The Iron Grail (30 page)

‘They are alive. The kolossoi take from their life. Seven centuries ago, these men—Atalanta too—are the living dead.’

He tried to wrap his thoughts around the statement. Shaking his head, he said only, ‘What was done then is done.’

‘Not at all. Your actions now can easily affect the lives of your six resurrected dead in their living past. How they will be remembered depends on when you give back the kolossoi. You had no right to use them; they were intended for use in your argonauts’ lifetimes. Once they were dead, you should have cast them away.’

He smoothed my clothing, looked thoughtful. ‘I wasn’t aware you knew so much about our little tokens.’

‘Your
little tokens
have been the stock in trade of sorcerers for ten thousand years. Under different names, and in different forms, but of course I know about the Gift of the Greeklanders! Where have you hidden them?’

‘Where is Kinos hiding?’

I could hear the approach of men along the path that led to the king’s house. One of the women, tending the fire, had gone for help at the sound of raised voices.

I decided to let Jason know how close he had been to his son. I told him that he had been within slingshot range of the boy who was now a man. I told him that he had exchanged blows with him.

‘Blows? When?’

‘When you crossed the river. The horseman who tried to kill you.’

You are not the one. You are not the one.

Jason was taken by surprise. ‘That aggressive bastard could not have been Kinos. He would have recognised me. I always wore a beard … the grey in the beard would not have stopped him recognising me.’

‘He remembers you differently. He is a grown man. Your other son was a grown man. What sort of reception did you get from him? Ask the flesh of your belly! Don’t expect a welcome feast until he is sure of who you are.’

My words affected Jason, a moment of concern, the lines around his eyes crowding together. Even so, he whispered, ‘You
do
know where he is…’

Behind him, Urtha and Manandoun entered the gloomy room, hands resting purposefully on the decorated ivory hilts of their swords. Manandoun asked sharply, ‘Can we help?’

‘Thank you. No.’

Urtha reminded Jason of what he had said the night before. ‘I will not have a contest between you at the moment. You are both guests in my house.’

‘There is no contest,’ Jason said, then turned and bowed his head to the king. ‘I have just learned that I have seen my son without recognising him; and that he saw me without recognising his father. I have just learned that Merlin can help me, and I plead for that help; I pledge no hostility while I am in your fort.’

‘Except to the enemy, I hope,’ Urtha suggested.

The two men turned and left us. Jason’s face, again creased with thought, caught the light from the door as it was opened and closed, a brief glance towards me. ‘I don’t know where the kolossoi are to be found. I lost them as soon as Argo came along this river. Ask the ship. She’s more a friend of yours than she is of mine.’

If I could have sucked the truth from the sap of his brain, I’d have done so, there and then. But Jason was closed to me. He always had been. Besides, something in his manner suggested he was not lying.

*   *   *

A kolossoi is both a simple and a complex thing; an object; magical and personal, each one quite unique since each one is constructed out of the life and dreams of the man or woman who offers it as the token of help to a friend or brother or parent or son.

In the Northlands they call them
sampaa
. In the hill country beyond Colchis, they are
korkonu
. In many countries their power has been misunderstood and they have, and had, become simple objects, amulets and talismans: trinkets, sparkles, dew drops on the meadow, nothing more.

In the long-gone, in the murk and magic of the forested, formidable world into which I was born, I had known them by a name, but since the name itself has power, I cannot write it, even mark it, even sign it.

My own ancient ‘kolossoi’ is well hidden. Not even Medea will find it.

The kolossoi of these old Achaeans, Greeklanders, call them what you will, were hideous, portable, and almost hypnotic if looked at for too long. I doubt that Jason had even glanced at them when he had dug them up from where he’d hidden them. He would have used the shield trick, made famous by Perseus in his encounter with the mother Gorgon, Medusa, whose direct look at a man could literally petrify him. The shield would have been of polished bronze or silver in which he would have viewed the reflection of the artefacts he sought as he reached for them, a simple diversion of light that would have sapped the power of the objects for a moment, long enough for him to cover them in a leather bag; or box them; or conceal them under a cloak if they were large and beginning to grow after having been disturbed. And some kolossoi were indeed
colossal
.

