I had heard from a storyteller by the name of Homer—existed below the earth as it could be perceived. Importantly, they were not Otherworlds, or Ghostlands, or any sort of place where the Dead might journey to seek rest or rebirth.

  They were simply echoes. And they had not all been formed when the world was formed, though it was believed there were ten that had. Most of them had been brought into creation by anguish, or dreams, and the intervention of creatures such as me.

  They were, to put it bluntly, the leftovers of play, the fragmented remains of exercises in charm, enchantment, magic, and manipulation. Once formed, they were very hard to discard. They lived on—as Echo, fading slowly but never completely, as persistent as memory.

  And we were inside such an echo.

  During my own extended childhood, these discarded echo realms had been guarded by “oolering men,” who maintained a lifetime’s vigil at the entrances to the false lands, preventing the inadvertent straying into nonexistence. Later, these entrances had become places of pilgrimage, and the guardianship of what were now called “hollowings”—as often enough the source of oracles—had passed into a more powerful form of government: that of priests, priestesses, and those who could benefit from the attractive power of such situations.

  Poor Delphi itself, that poverty-stricken hole in the rocks, its temples purloined of all richness by various nations, exploited by profiteers disguised as prophets, had almost certainly been the remnants of such a hollowing.

  I liked to call them “ways under.” I was afraid of them. They were unpredictable because they were substantially the product of unpredictable minds. Young minds, usually, but sometimes mad ones. One day, some time in ages to come, there would be secrets to be discovered in the “mining” of them. But such endeavours had never particularly interested me.

  I was interested now, however, because not only were Jason and his companions sitting silently in the centre of such a “way under,” but everything about it stank of deliberate construction.

  Tairon had referred to Shaping Chambers. The island was covered with the Shaper’s Shaping Chambers. Could these have been the entrances to the largest Echonian land that I could imagine—an echo of the whole island of Crete itself? Were we now crouched on a beach that was one of those entrances, and a large one at that: the labyrinthine Ak’Gnossian palace? It was an intriguing thought.

  If my feeling was right, then who exactly had made this place? Who had turned this long, thin island into a maze of echoes? And if this was all echo—where was the real island?

  Honey had visited Niiv and me in the night. The honey smell, the honey spell, the elemental presence of something that was most certainly not of Shaper’s invention. Was she the anguished dreamer who had created the devouring dream?

  I rambled on, thoughts tumbling, oblivious of the dark frowns of the ignorant, aware of Tairon’s gleam, Talienze’s smile.

  “At some point,” I concluded, “at some moment along our journey from Alba to the harbour at Akirotira, we passed from the familiar world to the echo world that now surrounds us.”

  “At Korsa!” Tairon exclaimed. “I knew there was something wrong there. It was there; I’m certain of it now. Remember that strange tide? The way the sea surged, the way Argo threw herself against the wall of the quay? That was the moment! And it was not you or I, Merlin, who was spinning the thread of that change.”

  “Argo herself,” I concluded for him. This Cretan was clever.

  “Argo herself,” Tairon agreed.

  “Talking of whom … here she comes,” Jason murmured, rising to his feet and pointing into the rising sun. “Is it her?”

  There was a look in his eyes, I noticed, an expression that was not so much joyous as apprehensive. He watched what he thought was his ship, a small shape in the glea
m of sea, but he was anxious now.

  Niiv whispered, “Look at your brutal bastard friend. Well, well, well.”

  “What do you see?” I asked her. “With your eyes and intuition, I mean. Nothing else.”

  “The same as you. He’s frightened. And he doesn’t know why. This is the moment!” She grasped my arm. Her voice was soft, malign: “Soon we’ll hear the sound of chickens flapping home to roost. This should be good.”

  I pushed her away from me. She was outraged, wide-eyed, her hands on her hips in that most obvious of poses; a moment later, devious, pretending she was not upset.

  I ignored her. All I could see was Jason. I have seen elementals in many forms, but those that clouded his head now were like the marsh insects that swarm around men and cattle alike at dusk. Fury and memory, fear and fire were shaped in that ethereal miasma, a past being drawn from a man who had long believed it buried.

  Approaching the beach was not a ship but a wave. It loomed larger, a bow-wave, cascading in silver foam from a prow that slowly rose above the water.

  Argo surfaced like Leviathan, surging from the sea-wrack, painted eyes watching us as her keel found the land and her prow ploughed onto the pebbled shore as we scattered from her sudden, shocking arrival.

  Rage and regret dripped from her hull, as potent and tangible as the water that drained from her deck. Jason stepped forward. He pushed me roughly aside. He was being summoned. I risked a moment of eavesdropping and heard the harsh, hoarse voice of the ship, mournfully bidding him aboard. The rest of us were discouraged from approaching, and Jason alone entered Argo, passing into the Spirit of the Ship.

  He appeared a while later, ashen and haunted, in a very bad mood. He called out, “The others are here. Wet, but alive. Time to sail. Push this rank old barge off from the beach.”

  We did as we were told, using brute strength and what ropes we could find, to drag the ship back into the ocean. Once we were all aboard, Argo turned her bow to the middle of nowhere and caught a current that only she could sense. She crossed the sea and eventually entered the channel of a river.