The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (48 page)

Were they aware of me, standing just a few paces away? It seemed they were wrapped in their own world.

For a few moments I couldn’t tell whether they were about to strike at each other. Certainly Thesokorus was still as tense as a cat about to spring.

Then slowly both men straightened. I glanced round to see Daidalos watching from the top of the slope. Light glinted on him as he turned quickly away, a disappointed man.

Jason unbuckled his sword belt and slung it over his shoulder. His son did the same. Both men nodded to each other, each without smiling. Then they went to the water’s edge, crouching down, and after a moment sitting down, side by side, staring into the distance in silence.

I left them alone.

*   *   *

With a roar like thunder, the land again transformed, but not back to that half-seen vision of Crete; this was the eastern edge of Urtha’s realm, and Nantosuelta flowed violently past, curling round this bulge of land from south to north. The army from Ghostland was spread out in the forest, restless spirits on restless horses, waiting for the way to cross to the realm of the Coritoni, where only the Unborn had been allowed to travel. It was dusk here. Fires burned on the hillside across from where I stood. A grim hostel rose before me, the rear door a narrow wedge-shaped space framed by massive lengths of round oak. The carving of an elk’s head glared from below the eaves, spade-shaped antlers stretching five men’s lengths in each direction; the muzzle of the beast was not elk: it was snarling wolf.

Beyond it, moored, was my Argo, in the last true form she had taken: part Greek Land, part Northland, fine oak and hard spruce lashed together, fit for high Ocean as we had discovered.

Daidalos had clearly used his garnered influence to ready his army for the crossing, getting them to hammer on shields, shouting out their war cries from whatever age they had come, and hurling a storm of sling-shot onto the opposite banks; I doubted their iron arrows could cross the water.

The fear was: if they couldn’t cross either, they would turn back and finish the pillaging of Urtha’s land that they had begun in their dash to go east.

“Daidalos!” I shouted then. “Daidalos!”

There was no reply from around me, so I entered the hostel. It was a massive space, almost as dark as night, polished metal shields hanging on wickerwork partitions, reflecting the dim light that crept through the eaves, and the shadowy movement of those who moved about the hall.

“Daidalos!”

A shield was struck by iron, then a second, and the hall rang with the sound. As it faded, I sensed the presence of the man.

“Who are you?” he asked from his hiding place.

“I’m the boy who built Argo. I built the first little boat. When you fitted her out, in your island harbour where you had your Shaping Chambers, you would have experienced the Spirit of the Ship. All her captains have their echoes there, and so I would have been there.”

But why did I know him?

Daidalos prowled this gloomy hostel. Sometimes a silvered shield caught the gleam of bronze, sometimes the pale reflection of his face.

He was silent for a long time. Then he said, as if he had heard my question, “You put a small image on that boat. The image of a man, the receptacle of your own captaincy. You built a boat and you built a sailor.”

I
hadn’t
remembered. But it came back to me now. Of course! The little figure, what the Greeklanders called
kolossoi.
A life in wood or metal. My small figure had been roughly hewn from the fallen branch of an oak, whittled to perfection (or so I’d thought, being only a few years old at the time), polished with oil, painted vibrantly, hidden after that, in a small secret compartment in the back of the crude, simple vessel.

Now I understood. It was as if insight into that other world “where charm rules rather than learned knowledge” was flooding me with understanding.

“I made you,” I whispered, still struggling to understand the process by which that tiny figure had matured into the man and then this creature.

“Every time she was rebuilt, I grew stronger,” he said, as if again sensing my question. “I stayed with Argo until I was strong enough to leave, to make my way in the new world. I found an island, perfect for my dreams, perfect to develop and refine my skills. And later, when I was exploring the Middle Realm and fighting unnatural forces, Argo came back and I made her even stronger. Only to have her
pirated
by the man who should be dead by now, as dead as the woman who just departed. But that’s now a task for another time.”

“You helped build Argo. Do you believe she wants such vengeance?”

“I have no love for that ship. She betrayed me.”

“And grieved about it.”

