by John James
‘I am named after my great-aunt, whom you know as Boadicea, who sacked London and killed ten thousand Romans, beside many Syrians and Greek pedlars.’
She shut her little lips tight again, it was the only thing she said all the evening. I looked at Taliesin over the King’s head. He smiled happily and drew the back of his hand over his throat. I made desperate choking noises, and they took this for acquiescence. All I could hear was Albert screaming, and then stopping screaming, while Taliesin stood on a stool and delivered a five hundred line epithalamion.
I decided that the only thing to do was to join the others and finish the Spanish wine. For them it was celebration, for me an anodyne. I determined to drink till the sea-gulls on Bithig’s forehead started going around the other way. Long before that I was unconscious.
7
I woke up next morning in a room in the palace. I had a frightful headache. A young man called Annwas brought me some hot milk and boiled seaweed. I asked him in Latin if I could go into the fresh air, and he led me to the nearest courtyard. It was raining steadily. I stayed inside.
In the middle of the morning we went to the hall. It was full of warriors, but they crowded around me and asked me to recite to them in Latin, for they were all eager for learning even if none of them could read. I gave them nearly the whole of Book Four of the Aeneid. Just as I came to the death of Dido, as I whispered,
The shears sever, the shining hair hangs down,
No longer lingers life, Dido lies dead,
I found I had no audience, because the first servants had come in with midday drink and food. I tried to forget it all again, this time with cider.
The next I knew Annwas was calling me for dinner. This time we ate in the hall. Bithig wasn’t there. Taliesin was furious and showed it in a thousand little hints. Etiquette forbade him to leave before his King, and as a result he was limited to his seven boiled beans and water. Casnar was amused, and told me so.
‘We’ve got to have him pure overnight. Can’t have him unclean in the morning, spoil it all.’
‘All what?’
‘The wedding, of course, Bithig is fasting too, and it always ruins her temper.’
I did a lot of drinking that night. I just hoped it would keep me fuddled through the day. It didn’t of course, it just gave me another headache. Annwas woke me early with a colossal breakfast, all salty. Have you eaten salt herrings and salt bacon when you have a dry mouth and a nasty taste to start with?
Annwas and another man named Evrawc argued for hours about how to dress me for the occasion. I refused to wear the red and green pattern, or any gay colour, and they insisted, and they were quite right, that my grey was in no condition for a formal appearance. In the end they stole Taliesin’s second best toga, and someone sewed a purple border on it, so that I went to my first bigamous wedding dressed as a Roman magistrate. But my long white hair was most un-Romanly dressed with goose grease.
We walked in a kind of rough procession down to the grove. The main part of the ceremony was my paying of a bride price, and the original intention was that this should have been a token offering, a small bag of gold supplied from the Royal treasury. However, my pride would not allow that, and I had had a hard day’s work with the three cups and the dice the afternoon before. As a result, the bride price I paid was a wild mixture of collars and armbands and brooches, but all gold and of good quality. My escort, however, though they carried their weapons with an air, had a rather bare and poverty-stricken look. While I was in Casnar’s kingdom, I got on to reasonable terms with the king, and I felt that by paying my gaming winnings into the family purse I was at least earning my keep.
After we had waited in the Grove for a very long time, so that Taliesin began to worry whether we should be able to start within the propitious hours, Bithig and her brother arrived in a chariot. She wore a veil. I was glad of that. I had spent most of the night dreaming of being married to Medusa, and I still had a headache. The ceremony was short and simple. We shared a cup of a rather horrid drink made out of dandelions, and paid the bride price: in fact the longest part of the whole proceedings was waiting for Casnar to finish counting and weighing it.
Then we got into the chariot, Bithig and I. She peeled off her gloves and threw them into the crowd. She threw back her veil. I nearly leapt out of the chariot, but there was a double line of spearmen on each side. They had married me to Medusa. It was not sea-gulls or crabs that ran around her forehead, but an inverted crown of snakes’ heads. Snakes wriggled up her arms under her sleeves. And there was a dragon’s head on each cheek, that snapped at me each time she changed her expression. I tried not to think of the night, when those snakes would twine around me and throttle me.
