by John James
The blind man struck a few chords on the lyre – it was soon obvious that he knew nothing about music, but merely beat a rhythm and was there simply out of charity on Tannwen’s part – and the old woman sang, in a kind of monotonous repetitive melody:
The people down in Menevia that live by the edge of the waves,
The fish and the weed are their portion, for they are the Dead Gods’ slaves.
They shut themselves in their houses on the night of the Samain Feast;
They sit with their eyes to the water, they sleep with their backs to the east.
There comes a knock on the lintel, and the Fisherman walks to the sand.
He sets his boat on the wave tops, and he paddles away from the land.
The boat sits low in the water, the Fisherman hard strains he,
For heavy it is as if packed with men, though no man does he see.
When they come to the Isle of the Blessed, where the Green runs down to the Grey
The boat grows light and the dead go ashore, before the beginning of day.
But the Fisherman waits till he is paid, as he waited in days of old;
For every Blessed Soul he bears leaves him a scrap of Gold.
Oh, that is the Gold of Ireland, treasure that floats on the waves,
Collars and bracelets and cloak-pins, that the dead bring from their graves,
Though live men may go to Ireland, no living souls come again.
From the Isle of the Dead and the Blessed, the island beyond the rain.
Nonsense, I thought, just nonsense, as sensible as the doggerel metre it was sung in. But I wouldn’t be going to Ireland, not till the land was safe and settled and merely another good place for the family to have an agent. Then I might, might, go across and choose the agent. That could wait.
Chapter Eight
The next day we rode from Calleva to Spinae. There is, at least, some reason for Spinae’s being where it is. It is the place where the road to Corinium and Glevum leaves the road to Sulis and the Lead Hills, on the high ground above the crossing of the Kennet. But there is no real town there, although it would have made a much better place for one than Calleva. There are two inns, and a few small houses, and, where the roads part there is a kind of permanent market, where the peasants sit and sell off odds and ends of country produce to people who pass by. There is quite a good clientele, as a number of the travellers to Sulis are wealthy.
We clattered down into the village, Taliesin on his rather horrible horse, which kicked and bit everything and everybody in sight, and all of us loaded with the light bulky packages I had had so much trouble in picking up in Calleva, but which were, Pryderi noted with relief, the wrong shape for shield frames. We had an argument about which inn to stay at, and my two companions insisted for reasons of their own on our stopping at the dirtier and smaller of the two, even though I was paying. We unloaded the horses into a hut where we could all sleep on straw pallets on the floor. I stroked my parcels lovingly before I opened them.
‘These ought to sell well at the Forks,’ I said. ‘All we need is a few hours’ dry weather to sit out.’
‘What are you going to sell this time?’ Pryderi’s voice betrayed a certain loss of patience and confidence.
‘Saddles. We’re going to make some saddles tonight.’
‘Do we know anything about making saddles?’
‘We can try.’ I unwrapped a package. ‘I’ve got some saddle frames here, best second-quality beech, warranted well seasoned, at least three weeks since they were cut. Never mind, this leather will cover it all. It’s a good thing I brought so much of it – I wonder why Leo Rufus couldn’t sell it. Now, if we can make up some of the blue dye, we can have a fair stock by the end of the evening.’
‘But you can’t sit on leather and beechwood,’ Pryderi objected. ‘What about the horsehair for stuffing?’
‘Horsehair? No need for that. Why do you think I cut all those rushes when we crossed the Kennet? Now, we can all start by cutting out, and then stuff later.’
‘No,’ said Pryderi. ‘Taliesin can do all the stuffing. I can cut and sew, but he can’t handle iron.’
I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I came to think about it, Taliesin always ate with a bronze knife and he always shaved with a sliver of flint, and otherwise he never did touch iron. But while he worked on the saddles by lamplight I asked:
‘Are we likely to have any more trouble with the local guilds?’
‘Am I going to have trouble, you mean. The answer is, no. Spinae isn’t any kind of municipality, incorporated or unincorporated.’
‘If it comes to that,’ I went on, ‘could we really have argued our way through a court on those charges? Were the charters as specific as you said they were?’
