Celtika (8 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I warned you she was more powerful than me. I tried, Jason. With all my heart, I tried.’

Jason’s look was grim, tearful, but he acknowledged my words. ‘I know you did. I’m sure you did. You’ve been a good friend. I know you would have tried.’ He groaned as he attempted to move. ‘Come on, help me up! Tisaminas, help me up. And fetch horses! We have to follow…’

‘The horses are on their way,’ I told him.

‘She will run to the north, Antiokus. I know the way she thinks. She’ll run to the shore, to the hidden harbour. We can catch her!’

‘We can certainly try,’ I said, though in my heart I knew that Medea had slipped away for ever. She had always outwitted Jason.

As I watched the man struggle to regain his composure and organise his thoughts, I suddenly felt very sad. The sadness quickly became overwhelming. I might even have murmured aloud, ‘Oh no…’

Jason sensed that something was wrong. Dark, moist eyes watched me through their pain.

‘Antiokus…’ he said softly. ‘If you think it’s vengeance that directs me, you’re wrong. It isn’t Medea I’m after. Not yet, at least. It’s my boys.’ He was shaking violently as he reached to embrace me. ‘I will need to grieve for them before anything. But she has
taken their bodies!
Antiokus—stranger to this land that you are, you are not so much a stranger here that you don’t understand this: how can I grieve over just their memory? I
must
have my sons back. In my arms! They belong to
me,
not to
her.
’ His grip on my shoulders was crushing my flesh, his face close to my own. ‘My good friend … Antiokus. Don’t be sad. Help me!’

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t tell him what I was thinking. How could I tell him that it was time for me to move on, that I would soon have to leave him? He knew that something was upsetting me, and being Jason he was trying to instil courage in me. But he had misunderstood the cause of my sorrow, thinking I was angry that he would pursue Medea so soon after his loved ones had died.

Orgominos rode up, with five horses on tethers.

Bruised and battered, bewildered and clinging to his reason by the narrowest of grips, Jason drew away from me, flung himself on to one of them, called for us all, called for me in particular with a long, hard look, then led the pursuit of his fleeing wife, through the open gates of the palace.

I rode with him, but for a few hours only.

*   *   *

At that time, in Iolkos, we could hardly believe what we had seen. Such an abominable murder! And yet we had had to believe. It had happened before our eyes.

But now, in the grove of the
skogen,
Medea’s actions became transparent, and at last I saw the way we had been deceived. As the scenario unfurled I could not bear to watch Jason as he witnessed Medea’s conjuration, but I heard the thunder of his heart and the quickness of his breath as the truth at last came home to him.

One nick to the throat on each boy, drawing blood as a powerful drug was passed into the flesh. The boys collapsed in seconds. Pig’s blood shocked our senses as it seemed to spurt from their necks. Medea stooped over their bodies and from beneath her skirts pulled heads made of wax and horsehair, wrapping them in strips of her veil. She threw them to Cretantes, then summoned her strength and dragged her sleeping sons to the horses, letting us see only their trailing legs.

So fast, so clever, so persuasive!

Jason’s heartbeat, as he relived the truth, was like the drumming of a war galley in full attack.

*   *   *

All day we had pursued Medea. Her chariot of oak and wicker sped across the hills, its wheels turned more by her will than by her horses. At some point she escaped the pursuit. We found ourselves chasing only her guards and her chariot, the charioteer a man in woman’s clothing. Medea had slipped away, with Cretantes and the boys, and run to a cove on the shore, where a small ship had taken her to the eastern ocean and into a territory that was at war with Iolkos.

Oddly, I must have glimpsed this event from the hills above the sea, though I had not realised what I was seeing. But the
skogen
picked it out of my confusion and amplified the scene in its singing grove.

The galley had eight oars, worked vigorously. The furled sail was black and gold, Medea’s colours, arrogantly displayed as if she knew, now, she was safe. Narrow-hulled, sitting low in the water, it slipped quickly towards the open sea, to the east, towards Rhodes, perhaps, or the ruined city of Troy. Medea sat, crying bitterly, her arms around her sons, who were now awake. They were squabbling, rubbing at the sore cuts on their necks, unaware that their mother was watching the headland and saying goodbye to a life she had come to love—until Jason’s betrayal of that love. She was a widow in heart, leaving behind a man dying of despair because of her fateful conjuration. Jason had paid the price of his treachery; Medea had condemned herself and her sons to a life in exile.