Before us in the chariots marched bagpipers. It was wonderful in that desert place to hear real civilised music again. The pipes are the absolute peak of human achievement in music making. They played, and the crowd sang, a song I had not heard before, which, I was told, was a prayer to the Goose God to lead them through the barren land. We rode to the open space below the steps to the dun, and mounted a dais.
There, so near to civilisation were we, we watched a whole day of ritual games. They raced chariots and they raced on foot, and they had contests in throwing the javelin, and in throwing a great stone, and something I had never seen before, in throwing a tree. And they danced. These people do not dance as all other nations dance, for rain or dry weather or victory in battle. They danced for the sake of dancing, with no real religious feeling behind it at all. It struck me as almost blasphemous. They danced by ones and by twos and by fours, and by twos of fours and by fours of eights. They danced till the dusk came.
Then when it began to get a little chilly, and the pedlars were selling hot soup and mulled beer instead of cold boiled ham, we went into the hall for the marriage feast. I was rather glad that Taliesin took so long over his marriage song, and that he translated it line by line into Latin. After that, while we ate, the competitions went on, but now they were competitions in the composition of verse, and in singing and in playing the bagpipes and in blowing the horn. It would have been glorious, at least the pipes would have been, if I hadn’t had such a dreadful headache. Drinking did nothing to settle it.
Every time I looked at Bithig, the snakes flickered their tongues, and the dragon mouths opened and closed at me. This was no place to stay, but it was worse to go. The pipes played louder, and Bithig’s lips grew more set and determined. It was a situation to turn a man’s hair white. Mine was white already.
Bithig began tugging at my wrist, under the table. Later, she got me by the elbow and pulled, not caring who saw. I pretended to be affected by the music and beat time with my hands on the table. Bithig went on tugging. I went on tapping. The pipers went on playing. My head began to fragmentate. Taliesin was nudging me. I took no notice. Finally Casnar leaned across the table, picking his teeth with his knife, and said very loudly,
‘This has been a long hard day for the pair of you. Especially for my poor little sister, always delicate she was. Feel like going to bed, now, don’t you?’
Taliesin was jerking his head toward the private door. Morien was stropping his knife on the sole of his shoe. Those Picts have no doubts about the main purpose of a wedding.
I got up rather unsteadily, and Bithig gripped my wrist with a hand hard and strong after years at the hunt. She heaved me after her through the private door, and through half a dozen more doors, and each time I hit my head on the lintel. Nobody in the hall took the slightest notice of our disappearance; I felt that there the fun was only just beginning.
I was dragged stooping through that maze of passages for what seemed an hour. It would have been pleasanter in the Cretan Labyrinth, for Bithig went first, and the Minotaur would have eaten her before me.
She got me into her bedroom, a much more comfortable room than the one they’d given me. It was done up with very good Roman furniture, all fifty years out of fashion of course, but they tell me that ki
nd of thing’s coming back now. The whole room was ablaze in the light of at least two dozen candles.
‘All right,’ said Bithig. ‘Bed!’
‘Please,’ I asked her. ‘Can’t we put the lights out first.’
‘Who do you think I am? Psyche?’ She’d had a good education, I’ll say that. ‘Don’t you want to see what you’re getting? I went to a lot of trouble over this.’
She slid out of her dress. Her short sleeved bodice in red flannel showed the snakes peering from a forest of convolvulus that went up to her shoulders. She took off five more underskirts, red and yellow and green and blue and purple. Finally she flung the bodice and the last skirt, a black one, at my head, and I saw it!
