The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex

by Robert Holdstock

  Four masks—what had happened to Radagos?—to show that four friends, four brothers, had been the key to life at its beginning. Perhaps the blank mask was to say, in Durandond’s understanding and in the way he had been buried, that everything in life is an unmarked stone before it is shaped by the encounter.

  I felt at peace in this room and stayed there for a long time.

  But as with the passing of a day, one must always eventually shift, stretch, and move on.

  It was a crawl, then, round the maze of the shaft before entering the burial room itself. No one had been here since Durandond had been placed on the bier in his four-wheeled cart. By light-of-image I saw the corpse; it was covered by his cloak, a garment now little more than threads held together by threads, draping a body no more than bone held together by sinew. The remains of his dogs lay at his feet. The room was packed with his favourite things, and I summoned charm-of-memory to make them glow again, to shine again with an echo of their old life. Pots, jars, helmets, weapons, barrels of meats, herbs, fruits, and grain. And boxes; and the images of children; and the carved images of women and older men; and the beautiful image in beech wood of an especially handsome woman, and this I guessed to be his wife, Evian.

  I summoned Morndun then, and raised the dead king, applied charm-of-memory to the desiccated brittle-bone of the once proud man. A forgotten spirit-of-life glistened.

  He rose from the cart, looked at me, quite angry, I suspected, but then, as if he remembered me, he gave me a sallow smile.

  He stood up, head bowed (the ceiling was low, though why this should have mattered to him was not apparent, since he was insubstantial in this form), and walked to the oak bench at the eastern wall of the chamber. He sat down and leaned forward, hands clasped, breathing hard.

  “So. You again,” he whispered.

  “Me again.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Long. Very long.”

  He was silent for a while. “It’s a strange life, this life of sleep and dreams, then life and action, then sleep again, and dream again. Eternity is an odd thing. The brightness of life in the Otherworld has an insubstantial feel to it. Too much glow, not enough shadow. A land decorated with light, but false light. I like sleep the best. Death sleep. And for most of my death, my dreams have been good. Until recently. In fact, you have woken me from one of the worst of my recent dreams. I’ve been dreaming of the Rieve. Is that why you’ve called me back? To ask about the Rieve?”

  “I want to know about the Daidalon. I want to know about how you came to Alba.”

  He looked up at me, strong face dark with curiosity. “The Daidalon?”

  “Very important.”

  He thought about that, then nodded quickly. “How long will you give me?”

  “Not long. I’m sorry. Holding you here is very expensive. I have to conserve life as much as I can. I have to conserve strength. My shadow stretches far away into Time. You know this. You sneered at me for it when we first met.”

  “I wasn’t sneering. Why would I have sneered? I’d come a long way to find you. I was probably teasing.”

  “Teasing, then.”

  Again he sighed. “The Daidalon. By the sour breath of the Dismemberer, yes. That was something of a mistake. The Daidalon. I remember, now. And the Rieve. And Alba. My dreaming self must have known you were here. Because my dream is breaking: I was dreaming of my father. The loss of my father…”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Such a terrible time…”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Breaking, They Face the Setting Sun

  To the far north the sky was black with smoke. Durandond and his father watched from the top of the Eagle Tower. The glint of light on metal told of the movement of an army south. They spilled through the valleys and across the plains, racing towards Eponavindum, the royal citadel of the Marcomanni.

  They were not the enemy. This was Durandond’s friend Orogoth, running from the destruction of his own stronghold in the heart of the territory of the Ambiarisci.

  The messenger had arrived earlier with the warning. The Savage Rieve had swept eastwards during the night, overwhelmed the walls, and set Orogoth’s citadel of Trigarandum to the fire. Orogoth had fled, with his father’s corpse on a wagon, as many of the treasures of Trigarandum piled into chariots, carts, and slung across the horses of his companions as they had had time to gather.

  Arcandond was pale and shaking. He had been ill recently, and his sight was failing. He seemed older than his years. But he could see the destruction to the north; and he knew of the reports of the overwhelming of the Vedilici and Ercovisci as well. The old kings were dead, their sons fleeing to the west, taking whatever they could, running for their lives.

  Durandond comforted his father, but Arcandond would have none of it. “I’m not so old.”

  “Forty-four years. That’s not so young.”

  “My father lived to sixty. He died fighting.”

  “Not this sort of fight. Time to go. Omens and common sense dictate it. We won’t stand against the Rieve.”

  “You won’t. I will.”

  “Then I’ll stand with you, and we’ll ride to Ghostland together.”

  “No.” Arcandond’s voice was strong. “I can’t allow you to die. You must take your courage and fighting instinct and take it in a different direction. Deny the battle. We can’t win. We’re broken. But you can take our name to another land.”

  “West?”

  “There is nowhere else to go.”

