Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  Gwawl just came straight into the Capricorn. It was the easiest thing and the simplest you could imagine. It was obvious he wasn’t expecting to meet any danger at all, not as long as I kept out of sight. I wasn’t in the bar, I watched from the kitchen – when you have only one eye, a very narrow crack is enough to look through.

  In the bar, Gwawl found only a crowd of sailors very obviously having one for the Channel, and a blowsy woman with an empty basket. Cicva had done well with her face painting, and her wig – she could have passed for thirty easily, and did so in the dim lamplight. But you can never trust a woman – instead of the fine Roman dress I had got her in Lutetia, she wore a scarlet blouse in the British manner. And beneath that, she wore the ten or twelve petticoats the women up there delight in, each one a different colour and, if possible, a different material for each, cotton if you could afford it, and linen, and wool. Over the top one she had a linen apron, with lace frills at the edges, and over that a broad belt of red wool, embroidered with flowers, and fastened with a big bronze brooch. Her shawl, over her shoulders, had also cost a good deal of money, for it had a fringe of red tassels, and I thought then, from the little I knew, that Cicva had ideas about rank that were quite beyond her – only noblewomen among the Brits wore such elaborate shawls. And little, indeed, I knew. But if all this finery, justified or not, caught Gwawl’s eye, it was worth the expense.

  Gwawl bought something to drink, and then looked round. It was obvious that Goth Bert was the Captain: he was drinking two to his crew’s one. Gwawl began to haggle for a passage. When they were nearly settled, Cicva put her arm around Gwawl’s shoulder and said beerily:

  ‘That’s right, boy, you come in my little boat with me!’

  ‘Clear off!’ Gwawl shouted at her. ‘Find your own bunk and someone else to pay for it!’

  It was clear that he sensed some subtle double meaning in her words, that a respectable woman would never have intended. And Cicva resented that.

  ‘You Syrian by-blow,’ she told him, not loud or shrill, just quietly nasty. ‘You big slob. Who do you think you’re talking to?’

  Cicva had a good vocabulary now in both Greek and Latin, as well as British and Gaulish, and a few choice phrases of doubtful provenance that Goth Bert had taught her, in every dialect of German from the Alps to the ends of the Shallow Sea. She used them all.

  Here she was, she said between the profanity, sold her embroidery and trouble enough it was buying it up on her other side of the water to bring it across to peddle here, and not much profit she made on it either, not more than three or four hundred per cent, after all her expenses were paid, and now home it was she was going, with her passage paid and a purse full of money in her apron, and if Gwawl didn’t appreciate her company he might as well wait for another boat, and the Gods only knew when that would be, the way trade was going in these days. And Gwawl heard Fat Bert say that that was right, and who did he think he was, talking like that to a decent woman who travelled with them every month punctual as the moon, and why should he bother about a casual stranger who had insulted an old-established customer. Lombard Bert said he hadn’t killed anybody for weeks, and nobody told him to keep quiet.

  Just as I began to think they might be overdoing it, Gwawl swallowed what was left of his beer and his words together, and bought three rounds, one after the other, for everyone in the place, Cicva included. Goth Bert put the passage money up by another half, and Gwawl agreed to it without any further argument, seeing himself at a distinct disadvantage and him in a hurry, too.

  Lombard Bert picked up Gwawl’s bag to take it down to the ship at once. I slipped out the back way and followed him. We whiled away the time of waiting by sitting on the forecastle and going through the bag, but there was nothing there of any interest to me, though the Berts earmarked several things for future distribution. When we finished I repacked the bag in something like the same order, and began rubbing pig fat in my face as a protection against the salt wind, which burns it otherwise. Lion fat is much better, but I couldn’t find any in Bonnonia.

  After we had arranged Gwawl’s belongings to our satisfaction, I strolled on the quayside and looked at the ship. There is nothing as beautiful as a ship, even a clumsy broad-beamed tub like the Gannet, as the Berts had renamed her. When she was in the North I suppose she had been called something like ‘Fleet Wind from the Ice’, rather on my grandfather’s principle that she would partake of the qualities of her name. She was a good ship, nothing remarkable, but reliable and sturdy. We would have to sweep her out of the harbour, but once we were clear of the land there was a wind from the south-west, just right for Britain.

