The Hadassah Covenant

by Robert Holdstock

  He rose from his crouch, towering over me, his eyes ablaze, but with challenge and hope, not anger. All he said was, ‘I don’t care about that! Why should I? When we ventured for the fleece in our youth, when we stole the treasures and the oracle from Colchis, when we fled from our pursuers across the sea and into the marshes, and along unknown rivers, through gorges and dark forests, through lands haunted by the worst of nightmares, didn’t we then live in worlds that meant nothing to us? Well, didn’t we? Answer me!’

  ‘Yes.’

  He had referred to Medea as ‘the oracle’. I wondered if he was burning to know her fate, or blocking all thought of her from his mind.

  ‘Yes!’ he went on. ‘We lived by our wits, Antiokus, remember? And by our swords, and by our ship … and by the whim of the goddess!’

  He was alive again! He paced around the tent, vibrant and quick in movement and thought.

  ‘We had no idea where we were, or where we were going in. We just rowed Argo against the flow of dark water, carried her over land when we had to, hoping we were heading for home.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘I’m glad you remember. So believe me when I say this!’ He leaned down close to me, speaking like a man reborn in faith. ‘All my life I have accepted that my world is the world I live in! I don’t care about time. I don’t care about place. I’m here! This is my world, now, Antiokus. New, strange, all to be discovered. And, I hope, in daylight! And if what you say is true, at least one of my sons is living in this world as well! I can find him again. It is this sort of challenge I was born for. What better reason, my enchanter friend, for shaking off the ice, rebuilding our ship, and sailing south to the sun? Eh?’

  ‘I can think of no better reason, Jason.’

  ‘Good. Good!’ I stood and he embraced me, grinning. ‘And we can recruit oarsmen from around this lake, and as we journey. Go to sleep and dream. Merlin. Dream well. I’ll do the same. When we wake, we’ll haul Argo to dry land. And bring her back to life as well!’

  PART TWO

  The Spirit of the Ship

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Spirit of the Ship

  I had never forgotten Argo’s beauty. Even now, as she lay listless on the lakeside, rotting, weed-wracked, her slender hull streaked with bright colour and images of the gods and elementals of Jason’s Greek Land, she was wonderful to witness. There was a sleekness about her despite the broken stubs of the branches that had sprung from her, a flowing shape to the hull from the sharp prow to the elegant curve of her stern, rising to the split and quiet-eyed wooden image of Hera. She almost shuddered when touched, a memory of life, and seemed to whisper as she lay on the hard ground, propped up and tethered.

  And she was whispering: build me back. Build me better. Build me for the quest. I’ve been dying too long.

  I had thought the ship had died on surfacing from Enaaki’s swift-toothed realm, but walking round her, torch held high, I felt the final spark of life still glowing, the last guardian holding on as she had held on for nearly a thousand years.

  * * *

  Now that the sun was showing herself, however fleetingly, I could measure days again. And for two short days and their still-long nights Jason knelt before the prow of Argo and spoke to her in the silence of his soul. On the third day he dug a deep pit, filled it with kindling and logs, then called for Niiv’s uncle, Lemanku, a carpenter and boat-builder. He had offered his skills to Jason; Jouhkan, too, had offered to help. Lemanku cut through the faded effigy of Hera and brought the sightless goddess to the pit. Jason stood the head above the logs then killed a reindeer calf with his bare hands, strangling the creature in front of the gathered red-cloaked Pohjoli, who watched with great interest. They waved their torches and sang short bursts of warbling, high-pitched song to show their approval as the sacrifice progressed.

  Hacking off the head of the beast, Jason tossed it on to the logs, then set light to the kindling.

  Soon a great fire roared from the pit.

  Working with a strange frenzy, Jason jointed the dead animal and skewered the pieces on stakes across the fire. Niiv helped him keep the fire burning.

  When the head was charred to the bone, he poured a flask of the heady, blinding local drink on top of it. The flames rose and turned blue, flickering eerily for several minutes.

  When everything was done, and the embers smouldered, the roasted flesh sweet on the air, Jason stood before Argo.

