Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  About that time, Donar made me a helmet. He remembered the great parade helmets he had seen south of the Danube – Aristarchos had a splendid one – and he made me the nearest he could to that. It was a cap of iron with a ridge from nose to nape. The neck piece came down to protect my spine, and side guard for my cheeks. It left plenty of room inside to pile my hair for padding, as was the custom. You could always tell a Vandal by his topknot in those days.

  Then he made me a face piece, with a nose and moustaches. The eyebrows he worked with boars set with garnets, and the ends of the eyebrows were the boar’s head. Bragi carved shallow on wood the scenes of my own real life, Apollo and Artemis, the death of Grude and the treaty with the kings, and he beat out plates of bronze, thin as vellum and moulded them over the carved wood, and fitted them to the helmet, and gilded them.

  This he did in the smithy next to the black sheds where a hundred now watched the Honeydew. Snake swords we sold, the swords that would cut two bodies at one stroke. Honeydew we never sold. We gave it away.

  Yes, we gave it away, free. The Germans would give their eyes for a smell of the stuff, so we let them have it free, as a gift, after a sale had gone through. In hope of a cup, a sip of Honeydew, a man would cut short his bargaining, bring down his price, forget to weigh his silver, measure the cloth, look for moth holes in the furs. We gave the liquor away, it was more profitable. But no Aser ever gave something for nothing.

  Pictland

  1

  It was boring in Asgard that Spring. Freda was pregnant again, and I never got a chance to play with Scyld, Donar always had him. So when Cutha Cuthson came by and said I ought to go with him to the Saxons for some sea fishing, I went.

  ‘It’s not only the sea fishing,’ he told me one evening on the way. ‘It’s my daughter.’

  ‘The Queen?’

  ‘The Queen. Mad on horses she is, and she leads the women in the dance, like her mother did after the old queen, Edwin’s first wife, died. She wants Sleipnir for her mares, wants to improve the blood.’

  I learnt more about the Saxons as we went on.

  ‘Edwin’s had bad luck. First of all there was his wife died giving birth to Harold, and he didn’t take another. Well that’s all right, there was always, let us say, the possibility of fertility that only a fertile king can give to a nation. But then Harold was going north to marry Gambara, and the Black Danes caught him in the Strait.

  ‘Then we were able to persuade Edwin to get married again, and he married Edith, reasonable, I’m the richest Saxon there is, not to speak of being Edwin’s cousin. But that was three years ago, and there’s no sign of any heir. Some people are beginning to grumble. In the old days, of course, there would have been no hesitation, he’d have been ploughed in to make the barley grow the first barren spring, but now – well, we know there’s a lot more to being a king besides the barley. There’s the herring shoals to foretell, and the whales to call to shore, and treaties to make with the Friesians, and the price of salt to fix … and besides, Edith won’t have it, and if she won’t have it the women won’t have it.’

  The first few days at Edwin’s hall on the edge of the salt beaches were taken up in games. Or at least in one game, the Head Game. There were two villages involved. They took a Batavian that had been shipwrecked, and that they had kept in a cage for the purpose, and someone cut off his head. The King threw the head up in the air, and the two villages fought for it. There were no weapons used, not even sticks, but three men died, two who burst when they were running, and one who got sat on by a couple of hundred men when he had the head in his hands. I had a busy week after that looking at sprains and bruises. The village that took the head within their own gates kept it and put it up on a stake and were proud of it.

  This game lasted for three days. The two villages were unequally matched, which was why it took so short a time to finish.

  Each night in hall we talked, and Edith sat with us at high table. I must say she was very taken up with her horses. She had grown up with horses – Cutha was the chief horse master of the Saxons – and she kept on bringing the conversation back to them, till at last I said to her,

  ‘You shall have Sleipnir for your mares, tomorrow.’

  It was two days later that we went, riding alone, the two of us, with a gelding led behind for my return. The mares were, of course, in the Grove where they worship the Mother.

