The Iron Grail (37 page)

Instead, he disappeared inland, but later came to fetch me. This house had suddenly appeared among the tombs. It hadn’t been here before, I’m certain of it. I came through one of those mounds on to the island in the first place! But he persuaded me that I simply hadn’t seen it, that it was a house that only showed itself at certain times.

We sheltered here and ate exquisite food, brought to us by young people from the other side of the island. This went on for several days. I told him all about my life and troubles, and Argo and Greek Land. He seemed very interested in Greek Land. In that time he often went back to the cliffs, above the bay where his ship was moored—what did those other men eat or drink, I wonder? They never left the vessel as far as I could see. He kept gazing to the east, becoming more and more frustrated. He was waiting for something, but whatever it was it kept eluding him.

Then he began to taunt me, about my little weakness, my habit of getting lost in the passages under the earth. He started to find something very funny. He had changed. Now he became warped. I was frightened. I thought of a quick escape, back the way I’d come, though that was just as frightening, and he must have detected my fear. He asked me to play the bagpipes. I took my chance and played the melody that would open the ‘way down’, the gate back into the underworld. I thought I would take a chance on escape. But as I did so, the shutters on the door and windows burst open and creatures from a nightmare flew in and tore the bag to pieces before fleeing. One of them crunched through each of the wooden pipes as if searching for musical marrow.

The mad man laughed loudly and tossed me a joint of meat. As he ran from the house, he shouted, ‘At least you won’t go hungry. But you must wait for a ship that has taken an Age to get here before you can again find the pathway out of here! My Phineus!’

I followed him frantically to the bay, but he was a fast runner and had already struck away from the island when I reached the beach, nosing the vessel to the setting sun. That was when I saw, in the distance, ahead of him, a vast fleet of ships, dark-sailed and indistinct in the haze of sea and sun, but long vessels, war-galleys, I’m certain of it. Many ships, catching a vigorous wind and slipping steadily out of sight. I have no idea where they were going.

He played me for a fool. It was part of a game, a cruel game.

‘What emblem was displayed on his sail?’ I asked when it was clear that Elkavar had nothing more to say.

‘The sail was cloth-of-black with red-embroidered edges, and the green head of a woman at its centre; her hair was a tangle of serpents; her eyes were hollow.’

‘Medusa,’ Jason muttered. ‘This gets stranger by the moment.’

‘But you
are
the ship that has taken an Age to get here,’ Elkavar breathed. ‘I’d hardly dared think that Argo would be the beginning of my release.’

We all looked to Jason as Elkavar spoke these words. Jason had engineered the release of the blind seer Phineus from the tormenting harpies. But he had had the assistance of argonauts Zetes and Calais, the fleet sons of the Thracian Boreas, who had chased the demons as far as the Sky Floating Isle and cut off their tail feathers, marooning them.

We soon discovered that we could not penetrate more than a shadow’s length into the stone-lined passages of these
sidhs
, as Elkavar called them. When we tried to set a net to catch the elementals, after Elkavar had repaired his pipes and begun to play, they were quicker than we could act, doing their damage despite the amazing speed with which Atalanta despatched her arrows at them.

It was Rubobostes who came to our rescue. He had understood the problem, despite his doubts about Elkavar’s mortal existence, and with Ruvio had dragged the huge carved pipes from the beach to the hill top and the woodland clearing.

‘All we need now is a bag big enough to blow these things, and if instinct serves me right, we’ll blast the elementals so far back into those mounds that they’ll take a season to return. By that time we can have released the
bagpipe-man
from his curse…’

The words were said with the implication that this would be to release a greater curse on to us.

He added, ‘There’s a legend among my own people that is very similar to this situation, which is why it came to mind. I can’t remember the details, though an amount of sorcery was involved. We’re a little short on sorcery these days, it seems, so we’ll just have to improvise.’

Elkavar had fashioned each new wind-bag from the animal skin pouches in which his food had been brought, using bone needles and twine made from strands of ivy, softened by chewing, for stitching. The meat and skin must have come from somewhere, and Urtha was called up from the ship. He and several marauders from among the old argonauts scoured the far side of the island, eventually returning with a pile of uncured hides stacked on Ruvio’s back.