“By aiding my abduction, she helped kill my children. Only Raptor survived. He was already beyond the boundary of sky. But Argo has been helpful since then. She is trying to make amends.”

I said nothing in response to that. I couldn’t read the meaning. And Daidalos, this reborn man, was still challenging me, perhaps because of his anger at my coarse and primitive assault upon him.

“When I find the other part of this—” He raised half of the gold lunula amulet. Munda’s half; I could see it clearly reflected in a shield, Daidalos’s shadow looming behind it. “—I shall cross and open the way for the army. I will take an army with me across the world and back to my mountains. With their help, I’ll destroy the Woman of Wild Creatures who made my life so hard.”

“And everything in your path.”

“It won’t be that wide a path.”

“You are rotten to the bone with vengeance.”

“On the contrary. I am bright with new creation. I’m missing only the fifth part. Four were enough to let me cross the first shore of the river. But I could only exercise a slight influence farther east. I made oak idols out of two hundred warriors; I summoned the Oldest Animals. I even stole the spirit of a man, a slave from the south, to bring back newly fallen discs from the island, when I heard the whisper from Argo that she would be voyaging there—”

Talienze!
So that had been his function.… Possessed by Shaper without his awareness.

“—I knew, then, that I had the same range of strengths, but only in a very small measure.”

“He would not have been able to bring back new discs. Your stolen spirit, Talienze. You know that in your heart—or in the space where your heart should be. You know the fact.”

There was silence again. “Raptor is still in the Middle Realm.”

“There’s no Middle Realm. It exists only because you desire it to. You created it just as you created the discs, flying down to your mountainside, with their gibberish and those facts among the markings that you longed to know and have confirmed.”

Something struck one of the shields, sending it crashing to the floor and spinning even as the striking object itself spun around it. A second flying disc passed so close to me that I had to bend with a swiftness that my body hated. I was feeling old. This one also struck a shield, fell at my feet and I picked it up. It was hot and inscribed with patterns and symbols.

I could feel Shaper’s confusion, as tangible as sweat.

“You see?” he said uncertainly. “Even here the boy can reach me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the origin of those discs was not from me.”

“No. It was from me.”

It was not an easy charm, not so easy as animal possession, because it involved metal. But it could be done, and Daidalos had been doing it for years—years in the past, that is. That was a strong talent.

“The mistake you made,” I said to him quietly, “was not that you strove too hard for the impossible, but that you failed to realise that you were born too soon.

“When you were desperate to explore a place that may or may not exist, and sent your sons and daughters to their deaths, you betrayed your own mind. You started to draw on the unnatural. The unnatural exists, but it exists to keep the natural under control. The moment you sent Raptor to your fabled Middle Realm, you were lost. Only the unnatural could have got him there. You betrayed your intellect.

“You forgot, or you denied, that you were a man born too soon to see his dreams come true.”

“All of us can face that particular reality.”

“I agree.”

“Some of us fight against it.”

“To what end?”

“The triumph that comes with glimpsing the unknown.”

“A life, the lives of all you love, are worth a glimpse?”

“You tell me. You’re the man who walks with all of Time as his lover, hanging on to her every word, soothing her and stroking her. A boat gently drifting. Argo was your cradle and your shroud. I went beyond the boundaries!”

“You failed.”

“I tried! I sent my life to the boundaries. Two beautiful sons, three beautiful daughters ready to follow them. I sacrificed life for understanding. Isn’t that the whole reason that we are given the power of imagination?”

“Imagination is to be used to envision. You used it to create false understanding. You dreamed beyond the boundaries. Many of us do. Nothing wrong with that. How much we’d like to achieve an understanding of the incomprehensible. We have to accept that all we can put in place is a small part of future time, a small addition, a little help for the time when you don’t have to stitch wings into sons to make them fly.

“You shaped your own world of dreams for yourself, Daidalos. You are an
adept
at shaping, there’s no denying it.”

“You shaped me first. Yours was the life spark.”

“You used it well. Until Crete.”

“I’ve used it again to bring this river back to her ancient bed.”

“But she won’t let you cross over.”