‘How should I know, boy?’ Pryderi laughed all over his fat face. ‘I can’t read.’
Luckily there was no one in the inn that night who could read or tell a story. I should have slept peacefully, but instead I dreamed. I had not dreamed in Calleva, and that is why I know that nothing will ever happen there, but in Londinium I had dreamed of fire, and here on the road to Sulis I dreamed of battle. I remember a little. All through a day, I dreamed, we had stood against an army that came at us from the East, and towards evening they had fallen back, exhausted, and left us holding the field. And yet at that moment, a new army came at us from the West, along the road, and though they were as many as we were, yet we laughed, because they were too late. And I woke from that jumble of weary men and dead horses to find the dawn breaking bright and clear on a fine day for sitting by the roadside and selling whatever we wanted.
Pryderi and I sat there at the Forks, and the first four saddles we had made, and that Pryderi had painted, went very quickly and easily. But the last saddle stuck, and nothing I could say would persuade anyone to buy it. Of course, it was the old story you find all over Britain. Nobody will try anything new. This saddle was entirely my own work. I had painted it in the latest civilised style as I had the shield, with splendid details and gorgeous colours of the battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. This was much superior to the simple line patterns Pryderi used, and I’m quite sure that it wasn’t the art that people didn’t like. No, I know what it was. I had fitted the saddle out with an innovation just coming in then from Scythia. I had put two straps hanging down from the saddle, one on each side, and a loop on the end of each to put your big toe in. It was supposed to hold you on the saddle and let you use your hands more and give your knees and thighs a rest. Myself, I think it is a mistake in technology. I have tried it myself, and I didn’t like it at all. It took twice as much effort to stay on, and you couldn’t get off in a hurry if the horse fell or anything. Besides, there was all the trouble of riding barefoot.
Anyway, whatever the reason, nobody wanted to buy it. I began to think that I would never get rid of the thing, and that perhaps we would have to carry it on, or even use it ourselves. Besides, it was getting late, and I began to see us spending another night in Spinae. Then I noticed a scattering of birds among the sheep droppings. Even Calleva was a decently clean and cultured town, and they kept the streets quite tidy in a civilised way with pigs, who foraged everywhere and got rid of all the garbage people threw out of doors, just as they do in Londinium and Rome. But in Spinae, and in all the other little hamlets we came to after this, it was sheep they used, and the horrid things would come up and take the bread out of their mouths if people weren’t careful. I began to see why the Brits ate so much mutton – it was a way of getting their own back. But when there was a chattering of starlings among the droppings, I didn’t have to look up, nor listen for the chink of money bags. I began, automatically:
‘Great Lady, Great Lady, look here at this saddle. A masterpiece it is, a marvel of the saddler’s art, brand new and incorporating all the latest improvements and innovations brought straight from Rome. This is the way to be in the fashion, Great Lady, to be the envy of all your peers. Buy a Scythian saddle, made for th
e men who ride the great plains of grass not only all day but all the year. On their horses they eat, and they sleep and do all that they wish to do, and that without fatigue, and it is all due to these straps which they use to stay on their steeds while their hands do other things …’
‘Let’s see a two-seat saddle, then,’ said Hueil with a snigger. ‘For otherwise one generation of Scyths will have to last the life of all the world.’
I ignored him.
‘Now, Lady, just look at this decoration, at this painting,’ and I looked at it myself and the more I looked at it the more I realised that the side of the saddle I had facing me showed the rape of a mare-centaur by a one-eyed lapith, and the centaur’s anguished face, turned back over her shoulder as she tried to unseat the unwelcome Greek who tried to mount her, was that of Rhiannon. I could not remember consciously trying to do this, and yet, how our actions betray our thoughts. I could not for the life of me remember what was on the other side, so great was my confusion now as on every occasion I had seen Rhiannon, but I hoped that it was nothing to give offence, as Hueil was bigger and nastier-looking than I was, and there were the four other men, and Pryderi and Taliesin had run away. I went on:
‘Here we have the peak of the painter’s art, born of a skill built up over years of practice and hard study. Twelve hours a day this painter worked, Great Lady, all the days of his life, for forty years and more, till he was able to produce such a scene as you can see here. And look at the leather, Lady, look at the leather, feel the quality, genuine Cordoban, double-tanned for durability, double-stitched for strength, double-stuffed for comfort, the ground just the right colour to match your shoes. Most Mighty Princess, how could you ever forgive yourself if ever you missed an opportunity like this, a chance to buy his gem, and at such a price, too. And what is the price? What am I asking for it? Do I ask—’
She cut me short.