  When we came to the fence of living thorns that surround the Grove, we dismounted. I wondered already that she should take a stallion into such a place. We unsaddled Sleipnir outside, and turned him loose to run with the mares. Then to my surprise and horror Edith took my arm and led me toward the gate in the fence. I stood still.

  ‘Come!’ she cried. ‘What are you afraid of? Little bears? I tell you, there is no woman here but me.’

  ‘Except the Mother.’

  ‘The Mother? I suppose you think there is no Mother, or that I am the Mother? I tell you, Votan, the Mother sleeps, and she shall sleep here till a man wakes her – a man, Votan, not a god, or a half-god, or an Aser.’

  ‘The guilt is on you,’ I told her, ‘for you, that profane this place, are a queen.’

  ‘A queen?’ She looked at Sleipnir galloping toward the white mares. ‘What is a queen? I am not a queen. I am only Cutha Cuthson’s daughter. I’ve never been anything else. Married to Edwin I may be, but a queen, never.’

  ‘But if you are the king’s wife, then you are queen.’

  ‘What is a king, then? A king is the luck of his people. It is the king who calls the fish to the shallows, or the ships to wreck. The king is the luck of his people. It is the king who charms away scabs and brings rain and makes the corn to grow. A fertile king makes fertile all the nation. And if he is not fertile?’

  Ploughed in to make the grass grow, I thought. She read my mind.

  ‘Would you have that happen to Edwin? Would you have it happen to the Saxons? Without him the whole nation would split up, some to be Danes and some Friesians and some Lombards. Or worse, dissolve into a thousand leaderless families like the Vandals, and serve foreigners for a crust of bread.’

  We watched Sleipnir among the mares. She spoke again, bitterly. She was nineteen; she was Cutha Cuthson’s daughter. She had grown up in a mist of riches. No bog woman, she had heard all the tales of the merchants, all the gossip of the trade roads, all the songs of the bards. She had led the women in the dance before the Mother, as her mother had done when there was no queen. She was bitter.

  ‘What then, is a queen? She is the living proof of the king’s luck. Her fertility shows forth his power. How can he crop the fields if he cannot crop her?’

  She took my elbow. She sensed my reluctance, my fear.

  ‘What’s the matter, Votan? Do you think we will cut you in pieces, you who hung on the tree? Last night I burnt the blade bone and I watched the fat on the pot, and I know you will see lands the Riders never knew. I saw your life, Votan, and it will be long.’

  We came to the cart, the Mother’s cart. It was high built on man-high wheels of foot-thick elm. The frame was of ash, and the panels of lime, carved and painted with the rites of the Mother. The roof was pointed, and thatched, with barley straw. There was a door in the end and steps to it.

  Outside the thorn fence I had left my spear and my knife, the only iron things I had. Here before the cart I laid aside my bronze cloak fastener and my gold armlet. The foot of the steps must serve for the threshold, and there I did what else was necessary. Edith had chosen as wisely as she knew, a stranger, a wandering man without father and without a nation, yet a man of wealth and power, known to be potent, his wife with child again. Now by what I did at the steps she knew that I was no stranger to the Mother.

  We paid our duties to the Mother. She was here carved, roughly, no not even carved, chopped with an adze out of the ash whose shape She still kept. Before Her was Her bed, down mattress and down quilt, covered with sheets of linen.

  Later I asked Edith,
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br />   ‘Why a cart? Why, here, a cart?’

  ‘Votan! That you should ask.’ She laughed. All the tenseness and bitterness was gone. She stood naked and went to the door, and took from hands unseen cups, and a jug of barley beer, and barley bread, still warm, and deer meat, smoking hot.

  ‘Long, long ago, the Women tilled the earth and worshipped the Mother. The horse gave us no more than the cow, meat and hide and hair. Then the Mother lived, as we did, in houses, or caves, and, in the heat, in groves and woods.

  ‘The Riders came out of the east. They worshipped only the cruel sky that sends snow and sun to torment us. They swung their great iron swords from their high, high horses, and they took the poor Mother from her groves, and shut her in a cart to travel the roads of the world for ever.’

