Celtika (43 page)

As we waited gloomily on the plain of bones, Elkavar cast me a look of despair and irritation. ‘I told you there were men up there…’

‘I was deceived.’

Jason overheard this exchange. ‘Who deceived you? Who could possibly deceive a man who can raise a dead ship from the bottom of a lake? A man who doesn’t age? Who doesn’t die? Sometimes you make no sense. Are you playing games with us, Merlin?’

‘No. I was deceived.’

The argonauts had gathered round me in a semicircle, pain on their faces, or perhaps confusion. Jason said, ‘Remind me what my son said to Brennos. About betrayal. What was it again? You were listening.’

I made no response to that. Jason was pushing the blade home. He knew. I was sure he knew. He was waiting for me to agree that I would not betray him in the night, only in the full light of day, his son’s words to the warlord.

Again, before I could make any answer at all, Jason said, ‘She sent my sons through time. Seven hundred years through time, if you’re to be believed. And now you tell me she sent them with a ghost for a brother. And I see ghosts on the horizon, and chase them. And you speak to my son behind my back!’ He kicked his horse towards me, came up close.

‘Tell me the truth, Merlin. She’s alive, isn’t she? She followed them through time herself. She came with them. It’s the bitch who is causing all this difficulty for us. Tell me the truth … please…’

I noticed Elkavar watching me carefully. He had known, of course; but he had said nothing.

‘Yes,’ I said to Jason. ‘Yes. She is alive. She tried to bar your way into Alba, where Kinos is hidden. Those gigantic statues, the fear we felt, perhaps even the wasteland, though I can’t be sure about that. She poisoned your thinking on the Rein, souring your words, hoping to turn Argo against you.’

‘She was on Argo?’ Jason roared.

‘Hidden. She’s clever. Not even Mielikki knew she was there.’

‘The gods know everything.’

‘Alas. No. Or, perhaps, fortunately no. She sent spectres of her sons to keep the living sons happy. She sent a spectre to tease you and trick you. She blinded my eyes to the Greeks on those high cliffs. God knows, Jason, she may have blinded me on other occasions. I wasn’t expecting her; so I wasn’t watching for her.’

‘She came through time with them,’ he echoed. He was asking, not stating. He scented that this was not the case.

I said nothing. Nothing was all I needed to say. Jason was one of those few men in my long life who seem to have me opened like a carcass on the table, every curl of innards exposed and glistening to their gaze.

‘You’re a liar!’ he breathed. ‘By the Sacred Bull, you’ve been lying to me. I don’t know how, or in what way. But you’ve betrayed me! Something is up.’ And almost in pain, he repeated, ‘Something is up. Leave me alone, Antiokus. Our time is finished!’

He turned from us and rode into the ranks of men still squeezing into the narrow valley, preparing themselves for the assault at the far end. Gwyrion challenged me: ‘Are we going to let him go alone? Didn’t we come here for this?’

Tairon shouted, ‘Whatever is between you and Jason, I strongly suggest you put it behind you for the moment. We have to get through this pass, and besides, didn’t we agree to help Jason in return for passage on Argo?’

‘Come on, Merlin,’ Elkavar called to me, carefully. ‘These may be called the Hot Gates. But their heat is nothing, I think, to what you’ll be finding on the other side!’

*   *   *

What I had failed to see from ‘on high’, looking into the distance at that rank of Greeklanders, was how poor an army they were. They glittered with iron, and screamed their taunts with vigour; but they were fewer than they seemed, they were not the best; Greek Land had not recovered from earlier wars. It was a land where gates were closed against the enemy rather than opened to allow their forces to pour out and attack. They squabbled; they argued; they disagreed.

By Jason’s Sacred Bull, they sounded almost like the
keltoi!

Brennos lost more men than even a Greeklander could count that day. I have heard that their corpses were left in the pass for a hundred years, so compacted with time and the weight of the dead that men rode over them thinking they were on the path itself. And eventually the sea herself, Ocean, pitying, compassionate Ocean, rose and cut away the hills, and dragged those stones and the bones into her dark waters.

