The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (14 page)

Then again, across the world, all around the Path I walked, the supernatural in nature could be seen to work and be effective when conditions and the minds of priests and enchanters were fully attuned—albeit to a tiny extent—to the shifting edge of the underworld.

Munda’s small but vibrant skill was deluding her now. I lost her for a while, then discovered her at the western end of the hill. She had instructed the daubing of symbols in red ochre on the three tall gates. Her work was being carried out with puzzled amusement, though the Thoughtful Woman, Rianata, was not amused at all as she watched from a distance.

“Is she aware that red is the colour of the dead? She must be. She is painting signs of welcome. And what is she building?”

Some way from the inner gate, straddling the rough road that led to the centre of Taurovinda, Munda was herself helping to construct a rickety hut. Five men were doing the heavy work. Two of Urtha’s champions watched curiously, leaning on their shields. No one knew whether she had the right to do this, nor could they understand the reason. The structure was so flimsy that a brisk breeze would blow it down, so any sense of disobedience to the laws of the fortress were easily dismissed.

It was only as I wandered across to the busy girl—busy binding poles together to make angled supports for the roof—that I realised she was making a model of one of the hostels by the river. It would have a double entrance, the central pillar already crudely painted to suggest the form of a woman, her arms outstretched and resting on thin pillars of elm, stripped of their bark and ready to be patterned as animals.

“What is this for?”

“It’s a place of welcome. For the representatives of Ghostland.”

“It’s small. Not many representatives could fit inside.”

“They won’t have to stay here. This is just the welcoming place.” She looked up at me and smiled.

“I can’t imagine that your father will welcome them. Have you forgotten Urien? It was the Shadows of Heroes who killed him.”

“I haven’t forgotten Urien. Of course I haven’t. But don’t you understand, Merlin? The mood has changed. I’ve seen it and I’ve heard it. The voice is urgent. We must not be alarmed by what is happening at the river. We must prepare for a great event. A union between worlds. And my father’s country will become a greater country than all the others put together.”

She bustled and busied herself with her toy. The words that came from her lips were spoken in her voice, but they were not her words. Everything to the west was still, but the skies streamed towards us, silently, without breeze or gusting wind, a storm seen in the still surface of a pool.

*   *   *

I watched her and wondered. Curiosity got the better of me and I summoned a little charm, glancing into the girl as she concentrated on what she was doing.

Innocence and preoccupation were all I saw for a moment, but then—as I risked probing a little deeper—an older presence loomed before me, barring the way, a storm-shrouded figure of power and life-draining fury. I was shocked and drew back quickly, but not before I had caught a glimpse of the flash of eyes—fierce eyes, angry eyes.

It was only later that I realised I had glimpsed not an old enemy, but an old friend. And it was time to see her.

*   *   *

Niiv helped me pack supplies. She had been persuaded to stay behind and help look after Munda. “She needs a knowing eye on her,” was my way of stopping my vivacious lover from insisting on accompanying me.

The encounter I was facing was one I wished to make on my own.

As usual, I begged two good horses from the small herd of travel ponies. I selected animals that would be adept at negotiating forest and marsh. Fighting horses were no good for that. And then I left Taurovinda, Munda watching me with hawk’s eyes from one of the gate towers, Niiv, on the walkway of another, making the usual motions of a swan in flight. She had put on her cloak of white feathers, and as I left at dawn, so the rising sun transformed her into a slowly moving bird, waving to me, calling to me. My swan girl.

I rode north and east, and entered the forest. After a few days, I recognised that I was leaving the tribal lands of the Cornovidi. The markings on the trees, and the patterns on the tall stones, began to change. I was close to Nantosuelta, but Argo was hiding from me.

She sent her emissary to fetch me, a
fetch
himself, a living spirit. He didn’t speak; he didn’t acknowledge me; he appeared suddenly at the other side of a glade and beckoned to me.

I didn’t hesitate. I followed my old friend Jason, knowing that he would lead me to where I wished to go.

Chapter Twelve

So Old, So Beautiful a Ship

Argo had hidden herself in a little patch of late summer. She was nestling in a creek, among thick rushes and dense willows. The air was misty and warm, the sounds those of very early morning, combining a certain restlessness, a certain stillness.

