The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (43 page)

Arcandond’s army had painted their faces grey and red, the red running in a single vertical stripe dividing their faces. On his saddle, each man carried the head of an old enemy, reeking of cedar oil, and the carcass of a hare strapped to the withers of his mount. The hare could fight, the hare could run, but the hare was favoured by the Moon, and would never run scared.

As Arcandond led his troop to the north, to meet his fate and his death, Durandond rode south to where the hills became clustered and the valleys turned to the west through deeper gorges, protected from all but the most determined hunter of royal bounty.

The last gift that Arcandond had given his son to treasure and protect was the small box of oak in which the fifth part of the Daidalon was kept. The two Speakers, still stained with the blood of omens, stood on either side of him, their grim faces telling all that Durandond knew was to be their own fate. They could never leave the sacred groves. The Rieve would find them and remove everything from them that had ever been used to scry the future.

As Durandond accepted the box, his father said, “I have never used it. Nor did my father. And nor must you. When it was used, it turned against the user. Nobody knows how, or why.”

“I know the Declamation,” Durandond assured his father. “I know the misfortune it contains.”

“This is the fifth part. Neither the fifth part of a man nor the fifth part of a god. It’s the fifth part of something beyond knowing. You know that it must never be reunited with the other four parts.”

“Yes. I remember the Declamation! I must never use it; I must never destroy it.”

There were tears in his eyes. His father, battle-harnessed, stood before him, eyes as strong as the iron he would soon be wielding, but heart and body as frail as the man he had become in these long years of luxury and untested spirit. Durandond felt love for him, and shame for him.

Arcandond didn’t need to say the words to his son: I could have been a better king. I could have been a better man. Be that king in my place. Take the pride we once had as a clan and settle it on another mountain.

As if the words had been spoken, Durandond whispered, “I have every intention of doing so.”

He embraced his father, cheek and chin, knelt before him, then stood, smiled a last good-bye, and turned from him.

Later, entering the low hills to the south, safe for the moment, Durandond rode up into a ridge and looked towards the citadel. Flames rose from the walls. Dark shapes tumbled from the towers. Death moved chaotically among life running with frenzy and despair.

“We should have listened to the Wanderer,” Orogoth observed sadly.

“As I said before: I
did
listen to him.”

“Then why did you do nothing about it?”

“I thought we
were
doing something about it,” Durandond said with a wry glance.

“Travelling west?”

“That’s what he told us to do. There was no escaping the prophecy, in my opinion. That’s why I’m prepared, whereas you were not.”

Orogoth accepted the criticism. “Cailum rode with his father against the Rieve. At least he sounded his war cry, even after his father was cut down beside him.”

“He’s still going west, though. A messenger brought the news.”

“He has his father’s body with him.”

“Good. West is where the Dead live. West is where we make our mark.”

Orogoth laughed for the first time in this encounter. “By the dawn shout of Taranis! Your confidence flows as full as the milk from Brigantia’s breasts.”

Durandond glanced, amused, at his foster brother. “A good thing?”

“I’m not complaining. We need to invoke as much confidence as possible, now that we live in the shadow of our fathers’ humiliation.”

“Then take my advice: stop invoking gods and start riding.”

“West. To lands unknown,” Orogoth agreed.

“No,” said Durandond. “Home!”

*   *   *

The hunched and melancholy ghost of Durandond drew on my strength as an unborn child in times of famine draws upon the body of its mother. Draining, desperate, drawing the vitality that it needs to survive, a desperate clawing and clinging to life that weakens the mother, but leads to the expulsion of a living, healthy infant. This shade, aroused by my need, now milked me for sustenance as it remembered for me.

I aged. I had given up the struggle. Something in me had changed, giving in to fate, just as something had happened to Durandond in that long-ago when, instead of rallying his retinue of champions and fighters to ride with his father against the Rieve, he had obeyed the wisdom of the older man and abandoned his kingdom to the wasteland that would follow:

To go in search of a greater land, to continue the dynasty of kings.

