Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  This painting took me the latter half of the day, and when I finished, it was nearly dark. But there, in the twilight, Pryderi took another shield, and a tiny disc of scarlet paint, and a chewed hazel twig. He dipped the end of the twig in the paint, and on the azure surface of the shield he drew one line. It was a long sinuous line, and he drew it all in one movement, never lifting the brush from the leather. There we saw, when he finished, a great Pictish bull, head down, tail up, pawing the ground, ready to charge. I expected him now to fill in this outline with lights and shades and patches of colour, and to make the background rich with trees and grass and rocks. But no, instead he took the same brush and the same colour, and in the bottom half of the shield he drew a second bull, but this one facing the opposite way. Hideously bare and stark the whole shield looked, when he laid down his brush, just the two bulls in outline. Ah, I thought, tomorrow we shall see I will have to fill in that picture for you, when all the other shield blanks are sold and we want to get one off our hands. You will be coming to me, Pryderi, and asking for lessons in how civilised men paint pictures.

  So in the morning he and I went into the market place. Taliesin excused himself, on the plea of business elsewhere. We two found a comfortable place at the base of a pillar, and a couple of denarii to the market warden made sure that the lack of early booking would be overlooked. And I stood there, with my great picture shield covering my body from neck to ankle, as we see painted on old vases, and I began to talk.

  ‘Comrades and brothers, listen to what I say.’ Of course they always listen, it doesn’t cost anything, but once they listen they may, may perhaps, buy.

  ‘Proud am I of my ancestry. Proud am I of those who came before me. Proud am I that I can recite the names of my progenitors, to the fortieth generation. And so should you be proud, that can do as much. But do you show your pride in your houses? Do you hang on the walls the signs of your noble birth and the deeds of the great kings from whom you are sprung? I know you do. I know that it is only the cost, and the dearth of men who are skilled in handling the brush that holds you back from honouring each several one of your immortal ancestors. But now all your problems are solved. Here we are before you, shield- and sign-painters by appointment to His late Sacred Majesty. Out of pure piety, and love for our kinsmen, and desire to improve the palaces of our native land, we have come to offer to you shields painted and decorated in any pattern your ancestral piety requires, and that merely for less than the cost of the materials. And such a small sum we only charge because it is well known that no one values a free gift. But do not delay, because we wish to be equal benefactors to all the nations of the Isle of Britain, as much to the Silures and to the Coritani as to the Cantii and to the Atrebates. Come now while there is still time, and while we have any shield blanks left to paint on.’

  And they came – oh, Zeus, how they came. They pressed on us to buy. But to my chagrin, there was not a man who wanted to buy my shield of Peleus and Thetis, even though we swore that it showed Dylan the Son of the Waves, nor did anyone want anything in that style. In fact, they said bitterly that it was rubbish like that which was all one could buy nowadays, and that good honest old-fashioned art like Pryderi’s bulls could not be bought for love or money. And indeed, when I thought of it, it was in pictures like his that the Brits embroidered their linen and painted the outsides of their houses, in bright lines on the whitewash. So I talked and sold and haggled, while Pryderi sat with bowed head and painted bulls and sea horses and chariots and the geese flying high.

  So, with great profit, we came to the end of the morning, and Pryderi was painting the last shield blank with a wild boar, and I was even wondering whether it would not be good trading to wipe out my Thetis and let him spread his swine over it, if only it showed a profit, when I realised that the crowd that had thronged about me all the morning had fallen back, and that in front of me instead of people were a flock of pigeons, all cooing and coocoorooing and sweeping the ground with their amorous breasts. And even as I divined what it was, I heard a voice say:

  ‘That’s a pleasant daub. I would have preferred Eurydice, of course, but there’s no choice.’

  There was never a voice like Rhiannon’s, singing or speaking. Smooth and clear it was, like cream pouring out of a jug, whatever language she used, whether Greek or Latin or the tongue of the Brits. Sweeter by far it was than the murmuring of the doves, that still swarmed about her feet like bees upon a lime branch. A voice it was to make your hair stand on end with love and lust and desire for beauty in the dark as well as in the light. I looked up to where she stood, Hueil and four other men behind her.