Those of Jason’s friends would have been of the smaller kind.

I had an idea of what had happened to them, but Argo, if Mielikki would let me pass into the Spirit of the Ship, would certainly be able to tell me. Though that certainty, of course, was not a reason to believe that she would divulge the hiding place.

*   *   *

Argo had hidden below the Thunder Hill, somewhere along the intricate channels of the river, Nantosuelta, which coursed through Taurovinda in a series of helical veins, much as the blood, I believe, flows through the limbs and bellies of men: controlled and urgent. The hill was a world of its own, opened by shafts from the surface, seething with a spiralling network of water coming up from below.

The most obvious place to descend and find the ship was through the well dedicated to Nodons, close to the western gate.

A stone maze, the height of a tall man, protected the well, though its centre could be seen from the higher fortifications. This was protective not so much against men as against the supernatural. The maze around Nodon’s Well was simple, a winding double track, no blind ends, and somehow I still got lost.

When I reached the pool, below its thatched and flowered roof, the three women who drew from it were hardly able to suppress their laughter. They each had a tree under which they sat: a blackthorn, a rowan, an aspen.

‘Have you come to drink, wash or watch?’ blackthorn asked me. By watch she meant ask for a favour from Nodons, which would mean the depositing of an offering into the deep well.

‘To descend,’ I said. ‘And without interference from you, if you don’t mind.’

They looked at me blankly, then with amusement tempered with surprise as I stripped, piling my clothing neatly in a niche in the stone wall.

I slipped into the pool, arms above my head, and let the tug of the earth draw me down. I summoned
silvering
, the spirit of the fish. My chest ceased to ache, my vision cleared, if water entered my lungs I was not aware of it. I could hold this state for half the morning before the urgency of the human flesh would drive me to seek air again.

The well descended, then levelled out, rising again through the earth, water caught between sharp rock walls; then it plunged again and soon I felt the powerful grip of Nantosuelta drawing me into her arms. This was another maze, a water maze; I swam through the hill, deeper and deeper, pushing against the rocky tunnels, squeezing through crevices hardly wide enough for a fish, let alone a large-limbed man. Sometimes bent double to follow the flow, sometimes plunged into a wide underground chamber, at last I slipped across slimy, smooth rocks into the river herself.

Light here was dimly phosphorescent, a green and yellow glow from the walls and roof. The hill above this place rumbled and moaned, shuddered and breathed, as if it were a beast, slumbering unhappily.

Everywhere there were signs of the connection between Taurovinda and the Sun Bull, from dried dung, voluminous and rock hard, to the scattered skulls and horns of smaller representations of the beast. Every outcrop of phosphorescent rock in this underground river system seemed to be the calcified head of such a creature.

More numerous were the boats, the small boats which had carried the honoured dead from the hill to the river over so many centuries. They lay on the rocks, or drifted sluggishly in the flow, tethered by leather cords. They were empty, of course, and some were very rotten, though they spoke of many ages in the carvings and tracings on their simple hulls.

In the world above, rites and ceremonies were played out month after month in the groves, sanctuaries and sacred ways, while everywhere else life went on as normal, with due acknowledgement to the secret language of the underworld. I wonder how surprised those priests and kings would have been to know what vestiges of their ceremonies were accumulating below their foundations.

It would not have happened in any other fortress. I had now seen all I needed to see to grasp the greater significance of Taurovinda.

But where was Argo? She would be moored somewhere in these caverns.

I could do worse than call for her, it seemed to me, so call for her I did, and after a while she answered. I slipped and slid along the rocks until, gently illuminated in the strange phosphorescence, I saw her prow.

Mielikki watched me sternly as I climbed into her hull and went to crouch below the figurehead, naked, shivering, hoping that Argo would open her spirit to me.