Jason’s dark form loomed ahead of me as he wound along a hidden track, keeping close to the river’s edge, his feet sinking in mud. Two black-crested cranes flew up before us, alarmed, and winged their way into the gloom of the wider river. Then I saw Argo for the first time, just the eyes painted on her prow. They seemed to watch me forlornly as I approached, pushing the tall rushes aside.

Jason glanced at me before he walked away from the ship. As I watched him disappear, so I saw the imposing shape of my old friend and fellow Argonaut Rubobostes, a Dacian of girth and strength, but a man who now stared at me, half-hidden by the high grasses, with an expression of blank ignorance as to my nature. He looked gaunt, eyes rimmed and dark, beard and hair no longer the lustrous black of our first meeting, our first adventure, but grizzled and unkempt. He slowly sank down to a crouch, wrapped in his heavy cloak.

When I raised my hand towards him, he made no response.

I was consumed by the atmosphere of desolation and despair. What had happened to the bright ship, this beautiful ship of other years, the vibrant shell of oak and birch that had sailed over seas and along the narrowest of streams, even crawling over the land between the headwaters of rivers, shimmering with magic, set apart from ordinary eyes, transformed according to older laws of nature? And what had happened to her crew?

Argo was listing slightly towards the bank. A rope ladder dangled from her rail. The once-vivid decorations along her hull, the symbolic echoes of her past—medusae, harpies, cyclopes, other, stranger creatures—were faded, as frail to the eye as was the ship’s life-spirit to the senses.

“May I come aboard?” I whispered, my words almost lost in the susurration of the rushes.

For a moment there was silence.

Then the ship’s guardian goddess, Mielikki, Northland’s Lady, answered. “This is a sad ship, Merlin. This is a damaged ship. This is a ship in shame. But, yes. You may come aboard.”

I swung up the rope ladder. Argo shifted slightly with my weight. Everything about her felt precarious. When I peered over the low rail, I saw the fierce features of the Northland’s Lady at the stern, the goddess of the ever-winter or ever-summer of the north, of Pohjola—where Niiv had been spawned. The Pohjolon forest spirit stared hard at me through slanting, trickster eyes, a birch-carved figurehead that leered towards me. The flowing locks of her hair, intricately patterned by the people who had constructed her, were tangled with ivy, draped with the bright yellow fronds of willow. She, and the ship, were both being drawn back to the wood.

The bilges stank of stagnant water and rotting food. Barrels, ropes, bales of cloth, and the bones of animals were scattered, as if she had been wrecked against this fronded bank, not moored here.

Argo, my precious ship, my precious friend, was in a very sorry shape.

I waded through the filth on her lower deck and approached the narrowing of the stern, where I knew the “Spirit of the Ship” was hidden. Mielikki—“birch and bitch,” as Rubobostes called her—loomed above me. I heard the slightest sound of creaking wood as she angled her head to keep an eye on me, but she knew that I was no threat to Argo; and besides, she was as fond of me as it was possible for the Northland’s Lady to be fond of anyone. Coldhearted she may have been in her homeland, among the frozen forests, amid the snow wastes, by the deep icy lakes, but she—like Argo, her mistress—favoured the captains, whether old or new.

I had been Argo’s first captain.

Something told me—an intuition, nothing at all to do with enchantment—that Argo needed me now; that I was a guest she had craved for, but had been reluctant to summon.

The Spirit of the Ship is a threshold between the world of the lower deck and a world out of time, an all-world, a place where all seas are being sailed, all shores raided, all sanctuaries violated or acknowledged, all summers the same, though the celebration of summer is a different feast in different worlds. I stepped across the threshold and into a swirl of ship’s memory.

Mielikki, now in her gauzy veil and clothing, was standing among summer trees; in her youthful guise, slender and serene, she raised a hand to me in greeting. The sinister trickster was gone. The pricked-eared lynx that was her companion crouched in front of her, eyes wide and watching, fur hackled along its spine.

Mielikki beckoned me forward. I stepped deeper into Argo’s spirit, and:

A wave broke across the bow, throwing the crude ship towards the rocks.

