The Iron Grail (31 page)

I questioned her more, but she simply smiled and stroked her cat.

Dealing with gods and oracles is a frustrating affair. Whether by riddle or omission, they never can bring themselves to tell you everything they know.

*   *   *

Argo had hidden the kolossoi in Ghostland. That much was clear. And that she ‘knew’ she would soon be sailing across Nantosuelta suggested she was aware that Kinos, Little Dreamer, lived there now. Jason had half suspected as much; he had already put a tentative step into that Otherworld, but had abandoned the landing, crossed back and come to Taurovinda.

The reason was obvious: the Realm of the Shadows of Heroes was a far more complex land than Alba itself. He needed a guide.

Medea knew the whereabouts of Kinos. And he knew that I was drawn to Medea by a bond of forgotten love. I could almost hear the tugging of the ropes inside his head, raising and lowering sail, signalling his direction. Follow him, find her; follow her, find my son.

I was still crouched on the slippery rocks of the underground river, feet resting against the ship’s cold hull, when Mielikki whispered, ‘Something is disturbed above! Something is wrong! Go up, Merlin. Go up now. Hurry!’

*   *   *

The cause of the disturbance was Urtha’s daughter.

Munda’s protestations at her incarceration in the women’s hostel had become increasingly anguished. Her voice, raised and furious, sounded through the citadel; animals were disturbed and children amused; but when the fury had turned to wailing there was a marked increase in concern among the wiser in the enclosure.

The girl was no longer angry. She was in pain. Her voice was an animal howl, distressed and primal. When Ullanna commented that she sounded like a woman in labour, Rianata, the Thoughtful Woman, reacted like a hare bolting from its form.

‘Eyes of Riannon! What have I done? How could I have been so blind?’

She returned later and urged Urtha to call a council. ‘The girl will have something to say to us all. A representative of all who live here must be present. Hurry! She is not in our world. She will lose her wits if we don’t bring her to a sounding place. She will have something to tell us.’

‘What sounding place?’ Ullanna asked, concerned.

‘The king’s hall. Make a circle. Tell all present to maintain absolute silence until the frenzy takes her. Poor girl. Poor girl. I should have seen it coming.’

And this is exactly what was done. Twenty men and women made a circle in the royal lodge, seated on hard benches. In the lower parts of the room others, Jason included, sat cross-legged and curious. A fire blazed some way away from us, but torches gave a clearer light, a shadowy light, picking out the gold and bronze of the buckles and brooches of the men present, and the brightness of colour in the hair and on the faces and arms of the women.

When Munda came into the hall she was feral. She flung herself down on the hard floor, scratched at the surface, her head waving from side to side, her copper locks glinting. She was murmuring words, but in a slurred way. I was not alone in the room in discerning the endlessly repeated statement: I hide nothing.

That Munda was already inside the ageless cloak of
imbas forasnai
was obvious—to me at least; the glow was there, that glimmering of the skin, the shimmering aura that covered her from head to foot; her eyes were empty, depthless. What was she seeing? Her tongue flicked between her lips, tasting the air of future worlds.

Suddenly she was calm. She rose to her feet, facing her father, hands held up before her at chest height, palms out, fingers spread. She was trembling like a fledgling thrush, dropped from its nest.

‘I am Munda. Daughter of the king. Sister of the king-to-be. I hide nothing. Listen to me, and despair at your actions.’

In her child’s voice, sometimes strong, she said:

‘I see a lost man, a twisted man,

A lordly man.

His eyes are the colour of hazel,

He is lean of limb, easy on the eye, dark hair curls to his shoulders,

his laughter a delight.

His belt is stained with crimson.

His sword is a scythe, reaping. There is no meaning in his killing.

Bronze is thirsty, as strong as iron in the warped man’s grasp.

This man means doom for two of you,

Two whom I see now.

I hide nothing.

‘His stronghold is a green place,

A place of verdant stone, vibrant, shining.

A vast sea crashes against the shore.

A host is camped there, blood-blinded,

Siege-wearied, year-lost, men-lost.

Your ship beached among them!

