‘Thank you. I assure you I’m alive.’
Emereth smiled and nodded, glancing nervously at Bydavere. ‘Of course you are. Bydavere?’
Bydavere said, ‘This was not a life stolen, nor a death. It was a fate stolen. Arthur: in my briefly considered judgement, you have been denied for the moment, only for the moment, the life after death that will become your - how can I put it, how to put it? - your life-after-death heritage. I have always thought that there is something about you that will last. God knows what that something will turn out to be, but something. Don’t seek vengeance. Seek truth. And seek the person who - I suspect, from the smell . . . did I tell you about the smell?’
‘No,’ Arthur said darkly. ‘You did not tell me about the smell.’
‘It was a woman’s smell. I’m sure of it. I’m not without experience in that arena. Even as we put the body on the barge, I thought: this is not Arthur. Women smell different to Arthur.’
‘I sincerely hope so,’ Arthur agreed quietly.
‘We must find this woman. For whatever reason: she has claimed your death, and she needed to claim it. No revenge at first, therefore, just assistance. And then revenge. That’s what we do.’
‘It is indeed,’ said Arthur, and reached to take his friend’s hand in his. ‘It is indeed. But she went across the lake. How do we get across the lake?’
‘By the Good God, Arthur,’ Bydavere sighed. ‘Can’t you ever ask a question that has an easy answer?’
In the oracle room, in the Palace of Green Porcelain, Yssobel pulled back from the whispering voices she had heard. The oracle was a rock-carved well of crystal water, its rim carved in the shape of three hares on their sides, limbs entwined, heads turned up to the listener. The eerie sounds of the conversation between Arthur and Bydavere shifted between the open mouths of these three stone-shaped images of the fast-moving animals.
Yssobel recognised the voices, even though they were spoken almost with a faintness that she might have associated with an echo on the wind. She had heard the men speaking as they had nursed Arthur, and later, as they had cried and joked before sinking into the drunken slumber that had given her her opportunity.
To steal his death.
Narine had called loudly for Yssobel when she had whispered Arthur’s name into this particular museum exhibit and had begun to hear a conversation. The scene, again a reflection in this place of memory and reflections, had shimmered on the water.
‘He’s coming for you,’ Uzana said. ‘I’ve collected men like him before. They’re confused at first, thinking they’re still alive - when they’re not! But at the end they just get angry. Your man is the other way round. But yes, as certain as a crow feeds on dead meat, he’s coming for you.’
‘He’ll take the same barge,’ Narine agreed. ‘Those two men on the barge will tell him everything. They’re just transporters. This way, that way. They have everything to lose if they fail.’
‘This man Arthur, and his cohort; they’ll have a long chase,’ Odysseus said thoughtfully. ‘They will not know in which direction we’ve gone.’
Narine laughed, looking scornfully at the young Greek. ‘Don’t you see? Didn’t you hear? Bydavere is a hound! He will follow Yssobel’s scent like a hound!’ And she added, with a small nod of her head. ‘Oh yes. They’ll know where to follow.’
‘How can a man be a hound?’ Odysseus asked. ‘Are you saying he can beast-change his body? Man into dog?’
Narine laughed again, then put her arms around his shoulders, holding her mouth close to his ear, speaking softly, though the other two could hear.
‘A hound is cunning; a hound uses strategy; a hound uses all its senses and its sense; it disguises itself in the wood; it waits for its moment. It slaughters. And Bydavere,’ she added, ‘is very much like you. Or what you will become, from what I saw in your palace.’
She pulled away. Yssobel saw the spark in her Greek friend’s eyes, the hint of a smile; that hint of pride at having been compared favourably to a cunning animal.
‘In which case, I imagine we have more work to do,’ he said. ‘This great army is turning, coming back. But back to where?’
Uzana was knocking gently at the thin crystal cage that contained the mummified corpse of a woman, sitting on a three-legged stool, a snake around her ankles. ‘I don’t think we’re going to get much out of her.’
Narine consulted the three hares. The water shimmered, seemed for a moment to gleam with flashes of vision, but it revealed nothing. The Oracle of the Three Hares, as Yssobel decided to name it, clearly needed time to recover from the first effort.
