Celtika (19 page)

‘Is this to fight?’ Urtha shouted. ‘Because if it is, I’ll come alone.’

Ambaros looked at him long and hard, then shook his head. ‘No. Not to fight. Not yet. And not between you and me. But save your blood, Urtha. You’ll need it in the time to come.’

The old man gathered up his spears and shields, slung them over his back and paced off through the drooping, pale green fronds of the willows towards the place where the river surged white and fierce over the black stones of the shallows.

Urtha and Ambaros met in mid-stream and embraced. I was introduced, then Niiv, who was still staying close to me, then Jason. The two grizzle-beards eyed each other cautiously, exchanging the merest of courtesies.

‘That’s a restless ship you’ve sailed up the river,’ Ambaros volunteered. ‘She aches to be away from here. And a strange ship, though why that surprises me I can’t imagine. The world has gone more than strange in the last little while.’

‘She’s Argo. I built her with my own hands,’ Jason lied. ‘In Pagasae, the harbour of Iolkos.’

‘And where is that?’

‘South of here, on the warmest sea you can imagine. In Greek Land, as you people call it.’

‘And you built her with your own hands…’

‘And then rebuilt her by the light of the North Star, with the help of your son-in-law and this man here,’ he waved in my direction, ‘with frozen timber, and ice instead of bronze. But she still smells the wines of Makedon and the olives of Achaea, which is why she’s restless.’

For the first time I realised that Jason was homesick, transferring his own desires and dreams to the ship. If Argo was missing anything at all, it was the snows of the frozen north and the stink of rutting reindeer—Mielikki’s tastes—rather than the aromatics of Greek Land.

Ullanna had just crossed the stream, bow over one shoulder, arrows over the other. Ambaros exercised a greater courtesy with her than with Jason. She reached for his arm and touched the two healing scars in the flesh.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said through me.

‘My wife and my daughter, the mother of this man’s children.’

Ullanna rolled up the loose left sleeve of her jacket. A long scar ran from shoulder to crook; when she opened the hand I could see the mark of arrow shot. ‘My husband and my infant son,’ she said. ‘Killed by Persians while I was hunting in the hills. We mark our grief in much the same way.’

Ambaros put a finger to the scar on her hand, between the smallest fingers. Ullanna drew an iron-tipped arrow from her quiver and made a quick thrusting motion through the flesh.

‘We grieve for as long as it takes the wound to heal,’ she said, and Ambaros nodded. ‘Or so we pretend,’ she added, and Ambaros smiled at her.

‘Short, painful, practical,’ Jason muttered to me. ‘If I’d known how to grieve like that—to get it over like that, quick and fast—it might have stopped me rotting for twenty years.’

‘Well, you’ve stopped now.’

‘Yes.’

The ram’s horn on Argo sounded a warning, but Ambaros raised a hand. ‘They’re friends. Some of the few faithful who stayed behind when your dog-horsemen quit the fort with Cunomaglos. The rest are dead. That’s what happened here, Urtha. You went away, then the others rode off, down river and across the sea to the land of the
bolgae,
then further still.’

Four grey-cloaked horsemen, spears lowered ambiguously, trotted evenly and easily through the river, cautious but relaxed, now that they saw Ambaros at conversation and not engaged in defence. Urtha knew these men, but not well, and they would not have been his chosen warriors. More important, though, he wanted to hear from Ambaros himself what exactly had happened; who had done the slaughter. And what had he meant when he’d said the world had gone ‘more than strange in the last little while’?

‘Let’s talk as we ride,’ Ambaros suggested. ‘Take these horses. My friends here can do some foraging as they follow on foot.’

The four
uthiin
seemed taken by surprise, but dismounted politely, if not without black looks at Ambaros.

We mounted up and Ambaros led us through the woods, towards the west.

*   *   *

After the attack, and his escape, he explained as we rode, he had not returned to the stronghold. He had fled along one of the river’s tributaries, deeper into the forest, and into one of the several gorges which marked the barrier between Urtha’s land and the realm of the Shadows of Heroes, that place of timeless ghosts where Urtha and his clan expected to go when they finally fell in combat, or to the years.

