“That’s better,” she said. “It will ease the pain later, when he punishes me.”
“Why will he punish you?”
“Mostly because I don’t like him and he knows it, and I make life difficult for him. Partly because I’m a woman, or what’s left of one, and ever since Medea killed his precious lover and his boys, he doesn’t much like the female sex, although he doesn’t prefer his lusty companions. He has very little choice. Boys, boy-shaped girls, and…” She sucked her fingers pointedly. “Well, I hope you don’t mind eating meat from a carcass that Jason has raped.”
She was grinning mischievously. Jason suddenly lashed out with his hand, a stinging blow to her cheek, drawing blood from the corner of her mouth. He spoke angrily, she translated quickly.
The business session had begun.
“What magic did you use to kill Peleus? And make Tisamenus disappear…”
Which one was Tisamenus, Richard wondered, but he said, “A magic that surfaces out of dreams. The dream lives in the skulls of certain men, and also in the earth. The light of the sun, and the terror of lightning, can be controlled by this magic, and made to dance at my orders.”
It was sufficiently garbled for confusion, but Richard was proud of his invention. When Sarin conveyed this information, Jason began to look hungry in a different way. Predictably he asked, “What will you trade for knowledge of this magic?”
“Nothing,” Richard said. “The magic is known only to me. The very earth in this place is at my command—” Jason had seen something that would not give the lie to this lie—“No one else can have the knowledge.”
It was some moments before Jason answered, his gaze burning into Richard. When he finally spoke it was in a whisper, and Sarin had to listen hard as she gave voice to the old man’s thoughts. “Will you come with me, then? Will you sail with me on the Argo, as my honoured companion, and work your magic for me? If you believe this, you’re a fool.”
It took Richard a moment to dissect Sarin’s commentary from the translation. As he glanced at her she raised her eyebrows, quickly and pointedly. He said, “No. Thank you, but the Goddess Hera directs your fortunes. You must ask her for all the magic you need.”
Jason turned his head and spat angrily. His face literally darkened as he met Richard’s gaze again. “Hera? She rations me. In some ways I’m no more than her shadow, and she dances at her own whim to make me move.” He scratched the grey stubble on his chin, smiling thinly. “But I like the tone of your magic. I like its effect. There are places I wish to go, there are treasures to acquire, achievements that would be easier with a magician like you. I will offer you a palace. I carry a treasure in the hold of the Argo with which I could buy two such places. I will give it to you.” He grinned hugely. “And gladly! Just come with me for one year. No more than that. One year. Come on—what do you say?”
Without taking his eyes from Jason, aware of the face that Sarin was pulling, Richard said, “No. This is my home. My gods watch me from the woods. The forest and myself are as one. I seek something that only I can find. My own adventure will take me deep into the wood, not onto the high sea.”
Jason was very tense, the fingers of his right hand gouging at the earth. He said, “Then I will help you find what you seek. Myself, my friends. We’ll be at your service for … two years. If you will spend just one year with me.”
“No. I must find what I seek alone. There is a god called conscience, and he needs to be placated.”
The word was hard for Jason (for Sarin, too, Richard noted). The argonaut came from a time when the notion of conscience was still raw-formed, still a confusion of the will of gods and predestined actions. Richard went on, “More importantly, there is a life called Alex, a life that is in limbo. Like Orpheus—”
“Orpheus? I’ll introduce you—”
“Like Orpheus, I have to enter hell to bring him out. I can only do it alone.”
Jason was angry, but he tried to hide the fury. He stood, kicked the lamb to Richard, then tugged Sarin to her feet, dragging her to the river. “You should give me the chance to help you!”
“Leave the woman here for a while!” Richard called, and he heard Sarin translate, but Jason snapped a negative and pushed the frail creature into the water ahead of him, splashing through the shallows towards the gully. As he disappeared from view, he shouted out, and Sarin’s voice echoed the words: “Perhaps your magic is not as powerful as you think!”
