The Iron Grail (15 page)

Jason raised his hands in agreement. The rough crew began to sing, a rousing melody learned from the Sicilians on board, a coarse song that always made them laugh as they shouted out the last stanza of every verse.

They had their minds on adventure, and on spoil. Jason had played up the availability of talismans, new weapons and armour and the beauty of women on the isle of Alba. This crew had been easy to recruit, but he didn’t trust a single man among them, save for the six of dark demeanour.

Niiv was nervous too. Only Rubobostes’ protective bulk and Jason’s authority had saved her from violation on two occasions, though both those men had ended up mysteriously without speech and been put ashore on a high rocky headland, far to the south.

Now Argo moved almost effortlessly through the water, drawn ahead by the steady rhythm of the oars, silent and serene as the river channel narrowed and the forest crowded closer to the edge. Niiv was still in position in the tall prow, calling out the hazards of gravel banks and floating logs. Standing in front of the oarsmen, Rubobostes used his brawny arms to signal port and starboard. Jason had trained his rough crew well. Argo drew smoothly against the flow, winding her way into the heart of the land.

CHAPTER NINE

Wolf Stalking

It was Urtha’s two great hounds who first sensed the wolf, slinking through the undergrowth at the edge of the camp. First Maglerd, then Gelard—old names for old dogs—rose slowly to their feet from where they had been sprawled by the crackling fire. Hackles rose, heads dropped and two low, warning growls roused Ullanna from her half-slumber. She reached quickly for her bow, used it to tap on Urtha’s foot below his cloak. The voices of the hounds rose and fell; their bodies had started to shake. Where their dual gaze was fixed, bright, lupine eyes watched back. The maw glistened. The lean head turned right and left, taking in the sprawl of sleeping figures and the guttering flames, and was then withdrawn.

Maglerd made ready to begin the chase, but Urtha called softly, ‘Easy, dog. Good dog. Easy, Maglerd.’

The wolf stalked the edge of the camp for a while, then silently disappeared.

The hounds settled uneasily by the fire.

Ullanna shook her head quizzically. ‘Why did you stop me? I could have got two shots off before it disappeared.’

‘It was just a wolf,’ Urtha said, frowning. ‘It wouldn’t have hurt us. Besides … it didn’t disturb the horses. Don’t you think that’s strange?’

The Scythian glanced at the two silent horses, tethered close by, asleep on their feet. Urtha was right. Their calm was uncharacteristic.

‘More than a wolf, then. Is that what you’re saying?’

The king drew his red cloak around his shoulders. His face was still dark with thought. ‘Yes. I think so. I was dreaming when you woke me. I was dreaming of Kymon and Munda. They were calling a warning as they ran towards me. And behind them, watching me through the dream, was our friend from the Northlands, that young-old man with all the charm…’

‘Merlin?’

‘Friend Merlin. Yes. I didn’t call on him. I didn’t know how to do it. He’s found us on his own. Maybe he’d found us before.’

They looked back at the undergrowth where the wolf had appeared, then—remembering Merlin’s trick of inhabiting birds—glanced up at the night sky, searching for a hawk. There was nothing there but the movement of clouds and the occasional glitter of a star.

‘There is something wrong,’ Urtha murmured.

‘You keep saying that,’ Ullanna teased gently. ‘It’s beginning to be unnerving. We know there’s something wrong. The Desertion of your land. The wasteland. It’s why we went to Makedonia, to kill the man who had left your home unguarded.’

‘They are warning me about something else,’ Urtha insisted. ‘Why else be in my dreams?’

‘I believe strongly in dreams,’ the huntress agreed, adding pointedly as she rubbed sleep from her eyes, ‘but I also believe that dreams
break
in unexpected ways. They don’t always signal the truth. Don’t anticipate trouble before you’ve reached the Hill.’

Urtha looked around him at the dark wood, then smiled at Ullanna. ‘You’re right. But may Quick Forest Father clear our track to that Hill, as you call it, and bring me there safely.’

And with that brief, concerned invocation, he hunkered down into his cloak, to stare silently at the fire until that last hour before dawn, when the first preparations for the next day’s journey would be made.