On impulse, she lifted from her neck the silver clasp and finger ring that Jack had made for her. Avilion is what we make of it.
And on the small ring, crudely inscribed: Here to there. There to here.
She remembered what he’d said by the forge. How each of them would find a different world, and each return. Now she saw a different vision in the beating and shaping of the metal.
‘Legion is coming to Avilion,’ she said. ‘It’s coming here. But where is “here”? Where in Avilion?’
On an impulse, Yssobel threw the small ring into the air and let it fall onto the tiled floor, wondering if it would spin and roll to the appropriate oracle, an echo of a child’s game that she and Jack had played with a pebble and a ring of childish treasures. But the ring fell dead and still. She replaced it on her finger.
And then, as they walked back towards the entrance of the museum, Yssobel discovered the answer to her question. As she passed the wide, slowly moving picture of the men running across the field, she was surprised to see that it had changed. Now it showed a deeply wooded valley, with the tall towers and broad ivy-covered walls of a fortress, almost growing within the forest. And slowly rising into that scene were the shining armoured shapes of men and horses, visible among the trees.
Narine said, ‘That’s the Sylvan Fortress. The windows of the towers all look out towards different worlds.’
Yssobel knew that well enough. She had created the castle in the forest at the very heart of her paintings of Avilion as she imagined it. Once a beautiful castle, the land in which it stood had suddenly risen up and consumed it. Tree and stone had mated and become a single entity. She watched the slow movement of the army: tiny figures, but a multitude of them.
‘If that’s this army called Legion, then my mother is somewhere in the chaos.’
‘And to get there we need a boat,’ said Narine. ‘And there are boats in this place, if we can find them.’
They searched the galleries and soon Uzana’s call brought them to a vast chamber, where a huge, strange ship lay crumbling on its side, its deck rotting, the tatters of sails hanging from broken spars. It dwarfed all the other vessels, but there were hundreds of them, from longships and a galley with eyes painted on its prow that Odysseus recognised as a warship from his own land, to canoes and tiny coracles. Yssobel found a barge that seemed solid enough to take the four of them, and they hauled it slowly from the chamber, and pulled and pushed it to the entrance of the green palace. They rested before taking the boat across the beach, heaving it half into the water before gathering their belongings, weapons and supplies. They let the horses go, then launched the craft and hauled themselves aboard, taking up the oars.
The Sylvan Fortress
The crossing had not taken long. Soon high cliffs emerged from the sea mist and they rowed towards an obvious ravine, a narrow entrance. Now they rowed against the flow, and in heavy shadow as the rock rose sombre and sinister above them. But quite soon they emerged into the shallows and into the light.
Leaving the boat, they walked on. There was an eerie silence about this world, and even though birds flew and flocked, they seemed to make no sound.
Walking and resting, they made their way inwards and suddenly, startlingly, they were at the edge of a steep decline, and staring out over a thick green canopy of forest. There, distantly, were the towers and the walls of the deserted Sylvan Fortress.
Narine turned to Yssobel and smiled. ‘This is where we leave you.’ She looked at Odysseus. ‘Goodbye, you hound.’
‘Why are you leaving?’ Odysseus asked.
‘Because we smell the coming deaths, and we will have a different role than as your guides.’
Uzana embraced Yssobel, but said nothing. The two collectors, the two queens of the dead, turned and walked back the way they had come. Yssobel watched them for a while and then, quite suddenly, they seemed to rise into the air, the brightness of their clothing now turned black.
It was a hard descent to the wide valley. There were human shapes in the trees, some male, some female, all slender and very tall. All forests were inhabited by such beings. Odysseus referred to them as dryads. Yssobel knew them as trunklings, her father’s word for them when he occasionally encountered them.
Soon, the massive wall of the fortress emerged from the screen of foliage. The towers were astonishingly high, each with four windows. And indeed, as the painting had shown, where the fortress joined the earth the forest had joined the fortress, wood into stone. The foundations were massive roots, four man-lengths across. The dryads that lay within the bark were giants, naked and gnarled, eyes closed as they slept, though as Yssobel crept past them, sometimes forced to walk over them, eyes would open and the head would emerge slightly to see who or what was intruding on its slumber.
