If the shield had been scallop-edged, blade-sharp, the man would have been cut in two by the strike! That was how fast young Kymon despatched the oval of wood and bronze.
He somersaulted back into the car, blood-drenched and wild; he had been badly cut across the chin. His eyes were brimming with tears and he shouted, ‘Lost! We are lost! My father will be ashamed of me.’
‘Not lost … just delayed. Your father will be proud!’
I turned the horses and sped us through the tall grass. Behind us, eleven only of our host came running or cantering after. Though the cloaked knights were withdrawing into the fort, making their horses walk backwards at a steady and ungainly pace, watching us, the rest of the Ghostlanders were busy at work taking grim trophy from our dead, displaying it on their spears.
Beyond the tree-line, among the groves, we were safe. But Kymon was distraught, helpless; his finest counsel, Larene, a wise young man, lay in pieces on the same ground where Kymon had been placed at his birth, to see the stars above his home, before he had been despatched to his foster father, among the Cornovidi. He stood, brooding in the shadows, staring out at the plain and the crows that were beginning to circle the killing field.
‘My father will be ashamed,’ he repeated softly, adding sharply, and with no room for manoeuvre: ‘And don’t tell me otherwise! This has been a bad day for us all.’
‘Worse for the men on those spears. You’re not yet bleached. You’re not yet bone.’
He would not be consoled, staring grimly at the display of heads being paraded outside the Bull Gate. ‘I made a mistake. It should be me gaping from those spears. Munda was right.’
Munda? Had she spoken to her brother as well? I asked Kymon what Munda had said to him.
‘To bide my time. To grow stronger.’ He looked round at me, desperation in his eyes. ‘There will be a call for me to be offered as hostage, Merlin … but until Urtha returns, I can’t risk that! Not that I don’t have the courage. But my father will need a son when he returns from his Greek Land folly. Won’t he?’
‘Quite right,’ is all I could say to the youth. Good gods, I had seen this slight young man perform feats that no horseman or shield man at Thermopylae had accomplished. The honourable move, if it had been the living we had been fighting, would be to now offer himself as hostage to the fort; in fact, he was too young for such a role. No king’s son who had not yet finished his time of fostering could be taken hostage. Killed, yes, but not taken hostage. But all that was academic. We had fought the Dead, and to deny them their prize of the king’s son was a triumph in itself.
As Kymon agonised—I let him steep in his own despair for a while, a kindly and useful abandonment it seemed to me—I went back to the plain and watched the completion of the butchering. I was surprised to see the leader of the knights trotting through the grass towards me, alone and unarmed, his round shield slung across his back, his head unprotected. He was certainly of the Unborn. He came to me in the guise-age of his middle years when, no doubt, he would be at his most adventurous. He turned right side on to me, which I thought was meant to be unchallenging.
‘Who are you?’ he called to me.
‘Someone who is older than the bleached bones that are interred below that hill,’ I answered. ‘Older than the oak that was used to make its first gates or the earth that made its first walls; old enough to have walked in and out of Ghostland without noticing the difference…’
‘Dead, then. But still alive. I had that feeling about you.’
‘And you? Who are you?’
‘That is a good question,’ the rider said with a laugh. ‘I wish I had an answer. This is my place, though; I belong here. I have dreamed of this hill. I can’t wait to occupy it. The boy would have come to no harm … with me. Do you have a name?’
‘None that I’ll tell you. You? Are you named?’
‘Sometimes I think I am, sometimes I think I’m not. It’s the curse of being neither here nor there. I did not intend to harm the boy…’
‘I know that.’
‘The others will. They want to harm him very badly. There are more of them than us. But we are all determined to take this place. So if you want to keep your chariot-jumping prodigy in blood and brains, keep him away from here. I promise you, if he comes back I’ll deal the killing blow myself. I have no choice in the matter. Keep him angry; but keep him flushed! Keep the crimson in his cheeks, not on the grass. You see it, I think; you see the consequences. You see it red. You see it crow-ravaged.’
