Celtika (34 page)

One of the raiding band, a tall man, young and lithe, one of the few to be wearing a bronze torque necklet, suddenly somersaulted over the thin, desperate rank of Makedonians, and jumped to the rocks that led to the main entrance to the oracle, where Elkavar and I watched. But as this man came bounding up the path towards us, so the tall, dark figure slipped from his hiding place in the crevice, coming up behind the Celt and quickly impaling him on a spear. The man arched backwards, face a grimace of pain, fell back and twitched.

I recognised his killer at once. Orgetorix!

Jason’s son looked quickly round, then made to move back into hiding. But his action had been seen from below. A warrior came leaping towards him, sword ready to strike, the sound of his approach lost in the din of the skirmish. He was moments from the kill. I grabbed a spear from Elkavar, raised it, gave it wings and flung it.

Orgetorix saw my action, saw the spear come towards him, was frozen with the surprise of it and more surprised when the shaft tickled his neck. He turned quickly to see the weapon embedded between his attacker’s jaws, as the man flew backwards, squirming and struggling with the shaft. Then the young man bolted: not back to his previous cover, but up to the oracle, through the narrow gap between the rocks, and into the fragrant space where Elkavar and I crouched, watching the mayhem.

Orgetorix said nothing for a moment, though his quick, fierce frown as he met my gaze suggested instantly that he recognised me.

He looked at Elkavar, looked him up and down, saw all the signs of a man who might be from among Brennos’s gathering and asked, ‘Are you defending this place? Or attacking it?’

Elkavar almost understood the other man’s words, but not quite, so I intervened.

‘This is Elkavar of Hibernia. I am…’ what else could I say? ‘Antiokus … the name you once called me as you chased me with a catapult in your mother’s palace. I’m known as Merlin, now. And we’re neither defending nor attacking this sanctuary. But I’m afraid the sanctuary is lost.’

‘I’m afraid you’re right.’ He glanced at the fighting. ‘This place is very special to me. But those bastards want their spoils, and there’s nothing I can do.’ He paused for a moment, then studied me again. ‘A catapult? In my mother’s palace?’

‘You were just a child. Your aim was good, though.’

What a look he gave me. For a moment he was running through those marbled corridors, pursuing the shadow of bird and hound—a little trickery to avoid those small clay pellets!—laughing with the tease of it as I vanished, and with the surprise of it when I loomed up behind him, with the small triumphs that I’d allowed him as he caught me.

But the memory was too fleeting. I could see it fade from his eyes, though his interest in me burned on. It was more important to attend to the business of slaughter.

The last of the Makedonians fell below the swift blades of the war band. The bodies were looted and trophied, then flung face down. Blood-smeared men poured into the cavern and began to search the passages, coming very close to where the three of us were hiding.

There was not a great deal to loot. The oracle at Arkamon had not been in great demand. It had had a strange reputation for all the centuries I’d known of it, which is why, whenever I had been able, I detoured from the Path to come and see it.

This was not a place of pilgrimage so much as of last chance. The voice of the oracle had come and gone at a whim; it had no great reputation. It was unusual in that fact, and curiosity had often brought me here, and it was through curiosity that I had found Orgetorix.

Who sat here now, watching his special place be looted by half-naked, half-crazed, bragging warriors of the Tectosages, men who were increasingly irritated to find nothing but walls of rock painted with ghostly images of animals, stinking passages that led down into an even more rank and unwelcoming earthly bowel, and a few items of gold and silver that were plucked from the alcoves where they had been carefully placed, stuffed into sacks and taken away.

With their departure, the world outside settled into crow-feast and silence. The Tectosages’ dead had been gathered up and carried away. The Makedonian dead had been left where they lay and would soon begin to rot.

There was nothing the three of us could do, so we slipped out of the cave and found our way back to the ransacked village. There were crows here too, but Orgetorix’s friends as well, holding his horse. They had stayed clear of the raid; they had kept quiet during the pillaging of the village. They had been with Orgetorix too long to question his instructions: do not participate in the raid on this oracle!

One of them, though, recognised me. He leaned forward in the saddle as we gathered in the square and said, ‘You were here before. You were sitting over there, watching and waiting.’

