Read Online The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex by Robert Holdstock - Free Book Online

was asking me if I was “newly dead” or “another bloody ghost waiting for its flesh.”
    I replied that I was neither, but that a man was waiting for me inside the hostel. His question, though, suggested that traffic through this inn was two-way.
    They allowed me passage into the gloomy interior, and again I found myself in a maze of corridors, with small miserable rooms opening on either side. Distantly, the sounds were of chaos, the clamour of voices and the din of argument. I followed one of the guards towards the light. I led my horse, which tugged nervously as we walked through the narrow corridor towards the open garden at the heart of the hostel. Here, to my surprise, I found a sunlit square that belonged in Greek Land, not in Alba, a place of olive and pine trees, and small houses, whitened with lime, roofed with red clay tiles. The air buzzed and hummed with a different summer. The chaos was behind us. Groups of men and women sat in the shade, drowsily talking, some drinking, a few tending to fires. In the shade of an apple tree, his shield leaning against his knees as he sat, was a young man I recognised, older now by several years and very hard of look. His right eye had taken a slashing blow, and the hair above the scar was white. He was missing a finger of his left hand. His legs and arms were ridged with veins. His clothing was simple, a loose, patterned shirt, knee-length trousers, sandals. But behind him, as he sat ill at ease, were stacked his weapons.
    He was expecting me; that much was certain. The moment I entered the square he saw me, half smiled, then waited for me to tether my horse, and come and sit in the shade.
    And talking of “shades,” Orgetorix had hardly greeted me before he said, “Yes, you’re right. I’m only the shade of the man you knew. You, I’m sure, are Antiokus. You were present when I tried to kill my father. The event is like a dream to me. I see everything through a dark dream. That’s because the living man of whom I’m the shadow communicates to me. I feel his pain. I feel his scars. I feel how lost he is. I grow with him, and change with him, but I’m the shade. I call him my bone-blood-brother. I exist only as long as he is lost.”
    Orgetorix in spirit shape, it seemed, was as melancholy as the young warrior who had roamed the hills and valleys of Greek Land.
    I should perhaps write a few words about what had happened to Orgetorix. He was the eldest of Jason’s two sons by Medea, many centuries before, born after the quest for the Golden Fleece. Named Thesokorus, he was nicknamed “little bull-leaper.” His brother Kinos was nicknamed “little dreamer.” When Jason betrayed Medea for another woman, Medea—an enchantress of savage power—slaughtered her two sons in front of her lover. Jason was devastated, never recovered, and eventually died of grief because of the loss. In fact, Medea had used trickery and illusion to present only an apparent execution. The two boys were spirited away into Greek Land. And then—and this was the ingenious part—she spirited them away into Time itself: into the future; into the very time in which this tale is set. The boys were separated, but Medea created a “ghost brother” for each of them, though this cost her dearly in life and power. Eventually the ghosts went their own ways. Kinos died under tragic circumstances, but Thesokorus, now known as King of Killers, after he had fallen in with Celtic mercenaries prowling the lands around the river Daan, was found by his father. They fought in the shadow of the oracle at Dodona, in Greek Land, and Orgetorix rejected the older man, having horribly wounded him.
    And how had Jason himself returned to life so far in the future that he could meet his time-flung sons?
    Well, a conspiracy between old lovers saw to that: a ship (Argo, of course) and me. And it was when I helped resurrect the Greek hero from his resting place, below Argo’s decks, at the bottom of a Northland lake,