She would not be coming back, I was sure. She was only on loan from the Northlands. The goddess that protected Argo also protected her own impetuous child; and though Mielikki gazed at us with snow-cold fury, she was a kind mother, and Niiv was her child. When this was over, Argo would be seeking a new protector; and I would be looking for a new lover.
When this was over! How easily the words come now, so long after events, so long after the resolution. I tell of those events by looking back, and I record by remembering how it was, how we felt, the fear and the sadness, the anticipation, the hope and the confusion that had gathered around this small band from two large kingdoms who were being threatened by their own past and future, the living spirits of ancestor and descendant who had gathered at their frontiers, blood-thrilling and land-gathering, and all under an influence they could never hope to comprehend, and for reasons that they could never have known in a hundred generations.
I didn’t know those reasons either. I wasn’t prepared to scan the future. I had an inkling that a great challenge was ahead of us, and that resolution was possible, or devastation inevitable. Either would free me from the bind to Alba.
When this was over!
When what was over? We were to start seeking answers in a place that Argo knew well, an island that I, for my part, remembered vaguely, and where—for reasons that Argo denied me—Jason could not be permitted to go, not in any fully sentient state. She was taking him there as a ghost.
We were all in a web, a maze. Finding the thread that would lead us out would be our challenge.
Meanwhile, I was not alone in my sadness at leaving the greater island of Alba. Urtha and his son stood, arms around each other, faces set grim, watching their neighbour’s land pass into the distance, swallowed by every lazy bend in the river and the woodland that gathered at every curve, branches reflected in the water, as still as the hearts aboard the ship. Father and son, no doubt, were thinking of two women who remained beyond that now-threatening hinterland of bronze hounds and ghost-swarming hostels.
Ullanna and Munda.
Two women with very different sympathies to the circumstances that had overtaken them.
PART THREE
KRYPTAEA
Chapter Fifteen
Awakening
Rubobostes the Dacian was on the steering oar, braced against the storm. He seemed immovable, even as Argo listed violently and juddered as massive waves swept across her deck. Jason, cloaked, hooded, and haunted, stood at the rail, holding a lantern, signalling to the Greeklander vessels, keeping in touch by a code that he had contrived with them as soon as we had reached the open sea. Tairon—the exile from the very island to which our sea path now took us—clung to the rising prow, soaked by the bow-waves that flushed our poor ship, seeking a way through the mountainous waters. Tairon was an expert on labyrinths, and this ocean, south of Alba, close to Gaul, was a maze more complex than the tombs that burrowed below the great white-crystal pyramids of Egypt.
These three old Argonauts had at last begun to wake from the dream. Yet though they went about their business, they were still uncommunicative; they recognised me, but not in the human way, as if we regarded each other as reflections in a dark mirror. Argo was not yet ready to give them a full release from the silence she had imposed upon them. Their voices were functional only.
In the late afternoon, in storm-darkened weather, one of the Greeklander traders began to take on water, listing heavily, signalling her distress. The coast in the gloomy distance was high and craggy, no obvious haven or cove. Her companion vessels were some way ahead of us. The storm had caught us by surprise, and in the wrong part of the ocean.
Jason shouted, “She’s asking for help. For four of her crew to come aboard Argo, and as much cargo as we can manage.”
“How many crew on board?” Urtha shouted across the noise of the sea.
Jason called back, “Four that are important, he says! And fourteen pairs of hands at the oars.”
Urtha struggled towards me, slipping on the wet planking. “Four pairs of those hands should see us at full capacity, if I remember the last voyage well enough. But who is to decide, Merlin? Who is captain on Argo?”
“Hardly the time to discuss rank, Lord Urtha,” I replied. He frowned at my use of the formality. “Jason will be captain when Argo wills it. Not until then. For the moment, you must take command. I agree with you. Four or six can be saved—from the galley!—and no cargo.”
“I agree.”