  ‘Goodbye, Old Ship. Goodbye, Old Swan. But now I will see you put on flower again. I will see leaf spring from your deck. New life to this great old ship. I loved you once, Argo, when you were guided by Hera, great-hearted Hera. I will love you again with a new guardian spirit. I promise this with my life!’

  Then he turned to Lemanku and Jouhkan and said, ‘Now for your part in this. Break her down to the inner ribs and inner ship. But stop there. We start again from there. Don’t touch anything of the old ship inside.’

  His words surprised me. This was the first time Jason had ever referred to the ‘old ship inside’. I had sailed with him on an adventure that had lasted years, had cost lives and taken us to the strangest lands, had caused the death of his sons (or so he’d thought) and condemned him to twenty years of misery. He had never once mentioned that he also knew what I had intuited when I had first come aboard his Argo, in Iolkos, lifetimes ago, shortly before she was launched for Colchis and the fleece …

  * * *

  I had seen nothing of the construction of Argo, those centuries ago in Greek Land, when Jason had first ordered it and the boat-builder Argos had emerged from the night and nowhere and offered his services. By the time my journey round the Path brought me to Pagasae, north of Iolkos, the ship was already on the slipway and ready for launching. The silent boat-builder had finished his work; the rotten and ancient hulk that always lay at Argo’s heart had been encased in fine new wood and bright paint, decorated with symbols of sea and sky and the protecting gods. Jason himself had gone to Zeus’s oracle at Dodona and cut a branch from the sacred oak for Argo’s new keel.

  I followed the crowd—most of whom had gathered to see the band of heroes that Jason had summoned as his sailors—and on impulse asked the bright-eyed young man who was making the dedication to Hera (Jason himself) if he had need of an enchanter on the vessel.

  ‘No need at all,’ he replied, not moving his open hands from the smoke that drifted from the offering. He didn’t even look my way.

  ‘I’ve come from the Orkades, through Hyperborea and western Illyria. It’s blighted country. Day has turned into night, the wind has turned into fire and the ancestral dead are walking from their tombs. I could do with some new friends. I also tell a good story.’

  Though not on this occasion; the land to the north and west was blighted, and I had fled the terror, not wanting to stay and try to understand its cause.

  ‘A storyteller?’ Now he glanced at me, thought for a moment, then grinned. ‘Why not? It would compensate for Heracles talking about himself all the time. Can you use an oar?’

  ‘For rowing and fighting, yes. Any other uses I can learn. I can also hold on to ropes, rudders and men retching in a storm…’

  ‘There’ll be a few of those!’

  ‘And I know enough to piss downwind in a gale—’

  ‘An educated man! Try to teach Heracles the habit, would you?’

  ‘—and how to navigate in thick cloud. I also speak more languages than most men have ever heard of, and can understand new ones within half a day.’

  ‘We’re not short of babble-speakers.’ Did he mean translators? ‘And we’ll need no more than three languages on this voyage: my commands, your responses and songs in any tongue you like. But as long as you can row, and if you really can navigate in cloud … you can navigate in cloud?’

  ‘There’s a trick to it.’

  ‘I have a wave-reader and a wind-reader, but a cloud-reader? That trick I’ll allow. And as long as you keep all other sorcery to yourself, you’re wel
come. And I mean what I say. All other tricks. I don’t want them on board. Is that clear?’

  ‘Very clear,’ I agreed, though his refusal to countenance the use of charm and enchantment puzzled me; most sailors would have sacrificed dearly for such talents on their decks. Jason, of course, was no mere sailor, and he had a fussy and fractious guardian watching him from high Olympus.

  ‘We sail with the next tide,’ he added. ‘Come aboard when you’re ready. No horses, though. Not live ones, at least. And then only their haunches.’

  So I sold my two horses—at least I wouldn’t know their fate—and joined the rank of argonauts, their only greeting being to present me with a long pole of ash and instruct me on how to fashion my oar.

  A wan and nervy, though very pleasant young man called Hylas helped me. Working with wood was not one of my strengths. Hylas was Heracles’ servant and long-suffering lover. A young man of good humour and intellectual finesse, he was clearly exasperated with the relationship. Heracles was faithful to a fault to the youth, which by other accounts was a courtesy he did not extend to his female consorts; but Hylas, whilst acknowledging the big man’s kindnesses, was at breaking point, not just with the demands upon his body, but with his master’s monstrous self-centredness.