Before and behind, snakes and dragons’ heads and tails peeped out from the riot of intertwined briar and bindweed. Not an inch of space was wasted, not an inch. Out of the symmetrical cloud of blue patterns, beautifully designed if you like that formalised art, there crystallised a few close coarse spirals. One centred on her navel, one on each breast, one on each buttock, one on each knee cap. As I looked in horror, each spiral began to revolve, to open and shut, to expand and contract. The whole room shrank in on me, and swelled out to fill the Universe, and shrank again, and the candles flickered till you couldn’t see for dancing shadows.
‘I need a drink,’ I said.
‘Nonsense. You’ll be all right, as long as you don’t sit down.’ She was a hard woman, all right. ‘I don’t want you going to sleep here. Stand there and listen.’
Outside the bagpipes were playing. For a moment Bithig stood poised. Then she began to dance. Perhaps the people at the games didn’t dance anything in particular, but she did. They didn’t dance rain or barley, but Bithig danced bed. Bithig danced sex.
The pipes droned and throbbed in rhythmic surges. The dragons and serpents crawled and chased their tails among the rustling leaves. The spirals expanded and contracted, in and out, in and out. I never knew when I started too. I danced my clothes to the four corners of the room, I danced my clothes to the four corners of the room, I danced my wits to the eight winds of heaven, I must have danced my headache somewhere because I never had one again in all my life. I danced Bithig into bed in the pressing bounding beat, and as we rolled to a climax, the pipes and the harps and every singer in the palace joined in that song about the need for purity of heart.
8
When day came, and the candles were burnt out, a woman came in with a jug of hot milk.
‘There is a fine day it is,’ she said brightly.
‘Fine? You mean sunny?’
‘No, no sun. But it has not been raining for, oh, half an hour at least.’
Good weather is a question of what you are used to. Two days without rain are a wonder in that country. Two days of sun are a miracle, and I had brought three.
I drank most of the hot milk. Bithig was snoring. I never had a wife like her for lying in bed in the mornings. I summoned up courage to look at her. I took a good look.
This was not the woman I had married. There were no snakes, no dragons, no crabs or butterflies either. She was just a blotchy mess of blue and white. Blue and white blots, smudges, smears, stripes all over. I looked down. I was in the same state, blue everywhere. I leaped out of the bed. There was a bowl of water in the room, and towels; I washed, I rubbed till the blood came. It only spread the blue.
There was laughter from the bed. Bithig was laughing at me. She lay there, all blue and white and blotchy, and she laughed at me, damn her.
‘Water only makes it worse,’ she got out at last. I went over and emptied the bowl over her head.
‘Now get it off yourself,’ I told her. I rolled her over and beat her on the buttocks till there must have been some genuine blue among the blotches. She wriggled out of bed, tripped me, and sat on my face to rub the stuff into my legs. I got my head round far enough to bite her in the bottom and as she sprang howling across the room she cannoned into the serving-woman, who showed no surprise at the yelling wrestling pair who bounced off her and covered the room with fried eggs and sausages.
‘Get some more milk, Myfanwy,’ said Bithig. ‘This Mesopotamian idiot drank the last lot.’
‘I’m not a Mesopotamian.’
‘Greece, Mesopotamia, India, what’s the difference?’
Myfanwy came back with more milk.
‘Nothing else will take it off. Shall I do the gentleman’s back, dear?’
‘It’s a wife’s prerogative to wash her husband’s back,’ I insisted. After all, she ought to do something.
‘And vice versa,’ snapped Bithig. ‘Have you got some butter for the hard bits, Myfanwy?’
‘Two big pats, best salted. Dreadful it is when it gets wet. You have to scrape and scrape. Would you like some more egg and sausage?’
When she brought it, and we were both clean down to the navel, Bithig asked her again what the weather was.
‘Well, it was quite fine first thing, but it’s raining again now.’
‘Heavy?’
‘Pouring down, sweetheart.’
‘Oh good, now we don’t have to go out all day. Mackerel for lunch, and a few gobbets of everything for dinner. Now, back to bed.’
And that was how three days went by, in rain and bedding, in lechery and luxury, bigamous and entrancing. We once or twice came up for air and conversation.
