The Iron Grail (11 page)

We made a loud din, with voices and clashing weapons, and waited there in the cool day, watching the clouds carefully to make sure we would not be blinded by the sun should the sky clear suddenly. Cimmenos, on heavy horse with a retinue of six men, waited with calm aggression before the gate, challenging the Dead to come and fight.

Kymon’s chariot wheeled up to mine. He had been racing the horses along a length of land on the plain, facing the eastern ramparts, a restless, angry action. The boy had made himself look fierce and let his long hair flow. ‘I hate this waiting! Give us eyes to see them, Merlin. If you can’t do that, tell us what
you
see.’

I see it bleached; I see it bone …

I shivered slightly at the memory of Munda’s words. The hill was silent, but that open gate was like the entrance to a trap. I sensed the snare, but when I summoned the hawk and flew into the sky, I saw only the empty road, the deserted enclosure, the ruined houses.

The hawk wheeled. I didn’t want to lose my senses for too long, but in the last moment of its shadowy existence it saw—
I saw
—the rippling in the grass behind us.

I shouted to Kymon and his spearman Iala, ‘To the rear!’ and wheeled the small car round to face the ambush, thirty tall men in rusting chain-link mail and tarnished helmets running at full speed through the waist-high grasses. I had seen armour like this in many lands, simple, old, heavy. These were Dead—once-great heroes, reduced to butchers. Their swords were simple, long and bright, and used with grim efficiency. They launched a sudden volley of light spears, which caught the whole rank of us off-guard. I saw several of our number thrown backwards. Kymon had urged his chariot forward, gripping the reins with one hand and stabbing furiously with his long spear with the other.

I heard Kymon shouting, ‘Man against man! I will take the combat!’

But single combat to decide this issue, now, was no more than a dream.

Munremur was cut down as he charged on foot, then Iala, in Kymon’s chariot, was hurled from the car by a spear through his throat. The enemy host started to close on the boy, but Drendas leapt from my car, driving his shield and spear ahead of him as he went to Kymon’s defence. He was surrounded by the enemy and quickly felled and impaled, though I saw him crawl away through the grass, looking for safety. Kymon whipped the reins and turned the chariot, kicking gymnastically at a man who leapt into the car and tried to grab him. The man tumbled backwards; my own spear went into him as I turned my horses and went in pursuit of Urtha’s son.

Kymon had gone into the long grass and turned, ready for the charge. His mouth frothed with fear and exhilaration. He had drawn his sword. The man called Larene, seeking to guard the king’s son, had leapt into the chariot, holding his fistful of thin javelins.

Kymon hardly saw me, but when he caught my presence he shouted, ‘We can take them, Merlin.’

‘We cannot!’ I assured him. ‘The trap is baited; they are inside the hill as well, waiting for you. They will take you hostage.’

‘Hah!’ he screamed, not a laugh, an encouragement to his chariot horses. They bolted back to the fray. Larene performed the Feat of the Four Points, but it was a magnificent act that would end his life. I saw Kymon duck as a spray of blood coated him from eyes to waist, Larene losing his life along with his head as one of the enemy somersaulted across the chariot, cutting down in the same movement.

I see it bleached. I see it bone
.

If Urtha should return alive, I would not have been able to look him in the eyes if bleached bone was what greeted him, his son’s among them. Kymon had forced his chariot through the hacking zone and was whipping the horses towards the Bull Gate.

Almost at once, war-horses spilled from hiding behind the walls, flowing out on to the plain, their riders the same grey-cloaked knights who had previously pursued Kymon from his taunting stance before the high enclosure.

I saw Cimmenos and Caithach ride quickly to his aid. I chased after the boy myself.

But though a group of these horsemen encircled the raging youth, they kept at a distance; the rest of the knights formed a barrier between the general affray and the king’s son. Kymon charged and wheeled, striking with all his might, but the knights kept back, containing him.

Their leader rode quickly up and down the line of men that separated the circle from the plain, his grey eyes fixed on me: he saw me clearly now. I was certain of it. I opened my ears a little and heard him whispering, ‘Go away from the hill. The boy belongs with us…’

I recognised the voice. This was the man who had come into the fort in the rain—the man with Urtha’s look about him.

By now my chariot was in full attack. A javelin struck its side, and an arrow pierced the neck of the slightly built horse who pulled on the left. If the animal was aware of its wound, it showed no sign of it. Kymon became aware of my approach. He shouted for me. Mailed men leapt at me. I used nothing but my arm to strike back at them.

Caithach, Cethern, and four others of our
foedor
had withdrawn from the fight among the stunted trees, and lined up ready to support me. The tall man on his heavy horse galloped round to block my access to the whirling, screaming boy, a boy desperate to fight, one hand on the reins, the other wielding his sword.

I thought briefly of summoning the wolf. I was no charioteer. A wolf could have leapt the ranks, grabbed Kymon and taken him to safety. I was prepared to do it, had even started to summon the charm that would enable me to run like a wolf, have the strength of that animal, and blind onlookers by seeming to appear in that form.

Kymon saved me the effort. I saw him bounce high into the air, then somersault. He did this twice, then leapt over the wall of knights, again bounced this way and that and flung his small sword with wounding effect at one of the men who were now riding down on him. The blade quivered in the rider’s chest and he reared up, falling from the saddle. Bounding and leaping, Kymon flung himself into my shattered car. He grabbed my plain-faced shield, left the chariot for a moment, twirled where he stood, three times round, and sent the shield skimming across the flattened grass, striking the man who was familiar to me, knocking him from his war horse.

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.