Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  ‘Let me see it.’

  ‘Aye, I will let you,’ he began, and it was obvious that he was about to launch out again into one of his interminable sentences, the only saving quality of which was that like all the Britons he was careful to begin each one with the main verb, but Pryderi passed him a leather-bound flagon of mead. The Dirty Man took a long, long swig. When he lowered the bottle from his mouth, he began to undo the basket with his free hand, saying as he did so:

  ‘Aye, sweet it is, the mead of the bees, sweeter than water, sweeter than death. But not so good it is as water to quench thirst. There is nothing like pure water from the spring to wash out the dust of the tunnels and the grit of the caves. In return for this, I will even let you have a piece of the earth coal. For it would not be right, nor fitting, nor lawful to give you a piece without payment and without price and without exchange. Into the very guts of the earth we go to gain it, and we cut it out from the roots of the hills. Into the heart of the rock and into the liver of the world we make our tunnels to find it, and there we hear the friendly spirits of the earth our mother. They warn us, when it is time to close our tunnels, and when they wish to bring down the roof so that the earth may rest fallow. And it is only the foolish man who stays when the spirits warn.’ He took another long draft at the mead. ‘Aye, here is a lovely piece for you, and worth the buying.’

  Now, what he said about it being wrong to give the stuff away I could well understand, having once been a doctor myself. When you have some skill or access to some commodity, and this has cost you a great deal of work in the past, then it is an act of impiety to the God who gave it to you not to show how much you value it by asking for it the highest price you can get. And if a man will not pay the price you demand, then he must go without. If he cannot pay for a fire or for food or for a doctor’s knowledge, then let him die of cold or hunger or disease. It is blasphemy for him to ask for food or firing or treatment free, and it is blasphemy for anyone to have pity on him and help him for nothing. This is the basic law of all religion, and the foundation of the science of medicine: no man is entitled to life unless he can pay for it.

  Anyway, this man looked into his pannier, and brought out a lump of something, I couldn’t see what at first, it was only a small piece and he hid it in his closed hands. With a look of complicity in some dark deed he put it into my hand. It was, to all appearances, a piece of stone, black, and sharp in contour, newly broken or quarried. It was soft, though, as stone goes. I could break it into little splintery pieces with my thumb-nail, pushing along straight cracks to split it into layers. It stained my fingers with black. When I split it along the cracks, the fresh surfaces caught the light. I was puzzled.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘If it is not knowing that you are,’ the Dirty Man replied, ‘then it is guessing you will have to be.’

  I turned it over and over.

  ‘It is too friable to be building stone. Likewise it would never serve for paving, even as occasional black pieces in a mosaic. It might, however, do for the black in a wall mosaic. Instead of using it as it is, perhaps you grind it down and use it to colour plaster black for wall designs. Or is it a dye?’ I spat on it. ‘Probably not, since it doesn’t dissolve in moisture. It might, though in oil, though I haven’t any and I can’t try it. I know it isn’t jet, since it is much too brittle to turn on a wheel. So, I suppose it must be an ore of some kind. What kind? Not iron, or lead, it is not heavy enough. But … tin is light. That’s it, I have it. It’s tin ore.’

  It was rather humiliating, I must say, to show a fine example of the methods of the sophists as I did then, and to be laughed at, but all the same Pryderi and the Dirty Man did laugh at me. Pryderi said, when he could.

  ‘Not to worry, you weren’t to know. I’ll show you tonight, you won’t believe me otherwise.’

  At that moment, the next section of our party came round the bend in the road behind us. The Dirty Man looked at them, moving on with the clusters of birds singing in the bushes at either side, and he asked sharply:

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Well, boy,’ Pryderi seemed to be ready to settle down for one of those irritating riddling chats the Britons are so fond of, and he was using his peasant voice to do it in, ‘that one in front, well, Taliesin that is, Taliesin of Mediometon.’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ said the Dirty Man, unimpressed. ‘The Druid. I seen him before, I did, and not much to look at now, is he? But her – who’s she?’

  ‘Her? Oh, well now, that is …’ Pryderi paused, savouring it. ‘Her, well she’s …’ and then it came in a rush – ‘Rhiannon of the Brigantes, Rhiannon herself, that is.’