Now Orgetorix too put a face to his suspicions. ‘That’s right. The scruffy man, with his two scrawny horses. You sat eating olives and goat’s cheese, watching us. You followed me up to the oracle. The oracle knew you were there.’

In the middle of a murdered village, Elkavar and I were surrounded by seven men on horseback, all of them, fortunately, more quizzical than threatening, but one of them, Jason’s son, watching me with an intensity that was almost burning.

‘I don’t deny it,’ I said to him. Elkavar was looking edgy. His elbow-pipes kept making nervous little wails.

Orgetorix asked me, ‘Who was my mother?’

I looked him straight in the eye, those dark eyes, those eyes that had once shone with laughter as he had scampered through the palace among the guards, playing his games of hide-and-seek, Little Dreamer following, Jason prowling, Antiokus, Jason’s friend, calling out: we can
see
you!

‘Your mother was Medea.’

He considered that answer for a long time, without expression, perhaps because he had not expected me to know; perhaps because he had been unsure himself.

But from his horse, looking down at me, he asked, ‘Then who was my father?’

‘Do you want me to answer: Rottenbones?’

The answer startled him. His horse reared up and backed away, distressed. He reached forward to calm the animal, still staring at me.

‘What was my father’s name?’ he asked carefully.

And I told him: ‘Jason, son of Aeson. He was a man who voyaged half the known world to claim back a land stolen from him; and a man who loved his sons—’

‘And betrayed those sons. And betrayed their mother. And betrayed everything. Rottenbones! A terrible name, but the right name for a man as hateful as my father.’ Curious, he asked: ‘Say his other name again? Let me hear it…’

There was something about this young, aggressive man’s behaviour that wasn’t right. And then I recognised it: he was
unable
to say his father’s name. Medea had put a lock on his tongue. I was certain of it. What crueller way to block a father from his son’s heart than to make his father’s name an unspeakable curse.

‘Jason,’ I whispered. ‘Jason.’

Orgetorix looked down, half slumped on his horse. His men were edgy, quick glances flashing between them.

Then Orgetorix said quietly, ‘Find horses for these two. Quickly. We have a long ride.’ He nodded to me. ‘We’ll have to follow those bastards, back to Brennos. With luck, they won’t remember what you did; or what I did. There’s an invasion going on, as you’ll soon discover. I remember you now. You appear in my dreams. I was just a boy; you showed me simple tricks; I teased my father. You told me wonderful stories … I remember you.’

‘I’m glad to see you again … Thesokorus.’

‘Gods!’ he said, surprised but not threatened. ‘You know I was called that? My childhood name? I’ll not turn my back on
you!
’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

King of Killers

The six men who rode with Orgetorix were a squalid bunch, mercenaries who had failed to keep their temporary bonds of honour to the chiefs whom they had served in various lands, and who had escaped justice by the skins of their teeth; if the stained, broken pegs that graced their mouths could be called teeth. Two bull-jacketed Iberians, a sour-faced, nervous Avernian, a half-faced Tectosages of age and wisdom who watched me constantly, and two men who had been lone-wolf for so long they had forgotten where they were born.

They had adhered to the young Greeklander as shellfish to granite at the ocean’s edge, perhaps because Orgetorix promised adventure and spoils; men such as these, ferocious and ferociously independent, still needed a path to follow, and a dreamer like Jason’s son—unaware of who he was, determined to find out where he had come from—was a little touch of magic in that dark, decaying night of their lives.

They were not happy now: Orgetorix, intrigued by my knowledge of him, was keeping my company more than theirs, though he asked nothing further about me for some time. All that relaxed them was Elkavar’s singing and pipe-playing. The music, and his mellow voice, opened up the gates of memory for these men as they sat around the fire, chewing tough, half-cooked meat and drinking very sour wine. Every so often one of them would stand and sing, a fondly recollected drone from childhood, and Elkavar would do his best to follow the melody, and add some rhythm.

‘I find it very difficult to summon enthusiasm,’ he confided to me at some point during our journey, ‘for a song that mourns for the shade of a murdered mother, wandering in the barren hills of her homeland in search of a husband who has abducted the daughter of a man who sells donkeys.’