  Arcandond was well aware of the prophecy his son had received, scant years before. He added, “I can stall them at the Pass of Olovidios—at the Great Tree.”

  Durandond spoke anxiously. “They’ll take your head. Parade it on a spear. Stick it in a niche in a tall stone, outside their gates.”

  “The head will smile in an arrogant way,” his father murmured.

  “The head will shrivel,” Durandond protested. “It’ll become a skull.”

  “I’ve always admired the skull’s smile,” Arcandond said with quiet amusement to his son. “So much said for so little effort.”

  “Then this is good-bye. And with great effort. But with not much to say.”

  Father and son embraced. The wind brought the harsh sound of shields being struck, the beat of approaching slaughter. Arcandond suddenly shivered, glancing into the sky. “The crow is trying to take me already. But I’m not ready!” he shouted. With a last glance at his son, he turned away, to find his arms.

  Durandond descended from the tower and made his way to the high gate that opened into the scrying groves, the orchards where the Speakers practised their craft. Already the gate was open and two men stood there, hands and short black robes bloodied. The crude wooden masks on their faces were blank-eyed and expressionless, but the knives with which they had performed the sacrifice were being held by the blade, bone handles pointed towards the king’s son. Durandond felt a moment’s shock, even though he had been expecting this.

  It was over. The reading of the victims confirmed it. The citadel would not last the onslaught from the east, or the gathering forces from its own land, the restless, angry population whose recent starvation in the famine had turned them from reluctant subjects to the citadel to a forest and farmland army of discontent.

  He had seen it coming.

  Ever since his first feat had been accomplished, in his tenth summer, and he had been invited into the sprawling, opulent hall that was the Hall of Kings and Champions, he had sensed the mood in the lands that paid their taxes to the king. The hall shone with statues in gold and marble. It vibrated with shields and silver; it growled with the finest hunting dogs; it stank of rich wine; it glittered with crystalline stones, beautifully shaped, carved into animal forms, some large enough for a small child to ride. No straw on the floors here, but thick, colourful rugs brought from countries so far towards the rising sun that Durandond, as a boy, could hardly imagine the distance.

  The trad
ers came by road and river, train after train of them. The roads were separated from the land by palisade walls and garrisons of armed men. There had always been two worlds in existence at once. The world of the road and the hall; the world of the field, the forest, and hunger.

  Towards dusk, Orogoth rode along the north road, two hundred men behind him, all of them battle-weary. Behind them came wagons driven by women, and women on horseback, children clutched across the saddle. The last of the Ambiarisci climbed the winding road to the high gate and came inside the vast enclosure, into the city.

  “Radagos has already gone west. He hopes to meet Cailum at the seacoast, near the white cliffs. As for Vercindond, I have no news of him, except that he escaped with fifty men, a handful of family, and two carts of the dead. All of us have taken our dead. The Rieve is destroying the tombs, dragging the earth from the mounds, breaking into the chariot chambers and throwing the honoured bones to their dogs. They are distributing the wealth of the death road, selling everything that our ancestors needed for their journey. They are defacing the memorials. These people have come from the pits and cauldrons of the underworld. My father said they come from Hades, a Greek Land monstrosity. Hades killed him, then.”

  “Greek Land has mostly supplied us with our comforts,” Durandond said quietly.

  Ororgoth eyed him carefully. “Transformation. Our Speaker of Land has been warning about it since he wailed his first scry. Our fathers were not as strong as the first kings.”

  “I agree. They were idle. But we are not kings, not yet. Just princes.”

  “You’re wrong. Kings, now. All of us but you. And that will soon change.”

  Orogoth’s words were harsh, but he was exhausted and bowed his head in apology. Durandond shook his head: no apology necessary.

  “This place will fall,” Orogoth said.

  “I know. That’s why I intend to go west. To find another hill.”

  “That old wanderer was right after all. Remember that day? By the Sky Shatterer, I could have killed him, he made me so angry. But he was right.”

  “I never doubted him,” Durandond said. “But he gave me a vision. And it’s a vision we can all share. I suggest you feed your clan—”

  “What’s left of it,” Orogoth intoned gloomily.

  “—rest the horses, and be prepared to travel with us at first light.”

  “The Rieve moves fast. We may not have until first light.”

  “That fast?”

  “That fast.”

  So Durandond made his peace with his father. He visited his mother’s tomb in the company of his two sisters. When he had finished, Arcandond himself came and rode around the decorated mound, inside the royal grove, where his wife had lain since her last childbirth.

  He had refused his son’s request to take her body with him.

  “We have until first light?” Arcandond asked.

  “With luck, and the indulgence of Taranis.” Durandond pointed to the storm clouds gathering to the north.

  “Then we have time to hide your mother’s tomb. Your mother will be safe. But take the verses of her life and make sure your sons and daughters memorise them.”

  “Sons and daughters it is, though I have other things on my mind at the moment.”

