Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, spitting out the stone from a dried plum from Dalmatia. ‘Poverty is a dreadful thing.’ I remembered the talk I had heard in Londinium. It was not conquest that hurt the Venetii – it had harmed, say, the Atrebates little. No, it was the Roman fiscal policy which insisted that all trade with Britain should go through the Channel ports, where it could be taxed, and the dreadful penalties inflicted not only on any Britons who dealt with smugglers but also on any merchants who might try, in Gaul, to hire a ship in the West and trade any other way. The Venetii had seen their ships destroyed, and even if they had been able to rebuild there would have been no further employment for them. But some of those ships still remained – I knew, I had once stolen one from Caw himself, and there might be others. If there were no others, what was I doing here? Oak-planked they were indeed, and pegged with elm, but on to frames of ash, and elm-decked, and these two woods had no quarrel with iron: and they were not rowed, but driven by a great lugsail of leather, that would let them beat into the wind. Were there indeed any left? And if not, where did Caw’s wealth come from?

  I wondered about that all through the evening. We were all very merry. At the end of the evening, Grathach and Nerthach complained, as we made our way to the house where we were to sleep, that I was very drunk: I must have been – they dropped me twice.

  Chapter Four

  I must say that Caw stood up to the drinking very well for his age. We drank till two hours before dawn, and the sun was scarcely beginning to rise when he woke me and hurried me out into the thin rain, clutching my cloak and sword.

  Silently he led me along past the sleeping houses, set far apart, because it is a characteristic of the Britons that they hate their kinsmen and each man’s ambition is to live where he cannot see his neighbour’s smoke. We did not walk far, only to an arm of the marsh where there was a small boat, hollowed out of a single log, hidden under the branches of a willow. We got in and paddled away from the houses, north-west. I had the choice of either wearing my cloak and being hot and wet, or of taking it off and being cold and wet, in the strong west wind and driving rain. I was dead weary from lack of sleep. I soon had corns over my bottom from sitting on quite different places from the ones you use to ride a horse, and all the rest of me was stiff – there were so many muscles I had not used since I sailed into Ostia. After hours, all I wanted to do was to lie on the bank and die, but Caw hurried me on.

  When we cleared the north edge of the Apple Hills, we could see the edge of the Lead Hills east of us, like a long cliff, and the column of smoke from the Mines, but only when we came, as sometimes we did, out of the patches of willow and alder that stood up out of the waters. Well after noon I was ready to refuse to go any farther, and the only thing that gave me any hope was the strong smell of the salt sea.

  Neither of us spoke much, except what was necessary to keep her head the right way, and among the willows it was more like choosing roads in a city than steering a boat. But at last, of a sudden, Caw barked:

  ‘Up there, left, up that backwater!’

  We came left, into a narrow channel, which widened out as such inlets often do, into a broad expanse of shining mud. And there, beached, was a ship. A real ship, I tell you, not a skin boat or a single log, but a ship. This was one of the Venetii, all right. High she stood out of the water, or would stand when she was afloat, with sides of oak planks, and decks of elm, and a high poop to help her ride a following sea. She had a single mast stepped a little forward of amidships, and the yard was down on the deck, but there was no mistaking it – she was rigged with lugsail.

  There she lay among the leafy willows, with a couple of men scraping the barnacles off her timbers. We pulled ourselves up a rope on to her deck. A man sitting at his ease in a shelter under the poop got up to meet Caw, bowing to him. He had First Mate written all over him, mainly in his attitude of extreme indolence while his men worked. Caw said to him:

  ‘Keeping well is it you are, Madoc? This is him.’

  ‘Oh, you, is it?’ said Madoc to me. ‘Here, have something to eat.’

  He held out a plate, full of gobbets of some anonymous meat. On the bank, someone had a charcoal brazier and was frying some more. I looked at the food cautiously. You never know what Barbarians may, or may not, give you. They might well have been trying me with Swan, just for the fun of it. I asked:

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘If it’s wearing it you are, then it’s eating it you can be,’ Madoc told me. ‘Seal this is. Fresh, too – only killed three weeks ago.’

  So I ate it. I looked around. The hatches were off, and there were a couple of men in the hold, trimming cargo, for the ship was obviously ready for sea, though where the water was that could float her was a mystery. On the bank, men were loading panniers on to packhorses. The strange thing was, that the cargo being trimmed in the hold and the cargo in the panniers was the same – dull grey bricks. Lead, I thought. I asked Caw:

  ‘Where do you get it?’

  He knew what I meant. He grinned.

  ‘From up there.’ He pointed to the smoke on the Lead Hills.