“She will. Just as soon as I’ve found the other half of this.” Again, the flash of gold. “Argo has told me that it lies close to the other side of the river, where the king’s son dropped it.”

Now he showed himself again, a shadow, passing swiftly to the riverside door of the hostel. I followed him, but found he had vanished again, though I could sense his watching, eager presence.

And something was happening to Nantosuelta.

Between hostel and farther bank, the river was slowing! What had been a raging flow, scouring at the banks and the overhanging foliage, was now calming in the rising moonlight. And as the flow ebbed, so she gradually exposed the gentle slopes that led to the stone-strewn bed itself.

How the army thundered! They surged forward, leading horses. Shield-din and voice-din sounded furious and rhythmic in the fresh night air, the blood-roar of gathering courage. Torches made a wall of fire on our side. Torches made a stream of retreat from the other.

The bronze hounds bayed.
Talosoi
moved down the very edge of the water, dropping to their familiar crouch and watching and waiting.

Argo had slipped her moorings, slipped away, prow towards us. There was a gleam in the water below her, a sun sparkle in the pale moon. A figure slithered across her side, eel-like, small and slight, dived down, surfaced, holding the lunula. The figure came aboard again lithely and Argo returned.

The din continued. The rain of stones continued. Slingshot was returned from the scant forces of Vortingoros’s defensive army, but from behind us, no sign of Urtha or Pendragon, or the others.

Now Daidalos appeared, a slinking form in his greying rags of clothing. He went down to the mooring place. The
talosoi
, those that I could see, some ten among forty, turned to watch him. The figure slipped out of Argo like an eel from its mud shelter, lithe, swift, and sure, and as she passed Daidalos, she tossed the golden fragment towards him; he caught it; Munda ran from him, ran to me, threw herself into my arms.

“I
had
to do it. Trust me!”

Daidalos held high his “heart and breath,” then looped a cord through each piece and slung them round his neck.

Nantosuelta was now a low, slow-flowing river, through which the hordes of the Dead began to wade at chest height, leading horse, dragging chariot, each formation preceded by a squad of spearmen, lightly armed and clothed, shields held before them to repel the stone shot.

The river was clogged with men and animals.

And then the river surged!

For the second time that I had witnessed, a bole of water, a great wave of destruction, poured along the course, flowing powerfully up the confining hills, throwing boulders and trees before it, coming towards us at such pace, faster than Conan’s chariot, faster than young dogs chasing a flight of game birds, it was on us in a moment. It had brought with it the great trees of another forest. Their broken trunks crushed the hostels, the
talosoi
, scoured the bank of the river itself. Both sides suffered. The army of the Dead was swept away still howling, away to the north. Even as ranks of them arrived to see the chaos, they seemed incapable of turning back. They lunged forward, plunged, sank, drowned, and screamed their way back to a new darkness.

I had a feeling that the river would later turn in its flow and take them west, to where they belonged, rather than to the sea.

I cowered in the Hostel of Shields, Munda wrapped in my arms, as if I could have protected her from any of the danger at that moment. Daidalos stood in stunned astonishment at the river-entrance, watching the destruction of his final dream.

Argo stayed at berth, protected by some older charm, her painted eyes staring at her two once-captains. She rose on the surge, but was not dislodged by it, even when a massive tree, torn from four hundred years of life, branch-whipped the area, a lost life flailing in anger as it was borne away from its rooting place.

Only the Hostel of Shields and its inhabitants, and Argo, survived the deluge. On our side, that is. As fast as it had come it had ceased, and the river calmed again. Munda and I stood up and stared towards where the storm had raged. The backs and skulls and raised arms of the
talosoi
were, for me, a grim reminder of the approach, so long ago, to Ak’Gnossos on Crete.

Daidalos was standing, staring down at the broken lunula around his neck. He had imagined that this last of the five parts he had fashioned, through amazing skill and great insight, to protect his body through time, would have been the way to open the passage home, for himself and his army of forlorn mercenaries, the unquiet inhabitants of the world where there should only have been tranquillity and pleasure.