The Hadassah Covenant

by Robert Holdstock

  The druidi were in disgrace, I was soon told. They had tried several times to penetrate the ice to find some lost and significant object from their chieftain’s land, and failed. Now they sat, sullen and thoughtful, away from the warlord. They were trim-bearded and crop-haired, though each had a single, long plait hanging from the left temple. They wore new deerskin trousers and thick fleece jackets. The older man had a splendid gold half-moon breastplate, a lunula, slung around his neck. They were both better dressed than the warriors, who sat huddled in brightly patterned cloaks, woollen trousers and long, beaten leather boots that were now quite rank in odour.

  The chieftain’s name was Urtha. He was a bright and irascible man, still youthful though combat-scarred, given to both great laughter and flights of fury. Like many men I had met in my long journey, his language often sounded insulting and was peppered with obscenities. I sensed that no offence was ever intended; it was simply the way of talking.

  He introduced his companions. Two were conscripts from a neighbouring tribe from among the Coritani, with whom Urtha’s clan of the Cornovidi were currently at peace. They were called Borovos, a hot-tempered, flame-haired youngster—who alone was responsible for the aggressive reputation of this group, I discovered—and his cousin Cucallos, who huddled inside a hooded black cloak and dreamed of other days and wild-riding raids. The other two were members of Urtha’s elite band of horse-warriors, which he called his uthiin. Most chieftains encouraged such bands to ride with them, and they took a name that reflected their leader. They were bound to the warlord by codes of honour and taboo, and had a status far higher than ordinary horsemen. These two, hard-faced, war-scarred, hard-drinking but pleasant, were called Manandoun and Cathabach.

  The rest of his uthiin were guarding his fortress and his family, back on the island, under the temporary leadership of his greatest friend, and foster brother, Cunomaglos.

  ‘Dog Lord!’ Urtha laughed. ‘A fine name for that battlefield hound. The place, my fine fort, will be safe in his hands.’

  ‘What are you searching for?’ I asked him.

  He scowled at me. ‘If I tell you that you’ll search for it too.’

  ‘I have enough on my mind,’ I replied. ‘My only interest is in a ship that lies at the bottom of the lake.’

  ‘The ship that screams like a man dying?’

  ‘Yes. Are you after the same ship?’

  ‘No. Not at all. No ships involved.’

  ‘Then why not give me a hint of what it is? We may be able to help each other.’

  ‘No,’ Urtha said emphatically. ‘But I will tell you that it’s an old treasure. One of five lost treasures. The others are scattered in the south somewhere. This one is important to me, though. Very important. Because of a dream I had about my sons, and the fate of my land. I need to know a little more. That’s why I’m here. I can’t tell you any more than that, except that these one-braids,’ he gestured at the huddled druids, ‘used an oracle—dead blackbirds, if I remember…’ his warriors, who had been listening, sniggered to a man, ‘… and the oracle said to sail north. To this piss-hole place! We’ve been trying to get here for nearly a season. At least, I think that’s true. How can I tell? Nobody told me that there was only night in the north.’ He lowered his voice irritably. ‘I’m going to make sure I get some new oracles when I get home. But don’t let them know.

  ‘And I’m missing my wife. Aylamunda. And I’m missing my daughter, little Munda—little terror!—she’s nearly four, now. And I like her very much. Even at four, she teases me … and I fall for it! She already knows more about hunting than I do. She’s got the goddess in her creases, if you know what I mean. She’ll be strong, one of these days. I pity the poor bugger who’ll have to marry her. But she’s great fun. She can run with my three favourite hounds, Maglerd, Gelard and Ulgerd. Wonderful creatures! I miss them too. I should have brought them with me.’

  ‘And your sons? Do you have sons?’