Ambaros had a very dangerous location for his hiding place, but there were caves here, and the hunting was easy. And since the rocks were marked with clear protective charms from longer ago than even legend could recall, he and his small band, and the other survivors of the attack—a few families and their dogs—had felt safer here after the destruction of the fort. And the more so because of the treasure they protected.

‘Treasure?’ Urtha asked.

We were just entering the gorge, now. Ambaros blew on a short, bronze horn, and an answering call echoed down the valley. Then he turned to his bond-son and said quietly, ‘Munda and Kymon. They escaped the slaughter. I have them safe, and will take you to them later.’

‘Alive?’ Urtha slumped forward on his pony, shoulders heaving as he cried silently for a few moments, an unfathomable mixture of grief and relief finding instant and welcome expression.

We threaded our way across a rushing stream, then along a winding trail through heavy oaks, aware of the crags above us and the scudding clouds. Soon we had come to the narrow gorge where Urtha’s people bustled about their tasks, and several horses complained as they were trained along the narrow banks of the shallow river.

And quite unexpectedly a strong and aching pang of memory surfaced, quite unbidden; it happened as I saw the heavy skins hung across the mouths of two caves, the crude coverings pinned to the earth with wooden stakes, painted with images to call only the Good God, and discourage the Crow. I had seen homes like this in my distant past, in places that were remote from here. I could remember the chatter of children and the baying of dogs, the crackle of fire, the swirling smell of smoke and the rich aromas of baking and roasting.

As if in a dream, I remembered bathing in a river, a girl next to me, throwing stones at floating logs, scoring points for each hit.

Where had that been? And when? My life was breaking open, like a dream, like a series of dreams. I felt anxious and tearful. Fond memories, forgotten for an age, were coming back, but I sensed they would soon twist into tragic ones. I wasn’t ready for this release of my past life, and I felt irritation at Jason and all of them for making such demands upon me that my age advanced too much towards maturity.

Urtha was calling me from where he waited in the gap in the skins covering the bigger of the caves. ‘I need you, Merlin,’ he said as I slowly approached, still dizzy from this flash of the past. ‘I don’t know why, but I do. I don’t feel unhappy about it. The crows have pecked my eyes and no mistake, but when your shadow passes by, the light sharpens slightly.’

He was staring at me searchingly. And at once I could feel Time weaving around us. I’d been waiting for this, half knowing it would come, not alarmed by it. I had felt the same thing with Jason in Iolkos. My dealings, my relationship, with Urtha would extend into an as yet unknown and undefined future. Perhaps only through his lifetime, perhaps longer. The manner was not yet ready for revealing, and I had no intention of stealing a glance.

‘We’ve never met before, have we?’ he was asking.

I’d met his ancestors, I imagined. I’d met most people’s ancestors. But I couldn’t tell him so, not yet, at least. Not until I was more certain of what was happening to my own life.

Then Urtha changed the subject. ‘You seem sad, Merlin.
Are
you sad? I have a certain cure for sadness.’

‘Confused,’ I replied truthfully. ‘And yes. A little sad.’

He peered at me in comradely fashion, then slapped my shoulder. ‘Then we’ll take the cure together. But we’ll talk about it later, if you’ll forgive me.’ He frowned as he said this, adding, ‘The gods, Nemetona especially, should be enough. But Merlin, I need you by me. Is that strange? I’m going to face the truth of my wife and son’s death, and I need to do it, and I need you by me when I hear it. There’s a calm that comes from you, like childhood … or perhaps death.’

What did he mean by that, I wondered?

‘I’m not intending to go anywhere, Urtha.’

‘Don’t. I need that calm.’

He was putting a brave face on despair, though the glisten of tears gave him away, but he blinked and sighed and stepped back into the warm gloom, sitting close to the blazing fire in the corner.

A deer’s carcass and several birds hung from wooden beams that had been wedged into the rough roof of the cave. Lean, unsmiling faces, the tribal gods, had been hacked from stumps and branches and were positioned in propitiatory locations, each with a bronze bowl at its chin. Rough beds were further back, and there were piles of cloaks and furs, wood and weapons, jars and iron-cornered chests, all salvaged from the fort after the attack. This was a warm home, if a grim one, and meat was eaten for a while, and a sour, slightly poisonous ale consumed by all of us save Ullanna, whose first mouthful she instantly spat on to the fire, causing the flames to rage for a few moments.