‘But I thought you were tattooed.’
‘No, only men. Women used to be, but it’s quite impossiblé. Just think of being saddled with the same face for life.’
‘Or the same body.’
‘That’s only for special occasions. It takes so long to put on and off. It’s very good for the milk trade, though. There’s a limit to the amount of cheese we can find a market for.’
‘What do you do it with?’
‘What do you think? Woad and goose grease, of course.’
9
The fourth morning it had stopped raining. We spent a couple of hours putting on Bithig’s tattoo, and then we went hunting. We spent all the afternoon careering through the forest after a stupid hare that hadn’t enough sense to climb a tree or dig a hole, and even then we never caught it.
We went hunting nearly every day. The days we didn’t go for hare we hunted deer, which meant crawling about on your face in the wet woods trying to get a crossbow shot in. We never actually got a deer either.
None of this was very good for my grey suit. In the evenings I would cover it up with Taliesin’s second best toga, but with the soup stains and the drips of beer that too was getting to look grey. I didn’t dare get it washed, it would have taken two months to dry.
Then one evening, in hall – the royal family dined in hall once a week – I was moving around late in the evening trying to find someone to play dice with when I got into conversation with a stranger, who said he was a cloth merchant, and had a couple of suits in grey that would fit me without much alteration. He reminded me of Occa, somehow, his Latin was good, and he’d come up from south of the Wall.
‘Those suits aren’t much, but they are grey, and you only want them for a year and a day, don’t you?’
‘A year and a day? What do you mean?’
‘Don’t know much about the Picts, do you, boy. They’re old-fashioned up here. They still pass the kingship down from uncle to nephew, you know, and they still choose fathers for their kings by chance. Any stranger passing by who’s moderately royal, they marry him off to the king’s sister, and after a year and a day, when they’re sure he’s done his duty, or not, off he goes.’
‘Off he goes? Where?’
‘Nobody knows. Some do say that he don’t have no proper burial.’
‘You mean …?’
‘They eats him. Still, you never know, not with Picts.’
Well, I didn’t take much notice of that, there are all kinds of strange things they say about the Picts, and I bought the two grey suits, that is, I played him dice for them, and they were both quite a good fit. But a few d
ays later, we were having a quiet dinner in the king’s diningroom, and I was trying to get out of them when there would be fair winds to get back to Germany, and they were trying to wheedle out of me where the Amber came from, and Morien and Evrawc were there. Bithig got up to leave and I got up too, and she said,
‘No, Photinus, not in my condition,’ and she went! That’s all she said, ‘Not in my condition,’ and I didn’t see her again. Instead Morien and Evrawc stood very close to me, and Evrawc said,
‘We’ve moved your things into another room.’
They took me there, and Annwas was already outside the door, with a big shield and a spear. It was a good room, better than the one I had had the first night. There was a great big bed, chairs, table, seal-oil lamps. For some reason the rafters were full of sealed jars. It was a good room, but it was quite clear I couldn’t get out. I didn’t try. I went to sleep.
In the morning, Evrawc woke me up with an enormous bowl of porridge, and enough fried food for three. I looked at it wanly.
‘Come along,’ he said. ‘Eat up. How much do you weigh?’
‘About a hundred and sixty pounds.’
‘You’d better eat well. We’re counting on at least two hundred dressed for the oven, by next spring. Morien won’t be pleased if you fall short.’
‘Why Morien?’
‘Well, you came up on his land, and he gets paid by weight. There’s only been a deposit put down on you yet, the King won’t settle till after the feast. I think we’ll have to be putting a German in to make it go round. This Edward of yours, is it royal he is being or only noble?’
‘Just noble. Why?’
‘Well, thinking of him for next year, Bithig was.’
I got worried.
‘Is this all serious, about eating me?’
‘Of course.’ It was obvious that Evrawc could conceive of no other way of life. ‘Of course most of us nobles don’t really like the taste, but the peasants expect it.’