  ‘So now it is the Mother, and not the king who makes the corn to grow?’

  She giggled.

  ‘So they say, so they say. What do the men know of what we do or whom we honour? Yet, the days of the kings who are kings because they make the crops are ending. Soon they will give way to kings who are kings because they are born of the Gods themselves.

  ‘I tell you, Votan, from this day on, there is no man in all the Saxon tribes who will move to bring down Edwin. No woman will let her man depose Edith’s husband. Yet the men will never know why the women are so much against civil war, when there have been other times … Votan, you came when the Mother called.’

  Late in the afternoon we went down the steps. I put on my bronze buckled shoes and someone had waxed them. I picked up my bronze fastened cloak, and someone had wiped the mud from it, and ironed it. I left the gold armband where it lay. We walked to the gap in the hedge, and I saw it was a hedge of thorned roses, and the buds that had been when we entered were now full flowers.

  2

  Eventually, I got my day of sea fishing. I went down to the jetty in the grey and chilly dawn and looked at the boat. It was quite big, about twenty paces long, clinker built, with overlapping planks, not nailed or dowelled together, but sewn, rib to keel and plank to rib with juniper withies. She was undecked and there was a rickety tabernacle for a mast, but no mast or sail in the boat. I asked Edward, the owner, if he were going to take them. He looked at the grey sky and spat.

  ‘Good fishing day, and it’ll be dead calm. No use taking mast or sail. You know the great rules up here for foretelling the weather?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not up here.’

  ‘Well, the first is this. The best forecast for tomorrow’s weather is a description of today’s, whatever that may be. The second is this: any change will be for the worse for your purpose, whatever that may be., Stands to reason, any change will mean an offshore wind, to make us row back against it, and what use will a sail be then? Unless, that is, you have any other ideas.’

  It is sometimes embarrassing to be a manifestation, however imperfect, of a weather god. I declined to interfere, and we got in.

  This was the only time I went anywhere without Gungnir. I left it leaning behind Edwin’s high table. I had good clothes on, too good to go fishing in Edith had said, with a gold chain and a couple of rings and a big morse of gold and garnets to fasten my grey cloak. I had no sword of any kind, only my knife.

  There were twelve Saxons in the boat when we pushed off. There was the usual jumble of gear and fishing lines in the bottom of the boat, looking in complete confusion the way it always does at sea, till the time comes to do anything, and then you find how carefully it was all stowed. Ten men rowed, with light chopping strokes. The oldest man, Ethelbert, leaned over the bow and took us out over the shallows and the sandbanks to where we could expect fish.

  I sat in the stern with Edward, who had the steering oar, of course, and we talked about the sea. After a while he grasped that I had handled ships before, though quite different ships in another sea, and he let me handle her for a bit. You couldn’t tell in that flat calm, but the whole boat felt too limber by half. All the time I was in her, I was expecting those withies to wear through, all together, all at once, and leave us floundering in the water.

  Now just when Ethelred had picked up the anchor, which was a courtesy term for a big stone with a rope tied to it, the wind came. It came just as when you tilt the jug and the liquid comes rushing out of it all at once. One moment there was no wind at all, just a flat calm; the next moment it was blowing from hard astern, just a little off the sirocco, south of south-east. It was howling and blowing, and we were going up and down enormous waves. I had never seen or heard anything like it, and neither had the Saxons. Edward and I laid on the steering oar.

  ‘What about getting her head round?’ I shouted. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being pooped?’

  ‘No,’ he bawled back. ‘Pooped we may be this way, but if I come round we’ll be swamped for sure broadside on.’

  ‘Your boat,’ I told him. ‘You know how she handles,’ and I hoped he did.

  He was right. We found we could hold her fairly steady with two men on the steering oar. Ethelred came aft, and tied a line on a bucket and threw it overboard. We all gasped as we saw the way the line whisked out, and we never did get the bucket back. It was a good bucket, too.

  After an hour we were out of sight of land. The sky was still overcast, not raining, but grey, and there was still that wind. A little later we could see a blue smudge to port. Edward waved his arms at it.

