The Iron Grail (29 page)

‘He’s a bastard. He tricked you.’

Tisaminas tried to calm me. ‘He gave kolossoi to us in exchange. We never felt the need to use it. We discarded it long ago. We did it willingly.’

‘Listen to me! Last night I summoned a wolf to protect one of Jason’s more recent argonauts, a woman called Ullanna. That act, the enchantment, cost me very little. Perhaps one more grey hair, a minute off my life. I use my talents sparingly. But every so often I use them rashly and with pleasure. Something in me makes me do this. I never question the impulse. And I want to do it now. Tisaminas! I can help you, all of you. You don’t belong here, and you don’t deserve this callous summoning; Jason has betrayed you. He accused me of betraying
him
. The man is greedy, selfish, lost in instinct; he’s a wolf, chewing at the corpse of his remembered life, a scavenger on everything still living that reminds him of that life. To kill him would cost me dearly. I’ll age. I’ll get gout in winter! But I’ll kill him for you, and gladly. Just tell me where he has hidden the kolossoi. I can do nothing without knowing that.’

A voice behind me murmured, ‘Do you think if we knew the answer to your question we’d still be here?’

As I turned, so Atalanta kissed my cheek, cool lips on a fevered face; a gentle touch of affection, calming rage. I returned the embrace.

She had not lived to old age. Whatever had killed her had taken her in the prime of life. Gaunt though she was, she was beautiful; and from her eyes, Ullanna watched me; it is always the eyes that tell of the unbroken bond. There is something in the look from eyes that passes down the centuries.

Behind her stood Hylas. I recognised him at once. He too had failed to pass his middle years; no painful rigor of his bones, then; the gods of his age had been fickle and capricious; no doubt they had punished him for his desertion of their beloved Heracles. He was still in good shape, though more brawny in limb than when I’d known him, and the lines of distress, inflicted by the grotesque demands of his lion-skinned master, had smoothed away.

Hylas said, ‘You must have loved us very much when you sailed on Argo to offer such a sacrifice now. It will age you.’

‘I didn’t know you knew. About the cost in years to me of performing magic.’

‘The girl on the ship talked to me about it. The Northlander. She loves you, Antiokus. She talks about you in whispers. She whispers to me about her feelings.’

A chill hand clasped my heart. Niiv had clearly penetrated the shade-cloak of this youngish man. She could seduce the dead! Good gods, I’d have to keep her close! I realised at that moment that I could never let her get away from me. Whatever her shaman father had bequeathed to her, on his death in the far north, it was more than I’d realised. She was akin to a rose, growing strongly, reaching for the sun: beautiful, spreading untamed, not always in blossom, but always extending suckers to snare the unwary.

*   *   *

It was upsetting, to say the least, to be reunited with these friends from the past, friends whose deaths or departures I had mourned at the time before coming to terms with their absence. That crew aboard Argo, in the long-gone, when the seas had been full of challenge and a misty shore spoke more of the unknown than of the known, had been as close to a family as I had ever come, since beginning my walk around the world.

They had felt something similar. The confines of a ship create an intimacy of spirit that transcends clan, tribe and family. Everything is shared just as everything is risked. That we sympathised with Hylas over his overbearing master, Heracles, was simply testimony to the essential democracy that formed on such a tiny world within the world of Ocean.

But of these sad resurrections, it was Tisaminas whose presence upset me most. I had liked him very much, and he had been the most faithful of the argonauts to Jason, staying in Iolkos long after we had all dispersed, looking after the ageing, rotting man, keeping him in food and simple comforts, being the listening ear that could cope with Jason’s tirades of anger and grief against Medea, and at the loss of his sons.

Tisaminas should not have been here.

This was a rotten move of Jason’s. He had used the kolossoi, given to him in friendship to signify Tisaminas’s willingness to take up arms for Jason in the living world, as a means to crew his new ship on this selfish mission with the easy option of arms and limbs. For Tisaminas, this meant an absence not from his life after death, but from his life during life. I knew enough of the gift-bringing that was represented by kolossoi to know that for every day Tisaminas spent in the living world as a ghost, he had been shorn of vitality when he had been alive and with his family; and he had had a big family, four sons and two daughters, a clan that would have been a great burden to many in Iolkos at that time. Fortunately, one of his sons grew vines and one of his daughters had entered the Temple of Pallas Athena. A parent’s problems are often solved by such a combination of produce and promise.