‘Who are you?’ I shouted at this man. I opened my eyes, but the mist that separated me from Ghostland flowed across my vision. Not yet born, but a man of great power; he sat there in the saddle of his restless warhorse and searched the woods for an understanding of his own. I was aware of one thing: though we didn’t know each other now, we were certainly destined to meet each other again, and in his real life.
‘Who are you?’ I whispered again, and from the slow shake of his head, he had heard the repeated question.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered after a long pause. ‘I’m not privileged to know. But I am certain of one thing: that there is something rotten in the heart of the realm across the river; a warped man, dealing death. He holds prisoners and makes them believe they’re kings. And I want no particular part of it!’
‘Then why are you a part of it?’
‘Because I’m a prisoner who believes he is a king.’
Still he hesitated, nervous, at the edge of two worlds, between two states of mind.
Then he said, in a whisper that only I could hear, ‘In my sleep I dream a name that means nothing to me. Perhaps it’s mine. Perhaps not.’
‘Will you tell me?’
‘Pendragon. It has an odd sound to it. And you? Will you tell me yours, now?’
‘Merlin,’ I called. ‘It’s a nickname, but it’s the oldest of the names I’ve taken.’
‘It’s the name I shall remember.’
Finally he turned and rode away.
I was grateful to see the back of him—his existence disturbed me—but more grateful for the information he had wittingly given me: that the rising tide that was flowing out of Ghostland was not united in its goal; dissidence and difference plagued it. We had witnessed a small incident to that effect. A brief display that had left half of our small, determined foedor mutilated and rotting on the Plain of MaegCatha.
PART TWO:
The Return of the King
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sons of Llew
A fierce wind from the west had made the sea channel to Alba impassable. From a high cliff at the edge of the land of the Bolgoi, Urtha, warlord and High King of the Cornovidi, gazed over the heaving grey sea at the distant strip of white that marked a gateway into his own land. His combat wounds were healed, his strength returned.
Below him on the shingle beach a woman stood at the water’s edge. The wind streamed through her yellow hair and would have whipped the green cloak from her body had she not been holding it so tightly against the storm. Behind her, the two boats that would take them across the channel were drawn up almost to the cliffs, pegged down and covered. They had had to barter two of their four horses to get the use of the boats. Their owners, youthful and surly men of the Atrebates, were used to crossing to the Island of Mists, trading wine and bronze, sometimes meat, sometimes hostages. But they would not risk this high sea.
The woman was a Scythian huntress, Ullanna, daughter of King Androgon, and had been used in her time to warmer conditions and more fragrant oceans. She turned where she stood in the freezing spray and looked harshly up at the man crouched on the cliff above her. Seagulls swirled and screeched; her voice carried through the noise of surf and gull.
‘This is a grim sea. This is a desolate stretch of water. There is no warmth in it at all.’
‘I’ve seen it brighter. I’ve seen it calmer,’ Urtha shouted back down. ‘But it’s not here to please you. It’s here to guard that island and its kingdoms,
including mine!’
‘This is a dreadful wind. It’s blowing through my bones!’
‘The good thing about winds,’ Urtha replied through his cupped hands, ‘is that they blow themselves out.’
Ullanna’s eyes narrowed as she stared up at the king on the cliff. ‘You’re in a fine mood despite this storm.’
‘I should be. I’m on the boundary of my homeland at last. Too far south, I’ll admit to that. But home is in sight.’
‘Only when the wind drops,’ the Scythian reminded him, her voice almost carried away in the gale.
‘Nothing lasts, however strong.’
‘Nothing? Not even love?’ she bellowed back, folding her arms and cocking her head.
‘Can’t hear you!’ Urtha shouted down with a smile.
He drew away from the cliff’s edge and followed the rough track to the small village which had given them hospitality and the offer of the boats, one for Urtha, his retinue and the two hounds, the other for the horses and chariot. Cathabach and Manandoun, Urtha’s uthiin, were crouched by the fire. Their cloaks were slung from the rafters to make a windbreak. There was fresh straw and horse-blankets on the ground.
‘A real palace,’ Cathabach muttered as Urtha entered. It was a crude community, behind a wind-broken enclosing wall, and Urtha had chosen an animal shelter as his camp rather than share the delights of the communal round-house.
