Celtika (6 page)

‘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.

I would have to go down among them.

*   *   *

And after three ‘days’ of education and preparation, I finally felt ready to do just that. With Jouhkan’s help, I made a passage through the ice, then stripped naked, swallowed the small
sedja
I had fashioned from a fish bone, and slid feet-first down the tunnel.

Prepared for the spirits that inhabited the water, I was not prepared for the water itself, and the cold was not just shocking it was almost predatory. I screamed as I plunged downwards, wasting breath for a moment, convinced that a thousand teeth were ripping my flesh. I watched as my body grew extensions of ice. It was all I could do to remember my purpose here as I hung, suspended in the lake, among the slowly turning shapes of shamans and priests, their bodies eerily illuminated from above, where the ice was alive with torchlight. Below, there was a stranger glow, but even my young man’s body was being defeated by the pure, hellish
chill.

So I summoned a little magic, ageing a little, but warmed myself and swam as deep as I could, below the level of the shamans. I summoned what sight I could and scanned the depths. There were ruins below me, or what looked like ruins, probably Enaaki’s hiding place, and faces that watched me, pulling back into the shadows as they caught my gaze. I saw the glitter of gold, the gleam of bronze and the sheen of iron, a wasteland of trophies, offerings and secrets cast into the lake over the ages. And the masts and prows of ships that had sunk here and lay at all angles, weed-covered and broken, ransacked for their timbers.

A sudden swirling around me and lean, translucent faces peered hard at me, elemental water guardians rising from where they prowled over the sunken dead. They seemed distressed by my presence so deep, but didn’t try to fight me. I had prepared for this descent for three days, offering more than just a meal of entrails to the entities below. I had sung and chanted in the groves, and I followed carefully the instructions of the young shaman who had taken pity on me, and made a personal drum, whittled birch bark, and scratched my name on stones, which I had dropped through the ice into the deeps.

Now I felt a certain confidence, and at last I put a name to my quest.

Air bubbling from my lungs, I called to the old ship, the grave ship, the ship that screamed …

‘Argo!’ I called, and the sound spread down into the lake, booming through the swirls and eddies of the deeps.

‘Argo! Answer me!’

I looked hard for the signs of her below. I called again, swimming deeper, then called twice more. I began to lose track of time. The
voytazi
kept track of me, I noticed, a vortex of eyes, mouths and bony fingers, keeping at a distance.

Too cold to feel panic, I began to entertain the grim thought that perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps she had not come here after all but lay elsewhere in the deeps, in another lake or a hidden sea, guarding her captain’s remains.

But then: that whispering voice with which I had become so familiar in my time with Jason, during the long journey through the heart of the world, before we had returned to Iolkos, the voice of sentience that was the ship herself:

‘Leave us in peace. Go up. Leave us to sleep.’

‘Argo?’

The water below me
pulsed.
The lake seemed angry. I could see a shattered vessel, dark and indistinct, its hull fringed by twisted branches that reached out like tendrils. The branches of the sacred oak that formed her keel, I realised—she had kept on growing!

‘Argo! Is Jason alive?’

Before I could speak further, invisible hands caught me. I was dragged up towards the ice, flung vigorously against the roof, a dizzying blow. I heard laughter. My tormentors sank down, swimming quickly like eels. For a while I stayed where I was, bobbing gently among the bloated dead, then my lungs began to burst. My control had gone and I was on the verge of drowning. I tried to summon warmth, but failed. I scrabbled along the underside of the ice, increasingly desperate, then saw a hook probing down, fishing close to a corpse. I pushed the dead man aside and clung on to that welcome curve of bone. The upwards passage was almost too narrow for my shoulders, but someone above knew I was a living being, and hauled and hauled until at last my head gasped above the surface. Niiv came running to me with a heavy cloak. In the glimmering dawn, and by the light of torches, I saw tears in her eyes.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ she said angrily. ‘I
told
you to prepare better!’

I had no response to that. My talents had failed me in the realm of Enaaki—or perhaps because of the power of Argo herself—and the lesson was a sobering one.

*   *   *

A while later, warmed and revived from my lazy, arrogantly ill-prepared excursion downwards, I lay on the ice, close to a hook hole, and again called to Argo, begging her to respond.

‘It’s Antiokus. You
must
remember me. I was with you when you sailed on the quest for the fleece of gold. Jason, please hear me. Your sons are not dead! Listen to me. Your sons are alive! Argo, tell him what I’ve said.’

I kept trying. I have no idea how long I lay there, staring down through the hole, which was already beginning to melt at its edges as the sluggish sun crept, worm-like, above the southern horizon. Pike-faced
voytazi
taunted me, flashing their toothy grins then disappearing, teasing me with the threat to drag me down.