‘Why do you talk so much, Mannanan? You know that you could sell me anything, even yourself.’
I looked up at her, for the first time at the Forks. Have you seen the fishing-boats come in to sunny Naxos, the low sun glinting on the white and purple sails, loaded down with tunny, octopus and cuttlefish, oysters and mussels and sponges from the deep? As you see the skipper, leaning on the steering oar, smiling in joy for wealth and hope to live another day, so I saw Rhiannon, smiling as she bent above me, as a spear-fisher smiles looking down upon his prey. There was a necklace about her neck, of mussel pearls on golden wires, and her head piled with its copper hair was bound in a coral wreath. Her white and yellow silken cloak parted to show her linen blouse, embroidered with sea anemones and the weeds of the shore. She was a sight to drive any man mad. But I remembered, I was a Greek, I know logic and how to think and all the rules of Nature, and I drew myself up and I told her:
‘I am a Citizen of Rome, and of another city older than Rome, and I am no man’s slave. I am not bought or sold.’ I shifted back the folds of my sealskin cloak, which I was wearing that day to look more the great and rich merchant which I told the passers-by I was, and which indeed I am, greater and richer than any in Britain, and I showed the jewelled hilt and the bronze scabbard of the sword Burn, so that Hueil could see it. ‘I give myself where I please, and for no price that anyone can pay. I do not give myself to anyone who asks for me. But I will give you, Rhiannon of the Brigantes, this saddle.’
And that was the first time I spoke her name. Hearing it in my voice changed her temper. She turned and spoke sharply:
‘Hueil!’
He bent and picked up the saddle, and threw a gold piece in the dust before me. I picked it up, and bit it, ostentatiously. Then I told them:
‘Beware, Lady. A gift thrice refused brings bad luck.’
She had the last word, of course. She called:
‘Tell me that again, in the Summer Country.’
And off she walked, her cloak billowing out in the wind like a sail, but her shoulders beneath it were shaking with – what? Rage? Shame? Laughter?
I went back to the inn, where I found Pryderi and Taliesin already saddling up the horses. I tossed the gold piece in the air before them.
‘A fair rate of profit,’ I told them.
‘Count your money with care,’ Taliesin advised me. I looked at the coins. The first was struck by that old King in Gaul. The second – on the reverse was a tangle, dots and squiggles, not intelligible to any human being, not even to a Brit: it was just the pattern they always put on coins. But on the obverse was a head, crude, but recognisable: it was an attempt to draw a real man, someone who once walked the earth, and the artist had seen him, had known him. And above his head, some letters. With difficulty I read them: Tascio Ricon.
‘Tasciovanus, you would have called him,’ said Taliesin. ‘My ancestor, and Rhiannon’s, and even Pryderi’s. It was he, the great King, who defeated Caesar, and drove him back into the sea, never again to see Britain. That was in the days of glory.’
Like the first, it was new, crisp, unworn, unclipped, a marvel in a coin twenty years old, let alone nearly two hundred. But that the third coin, that I had received that day, should be in such a state was even a greater marvel. For a stater it was, a gold stater of Alexander, the Greek who conquered the world, and had he lived there would have been no need to call myself so often a Citizen of Rome as well as of my own city. And Alexander, remember, was not a Greek of those outworn cities of Attica, but a Macedonian, as far from the line of Themistocles or Solon as we of the old towns of Asia. But this stater – I looked at it. I knew the die well. This had been struck in the Old City, in my home, in my very house, by my own ancestor. These coins showed common ground between Rhiannon and myself. They were not choosen foolishly. I would not spend them easily.