*   *   *

This is what it has come to. A king who exiled himself from his own land and is creeping back to his home as a beaten dog crawls back to the stink-pit behind its master’s house. How did it come to this? I couldn’t have made it any worse! No one has that much talent
.

Oh, Aylamunda! Why did you listen to my dreams? Why didn’t you take a quern and knock some corn-sense into the chaff inside my head? I miss you so much. I will find where you lie and kiss you to the Beautiful Island. I promise you.

Forgive me for loving Ullanna. She saved my life. She will never be you. Cathabach would have me pinned down with hazel pegs in a shallow pool and drowned for loving her, but I know you would understand. Take the next step after a blow, strike back, worry about the shaking legs when there is no further threat. You were my battle cry. You always will be.

Why did I go in search of the shield of Diadara? What mad spring hare drove me to such springtime madness? Such quests are the quests of fools. I should not have left the stronghold on the whim of a druid’s henbane-scented ecstasy. I might have more easily found Dagda’s Cup, that great iron cauldron of rebirth, simmering with the souls of the chosen, ready to be plucked from the stew and returned to life. Sometimes I think I can smell the flavourings! Nightshade and rosehip, a son, a daughter, earth and stone …

*   *   *

‘Urtha? Are you dreaming?’

Ullanna had reached out to rest a hand on his arm. She looked concerned. ‘You’ve been murmuring and sighing.’

‘I was thinking of what I’ve wasted. The time, the lives. Look what I’ve come to: a king with a retinue of two critical men, one of them half druid; two capricious Otherworldly twins, the god-sons of Llew, not a god to take lightly, one chariot, four horses, one tent, cushions that apparently have an insufficiency of goose-down, and several stinking blankets.’ He turned to look at the woman and smiled as he saw her brow, raised and ready to object to her omission from the list. ‘Thank the healing hand of Nodons for you.’

‘At last,’ she joked. ‘I was about to give you a
reason
to invoke the hand of the healer. It’s not so bad. We’re not far from home…’ She sat up suddenly, shaking her head. ‘That sounds so strange, and yet so right. I begin to think of your country as my home. And I’ve hardly been there. Well, home is where you cross your spears against the door, as we say in Scythia.’

*   *   *

The wolf prowled, the warlord’s mastiffs howled, but the quick, grey interloper kept at his distance, and the king kept his dogs on the leash of his commanding voice. Maglerd and Gelard were old dogs, named for even older gods, and they knew enough to trust their master.

But they hated the lupine stink that occasionally carried on the air.

Soon it had gone, however, and the
foedor
made its way past the totem stones and grotesque wooden carvings of horses, slung from oak boughs, that marked the entrance, through this forest, to the land of the Coritani. Here loud-laughing, heavy drinking Vortingoros had once been High King, with fifteen chieftains paying him tribute. He had owned five bulls and a hundred horses; he made claim to a tenth part of a thousand cattle. The pig forage in his forest was so hearty that he could claim a fifth part of each sow slaughtered and that portion would feed the four hundred in his fort in a single feast.

Or so he liked to claim.

But Vortingoros, like his knights, had disappeared with the Desertion of the land, that blighting shadow. Only effigies in polished oak and elm had been left, crouching figures, fully armed, littering the valleys and the woodlands, each carved to resemble the man who had been drawn away by whatever gathering had culled the men of the Coritani.

*   *   *

Two days later Urtha led the small band between the towering effigies of boar, bull and crane, on their stork-thin legs, that rose above the winding road where it entered his own forested realm from the east. The river was close by. Sun-wheels, fashioned from willow and hazel, blocked the narrow paths. The chariot creaked and rattled over the rough ground, avoiding the obstacles, the two Cymbrii, carrying Nodons’ wheels, riding in front of it. The hounds sniffed and growled, aware that ahead of them, pulling back as they advanced, the scrawny wolf was still an insistent observer of their progress.

A day after that the whole character of the river changed. It felt heavier, more silent, its edges crowded and brooding with low hanging trees. The dogs were almost uncontrollable in their excitement. They tugged at the leash, nosing the undergrowth as if for the first time in ages they were in the presence of familiar scents.

The Cymbrii cantered through the woodland, following the maze of paths that led westwards. And eventually Conan came back, eyes bright, long hair filled with leaf matter.