Orgetorix kept his own counsel for two days, as we rode south and east in the wake of the raiders. All I learned in this time was that he had heard of the plan to attack the small oracle at Arkamon, and had followed not so much to attempt to stop the ransack, but to ensure that nothing of its spirit was taken. He believed that a little piece of his past lay within the caverns. Why else had the oracle called to him to find it?

We moved through the land in quiet, cautious harmony.

*   *   *

Then, unexpectedly, we felt the rumble of the earth itself.

The low murmur, the tremble of an army on the move. To look to the east was to see the tell-tale sign of haze, the dust that a hundred thousand horses threw into the air, the rippling of twilight and dawn that comes from the rising heat of so many bodies.

Brennos was close to a series of valleys, running towards Thessaly, which were likely to be heavily watched. I rode with Orgetorix to a point on the hill where we could just make out the distant glitter of arms and armour. The raiding party, travelling at the wild gallop, had almost certainly rejoined the main body of men.

‘So there it is,’ the Greeklander said wistfully. ‘A horde dedicated to ransacking a part of the country that I should hold dearer to me than life itself. And I have done my bit in bringing them here. I have skulked and scouted the hills north of my country for them. I have led the invader to the city gates.’ He shifted in the saddle, arms crossed on the stiff pommel, dark eyes picking out my own attention. ‘You seem to know a great deal about a great many things, Merlin. Do you know where that horde is going?’

‘To Delphi.’

He nodded absently, clearly not surprised by my knowledge. ‘Some of them will make it, no doubt. Brennos believes that his ancestors lie in the oracle there, prisoners of past plundering. I suspect that all he has done is created a wonderful story as an excuse for looting the sacred place. The pity of it is, I can feel neither for the truth nor for the lie. I don’t care either way. That little shrine behind us meant more to me than the whole of Greek Land, and I watched it raped and could do nothing about it. There is something dead in me. And why am I telling you this? Because there is something dead in you. We are dead men on a vibrant earth. We are out of place. Or am I wrong?’

‘We are not so much out of place as out of time.’

Orgetorix laughed. ‘Well, well. I’ll sleep easier with that as a comfort for my dreams. Out of time? It’s time to talk. Let’s eat. Tomorrow our lives will change completely.’

*   *   *

The coarse band of men were impatient with Orgetorix, and had lost patience with Elkavar, who had been consigned to a solitary position at the edge of our rough camp. The mercenaries were keen to rejoin the army. Though Brennos was forcing the pace, we could see his fires in the distance, and these men could imagine a better spread of food being offered at the clustered camps than the dry rations we chewed on in our rocky overhang, more exposed to the night than sheltered from the cool wind.

‘I recall you more and more,’ Orgetorix said from his blanket. He was stretched out and propped on his elbow, the position he adopted both for eating and talking. He waved his small knife easily as he spoke, cutting chunks from a coarse loaf and swallowing quickly.

‘There are two faces I remember, from the palace dream. Both are staring at me from behind thick golden bars. One is black-bearded and the man is screaming; the other is not bearded at all and he is anguished. I can never remember enough of this dream to remember the words being shouted—angry, certainly; frightened; begging—but there is always a terrible smell of stinking blood—and then a knife goes into me.

‘And another strange thing. This happened soon after. I’m sure this happened to me in real life, though it feels vague. I remember being huddled in a boat with Little Dreamer. Little Dreamer was my brother. The sea was rough and a cowled woman was barking instructions to an armoured man who was rowing for all his worth, the sweat pouring from him. A ragged sail was flapping, torn and useless, and we came ashore. And this man picked me up under his arm and carried me to a cave. Little Dreamer screamed. The woman stalked about us, pacing up and down against the light, cursing in a strange language, while outside the weather changed to a black storm. It still makes me shiver to remember how the sea came crashing into that cave, sucking at us, trying to claw us back to its waves.

‘My little brother was crying; and I was terrified. Something was raging at us; Poseidon, I expect. We were out of favour with the gods, there was no doubt about that. It was almost a relief when the woman took us in her arms at the back of that cave, safe now that the tide was receding, and told us to sleep. I remember those words so clearly: you must go to sleep now; as boys. You will go to sleep as boys. You will wake as men, and you will care for each other, and you will be cared for.’