  Oh, have you ever seen the Imperial pleasure galleys on the Lake of Trasimene? Splendid they are in scented cedarwood, with figureheads of ivory and rams of bronze. Each mast is a single fir tree from the groves about Olympus, and the yards from strange and secret woods, from the sources of the Nile. Of cloth of Gold are their single sails, the shrouds and stays of copper wire, the dead eyes are carved from ebony and the blocks from the wood of life. The handles of the oars are lapped in the hide of the gentle unicorn, and the rowers’ benches cushioned with velvet stuffed with down. The tacks and sheets and braces they twist from the hair by virgins, vowed to the Great God Neptune in Colchis by the sea.

  So I saw Rhiannon stand there in the market. The infrequent sun was shining on her Gold and copper hair. About her shoulders she had thrown, to hide her splendid bosom, and veil from the eye of covetous man her silk and cotton blouses, a cloak of strange and shining cloth, of the fine, close silk from Samos, the warp of white and shining thread, and all the wool of yellow. Thus in that fine and shimmering Gold and white, fastened by a morse as big as a man’s two hands, of bronze inlaid with Gold and emeralds, Rhiannon bargained with me for my painting. So I began to talk, and I took my tune from some brown pedlers I once met, men from, I think, India. I told her:

  ‘Aye, this is a masterpiece, Great Lady, a painting fit for the Gods. It is on work like this that I rely to keep my children from starving through all their long lives, without their doing any work themselves, because all they have to do is to say that it was their father that painted this shield, and in any civilised place a grateful Government will feed them at the common table and clothe them out of the public purse, out of sheer joy that a man could exist who could bring such beauty to birth.’

  ‘That is as may be,’ she interrupted, and at the sound of her words I would have given her anything. ‘How much?’

  But the inborn skill of a hundred generations of merchants was too strong in me at first. I answered, without thinking:

  ‘How much? You ask how much, Great Princess, for the work of all my life, for all my stored-up skill, for all the knowledge that went into compounding the colours and priming the ground? How much is the wisdom of all mankind worth? Think of the great emotional experience that went into it, that was necessary before I could conceive of such a scene’ – and looking at it dispassionately, I had to admit that I had given to Peleus a look of sheer lust that I would have given a great deal to have achieved: I mean, at my age it would have taken something pretty ripe to have aroused a response like that. I went on:

  ‘But let us be looking, Great Lady, at the hypotheses of the matter. Supposing that such a painting were for sale, where should we start the bidding? At two hundred denarii of silver? At—’

  She looked at me coldly and said:

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Glory be to all the Gods. At last, Lady, for the first time in all my life, I have found someone who would truly admire and value great Art, who would start the bidding at a price higher than even I would deem proper, at a price which would almost cover the cost of the materials and the hire of the splendid studio where I did the work. Hear, all of you who stand round’ – though it was painfully obvious that the only people within earshot were Rhiannon’s bodyguard, their cloaks much streaked with birdlime, for everyone else had retired to a safe distance, though whether to be safe from th
e men or the pigeons I did not inquire – ‘hear, all the men of Britain, this Great Queen values my work at three hundred denarii!’

  ‘Not three hundred, you fool. Three denarii. New ones.’

  ‘Oy-oy-oy!! Do not mock a poor artist, Great Lady, do not make game of a humble man who labours with his hands day and night to bring beauty into the world, and has nothing in his purse but what will bring him a crust of bread tonight, and a dip at the common fountain, and leave to lie in the corner of a stable seeking the filth of the horses for warmth! Look, Lady, look at these nymphs’ – and I traced the outlines of their bottoms lovingly, taking care, however, not to touch the surface in case the paint was still wet – ‘see the warmth of affection I put into them, the delicacy of the brush strokes, the vibrating movement of their draperies …’ The draperies seemed to vibrate because while I was painting Thetis’ attendants, Pryderi was telling dirty stories, and I laughed so much at the one about the Old Woman of the Bog and the Pedlar’s Mule that I couldn’t have drawn a straight line to save my life. ‘How could you think of such a paltry sum in the same moment as seeing these little darlings? Let us say fifty. Great Lady, a mere fifty, to anybody else it would be a hundred, but special to you, Lady, special to you, I will charge only fifty.’

