by John James
They stood about ten yards from me. They had no weapons at all. One of them, the oldest, I thought, came forward and said something. I could not understand a word. I said in German:
‘Drink … drink …’
One of them, a boy, brought forward a pot. There is nothing like bitter beer for quenching your thirst. I drained it.
The older man then said something in German, very thickly accented. At first I thought he was talking about the Old Father Mountain, and I said ‘Yes, Yes’ and pointed. He talked on, and I slowly began to follow. He was calling me Old Father – no, he was calling me Allfather. This was wrong. This was what they called the God in Germany. I said: ‘No, no, Photinus, I am Photinus,’ and the man said,
‘Yes, yes, Votan, Votan Allfather. Come, Allfather, come and eat.’
I was too ill to protest any further. I tried to step forward, but I could not move. Some of the men ran back to the edge of the wood, and returned with a litter made of boughs. They helped me on to it, and carried me away. One of the boys carried my spear erect before me. Another picked up my bag, turned it inside out, and under the horrified gaze of his seniors gobbled up the end of sausage left in it. Before the older men, crimson with rage and shame, could begin to scold, I said, ‘Eat, eat it all!’
Another man picked up my two water bottles and shook them. There was a swishing sound. One of them still had about a pint of water. Had I, in my delirium, always gone to the same bottle to drink, and always found it empty?
They carried me some miles along the river edge to where they lived in little huts of boughs. They were a wandering people with neither king nor cities nor any possessions, not even any iron, who lived on what they could gather and catch along the river and in the woods. For their clothes and pots, and even for corn, they traded the furs they caught through the winter.
‘We take them,’ said the headman, who said his name was Tawalz, ‘to the Asers, and they give us the good things of life.’
‘Who are the Asers?’ I asked him, for this was a name I had not heard before. But all Tawalz would say was, ‘We take you to Asers, you meet Asers, first you heal.’
In one of the huts, Tawalz and some old women cut and soaked away the shirt from my wound, and – and this shows how poor they were – one of the old women took my shirt away and carefully darned up the tears, and washed it and brought it back to me. First they cared for the scabby weals the chain had made on my chest, and the scratches from the branches and the insect bites. They brought ointment to smear on, but I would not let them use it till I was sure that it was not bear fat.
Over the great festering wound in my side they were more concerned. Tawalz said:
‘It is not deep but it will remain open till we can find the healing stone that is upon the sword and lay it upon the wound.’
‘It was no sword,’ I said. ‘It was a spear, and my own spear, that the lad carried into camp.’
So they brought the spear, and just like any civilised doctor Tawalz put ointment on the head and bound it up and vowed the hurt of the wound to the God, and then cleaned the wound itself and bandaged it.
I wanted to sleep, but the old women, all anxious, said through Tawalz that I must eat first. They brought me stewed meat in a bowl, and when I tasted it, it was something that I had not tasted for years, it was horse. I asked them why horse, and Tawalz said:
‘Allfather, it is a horse for you.’
They had caught a horse loose in the forest, and while you or I, if we found a stray horse, and there was no danger of being caught, would use it or sell it, they knew no better than to take it to the tree, which was all the temple that they had, and sacrifice it. But to my horror, it became clear that the horse was sacrificed to me, and now they expected me to eat it all. Have you ever tried to eat a whole horse? The old ladies were very insistent that I should. First I could eat it fresh, and then I would have it salt, and with the offal and the intestines they could make sausages, and they were busy cleaning the skin to make a blanket for my bed. I forget what they were going to do with the hooves.
I managed to get over to them the idea that if the sacrifice were to me, then I could do as I liked with it. So I would give a feast to the whole clan. And since it is no use eating flesh alone, I gave some of the silver pieces from the wallet for two of the young men to run twelve hours each way to the nearest German farm, where they had an arrangement, to buy corn, salt and beer. Then they let me sleep.