*   *   *

A gust of warm summer air; a lynx peered at me, then turned and bounded away towards a thin stand of trees, aspens, shaking in the breeze. I crossed the threshold, stepping into the summer landscape. Mielikki sat close by on a rocky outcrop, dressed in a thin, white dress, youthful and pleasant to look at, except for her eyes, which narrowed at their edges in that way the Northlanders call
pookish
.

‘Thank you for returning the little boat,’ she said. ‘Argo is glad to have her back. A wound has been healed.’

‘That little boat has been my friend and my comfort. I know it left a wound in the great ship. I’m grateful for the loan. I would like to thank Argo herself.’

Mielikki scowled; the breeze took on an icy edge, a flurry of snow, the growl of a cat hidden in the undergrowth. The summer landscape returned, but now there was a fierceness in the protecting goddess. ‘No thanks for me? I intervened for you in Dodona. I persuaded Argo to lend you the little boat and take you away from Jason. No thanks for me?’

Without thinking I simply told the truth: ‘When I fled from Greek Land, I was thinking of nothing.’

‘Nothing but yourself.’

‘I was confused. I live through centuries. Understanding friendship is not made easier by watching friends die old and corrupt while you still live as a vigorous man. I draw back from friendship. Several times in my life I have formed a close bond with someone. Jason was one such. Those bonds mean a great deal to me, and when Jason confronted me at Dodona, threatened to kill me, dismissed me as just another betraying bastard…’

I couldn’t finish. A rage of anxiety and grief rose to form, like thunderclouds, in my skull. I felt bleak.

Mielikki said the words I couldn’t bring myself to say. ‘You felt lost.’

‘I felt lost.’

‘Do you still feel lost?’

What a question. Did she understand how taunting that question was? Lost? Nobody on the earth above me would be alive forty years from now. I would lose them all. Jason included, since he had now been abandoned by Argo.

But
lost
?

If I am to record the truth of the matter it is that I live for these small whirlpools of action and desire, quest and conviction, loss and grief, that occasionally spiral through the world as I know it, little whirlwinds of passion in a dull, dull landscape.

No. I was no longer lost.

‘Where do I find Argo?’

Mielikki laughed. ‘She is all around you, Merlin. Look around you.’

I turned slowly, looking between the stands of wide-branched oaks, blind for a moment before I understood.

‘This is the wood from which she was first built,’ I murmured.

‘Carved,’ Mielikki amended. ‘Argo began her life as a canoe, a primitive craft hacked out by one man’s hand. He rowed her to some strange places in the wilderness before she passed on to her second captain. Only those captains, the men who built and built
on
Argo, can talk to her directly. But tell me your question and I’m sure she’ll answer you.’

Mielikki sat on the rock, the lynx rolling on its back at her feet, batting at small bees with its paws, a playful cat despite its ferocious growl. She reminded me of the Pythia who sat before the cavernous oracle at Delphi, the intermediary between men and the gods. Perhaps this was one of the first oracles.

‘Jason stole the lives of six of his argonauts; small tokens; kolossoi. Men are in limbo because of his action, and he claims he has lost them. He said that Argo would know.’

The woodland shivered. A shadow passed around the small glade. The lynx sat bolt upright, alarmed and suspicious. Mielikki reached a reassuring hand and stroked its head. Her pale face was thoughtful and I knew she was listening to the voice of old Argo herself. This girl, the protecting goddess of the ship in her summer form, was so pretty compared to the figurehead on the vessel. It was hard to remember what ice-raging violence could suddenly storm from her.

‘She knows the small lives,’ she said suddenly. ‘Jason brought the kolossoi to this place and hid them close by. But though Argo loves Jason, as she loved all her captains, she could see that he was using them badly. They are quite safe. She has hidden them elsewhere, across the Winding One, and when Jason has shed his cloak of fury, she will fetch them back and give them back to the men and the woman who have lost them. This will not take long. She knows that she will have to sail across the Winding One. But she will not make the longer journey into the Realm of Shadows, to pacify the Warped Man, Dealing Death. She is too tired. These last years have been arduous for the ship as much as for her crew. When she is rested, Merlin, come with us, and she will tell you where to find the small lives. You will then be their guardians.’