  ‘I might pay twenty,’ she said cuttingly, ‘if I were buying it in the dark, and there was no other picture in the market, and I were anxious to cover up a bad spot on the wall in a room never seen except by candlelight.’

  ‘At twenty denarii you value it, my Lady? Then I will not ask you to pay twenty denarii for the great crowning glory of my life. I will not ask you ten, or even five. Lady, I grant it to you freely as a gift. I will take nothing for it. I say, I give it to you. Take it away quickly before I repent and take it back again. I am already in tears at the very thought of losing it.’ And I pulled the hood of my cloak down over my face, but not so far that I could not see, and I wept bitter tears, most convincingly, loud and wet.

  Rhiannon picked up the shield. She put her arm through the strappings. It looked, in spite of the painting, very martial – I still wondered why the Brits liked shields of that size and shape. She called over her shoulder:

  ‘Hueil! Pay him!’

  Hueil came over. He looked me straight in the eye a moment. Then he flung a coin down into the dust. I felt outraged at this insult to my dignity, but I picked it up, all the same. I mean, Gold is Gold, and it can all be spent. Hueil walked away, brushing feathers from his cloak and all the pigeons flew off after Rhiannon in a swarm. I tied the coin in a corner of my shirt, and I looked around for Pryderi. He emerged from behind the pillar. I was about to start to discuss with him the disposition of the profits when a large and important-looking man came up to us.

  ‘Are you the two who’ve been selling shields here?’ he asked.

  ‘And lovely shields they were too,’ answered Pryderi, though I was pinching his arm as hard as I could, because this man had petty official written all over him. ‘Now, if you want one like that, then just tell me your name, and your clan, and your nation, and the name of your father, and I will have one designed and painted and executed that will tell all the passers-by unmistakably and clearly and plainly how rich and great and powerful is your descent.’

  ‘That is all I wanted to know,’ the minor official replied. ‘An obvious admission. I am the treasurer of the Guild of Shieldmakers and Armourers of the County of the Atrebates, and though it is disarmed we are, and have been for many years, and there is no making of weapons allowed, so that the main concern of our members is with the welfare of the poor and sick among us, yet still we have the monopoly of the making of shields in this Country, under the provisions of the municipal by-law “Whatsoever person” of the seventh year of the Emperor Hadrian. And this Country, which extends from the southern edge of the Oak Forest to the banks of the Thames, has for its centre and chief place this town of Calleva. And I have not seen any record that you have paid a contribution into our common fund, as is good and right and proper.’

  Now the last thing that I was willing to do was to pay for what by now amounted to a burial club of well-to-do tradesmen to eat an extra dish at their annual feast if there was any way out of it, but for the moment even I could see no way out. But Pryderi caught on something.

  ‘The making of shields.’ He rolled the words around his tongue. ‘There is a fine phrase for you. There is a fine legal phrase. It insinuates the activity of a trained man, who has passed through all the stages of his apprenticeship, and who can cut the wattles and plait them into a basket, who can plane the seasoned lime planks, who can tan leather and dye it, who can beat out sheets of the red bronze and emboss it and enamel it. All this is comprehended in the phrase “the making of shields”. No, there is no ambiguity there. “The making of shields”. A splendid craft.’ Pryderi looked sideways at the official, like a cat at a mouse it wants to make a move to escape. Then he struck, fast and accurate as a shark. ‘But we have not been making shields. We have been supplying them, and we have been assembling them from materials made for us by other trained and skilled shieldmakers in other towns: and it has been for citizens and councillors and senators and noblemen of your town and of all the County of the Atrebates that we have been doing it, and I can recite to you all their names, and their attributes that I painted on the shields which we assembled. So it will be all these gentlemen as well as us you will be having to prosecute if this comes to anything, if it is that there was an offence which it is not saying that there was I am there was.’