  ‘Rhiannon herself? Herself? Here? Already here?’

  The Dirty Man was of a sudden out of breath. Rhiannon clearly was a different kind of being from us, or from Taliesin. He stared as she came nearer. As she approached, the wood on either side of the path was full of the scurrying of wood-pigeons, and jays, and tree creepers, and the songs of the thrushes and the warblers. The Dirty Man had pulled his old horse to the side of the road, and now he stood beside it, his hands raised level with his face, spread out, palms forward, his head bowed, the universal attitude of prayer. Rhiannon came level with us and reined in her horse. The birds fell silent.

  ‘What is it, my son?’ She gazed down at the Dirty Man, who did not dare to look her in the face. Rhiannon at this time was, perhaps, twenty-two or twenty-three, in the grand flush of her beauty. The Dirty Man was at least forty, nearing the end of a hard life. His drooping moustache was flecked with grey.

  ‘Bless me, my Mother, Mother of Those Below,’ he asked her. ‘Give me good fortune. Let me find the seams below, fat thick seams, rich and good, that will kindle and burn and give warmth to make men live and cook good food. Keep the choking mist from my lungs a few more years, and let me not be burnt in the great floods of flame, nor drowned in the blaze of waters. Let me not be caught behind the falls, and let your messengers tell me when the roof comes down. Only for a few years, my Mother, only for a few years, till the boy is old enough to come into the seam and feed himself, and his mother if need be.’

  ‘Be content my son,’ answered Rhiannon, speaking slowly and with ceremony. ‘Those who toil below are not forgotten by those who dwell below. You shall not come to your end till the boy can dig for himself. And this you have not asked aloud, but only in your heart and I will grant it you. You shall not die like the common run, standing or lying and in the light of sun and moon. You shall die like a man, crouching amid the falling stones and in the dark. When it is your time, I shall take you to myself in the bursting roof, quickly in noise and fury and in the blackness. This I grant you, my son.’

  Pryderi and I mounted. We all passed on. At the next bend in the road, I looked back. The Dirty Man still stood by the wayside, his hands still held before his face. His horse patiently cropped the grass behind him. The birds sang again about Rhiannon.

  Soon after that day we came to the crest of a hill. The sun shone almost level from a little west of south. In line with it, out of a great stretch of open country, a hill stood up, a tall round hill the shape of an upturned bucket, an echo of the mound of Arberth, but taller, much taller. Pryderi pointed.

  ‘See that? Once we’re past that, we’re in the Summer Country. That’s the place to be, for the winter. Spending winter in the Summer Country, there’s lucky you are.’ He spoke like a peasant, laughing like a simple man at the play on words, ‘Just let’s get past the Glass Mountain and then we’ll be right till the spring.’

  I took little notice of his Glass Mountain or any other strange names. Far, far away, something shone. It might be, it might not be, but I was sure, too, that I could smell it, faintly, faintly … it gave me life. Somewhere within a day’s ride was the sea.

  A mile or two down the forward face of the hill we came to another farm, and we were greeted by rooms ready for us, and stabling for the horses, and food ready in the pot. But this time it was no Ste
ward who stood to welcome us. Hueil dismounted, his arm still bandaged, and stood to receive us at his own door. It was a fine evening, almost warm by our standards, overpoweringly hot to the Britons, and we sat to eat in the courtyard, around a brazier set there for comfort and light and not for heat, and we sang, quietly and in harmony, out of joy at being surrounded now, not by mere friends, but, most of us, by our own kinsmen.

  ‘Where’s your keepsake?’ Pryderi asked me of a sudden. At first I couldn’t understand what he meant, but then I remembered, and out of my wallet I took my little piece of black stone. Pryderi took it, and fingered it for a while. Then he leaned forward and put it into the fire.

  ‘Watch!’ he told me. For a little while nothing happened, it just sat there black and dead. Then the stone began to glow at the edges, and little blue flames started from it. I remembered the officer at Rutupiae who had said, ‘They’re so poor, they burn the very stones of the earth for want of wood.’ Pryderi explained:

  ‘The people near here dig it out of the earth and peddle it about the country. It is good for fires. The Romans buy a lot of it for smelting the lead.’