  ‘I’m sorry you mentioned them,’ he grumbled. ‘Demons. Twin demons. Five years old. It took charm of heroic proportion to persuade their foster father, a chief of the Coritani, to keep them for as long as he did. Borovos and Cucallos, here, are among his knights, and they know what I mean. I didn’t want the little horrors back, but he sent them back when they were five, with a fine black bull and heifer as an apology. When I go home, I’ll have to start the proper fathering myself. I imagine they’ve driven poor, noble Cunomaglos, their new guardian, to distraction by now. If not to combat! Yes, I’d hoped to have two more years of peace. Little grim-faces,’ he went on, more to himself than to me. ‘Not idle. Not stupid. But too quick to get angry with everything, according to their foster father. There’ll be trouble when I’m dead. Those two will fight each other, through greed I expect, tear the land apart, unless I can find a way to change things…’

  He continued to mutter inaudibly for a moment or two.

  All the male children of the chiefs of the keltoi were fostered for up to seven years, I remembered, before being returned to their natural parents. It was called ‘the separation’, and was usually a painful time, though not, it seemed, in Urtha’s case. The return was called ‘the greeting’, and was a time of testing and bonding, which could be equally painful because of its hostility. One in three of all returning princes would end up as a marsh sacrifice in his early adulthood, pegged down in shallow water, strangled, throat opened with a knife.

  But I wanted to make friends with Urtha, at least for the moment. ‘Do I understand your priests told you this? That there will be trouble in your land?’

  ‘Yes … They’re the ones who read the signs, after I told them my dream.’

  ‘Then I suppose it must be true.’

  Urtha glanced at me sharply, then looked at the gloomy enchanters. ‘I see what you mean,’ he agreed in a whisper. ‘They’re useless now, maybe they were useless then. Maybe things will turn out better.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘And I have a task of my own.’

  ‘The screaming ship, you said.’

  ‘The screaming ship.’

  ‘Don’t know much about it, but good luck. You’ll need it if you’re going to freeze your balls trying to raise her from below that ice.’

  ‘Thank you. But in a few days, by way of thanks for your courtesy, I’ll see what I can see, if you know what I mean … if you’d like that.’

  He scratched his thick, black beard, thinking about what I’d said. ‘You’re an enchanter?’

  Why hide it, I thought. Anyway, he would find out in a while, either when he realised I was going down to the ship, not raising her, or from Niiv, who I suspected did not hold the notion of discretion high among her virtues. ‘Yes.’ And I added, with a smile, ‘I’m the best.’

  He laughed. ‘They all say that. Anyway, you’re too young. You’re no older than me.’

  I cannot remember, now, why I said what I said next, why I trusted Urtha with an answer which, though vague, I had kept from Niiv. ‘I’m very much older than you. But I’m an old man who stays young.’ He looked at me blankly. ‘When I was born,’ I went on, ‘your land was still empty of anything but forest. The oldest animals still stalked the river edges…’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘A long time ago. Hundreds of good horses ago.’

  ‘You’re a moonstruck liar,’ Urtha said after a moment, a canny smile on his lips. ‘That’s not a complaint, you understand. Not at all a complaint. You may be a liar, and moonstruck, but I suspect you lie well, and since all we see is stars and moon … I’ll look forward to a few of your stories.’ He glanced gloomily around. ‘Nothing else to do but drink and piss in this gods-forsaken place.’

  ‘I’m not a liar,’ I said evenly. ‘But I’m not insulted by your doubts.’

  ‘Nothing more to be said, then,’ he grinned. ‘Only something to be drunk!’ He reached for a leather flask and waved it towards me.

  ‘I agree.’

  * * *

  A
discomforting event occurred soon after, which put me on my guard. The next ‘evening’, which is to say after the formal meal before sleeping, one of Urtha’s retinue—Cathabach, I think—led me into the snowbound forest. Urtha and the rest of his men were there, staring up at the dangling clothing of his two enchanters, stretched over crude wooden, human frames. As I’d approached I’d noticed that a certain amount of humorous commentary had been abruptly stopped. Only frost-breathed reverence greeted me as I came up beside the chief.

  ‘This is what happens if you don’t get it right,’ Urtha said. ‘What a shame. For all their faults, they had talents.’

  ‘What happened to them?’ I asked, sensing mischief had been done.