The grove was filled with the sound of a man crying with rage.

‘Is this true?’ Jason demanded of me. ‘Is this true? Or just a trick?’

‘Everything you saw is true,’ I whispered and the man threw back his head and howled at the fading stars.

‘All those wasted years! All that time in mourning! And I should have been hunting her down. I gave up the chase too quickly—I should have been hunting her down!’

His tears were of anger and frustration. His glance at me was bitter, as if somehow I was to blame.

‘All those wasted years, Antiokus! I could have had my sons by my side! May the goddess be damned for not telling me!’ he shouted.

And with that last furious curse, Jason left the forest sanctuary.

I stayed in the grove until the song-chant ritual of leaving was complete, then rode back to the lake with Jouhkan and an uncharacteristically silent Niiv.

‘Where is he?’ I asked Urtha when we came to the camp. He pointed out across the lake and I saw Jason standing on the broken ice at the prow of dead Argo, his arms raised to the ship as if trying to call her back. The ice was melting fast. It gleamed in the dawn. The frozen silence was giving way to the sound of running water. The ice itself creaked and cracked as it ‘gave up the ghost’.

Later, Jason came to Urtha’s tent. I was eating, Niiv sitting silently and thoughtfully beside me, watching the fire. He asked permission to enter and Urtha waved him in. Jason had cut his ragged beard down to a stubble and had tied his long hair into a single plait that reached down his back almost to the waist. He had found a pair of red, Roman trousers, tight around the thigh and cut above the knees, and a pair of grey fur boots. He still wore the black sheepskin cloak in which he had spent the last years of his life in Iolkos.

His eyes were sad as he stared at me. He dropped to a crouch and warmed his hands at the wood fire.

‘The ship is dead. Argo is dead. The goddess has left her.’

‘I know. The effort of resurrection was too much.’

‘I take back what I said in the grove, Antiokus. Everything! Perhaps Medea had blinded the goddess as much as she had blinded us.’

‘Most likely.’

‘But the ship is still useful. When the ice melts, we’ll tow Argo to the shore and rebuild her. And if we can find a decent trunk of oak in this wretched land, and lay a new keel, perhaps we can call the goddess back.’

‘That’s a good thought,’ I offered.

‘Yes. But if not, we’ll have to sail without her.’

It had already occurred to me that Argo could be rebuilt under the protection of one of the local goddesses, unrefined and unpredictable though they were. I kept the thought to myself for the moment because Jason was still watching me, the furrow between his eyes deepening.

‘How did you know?’ he asked at last. ‘How did you find out about Kinos and Thesokorus?’

I told him that I had found only Thesokorus, the ‘little bull leaper’, as Jason had called him for his adventurous spirit. Of the ‘little dreamer’, Kinos, I’d heard only a riddle.

‘Thesokorus. He’ll be so grown, now,’ Jason mused.

‘He’s known by another name.’

‘Names don’t matter. Did you see him? Does he take after me?’

I had been anticipating this moment with some apprehension. Not so much because of the truth of what had happened to his beloved boys, but because of what Jason would now have to learn about himself.

I knew about Thesokorus because I had passed by an oracle and heard a series of questions from a son about his father.

CHAPTER FIVE

In Makedonia

From where I sat, in the shade of an oak at the edge of the town square, I could see the hazy hills and the sparkle of sunlight on the marble gates that marked the entrance to the sanctuary of the oracle.

I had been here for eight days, waiting for the sounding of the bronze horn from the high slopes above this white-walled Makedonian town. The oracle was under the protection of the god Poseidon; the oracle herself was capricious and unreliable and it was rumoured she was a shade of Persephone, who walked the dark corridors of Hades. No human medium was used to express the voice of this goddess; the voice came directly from the cave where, when it suited her, she rose from the gloom. She was nameless, never addresssed directly, known only as the ‘caught breath of Time’; and she came and vanished from her caverns like a breeze on a still summer’s day.