The gateway to the courtyard was an oval slash, like a deep wound in bark. Faces were carved around the slit, but they were ugly, some skull-like, some clearly daurog, the summer form of what Steven called the green man, some intensely un-human.
Yssobel had brought no defences against the daurog, should they appear, but she could make them easily enough in this place.
‘We’re here too soon,’ Odysseus observed unnecessarily. ‘Which encourages me to ask the question: how do we know they’re coming? Perhaps they’ve already been. Perhaps they will be here a long time from now.’
‘They’re coming,’ Yssobel said quietly, looking up and round at the massive structure. ‘I’m the focus. I’m the crossing place. Narine and Uzana called themselves Collectors. I knew the moment I saw my mother in the shield that I’m a Caller.’
Odysseus shrugged, half in agreement. Yssobel smiled at him. ‘While we wait, I’m going to see what can be seen.’
She climbed a tower. She was exhausted by the time she reached the first of the four windows. But when she looked out she saw a view that took the rest of her breath away, a stunning landscape of mountains, rising sheer, snow-capped, with beautiful, ornate buildings covering their faces, clinging to the rock, delicately shaped elegance against the harsh, rugged stone. She stared at it for a long time, letting her red side absorb its power and majesty.
From the second window she saw a sight that shocked and startled her. A woman was being transformed into a tree, her mouth open in a silent scream as branches grew from her, and her body grew within the forest around. She aged as rapidly as a meteor passes across the sky, then broke and fell. Snow was suddenly coating the land, and a man with a stone axe cut a chunk of the fallen tree and carved it, forcing it into the ground beside his crude leather tent.
Yssobel was disturbed by the sight, with the violent way in which the woman had been transformed. It all suggested a time very much in the past. It had nothing to do with her own dreams.
She moved to the third window.
She was looking out over a bleak land, at the edge of a bleak and cold sea. A great hall had been built there, with smaller buildings around it. The hall was magnificently decorated and vibrantly painted along its walls. Shields hung from the eaves and hundreds of swifts flew between them as if in a game.
From the fourth window she saw Amurngoth, many of them. They were walking in their ungainly way through the underworld, along a passageway illuminated by the torches they carried. As they passed her point of view, so she saw Jack, holding the hand of the boy she had seen earlier.
She called to him, but this time he didn’t hear. Perhaps he was Jack for the moment, with his Haunter side subdued.
As he passed she blew him a kiss, then returned to where Odysseus was waiting, seated on the steps that led up to the main entrance of the Sylvan Fortress.
‘Did you see anything?’
‘Nothing I could understand - except that I saw my brother.’
Odysseus nodded. ‘That’s twice, then. Is he close?’
‘I don’t know. Space shifts, and time shifts. He looked a lot older and more beaten than when I last saw him. I think he’s been on a journey.’
Legion was culled from all of time, selected from armies across the world. It was an army of the dead, formed in antiquity to service those who could summon it. The summoning usually came from a king’s request at an oracle, or from the horn call, or from the shaman or druid who was confined within a besieged fortress.
Legion had been moving backwards in time, and towards the land of the Gauls, to a place called Alesia, summoned to help the men and women held there under siege by an army from Rome.
They had answered the call and were close to their task - to take the Roman army from behind - when Christian heard the whispered voice that frightened him.
And turned the army round.
Ghostlike, they moved through earth, but they made a noise, a din, a racket, of dogs and cattle, and the squeaking of un-oiled wheels; and songs, a cacophony of sound as the marching songs of so many worlds combined in harsh dissonance.
Christian was at the army’s head, on horseback, leading the way. He was following a whisper trail, the whisper of the woman who had called to him.
As they covered earth, so they rose in time.
Disorientation suddenly occurred. The land ahead of the army stretched and twisted, almost seeming to part. Beyond them lay a star-studded darkness, as if they’d reached the edge of a cliff and were looking straight ahead at the night sky. Several of his commanders were edgy, implying that they had come the wrong way.