Chapter Nine
We rode out of Spinae immediately, keeping our faces hidden as we went past the other inn, the one with a fine modern bath, for there, it was clear, Rhiannon would be staying. Beyond the Forks, we soon entered the Forest, and I began to wonder where we would sleep, because it was getting towards dark. But an hour’s ride west, Pryderi suddenly turned his horse off the road, and we followed him along a half-hidden path till we came to a hut, built, I suppose, long ago by some charcoal-burner. While I unsaddled the horses and hobbled them, and Taliesin fetched bundles of green bracken for our beds, Pryderi went into the hut. He came out again with, to my surprise, a hunting bow and a boar spear.
‘I feel like a taste of decent meat,’ he grunted and slipped into the woods. By the time I had lit a fire he was back, calling me, and I brought a packhorse and followed him to where he had killed a great stag. We got it back to the hut fairly easily, slung across the horse’s back, and there we did all the real butchering, burying the offal and hanging up the joints and the hide. We ate well on venison steaks broiled on sticks over the fire, and mushrooms Taliesin collected, of several different kinds which I had not seen before, but which he swore were harmless, and so they were, except that it was them, I suppose, that made me sleep so sound in the open air till Pryderi woke me to stand the last watch by the fire against wolves. Or perhaps it was the cider. Up till now I had drunk beer among the Brits, but my two companions had brought with them no beer but only a jar of cider, and then I began to realise what real ecstasy was. I will not hear a word said against beer, if that is what all around you are drinking. But if you have the choice, then cider is a drink for kings. I tell you this, once the Germans begin to taste cider, they will soon forsake beer utterly and plant apple orchards where once they grew barley.
But it was cider and venison again for breakfast, and then we travelled on to a village a little way from Cunetio. We stopped eventually outside an inn, and this at last was a real Brits’ stopping place. The other inns where we had slept had all been possible, just possible stopping places for civilised men who weren’t too particular, but this was no place for anyone who was not native born. We had stopped in the middle of the day for a bite of cold roast venison and an oatcake we bought from a
girl at a farmhouse by the way. All alone she was, and baking like a mad thing, for every other soul was in the fields at the last of the wheat harvest.
I remarked that I had already tasted enough of that stag to see me through a lifetime. Pryderi laughed.
‘And it’s more of him you’ll be having for your supper, but it’s depending I am on him to pay for our beds too.’
Sure enough, he was able to persuade the innkeeper that it would be just to take the carcase of the deer, and the hide and horns, to pay our bill.
Now, this was the first British house I had stayed in, that is to say, the first built in the British way. For all the nations of the earth build their houses with straight walls, and it is only the houses of their gods and their graves that they make round. But your Brit likes to build himself a round house, and simple it is to do. First of all you mark out a circle on the ground, and around this circle you dig holes two or three paces apart. In each hole you set an upright post, twice the height of a man. Then you join the timbers together with light rafters, and this you can thatch, leaving a hole in the middle of the roof for the smoke of the fire. Perhaps the house is not big enough for you. All right, then you draw another circle outside the first, and set there another ring of uprights, and thatch the roof between the inner and outer rings, and if you feel so inclined there is always room for another circle, because you have all the island to cover if you have a mind to. The walls you then fill in with basketwork well caulked with mud, or even with a few courses of stone. If for any reason you are not satisfied with one open hall to live in, then you can join uprights together to make booths, and so this inn consisted of a great round house, with an open hall at the door, and a ring of booths at the farther circumference.
We exchanged our deer, then, for the use of a booth for a night, and glad we were to get into it, because the luck that had brought us dry, if not fine weather now deserted us. The cloud got lower as the morning wore on. The girl who sold us the oatcake was looking anxiously at the first few drops showing on the flagstone at her door, and awaiting the rush home from the fields. By the time we reached the inn, three hours after noon, the rain was falling steadily in a monotonous drizzle, not heavily, but thoroughly. I was tolerably dry myself, because I put on my sealskin cloak, and that shed the water like – well, have you ever seen a seal? The other two had their soft leather jerkins, but all the same we were all glad to get indoors.