Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)
Page 26
‘The Burgundians,’ they said, ‘are destroyed, and their name will soon be forgotten. Those who did not go to the Battle are returned to their allegiance and call themselves the East Goths. Yet a few still cling to the House of the Volsungs, and they hide in the great forest, and their King is Sigurd Sigmundson who is a child.’
‘The Cat King will not last long,’ they told me. ‘The Cheruscan King and the King of the Thuringians have allied against the Chatti, and the Cheruscan King has married the Thuringian King’s sister, and his heir is her son, who is Votan-born. But it is that woman, the She-Bear, who rules over both nations already.’
‘Edwin the King is dead,’ they said, ‘and Cutha is regent for his grandson Harald, for he is Votan-born. And the Saxons are ready to march to take back the salt beaches, and they say the Danes cannot be protected by the Treaty, for they did not come in time to the Battle; but the Danes say the Saxons cannot be protected by the Treaty, for their King did not come himself to the Battle while Sweyn sailed in his ships.’
So I went from farm to farm and from house to house, and never a prince or a noble did I see. The peasants gave me food and shelter, and I paid for my food with healing of sprains and bruises and broken bones and running sores and boils, and all the charms that I knew I taught to anyone without payment. And no one ever asked who I was that went one-eyed and grey-haired in a grey cloak.
6
At last, at the end of the summer, I came into a land where the rivers flowed south. One day, a little before sunset I came out of the wood, the scrubby patchy stuff you get near a river, into an open space. In the middle there was an oak, a very old oak, dead, blasted, and scarred by lightning. Around it were scattered horse skulls and bits of cloth held down by stones.
I went to the tree, and thrust Gungnir’s point into a dead limb. I walked down to the river, and I washed my face.
When I looked up, the Most Holy One stood before me, as he stands in the Sanctuary. His cloak was of scarlet, and his hair hung about his shoulders. After a time I asked him,
‘Father Apollo, Paeon, Joy, Bergelmir, which are you?’
He answered,
‘I am all of these, and none of them. I sent you into the north, and my own spear I laid upon your shoulder that all men might know that you came from me.’
I asked,
‘My Father, have I done your will?’
‘All that I laid on you to do, as I laid my spear on you, you have done. Njord, that brought Loki to drive me out, is dead. Loki is dead. Mymir that watched me go is dead. Vikar that gave Mymir a ship to bring him to the Holy Island alive is dead, and his son, Skazi’s son, is dead, and all Skazi’s children that should have been my children are dead, but the one that shall bring misery to all the land of Italy in her own time. The Amber peace is broken, and the Amber road is closed, and the rule of the Asers, the Amber Lords, is over.
‘Now I take my load from your shoulder, as I took the light from your eye. No one-eyed man, no man who lives in the flat world of half light, can serve the unconquered sun. From my worship for ever you are free.’
He held Gungnir in his hand. He walked away into the forest. I knelt by the river, and I cut short my hair and my beard with my knife, the knife that Joy spun on the tavern table, the knife that had killed the Catman beneath the tree, that had killed Mymir on the Holy Island. I left the knife embedded in the ground, and I threw the hair into the river, as a sign that henceforward I worshipped the Gods of Earth and Water, and not of Fire. And I walked toward the Danube.
7
I came to the ferry. I chatted to two cavalrymen. They were not very happy.
‘We’ve got a new Cavalry Commander at Vindabonum,’ they said. ‘He’s called Aristarchos. He’s always getting us on stunts across the river, he keeps on talking about learning how to melt into the ground, how to move quietly. That’s not what we joined the army for, that’s how the barbarians fight. We joined to ride in line, with shields and plumes, the way the girls like to hear about it.
‘He’s brought a lot of Brits in, too. The sergeant-major’s a terror, the killer type, and so fussy about his food, always wanting cheese …’
I wondered about the sentries at the landing stage. When I got off the ferry Gwalchmai took my arm and led me straight past.
‘Taliesin’s looking for you,’ he said. ‘He can’t get the pots to work.’
‘I’m not surprised. How’s my bigamous wife?’
‘That was an ill-advised thing that we did. Upset the whole social system of the Picts we have. Bithig’s still married to you, she can’t have another husband. But they gave the boy a new surname, Votadinus, to show whose son he is. Unusual, that is. Did you know your father’s gone home? Amnesty, there was.’
I went round to Otho’s house. The porter wouldn’t let me in, but I made so much noise it woke the Spanish butler from his mid-morning nap, and he remembered me. He brought me in, and they gave me a bath, with plenty of oil. They scraped me down and got off all the pig fat of the year. The butler brought in clothes, my own clothes.
‘Your father left them here when he went back, sir, to the south. He sold up all the slaves, we took one or two over, and we closed up the house.’
‘What happened to Ursa?’
‘Oh, her brothers came, just after you left, and wanted to buy her back, but your father let her go, for nothing. I heard that she was royal, whatever that may mean, among the Thuringians, but I don’t know anything about that.’