  Four hundred men went with Arcandond out onto the plain, by torchlight, to line up against the wild horde coming from the north. Already the night began to rumble with their war-wagons, and the din of their shield striking. Towards dawn, the distant air was shrill with the sounding of horns and the cries of men at the gallop. They sent a pulse of hatred ahead of them, and the stink of smoke and ruin.

  Around Eponavindum, the land began to stir. It was as if the fields and woods gave birth to screams, but the screams were of triumph and vengeance. Ragged, rough, and ready-armed, the tribal territory of the Marcomanni transformed into a bitter net, to catch the king.

  Durandond had prepared for this. The wagons were ready, his own two hundred horsemen heavy with weapons, the children and women armed and hidden, ready to spring to the attack if the net closed too soon.

  Arcandond’s army had painted their faces grey and red, the red running in a single vertical stripe dividing their faces. On his saddle, each man carried the head of an old enemy, reeking of cedar oil, and the carcass of a hare strapped to the withers of his mount. The hare could fight, the hare could run, but the hare was favoured by the Moon, and would never run scared.

  As Arcandond led his troop to the north, to meet his fate and his death, Durandond rode south to where the hills became clustered and the valleys turned to the west through deeper gorges, protected from all but the most determined hunter of royal bounty.

  The last gift that Arcandond had given his son to treasure and protect was the small box of oak in which the fifth part of the Daidalon was kept. The two Speakers, still stained with the blood of omens, stood on either side of him, their grim faces telling all that Durandond knew was to be their own fate. They could never leave the sacred groves. The Rieve would find them and remove everything from them that had ever been used to scry the future.

  As Durandond accepted the box, his father said, “I have never used it. Nor did my father. And nor must you. When it was used, it turned against the user. Nobody knows how, or why.”

  “I know the Declamation,” Durandond assured his father. “I know the misfortune it contains.”

  “This is the fifth part. Neither the fifth part of a man nor the fifth part of a god. It’s the fifth part of something beyond knowing. You know that it must never be reunited with the other four parts.”

  “Yes. I remember the Declamation! I must never use it; I must never destroy it.”

  There were tears in his eyes. His father, battle-harnessed, stood before him, eyes as strong as the iron he would soon be wielding, but heart and body as frail as the man he had become in these long years of luxury and untested spirit. Durandond felt love for him, and shame for him.

  Arcandond didn’t need to say the words to his son: I could have been a better king. I could have been a better man. Be that king in my place. Take the pride we once had as a clan and settle it on another mountain.

  As if the words had been spoken, Durandond whispered, “I have every intention of doing so.”

  He embraced his father, cheek and chin, knelt before him, then stood, smiled a last good-bye, and turned from him.

  Later, entering the low hills to the south, safe for the moment, Durandond rode up into a ridge and looked towards the citadel. Flames rose from the walls. Dark shapes tumbled from the towers. Death moved chaotically among life running with frenzy and despair.

  “We should have listened to the Wanderer,” Orogoth observed sadly.

  “As I said before: I did listen to him.”

  “Then why did you do nothing about it?”

  “I thought we were doing something about it,” Durandond said with a wry glance.

  “Travelling west?”

  “That’s what he told us to do. There was no escaping the prophecy, in my opinion. That’s why I’m prepared, whereas you were not.”

  Orogoth accepted the criticism. “Cailum rode with his father against the Rieve. At least he sounded his war cry, even after his father was cut down beside him.”

  “He’s still going west, though. A messenger brought the news.”

  “He has his father’s body with him.”

  “Good. West is where the Dead live. West is where we make our mark.”

  Orogoth laughed for the first time in this encounter. “By the dawn shout of Taranis! Your confidence flows as full as the milk from Brigantia’s breasts.”

  Durandond glanced, amused, at his foster brother. “A good thing?”

  “I’m not complaining. We need to invoke as much confidence as possible, now that we live in the shadow of our fathers’ humiliation.”

  “Then take my advice: stop invoking gods and start riding.”

  “West. To lands unknown,” Orogoth agreed.

 
“No,” said Durandond. “Home!”

  * * *

  The hunched and melancholy ghost of Durandond drew on my strength as an unborn child in times of famine draws upon the body of its mother. Draining, desperate, drawing the vitality that it needs to survive, a desperate clawing and clinging to life that weakens the mother, but leads to the expulsion of a living, healthy infant. This shade, aroused by my need, now milked me for sustenance as it remembered for me.

  I aged. I had given up the struggle. Something in me had changed, giving in to fate, just as something had happened to Durandond in that long-ago when, instead of rallying his retinue of champions and fighters to ride with his father against the Rieve, he had obeyed the wisdom of the older man and abandoned his kingdom to the wasteland that would follow:

  To go in search of a greater land, to continue the dynasty of kings.

  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.