But on that day, when Jason rode away from me, the Greeklanders fought until night, and then broke ranks and dispersed, leaving their slaughtered to be butchered and displayed, horrifyingly abused by the triumphant horde, used to invoke certain gods of an underworld that I have always feared, and always avoided.

A beauty that does not age or fade

is lost in time

not part of this world

and always untouchable.

from
A Flower
by R. Andew Heidel

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Sanctuary

If Brennos had expected further resistance from the Greeklanders, he was to be surprised. The army fell back before us, assimilated by the hills and valleys like cloud shadow.

For the next few days we had easy passage south and then towards the setting sun, following a route drawn from the vaguest of memories from the oldest among our host: myself. We found deserted villages and barren fields, but animals are harder to destroy than crops, and trees heavy with fruit, nuts and olives were in abundance. Brennos’s horde had shrunk considerably by the time we came within sight of Mount Parnassus. This land was so open, so fragrant, so easy, that clan after clan had split away, with apologies and due ceremony, and gone to find pastures of their own.

Achichoros had already departed for the east. Now Bolgios took a census of the clans loyal to him and broke away, to ride to other sanctuaries and the western shore. The fierce man’s decision shocked Brennos, but again he was diplomatic. The long march was halted and a feast prepared for all the commanders, and each clan’s champion. The ceremony lasted until dawn, and it was decided, in serious discussion during the revelry, that the two armies would link up again in the land of the Illyria, at the northernmost point of the western sea, where the mountain passes led directly back to the Daan.

To show each other that they would abide by their word, each war chief sacrificed a favourite horse. The entrails were burned and the mane and its strip of hide cut from each, scraped of flesh and presented to the other as a belt. This bond in horse-hair was a powerful one. The carcasses of the horses were quartered and salted, the food for kings for the next few days.

The dust from Bolgios’s train clouded the sky until twilight, long after the earth had ceased to shake. We settled down for the night, but Brennos sent riders to rouse us all before dawn and we ate and drank on the hoof. Each day was the same, until the gleaming slopes of Mount Parnassus lit up the horizon, a beacon, beckoning to the invader.

The last time I had seen Parnassus was during the year of its first inauguration as a sanctuary. Being in Greek Land, where numbers mattered, I entertained myself by working out precisely how many years ago that had been. Eighteen hundred! Eighteen hundred years in the past of my life. The valleys had echoed and shuddered to the wailing of bronze trumpets and the thunder of skin drums. The slopes of the mountain had crawled with screaming women; the air had been heavy with the blood of butchered goats and rams. I remembered how the river that flowed between the hills had been tinged with pink, and had smelled of death.

It was silent, now, save for the rumble of horses and chariots turning slowly towards the deep pass that guarded the oracle of Apollo. We had crossed the wide plain known as Crisa without difficulty. Old traps and defences, scattered over the foothills, had proved no problem either. I rode ahead of the main column, with Elkavar and Tairon, and felt the first cool flow of breeze from the snow-capped mountain of Parnassus itself. It had seemed small in the distance, but its steep slopes now towered above us, and the air echoed with each movement of our horses.

We rode carefully, skirting the great mountain’s flanks, and came into the gorge that led to Delphi itself. Sheer walls of shining rock almost blinded us. The land ahead might have been cut in two by a sword. Gloom and shadow were all that could be seen against the sparkling brilliance of the cliffs. The river curled through stands of ancient olive trees, themselves shimmering silver as if with frost.

At dawn, part of the hills glowed rose-red, and it was there that Apollo had carved out the caves that would become his sanctuary. I knew where to look, which winding path to follow between the marbled shrines and sacred groves, and soon, as we rode ahead of the main army, we could see another strip of gleaming metal. This was not the ancient rock of the cloven gorge, however, but the last defenders of the oracle, two hundred Greekland veterans prepared to die for their god.

A report came back that they were all wearing the bull-hide belt. They would fight to the death, then; no retreat was possible for them in this world. They had taken an oath to that effect.

A storm cloud suddenly swept across the edge of the cliffs, darkening the gorge. The hoplites clattered swords on shields, a sound that rose in volume as it echoed through the valley. They seemed to slip like trickles of water in all directions, taking up defensive positions.

They would not hold against the ponderous horde of men which even now was riding slowly into sight of its goal.

