Celtika (26 page)

Rest came to us all, then, and we slept until dawn. I awoke to find Niiv curled into my body, her face as peaceful as a child’s. While the rest of us stood, stretched and sought relief from that long and arduous night, Niiv slept on. Mielikki had left her and her beauty was back.

Jason called to me and I went to the thin, fern-fringed stream that ran down from the mountainside among rocks, scrubby oaks and twisted thorns. ‘Did you do this?’ he asked. ‘Did you bring us up this impossible stream?’

‘Not me. I just looked ahead and discouraged predators.’

Indeed, my back was aching and my eyes sore. I’d been using my talents without realising it and could think only that Mielikki must have had a bony hand on my heart during that river trip. It was too worrying to imagine that it might have been Niiv influencing me.

‘You look concerned,’ Jason said.

‘I’m always concerned around you,’ I replied. ‘You piss on goddesses and stalk the world, seven hundred years dead, as if nothing had happened. That’s a concerning sort of man.’

‘Seven hundred years?’ He laughed quietly. ‘I don’t even want to know what might have passed in my sleep. And that’s how it feels, Merlin. I’ve been asleep. Now I’m awake, but what’s changed? Trees look the same, the stars look the same, you look the same. Women look and smell the same. The sea smells the same. And I’m sailing with one young man who’s out for revenge, and a lot of others who are searching for things that only the gods are prepared to give them. What’s
different?
On board is a man who sings like a dying cat rather than a skylark and plays an instrument that sounds like Hel giving birth, rather than the lulling strings of Orpheus’s harp. But what’s different? When I see my son I’ll know him by his eyes; he’ll know me by mine; he’ll want to fight me; he’ll be angry; he’s lived without me as long as I’ve lived without him; it will take time for the embrace, it always does when love has been denied a father and his son. What’s different?’

He stared at me, waiting for an answer.

‘I don’t know,’ I said at last. ‘But something is.’

I was thinking:
the ship. Something in the ship. Something sour
 …

Jason shrugged. ‘New gods, new philosophies, new metals, new kingdoms. Is that what you mean by
something
? It would take me the rest of my life to understand
those
differences. All I crave is to fill in the gap in my sons’ lives. I’ll do anything. I’ll sit down by the fire, I’ll do as I’m told, I’ll let them mock me, rage at me, call me seven kinds of monster … just so long as I fill that gap of twenty years. I’m haunted by that silence, Merlin. Can you understand that? Where did they go? What did they hunt? Who did they love? What jokes did they share? What did they learn? That’s all that interests me. That’s the only difference in my life that I wish to be made recognisable. Can you understand that?’

‘More than I can understand how a ship built for forty men can have been rowed by twenty up a stream too narrow for a swan.’

‘But it was you who did it. Admit it, Merlin.’

‘Not me. The ship.’

‘Not the ship. Not the ship! I no longer need the ship. You were right to say she died when I came back from death. I will not have help from that ship, only you. You, however, can take help from where you can. And pass it on if you need to.’

And with a wave of his hand, a dismissive, angry, ungrateful gesture, he stormed back to where his argonauts sat huddled around the fire, yawning, murmuring, trying to come to an understanding of their dreams.

*   *   *

Later in the day, Rubobostes galloped back to Argo, his face red with excitement.

‘It’s a long haul up the hill here, but then it’s a free ride down to the marshes. I saw horses and deer grazing in the distance. Riding
and
eating! A Dacian’s dream! It looks rank and dangerous, though, and there are heavy forests on the horizon. Where’s Ullanna? She could hunt blindfolded and still bring us our supper.’

Niiv slept on. No amount of shaking or calling to her could rouse her, so I wrapped her carefully in her cloak and carried her into the belly of Argo. She was in the Death Sleep, a place I’d been to myself, though being so much younger than me, and being inexperienced in the using of the power of charm, she would take longer to walk back from that realm.

When she came back, though, she would be stronger.

It was Elkavar who brought a note of practicality to the situation, as we began to unload the contents of Argo’s hold.

‘We’ll never haul this ship over that hill,’ he said. ‘Not with so few of us. Fifty or sixty, maybe. But not with so few.’