But before I slept I looked at my hair as it lay on the pillow, and I grew afraid. I asked for a mirror, and of course they had no such thing, but when they understood at last they brought me a bowl of water. When it was still I looked at my reflection in the water. My face was lined and haggard, as I expected. What I did not expect was this, that in those days on the tree, my hair and my beard had changed from black to white. From that day to this, I have been as you see me, a white-haired man, and for years I bore an old man’s head on a young man’s body. It is not at all a bad thing in many ways. It gives you an authority, a reputation which you would not otherwise possess, and old men and chieftains bow to you and call you Father, or even Allfather. White-haired Photinus I have been ever since, and it was as a white-haired man that I came to the Northern Sea and faced the Asers.
6
I slept for twenty-four hours, as far as I could guess. When I woke, they brought me my clothes, all washed and pressed with smooth stones, and they also brought me all the horse furniture. This was not only the rope harness and iron bit and a few iron fittings, but the blanket too, red and blue check, and my own kit-bag. So I went to their feast in all dignity in my best blue tunic, and I drank from my own silver cup, and I ate off my own silver plate. We ate the horse; forty of us left little of a horse, or of a couple of deer and a few dozen carp with it. There was enough beer for all the adults to drink their fill, and even for the children to taste. The women, as well as the men, sat round the fire to eat.
These people are used to eating but once a day, and that not every day. Their bread was the worst I tasted in the north, being over half acorn and birch pith mixed with the flour. They called themselves the Polyani, from their word for the river meadows in which they lived; and they were proudly distinct from the Rus, who spoke the same language and lived in the same way, but farther east on the wide plains of grass, next to the yellow men, or the Lesny, who lived in the forests between.
I tried to find out who or what they thought I was.
‘Joy led us to Allfather, joy told us he was here,’ said Tawalz, and I was never sure if I had understood him correctly. ‘We come to the tree, and we see Allfather chained there to hunger and to thirst. Yet there is water in his bottles, and there is food in his bag. We see the wolf dance to Allfather, and we see the bear come to feed Allfather and bring him honey. And at the end we see Allfather bend down for his magic and unlock his chain and step from the tree.’
‘How many days was I in the tree?’ I asked.
‘Oh, many days, many days,’ said Tawalz. ‘Many days – nine days.’ But later I realised that nine was an indefinite number to them, more than several and less than many. I was never sure how they regarded me, as the epiphany of a God or as a Holy Man fulfilling a vow. We talked of other things. I told them of cities. They listened, and then said:
‘Oh, yes, like Asgard.’
‘What is Asgard?’ I asked, but they had never been there, they only knew it was where the Asers, most of them, lived, and if it were not a city then it was recognisably like one. I talked about Egypt, and I told them of the elephant. They said, yes, they knew all about elephants, and they drew one in the sand to show that they knew exactly what I meant. They said that far to the north of them was a desert, but a desert of ice, not of sand, and this is reasonable, for the earth is perfect and symmetrical and there must be deserts of cold to balance the deserts of heat. In those deserts too, it seems, there live elephants, but they do not wander about the earth. There they burrow underground, seeking in the heart
of the earth the warmth they cannot find on the surface. When they come to the surface the light kills them at once, and so they are often found at the end of the winter, which is one long night, dead half-way out of their burrows in the ground. The Polyani and the Rus call them Mamunt.
The Polyani had no real Gods, only a few spirits of pools and woods and rivers, that were better bribed than worshipped. Where they felt the need, they borrowed the Gods of the richer people around, the Germans, or farther east, the Scyths, or in the south the Greeks. Tawalz said:
‘We knew you would come, Allfather, because long ago, in Grandfather’s Grandfather’s time, a man came talking about a God, who hung on a tree, and was wounded with a spear. He said this God would come to us alive. We do not know it is Allfather.’
I asked who this man was, but they could not tell me, except that he would not eat wild boar. At the end, they had been forced to do what he seemed, to the best of their understanding, to be asking them to do. They ate him and drank his blood. This had been a most repugnant thing for Tawalz’s ancestors, and only their excess of courtesy, and their desire to do whatever their guest requested, had brought them to do it. Besides, the tradition was that he tasted vile, and most of him had been decently burnt. They hoped that this minor waste did not offend me. This was the only thing they told me that I found it difficult to believe.