(ii) Dancing with Shadows
Somehow she slipped her chain, and came back to the compound after dark, huddling by the glowing embers and calling softly for Richard. He ran around the grass path, peering over the weeds until he saw who it was, then went to her, picking up one of the still-burning branches and leading her by the hand to the longhouse. She was shuddering, wincing with pain, and he wondered if it might be the defences, so he turned down the generator and indeed her agony diminished.
He had been huddled in the longhouse without a fire, but he set light to the pile of wood, now, and they sat and listened to the crackle of dry bark, watching the smoke stream up to the roof hole. There was food left, and unsurprisingly Sarin went at it like a hound. She sat cross-legged, her robe riding up her thin legs, and as the light grew with the fire Richard saw the bruising on her thighs. Distressed and disturbed for her, he reached over and tugged the cloth to conceal her wounds. Her neck was black and blue where the chain had been.
“He’s sleeping. He put me back in the hold, without the chain, but there’s a loose plank and I’m small enough to get through it. I mustn’t let him know I’m gone. It would be too terrible for the others.”
She was not the only prisoner, then. But Richard hesitated to ask her who else was locked below the deck of the Argo. He wanted to know more about Sarin herself. How had she grasped his language so quickly? What was her myth?
By firelight, relaxed and warm, with a friend at last, she told him about her life. To her, of course, it was a natural life that had ended abruptly when she had been taken by Jason.
She had lived in a town called Eshmun, close to a city and sacred site where the priests had ordered the construction of a great tower to reach to the gates of heaven itself. A place called Babel. As a child, she had seen her grandfather broken by the work, sent home to die once his bones had cracked and his muscles become like rags. Her father had been taken. When he too was broken by a fall, his dying words had been that from the top of the tower he had seen a place where the sun shone from every horizon.
Sarin, her mother, and sisters were now alone, and unsupported. Sarin had been six. One day they had been taken by other women, and moved up to the base of the tower itself, which was so wide, so huge, so high that it blocked the light from the west. They lived among the tents. Sarin for a while had helped prepare food for the builders, carpenters, and stonemasons. But soon she was old enough to follow her sisters into the tower itself, and climb one of the twenty flights of spiral stairs. This led to the ornamental rooms where jade lions watched over shallow pools of water, and those men with the Vision of the Tower came to bathe and relax, and take their various pleasures. And Sarin, for a year or more, was one of these.
Because of the nature of her work, because she would need to talk to men from all across the world where customs and the secret languages were different, she was trained in the language of the Tall Grass. The Tall Grass language had been the first language, spoken in the long-gone by the first adventurers. Over many generations the Tall Grass tongue had become rich and complex and all men the known world over spoke it; a small part of it, however, had become divided and secret; each and every man and woman had a secret language, which they spoke alone, to the moon, or to hidden forces, or to God.
Once Sarin had learned the ancient Tall Grass tongue, she could see deeper into the wisdom of the men of Vision, further into their hearts, further into their humour, further into their fears. She became one of the Comforting Mouths, women whose conversation and understanding was
like magic. Her head was full of language, and those languages were like windows onto long-gone worlds. Sometimes, too, there were long-to-come worlds, showing themselves in dreams. This was the nature of the Tall Grass tongue: so simple that it was the key to everything human beings thought in their secret worlds. The women kept this secret closely guarded in their hearts.
One day, Sarin made the mistake—the only mistake she would ever make, until she failed to kill a man called Jason who came to abduct her—the mistake of mentioning her visions of the long-to-come.
One of the Tower Builders, aspiring to the priesthood, was jealous of her dreams. He asked her to reveal the names of God in the worlds of the long-to-come. Sarin refused. He beat her, then dragged her to the stone drop, a hole in the wall through which the blasphemous were sent to their death on the rocks and tents, an hour’s fall below. The Builder held Sarin by the hair and dangled her from the stone drop. From here she could see the sun at every horizon, and she remembered her father’s dying words, and that made her think of her grandfather, and her mother and sisters, now lost in this great structure in the service of the Builders.