I put on my own clothes. It was wonderful to walk with bare legs, like a real human being. I went down to Rudi’s tavern. He had prospered, he now had three rooms, different prices, and the terrace outside was for the select customers only. His number five wife was serving. Otho was there, and Aristarchos, and Polycleites, and a young officer named Bion – he was killed the next year, trying to steal horses from Fenris Wolf. I sat down with them, as usual, no greeting. I asked Aristarchos,
‘Were those Picts really going to eat me?’
‘It was the possibility that mattered, and not the actuality,’ he replied. Learning British had had a dreadful effect on his conversation. ‘But it made you start moving out, didn’t it?’
‘What are Amber prices going to do?’ asked Otho.
‘Up.’ I answered. ‘There won’t be any coming back this year, or for years to come. What you’ve got, hold on to.’
The girl came with beer and sausages, but I waved her away.
‘It’s never the same down here as it is out there. Bring me some stuffed olives and wine, real Chian with resin in it, while I make up my mind.’
‘All that Amber you sent me back through Fenris in the Spring, I’ve never seen anything like it,’ went on Otho. ‘Wagon loads of Amber, worked and unworked, and furs, too. Where did you get it?’
I was ordering. A civilised meal, bread dipped in oil, thin slices of veal fried in oil, roast skylarks on a spit, green beans, fresh figs.
‘Not too difficult. Just walk around the villages a bit, you can get it if you pay for it.’
‘What are they like, the villages?’ asked Bion. ‘Are they like this?’ He waved his arm at the orderly streets of Vindabonum’s German quarter. They were clean, there were no dead dogs in the streets, no piles of manure at the very doors of the houses. I thought of the bustle of a palisade full of Vandals and Saxons and all their horses, of Edwin’s hall with the fish nets always drying, of Asgard.
‘Yes, just like that, more or less.’
I started on dormice in honey, something I had particularly missed. Aristarchos was silent. Otho went back to the Amber.
‘What were prices like? Did you pay much for the Amber?’
I stared into my wine, real island stuff. I saw them all in the cup. I saw the Polyani pour out the beer before the tree. I saw Grude heaved across the bench. I saw the Goth ships row in, and I saw Jokuhai-inen dance the Bear Sacrifice, and I saw the Saxons play the head game. I saw a Vandal packtrain on the road, and I saw the Vandal wedges go
up the ridge at the trot. I saw the painted Picts dance for no cause, and I saw the gagged Scrawlings make the Honeydew in the Black Sheds. I saw Edith in the Mother’s Cart, and I saw Gambara, furious, seize Hoenir’s sword. I saw Bithig in her chariot. I saw Loki at the Table of the Dead and I saw Donar stand between the teeth of the World Serpent.
And I saw Freda, Golden Freda, Freda Goldlover, sit among her maidens in the red and yellow firelight. The wine clouded before my eye, and I saw the smoke from burning Asgard roll foul across my life.
‘A fair price,’ I said. I closed my good eye too. ‘A fair price. I paid it all.’
Not For All the Gold in Ireland
John James
www.sfgateway.com
Contents
Title Page
Contents
Gaul
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Londinium
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
The Mere
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Ireland
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Gaul
Chapter One
Well, if you really want to know how it was I came to be in that lugger, on a fine reach south-west in a north-west gale, with the north coast of Ireland on my left hand, in company with a Druid, a Colonel of Thracian Cavalry (misemployed), the King and Queen of the Silurians, a Priestess of the Gods Below, to whom I may or may not have been married, and a handful of Brits who alleged they were sailors, then I will tell you.
It all started in my Uncle Euthyphro’s house in Ostia, at dinner on a warm spring evening. It began with my Uncle Euthyphro saying:
‘Someone will have to get it back. And he may even have to go to Britain to do it.’
I made a face at him. Go to Britain? He might as well have said go to the waters of Lethe. After all, what did any of us know about Britain in those days? It was difficult enough for the ordinary citizen to go there, almost as difficult as getting ashore in Egypt, though of course it was simple to arrange for members of a wealthy family of merchant-priests like mine. But so far nobody in the family had wanted to go there, although we did some trade, in dogs and wool and oysters and mussel pearls. We had an agent in Londinium, and so we didn’t need to go ourselves.
Well, what did we know? It was an island where it rained a great deal of the time. A hundred years ago, now, His Sacred Majesty the Emperor Claudius had conquered the fertile southern quarter of the island, where the Brits live, and had left the Northern Desert, as huge as Africa, to the painted Picts, building a wall to keep them out. The Brits, we knew, were the same people as the Gauls, speaking the same language, and the Irish beyond the Empire were the same people also, Many of the nations of the Celts had been broken up long ago, and parts of them lived in both provinces. For instance, the Parisii lived around Lutetia in the north of Gaul, but another branch of them were spread all around the fortress at Eboracum.
