Free The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex by Robert Holdstock Page B

what?”
    “No more than the same tricks. We’ve been here before. You know it. Nothing you say can hide the fact that you’re up to something.”
    “I confess that I’ve tricked you before. But not this time.”
    “I remember those same words. From before.”
    “I have changed my mind about many things, Merlin. I won’t say I’ve grown wise. I’m tired. Tired of summoning anger and aggression towards a man who once was brutal, and now is just as lost as I am. And no, I don’t mean you. I mean Jason. I had two sons, Merlin, two that I kept. I let many go before they had breathed their first air. I had to. They were too full of the man. But I kept two, and I loved them. A little dreamer, and a little bull-leaper; a quiet boy and an active boy. Each, in his own way, a delight to me—and of course to Jason. When I stole them from Jason, I killed him there and then, killed everything he had known, every hunger in his heart, every dream of peace in his mind. Now I realise I wounded myself in the same way. Thesokorus is alive and searching for us. I mean it truly, Merlin. The boy—the man—deserves to be with both his parents.”
    I said nothing. Medea was exhausted, every movement of face and limbs testifying to frailness and fragility. I was helpless to explore the extent to which this was an act; on this side of the river, my abilities in insight were cramped, closed down.
    I was suspicious of her, and it was certainly the case that she had lied to me in a very similar and persuasive way, the last time in this very land of the dead, on this side of the river, in a valley that echoed and appeared to be the image of our place of growing up. How badly I had fallen under her spell! But of course, it had happened before. With each new encounter with Medea, so I remembered a little more of those early centuries, when we had been close as friends, as lovers, and as seekers, prowling the Path around the world in awe and wonder at what we were discovering.
    It was an uncomfortable thought. I was bound to Medea because she, having squandered her enchantment, ageing rapidly, could remember so much more than I could. I, who had hoarded my magic and stayed young, was paying the cost by being denied my own long life.
    Only by ageing would I understand and experience the pain and pleasure of the encounters and experiences, the adventures and wild pursuits that had been my life for several thousands of years. Like a head-damaged veteran of some terrible war, able to remember only a few years, sometimes only a few days at a time, I was closed off from myself. In some remote part of the eastern world, where clay tablets were used to record the actions of kings and the deeds of heroes, the sentences of criminals and the wealth of brides, perhaps there was more being written about my life than I could dream in a hundred years. My life was clay. I remembered so little.
    Medea knew this, and there was a look about her, enticing and seductive, that told me she was aware of that knowledge.
    “Help me, Merlin. Will you help me?”
    “What exactly is it you want, Medea?”
    “To have Thesokorus reconciled with his father. To have reconciliation between Jason and me. Hard, I know. A hard thing to do. Which is why I can’t do it alone.”
    I watched her for a while. She was so difficult to read. I wished I could entice her across the river where she would need stronger defences to stop me searching her spirit.
    “Of the two proposals, which is the more important?”
    It was worth a try, but Medea could have seen that obvious question from the Moon itself. “Thesokorus to be reconciled with Jason,” she said. “But I will try with every sinew in my body to become part of the family again. But first: father and son.”
    “Where is Thesokorus now? The real man.”
    “I don’t know. Close. Not in Ghostland. But hiding. If you find him, you may tell him everything I’ve said.”
    After a moment, I agreed. Then I asked her to help me in