‘Odd people,’ was how he described the community they had discovered. He was speaking with difficulty, slurring his words. ‘They seem dedicated to no other purpose than to supply food and drink for passing ships; there’s no harbour over there; they lower packages of supplies down a sheer cliff and haul back up, by exchange, whatever it is that they need for themselves. About forty of them are women, and twenty men; no children. When they’re not making food they’re making love. They’re all very fit and young; it’s close to paradise except that none of them speak, only using fingers and gestures. Though they seem to get by very well with just fingers and gestures.’

‘Did you see many ships?’ I asked.

‘Three very large, heading west; and a fourth still receiving supplies.’

Urtha too had received supplies, from the smell on his breath and the odours emanating from the others; they were extremely drunk.

Two days later, as the wind-bag approached completion and the tall pipes were inserted and bound in place, the absurdity of the situation began to infect us. Though Jason went very quiet, Niiv laughed as I had never seen her laugh before, Urtha and Tisaminas sharing the amusement. Rubobostes seemed furious that the mood of hilarity had begun to overwhelm his vision, and when he proposed feeding his majestic and unnatural steed on long grass, to make it pass more wind and thus help to inflate the bag, it was more than most of us could endure.

I wish I could record a more sophisticated resolution to Elkavar’s plight, but the fact is, at dusk on the third day of our labours, giant musical pipes, played by squeezing a wind-filled leather bag of huge dimension, flattened by straps under the pull of the Dacian’s indefatigable horse, blasted a wailing gale into each of the mounds, a noise so abominable, so raucous, so shattering, that the building in which Elkavar had sheltered developed cracks in the stone, parts of the cliff above the bay fell on to the beach, and a group of adventuring men, two women, and one horse, were blown off their feet by the shock of it; and by the resulting odour.

After that, all was silence.

Though for a while only.

When Elkavar then sounded an appropriate melody on his own set of man-sized pipes, the new goat’s-skin wind-bag squeezed between his elbow and his ribs, the sorcery that had trapped him in this place fell away, and though nothing appeared to change, save that the entrances to the mounds closed up, as if Time had healed them, and the stone building collapsed into rubble, the Hibernian was free; free to pass beyond the beach and back to Ocean. The elementals had fled downwards. The game with him was ended.

We took him on board our unexpectedly nervous ship, our reluctant vessel, an Argo who was suddenly whispering caution. Like any traveller, her experiences with the many worlds she had seen had still not given her full confidence in this new one. Jason and Urtha, heady and half blinded with the strange brew of adventure, took turns to reassure her. She did not punish them for their lies.

Meanwhile, we made sure our sleek-hulled friend was well provisioned from the community that had serviced the glade and its erstwhile captive, then cast off, following the ghostly fleet.

Chasing the Warped Man.

*   *   *

This was a strange ocean. No sooner had we left the Isle of the Wailing Man behind than another island began to loom upon us, its sheer green slopes split by a fall of water that surged into the sea, throwing up a haze of spume and mist. Elkavar urged us to sail south.

‘The Warped Man told me of this place. The Island of the Stripped Dogs. Look, there!’

We had come in sight of a strand backed by dunes and low hills, with several paths leading inwards. The creatures that raced along the sand, barking at us, were gruesome, a pack of them, once fine hounds now stripped of their skins.

This was another wailing island, though this time the sound that rose and fell as it shifted with the wind was the sound of a thousand dogs baying and whining. As Argo moved slowly round the coast, we could see the great sail erected on its highest point, a sheet of skins stitched together, the hollow eyes and mouths of the boneless heads opening and closing with the gusts, emitting the most forlorn of cries.

Niiv was entranced. She shimmered in the same way as Munda, when the girl had been possessed by
imbas forasnai
. She was hearing something more than this preternatural howling; I realised she could hear a song within the sound.

‘Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful!’ she cried. ‘Merlin, come and listen.’

‘What are they singing?’

I suspected that she was not using charm to hear the hound-song. It would have been too great an irony if, as my own powers faded, hers remained. I suspected she was born for such a task.

Indeed, she said, ‘I have heard the song of reindeer and snow wolf, I have heard lynx and lark and eagle. But this lament is the most beautiful. Can’t you hear it? This is so old. I’ve only ever heard fragments of it, each time a dog howls at the moon. But this is the whole song.’