The last thing I asked Tisaminas was how long he had been on Argo, this time round.

‘Half a year,’ he said. ‘Looking back, I can see where I was absent. My wife was distraught; she took a lover! My eldest son tried to kill me. I even tried to kill myself in the harbour of Iolkos. I felt like a shadow of myself. I slept like a cat. I remembered nothing from day to day. A man who lives his life in the arms of wine-swilling Bacchus could not have felt more estranged from the world than I did at that time.’ His gaze was full of pain. ‘But it lasted more than half a year…’

How strange: to think that Tisaminas’s life several centuries in the past was now dependent on my dealings with Jason. This is what the Dacians called a
conundrum
; a knotty problem.

‘Old friend, what has been taken cannot be returned; I’ll send you home as soon as I can. While you are here, you are still alive in Iolkos, but in a stupor, and there is a celebration to be had when you appear to return from the living dead.’

‘That celebration is a distant memory,’ Tisaminas said with a wan smile. ‘But I did enjoy it. I raised a cup to you. I didn’t understand why.’

‘We are shaping the past. It’s easier than shaping the future. Your shade was aware, even if you weren’t.’

‘The consequences, though…’

‘Leave them to me. I play a very good game of consequences.’

He seemed relieved to hear my words.

*   *   *

That night, five spectral figures slipped past the guard at the rear gate. Tall men in long cloaks, their hair loose, carrying only sword and scabbard, they sought me out. I recognised the man who dreamed himself Pendragon. His eyes caught the silver of the moon as he greeted me quietly. For a moment, again, I thought I was looking at a reflection of Urtha.

‘This has been a wonderful day,’ he said to me. ‘The Sea Prophecy has come true. The Old Ship came.’

‘The Sea Prophecy?’

‘One of the Five Uncertain Prophecies made by a man called Sciamath, an enchanter, now lost to us.’

Sciamath again, the man whose cloak was a whirling flow of forests, a seer of ancient days. An enigmatic figure who clearly worked his visions in the Otherworld as well as in the territory of kings. I had not known he was lost.

‘The prophecy?’

‘That an Old Ship with a crew of ghosts would release us to pursue our dreams again. We have been slaves to the Dead for too long. The siege of this place is ended. This is our moment! This is goodbye, Merlin. I had thought we could investigate the world together, but the time is not right. On the other side of that winding river there will now be a reckoning, of no concern to you. I will see
you
on another day!’

The five warlords, the five Unborn kings, held their richly patterned scabbards towards me in salute, then turned and slipped from the fortress, silent and unseen, to take war across the river.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Light of Foresight

A squad of men, armed with Ullanna’s contrived charm-sticks, had gone out on to MaegCatha Plain, beating the grass and brush in the manner of children beating to disturb wild fowl and woodcocks for the waiting archers. Nothing on the plain that was now in hiding, and might be induced to fly for freedom, would be edible, however.

Still mindful of Jason’s last bitter words to me, as he had lain ‘mortally’ wounded by his own eldest son in the shadow of the oracle of Dodona, I went in search of the man, to confront him on the matter of his own trickery. The guard at the king’s enclosure recognised me and allowed me past, but I entered a long house that was barren of any life save the fire and its tenders, the two hounds which were catching up with sleep, though each raised a languorous head to study me as I came into the place, and the Ligurian argonaut, who was sick and curled up on a low bench.

‘Where’s Jason?’ I asked the man. Smoke swirled in the main room, and light picked out the details of shields and weapons, scattered around, ready for use. Gold filigree flashed from several of the banners hanging from the rafters.

‘Looking for son. Looking for stinking sorcerer bastard who know son,’ the sick man grunted before pulling his cloak over his head.

Looking for me, then.

But I ignored the gesture of reconciliation in the Argonaut’s voice. I could have prowled for him as the hound, or scanned with an eagle’s eye from the low cloud above the hill, but I had a strong feeling that the old Greeklander was close; and sure enough, as I entered the antechamber from Urtha’s main hall, stepping into the claustrophobic gloom of the place where shields and spears were stored, I felt the prick of a knife below my right ear, a point painfully made.