  ‘It is the gift of the Gods Below,’ said Rhiannon. ‘It will be the salvation of the Isle of the Mighty.’

  Well, you know how women prattle. I saw a lot of it used later, and it does indeed burn very well, once you can get it to light, and that’s the problem: you have to get a good wood fire going first to kindle the stone, and of course if you can do that, what’s the use of looking for anything else. So who on earth would want it? It’s so heavy to carry, and takes so much trouble to dig out, that it will never replace the charcoal. No, there’s no future for earth coal.

  Chapter Two

  It is a strange place, the Summer Country. It stretches between the Glass Mountain and the sea, from south to north. On the east, the boundary is the bluff edge of the Lead Hills. On the west is the ridge that marks the edge of the Deer Moor, a desolate bare country where only the wild beasts live in winter, and where the sheep graze in summer. Between them is a low ridge that men call the Apple Land. I will tell you why.

  On either side of the Apple Land a river flows to the sea. And each river is ponded back by the tides into a marsh, so that swamps stretch from the edges of the Apple Land, east to the Lead Hills and west to the Deer Moor. That low land is covered in alders and willows, and little humps of land stand out of the swamp, which in winter are islands in the floods. And on a clear day you can stand below Hueil’s farm, and look over the Summer Country, and count a hundred little smudges of smoke, and every one is a farm in the marshes.

  We came down from Hueil’s farm and we entered the marsh, the horses following a firm path. We skirted the base of the Glass Mountain. I suddenly realised, at the foot, that we were passing through where once a village had been. The ruined houses, deserted these fifty years, were overgrown with weeds. There were only two farms still occupied. One of them had a farmyard, fenced in on three sides, and on the fourth butting against a rock-face, and within that a barn against the rock. The people of the place looked incuriously at us as we passed. We said nothing. We did not talk to each other on the long road into the marsh.

  The horses went well, carrying us down into the Mere. They stepped delicately along the track beaten out by the hooves of countless cattle. We passed into the meadows of long sweet grass, dotted with clumps of trees, and the ground about the track grew softer and wetter, and the grass longer and coarser, and the trees grew thicker and closer together. I realised that we were now riding along a made road, of logs laid crosswise in the way, covered with layers of gravel. It was a firm road, wide enough for two packhorses to walk abreast with a man between to lead them. It might well have supported even a wagon.

  In some places about us the ground was firm and in the bright meadows, too wet for sheep, grazed the little black cows you find everywhere in Britain. In other places you could see the water gleaming around the roots of the grass. Soon there were open pools, and wider lagoons, between ridges and tussocks of stiff reeds and bulrushes. There was no riding here, or walking either, off the track, but there was not enough water for a boat. In some places the lagoons were shallow, mere low-lying fields filled by the summer rains; but some of the pools were deep and black, good places, I thought, for pike. Now instead of scattered clumps of big trees, there were willows and alders on the edges of the pools, and between patches of scrub, too dense for a man to push his way through quickly on horseback, or even to think of entering on foot. There was no choice but to follow the track.

  Deeper and deeper we went into the marsh. The water looked like lead under the cloudy sky. There was now no sound but the scuffling of hooves, and the occasional twittering of birds following Rhiannon. Pryderi rode with me, and behind Taliesin went with Rhiannon. Nerthach and Duach brought up the rear. Both Rhiannon and Taliesin looked straight ahead, with faces emptied of fear or joy. Only, from time to time, Grathach far ahead broke the silence with a sad and shapeless song, too faint for me to hear the words. I did not know where we were going, or what we would find in the Summer Country. I tried not to guess.

  We saw no people. There were people living in the marsh, sometimes so close to our road that we could smell their fires, but we never saw them. There were piles of willow withies cut and stacked by the side of the log road, and stacks of logs, too, sometimes, ready for the charcoal-burners. There were boats on the lagoons, crude things carved each out of a single log, blunt-ended, just enough to keep a man afloat while he fished. We still saw cows where the ground was firm enough: they must have belonged to somebody, I thought. There was nobody to talk to us, or to watch us, that we could see. But I was sure that we were seen, and watched.