  ‘He’ll do anything, go anywhere, for fame. He’ll accept any challenge for self-aggrandisement. He ignores the gods at his whim, and argues with them all the time. He calls himself the “sower of seed and future song”. Can you believe that? He has forty sons, as many daughters, all of them bastards, and left each of them with an account of his deeds and heroisms to date, with instructions that they should spread the stories to the four quarters of the world just as soon as they can walk and talk! He’s only here to help Jason find this sacred golden fleece because some god or other whispered that this particular quest might be the best remembered beyond his days. It would be unthinkable not to be a part of it, therefore. After all, who will remember the rest of the crew?’

  He fell silent. Brooding.

  ‘Ego … ergo, Argo, eh?’ I suggested with a smile.

  Hylas laughed, the mood of desperation broken. I was surprised, indeed impressed, that he had understood the western dialect of the simple joke.

  ‘Something like that,’ he agreed. ‘Something like that. But I tell you, Antiokus, on my life: at the first opportunity, the first landfall, I’m making good my escape. If I seem to have deserted Jason, it will not have been through any lack of courage for the quest. Will you remember that? I feel I can trust you. This is no life I’m leading … my dreams are filled with wonders, visions, and strange speech—and I come close to understanding them all! I need to find them for myself. I am being directed. But how can I explore the world the gods have granted me when I’m roped to an ox-balled man-boar who wears nothing but a cloak made from the pelts of wildcats, and shits as he walks along because he says it saves time on his journeys?’

  ‘A very good question,’ I reassured Hylas. ‘A good question several times over, in fact.’

  Hylas’s dreams were his gate to a broader, deeper world than that of the mountains and valleys of his own home. He had the inbuilt talent to digest strangeness and turn it into the familiar. He was a natural interpreter. And though he was by no means alone in this ability—Jason’s earlier point to me—he was unusual in being tied by the heart to a man, an adventurer, a ‘gods-favoured’—Heracles—whose deeds were beginning to be known even as far as Hyperborea.

  ‘I’ll assist you,’ I added. ‘Just ask me for help when you need it. But you must promise never to reveal to anyone what I do for you, or how I did it. Should I do it.’

  ‘On my shield!’ the youth whispered with earnest gratitude, and a little curiosity which soon faded behind a smile of relief. ‘You’ve given me some hope, Antiokus. A little courage too. Something to nurture. Good for the heart. Thank you! You’re shaving the wood too shallow, by the way. At this rate it’ll take until winter. Here, give the oar to me. I’ll do it for you.’

  He ran from the ship when we moored on the Cianian coast, near Mount Arganthon, a full month later when the voyage was well under way, and I tricked Heracles into thinking his young companion had been taken and drowned by nymphs from a pool in the woods. The pool was small and sweet and the nymphs enticing, but they were wholly innocent of any murder.

  They fled down to the mud when Heracles stabbed the pool with his spear a thousand times, screaming abuse. He drank a flagon of vinegar and pissed and puked into the savaged waters. He left the Argo immediately after that, to wander aimlessly for a while, ignoring the gods as usual, his heart broken.

  When he had gone, Hylas crept back on board from his hiding place and we put him ashore some days later at the mouth of the river Acheron, at his own request. After that, I don’t know what happened to him. But I missed his bright spirit and good humour.

  That was later, after Argo had begun her quest. But at the dockside in Pagasae, with my own oar now finished by the same skilful youth, marked with my name and added to the wood pile ready to be loaded, I ascended the ramp to inspect the ship itself. And quickly realised that this was no ordinary vessel. There was nothing that I could identify, and I was not prepared to open my soul to a deeper understanding, but below the deck, somewhere to the fore, there was an older heart than the massive oak beam that had been shaped to form her keel.

  I ducked down into the bilges, started to move forward, and was warned away! I could think of it in no other terms than that. Not a voice, not a vision, just the most intense feeling that I was entering a place that was not just private or out of bounds, but was forbidden.