Cathabach was slowly turning the spitted carcass of a chicken over the wood fire. It was warm, at least, in this grim house. ‘Someone doesn’t want you home,’ he went on dryly. ‘Wrong river, wrong weather.’
He was alluding to the fact that Urtha, with reckless and false confidence, had guided them along the wrong tributary some days ago; instead of reaching the muddy estuary of the river inhabited by Soma, flowing into the sea close to its narrow strait with Alba, they had travelled along broad and beautiful Sequana, far to the south, and had spent the best part of seven days in dangerous territory reaching this cliff-lined beach, in sight of the island.
‘After the journey we’ve just made,’ Urtha said, looking hungrily at the food, ‘nothing will stop me. Not even the bastards who live beyond the white cliffs of my own country.’
Manadoun muttered grimly, ‘It’s not those bastards who worry me. All they do is shout at the sea and show off at the river crossings. It’s the bastards to the north: the Trinovanda. They collect heads like most of us collect eggs; they gather hostages as we would gather forage. And their forests are the stalking ground of some very strange gods.’
‘Nothing as strange as we’ve seen in recent seasons,’ Urtha reminded him. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’
Manandoun shrugged. He was tired; they were all tired. The journey from Makedonia had been arduous and long. Urtha had been between life and death for a good part of it, the wounds in his body healing slowly. But now that he was healed, he seemed to have boundless energy.
His knights were weary, though. They were impatient to be home, and apprehensive: they held no real hope of finding anything other than wasteland. They both knew their families were dead. But they also knew that two of the king’s children were alive. They were Urtha’s uthiin, and honour bound to bring the king safely home.
‘We should steal the boats the moment we’ve made the crossing,’ Manandoun grumbled on. ‘Sail them north along the coast.’
Cathabach shook his head in disbelief. ‘Do you know how many ships have foundered north of here? The land comes up suddenly from the bed of the sea, a sucking sand that swallows them down, like a fish gulping a fly! I’ve heard their masts can be seen at low tide, the rigging slapping against the broken wood. Screaming men are tied to the masts by weed and wrack. Where did you learn to navigate?’
‘When did you get so superstitious?’ Manandoun asked dryly. ‘Oh yes. I forgot. You were once a druid. Well, the sucking sand is just legend. The creatures of the Trinovandan forest are old and dangerous. Not legend at all.’
The two men looked at Urtha, who smiled. ‘To get to the point,’ he said, ‘I don’t fancy the sea journey north, sucking sands or no. Nor the forests, stalking boars and mad-eyed hounds or no. So I agree with Manandoun: we’ll certainly steal the boats when we get to the other side. And then we’ll navigate the river channels, west and north until we’re at the borders of our own realm. It will have its own dangers, of course. But we have a good hunter in Ullanna, and she has a nose and an eye for direction.’
Manandoun and Cathabach exchanged a meaningful glance.
Urtha said quietly, ‘Explain that look between you.’
Manandoun said, ‘The look meant only that I’m not sure of Ullanna’s sense of direction on the sea. But if you trust her skills, that’s good enough for me.’
Cathabach said, ‘The look meant only that I doubt Ullanna is familiar with our land, Alba, its forests, valleys, rivers, mountains, plains, clans, dangers and delights. But if you trust her skills, that’s good enough for me. You perhaps know something we don’t.’
‘I don’t trust her skills,’ Urtha said bluntly, ignoring the sour tone in the other man’s voice. ‘But we’ve brought that chariot, two horses and the four of us on a journey of two seasons and over more hills and dales, and plains, and woodland edges than I can imagine: from north of Greek Land, over those snow peaks, those ice peaks, those frozen rivers, and then that boar-rich forest, and the angry tribes, and the refugees from the wasteland; and my own mistake at the river junction which brought us too far south. In all of that, you, Manandoun, watched at our back and you, Cathabach, watched at our front. And I hunted, to get back my strength. And Ullanna, whom I love—I’ll not hide the fact, I love her!—Ullanna kept our horses cleaned and fed; she kept the chariot greased and mobile; she sniffed wind, rain, spoor and blossom. She plucked food in mid-flight for us. She, like you, did her part in getting us here. All of that said, I agree with you. Once in Alba, she’ll be as lost as all of us.’
