Celtika by Robert Holdstock Page A

skilful youth, marked with my name and added to the wood pile ready to be loaded, I ascended the ramp to inspect the ship itself. And quickly realised that this was no ordinary vessel. There was nothing that I could identify, and I was not prepared to open my soul to a deeper understanding, but below the deck, somewhere to the fore, there was an older heart than the massive oak beam that had been shaped to form her keel.
    I ducked down into the bilges, started to move forward, and was warned away! I could think of it in no other terms than that. Not a voice, not a vision, just the most intense feeling that I was entering a place that was not just private or out of bounds, but was forbidden.
    Mystified, thrilled, I decided to go back on to land, intending to find Argos, the shipwright who had constructed this galley, and ask him about his creation. But as if she sensed my curiosity, and had been made angry by my presence, Argo began to strain at the rope tethers. Her hull groaned, the wooden tenons holding her fast above the slipway began to pull from the hard earth, the ropes singing with the strain. The ship twisted and slid about on the mud ramp, like a throat-cut pig thrashing in its own blood. I clutched the housing for the mast with all my strength, expecting at any moment to be pitched over the side. Argo bucked and protested below my feet.
    Launch me, she seemed to be saying. Test me in the water. Hurry!
    The air was filled with a sound like Furies screaming.
    Jason grabbed a double-bladed axe from one of his colleagues, called to Heracles to do the same, stepped swiftly forward and shouted: ‘The rest of you, into the water. You! Cloud navigator! Throw down the scaling nets!’
    As the argonauts stripped to the skin and raced for the sea, Heracles and Jason each hacked at the retaining ropes, cutting through in unison.
    Released, Argo streaked down the ramp, stern-first into the harbour water, plunging deep below the surface, almost drowning me. When she came up she shuddered, an animal refreshing itself after a cold swim. I flung down the coiled net ladders, two to a side, then went to the prow, staring down at the shouting men who swam vigorously towards us. Who they were, where they had come from, what skills they possessed, all of this was alien to me at this time, but they circled Argo, laughing, as if capturing a bull, and though the ship turned under her own control, facing each cheering hero in turn, she stayed in the circle, calmed herself, then allowed the men to haul themselves aboard.
    Heracles followed them, dragging a dozen oars through the harbour waters, lifting them two at a time to the waiting hands of the crew. Six oars each side—she would be rowed by twenty on the open sea—we took the galley gently back to the harbour side, where we tethered her again and started to load supplies.
    ‘What a ship!’ a delighted and muddy Jason cried as he came aboard by jumping from the quay. ‘With vigour like this in her keel, we’ll make the haven at Colchis in one night’s dream! Never mind three months! The fleece is closer than we think.’
    Events were to prove otherwise, of course, as I have written elsewhere.
    *   *   *
    Argo was not one ship, but many, and a fragment of each, even the oldest, was locked in the prow, the ship’s heart, hidden in the slender double hull. Hera had been only the latest in a long line of guardians of this Otherworldly vessel. To crouch in her prow was to feel the flow of rivers and seas that had persisted through time, to smell old wood, old leather, old ropes, shaped and stretched into vessels that had drifted, sailed, rowed and ploughed beyond the known worlds of their builders.
    So much life in one cold hulk.
    Now, lifetimes later, the skin was ripped from the rotting remnant of that proud and vigorous ship. In the frost-sheened, rosy dawn, and under Jason’s supervision, Lemanku tore away the planks of the hull to expose part of the hidden heart of Argo. I