This encounter means doom for two of you, one a woman.

I hide nothing!

I can hide
nothing
!

‘Islands like bright jewels float in the ocean.

They lead the way to the crooked king,

On the Island of the Three Brothers.

I see a father-calling place, hidden in the stronghold,

A man and a boy in each other’s arms,

Tears and laughter, snakes and dreams.

And the rest is void.’

As she finished speaking, the girl doubled up in apparent pain, falling to the ground, thrashing wildly, her open mouth flecked with foam, though no sound emerged from her. Rianata and Manandoun held her limbs until the seizure eased. Munda was suddenly aware of her surroundings again, sitting up and tugging at her long hair. She looked at me with the expression of someone emerging from a deep sleep, wits slowly returning.

‘That was a strange dream,’ she said.

‘We’ve shared it,’ her father answered. ‘I was wrong to shut you away. Foresight was struggling from you.’

‘I dreamed of wild dogs stripped of their pelts, and a wailing man tormented by spirits. And a boy who has built animals from pieces of bronze. All living on islands.’

Urtha glanced at me, frowning. These facts had not been in the declamation. Rianata intercepted the look. ‘She will have dreamed more than Foresight will speak. But what she saw will fade quickly. You must remember every word she says. This girl has
travelled
! She is remarkable, Urtha. It will be years before she has her first rush of blood, but she has had her first rush of vision. She is already in Setlocenia’s embrace.’

Setlocenia was a goddess of long life and long sight, Manandoun whispered to me.

‘Why are you talking about me like this?’ Munda demanded as she stood, looking round at the circle of impressed faces.

‘Because you are ahead of your time,’ her guardian informed her. She smiled at that and sought out her brother in the circle of seated men, giving him a look that said: so there!

Kymon straightened up on the wooden bench where he sat beside his father, and folded his arms, as if to say: but look where I’m positioned in the ranks!

Siblings competing, children at play, though the cloak of age was slowly spreading around them.

‘I am hungry for this,’ Munda said.

‘Don’t be too hungry,’ Rianata countered. ‘Fine taste comes with discernment; discernment is learned with patience.’

Now Jason rose to his feet in the shadows at the back of the hall. ‘If a guest may ask a question?’ he said in Urtha’s language, broken but clear enough, continuing when Urtha encouraged him to do so: ‘The only ship I know in this place is my own ship, Argo, and the girl has seen it beached in the middle of a war. Is there any way I can get a clearer picture? Is there some god, or elemental, or High Woman, who can help her with the detail? I would be grateful for the detail. I am more than prepared to honour a god with sacrifice, or be provoked by an elemental, or obey the whim of a High Woman. I need the detail. Is there a way?’

There was not, and he was told so, Cathabach adding: ‘
Imbas forasnai
is a glimpse of things to come, and is often misleading. We are now in
dur viath
: the constantly dividing path. And we must pick our ways carefully. The girl’s foreseeing is the likeliest course of events, but if we choose insightfully we can avoid doom.’

Jason looked at me for a moment, as if I might translate the incomprehensible statement. I simply shook my head. There was a moment of old fondness in that glance before he turned away.

The gathering broke up and Munda was taken back to the women’s house, but this time as a friend of the lodge, not its prisoner. She had already assumed the wild look I always associated with such precocious prophetesses, her hair taking on new life, her eyes sparkling, her body movements like a bird’s, sudden, careful, checking from the corner of her eye. It is from the corner of the eye that glimpses of other worlds can be garnered.

And she was very aware of me.

*   *   *

Cathabach declared that his
geis
was ended. After ten years carrying sword and shield, he would return to the way of oak. There was a question that he had not served the full ten years. He went to the women’s lodge and lay with the Thoughtful Woman. When she examined what had come from him, she pronounced that there was indeed wood sap in the fluid.

Now Urtha verified the end of the period of taboo. He accepted the old warrior’s sword and blunted its edge, then knelt across its shaft and began to bend it. Cathabach himself completed the bending until the blade was turned back on itself, ready to be cast into the river.