‘It’s on the matter of the way you live with the Scythian woman that I’ve been meaning to speak to you,’ Cathabach murmured.
‘Yes. I’ve had the feeling since we crossed the mountains north of Makedonia that you had a thorn speared in your chest.’
Cathabach went pale at the insult, his green eyes narrowing with hostility. ‘Aylamunda, your wife, is dead, but has not been given the honour and tribute due to her. It is unsanctionable that you share your blanket with the Scythian! My heart is heavy as I say this, but you are in breach of the code of kings! Until Aylamunda’s living spirit has been sent on its journey to the Island of Women, you should be in what the Eberianii call “the condition of the long face and the howling heart”.’
‘We call it “mourning”, old friend, and I am in mourning. I just don’t have time to howl.’
‘It defies the law that you love the Scythian—’
‘Ullanna! Daughter of King Androgon, descendant of Atalanta.’
‘The Scythian! It defies our law that you pillow-talk with her. You will bring hardship and a long sigh on the clan unless you pay proper tribute to the mother of your children. Ambaros’s daughter. Your consort in arms and wisdom. You have not washed at the spring. You have not made the shield to protect her. You have not walked for the three days of remembering. You have not sung the Three Noble Strains.’
‘I intend to do all of it,’ Urtha said calmly. ‘The Good God knows, I miss Aylamunda.’
‘You don’t show it!’
‘That is discourteous.’
‘It is you who behaves with discourtesy.’
For a moment the two men sat and stared at the ground between them, each regretting his angry words. Then Urtha asked, ‘Cathabach—what should I do if my favourite horse dies suddenly?’
‘Follow the law. Then take and train a new horse.’
‘What if the horse is killed during battle?’
Cathabach shook his head, understanding the king’s simple meaning. ‘Of course you’ll find a new mount on the field. This comparison is unworth
y. Of me and of Ullanna…’
‘The Scythian?’ Urtha goaded. ‘Need defines worthiness, Cathabach. Need decides strategy. The law is all very well when all is in its place. I was not in the kingdom of my ancestors when Ullanna stepped into my life. I will honour Aylamunda. Cathabach, old friend—I ache to do it. Lord of Forests, hear my pledge!’
Manandoun said bluntly, ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about. If Ullanna’s warmth keeps the king a king, we will all triumph at the end of the day. We can follow west, and we have an idea of north! Gods! Ullanna is skilled at finding trails and tracks. As long as we head in the general direction of Taurovinda, we’re bound to fetch up somewhere close to home.’
* * *
Though the high winds faded away during the night, and the sea calmed, Urtha’s optimism proved unfounded. A dense fog formed over the ocean and the land, sitting still and silent. Urtha and Manandoun walked along the shingle beach to where the men of the village waited by the two ships. Their beards and hair glistened with damp.
‘Can we row in this?’ Urtha asked, but they shook their heads. The Prowler of the Sea, whom they called Kraaknor, sent this fog whenever his daughters rose from the sea bed to swim. Their backs were covered in sand, and any ship that struck them would be held fast and dragged down.
Manandoun was sceptical, but Urtha suspected that the sand banks might have shifted in the storm, and the villagers were exercising a very real caution.
Besides which, it would be very easy to get turned round in this low visibility. Lode-stone metal, which would help steer a straight course, was not among the possessions of either Urtha’s uthiin or their Atrebatian hosts.
Those hosts were growing restless too. They were not happy with the exchange arrangements for the risk of their lives, crossing the channel: two horses which Urtha was confident he could replace on the other side. They had their eyes on the solidly built, iron-rimmed chariot that Urtha had been given in Makedonia, after his combat. They had asked twice, in the courteous fashion, and been bluntly refused. They had offered to take the uthiin north along the coast, thus avoiding the Trinovanda, but they had been refused. Urtha and Manandoun kept their swords unthreateningly across their hips, and not their thighs, though they had loosened the fastenings of their heavy woollen cloaks.