It took another ten days or so after the feast before my side was healed well enough to travel. I was very weak, and I spent the time sitting at the river bank fishing. There are no Votan-born among the Polyani. I watched Tawalz and his brother Olen build the raft on which they would take the winter’s catch of furs, bundled up by kind, down river to, they said, Outgard, wherever that might be, to sell, they said, to Loki, whoever he might be.
‘Is he an Aser?’ I asked, and they hummed and hawed, and were of two minds.
‘Is he an Amber King?’ I asked, and of that too they were uncertain. They only knew that he was the man who would sell them iron and cloth and salt for their furs. They had very little iron. There was but the one axe in the whole band, and that among people who lived on the forest edge. The raft they built well, of logs jointed and dowelled together, with a little shelter, for us to sleep in.
In the end we went off, Tawalz and Olen and I. There was little poling to do, the river carried us on, and we would stop for the night near the camps of other little bands of Polyani. I could not follow much that they said, but I knew that the tale of the white-haired man who starved on purpose wounded in a tree, attended by wolves and snakes, was travelling well ahead of us. The further we got, the greater the respect with which I was treated, and of course some of this consideration rubbed off on to Tawalz. Later it profited him.
7
One afternoon we came to Outgard. The river was wide and shallow, fordable for a man on foot. We grounded the raft on a sloping beach on the east side of the stream. The two Polyani humped the bales of furs out on to the bank. Tawalz led me up from the water’s edge to the beginning of a path paved with logs. At the end of the path well above the flood level was the long black line of a palisade. Olen came behind. I looked back at the bales of furs, abandoned.
‘Will they be safe?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ said Tawalz. ‘Look, here come porters. And up there, see? Vandals.’
There were three or four Germans lounging at the gates, different from the crowd of Polyani who passed us as they went to carry the furs in. The men at the gate were big men in all their gear, with spears, shields, and, something I had not seen before in the north, mail shirts. They wore helmets, second-hand legionary pattern, and each had a blue cloak. I found out later that this was a batch of cloth that Loki had bought as a speculation and been unable to sell, so he had paid his Vandals in cloth.
‘Loki keeps them here. Nobody steals furs. Loki sits within the gate.’
And he did. By all the rules, looking back, I should have hated Loki. In fact I rather liked him. I kept on liking him, really, right up to the end. He was young then, about thirty, and my build, fair hair and blue eyes, of course. He was the first German I ever met who was a dandy. He was wearing a red shirt and blue trousers, and yellow puttees matching his yellow cloak. He had soft leather knee boots and a soft leather belt, two palms wide, worked with a pattern of silver wire. Round his neck hung a great globe of Amber on a golden chain.
He carried no sword, and I tell you, he was clean. He wasn’t as clean, say, as an auxiliary trooper going on duty, but he was about as clean as the Polyani who spend all their time in and out of the water. The Polyani, though, never bothered to brush the mud off. Loki was a great deal cleaner than the Marcomen.
Loki was more like a Greek than any German I ever met. Not, of course, like one of those stupid dolts from Attica or the Peloponnese, but one of your bright lads from Rhodes or Alexandria. He was a merchant, and there he sat at the gate in a kind of booth, with his scales and his measures on the table. He spoke to Tawalz, as soon as we appeared, in the good old beat-’em-down-below-cost manner.
‘What do you think you’re doing here? Far too late, far too late.’
Tawalz was used to this. He said,
‘Furs. Fine furs, you never saw better. Such you never see again.’
‘It’s been a bad year, all down the river. Poor stuff, take it away.’
‘No, all good fur, first rate. It surprised us all. He brought it.’
‘Who’s ‘he’?’
