The Iron Grail (43 page)

Jason turned in a circle where he stood. ‘Good gods! I should know this place, but where’s the bull? There should be a bull where those bloody statues stand.’

Then he saw the faces, noticing the features below the corrosion, the watchful eyes, the youthful smiles, the clean lines of faces not yet scarred by war or tortured by grief.

‘It’s me!’ he declaimed, and added, laughing, ‘High and mighty.’ Then grimly: ‘And the woman of my fever dreams…’

But he was impressed by what he saw, as if there was welcome and dignity in being represented in this way, even in the company of a wife he despised. The images were massive; he felt them to be triumphal. Kinos had called to him, and he had answered the call.

His son would be waiting for him.

Our footsteps echoed through the empty halls as Jason led us at a steady trot, searching the bright corners for evidence of the boy he was convinced was hiding here. He had hesitated at the bridge, staring down into the booming, chthonic reaches, but had run over the marble arch with confidence. Not so Niiv, who clung to me in horror. I had not realised that she had a terror of falling.

‘The place is empty!’ Jason cried at last. There was confusion and dismay in his tone of voice. ‘It’s just a shell!’

He took off towards the main entrance, Hylas in tow. I turned back on my tracks and with Niiv hurrying after me, her spear clutched nervously in both hands, her pale eyes wide with caution, I retraced my earlier steps and found the war room.

‘Wait here,’ I told Niiv. ‘Don’t cross the threshold—’

‘Why not?’

‘And don’t ask questions!’

‘What is this place?’ The moving lights, the images on the walls, were reflected in her eyes. ‘Who are those men?’ she whispered, her gaze flickering between each of the stooped, hunched, thoughtful bronze warriors grouped around the map table.

‘They’re only toys,’ I reassured her. ‘Stay here.’

She sat down against the outside wall of the dark room, peering round the open door every so often, struggling to understand.

I went to the concealed shrine. The brazen statue of Pallas Athena regarded me dully through the eye slits of its face-hugging helmet.

‘You played a fine trick on me in the hinterland. But I wonder: has your own enchantment faded, this deep in the Otherworld?’

Cold metal eyes caught the movement of light; but there was no light of their own deeper than the bronze.

‘He doesn’t even know you’re here,’ I went on. I was quite determined to have my say, even if the inhabiting spirit of the ikon chose to remain aloof. ‘You must have some token charm left in your body to have been able to stay so close to him, and so out of sight. He’s felt your kisses and your tears. He’s used the power of the earth itself to turn his memories into this monstrous structure. Your son is mad, Medea. You are aware of that, I’m sure. For all your protection, you couldn’t stop him losing everything that mortal men call wits. He’s just a dog, howling at the moon. He acts by instinct. He’s no more alive than the toys he’s made in memory of his father’s stories.’

Cold metal eyes; no light of their own. Perhaps I was wrong.

‘But then, why am I surprised that he’s mad?’ I taunted. ‘His mother was full of confusion. Medea! Priestess of the Ram, yet her sanctuary in Iolkos was built around the figure of a bull. She could have hidden him in any country of her wish, but she flung him into the future, into a land of the dead. He was doomed from that moment on. Doomed to madness as his mother is doomed to fail in her protection. You hide as Athena, Protectress of Cities. You protect nothing but your own need to have the vestige of a son. Your son is dead.’

Cold eyes. Without light.

I rapped my fingers against the tarnished breast, where the heart might lie. ‘If the betrayal had been yesterday, or last season, a year ago, I could understand how you could hold such hate in your heart. But you have lived the centuries, waiting. Seven centuries, Medea. It’s seven centuries since you sent Kinos to this unfortunate location, to hide him from his father’s eyes. You’ve waited, lived, waited, eaten, drunk, slept, walked, mourned, and waited. Seven centuries! How can hate live so long? I don’t understand. How can any living being hate for so long?’

The eyes grew alive!

‘Did seven centuries diminish your love for Jason? You fool. We live in twilight. Time slows at twilight.’