The sky glowered, the wind howled, the cold sea raged at us. Ropes flailed, planks creaked, the tarred knots that bound this simple craft together screeched as the strain tore at them. The small sail was shredded. A few oars had not been smashed against the rocks in this narrow passage, and they heaved against the swell, while the captain and another man hung on to the steering oar with all their might. This was not Jason; this was not his Argo as I had known her. This was an older ship, on an adventure that was part of the ship’s memory, not mine. The captain, hailed by one of his men, was Acrathonas; the name was familiar. An adventurer of the highest calibre, a Jason before Jason.

In this sea-dream, I saw the white shapes of creatures in the cliffs: creatures in the form of bones, creatures of enormous size. This was the sea-passage of Petros, and I knew now where Argo was going, though why she was dreaming this particular storm was not clear to me.

Through Argo’s eyes I saw those bones take on flesh, then colour, the iridescent greens and reds of sea monsters; they bulged from the high stone walls, slipped and slithered into the ocean, and began to snap and tear at Argo with impossible jaws, staring at their prey with lifeless, unblinking eyes.

Harpoons were slung and hauled back. Men were whipped overboard, snatched in the toothed jaws of the leviathans and dragged, bloodily, into the roiling sea.

Only when an immense lizardlike head rose above the ocean behind Argo, a head the size of a house, eyes the size of a giant’s shield, did the ship begin its long sea-slide to safety, running from the skeletal jaws of fate, borne forward by the sea wave that resulted from the rising of that behemoth.

A new sail was hauled quickly to the masthead, and the west wind, amused by the narrow escape, blew a gust in favour of the flimsy craft, which leaned dangerously close to a capsize, but turned to grab that saving breath and ploughed with the storm, towards the east, towards an island, a strange and mysterious stretch of mountainous land, that I would one day come to know well. Acrathonas, like Jason after, would pillage that island, though I knew this from tale-telling alone.

I had had no time to try to understand the significance of Argo sharing this fragment of dream with me—and there was surely a significance in the act. Argo, for all that a human heart seemed to reside in her, was not given to senseless nostalgia. Shortly after, I was back with the ship in the world of the present.

The woodland shimmered; the cave mouth behind me in the crumbling façade of rock, formed from petrified wood, blew gently. The tall grass that separated cave from woodland blew in that breeze. The lynx prowled restlessly and Mielikki drifted towards me, eyes bright behind the thin white veil, mouth solemn.

When she embraced me, I was consumed by her, but we seemed to fall slightly, and though I was grasped by a woman’s arms, I was embraced by the sea-racked wood of Argo’s staunch hull.

I smelled salt-breeze and bitumen, rotting rope and hewn wood.

The Spirit of the Ship, the old sentience, spoke to me through her guardian.

*   *   *

“She is ashamed and frightened, Merlin. She was responsible for a great betrayal in her past, and the shadow of Nemesis is close. This ship is more than wood and rigging.…”

“I know. Why remind me? I built her!”

“You built her out of innocence, and set her loose on the world’s waters with pride. As you grew to become a man, slowly, over many ages, so Argo grew to become the fine ship that Jason sailed. A snake sheds skins to grow; Argo shed wood. Shipwrights and builders have taken the craft and reshaped her across the years. She is stronger, faster, sleeker, and trickier than the coracle that you constructed, but that infant’s heart, the sliver of oak, remains embedded.”

I was puzzled. I knew well enough that Argo contained a splinter of every vessel she had been, a fragment of the heart of every captain who had directed her course along rivers or across the oceans. And I was aware that my childish efforts in boat-building, under the watchful eye of ten masked figures, ten thousand years before, or more, had been the beginning of this seagoing life-form, this world upon the waves.

Why was she going to such lengths to remind me?

Sadness and anxiety were a rich taste in my dry mouth, as I let Mielikki pass on the feelings and the dreams of the vessel.

And I was suddenly in the world of my childhood, and all about me was the roar of water.

It was a moment of exhilaration, a flash of memory so powerful, so real, that it stunned me. This revisit was not of my own doing. It was Argo, spending her own life-force to send me back, to give me a glimpse of the moment when I had put enchantment and life into the boat.