  Gwawl was a long time in coming. I went back into the ship, and I looked at Bonnonia. The full round moon flooded the shore with a bright pale light, so that the patches of shadow were as dark as a bottomless pit. I thought that it was like the good hard noonday sun of the South, that has no half measures. Either a thing is in the dark and cannot be known, or it is out in the pitless light and cannot be hidden. I sat on the bulwark with my legs dangling and looked at Gaul, a familiar land of wine and olive, where everything was what it was, where a mule-driver was a mule-driver and a pirate was a pirate, and a slave girl only a slave girl. That was the last I knew for many a day of clarity and single-mindedness and fixity of meaning. For the wind was right for the misty island of Britain.

  Chapter Four

  It was an hour or so after sunset, then, on that evening at the end of May, when Goth Bert and Cicva brought Gwawl down to the quay – or, to be more accurate, before Cicva and Gwawl carried Goth Bert down to the quay. The delay had done us no harm, because we had to wait for the tide, but as it was we barely had time to take the three aboard and cast off. Gwawl and Cicva went into the cabin under the poop. I squatted on the deck above their heads, next to the steersman, and the crew rigged the sweeps. Goth Bert joined me. When I realised how much beer he had drunk I persuaded him to lie down while I took the ship out myself. It was a good thing the steersman knew the channel.

  After a little while, when we were nearly clear, Goth Bert came to his senses again and I let him have his ship back. I lay down myself on the deck, with my ear to a knot-hole, and I could hear most of what went on in the cabin. I heard Cicva:

  ‘It’s a long trip. I always get bored. How about a little game to pass the time away?’

  I didn’t hear Gwawl answer for a while. He was still a bit drunk, and I hoped that he wouldn’t be sea-sick: there wasn’t much wind, really, and the ship was now doing that horrible motion like a screw. Then there was a slight scuffle in the cabin – that showed he wasn’t too sick – and a bit of giggling and squeaking.

  ‘Not that kind of game!’ Cicva told him sharply, but not too sharply, not wishing to cut him short altogether. ‘There are too many people about.’

  There were, too. We had twenty-eight men in that ship, besides the two in the cabin, and it was a problem where to put them all. But at least they were sailors and didn’t get in each others’ way. Fat Bert suggested towing Lombard Bert behind on a line. This provoked a good deal of horseplay between the men who weren’t at the sweeps, and when I could listen again Gwawl was saying:

  ‘… and then you guess which cup the pea is under.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Cicva, ‘I have heard of it. Find-the-Lady, they do call it where I was brought up.’

  Now, I never heard it called that before, which shows how limited even a Master’s knowledge can be, and myself the greatest Lady-finder of them all. Gwawl added, deceptively offhand:

  ‘Of course, you have to bet something on it to make it worth the while playing …’

  And then I couldn’t hear for quite a time, because Goth Bert had them ship the sweeps and set the sail, bringing her round into the breeze, which was beginning to freshen a little. When all the shouting and running had stopped, I could hear Cicva sounding clumsily coy and not being very good at it.

  ‘We call it “Strip-Glyn-Naked”. Every time you lo
se a turn, you take another garment off.’

  Gwawl was very clever and played hard to persuade, but I could hear the prurient lust bubbling in his voice. For myself, I was getting a little worried, because I had planned for Cicva to do it all in one or two passes. But you can never trust a woman to stick to a plan. It was Gwawl, I thought, who needed the hyena hair, and Cicva played him like a fish when he thought he was playing her.

  First of all, of course, he let her win. She had his cloak. Then, though he didn’t realise it, she let him win. He won her apron, and her shawl, and her cap, a flat padded cap that the women there wear to carry tubs of shellfish on their heads. I was a little worried in case she took her wig off with her cap, but it all went well. She let him take all these with little squeaks of protest. Then she went to work.

  All those weeks in the litter, Cicva had studied the game of the pea and the three cups with the greatest Master of the Art alive, the greatest Master of all time, that is to say, with myself. I had also got her to a fair stage of dexterity with the finger game, and she could palm and switch dice as if she were a magician born, and by this time I was beginning to wonder if that were not what she was. Now this was the first time that Cicva had played against anyone but myself: it was, in fact, the first time she had played against anyone of inferior natural talent to herself.