‘What are they lamenting?’

She took my hand and pressed it. ‘These are hounds from the first coming of people. These are the lost; they never knew the leash nor the warmth of fire. These were the old dogs who watched their young cubs taken and tamed. Now they wish they had not nervously hugged the forest edges, but had come close to the fire and shared the warmth and the songs of people. This is their own island. We should land and play with them for a while. They have seen play, but never known it. It would be a kind thing to do.’

Rubobostes’ grimace seemed to say it all: play with those skinless, blood-matted creatures, slavering at the edge of the strand? Thank you, but no.

I was more aware of Niiv’s deliberate look at me, the pressure of her fingers on my own.
Play for a while. It would be a kind thing to do
.

As if suddenly aware that I had grown cold against her, she loosened her grip, smiled sadly and said, ‘There is something else in the song. I can’t quite make it out. There’s a low moan like a voice intoning a warning, or a direction … something about the Father Calling Place. It will rise over our horizon, but it is unsafe for more than one man to land on it.’

Rubobostes had been listening to the exchange without fully understanding Niiv’s meaning. When I translated for him, his brow furrowed and his eyes quickened.

‘This is another trick,’ he said. ‘Not the girl, but what the girl has heard. Leashes? We’ve all been tied around the neck, and someone is gently tugging us along.’

I could not have agreed with him more, of course, and told him so. But I needed to speak to the ship.

Jason, despite Mielikki’s hate for him, and Argo’s disappointment in his actions, was as proprietary as ever, blocking my way as I tried to approach the birchwood face of the goddess. The ship rocked as the wind tossed us, the sail cracking, whip-like, as it caught and strained below the strengthening breeze.

‘What has Mielikki said to you?’ I asked him.

‘Concerning what?’

‘Concerning these islands. This voyage.’

‘Nothing. She’s silent and angry.’

‘I need to know what she knows. At the next island where we make landfall, only one of us can go ashore.’

Jason smiled coldly, scenting the aroma of what he loved: the unknown and danger. His look suggested: what of it? I am the captain; I step ashore.

Urtha, understanding what was being said, murmured, ‘If only one of us can go ashore, then Merlin knows more than we do, and he alone should go.’

Urtha, as I would come to discover with increasing frequency and affection, was as pragmatic as he was proud.

But he asked me pointedly, ‘Why do you need to talk to the ship?’

‘Reassurance.’

‘Reassurance? You? Now I
am
worried. Hey, Greeklander! Stand back from that lovely face. Let the man have his reassurance.’

Jason’s hostile gaze never left my own, but he was aware that Urtha’s words, sounding friendly, were not meant lightly.

If Jason hesitated, it was for a moment only, long enough to notice, too quick to offer insult. He stepped aside.

Mielikki called me down to the Spirit of the Ship, huddled in the stern below her grim visage. At this threshold the breeze was tinged with winter frost. As ever, the Northland Lady was missing her home.

My question to the goddess was simple: Niiv had understood a great deal about the last island, facts that seemed to me to beyond what should have been apparent to her; perhaps the goddess knew more. This ocean had no real business being here, not, at least, in the form in which we were seeing it. If not Mielikki, then perhaps Argo herself was aware of what lay ahead. And why my charm had deserted me.

‘There is a smell of Time in the ocean,’ Argo told me through her incumbent. ‘But new hands have played with the form of the land that floats here. I don’t understand why your charm has been taken from you. Your enchantment is designed to work in a charmless world, perhaps. But if Fierce Eyes is here, then charm has deserted her too. You are two of a kind. All she will have is her guile.’

‘Are we sailing into a trap?’

‘Yes. Of course. Though whose trap—that of Fierce Eyes, or this spectral Warped Man—I cannot tell. I can’t get a clear idea. There are too many ghosts, an abundance of ghosts, evident from their memories in the ocean. They follow us like spouting, chattering fish, though they have no form. But you are approaching the Island of the Wicker Men; and beyond that is the Island of the Stone Giants; beyond that, the Island of the Iron Grail. Beyond that, all is warped to the old wood of my eyes.’