  The official spent a little time disentangling Pryderi’s meaning from his syntax, which had grown a little wild, and that not by chance. Then he said:

  ‘Deceived it was they were, all these respectable people. They could not know that you were not members of our Guild nor of any Guild affiliated thereto nor licensed to act as if you were being members of our Guild, and they will so testify.’

  There was a point there that Pryderi could have kept the pot a-boiling on for hours if he had felt so inclined, but he was tired, and hungry, and, especially, thirsty, as he confessed later, and so he returned to an earlier point of attack.

  ‘It is showing, you will have to be, that your by-laws have been infringed by our making and supplying shields. Now in the first place, it is showing you will have to be that either of us both made and supplied shields, and that is difficult, because although you may be able to prove that one of us sold shields, you will not be able to show that he made or painted shields, or that the other, though it may be he painted shields, ever supplied or sold or even presented any shields. And it is then showing you will have to be that the painting of shields, which is all you will have any evidence for, is covered by that clause, and sentence, and phrase of your by-laws that concerns the making of shields, and it is tolerably certain I am that it is not, and that if you appeal to the by-laws of other towns on this point, then there is no parallel you will find. Now my friend here is of that opinion, and he has had experience of all manner of courts throughout the Empire, though it was always Not Guilty it was they were finding him, the Gods be glorified, and it is easy enough we will find it to hire lawyers, better than any that usually find it worth their while to practise in a hole like this. Now, is it willing you are, and only the hired treasurer and all, to commit the members of your guild to an expensive lawsuit when it is plain that it is not the by-laws of your own Guild you are knowing yourself?’

  Well, the official, poor man, hummed and hawed to make a brave face of it, but of course in the end he agreed not to begin a prosecution, as long as we promised him not to do it again, and that we could easily do as we had used all the shield frames, though not all the leather and the dyes. And on top of that, Pryderi terrorised and browbeat him, by threatening to blacken his name to the Guild members, into giving us a silver denarius to pay for our dinner at the inn, to which we merrily returned, but not till I had myself made a few purchases in the market.

  At the inn, we found T
aliesin already waiting at a table for us. We called for our supper – the argument with the treasurer and my bargaining had taken more time than you might imagine. The inn was unusually luxurious for Britain. There was a real choice of dishes for the meal. I could have sheep’s head, breast of lamb, shoulder of mutton, or a sheep’s stomach stuffed with mutton offal minced, and then boiled. I began to realise that by leaving Londinium I had entered into the land of the Sheep. It is mutton that the Brits mostly live on. Cattle they keep, but only for milk, and to boast about how rich they are. Their real life is based on sheep, which clothe them and feed them, although they will deign to eat pork when it seems appropriate. I remembered bitterly that at Pontes I had a choice of leg of lamb or stewed beef, and I had chosen the lamb as being more of a rarity in my life. Alas, alas, what we miss through ignorance.

  However, I chose a dish of sheep’s brains, and beer with it, and we chatted on this and that, till suddenly, apropos of nothing at all, Taliesin said:

  ‘And if it is Ireland you are thinking of, then I am thinking it would not be a wise place for any man of this island or from farther east to be going to. For the Irish to come here is one thing. But for a human being to go there is another, because it is doubtful it is, I am telling you, whether the Irish are human in the sense in which we use the word.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

  For answer, he turned towards the door, where looking timidly into the room were two people, an old blind man with a kind of lyre which is popular in those parts of the world, and an older woman. He beckoned them over.

  ‘Now, Tannwen, my daughter,’ he said with all the assurance of Priesthood and thirty years (or less – I was never quite sure), ‘sing us your old song about the Western Ferrymen.’