‘Argo!’ I persevered. ‘You must believe me! The world has changed in a very strange way. But the news is good for Jason. Argo! Answer me!’

And then at last the voice, again, whispering to me from the icy depths.

‘He does not wish to return. His life ended when Medea killed his boys.’

‘I know,’ I said to her. ‘I was there. I saw what she did. But it was only a pretence. What she did was an illusion. The blood on their bodies was just illusion.’

I felt the ice shake beneath me, as if the whole lake below had pulsed with shock.

There was only silence from Argo, but I intuited that she was puzzled, and that my words were seeping through the wood of her hull and into Jason.

I said it again: ‘Jason: Your sons are still alive. They have grown into men. You can find them. Come back to us!’

A moment later, the ice below me bucked. Then cracked open with a sound like a whiplash, a great split exposing the pure water below.

I stood, slithered and crawled my way back to the margin of the lake where the circle of torches blazed in the hands of the visitors.

*   *   *

She was coming up. In that second when the ice had opened, before I had fled for safety, I had seen Argo’s shadow start to rise, branches like craggy fronds reaching from the shattered hull.

To the north, the lights in the heavens streamed almost as far as the zenith. The winter night was passing faster now. The frost-white trees were beginning to show colour. The rising of Argo was coinciding with the first true passage into dawn. Even as we stood, the brightness grew stronger over the bleak forest to the south, dawn fire rising in a steady arc.

And then she struck the ice. The surface of the lake exploded upwards, a fountain of glittering shards falling around the dark hull as the old ship, mast-shattered and weed-wracked, nosed up from the deeps, the tall prow draining water, rising with solemnity, almost dignity, branches snapping off like oars, until it had half stretched out from the lake … then falling back, the stern coming up, the crouching figure of the goddess draped in long-fronded weed, the whole boat shuddering like a waking beast on the cold water, then settling and becoming still.

Hanging from the mast in a web of ropes and weeds was the shape of a man, his head stretched back as if he had died screaming to the heavens. Water came out of his open mouth. Dawn light caught the living glitter of his eyes. Even from the edge of the lake I sensed that he was watching me.

‘I knew you would survive…’ I whispered to him. He wouldn’t have heard, of course. He wasn’t dead, but he was in deep cold.

But something was wrong with Argo. She was too still, now, too quiet for the vibrant, urgent ship. When she had been launched she had strained at the ropes. More than sixty men had been needed to hold her on the slipway. She had writhed and wrestled to get free, to find the ocean, and when she had finally been released she had struck the water of the harbour with such speed and energy that she had sunk for a moment before surfacing and turning to open water. The argonauts had been hard-pressed to get aboard her, swimming out and crawling up the ropes to find their benches and their oars, to slow the impatient ship and turn her back to the docks.

She had been such a strong ship. So alive! But now …

I walked out across the ice again, Niiv and Urtha with me carrying torches. The oak ship creaked as she warmed. Jason’s body gently swung where he was suspended. I touched the slippery planks, walked round to the prow and stared at the blue-painted eyes.

‘What is it?’ Niiv asked quietly.

‘She’s dead. The ship is dead.’

Poor Argo. She had sailed so far with her precious cargo. She had taken Jason to the deepest grave she could find, a place of memory and magic. She had not expected to rise again, but my voice, my message, had set the heart in the oak at work once more and she had striven to return to the surface. The effort, it seemed, had been too much, and she had perished even as she passed life back to the captain.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I didn’t know how hard it would be for you.’

Urtha called, ‘The dead man is moaning. He’s not a dead man at all. I’ve seen this happen before…’

Jason’s head had dropped and he was beginning to thrash in the web of ropes. Urtha was fascinated. ‘When a man drowns in a winter lake he stops breathing, but sometimes the spirit stays with him. It happened to an enemy of mine. A remarkable thing. He was drowned for a night and a day after our fight at the edge of a mere, but suddenly floated to the surface and opened his eyes.’

‘Did you become friends after that?’ Niiv asked him.

Urtha looked at her, confused. ‘Friends?’

‘It was an omen. An omen of friendship.’

‘Was it? I had no idea. I took his head. I’ve still got it.’

‘Help me with him,’ I said sharply, cutting across Urtha’s reminiscences. We hauled ourselves on to the deck, slipping on the slimy surface, clinging to the net that held my old friend. Urtha used his bronze knife to slash the weeds and hemp and Jason slipped into my arms with a further rush of water from his lungs and the howl of the new born.

A sled had been hauled across to Argo, and Urtha and I gently lowered Jason down to the waiting Pohjoli, who wrapped him in skins and hauled him back to the shore, to the reviving warmth of a tent and a furiously burning birch-wood fire.