  She just cleaned him out. On each turn, she had him staking another garment against the ones he had already lost. By the local rules where Cicva came from, and to which she insisted on playing, talking Gwawl down in a shrill torrent, she nominated the garment. First of all she regained her own clothes. Then one by one she took tunic and shirt and trousers and shoes. When she pointed to his belt, which had a big pouch on it, I heard him cry in an anguished voice:

  ‘No, no, you can’t take that. A belt is not a garment. Who will recognise me without my belt? You can’t make me gamble on that!’

  We were prepared for trouble at this stage, and Bert Longnose, who had looked in to see if they wanted any more beer, said:

  ‘Do what the lady says. You started it.’

  Bert Longnose was a very long thin man with a long thin evil face, and he had Lombard Bert’s axe in his hand, by accident, it seemed. So Gwawl put the belt on the table, and did what he could with the look of a drowning man. When Cicva had won it – she was working the cups now – she flicked it onto the deck of the cabin, and Bert Longnose heeled it out behind him through the leather curtain that served as a door. In a moment I was looking through the great wad of vellum by the light of the forecastle lamp.

  I had to read through the whole of the Monopoly Deed to make certain that all the pages were there, six of them, and to be sure there was no delicate knife-work and no clever alterations and improvements. The Deed of Transfer was on one sheet, with my cousin Philebus’ signature at the bottom. There were also a number of other documents of interest, letters of introduction from bankers in Rome to bankers in London, and, quite intriguing, some to the Commander of the Second Legion, who seemed to be in debt all over the place.

  I took the Deed of Transfer into the waist, where one of the lesser Berts had a brazier alight on a sand tray, and we fried eggs and bacon over the parchment towards dawn. The moon had gone now, and so had the stars, and there was thick mist rolling around us. I was glad I had put on a pair of the Gaulish trousers I had bought in Lutetia: tunic and bare legs may be civilised and gentlemanly, but they’re not for the sea in the North. Gaulish trousers – and British ones are the same – have wide bottoms to the legs, and they are easy to roll up when you’re walking through the swamps of that rained-on land: in fact, in the far West, you may even see the old men, who do not care about fashion, walking about in trousers cut off a little below, or even above, the knee. German trousers, of course, you will know, are tapered to fit tight and snug around the ankle, and in my opinion are quite unsuited to a maritime life: but the Berts all wore them, however impractical.

  When it was really light, Cicva came out of the cabin and sat with us eating, and peering through the mist trying to see the coast of Britain. Several times the Berts all agreed that they saw it, though I could have sworn it was just more mist. Gwawl didn’t join us.

  ‘Oooh! That was a night,’ said Cicva, when she had finished her breakfast, licking the fat off her fingers in a lady-like way. She stretched and blinked. ‘I hope that was what you wanted.’

  ‘Perfect. I trust you didn’t leave him anything.’

  ‘Not a sausage. And I didn’t give him what he was looking for, either. But I did give him an old apron to make him look decent. It was white, once, and I drew a black stripe on it with pitch, both sides, so he ought to be satisfied.’

  ‘Can I kill him now?’ asked Lombard Bert. ‘I haven’t killed anybody for – Hey! Come back! Bring it back!’

  Goth Bert went up on the forecastle, and threw the axe with a splash into the water. Lombard Bert screamed things after him that even Cicva knew to be obscene.

  ‘Waste of a good axe,’ I observed.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Fat Bert assured me. ‘It’s on a line. We’ll haul it out by dinner-time and sell it back. We often have to do it.’

  Lombard Bert’s curses were interrupted by some even more horrible cursing, and in a wider variety of languages. Gwawl had come out on to the poop, and was standing looking down at us in the waist. He was only wearing the apron for a breech clout, but he was by no means cold in the clammy air. He was aglow with rage.

  ‘I ought to have known that your family was behind all this,’ he shouted at me. ‘Where’s my clothes? Where’s the money? Give me back my clothes! Give me back my letters!’

  ‘Not likely!’ Cicva was happy, taking off her wig and wiping the paint from her face with Gwawl’s best shirt. ‘I won it all, fair enough.’