‘Where’s Little Dreamer?’ was Jason’s question. The knife point was as insistent as Niiv’s groping, and as futile.

‘Somewhere in this land,’ I replied.

‘I know he’s somewhere in this land. “Between sea-swept walls, where he rules but doesn’t know it.” The words of the oracle at Arkamon. I haven’t forgotten.’

‘This is the land between sea-swept walls. The island of Alba.’

‘Island? It goes on for ever. This is no gods-protected island! I’ve been sailing its rivers for moon after moon. I’ll never find the boy unless I can narrow down the search.’

He used the blade like an oyster knife, turning it as if he could prise open the bone below my ear. I paraphrased the words of Achilles, when surprised unarmed by his mortal enemy Hector as he made an offering to Athene in a grove outside Troy. Feeling the prick of the sword against his spine he had said, ‘Push in the blade or sheathe it. I don’t negotiate with metal, only
men
with metal.’

Hector was subdued, and later that day died by Achilles’ own sunblessed hand.

Jason laughed at my small conceit. ‘The very words Daedalus used to King Minos, when his first maze had failed to hold his half-creature son, the Minotaur, and the king was about to kill him. You know your history!’

Daedalus? Perhaps I’d been misinformed.

But I ignored the gesture of reconciliation in the argonaut’s voice. The blade still hurt, and my blood still beat furiously with the thought of Tisaminas, shade-dragged and vacant because of the mercenary whim of this once-great man.

‘Where have you hidden the kolossoi?’

He grabbed me by the shoulder and flung me round. He looked old and hard, angry and dead at the same time. A rank odour seeped from his mouth and there was that liquid look to his eyes, which might have been illness or the imminence of old age. His hair, loose and grey, hung like an oily blanket around a weathered face that might have been carved from stone.

‘Never mind the kolossoi! Kinos is all that matters. His bitch-mother has hidden him here. I haven’t the years to scour every damp valley and every stinking marsh for the lad. But you, you, Antiokus, you are the key! I know you know where he is. You are too meddlesome not to have found out. Where is he?’

‘Where are the kolossoi?’

‘Why?’ he screamed at me. ‘Why? What in the name of the gods does it matter about such tokens?’

‘It matters to me. It matters to Tisaminas and the others.’

‘They are
dead
. They have no understanding. Once they mattered. Now, they don’t matter at all! Except that they’re strong.’

‘They matter to me.’

‘They’re out of Elysia, they’ll return to Elysia.’

‘They’re hurting.’

A rage engulfed the old man. His fist slammed into my cheek and my knees buckled as my head spun from the blow. He shouted, ‘No!’ as he struck me. I never let my gaze leave his. He did not want to confront the truth of what I had told him. He kept his hands on my jacket, hauling me back to my feet. I was as dizzy with the foul miasma from his lungs as with the addling of my senses from the pugnacious response to my insistent questions.

I could have ended this so quickly, but this man had once been my friend. I wondered, even as he leered at me, whether a demon was riding on his shoulders. Nothing was visible; madness ruled the day.

‘Is he here?’ Jason breathed, his teeth bared. ‘Kinos! The boy who could dream for all of Greek Land. Is he here? Tell me, you bastard! Tell me and I’ll never trouble you again.’

‘Where are the kolossoi?’

‘Forget the fucking kolossoi! Antiokus … I know you too well; I know you will have found the scent of the boy! Just tell me where he is and you can go away, settle down in a small meadow, grow belladonna and beans and every midwinter go into a trance and fart your way to the stars! It’s a simple thing I ask. I no longer want to kill you. I did then, I don’t now. It’s a
simple
thing I ask. Kinos! Where did that bitch hide him? Kinos. Simple question. Simple answer. Leave the rest to me.’

‘Kolossoi.’

He clearly didn’t understand. ‘Why?’ he breathed in exasperation. ‘What is so important? They died seven hundred years ago. I’m just using them to row the ship. It’s a big ship. I need strong arms on the oars. I don’t intend to keep them around. They were my friends, they are the only friends I’ve got! I’m not disturbing them, Antiokus—’

‘But you are!’

‘How? They’ve been in their graves for seven centuries.’