‘I’ve carried this ship before,’ Jason growled at him irritably, ‘I’ll carry it again.’

‘Not with the sort of knots you use to harness her,’ Rubobostes put in quietly. ‘They’ll snap, or rip her keel from ribs. A hundred paces was fine. But not that distance.’

We all looked at him. He seemed surprised by the sudden attention. ‘Grease, rollers, ropes, pulleys, it would take a lifetime without a hundred men. What you need is Ruvio, old stump-puller there, and
Gordion knots.
’

A number of blank faces stared at him, waiting. Then Jason raised his hands: well? What are they?

‘A Gordion knot is very clever. A rope pulled through the tangle of the knot is helped by the knot itself! It seems to pull on itself. It reduces effort greatly. It’s been known since time began, but only certain men can master its complexity. A Makedonian warlord tried to untie it and failed—’

‘Alessandros,’ Tairon whispered.

‘Iskander,’ Ullanna muttered. ‘I remember now.’

‘The same. A generation ago, when he was leading his army east. He was ordered to either untie the knot or worship publicly at its sanctuary. He wanted to prove himself and so spent days struggling with it. But the knot defeated him, and in a fit of rage cut it through with his sword. An act of defiance. The knot fell apart, the cut ends dropped away, leaving two smaller, identical knots. A very clever device.’

‘And of no practical use to us at all, by the sounds of it,’ said Jason, still irritable. ‘Since we don’t have one.’

‘I should have mentioned: I know how to tie one.’

‘Well, well, well…’ Jason breathed, with a great, approving grin at the Dacian.

‘I told you I’d be useful.’

Jason and Erdzwulf lashed lengths of mast along each side of the keel, to broaden the base of the ship and make her easier to roll. Then the tired but willing Dacian horse took the strain as Argo, propped on each side by eight of us, pushed by eight, with four argonauts running the rollers from stern to prow, was inched along the rise of the hill, a labour that soon became a matter of routine. Ruvio snorted and steamed, but he was soon in his stride and had reached the first of two summits before his shaking head and whinnying objection told his master that a rest was needed.

Rubobostes fussed and stroked his steed, even sharing his water. I heard him murmur, ‘I hope we never run out of meat. I’m sure they’d slaughter and consume
me
before they considered
you
for the spit!’

When Niiv finally stirred from her deathly sleep, we were on high ground, looking into the misty distance. The first stretch of the Daan that was navigable lay only two days away, now, across a lake and marshes in the land that Erdzwulf was sure was the tribal territory of the Sequani, a land which stretched before us into evening oblivion.

PART FOUR

Hawk Watching

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Hawk Watching

The ice on the great river Daan had begun to crack. Swirling flights of cranes and crows circled the vast sprawl of camps and enclosures that stretched along its shores and through the forest. Spring would soon burst from winter tree and frozen ground. Already the air was quickening, and the gathered hordes were stirring from their winter quarters. The fires burned brighter and clan colours were added to the high totems that marked each separate army.

Here were kings of the Bituriges and Avernii, warlords of the Senones and Ambarii, chiefs and champions of the Carnutes and Trocmii, large clans and small, some each other’s bitter enemies. But all enmities and discourtesies had been put aside on pain of death, though early on Warlord Brennos had allowed some settling of hostility by champions. No claim for slaves or territory was allowed after the combat, however, merely an agreement for the losing party to pay from the spoils of the Quest.

Foraging parties went out again into the largely deserted country around this stretch of the Daan, searching for stray cattle, sheep and horses and forgotten fields of winter roots. Corn would be gathered on the way, later in the year from the fields, or sooner from the storehouses of villages.

With the end of winter, war parties with their own supplies came in from their camps to the north or east, the last of the tribes to join the Great Quest. Each was a long train of riders, chariots, men on foot, women and children, wagons and carts, and what remained of their oxen, goats, geese and salted joints of pig.

These new arrivals were assigned to one or other of the armies under Brennos’s two commanders, either to Achichoros or Bolgios, and taken to find ground to camp and forage in the woods. Their leaders were instructed on their position in the forthcoming march to the south, the direction of the march being the only available information at this time.

