The Hadassah Covenant

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘I didn’t say I could build her stronger,’ Lemanku said evenly. ‘Just better. I can build her to carry more, and sail faster.’

  Without pause, without thanks, Jason said, ‘I like the sound of that. How many men do you need?’

  ‘Experienced ship builders: ten. Iron workers: twenty. Charcoal burners: five…’ The list went on. ‘I can raise most of them.’

  ‘I’ll get the rest for you,’ Jason said, glancing at me. ‘You and I together, Antiokus? A little recruiting?’

  ‘We’d better get started. As dawn grows brighter by the day, this lake will be left alone for half a year. Everybody leaves.’

  * * *

  Lemanku demonstrated how the planks could be overlapped then nailed together with iron to create a stronger, more flexible hull. This was Jason’s first encounter with the hard metal. He watched the process of forging and tempering with fascination. The nails were made long, thick and crude, ready to be battened off, flattened out on the inner side of the hull.

  Even so, he wanted rope lashing. Lemanku was puzzled, but Jason was insistent.

  ‘I was taught that to be secure at sea the rope that holds a ship together should weigh more than the men who sail her.’

  ‘Then you’ll need more ballast,’ Lemanku countered. ‘The rope will soak up water and make the ship top-heavy.’

  ‘Are your ropes made of sponges, then? I’ll have to trust you. The ballast will be in skin bags. We can throw it out and recruit it whenever we pass a rocky beach! But we need the ropes. They’ll hold Argo together not just in a storm, but when we overland her. To haul a ship like this uphill, through forest, you have to hold her in a cradle. A cradle of rope. Haul her from the front and you’ll strip the keel!’

  ‘I know that,’ Lemanku retorted proudly. ‘I’ve built boats all my life. I’ve hauled them over ice and over rock. I know how to brace the keel, and broaden it, and grease the log rollers with fish gut, fat and liver. It’s been my business all my life. You intend to haul the ship? Where?’

  ‘I don’t know where. But every river has its shallows, and every sea gets blocked by land. It’s a precaution. Fish guts on the rollers?’

  ‘Eases the passage.’

  ‘I believe you. Between us we’ll build a wonderful vessel. Just give me my ropes!’

  Lemanku laughed out loud. The two men set out their plan for building new flesh on Argo’s bones, then Jason left the shipwright to his work.

  * * *

  While Lemanku continued to prune the wreck, Jason, Jouhkan and myself borrowed his shallow skiff and sailed steadily around the edge of the lake, in search of a new crew to row new Argo when she was complete. We had already recruited Urtha and his four companions, though there was a small price to pay: first we would row to Urtha’s homeland so that he could see his family once again, and Borovos and Cucallos could visit their own clan. This was only a short detour from the route back to Greek Land. In exchange, Urtha would lend Jason five of his uthiin warriors, all of whom, he was sure, would be eager for the adventure, the search for Orgetorix. Fighters, marksmen and experts in everything—like all keltoi, Urtha added—they would be invaluable.

  Jason agreed. For the moment, though, we were short of hands.

  Most of the occupants of the winter settlements had constructed crude jetties, mooring places among the reeds or stretching from the muddy shore that were now exposed as the ice melted. High fences or earth banks protected the tents and rough shelters from unwelcome visitors. Torches burned everywhere. Hounds of several breeds strained and howled at the leash.

  Jason had borrowed a bronze horn from Urtha and used it to announce not just our arrival, but the fact that we wished to trade. Twice we were greeted with such hostility and distrust that we made a circumspect retreat, but five times we landed and shared the food and drink of the motley visitors to the lake of the Screaming Ship.

  Our task was to recruit at least twenty men or women capable of using, or learning to use, an oar. Twenty argonauts willing to abandon their business in the north and sail blindly south again.

  Jason now demonstrated his tactful way with words, his teasing way with story. He drank, joked, flattered and mocked. He was far older than most of the men around whose fires he sat, but he was so quick, so deft with a wooden blade, that in the mock challenges he often called for himself, he either won by a ruse, or lost in a flurry of limbs and a burst of laughter.