  But Urtha simply pointed to tracks in the snow, leading into the wilderness. ‘They went “wolf”,’ he said. ‘It’s something such men do when they need to escape.’

  ‘Are they dead?’

  Urtha laughed. ‘Not yet. Just going home the hard way.’

  Such men as Urtha’s druids were held in high esteem by many keltoi tribes, I knew, occupying high stature. But not, it seemed, in Urtha’s land. Make a mistake: run naked through midnight snow.

  He stepped forward and stripped the deerskin trousers from one of the mannikins. He pulled the fleece jacket from the shoulders, and untied the gold lunula from around the other stick-man’s neck. To my surprise he offered me the trousers.

  ‘Any good to you? They’re shit-stained I expect, but you can clean them up, and they’re well stitched. Better than the stinking rags you’re wearing at the moment.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Do you want the jacket as well? Good for this climate.’

  ‘I won’t say no. Thank you again.’

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ he said with a searching look at me. ‘I’m not giving them to you. We’ll trade, in time.’ He passed me the thick fleece, then held the half-moon golden lunula in his hands, stroking it with his thumbs. ‘I’m glad to have this back for the moment. It’s very old. Very old indeed. It has … memories.’

  I sensed that Urtha wanted a response from me but I said nothing. After a while he looked at me, his eyes sad. ‘It belongs to my family. That man had the right to wear it. Now I can keep it for a while, until I find a better man to wear it. I’m glad you came out of the night, Merlin.’

  He clutched the lunula in his folded arms, his gaze in the distance. A few moments passed and he sighed. ‘So it’s done. They’ve gone. Ah well…’

  Again he glanced at me, then walked away.

  I clutched my new clothes and stared after him, wondering how many years I would have to add to my flesh and bones in order to heighten my powers of insight.

  Urtha was curious about me, and that made me curious about him. The disappearance of the druids, and the reclaiming of the tribal ‘moon’, suggested that change was in the wind for the warlord.

  All because I had ‘come out of the night’.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Argo

  Niiv was like a brightly coloured bird in her furs and shawl, racing around me as we walked through the snow, chattering constantly. ‘How are you going to do it? How are you going to do it? Tell me, Merlin. Tell me!’

  In the days that we’d been back at the ice-covered lake, the shaman’s daughter had dispensed with the formalities and ritual that she had inherited after her visit to the Mistress of the North. Instead of taking up a position of meditation and learning inside the skin and bone but where her father had spent so much of his life sending his spirit out on the wing, or on the fin, or by forest running, she had declared: ‘There is so much more to be learned from the strangers! The sedjas will guard me, but if I shut myself off and breathe smoke and beat the skin drums, out of sight of all these others, then what could I hope to understand of the world to the south?’

  Her spirited and forceful denial of tradition was not welcomed behind the high wall and heavy gates of her village, but was allowed, and the stinking skin lodge, with its potions, poisons, fungi, bark extracts, fish oils and eye-opening, if dizzying, fermentations remained closed, the flaps of the door pinned together by the narrow bones of some wading bird or other.

  The child skipped and laughed and teased through these last days of the long winter night, sniffing at me, questioning me, ignoring her uncle, Lemanku, who counselled against her overt curiosity; breaking all the rules; using her newly granted talents in charm to try to turn me inside out, unaware that after so many thousands of years on the Path I could hear every unspoken question in her mind (if I’d wanted to) and could keep her at a distance quite easily.

  It was not Niiv who represented the problem for me. It was overcoming mindless, ancient Enaaki in his lake. Older powers take more understanding. We grow too wise to comprehend the bleakness from the beginning of Time.

  ‘How are you going to do it?’ the harpy insisted yet again.

  ‘I’ve told you. I’m going to gouge a hole through the ice and swim down to the bottom of the lake.’

  ‘You’ll die at once. There are a thousand corpses in the water, all of them fools like you who thought they could simply smear grease on their bodies, dive in and find out the secrets of the lake. No, I’m sure you must have a trick. You have a special charm to protect you. A sedja.’

  I spoke the truth when I told her, ‘No special charm at all. If what I hope is down there is down there—then I’ll be protected from below.’