She felt at peace despite the pain and hung there, talking to the memory of her father, while the Builder’s arm tired. He demanded to know the names of God in the long-to-come. She asked him why he wished to know. He told her that in names there was great power, and when the tower reached to Heaven itself, those men in possession of the not-yet-known names of God would be as Kings in that great place.
That was when the tower cracked.
Sarin declined to let her secret knowledge be known.
The tower cracked again, and this time she felt the whole world shake, and reached to the Builder just as he released her hair. She clung to his arm, then found a grip upon the lintel of the stone hole. The tower trembled and the Builder was thrown out into the air, to fall for a long time, robes flapping, his scream outliving his body. As the tower began to collapse, Sarin scrambled into its ruined bulk, and scampered down the spiral stairs, dodging the rocks and stones, the cedarwood beams, the jade and golden idols. Eventually she was struck by masonry and lost consciousness, save for a dream in which, with thousands of others, she was falling through the ruins to her death below.
She woke among those ruins. Her mother was bathing her face. Everything was in chaos. The world was full of sound, and the sounds jarred and flowed and screamed, but as Sarin came to full alertness she found that she could understand those sounds. The secret languages of every man, woman, and child were now the only languages—the greater part of the Tall Grass tongue had been torn away!—but each was different. She could understand her mother, but her mother could understand none of her daughters, save Sarin.
Sarin was the Tall Grass Lady, and she was depicted on many painted and carved surfaces, vases, and sacred stones. She knew all tongues. When she had denied the Builder his obscene request, she alone had been spared by the fateful and vengeful force that had destroyed the language of the world, the tower, and its blasphemous intent. Sarin dwelt in a temple, and was visited often, to interpret between new peoples, new clans, new tribes. Her visions continued. Her fame spread …
And then—to this Sarin at least—a strange thing happened …
Out of the long-to-come came a ship like no ship she had ever seen, men like no men she had ever seen, carrying swords and spears with terrifying blades, speaking a language that she recognised, but talking of her own life as if she was long-gone, long in the past. They were collectors, and they had come to collect her. They would sell her for a high price to a king whose desire for power could make use of this Witch of Tongues.
They took her, abused her, beat her, and chained her in the cargo hold of the Argo.
Sarinpushtam. Tall Grass Speaker. A woman with the gift of language. One of Jason’s tradable treasures.
* * *
“There are two holds,” she said after finishing the last of the sour, lavender wine. It hadn’t done Sarinpushtam any harm, so Richard too had indulged from the golden jug, and now felt light-headed and aggressive towards Jason. “To get to the hold where the living are chained you have to go through the dead treasure hold. It’s stuffed. You can hardly move for fleeces, skulls, statues, and bits of armour.”
“Fleeces? Is there a golden fleece among them?”
“They’re all golden,” Sarin said with a little laugh. “He collects them compulsively. I don’t know why—nobody seems to want them.”
“What about guards?”
“They’re all drunkards. They’ll be vigilant during daylight, but they eat and sleep like lions, and drink like Old Vineface … I don’t know how you remember him in your long-to-come. They’ll soon drift off, but Richard, they’re not fools. If they sleep readily, because of their age, they sleep lightly, they wake fast, they’re stronger than they look, and they’ve lost none of their skills. They’re mean-tempered, ferocious old men.”
“I’ll be careful. At least Hercules didn’t come back.”
“Four of his illegitimate sons are among them, though, and one of the women is his daughter. The sons of the Dioscuri are among them too. And the shade of Aeneus, of whom you should be very wary.”
“The unsung heroes of Jason’s later legend,” Richard mused aloud, and was about to speak again, to ask who the rest of the argonauts were, when he noticed that sweat was pouring from Sarin’s face. She seemed to be in pain, and almost immediately she arched back and began to howl. Richard leapt to his feet and picked her up, astonished at the fact that he could hardly feel her weight. Her breath was bad, but her eyes, now wide, were terrified. “Something’s happening to me…”
The defences! Christ!