The voiced rasped from the metal. The words shocked me as much by their sudden expression as by their content. Medea was right: seven centuries after I had known Jason I had jumped at the chance to raise him from his grave in the Northlands lake. There are some feelings that live as if immortal, despite the thousands of encounters that come and go along the way

My question had been naive. Interestingly, to issue a challenge on the persistence of her hate for her husband had been the charm that enticed the soul out of the statue. She tipped back the helmet, threw off the bronze. She seemed to flow from the hard metal into soft, dark-robed warmth. Here was the old woman again, the beautiful woman, my first lover, faded yet not diminished by the passage of time through her bones and flesh. The shrinking of her body was testimony to the power of enchantment that she had used to make one life among so many lives in her endless existence. As before, I failed to see the age, only breathed the scent of first passion, reaping again the memory of youthful love before we had been set apart along the Path.

I wanted to take her in my arms. We were close enough to kiss. But she kept a distance between us, only a smear of sadness suggesting that she, too, was remembering older days, before Jason, before her truest love, before her fragile life had been shattered by Jason’s betrayal of her.

Did she read my mind? I was powerless, beyond intuition. My bones slept; all the carvings there, all the charms that made me so powerful in the outside world, slept comfortably, glad of a rest. Did she read my mind? She could surely have no skill in this land; then again, perhaps, like her son, she was drawing on the echoes of older magic still preserved on this strange island, in the middle of the Realm of the Shadows of Heroes.

‘You can have no idea of the horror of my life as Priestess of the Ram in Colchis. Something had taken away my charm. It was a dead place, and I was rotting. That’s why I built a sanctuary to a better god—a bull god—in Iolkos! It had all gone wrong in Colchis; Jason did not abduct me, as the silly story goes: he rescued me. There is a saying, somewhere in the world of Ocean, that when a ship founders in a storm, its crew will clutch for life at broken spars. Jason was my broken spar, not perfect, but enough to keep me living. How greedily I clutched at him. He gave me back my life. He was a spar of wood. But he was rotten at the core. When the spar decayed, I sank down into the deep.’

‘Taking your two sons with you.’

‘I couldn’t leave them. Jason was a brutal man. Think what he would have done to them!’

‘I know what you’ve done to them. One wanders the world, selling his skills with weapons, confused and lonely, haunted by the past. The other is a madman, drawing on old forces to recreate a life as a man that is nothing but childishness. You’ve killed them both, Medea. What solace do you get from being near Little Dreamer? The boy doesn’t even know you’re here.’

But all the fight had gone from Medea. She might have blazed at me, struck me, found new words in a harsh voice to justify what she had done in Iolkos seven hundred years ago. Only sadness touched the once fair features. And loneliness. ‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered. Then she glanced sharply to the door. ‘Who is out there?’

‘Only the girl. Niiv.’

‘No. Beyond her.’

I could hear the sound of men running. Hylas came skidding into the war room, momentarily astonished by what he saw, breathless, then shouting, ‘Antiokus! They’re killing each other. Come and stop them!’ He could only have been talking about Jason and Kinos.

‘They don’t recognise each other,’ I said to Medea, trying to plead with her to make the fog fall from their eyes.

‘I know,’ is all she said, closing her arms across her chest, dropping her head slightly, though her gaze remained on mine.

I left her there and followed Hylas. I could hear the ring of metal on metal, the screaming of two men, their words two chants of denial, repeated endlessly. The empty palace was filled beyond echoing with the sounds of fury and despair. As we ran, we became lost. The thunder of rage came at us from every corridor, grim elemental sound that turned us this way and that until we had to stop, exhausted, confused and helpless as the bright world shrank around us.

When I finally found my way to the bridge over the void, the encounter was almost at its end. Kinos, naked save for his helmet, chest-plate and greaves, fighting in the fashion of the Greeklanders of old, took a blow from Jason that knocked him back to the edge of the bridge.

Both men were striped with crimson.

Jason seemed almost startled that his blade had struck so easily. A hank of hair, lank and grey and bloodied, cut from his temple, dangled obscenely from his cloak, fibres caught in the weft. The near side of his face was darkly crusted. The up-draught from the void made his black cloak flow about his shaking figure. He was leaning towards his son, sword held defensively, but his naked hand reaching for the tarnished man.