  His account of Argo’s first voyage to Colchis and back was unrecognisable to someone who had been there. Rocks had crashed together a hand’s width from our stern; the fleece, once plucked from its heavily guarded sanctuary, had been pursued by warriors who grew in seconds from the scattered teeth of snakes; whole forests had pursued us on flailing roots along a great river that flowed from snow-capped mountains in a land populated by cannibal women and tree-wielding apes clad in the skins and bones of their wives’ victims.

  I think he was referring to the river Daan, and the people at its headwaters had been hospitable and friendly, helping us drag Argo across the land bridge between two rivers, so that we could sail south again, to the warm seas off Liguria and its haunted islands.

  But he whetted their appetites for adventure. And he read his audience better than I could ever have done; he knew instinctively, it seemed, when to win approval by insult and when by challenge.

  ‘One in every two of the bravest aboard Argo will die. Hold that in your heads as you decide whether to join me. Don’t come easily to me. If you do that, I’ll kill you myself!

  ‘I’ll say it again: one in every two of the strongest will fail at some point. One in every two of the swiftest will be run down by creatures out of our nightmares. One in every two of the wisest will be tangled in a knot of deceit and seduction that will trap them for ever. The risk is that great! I know this! I’ve taken the risk before, and on that occasion survived …

  ‘As then, so now! Believe me! But the reward will be greater for those of us who survive.’

  And when asked what we would be seeking, he said, ‘My eldest son.’

  ‘And how will searching for your eldest son reward us?’

  ‘Because of the opportunities along the way. Until you see bright-hulled Argo you won’t understand, and she is being built at this moment, over there, where you see the glow of the forge in the night. Argo is like you or me, always looking for trouble; she has a nose—if a ship may have a nose—for the mysteries that lie concealed in the world that seems so familiar and ordinary to us. She has been to the Otherworld and back … and so have I…’

  He was asked, ‘When did you lose your sons?’

  ‘A lifetime ago. They were taken from me by a woman who had been vomited from the mouth of Hel herself. No woman would recognise that creature as one of her own kind. No man could touch her skin and not realise she was long dead, kept alive only by hate and malice. Medea. Say the name and shudder. Medea. Killer of brothers. Killer of kings. Queen of Tricksters. But long in her tomb, now, and you should be grateful for that.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Recruitment

  Torchlight flickering on the black lake signalled the arrival of the first new argonauts. Two small boats were rowed towards us through the broken ice, the moan of a horn announcing our first recruits as from the settlement of the Germanii, stocky men with flaxen hair and beards, who wore heavy cloaks of bear and wolf fur against the cold. They had been cautious of Jason, when he had told them of the adventure to come. They had not seemed impressed by his story; indeed, they had seemed indifferent to the idea of the spoils and hoards that might be taken along the way.

  What intrigued them, it seemed, was that they had heard of ‘speaking caves’ which could tell men’s fates. They would journey in search of such an oracle, then (and would have no difficulty finding one: ‘speaking caves’ scattered the parched, scrubby hills of the land of Jason’s birth).

  They were strong. Our three recruits were Gutthas, Erdzwulf and Gebrinagoth.

  Ov
er the nights, other new argonauts drifted in, most by boat, some by foot, one by horse.

  A young pair of adventurers, Conan and Gwyrion of the Cymbrii, crossed the dangerous lake in a shallow skiff. They were subdued, thin and hungry, poorly dressed for the climate. Indeed, their clothing of colourful check-patterned trousers and cloak, and woollen shirts, was more suitable for a summer raid in the Southlands. Each had a golden-handled knife and a small round shield with the bearded, wild-haired features of Llew beaten in gold upon it.

  Jason welcomed them, urged them to fatten up, to get some strength (even their beards were wispy!), and asked them why they had ventured this far north.

  They hadn’t intended to, they explained. For pure devilry, set a challenge during a feast in their father’s hall, they had stolen Llew’s famous bronze and wicker chariot, pulled by its two fine black mares, and equipped with throwing spears that always returned to the hand that had thrown them. Having stolen the chariot from its garage, they whipped the horses into a gallop and rode by moonlight round Llew’s famous, high-walled dun.