  ‘That’s the Holy Island. Nobody lives there. Past that and we’re in the great sea.’

  Nobody ever likes to be out of sight of land, certainly not on a strange sea. There were all kinds of tales about this sea, how it was solid with fish and so on, and by logic if you went across it you should reach Britain. But who wanted to go to Britain that way when all you needed to do was to go down the coast to Boulogne, slip across and then coast north or west to wherever you wanted to go?

  But drifting out to sea had happened to other people before, always to other people. If it happened to you once and you ever came back, it usually put you off going to sea again. Therefore Edward had been careful to bring drinking water and a little food, sun-dried beef and twice-baked bread. The water casks were full; I had seen that done before we went aboard.

  A little way outside the Holy Island we saw something horrible. We came to the crest of a wave and we saw another ship. She was about half a mile away. She had a sail set, and drawing, and she was making reasonable way, not fast, but enough, and right before the wind – her wind. For while our wind drove us west of north, she was making north of east. We went across her bows, our tracks at right angles.

  Out of Richborough for the Saxon coast, the Saxons agreed, and they argued among themselves about her cargo, and all this to drown the thought that this was our own private wind, blowing for us alone. Only one man came aft, called Osbert, and he asked,

  ‘Has any of you wronged a Scrawling?’

  ‘No,’ said Edward, and Osbert went on,

  ‘Because the yellow Scrawlings in the east, they keep the winds in a bag, and when any one wrongs them they let out for him an evil wind.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘He gets blown out to sea, and over the edge of the world. And that’s the end.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, in as superior a tone as I could manage. ‘Why do you think I came fishing today?’

  I leant back in the stern and looked as confident as I could and occasionally said things like,

  ‘Hold her steady there,’ or,

  ‘That’s fine, dead on course.’

  I remembered how Jokuhai-inen could bring the winds to his whistle, and I remembered the Scrawlings that brought back Donar and that Loki had sold for me. I knew that if I let the Saxons think that this wind was sent against me I would be overboard in no time. I dared not, therefore, ask if they had any salt or garlic on board. If I had brought Gungnir I might have tried to cut the wind, I remembered the proper things to say, but I didn’t want to try with only a knife. So I sat back and let them think, without my saying
so, that the wind wasn’t sent against us, but that I had brought it.

  Toward evening, Edward issued a ration of water, not much. I had my old waterbottle, on its strap, full of hydromel, and we didn’t dare let the men know about that, so Edward and I hid it under the nets and sat on it. Albert, who was a careful dresser, came aft and went on the oar.

  For the night we tied ourselves to the thwarts, for the boat was rolling and pitching together in a most unpleasant spiral motion. Some of the Saxons were sick. At dawn we had water and dried meat, and at noon we had water and some fish we had caught, raw. During the nights we were kept awake all the time by men clambering over us to relieve the steersmen and to hold us end on, any end on, to the howling wind that blew out of nowhere. Yet no one suggested offering a sacrifice of what we had to Wude.

  Toward noon on the third day we saw land, quite close, for the boat was very low in the water. It was a low green shore, with two or three strange green hills like upturned buckets, and an island a little offshore of the same shape. There was more land visible to starboard. We were in the mouth of a river. Suddenly the wind dropped, stopped, just like that. The Saxons left off arguing whether we were off Britain or Ireland or the Land of Norroway, and with one accord began to row for the nearer shore. I said nothing; I was sure our troubles weren’t over.

  When we were close in, the current changed, the tide began to tug at the boat, and we were carried out to sea again, the oarsmen crying and cursing as they heaved. It was no use. Out we went, north and east, out of sight of land. We spent another night at sea, still under that black blanket of cloud, with nothing to tell us even which way we were going.

  By now the lashings that held the boat together were in a bad way. Edward and Ethelred had spent most of the voyage crawling about in the bottom finding frayed withies and replacing them from a supply that they carried, but now there were no more fresh withies left. We had had two men baling all the way, but now we had four. We were no longer rationed on water; we were more likely to drown than to die of thirst.