‘The land is deserted, Urtha,’ Ambaros said eventually. ‘It happened after you left.’

‘I know,’ Urtha said, standing as he spoke and dropping his head slightly, as if in shame. ‘I saw it, father. And I believe I recognise it for what it is. The second wasteland from the Dream of Sciamath. I know what you’re going to say, and I will agree with you until I know better. That it was by my leaving that this has happened. It is always the action of a king that blights the land.’

Ullanna and Jason looked at me for an explanation of Urtha’s dramatic behaviour, standing stiffly in front of the older man, his arms crossed, his head lowered.

‘Sciamath?’ Jason seemed to be asking with his eyebrows.

Sciamath had been born from the union of mountain and wildwood. A wild man in every sense, he had hidden from the world until the flesh on his body was as hard as his father rock, and the hair on his body as abundant as the full canopy of mother forest. Tall, radiant-eyed, clothed in woven strips of softened bark, he had walked into the world through one of the valleys that led from Ghostland.

No ghost, but very much a seer, he had brought a warning, a dream, a vision of the future:

In his Dream, grown in the wilderness as he himself had grown, Sciamath had foreseen three destructions of the land, three ‘wastelands’, as he called them. The first would be a
desecration;
the second a
desertion;
the third would appear as
desolation.

This Dream had arrived with the man at the end of the building of the stone-ring sanctuaries, many generations ago. The story, the Dream, had passed down the ages, and across the world to east, west and north, a warning to all the clans and kingdoms.

I remembered the first wasteland clearly, and with discomfort. For years, as I walked the Path at that time, it was as if the world around me had entered permanent night. Other worlds and other times spilled into the tribal lands. Indeed, perhaps this was when Urtha’s Ghostland had arisen. Kingdoms all across the north had been affected. Trees were on fire in every forest, but not burning down. Invocations to the gods brought only misery, and strange, giant animals stalked the hills and rumbled through the woods.

It had lasted a generation, and I remember hastening away from those western countries of Hyperborea, hurrying to Greek Land where, after a while, my path crossed with Jason’s and oak-hearted Argo, and brighter events began to occupy my life. I never discovered what had resolved and ended the
desecration
wasteland, though stories of ‘moonsilver ships’ seen at the time intrigued me.

But was this truly the beginning of the
desertion?
Could one small king, leaving his land to sail north, bring so much misery?

As Urtha knew, and as I now remembered, Sciamath had referred to ‘destruction of the forts by horsemen from the shadows; the sky darkening with four-winged birds; the land scattered with effigies in wood and stone and in the earth itself of those who have been lost; snow in summer; bees swarming in winter; a man who will come from nowhere, drawing the wildwood around him like a cloak…’

The list had been voluminous.

The strange sight of the crouching wooden figures in the land of the Coritani, and the events at his own fort, seemed persuasive indeed to the shaken young man.

I kept an open mind, however, as Ambaros requested the grieving king to sit down again, and began gloomily to recount the events of the months following Urtha’s departure for unknown snowlands, and his futile quest for a vision of the future.

*   *   *

‘Almost at once, Vendodubnos and forty of his men from the Avernii made a raid on the fort. Cunomaglos and the rest of your
uthiin
drove them off without difficulty. The skirmish happened outside the gates. Vendodubnos had come proudly by chariot; he rode up and down like a man in triumph after battle, shouting abuse at our walls as if the walls themselves could hear.

‘He had been misinformed about the strength of our fort. The look on his face when Cunomaglos and the others ran out in their shimmering battle dress, with only a shield and stabbing spear, was like the look on the face of a hog suddenly seeing the winter killing knife, all wide eyes, wobbling jowls and squealing. That was the chariot wheels! He went so fast the charioteer fell off, leaving the reins to the fat man himself. Cunomaglos ran so fast behind the chariot that he could casually prick out a pattern with his spear on the fat man’s backside.

‘It was settled quickly, after that. Cunomaglos brought the chariot and its two fine horses back in triumph. He was very proud. I watched him carefully; I thought he might develop the blood rage. The
uthiin
sang and gambled until dawn, but Cunomaglos stayed sober. I was worried about this. I watched him carefully, but he kept his own counsel and let the battle pride subside and his companions fall asleep. I should have recognised the signs.