  ‘How much did she get?’ asked Fat Bert in an innocent interested way.

  ‘Every penny. She’s cheated me out of every penny I had.’

  ‘In that case,’ ruled Goth Bert, who tried to sound like the captain sometimes, ‘you can’t pay your fare, can you? Chuck him over the side!’

  And so they would have done, but Cicva asked, being soft-hearted, like all women:

  ‘Have you got a spare boat? Cheap?’

  Of course, they had, a round skin boat like the Picts use.

  ‘How much?’ she asked them.

  ‘How much had he got?’ they chorused. Cicva counted out all Gwawl’s money, which only came to three denarii in silver and a few coppers.

  ‘Just right,’ they said, ‘but a paddle is extra.’

  So for a paddle she gave them his clothes to share out, and that was worth having, because he had bought a lot of good tunics in Rome, and he had also picked up several pairs of Gaulish trousers in Lutetia. His best cloak they very generously put aside to take back for Marco, Goth Bert insisting on that. Those two scoundrels were already on very intimate terms of understanding, and I was afraid it might eventually turn out to their mutual advantage, as long as neither of them was hanged.

  We put Gwawl into the skin boat, and passed him down the paddle. Someone wanted to give him a knife, too, to cut his throat with, but when I pointed out that he couldn’t pay for it they all remembered what a dreadfully unlucky thing it is to give a knife as a gift: a free gift of a knife always cuts friendship, they told him.

  But we did give him a jar of beer, and a loaf of bread, and we left him the salmon mallet to scare the birds with. We gave him a lot of good advice, too, like, ‘Britain’s that way’, or, ‘A fortnight to Jutland if you paddled hard.’

  We weren’t so far from that elusive shore either. The Berts kept on pointing it out, but it all looked like mist to me, even though Cicva suddenly said that she could see a man holding a white shield. At that we pushed him off, and sailed away, leaving Gwawl sitting in his little boat, cursing us to the ends of all the world till we lost his voice far off in the mist.

  Chapter Five

  In fog there is no wind, or very little wind, and it
was the drift of the waves and Gwawl’s paddling that carried him out of sight of us. It got thicker. It is hard to tell at sea, but I do not think we could have seen anything fifty paces away, if there had been anything to see, or anything to pace on. We just sat there in the damp, soaking mist and waited for it to clear. We kept quiet. You never know who may not be about in fog.

  About the middle of the morning we heard a ship. It went by close, but not close enough to be seen. It was a big one, I should have said by the noise, thirty oars a side. They were paddling and listening by turns, you know how. A long stroke, and then lie back on your oars while you count up to eight … nine … ten … and then the hammer falls for the next stroke. And in between the strokes the only noise is the hiss of the water under your forefoot, and you have time to listen for other oars in the mist, or men talking or laughing.

  No one in the other ship talked or laughed. We only heard the oars. It might have been a Roman warship out looking for pirates, but Goth Bert thought it unlikely, and he ought to know. Cicva slipped into the cabin, and an awful lot of swords appeared from unlikely places. Someone gave Lombard Bert his axe back, free. We were safe enough, really. With twenty-nine of us altogether, counting Cicva with her cooking knife, in the old tub, there wasn’t really room enough for a boarder to get on to the deck, let alone do any mischief. However I was glad nobody had tried it.

  By the time the long-spaced oar-beats had died away into the wet mist, I had had enough.

  ‘All right!’ I shouted. ‘Get the sweeps rigged.’

  ‘Oh, no, not that again,’ everyone said in horror, and someone suggested, ‘Why don’t you whistle for a wind?’

  ‘That I won’t. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, and I’m out of whistle. We’ll sweep her – that is, you’ll sweep her.’ They still argued till I bellowed, loud as any wind, ‘Who’s chartered this barge, anyway?’

  Then they got out the long sweeps, two a side, three men to an oar, and worked in ten-minute relays, grumbling that this wasn’t what they had turned pirate for in the first place, and this was the penalty for descending to honest charter work. But they worked, all the same. We took a free vote on which way was north-east, and in that direction we made, I suppose, about half a Roman mile in the hour. I stood on the poop and gossiped with Goth Bert, who had made a study of his profession, about the general superiority of oars over sail, if only you can find enough men willing to row.