I had heard stories of visitors waiting a year or more until they were called to consult her, and I had already decided to move on along my path in a day or so, since my main purpose here was curiosity rather than consultation. I had time enough on my hands to visit the strangest of places in the world, should I hear of them.

The town was small and was already crowded with groups of Romans, Makedonians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Scythians and Illyrians, most of whom had pitched their camps outside the walls and now idly wandered its narrow streets in search of wine, olives and the succulent mutton that was produced in the clay ovens throughout the day. The visitors were bored, listless, irritable and offensive to each other, but at least they seemed at ease with the local population.

Unlike the small group who sat edgily in the shade of three twisted olive trees, across the square from where I spent my hours in thought.

There were six of them. They were nervous, suspicious and defensive. I had recognised them at once as what the Greeklanders called
keltoi,
a warrior band from the northern countries, Hercynia, Hyperborea, Gaul Land and the like. To the locals, to the Romans especially, they were barbarians. I knew better. I had encountered many of their tribes on my journeys and I knew of their reputation for fairness, chivalry, single combat and complete adherence to a set of laws and codes that at once made them the most welcoming of hosts, and the most uncompromising of enemies.

Watching them, I couldn’t tell from which part of the wilderness of forest, marsh and mountain to the north they came. Not from among the clans of Alba or Gaul in the west, I was sure of that. Their kilts, trousers and short cloaks were dyed blue and red, their hair tied in topknots with colourfully beaded string, since they were not at war. Their moustaches were long, covering their mouths, the drooping tips stiffened into points with animal fat and reaching below their chins. They walked with an arrogant bearing, staring menacingly and lingeringly at any passer-by.

At all times one of them stood guard, holding his patterned oval shield in front of him, his spear resting lightly against his shoulder. The others sat in the shade of the olive trees, drinking wine from clay flagons and eating copious quantities of fruit, meat and olives. This was having a devastating effect on their digestions. Their horses were tethered close by, much to the annoyance of the townspeople, who felt these northerners should have camped outside the walls like all the other visitors.

I was deeply curious. The men were all fair-haired except for the leader. His own skin, by contrast, had an olive complexion, his hair grey-blue with limewater, but his eyes, unlike the blue eyes of his companions, were dark and brooding, his moustache quite black. He was certainly not clan-born. When it was his turn to stand watch on the group, leaning on a shield bearing the image of Medusa, he seemed particularly aware of the young but wild-looking man who surveyed him from across the square.

I was uncomfortable with that appraisal.

The temple to Athena, a crude white-washed stone building with two smoking censers on its rough steps, overlooked the activities in the square and was occasionally visited by priests, asking the goddess if the oracle was on her way. Each day at dusk they came out on to the steps and proclaimed, ‘She is still in the underworld, walking to us through the caverns.’

This resulted in a groan of disappointment from Roman and Greek, but the
keltoi
simply laughed cynically and spat olive stones in unison across the square.

They seemed very relaxed, despite their posturing, probably because they were enjoying this fine weather.

On the eighth day, shortly before dawn, the hills at last reverberated with the low note of the bronze horn. Five times the horn was sounded and the town erupted into life. Each party broke camp, saddled their horses, gathered their dogs and struck off at the trot for the foothills. The temple of Athena resonated with chanting, welcoming the rising of the oracle. Chickens ran, pigs squealed and dogs barked. There was a great deal of angry shouting from the locals as their Roman lodgers departed for the hills without paying.

The
keltoi
watched all of this carefully, and when the square was quiet they calmly saddled their horses, drained the last of the wine from the flagons, belched, laughed, made rude gestures and comments, and rode out of the small town. As they left the square, they looked back at me, watching me with steady, sinister gazes until they had disappeared from sight.

I bided my time, then fetched one of my own horses and followed along the steep track to the oracle.

I’d been here before, on more than one occasion, though several generations ago, and I knew where to go and hide, to listen while the oracle engaged with her devotees.