Durandond had acted with wisdom, even thought the act must have seemed cowardly. But I knew something that this shadow of the king might not have known: that what Durandond had put in place was a new clan kingdom, and a kingdom based around the land, not the citadel. Yes, Taurovinda was central to the land. But greed was not central to the stronghold.

Such a simple change. And yet it meant that one day Pendragon would inhabit the territory, with his own gutsy and lusty spirit.

Do these things matter to you who perhaps read this long after the events? I have no way of telling. All I can tell you is that in those days, these things mattered.

*   *   *

Watching through Morndun’s mask, I understood that Durandond was remembering the time of the fall with some anguish. He had died, I was certain, with thoughts of his father on his mind. He sat on the bench in his tomb, slumped forward on his knees, looking around at the goods in his mortuary house, his gaze lingering longest on the shield and helmet positioned at the head of the bound and sleeping corpse. A mask of tarnished silver covered the face, but Durandond’s thick white hair still lay spread on the wood of the bier.

After centuries, this mortuary house was still spacious, the rot visible only in certain hangings, and in the tarnishing of the metal, and in the form of the bones of his five hunting hounds, curled at his feet. The wooden bier, strong layers of oak, and the oak pillars holding up the heavy ceiling were still intact.

Durandond had not been buried with his wife and children, which surprised me, but then I was not aware of any fate that his family might have suffered.

“Eventually we came to the sea,” Durandond went on. “We were scattered along the coast, and sent messengers between our forces. The last to arrive was Vercindond of the Vedilici. An enclosure was constructed for the five kings and their families; a second was constructed to contain the wagons with the honoured dead, those that we had managed to raise from the earth before the Rieve swept across us. A hundred carts were placed in circles within that enclosure, and it was guarded night and day.

“We set to the task of building boats. So many boats! They lay like an ancient fleet along the strands below the cliffs. Some were designed for horses, some for the wagons, some for supplies. There is a skill in building ships, but we had built them for the river Rein, not for this unpredictable grey sea.

“By the summer, though, we had boats enough to cross to the land we knew as Alba. We did not anticipate a friendly reception. Those first weeks after our landings were bloody and furious. The people used chariots and horses in ways that astonished us. They seemed to have mastered the power of stones, great rocks flew at us. Their priests were more warrior than healers. They did us damage.

“But we forced our way west. We were a great force against the occasional war band from the older inhabitants of Alba. We took over their mortuary grounds for camps and fortified them. We drove them this way and that. Many of them retreated into the deep valleys and dense forests, out of sight, but not out of our thinking. They watched us constantly as we scoured our new land for the right places to settle.

“And one by one my foster brothers found a place to stop, consider, then to make a decision to settle. First Orogoth, then Cailum. A moon later, Vercindond had a vision of his fortress to the east and turned back the way we had come. Radagos went deeper into the west, and though messages came from him for some days, there was a moment when they ceased, and our young Speaker scryed that he had stumbled into the Otherworld, and been consumed by it. A dreadful fate.

“As for me,” the shade glanced at me, frowning. “I found your hill. The hill as green as the cloak I gave you. I swear that it grew before my eyes, one mist-shrouded morning when I stood with Evian, my wife, lost in the wild land, unable to sleep, feeling the pinch of cold and hunger. We seemed to be heading towards a great lake, or sea, some expanse of water scattered with islets just visible through the fog. I remember saying, ‘We will never find a place to start again.’

“‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘We can stay right here if you want. The mist will clear. It feels firm below our feet. I can hear the belling of stags. This land is rich. And I’m tired of wandering. Make a decision.’

“There was an uncompromising sort of challenge in her voice, the first time I’d heard it. She was tired and finding me tiresome. I didn’t know it, but our firstborn was already flexing his muscles inside her.

“As the fog cleared, we saw the illusion of water was just dew on the plain, and the hill was there, forested, bare-topped, stretching away from us, but steep from our point of view. We were looking at it from the east, and in my mind’s eye I could see the shimmer of gates and walls.

“On the top of the hill a bull was grazing. The grass there was bright. The bull was white. I had never seen a bull like it. By evening, four of us had crept up through the wooded flanks of Taurovinda and captured the beast. It was immense, and it gored one of us badly. But we caught him and tethered him, and then we took possession of the ground. The next morning, as trees were felled to make a roadway, I drove the first stake of the palisade wall into the earth. I felt it open the hill below me. I sent down roots and here they’ll stay.