Rubobostes leaned his great bulk on the steering oar. Bollullos and Caiwan stood ready to grapple the trader. Argo leaned and lurched towards the other vessel. Four fat and sea-swept faces watched us anxiously. Each of those men carried a large pack, tied to his back.
Bollullos flung ropes and the four grasped the ends, leaping into the heaving ocean and beginning to drag themselves towards us. The waves broke over them, but they clung on desperately. Behind them, saturated faces watched us from the deck in despair.
Bollullos let go of the ropes. Four white, screaming faces rapidly disappeared astern.
We sea-shifted as close as was safe to the trader, which was now beginning to list dangerously, sea swamped, the mast threatening to strike our own ship. The oarsmen jumped—where else could they go? We heaved seven of them aboard. The rest foundered along with their ship, sucked down with its cargo of clay jars, its skins, its horse—our traded horse, poor creature—and its plums in spiced wine.
Niiv took my arm as the craft disappeared below the waves. “I don’t know what gods live down below, but they’ll be feasting well tonight.”
The storm abated towards dawn and we caught up with the other merchantmen. We were all ragged from the rough ocean and at first light made for a shallow haven to effect repairs. We were still some way from the cliffs of the Iberian peninsula, and found a sandy bay, backed by reedy marshes. There was a good supply of wildfowl here, slow and easily brought down by slingshot, but no fresh water and no sign of a village.
Three of the seven souls we had saved returned to the small convoy from Greek Land. The other four remained on Argo, glad to use their muscle for an adventure a little more inspiring than bartering figs for pigs.
We sailed on.
Two of the trading ships left us at Gades, on the Iberian coast, the others catching the wind to follow the peninsula as far as the Gates of Herakles. Here, they, too, left us, one to scour the bays of Numida, the other cutting south and east across the ocean to Carthago. We anchored with our companion in the Iberian bay of Erradura, a small town that stank from the stone vats of rotting fish, a delicacy in many lands and highly prized, but which also supplied us with aromatic fruits and preserved meats. There were several Cymbrii here, exiles from their tribal lands in Alba, excellent storytellers. We passed a pleasant day in this gentle company.
Argo then passed the Isles of Balearis, and was rowed powerfully to the harbour at Massil and the marshes of the Rhone delta before making a crossing in open sea to the primitive island of Korsa, and the tomb-lined harbour of Lystrana, with its half-drowned skeletal ships and black-cowled guardians. It was here, where once he had sailed on the quest of the fleece, that the full light of reason rekindled in Jason’s eyes, and in Rubobostes’s, too, who came awake with a huge yawn and then—when he saw me—a huge grin.
Tairon was busy tidying himself, checking the ragged nature of his beard, examining the salt-encrusted skin of his arms and legs. He was a thin, fastidious man, but a man with great ability.
I suspected that Tairon had been in a higher state of alertness for some time, but he gave nothing away.
Jason strode about the ship, inspecting the supplies, the state of the oars, the sail, the damage to the mast. He cast a quizzical glance over all the new Argonauts, nodding politely. He seemed impressed by Bollullos, perhaps recognising strength and determination, two useful assets. He seemed bemused by the five youths, though of course he recognised Kymon. He playfully tried to tip Niiv over the side—she was no
t amused—then came over to me, tugging at his lank beard, eyes bright, teeth stained as he grinned at me.
“You keep a sloppy ship, Merlin.”
“We’ve made it halfway to Crete, sloppy or otherwise.”
“Ah!” Jason looked at the surrounding white cliffs, then grasped where we were. “Korsa! I recognise the place. We harboured here with the fleece, with the Colchean witch, had to fight off the Lysistarians. Gruesome creatures; brained two of my crew with clubs the size of a bull’s backside and dropped rocks on us from the foreland. No sign of them now, thank Hades. When did we arrive here?”
“Not long ago. You have been in a dream.”