  But the horses never tired. They galloped on and nothing the boys could do could stop the wild ride. Over hill, through forest, over misting sea and frozen river, the chariot had been drawn north, finally throwing the young thieves out and plunging through the ice and into the lake. For a long time they had been left to their own devices. That they had survived, and even stolen a skiff, suggested that they could make their devices work.

  They had learned a lesson. Now they wanted to go south. And home. Jason accepted them willingly.

  The Cymbrii had learned of Jason and his new Argo from their neighbours by the lake, Volkas, dark-haired warriors who wore thin plates of iron over their chests and thighs, and rattled bone knives against them to signal pleasure or irritation. The Volkas, too, had been intrigued by Jason’s quest. They were led by a man called Michovar. They came by foot, running, packs on backs, spears held in brawny hands, iron protection glinting. The Volkas agreed to row with us as far as their homeland, by whatever route we took. That was their reason for coming with us; they had been too long away from home, and those among them who knew about boats had died during the winter.

  Our numbers, recruited, it seemed, from the lost and lonely, were increasing. With Cathabach and Manandoun from Urtha’s uthiin horsemen, and his neighbours Borovos and Cucallos, we now numbered at least twelve, and possibly thirteen, since Lemanku was keen to join us. His age worried Jason. I pointed out that Jason was older than the boat-builder. Jason suggested that some men aged better than others, and Lemanku’s taste for cloudberry wine had not helped him. But a boat-builder aboard a boat on a long and potentially shattering journey would be a useful addition.

  Lemanku’s oar was almost certainly guaranteed.

  Soon after this, the wailing and whining of three dying wildcats announced the arrival of Elkavar from Hibernia. He had come through the woods and stood silently as the droning from below his arms died away. Urtha was delighted to see him.

  ‘Music at last! You’ll be a guest at my table. Or at least, what passes for a table in this snowball on a cow’s backside of a country…’

  Urtha had long since become impatient with the Pohjolan vocal wails and whines that constituted song. The young man’s leather air-pouch and three pipes, a musical instrument played by pumping his elbows, sounded much the same to me, but clearly not to Urtha and the other keltoi.

  ‘I’m sorry to startle you,’ the new arrival said in a soft and awkward dialect of Urtha’s language, ‘but in the country where I come from you quickly learn to mind your Ps and Qs. When I see men from Ghostland, and remember my part in the raid at Dun Eimros not so long ago, where I won in combat against the champion of the king Keinodunos—a hard match that was, a hard head to steal—well, when I see such as yourselves, I can’t be sure of my welcome.’

  Ghostland was close to Urtha’s territory, and to Hibernians such as Elkavar would have seemed to encompass the whole of the land, though in fact it was inaccessible except to the dead. Neither Urtha’s group, nor I, knew of the skirmish or the king referred to, but none of us were strangers to raiding and this man was clearly remembering a coastal attack, and its prompt and bloody settlement.

  ‘If that bag of pipes can raise our spirits when you play them,’ Jason said through Urtha, ‘then you’re more than welcome.’ I suppose he was thinking of Orpheus and his exquisite harpsong.

  ‘The way I play them will more likely raise the dead,’ the young man retorted with a grin. ‘But it looks as if you could use them anyway. The dead, I mean. That’s a big ship for so few pairs of hands.’

  ‘You’re welcome to add yours,’ Jason replied.

  ‘Then add them I shall. I’m Elkavar. I know how to use an oar and I can throw a spear from one hilltop to another using only my right foot. For some reason, we’re trained to do that sort of thing in my country, though I’m glad to say I’ve never had to resort to it.’

  He was not tall and not heavy in build and he looked hungry, his face quite drawn. His russet hair was cut short. He had a ready smile, but a quick and careful look in his eyes, both hunted and curious.