I had been standing carefully withdrawn from the scene. With my old grey cloak pulled around me, I leaned on my spear and looked round, inside the palisade. It was a big enclosure, a hundred and fifty paces each way, and all as neat and tidy as a legionary fort. At my right, along one side, was a double row of barns and stables. At the other side were huts, obviously for people. In front of me, at the far side, was a great hall, twice as big as Haro’s, with a huddle of kitchens and larders behind. In the open space in front was a kind of market with stalls, and a great throng of men buying and selling.
But Outgard was not a city. In the first place, there were no women, and certainly no confused crowd of children who get under your feet in the smallest German village. Secondly, that palisade was no wall, but a frail fence, built to keep horses in, not thieves out. Like all the houses, the fence had a temporary look. Even the fresh coat of tar merely made it look newer, less rooted. But it was something to look at while I withdrew my gaze from Tawalz who was whispering to Loki about ‘Nine days … wolves … bear … honey.’ Then Loki called out,
‘Hey, you! Greybeard!’
I just didn’t hear him, till he used my name and asked, ‘Votan! Where do you come from, and where are you going?’
So I paid him for his calculated discourtesy with a long stare, and then:
‘If I fight with Mamunt below the earth, or ride the sky beyond the clouds, what is it to you where I go?’ And to illustrate, I swung my spear point in a great arc from ground to sky to ground, and everyone watched the shining arc, and nobody saw my hands at all.
Loki didn’t try to answer that, he just wanted time to think, now that the rumours he had heard had come true. So he returned,
‘No gossiping in business hours. Eat at my right hand tonight. There will be a hut for you, for you alone. Tawalz will show you.’
I turned away, but Loki hadn’t finished.
‘Hey, that spear. No one goes armed in Outgard. Leave it with the Vandals at the gate!’
There was no harm in leaving him the appearance of authority. I leaned over his table and stood the spear in the corner of his booth, behind his back.
‘Take care of it,’ I said. ‘A God gave it to me. The last man who touched it without leave is dead.’
Off I went toward the market. Nobody who tries to sound as businesslike as that should be allowed an inch of latitude. Five paces from the booth, I turned and called to Loki.
‘Keep your eyes on the stock, merchant! Catch!’ And I threw him the Amber globe.
8
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Now how was I to dine with the Lord of the Amber Road in my rags? I had only two or three silver coins, and my silver cup and plate which I would need. It was like taking a cake from a blind baby. Those poor Germans never knew what hit them.
The first group I came to were playing the old game with three cups and a pea. Now I will not ask you to believe that I invented it; but Autolycus did, and he was staying with the Family at the time. I watched a bit, and gossiped.
‘Come far?’
‘Thuringia. Back tomorrow, thank heaven.’
I lost a diplomatic denarius.
‘What did you bring up?’
‘Usual. Linen out, back in furs. Ferdi there, he came up in glass. Risky trade that, but profitable.’
‘Any Amber?’
‘Not here, you’ll have to go to Asgard for it. Loki buys it in from the forest dwellers, and the furs, but he only sells furs. The Amber all goes back to Asgard, and Njord only sells for silver.’
I put the rest of my own silver down. The dealer covered it and I took him. In another four passes I cleaned him out. Then I took the cups and won what the rest of the school had between them. Then I allowed everybody to win something back, and even let the dealer have enough to start again, so I went off letting them all think that the game had been fair.
The next pair were playing the finger game. You know, I shoot out fingers and you shout a number at the same time. If you are right, you win. This sounds like pure chance, but you watch people playing. They think they are shouting at random, but everyone has favourite numbers, and if you watch a man for a little you can always work out his system. Then you can take him as far as you like. I did. I didn’t clean them out, just took enough to do the job.
What they lost was mostly silver jewellery, and a very few coins. I went to one of the market stalls. There was a Vandal behind it. All the stalls belonged to Loki. There were Vandals behind them all. I got a grey tunic, grey trousers, good boots, a soft belt. Then something caught my fancy, and I bought a big grey hat with a floppy brim. I asked about a cloak as long as the one I had on, and I was promised delivery next morning. They were fairly popular, the man said, but not in grey, the colour wasn’t really worth stocking. No German will wear grey, or that dark blue the Vandals used, if he can possibly help it.