‘There’s a plain ahead of us,’ he said with a teasing grin. ‘A hill rises on the other side of it, with some sort of structure on its top. A bit ramshackle, like an animal shelter. Does that mean anything at all to you?’

‘I think it might,’ Urtha replied.

Then Gwyrion returned from scouting, almost falling from his horse as he reined in, eyes wild, smile broad. ‘Ahead, by the river, is a place with tomb-mounds and tall stones, and secret groves, and a wolf crouching on top of the highest of the mounds, watching in this direction … does any of that mean anything at all to you?’

‘I think it does,’ Urtha said. ‘Lend me that horse, will you?’

Gwyrion dismounted happily. Urtha rode, bent low below the branches, until he came to the first of the groves. He reached out to touch the nearest of the tall grey stones that rose from their nests of briar; pressed on, through the clearings close to the rushing flow of Nantosuelta, until he saw the crouching wolf, black-cloaked and dark-haired, eyes glittering as it watched the king’s approach.

The wolf slowly stood, casting off the cloak.

‘You took your time,’ I called to Urtha. ‘I hope you’ve brought some good wine from the south.’

‘Merlin! I knew it was you. When did you start watching us?’

‘In that sea-fog. I’d been beginning to give up on you.’

‘Well, here I am. Home again.’

I ran down the slope of the tomb. Urtha dismounted and we met and embraced, relief making us laugh, lost for words.

‘Time to get things back to normal,’ he said quietly, then frowned as he saw the look on my face.

‘That will not be as easy as it sounds,’ I said to him, but he stopped me there, perhaps not willing to hear the worst until he had celebrated the best: the return.

CHAPTER TEN

Dark of the Moon

Urtha would not hear of riding on, past his own fortress, to the hidden valley of the exiles where Ambaros and the others had taken refuge. He stood at the edge of the woods, staring through the line of idols that marked this Ghostland territorial claim, out across the thicketed plain. He shouted insults at the enemy, very much in the manner of his own son a few days in the past, and called on Segomonas, the Mighty Victor, and Rigonemetis, King of the Sacred Groves, to turn the favours of the Crow and the Raven to his advantage, and away from those who now possessed the stronghold.

As his anger grew into rage, he swung his heavy body on to his new horse, my welcome gift to him, and entreated me to follow him, and the two of us rode through the long grass towards the closed gates. No one from the fortress came out to challenge us, though we were certainly watched. When we came to the scatter of corpses he rode solemnly around each sprawling, twisted body. He didn’t know them all, and their faces were impossible to recognise now that the birds had feasted, but he spoke to each one, and reassured the fallen men that they would soon find ‘an earthen cloak’ with due ritual, song, and proper remembrance.

But not just yet, he apologised.

I asked him why he needed to leave these sad dead in the grass where they had fallen, but his answer was a grim smile and a curious look, as if to say: you, above all, should understand.

‘Those woods and groves are our home now; that is where we’ll camp, among our memories. The dead won’t mind.’

I hesitated to point out to the newly returned king that some of the dead amid whose tombs we would find shelter were probably among the enemy army. The time to explain would come when it was ready.

Urtha was saddened to learn of Ambaros’s dreadful wound. He sent the two Cymbrii to fetch him—they had attached Nodons’ wheels to a newly furbished chariot they had found in the evergroves, left there after Kymon’s failed assault—and the twins rose to the challenge with vigour, whipping the ponies so that they raced along the edge of the Plain of MaegCatha and were past Taurovinda before the Shadow Knights could emerge and confront them.

We now began the task of erecting a short palisade wall along the edge of the wood, with a single gate to the plain. This was a token, a signal to the occupants of the fortress that we were digging in for the duration. In due course, with more help, we would extend the wall and make more comfortable lodgings; but for the moment we pitched our single tent, open to the river, and dedicated it to Taranis, the Thunderer.

At the end of the first day, as dusk closed over the land and torches began to flare on the stepped walls of the fortress, Urtha led his two
uthiin
on horse out on to the plain and to the line of warning statues. They used ropes to haul the rough-hewn carvings down. Two at a time, ten were dragged about the plain at the gallop, cutting through the thistle and thorn, sweeping down the long grass before being returned to the evergroves and butchered.