Kinos looked at me. Through his pain he shouted, ‘I’m confused. Antiokus! I’m confused. Help me understand. Is this my father? If he is, why don’t I recognise him? Not that it matters any more.’

‘Take his hand!’ I shouted back. ‘Don’t fall!’

‘Is he the one? Why don’t I recognise him?’

‘Hold on, Kinos. You built the Father Calling Place. You built so many of them. You forgot only that your father would age. He
is
the one. Take his hand! Don’t fall!’

The dying man stared at his father, then pulled off his helmet, let it drop away. ‘I waited so long. I began to forget the sound of your laughter. I began to despair. But I see now that you
are
that man, the man I called for. Why do my eyes open just as they are doomed to close?’

‘Close them,’ Jason said coldly, even though his free hand still reached towards the tottering younger man. ‘You are not my son. I would know Kinos, I would know him at any age.’

Kinos laughed and looked at me. He let his sword drop into the void. ‘There you have it. Don’t you see, Antiokus? I’ve already fallen. You don’t understand. And when all’s said and done, all I’m doing is going home…’

He blew a sad kiss to his father and tipped himself backwards. He was silent as he descended into the booming depths. The gleam of his breastplate flashed for a long time, but eventually the dark sea below claimed him.

‘It’s ended,’ a voice behind me whispered. I glanced round to see Medea shrinking back, burying herself below the veils of her clothing.

The fight had gone out of Jason, just as it seemed to have deserted Medea. The two of them regarded each other at a distance, but there was no anger, no hate, no hostility in that long gaze; perhaps just weariness and regret.

‘Antiokus,’ Jason said to me quietly. He pointed his sword into the chasm. ‘If the gods are not blinding me for their own purposes, I will say it again: that was not Kinos.’

‘Then who was it?’

‘I don’t know.’

Medea said, ‘It was the small part of Kinos that I took to keep his brother company. A little shadow, that grew like the man. I called him back, but I let him live for a while.’

Jason stepped across the bridge, dark face vile with blood, his eyes wet. ‘Then where is Kinos himself?’

Medea didn’t move as Jason approached, but she shouted, ‘No further!’ The man stopped. Niiv clutched my arm nervously, resisting the temptation to chatter at this difficult moment.

‘If I take you to him, will you leave this place to its memories? Will you go away peacefully? I am prepared to be kind to you, Jason. But you must go away afterwards; you must leave me alone afterwards.’

‘I agree,’ the old Greeklander whispered. He sheathed his sword, instructed me to do the same. Only the sound of small voices, urgently warning me from the scabbard, stopped me slaughtering the kolossoi. I slipped my own bronze blade through my belt.

‘Then follow me,’ Medea said. ‘I’ll take you to where your dream comes true.’

She ran ahead of us, veils flowing, bone and bronze rattling on the long chains around her waist. She took us into a darker part of the palace, down wide stairs and through labyrinthine passages; there was a feeling of life, here; and death. The walls writhed with animals, painted in luxuriant blues and greens. The scents of incense and burning herbs constantly greeted us. This was the living part of the dead palace: Medea’s lair.

At its end was the mortuary room. She stood facing us from its far side, pressed against the black marble wall. Kinos lay on the wooden bier in the centre of the place, his arms by his sides, his armour polished, his hair lovingly braided; flowers were scattered on his breast; his greaves were made of woven grass. The smell of cinnamon was strong, and other oily, musky odours, the stink of preservation.

Jason stepped up to the bier and stared down at the pale, sweet face. There were no scars on this one, though he was a man, much older than the youthful Kinos who had built the stone ship and its monstrous crew.

Medea spoke quietly. ‘After he built the palace he went into a war rage. He created siege after siege on the beaches, on the narrow plains around the hill. The Dead of this realm flocked to him; the Unborn were frightened of him. To die before you are born affects the future very much. He played his games with the champions of a thousand ages. I dread to think of the destruction he has caused in future Time.’

‘How did he die?’ Jason asked. The man was shaking where he stood, his head lowered, his eyes fixed on the waxy skin of the poor boy.

‘He died in battle,’ Medea answered. ‘He created wars for his own amusement. It was always a risk. He was killed in one of the first of the violent encounters.’

‘And the other Kinos, the one who has been attacking me ever since I came her…?’