  Well … possibly.

  I gathered up snow into a ball and threw it at her, striking her squarely on the nose, stopping her in her tracks. She was outraged. I apologised.

  ‘I thought you’d duck.’

  She shook her head furiously, snow crystals spraying. ‘I thought only children played like that with snow,’ she admonished.

  ‘Still a child at heart. Sorry.’

  ‘You’re not a child, you’re a madman,’ she went on. ‘And a liar. You must know so much more than you’re telling me.’

  If only that were true, I thought. I could smell her frosting breath. From below her clothes came the aroma of musk and I kept remembering her ancestor, Meerga, whose musky odour still haunted me. Her pale eyes were like jewels. Despite the cold I was aroused and charmed by this dancing bird in her blue, white and red-dyed furs.

  She knew I liked her. I could see the sparkle in the way she watched me. But she was so inquisitive, quite certain that I was in command of a hidden sorcery.

  ‘Very well. If you must know, I’ve eaten a whole reindeer antler, which I first carved with the Seven Cries and Chants that open the gates to the Frozen Deep, and under these new clothes my body is wrapped in fish guts and liver, so that Enaaki won’t smell the human inside.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she muttered irritably. ‘Enaaki will smell you at once. You’re making fun of me now.’

  I had no special skills in frozen lakes; it was a matter of small magic to survive drowning and the cold for an hour or so—enough time, I hoped, to make the contact with the deep. My problem was one of time—I had to get through the lid of ice before these brief glowing dawns became stronger, every instinct in me told me this. The ship only screamed in winter, never in summer. Bright dawn was very near and everything I needed to accomplish had to be accomplished before the sun melted the white whiskers of ice on the trees.

  ‘I wasn’t making fun of you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. If you don’t prepare, you’ll drown. One more white-belly to be hooked out and fed back in pieces to Enaaki. Make a joke of it if you want, but you need a guide. I can help you to find one. But only if you want to.’

  And she turned and stalked away, leaving me wondering where, among the camps that ringed the lake, I would find a full beast’s-worth of entrails to feed to the sinister lake guardian.

  * * *

  The best way to move across the lake, I discovered over the next few days, was on bone-blades shaped from the shoulders of reindeer. These had been carefully carved by a local man, who earned a good living
at it, and he skilfully attached them to whatever footwear might be needed. A push and a shove and even the most ungainly of ageing shamans could begin to move across the frozen surface. By bending forward and holding hands behind the back, the movement was swifter and more control could be maintained. I practised for a while, turning in elaborate circles and speeding around the edge of the lake, staying clear of the territorial markings of the various encampments, weaving between other visitors who seemed to be using this astonishing means of movement more for entertainment than serious business.

  Niiv floated out towards me. She was Pohjolan and skilled in ice dancing. She led me deeper, to where several shamans, all of them greased and naked except for their bone-bladed shoes, danced in a complex pattern around one part of the surface, trying to summon the power to carve a huge hole in the ice, she said. They skidded and slipped, bony white bodies in the torchlit night, cascading streams of ice marking each abrupt end to an elaborate dance of enchantment.

  Even the dogs wore blades on their paws, huge white hounds howling wildly as their masters threw antlers for them to chase.

  All of this was happening at the edge of the lake. The centre was guarded by ice statues, ten in all, a circle of gigantic, frosted figures (‘cold-night’ sedja, Niiv whispered, winter talismans) that stared towards the encircling forest through melting features. Inside this wide and protected circle was where the real activity was occurring. Here, holes to the water below had been carved, scraped, boiled and burned, but they closed up as fast as they could be used and it was easy enough to see that below the lid of ice the lake was fish-belly white with the naked dead, mostly visitors to the area, drawn by legend rather than applying local magic. Pohjolan men used long poles to reach through narrow holes and haul the corpses to the surface. Below the dead, though, were those who had managed to control their bodies. They floated as if suspended in the lake, arms crossed on chests, turning slowly, hovering in the cold waters as they tried to summon the spirits of the deep for whatever purposes preoccupied them.