  Mystified, thrilled, I decided to go back on to land, intending to find Argos, the shipwright who had constructed this galley, and ask him about his creation. But as if she sensed my curiosity, and had been made angry by my presence, Argo began to strain at the rope tethers. Her hull groaned, the wooden tenons holding her fast above the slipway began to pull from the hard earth, the ropes singing with the strain. The ship twisted and slid about on the mud ramp, like a throat-cut pig thrashing in its own blood. I clutched the housing for the mast with all my strength, expecting at any moment to be pitched over the side. Argo bucked and protested below my feet.

  Launch me, she seemed to be saying. Test me in the water. Hurry!

  The air was filled with a sound like Furies screaming.

  Jason grabbed a double-bladed axe from one of his colleagues, called to Heracles to do the same, stepped swiftly forward and shouted: ‘The rest of you, into the water. You! Cloud navigator! Throw down the scaling nets!’

  As the argonauts stripped to the skin and raced for the sea, Heracles and Jason each hacked at the retaining ropes, cutting through in unison.

  Released, Argo streaked down the ramp, stern-first into the harbour water, plunging deep below the surface, almost drowning me. When she came up she shuddered, an animal refreshing itself after a cold swim. I flung down the coiled net ladders, two to a side, then went to the prow, staring down at the shouting men who swam vigorously towards us. Who they were, where they had come from, what skills they possessed, all of this was alien to me at this time, but they circled Argo, laughing, as if capturing a bull, and though the ship turned under her own control, facing each cheering hero in turn, she stayed in the circle, calmed herself, then allowed the men to haul themselves aboard.

  Heracles followed them, dragging a dozen oars through the harbour waters, lifting them two at a time to the waiting hands of the crew. Six oars each side—she would be rowed by twenty on the open sea—we took the galley gently back to the harbour side, where we tethered her again and started to load supplies.

  ‘What a ship!’ a delighted and muddy Jason cried as he came aboard by jumping from the quay. ‘With vigour like this in her keel, we’ll make the haven at Colchis in one night’s dream! Never mind three months! The fleece is closer than we think.’

  Events were to prove otherwise, of course, as I have written elsewhere.

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nbsp; * * *

  Argo was not one ship, but many, and a fragment of each, even the oldest, was locked in the prow, the ship’s heart, hidden in the slender double hull. Hera had been only the latest in a long line of guardians of this Otherworldly vessel. To crouch in her prow was to feel the flow of rivers and seas that had persisted through time, to smell old wood, old leather, old ropes, shaped and stretched into vessels that had drifted, sailed, rowed and ploughed beyond the known worlds of their builders.

  So much life in one cold hulk.

  Now, lifetimes later, the skin was ripped from the rotting remnant of that proud and vigorous ship. In the frost-sheened, rosy dawn, and under Jason’s supervision, Lemanku tore away the planks of the hull to expose part of the hidden heart of Argo. I watched in fascination as the ship-shaped cage of branches was revealed, a tangled network of growth from the old oak that had been laid by Argos, filling the hull like veins. The growth had split the planking, but held it together too, in a protecting embrace.

  Lemanku was stunned by what his work was uncovering. He showed me how the wood was not just of oak, but of several types of tree: elm and birch and beech, though these elements were confined towards the prow.

  Jason’s instructions were clear:

  ‘Cut her back to within a man’s length of the block of wood that rises into the prow.’

  He was pruning the Argo!

  ‘Lay the new keel, then build out from there; enclose the prow area at the end.’

  Lemanku said, ‘This ship was constructed in a way I’ve never seen. Very primitive.’

  Jason asked him what he meant, and Lemanku showed how each plank had been placed edge to edge along the hull, crudely lashed with rope, then sealed with black tar, or something similar.

  ‘I’m surprised this ship didn’t break up in the first storm.’

  ‘But she didn’t break up in the first storm. Nor any other storm. I sailed her along forty rivers, through water that was foaming white, sometimes so close to freezing solid that blocks of ice struck her left and right. I sailed Argo in the shadow of moving mountains, at the edge of thrashing forests, and she never failed me. How can you can build her stronger?’