Free The Iron Grail by Robert Holdstock Page B

vulnerable.’
    ‘So a dead man can be killed again. Do you understand the rules of the situation, Merlin? Why can we see them one moment and not the next?’
    ‘I don’t know. I’m still working it out. Besides, I thought you believed the enemy were opportunists from another clan, claiming a deserted fortress for their own, and not the Dead at all?’
    He shrugged, not responding to the gentle criticism. ‘I can believe in both, I suppose, though renegades are easier to comprehend. But I remember that night very clearly, when Taurovinda fell. It was so confusing. It was so … strange.’
    I didn’t interrupt him. He seemed to need to talk about the night of his mother’s murder.
    ‘I remember being fetched from my foster home by Cunomaglos, my father’s foster brother and dearest friend. He told me to prepare to return to Taurovinda. My brother Urien was to come as well.
    ‘We were training at the time, practising running barefoot, and using slingshot to bring down geese as they fled the surface of a lake. It was summer and we had made friends in our foster home. I wasn’t happy to leave. But when Cunomaglos brought us home it was to find a farewell feast in preparation. Our sister Munda was too young to understand what was happening.
    ‘My mother and grandfather Ambaros made a great fuss of us. We were given horn-hilted knives, and new woollen cloaks, and made to parade up and down before the uthiin horsemen. We were called “the little guardians”. The whole town was singing. Urien and I made mischief. We killed one of my father’s pigs, I remember, and took its bowels and lungs to the sanctuary of Sequana, where we burned them, asking her in exchange to frustrate my father’s journey and send him home.
    ‘My father was furious when he found out. I hadn’t seen him for years and now he raged at my brother and myself. We had abused the protecting spirit of the kingdom; and we had broken one of his geisa . I didn’t understand the law of taboo on the king and his family at that time, even though two had been put on my own life when I was born. On Urien too. Urien died rather than break one of his.
    ‘We were banished for one night and one day to a small house by the tannery, where the air was foul. But our father came to us to say goodbye. He was still angry, but he told us that he was going in search of the shield of Diadara, polished bronze on a disc of oak and ash, in whose reflection could be seen the future. He knew where to find it, in a northern land. He would bring it home. Through Diadara’s shield he would see the answer to a question that had been concerning him greatly. It was to do with succession, and with the holding of the kingdom after his death. He had had a far-seeing dream, and had been disturbed. While he was away we were to treat Ambaros as our father, to behave ourselves and steal neither piglet nor goose, nor chase stray cattle—everything we’d been trained for!—but instead to train in weapons and simple poetry, and to obey one rule absolutely: that whatever Munda decided in a quarrel between the two of us—Urien and me—was to be the decision we would accept.
    ‘I wasn’t happy with that instruction, but Urien was killed before Munda could find a reason to rule us.
    ‘That was a bad night. My father had long since left on his quest. Cunomaglos, his favourite brother, was in charge of everything. But riders had arrived at the fort, weary men from the east. Ambaros was nervous. He made the children stay out of sight. That night there was a good feast, storytelling, and an exchange of news. But in the morning, Cunomaglos and most of my father’s knights left the walls, riding east, riding for fortune. Grandfather Ambaros rode after them, but he returned in a fury. We had been abandoned. Cunomaglos, my father’s friend, had abandoned us.
    ‘And what then? All I know is that we were attacked at night, by a host of men who charged through our gates and set fire to our