“Yes,” he said with a grim glance at the figurehead of Mielikki. “Something went wrong, soon after we left Alba the last time. Argo’s mood changed. She held us prisoner. I’m not even aware of where she took us, but it was dark, and cold, and she made us row like madmen, and then suddenly we shipped oars, hunkered down, and that was that. I knew I was sleeping, but I couldn’t rouse myself. But here I am. And Rubo and Tairon, too! Is that all of us? What happened to the rest?”
“This is all of you. I don’t know what happened to the rest. I believe they were abandoned.”
Jason was clearly unhappy with that answer. “There are some questions to be asked. But the first of them is, What are we doing here? And why are we going back to that dreadful country?”
I suppose that I wasn’t paying attention. It took several moments for his words to affect me. Back to that dreadful country?
“When were you there before?” I asked him. But before he could answer, the ship began to move on a sudden swell. The sea seemed to rise around us. A flowing wave poured through the narrow straits from the open sea to the enclosed harbour. The bole of water broke over everything in its path, Argo included, ramming the vessel against the crumbling stone jetty. We were all thrown off our feet.
The swell subsided as quickly as it had struck. Jason got back to his feet, touching a finger to his lips (be quiet about the matter) and went to help stack the strewn jars of supplies.
Tairon, with a nervous glance at Mielikki, whispered to me: “You would think Poseidon had caused the wave. Yes? But no. The wave came from the ship. I could see the pattern in the water. A deep wave flowing away from Argo, then returning to cause the havoc.”
“Are you certain of that?”
“As certain as I can be. This is an unhappy ship.”
Tairon’s words hardly surprised me. But later, he asked to accompany me ashore, into a narrow valley where Colcu had discovered a spring. Spring water was considered almost magical to the Celts, even though we had an ample supply of fresh water from streams running into the harbour. So each of us carried two large leather pouches, to be filled with as much as we could manage, such water to be restricted in its use.
I asked no questions about this. Tairon wanted to escape the heart of Argo.
“She abandoned all but the three of us,” he said to me quietly as we rested after our walk into the valley. Our water sacks were full, our faces freshened from the spring, our bellies satisfied with almonds and the rich berries we had gathered along the way. Distantly, over high mountains, storm clouds loomed ominously, but here, facing south to the bright sun, we felt at peace. Argo was a small vessel in a narrow harbour, surrounded by wrecks. The white gleam of the chalk cliffs that enclosed the bay were almost homely.
“Left them by the water’s edge, in Alba. It was a cruel act. They have no way home, those others. But she abandoned them because she is no longer the ship that she was. Something is rotten at her heart. Or something has buried itself there, and is dying, causing that corruption. She has brought us the long northern coastal route. I don’t know these seas well, but Jason does, and he has raised the question: Why didn’t we sail south, along the coast of Numida, to Carthago, then to Sicila? It would have been quicker, and far safer.
I was certain I understood the answer to the question: Argo was retracing her sea path from that previous voyage, when Jason had managed to bring her overland from the headwaters of the Daan, to the Rhone river that flowed south through Liguria and emptied into the ocean near to where Massil would one day become a haven. And then to this open sea.
Perhaps Argo was picking up echoes of that greater, happier time. Perhaps she was gathering little shards of her life, cast off in previous centuries as I knew she was capable of doing, small ships, faint echoes of her own early years that could sail or be rowed into the hidden realms of shades and shadowy magic.
It was time to return to the harbour. Tairon shrugged the water-laden bladders over his shoulders, clearly struggling with the weight—he was very slightly built—and we set off down the path.
“When did you leave Crete?” I asked him, aware that I knew very little about this man.
He staggered a little as he tried to turn, then kept on pacing. “A few years ago,” he replied. “We met in the far North, by the frozen lake. Where you met Niiv and rebuilt Argo. You surely remember.”
“Very clearly. You came out of nowhere in the middle of that long winter night. You said you’d been wandering through a maze for some time. You were surprised to find yourself so far North, so cold.”