“Hang on to me. I have to get you out of the Station.”
She began to weep, biting back the sounds, gnawing at her lip to frustrate the anguish of pain that she was suddenly experiencing. Richard cut straight through the grass, wading through the tall grass, crossing his winding paths. He hardly glanced around him as he passed the gates, and entered the water. If Jason was here, now, then he was in trouble. Sarin’s grip on his neck tightened, then relaxed and he was shocked, dropping her to the ground, slapping her cheeks, pulling her face round to see if life still existed. She was breathing shallowly. Her mouth was slack and wet. He picked her up again and stumbled up the bank, running fast towards the Sanctuary, to get her away from the humming defences, the totems, the talismans, the forces of the earth that could so unpredictably take the life of a mythago.
He fell to the ground, his legs too tired to work any more. He covered Sarin with his body, hugged her, his mouth against her neck not for pleasure, but so that he could feel with his lips for the pulse of life. She groaned, was sick, and he drew away, holding her hand, massaging her thin fingers, waiting for her to come back to full strength.
“What happened?” she whispered after a while. “I felt like my life was being sucked into a great hole. There were running creatures, running men, all being sucked down into a great hollow in the ground…”
The reference was clear. She had experienced Old Stone Hollow itself. So did that mean that it was the camp’s defences that had attacked her suddenly or had something reached to her from the cave? In any case, it would be dangerous for her to return to the Station.
“How do you feel?”
She wiped a hand across her mouth. “Too much wine,” she said. “I feel shaky. I don’t want to be beaten again. I’m going back. From what I’ve heard Jason say to the others, the Argo will not be seaworthy for four days, perhaps five. So don’t act hastily. If you really want to help, then we must wait for a good moment.”
She was staring at him. It was an odd look and he couldn’t interpret it. Suddenly she flung her arms around his neck and cried on his shoulder. Helplessly he patted her back, alarmed by the prominent ribs. “I will help,” he said. “As best I can. But you mustn’t come back to the compound. It’s too dangerous for you.”
“He’ll drag me back. He
needs to control you. He wants your head. Jason believes that the source of all magic is in the jelly that fills our skulls.”
Clever man …
“Richard…?”
“What is it?”
She drew back, peered at him through furrowed brow, licking her lips and grimacing at the taste. “If you can’t help us. If it seems Jason will win…” Her eyes gleamed with passion and desperation. “Richard. I would rather not be alive than with Jason. Do you understand what I’m asking?”
“Yes. I do.”
“The knowledge has only just become important to me. I can’t stand it any longer. I don’t belong with him. I don’t belong here. I dream of long-gone and long-to-come, but the dreams are wrong. It’s as if I am not in the right world. Can you explain that?”
Richard could have spent an hour explaining it, of course, but he shook his head. Suddenly Sarin was on her feet. She slipped off her colourful wrap and merged with night shadows, a pathetically slim shape, slipping down the bank to the gully, moving like the softest breeze back to her prison in the Argo.
* * *
“Riiich—aaaard! Good morrr-ning. Brek-faaast, Riiich—ard. Braaaaak—fust!”
The sound of Jason’s call, his shouted invitation to come to the river, woke Richard from a deep and dizzying sleep. He was in the longhouse, wet and cold with sweat. Jason’s voice, the accent pronounced, the laughter a clear indicator that he was amused by the strange words (no doubt taught to him by Sarin), was nightmarish.
“Riiich—aaaard!”
He dressed and ran in his crouch through the wind-stirred grass, finally peering through the gate at the crouched, cloaked shape on the far bank. Sarin was there too, but not in chains. On a skewer, Jason held two crisply black fish, plump of body. Fish for breakfast. Why not? The pain in Richard’s head was a sufficient warning not to accept any alcohol, however.
He thought of turning up the generator, but the memory of the previous night, and the possibility that Sarin would not survive the destructive field, decided him against such a move. Jason as ever was unarmed, but Richard nocked an arrow and skulked forward, finally standing in the open gates.