The Brits were a strange people, we had heard. Of course we all knew that every third Briton was a magician, and that they had strange things to do with the dead, though quite what nobody was sure. Yet there were plenty of men in Rome who in their youth had served their time as tribunes in the legions in Britain, and they would always tell you how fond they were of their little Brits. You often find this among men who have to go and live among primitive races – they fall in love with their charges. Literally, too. There had even been a few who had talked wistfully of how they would like to live in the island permanently, farming for wool. Going native almost, if only they could find the daughter of some great landowner, once a noble and now a Citizen of Rome, as some were by great and rare good fortune, to marry.
But go to Britain myself? I thought, that evening, in Ostia. Not if I could help it. Somebody else could do that. But there, if you could learn to stand the taste of butter, you could stand anything, and I could eat it without turning a hair. Not that butter would have stood very long, in my uncle’s house in Ostia that evening. Nor that it was really very hot, even for the first of May, but it was the last really comfortable evening I was going to have for a long time, though I didn’t know it. So it wasn’t the heat that made my cousin Philebus sweat. It was the talking-to that his father Euthyphro and I had just given him. All the names in my family follow the same pattern. It all started with my grandfather who had an obsession with philosophy, and believed that a thing partook of its name, that was part of its character. So he called all his sons and grandsons after dialogues of Plato, and I had uncles called Phaedo and Crito too. And if it had not been for my mother, who came from up in the hills and was half Galatian and so had a will of her own, and for the North Wind for whom she had a particular veneration and who therefore kept both my father and my grandfather mewed up in Alexandria for three weeks, I might well have been called Laws or Republic, or even Banquet. But even that might have been better than the name she gave me, Photinus. Neither good Greek nor good Latin, that name, and perhaps Grandfather may have been right in holding that the name governs the character of the thing. I seem to have spent half my life looking for better names. Votan I’ve been called, and Mannanan, and so many others, and each new name has brought me some kind of profit and some kind of loss, some gain in knowledge, some loss of innocence.
Well, it was quite hot that evening, and the dinner had been quite good, all except the goose liver which had been spoilt, and that was quite easily remedied: we just sold the cook and bought another which improved the general efficiency of the kitchen. I mean, it’s not everybody who wants to go and work in the sulphur mines, is it? But my cousin Philebus wasn’t thinking too much about the food: he had other torments on his mind. I had brought one of the family’s ships in that morning, it being the easiest way from the Old City to Rome, where I had a good deal of business to discuss with my uncle. Clearing the port authorities and dealing with all the documents relating to the cargo had taken me well into the afternoon, and I had only got into the house just in time for dinner. I was very tired, and then I had been thrown into the middle of this first-class family quarrel. I felt that before I made any suggestions about future action, I wanted to hear it all again, quietly, this time. My uncle was one of those men who can never forget they aren’t at sea.
‘Now, Philebus, as I understand it, you bought some kind of monopoly from the Emperor, or rather from one of his Sacred Majesty’s Chamberlains.’
‘Yes. From Faustinus.’
‘And you paid?’ I knew it must have been expensive.
‘Twenty-five thousand sestertia.’ But not as expensive as that, twenty-five million copper sesterces.
‘How much …’ I began to ask, and then thought, it was no use now asking how much of that was for Faustinus himself. ‘You lost the deed gambling.’
‘Three cups and a pea,’ nodded Philebus miserably.
‘The method is immaterial,’ I said consolingly. ‘I could take any man alive by that game if I held the cups, and even if I didn’t I would never lose a game if only I could count my thumbs. But if you aren’t up to my standard, you shouldn’t play. Never stake anything of value unless you can cheat, or have enough influence to buy your way out again. But do
you remember who it was you were playing with?’
‘It was Gwawl. Everybody knows him, even though he’s only been around the tables in Rome for a month. He’ll play with anybody.’
‘That’s a strange name. Is he a Greek?’
‘Sometimes he says he is, and sometimes he says he’s not. Some people think he comes from a Lugdunum Greek family, and you know how Greek they are, been there for a couple of hundred years, and intermarried with the Gauls all the time. But if he is from Lugdunum, there’s nobody here who knows his family. He might be anything, Gaul, Syrian, Spanish, anything.’
‘But look here,’ I protested, ‘a Monopoly Deed like this isn’t a bearer document, not usually. He can’t use it.’
‘He made me sign a transfer deed. He had it all written out ready, and the witnesses as well, waiting. The deed itself was in my name, personal to me. Now it’s personal to him.’
‘A lawyer, then, is he?’
‘No. He lives by his wits, gambling on the Games, mostly.’
From this point on I ignored Philebus. He was grateful for that. I asked his father:
‘You’ve tried to buy it back?’
‘He wanted two hundred thousand sestertia.’
‘And the monopoly is worth …?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean, Uncle, you don’t know? You’ve spent enough of the family’s money on it.’ I felt I could speak like that to Uncle Euthyphro, I was on equal terms with him, not like Philebus. ‘What about the man you took it over from?’
‘Well, the truth of the matter is, we weren’t taking it over from anybody.’
‘Not from anybody? But someone must have had a monopoly of the Gold trade with Britain.’