The Iron Grail (45 page)

‘I don’t expect that to be for many years,’ I murmured through my astonishment.

‘Nor does Argo,’ Mielikki said.

I could hardly take in what the goddess was saying. As before, when I had been with Medea, brilliant flashes of childhood memory opened my inner sight, the sounds and smells and brightness of the long-gone. The boat! Of course I remembered the little boat. It had taken me a season to chop and carve and shape and make riverworthy. It had been no more than a hollow wooden bowl, big enough for a small boy, made buoyant with inflated skins attached to its sides, and with a wide blade of hornbeam as a fixed rudder, my own invention. When I stood in it, legs braced apart, and raised my arms and my sheep’s wool cloak to catch the breeze, she had bobbed and scurried with the current, faster than the others, my friend’s small coracles, spinning and twirling in the swift water. I had travelled far and in safety, and paddled back against the flow in weary triumph.

When my little voyager had been taken from me, I had cried at the loss. How could I have known that she still sailed the world? That she was designed to find me on occasion? That she was a continuing part of my long walk around the Path?

I slapped her hull, the new, good wood, northern birch around the old oak, her latest cloak. ‘Good luck. I’ll catch up with you again.’

‘Goodbye, Merlin,’ she replied. ‘Jason is waiting for you.’

All the while I had been in the Spirit of the Ship, Jason had been crouching at my shoulder, but not privy to the scene, to the conversation with the protecting entity of the vessel. As I rose to my feet, he helped me up. Joints stiffen in cold and wet, and to tell the truth, I ached in nearly all of them.

‘I caught half the conversation,’ he said with a frown. ‘Your half. I get the impression that you’re staying here, with Urtha, in that muddy place, with his roasts and furious women.’

I told him that that was indeed my intention.

‘What about you?’ I asked the adventurer; this old king out of Time.

‘I go on,’ he said. ‘Like my second son, I went a little mad. I have come to my senses. I have been chasing dreams and chasing ghosts. But I have a first son still alive, and who knows, Antiokus—’

‘Merlin!’

‘I don’t
like
that name. It sounds artificial. Get another, or stick to the one I know. Anyway, Thesokorus might still recognise me. I shall try again. Kinos is dead, I accept that. I don’t believe Medea was playing tricks on us, not this time. The boy died of loneliness and moon fever. I need to be in Greek Land to mourn him, not here, not where the air is so vile and damp and cold.’

‘This is a
vibrant
place, Jason. Full of life! It has a full, formidable and challenging future.’

‘In which, no doubt, you will play your full, formidable part.’

He brightened up and tugged his beard. His teeth were almost black in his mouth. I hadn’t realised how decayed he was. But he was in a forward-looking mood. There had been a sudden, dramatic change in his head and his heart.

‘God’s luck to you!’ he said. ‘As for me, I have ten years … and I won’t waste them. Ten years at least, ten good years to sail this good ship on strange waters and find strange places to…’ He paused, frowning, trying to find the right word.

‘Loot?’

‘Yes! Loot. It’s what I do best,’ he agreed with a sour laugh. ‘Ten years. Listen out for my story. I have a feeling you will be the only one writing about me. Now get off my ship, unless you wish to join the adventure.’

‘Goodbye, Jason. I hope you find what you’re looking for.’

Now his laugh was genuine. ‘I’m looking for nothing!’ he roared at me, as Rubobostes helped me over the side of the vessel. ‘All I hope and pray is that Nothing is looking for me! Though I’ll know Nothing when I see it, and I’ll keep a piece of it for you.’

‘He’s mad,’ Rubobostes whispered as he let me go. ‘This next voyage should be very interesting. Are you sure you won’t come? We may have to make him disappear…’

‘He will never disappear, Rubobostes, old friend. And nor will you. Sail well.’

Argo slipped her mooring and drifted down the river towards the distant sea. I could hear the drone of pipes coming from the high walls of Taurovinda: Elkavar patrolling the boundaries of the fortress with his own particular system of wailing defence. Niiv, as ever, clung to my arm. The black dye was growing out from her hair, bright yellow roots gleaming in the dull sunshine.

‘Teach me things,’ she urged as we walked through the evergroves. ‘Teach me things, and I promise I’ll not look into your future. Not ever. Not ever again.’

‘’You give me moon fever,’ I told her. ‘You terrify me.’

‘I know,’ she answered. ‘But I love you. And I want you to teach me things. Teach me everything! I will do anything you ask…’

There will always be a moment when a man must give up the chase, or give up hope, or give up the ghost. Jason had done all these things. I was equal to Jason when it came to giving up the fight.

I put my arm round Niiv, and gave up resistance to her charms.

Afterword

Hill fortresses such as Taurovinda began to appear in Britain (also known as Alba, Albion, the Isle of Mists, and the Isle of Ghosts) about five centuries BCE, at much the same time as the sprawling and opulent Celtic citadels of Western Europe began to fall to marauding armies from the east, or to uprisings by the discontented lower classes.

Hierarchical, tyrannical and greedy for imported luxuries from Greece, Egypt India, and the Levant, the High Kings and Goddess-Queens were either killed, or fled into exile with their armed retinues and druid-priests. It is more than likely that many found haven across the sea channel, in mysterious Alba, and perhaps further west in Ierna (Ireland.)

Most of what we know of Celtic ritual and belief at that time is anecdotal. But in the Irish epic ‘The Cattle (or Bull) Raid on Cuailnge’ we have a powerful window back to this period of transition in Celtic society from a wise, if remote and sacrifice-obsessed matriarchy, to a boundary- and symbol-obsessed patriarchy, which brought with it the rise of the champion knight, the prophetic
light of foresight
, and the culture of kingly hospitality.

Many of the new hill-top citadels in Alba were built on the remains of far more ancient sites, whose true function remains intriguing and probably unknowable. Other fragments of the ‘Merlin Codex’ have more to say on this subject.

Robert Holdstock

London, November 2001

BY ROBERT HOLDSTOCK FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

The Merlin Codex

Celtika

The Iron Grail

The Broken Kings
(forthcoming)

The Mythago novels

Mythago Wood

Lavondyss
(forthcoming)

The Hollowing
(forthcoming)

Praise for Robert Holdstock

“Our finest living mythmaker. His narratives—intense, exuberant, earthy, passionate, dense with metaphor—are new trails through the ancient forest of our imaginations. An essential writer.”

—Stephen Baxter

“Rob Holdstock’s is one of the voices at the very heart of modern fantasy.”

—Guy Gavriel Kay

“A writer of both heart and fire.”

—Peter F. Hamilton

“No other author has so successfully captured the magic of the wildwood.”

—Michael Moorcock

“This is fantasy at its most intelligent.”

—
The Guardian
on
The Iron Grail

“Strong and striking … Holdstock masterfully conflates two great myths of two disparate cultures. The personalities of Jason and Medea are consistent with their legends, but their motivations are revealed with a sure, contemporary astuteness.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle
on
Celtika

About the Author

Robert Holdstock is the author of such novels as
Mythago Wood
, which won the World Fantasy Award;
Lavondyss; Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn;
and
Celtika,
the first volume of The Merlin Codex. He lives in London.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE IRON GRAIL: BOOK TWO OF THE MERLIN CODEX

Copyright © 2002 by Robert Holdstock

All rights reserved.

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Earthlight, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., a Viacom Company.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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ISBN 0-765-34987-6

EAN 975-0765-34987-3

First Tor edition: February 2004

First mass market edition: January 2005

eISBN 9781466840324

First eBook edition: February 2013