The three warlords rode through the swarming camps, Achichoros in his grey wolfskin cloak and falcon-crested helmet, red-bearded, jade-eyed Bolgios in his iron-studded leather armour, Brennos, narrow-eyed, narrow-featured, heavily moustached, his helmet made from the tusks of boars, his short green cloak embroidered with the bloody muzzle of this totem beast. They encouraged and promised, congratulated and reassured (their destination was not yet known to any but these three commanders). They made sure that the baggage trains were organised and ready, the order of animals, the order of horsemen. They settled the petty squabbles of rival bands, meted out justice in the presence of druids, exacted life where their rules had been breached, and all the time noted numbers, supplies, strengths and weaknesses in this wild and unwillingly restrained horde of glory seekers.

Only the envoys who had journeyed to the west remained to return, those who had gone to recruit in forested Gaul, among the Remii, and in misty Alba and mountainous Celidon. Each day, watch was kept for their dark shapes to appear on the western hills, but time was running out for them.

While they waited for their numbers to reach the final figure for warriors and champions, which had been told to Brennos in his glorious dream, games were held at all hours of the day and night, tribe against tribe, champions in combat, youth against the old. Chariot races, running contests, javelin contests and feats of memory enlivened the waiting. Now was the time for head hair to be shaped and stiffened with limewater, for chin hair to be cut back to a stubble, for bodies to be daubed with dyes in clan colours, and for bronze to be polished, swords given their edge and votive shields painted and cast into the water, dedicated to Daan, Teutates and Nemetona, the protecting gods. Cloth, woven during the winter, was cut and shaped, leather was stitched, the winter dead were given careful, sorrowful burial in mounds built on the northern banks of the Daan, in the shelter of groves.

Dogs roamed and scavenged. Horses were broken, trimmed and harnessed, given names, a few sacrificed, their haunches cast into the flooding water, the rest distributed to the elite among the horsemen.

Everything was restless, nervous, a suppressed energy that would very soon burst out into the land around like water from behind a frozen wall of ice. Brennos sensed the urgency of the need to make a move sooner, rather than later.

But a moon waxed and waned.

Then horns and trumpets, sounding a distant din from the western hills, signalled the final arrival of the Gauls, and the Albanii from the Island of Ghosts, and the fiery Celidonii with their wild running-dancing way of moving. It was evening. Orange light glinted on what seemed a thousand raised spears and shields, and then a thousand more as the tribes spilled over the crests of the hills and down towards the river, wildly yelling, racing their small horses, pursued by a horde of barking dogs and shouting children.

As these last arrivals were greeted, fed, numbered and divided between the armies, away from the mayhem a small band of skirmishers from the south rode quietly to the gates of Brennos’s enclosure, six men in all, wrapped well against the chill, well provisioned, well armoured, totally exhausted. Lord Bolgios, wine flask in hand, came out to meet them.

‘We’d given you up for dead.’

‘The dead have given us back,’ the dark-eyed man who led them answered. ‘We’ve been in Hell, and no doubt about that, but it seems we’re not welcome there. But the route you propose will work. There are watch stations at the heads of most of the valleys, easy enough to overcome. Only the pass in Thessaly will cause difficulty.’

‘You’ll be able to tell us all about it later. But first you need sleep. Welcome back, Orgetorix. And well done.’

A day later, Brennos lit five great fires in the sprawling royal enclosure he had constructed at the heart of the gathering, and sent for the kings, warlords and champions of every tribe to come and feast and learn the details of the quest ahead. They came dressed for ceremony, high-crested helmets, bright-coloured cloaks, shimmering bronze and gold at their necks and arms, riding the best of the horses, which shone behind their armoured masks. The smell of roasting meat and hot, honeyed wine was rich in the air. Four hundred men feasted for a day, and not one was allowed the best cut but rather all who had come to the feast were given a portion of all cuts; fighting and abuse were limited to the verbal kind, though a few jugs and plates were thrown. But a guard of men with throwing spears stood around the feast with instructions to strike down any man, no matter how high in rank, who drew sword from scabbard.

Truth to tell, it was curiosity as much as anything that kept these champions on their best behaviour.