  Now we had been moving for half the day, with never a stop for food or rest. There was very little open land now, only the thicket and the marsh and the narrow road. It was now too narrow for two horses abreast, and I followed Pryderi. The willows hid the hills on either side. The Glass Mountain had long since vanished. There was nothing to be seen at all but the thicket, either within arm’s reach on either side, or a spear’s throw away across black stagnant water, covered sometimes with green slime. Beavers fled from before us into their lodges, and otters, water dogs, as the Britons call them, looked up from their fresh-captured fish on the far banks and watched us without fear. Herons stood in the reeds to see us pass. Moorhens and duck went about their business unheeding. This was no place for men.

  I felt lost. I was lost. We were far from any human contact. There was an end now of houses and wine, of fires and the friendly talk of wise men. There was nothing but thornbush and grey cloud and water. There were no hills, no firm ground, nothing to which a man could cling, nothing real, nothing definite, only infinite marsh. All was lost. I knew that this was the end of the world, that all that lay before me was delusion and disaster.

  I had vowed myself to the Gods Below, and now it was the Mother of the Gods Below who rode behind me, displacing the Priest of the Unconquered Sun, on whom I might no more call for help. I knew now that I would never return to the real world, that there was no real world, that whatever I might see in future would not be the world. I had passed through the Gates of the Dead. I would never return. I was alone. I was dead.

  The scrub grew denser. It closed in on both sides of the path. There was only a narrow gash in the green wall ahead. Grathach, in his cloak of striped black and yellow, moved his pony through the gap, and was gone. Pryderi checked his horse a little. I touched his shoulder:

  ‘Forward?’ I asked.

  ‘Forward,’ he replied. ‘There is no other way.’

  The path wound through the wood. The green waterfalls of the willows curtained me in on every side. I turned left and then right with the path, and left again, I moved here and there, twisting around the trees, turning in my horse’s length. Pryderi was too far ahead to be seen. The twists of the path became more and more violent, more frequent. I became dizzy clinging with knees and heels and ar
ms to the horse as he scrambled among the soggy tufts and the fallen branches, black with rot and speckled with red. I was lost and alone in this wilderness, it was death, it was Hell, this was Hell, to wander for ever with no hope of ever arriving, no hope of any rest or any end.

  And then I came to, not an end, but a beginning, a choice. The path forked. One way went to the right, the other to the left. There was no telling which way to take. I sat still and listened. There was no sound, no sound of horses’ hooves, no sound of feet. There was no voice to be heard, not even Grathach’s song, nor the songs of the birds. There was no one in the marsh, no one on the path, no one before me or behind. I was alone. I had no help. I must decide. And yet, I was sure that I was not alone, that eyes watched me, alive or dead, that nothing I did but was known. And I understood that whatever I did now I must do alone, that there would be no help from any being.

  Which way to go? I sat, and I listened to the silence, and I sniffed at the air. There was no sound, nor the smell of fire, nor fresh tracks on the path, nor horse droppings nor broken twigs. But somewhere, along one path or another, I would find the Master of the Western Sea. And where would he be but by the sea?

  I put my hand into my wallet. I took from it a shell, one of those rare Indian shells, glossy and striped in cream and brown, and speckled over with black. The mouth of this shell is a slit, all set along with teeth that never move or grind together, and if a man puts his ear to the mouth, then he can hear the sea, however far he may be from it. And that I tell you is true, for by such a means I have heard the sea in the middle of a desert, and on the top of a great mountain. And there in the marsh I put the shell to my ear, spitting first on the ground, because I had no other offering to make to the gods of the place, whoever they were. I turned to my right, and I listened, and I heard the patter of little waves on a beach, rattling the stones in the undertow, and so faint that it could hardly be heard. And then I turned to the left, and I heard the great waves of the ocean, driven by the west wind, tumbling and crashing in ruins of foam, seas to crush ships and drown whales and take up great stone jetties and cast them into the market-places of towns. If there were ever a sea worth the Mastery, then this was it. I turned to the left.