“I sleep below that mark.”

*   *   *

I let the spirit pause for a while. As with Tairon’s mother, time spent in this resurrected state was short. Immediately after death: the
ephemera,
or the “twilight time.” Long after death, the “returning dream.” But like all dreams, this time of imagining would quickly corrupt into chaos.

Eventually I prompted him. “You took a fifth part of what you call the Daidalon. The others also took a fifth part?”

“Yes. The Daidalon. A man, brought to the Rein as a curiosity many generations before my birth. He had been captured on a southern island, in the southern ocean, by mercenary traders, men more used to dealing in gold-dust, weapons, and the skins of sheep, I was told. Daidalon was their name for him. He had been traded as a weapon in himself. My ancestors thought of him as a trickster. He was dragged between the citadels and made to perform.”

Durandond looked up at me. “This was before my time, long before my time. But some of what he created still hung in the great halls of our kingdoms. Carvings, masks, discs, and monstrous, tiny forms, attached to wings. Sometimes when a storm raged outside the hall, the winged statues would actually struggle to fly. This was not just the wind on the delicate frames, the butterfly wings. They truly seemed to struggle to escape the leather thongs that suspended them. They had life in them.”

“And this Daidalon?”

Durandond pointed to the casket in the corner of his mortuary house. “A fifth of the part of him was kept in there. The heart and lungs of the man. That’s what I was told. The heart and lungs of the man. Made out of gold, beaten thin, two layers with a code inside them. But they were taken soon after my death.”

Made out of gold.

I urged Durandond to recall everything he had been taught as a child about the Daidalon. He sighed. The spirit was weary. The house was becoming gloomy, earth closing in, the smell of dank suggesting that not everything was as pristine in this mortuary as perhaps it looked. Durandond was becoming agitated. He needed to reinhabit the corpse; to return to whatever island in the Realm of the Shadows of Heroes he rode with vigour. He was, after all, no more than one of the Dead, though he was not party to the vengeance that the Dead seemed to be wreaking on this land that he had claimed as his own.

Which was perhaps why he kept apart.

But this presence of memory was fading fast.

“When he died, in one of the citadels, he began to show what lay beneath. Flesh and bone, yes, but struts and tendons made of metal. And organs that were not blood-filled but metal-sheened. Bronze and silver and gold and copper; and there was amber in him; and hard stone that gleamed with colour when looked at in different ways, though it seemed at a glance to be as pure as ice. And other stones, shaped carefully, that bled rich colours, from scarlet to the blue of a summer sky; from twilight green to the dark purple that oozes from belladonna.

“The skin and flesh were just the mask. Some god, some forge of the gods, had filled the carcase of this man with moving parts.

“My ancestors cut him up and divided the parts. Five parts. Each had its own power: small gold discs from the eyes that opened a whole new world to those who knew how to look through them. His hands were bronze bones, but they could summon elemental forces that no Speaker could manage. The gold and silver plate that they found in his skull brought dreams and visions that have no meaning, but induced madness. In his tongue there was a golden comb that vibrated with sound, the sound of languages that no Speaker could comprehend. Some of the languages were in song form, so I’m told. When the comb sang—and it took only a touch of the metal to make it sing for a moon or more—the night sky changed.”

“How,” I asked him quietly, “do you know that the fifth part was stolen?”

“It happened during the twilight moment, shortly after I had died, when I still saw the world around me. I was making ready to ride to the river, to the Hostel of the Fine Red and Silver Horses, to select my steed for the other world. The mortuary house had been prepared at the end of a shaft, deep below, but I was still on the high platform, covered in my cloak and shield, in front of the doors to my hall. Speaker for the Land came furtively to where the grave gifts were being gathered. It was night. Though I was guarded by the High Woman and my surviving sons and their hounds, he must have entranced them. He opened the casket and removed the gold. He tied a cord to it and slung it round his neck. There was nothing I could do.”