Truth to tell, several of those present knew that Cathabach had been casting off his
geis
for several seasons. It had begun in Greek Land, on the blood-quest after Cunomaglos, during the march on Delphi. When Urtha, wounded, had decided to return to Alba, Cathabach and Manandoun had been distraught at breaking their pledge to Jason, to accompany him in search of his son. Such a promise counted strongly among these men of bulls and iron.

Jason, away chasing after his eldest son, had come to them—I had brought him there, in dream form—and the bond of allegiance was ended. Cathabach had seen the trick; if Manandoun had known of my intervention, he was too wise to have ever mentioned it. But Cathabach had known, which meant that even then he was shedding metal—his warrior’s arms—accumulating feather for his cloak, and tree-bark for his mask.

Cathabach now painted his body with woad, a purple dye used to tattoo the skin. He was already much marked. The new symbol was obscure in form, but served to make the connection between air, earth and water, the links severed in his ten year tenure as iron-gripped scourge of his chieftain’s enemies.

It was a short ceremony, conducted inside the low wall around the well. Only Urtha, Manandoun and myself were present, apart from the three women who tended to the water and ‘Nodons’ Cloak’, the flower and foliage that was fitted, entwined and draped about the stones around the deep pool.

Naked, Cathabach made an impressive sight, his hard body a whirl and confusion of images in blue and purple, a few in crimson, many of them more fabulous than real. It would have taken me days and nights to read him, longer than it would take to read a similar amount of the carved glyphs on the stones of the sanctuaries in Aegypt. Not just one life was pricked into this man’s flesh; an eternity of knowledge was recorded there. And Cathabach knew that it was beyond knowing; his sly look at me, as he saw me examining his skin, suggested that he, too, knew that the pair of us carried the past in or on our bodies.

He would not have disputed that my own secret history, etched on the living bone itself, was more powerful than his; but we were men alike, and what he lacked in depth of charm he certainly had in experience, since he had lived a life to the full whilst I had kept full life at arm’s length.

‘How many times have you seen a little ritual like this?’ he asked me sourly, noticing the way I stared at him. He was assuming I was cynical of this passing rite in a passing year in the passing of time and people.

But I answered him quite truthfully. ‘Many times. But only occasionally when it has a meaning that is profound.’

He reached to the metal pail, with its water from the pool, and splashed his face and back, holding his wet hands before him, examining the contours of his palms.

‘This well is profound,’ he said. ‘And it is ageless, endless. It reminds me of you. And of kings. Urtha is the moon that waxes this month. Next month, another moon. You are the morning and evening star that follows in its gleam. I think, Merlin, that you will be the last man alive to drink from this well. In the meantime: be a friend to the kings who follow Urtha.’

Now there was a solemn chant as Cathabach rekindled the life in each picture on his skin, made the count of nineteen by cutting the nineteen lines symbolising the phases of the moon, then dropped a short green tunic over his torso before wrapping a black cloak with rust-red embroidered edges around his shoulders, pinning it at the heart with a eagle’s-head brooch of silver and amber. He used shears to cut his long, greying locks to a finger’s length that could be limed and stiffened.

He shaved the beard from his face then left the fortress to spend a day and a night in one of the groves by the winding river. He carried a sack of dead birds with him. In his seclusion he would stitch the feathers of eagle, blackbird, lark and crane into the cloak. The feathers of the crane were the most potent. They would ensure the constant protection of Guranos, stalking god of water, land and air. After this he would be able to eat crane flesh, forbidden to all but druids.

*   *   *

Inside the orchard, the old argonauts were restless and unhappy. Word of Munda’s startling prophecy had reached them—how, I wondered—and they were disturbed at the thought of ‘doom’ taking them before their kolossoi could be returned. Atalanta in particular was agitated. ‘Is it true? Is it true?’ she asked, her gaze gaunt and beautiful as she searched mine for an answer.

My reply—that nothing was certain—confused her. It took a moment to realise her question was about Ullanna, not the prediction of a woman’s death. Was it true that a descendant of hers was in Taurovinda?

I told her the truth. I also indicated the immense span of time and generations that separated the two women, the two hunters, ghost and echo.