  When he had settled by the fire, and eaten a little meat, he asked a strange question. ‘Is there anybody here who can tell me where I am? I know that I’m north—I recognise the bright patterns of some stars—the Elk, there, and Deirdre’s breasts. But some have vanished. I’ve travelled further under the sky than I knew was possible. And besides, this cold land can only be north. When we raid to the north it’s always cold and wet. I don’t know why we bother, really. South is warm and misty, and there’s always good wine and good cheese. But this endless night!’ He looked at Jason. ‘So I’ll ask again. Where am I?’

  Jason laughed, ‘I’m not the best qualified to answer that question. You’d better ask Merlin. He can work enchantment, but is too lazy to do so. As a matter of interest, though, how did you get here?’

  ‘Well, I’m not the best qualified to answer that,’ Elkavar replied with a weary laugh. But he gave us an account of what he knew.

  He had been fleeing from a failed raid in his own land. Running south towards his own tribal territory, pursued by five fleet-footed men, he had managed to stay ahead of them, keeping to rough woodland and shallow rivers. Five days after the running had begun he had passed his clan-marked boundary and rested among the tree-covered hills of the dead, the mounds of earth that concealed the roads and tracks that led under the world.

  Cheered by his escape he had indulged himself in a song.

  ‘Just the one, and not even a song of triumph! Just of joy to be home. Sometimes I wonder if I have the sense in my head of a goose at winter’s start, still honking as the knives are sharpened.’

  The wailing and whining of dying wildcats had given away his place of hiding.

  ‘All the silent hills have small entrances to the hidden roads,’ he went on. ‘When the bastards came out of the night at me, I had little choice but to dive in and crawl for my life. I crawled for ages before I was able to stand. Then I stood and walked, and kept on walking, and I was thinking: this has to come out somewhere in the country! But I kept walking, always in twilight, no stars, no sign of life, nothing but the tunnel and the dangling roots of the forest above—and then I came out by this freezing lake. When I tried to go back into the cave—somewhere over there—it was just a cave. And I recognise some of the stars, but I’m north! Some of my stars are missing.’

  ‘We’re sailing south,’ Jason said. ‘We’ll get your stars back for you.’

  ‘Well, I thank you for that. And I’ve heard you’re sailing in search of your son. I’ll stay with you until you do. Anything, just so long as I’m south again.’

  Jason took me aside.

  ‘Could this cave of his be useful? Should we explore it?’

  ‘We can’t take the ship through. And if Elkavar himself couldn’t return, then I doubt any of the rest of us could.’

  ‘You, perhaps.�
��

  I told him that I knew of several such underways along the path I walked, dark roads that connected lands that were far apart. But like so much else in my world and his, those silent roads frightened me and I avoided them deliberately.

  Our pairs of hands increased as the finishing flourishes of paint and shield were put on Argo.

  By foot came Tairon of Crete, frozen and miserable, his travelling companions long since in their icy graves. He shared Elkavar’s enthusiasm for returning to the warm south. He could offer weak rowing but strong bowing; his bow was small and shaped from horn, but when he demonstrated its use I was reminded of Odysseus, who had shot an arrow through a line of axe-rings before slaying his wife’s oppressors.

  Tairon was the eldest son of one of his island’s oldest families. He had come north in search of the clay tablets carved by Daedalus, which showed the true pattern and keys to the labyrinth built to imprison the Minotaur. The world to which Tairon belonged was older, even, than Jason’s.

  If Tairon was immortal, however, he gave no sign of it, and when I used a little of my charm to see into his heart there was only youthfulness and that clumsy curiosity that condemns all men to quest beyond their abilities.

  Tairon would be a man to watch; confusing and intriguing in equal measure, but for the moment simply eager to sail south.

  The last to arrive at this time was a youthful Scythian, by all the signs younger than he was pretending, from his soft voice to his small hands. His name was Ullan. I couldn’t remember Ullan from our recruiting circuit of the lake, and something was defying my wits at that moment. His face was painted black because of the loss of his companion, he advised us, during the foul, freezing winter, and he was robed and cowled in a heavy cape, also black. He declined, for the moment, to say why he had come to the Screaming Lake.