“Yes. I got lost.”
“Who was the ruler in Crete when you left?”
There were many. He told me a name. It meant nothing. Then I asked him about the great painted palaces that had been built before the Greeklanders had conquered the island. They had been in ruins, he told me. The centre of the island had been shrouded in a permanent cloud. Every fortified town now displayed the double axe, the labrys, the island’s symbol of power, but the mazes had become forbidden places.
That was why and how he had come to be lost. A few boys were born into every generation with some of the old skills in maze-running. This was a strictly controlled practice. But the temptation to break taboo was usually too great. Those lads who maze-ran before they had received the necessary instruction mostly disappeared into the earth forever. The few who returned were mindless, gabbling, and were quickly sacrificed, though not to a deity but to a wild woman known as Queller.
Tairon was one of the lost.
My memory was vague; too many centuries of learning to recollect everything that came my way by way of story, action, or legend. But it seemed to me that Tairon was not just a few years out of his time, rather, nearly a thousand.
And Argo wanted him on board. My curiosity was keened. The more I heard about Crete, the more intrigued I was by the island, and by what had passed there in the long-gone.
* * *
From the white harbour we continued our way south, through the Tyrrhen Sea, then through the narrow straits of Mesna before catching the trade route across the ocean known as Cerauna towards Greek Land itself, to the southern peninsula, which Jason called Achaea, wary for warships and the swirling waters that could suck even a large vessel to the seabed in instants, and which were common off these shores. Charybdis was the most renowned.
We saw sails in the distance only once, some twenty or so, highly coloured, billowing in a strong wind. We could make out the faint beat of drums as the ships signalled to each other. They were Greeklander and sailing on a parallel course to our own, but sea haze and a rising swell had soon taken them from view. Rubobostes heaved at the steering oar and altered our course just enough to make sure we put even greater distance between ourselves and that unpredictable fleet.
Rubobostes was in low mood; he was sad, grieving. I had hardly spoken to the man since he had shed the ghost, in the mouth of the Rhone, but now—with Bollullos taking over at the oar—the Dacian’s heavy hand grasped my shoulder, and his foul-breathed grin greeted me as memory of our previous encounters returned. “It’s good to see you again.”
“And you.”
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To Crete.”
“And where’s that?”
“South. A long, thin island, full of mystery.”
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“Why are we going there?”
“To find answers.”
“Answers, eh?” The big man looked knowledgeably thoughtful. He reached for a small jar of wine as we sat in the hold. “Then I hope we find them. But for the moment, I’m too tired to even think of questions. And I miss Ruvio. Ruvio haunts my sleep. Whatever happened to Ruvio? I will die with his name on my lips, I’m sure of it.”
Ruvio was his horse.
“Ruvio is roaming free, somewhere on Alba. Fertilising everything that gallops in front of him.”
“I’m glad of that,” the Dacian murmured, then drew heavily on the jar. “That horse and I are part of the same life. Did you know that, Merlin? Not just inseparable, though we are separated now, but part of the same being.”
“I know you loved the creature very much. You were two of a kind.”
“We were one and the same,” the big man corrected. “We came from the same womb. Did I ever tell you that? The same mother gave birth to us both.”
“I didn’t know that,” I assured him uncomfortably, surprised by what he was telling me. “And perhaps the less said at this time the better.”
But the Dacian shook his head. “One mother, two children. You’ve heard of centaurs?”
“Centaurs? Yes. They once existed in Greek Land. Dead now, destroyed by Titans.”
“They exist everywhere. They’ve learned to hide. The lessons from Greek Land were not ignored. Man-chested, horse-bellied, the limb-supple grasp of a man, the swift-striding speed of an equine. I was destined to be centaur, but the womb split the two parts of me. It happens, apparently. So we were born brothers, one to ride and one to carry. So I was told.”
“You are part horse?”
“No. The horse part of me was separated. As I’ve just explained.”