*   *   *

Brennos fell upon the oracle at Delphi in a fury of iron, with a thousand elite horsemen and
gaesatae,
and forty wagons to carry back the ‘dead in gold and silver’ who were imprisoned in the mountain.

The steep valley was fragrant with burning censers. Every path, every statue, every deep entry into the hill, every tree had its own smoking tripod, an invocation to Apollo to protect the sanctuary.

Brennos had them smashed; he hacked branches from the trees and made them into burnt offerings; he pulled down marble figures which had stood in their niches for a thousand years, watching the valley and the mountain crags. He instructed his men to shout abuse at the snakes they couldn’t see but which he assured them were worming just below the surface of the earth.

He had bragged that he would cut the head from the Pythia, as she was called, the terrifying old woman who sat, veiled, in front of the sulphurous clefts in the rock and pronounced the oracles from Apollo. To hear him talk was to summon an image of the mistress of the oracle as some form of gorgon, endlessly spitting snakes from her twisted mouth. In fact, the Pythia—more likely a young woman, and vulnerable, easily influenced by Delphi’s corrupt priesthood—had fled long before the army had raised its dust in the north. Disappointed, but undaunted, Brennos cut the head from a youthful hoplite, shaved its cheeks with his knife and plaited its hair, then daubed ochre on lips and eyes. He presented the trophy to his commanders, later declaring how her ‘age’ had been shed like the skin of the snake she was; then he oiled and bagged the gruesome cut before the stubble could grow through the skin and give away his trick.

Now Brennos found the truth to the story that the Persians had looted the sanctuary before him. Almost all of what he had come in search of had long since gone east. It might still be found in the temples and palaces there. More likely, Alessandros of Makedonia, who had destroyed the Persians soon after their invasion of Greek Land, would have melted down the treasure for spoil and payment of his army. All of this, a generation ago; Brennos’s dream of bringing back the Sacred Dead—if truthful dream it was—now corrupted into the cash and coin of the living.

He sent riders to Achichoros with this news; Achichoros would almost have reached the Hellespont by now, the narrow gulf between the two lands at the southern extreme of the Black Ocean. The ruins of Persia lay beyond. His crusade would be broader than he was expecting.

Bolgios was not at Delphi either. He had taken several thousand men and turned north and west, to the oak sanctuary at Dodona, looting the land on the way.

The Greeklanders were in disarray. Their small armies fell back across the straits to Achaea, Jason’s land of old, to wait for the shaking of the earth to cease.

Apollo did not protect his oracle that day, though the Greeklanders would claim otherwise long after Brennos was food for ravens. But only two carts were filled with what, clearly, had once been looted from the lands of the
keltoi.
Four other carts were filled with further spoil, but in truth, it was a mean treasure with which to reward so vast an army.

Brennos knew it, and sent word to Bolgios to ‘take everything and anything’, silks, sapphires, polished stones, bronze, even ceramics.

‘Everything that glitters!’

There would be a great many hungry eyes scouring the treasure carts for their share.

*   *   *

I watched the pillage of Delphi from across the valley, in the airy ruins of a small building that had once served as the quarters for the soldiers who guarded the priests and the Pythia. Elkavar played softly on his pipes, trying to compose ‘a haunting song that will illuminate the heroic and tragic nature of this place’. And failing.

Conan returned quite quickly with the news that there was little to pillage. And Tairon, it seemed, had entered the caves of the oracle itself, more out of intrigue than greed, and when he later found us on the hill, he was puzzled.

The air was warm. The shouting from across the valley was shrill but distant. It was almost peaceful.

Tairon tethered his horse and crouched down beside me, rubbing his arms as if he was cold. ‘There is a labyrinth of great complexity inside the mountain,’ he said. ‘Chamber after chamber, passages spiralling inwards, but leading outwards. It’s a wonderful place! I feel completely at home. It connects with other oracles, I’m sure of it. I hear different winds blowing, and the creaking of oaks, and the smell of pine resin. And it connects to a place in my own land. I know the fragrance of my own land. There are traps and blind alleys. And a great deal of poor quality gold and fine obsidian, beautiful carvings, all stored in deep niches. Those bastards will haul it off, I expect, but they will never find it all.’