  ‘Buy it?’

  ‘Aye … in a way. You see, there are men we know who go in and out of the mines, and carry in the earth coal they use to smelt the ore. And there are other men there, in the mines and in the melting shops, who will do a great deal for very little, because it is very little they have, nothing at all, you might say, except their lives, and a twist of rag about their loins. So they will do, you understand, anything for a bite of decent food, or a jug, or even a sip, of cider. And there was once we even smuggled a woman in, and she stayed a week, and made her fortune, but she said she wouldn’t do it again – too tiring.

  ‘So men who carry earth coal in carry lead out, and lead in again. I suppose you know, there is more in lead than lead.’

  ‘Silver,’ I breathed. ‘There is always silver in lead.’

  ‘Aye, silver, and that is why the legions work the lead here and farther north, and if it were not for the silver they get out of it they would not stay in this island at all. So we take, let us say, perhaps one ingot of new smelted lead in five, and north we go to the Picts, and there it is arrangements I have with men, kings mostly, who will cupellate it for me. But we have to cover it over somehow, because book-keepers and centurions would come very expensive to bribe, as you may imagine, so it is pure lead we bring back, and send it in with the coal.’

  ‘No wonder you live so well in the Mere,’ I told Caw. ‘A very pretty scheme. It does you credit.’

  ‘As long as no one finds out. The tax-collectors don’t notice what you have if there isn’t Gold or silver on the table. And why shouldn’t we live well? It is our land, and our hills, and our silver, and our lead. Why should we not charge a little rent?’

  Then he drifted off into conversation with Madoc, and I sat down a little against the bulwarks, and somehow or other I fell asleep. When I woke up, my head now thoughtfully pillowed on a cushion of swansdown, we were, where I most love to be in ordinary times, at sea!

  I leapt up, reaching for my sword, and cursing at Madoc, who was at the steering oar, and at Caw, who was conning us between the mudbanks, and this was difficult because we were, in general, working in the opposite direction to the one where the wind came from.

  ‘What are you doing with me?’ I demanded. It was clear that they were still on speaking terms because they had left me my sword. Caw answered, in his careful way, between orders to Madoc:

  ‘It was thinking, I was, that if it is proposing you are to trade on the Northern Seas, then it is the realities of the situation you should be knowing, before it is any obligations you are taking on yourself and on your family.’

  ‘Whatever the realities,’ I replied, ‘I am in too deep now to draw back.’

  ‘But I am not,’ said Caw, flatly. ‘I have not yet decided whether I will entrust a ship of mine to you, and it is more I am wanting to know about how you behave at sea. And so I thought a short v
oyage would be a fine experience for you.’

  ‘A short voyage? And what good will a short voyage do?’ For I thought he meant a day and a night aboard. But he answered:

  ‘We will be back for Samain. Seven weeks let us say.’

  ‘Seven weeks? Seven weeks! No! Take me back! I have traced Rhiannon all this way, and now I have found the Lady, then I will not lose her again for you.’

  ‘Quiet, boy,’ said Madoc. ‘It is in the Mere that Rhiannon must stay now, till Samain and past Samain to midwinter.’

  ‘And there is no going back now, Mannanan,’ added Caw, ‘either for you or for us, because we held the ship a week to wait for you, and if we stay another day the weather will be too bad for us to return.’

  There was nothing for it. A-voyaging I went, and if I were to tell you the whole story of the voyage, you would hear only the usual travellers’ tales. We went to the land of the Western Picts in lead, and from there in wool and tanned leather to the Land of Norroway, and brought back walrus ivory and the hides of the tame deer to the land of the Picts where we loaded again with lead and silver, now separate. And I found, and it is true, that in these parts of Ocean, the waves at the end of the summer are as high, and the winds as wild, as anywhere in the Mediterranean in the depths of winter, when we prudent captains will not leave harbour. And more, I found that it is a common thing for the ships there to go altogether out of sight of land, not merely for a day or half a day, as we often may to cut across between two capes with a perishable cargo and an expensive crew, but for four or five days together between one island and another. And at the end, beating home south into a south-west gale, it took even all my strength and skill to hold her steady.

  And you would not believe even the most ordinary stories I could tell, how we married Madoc to a mermaid when he was drunk, and how Caw won the crown for telling the saltiest story at the Salmon Feast of the Picts, and how we moored at an island so that Coth the son of Caw could cook for us, and it sank beneath him and left him floating, spouting out a cloud – oh, I could tell you tales for seven weeks of what we did in those seven weeks, and of each of them you would say, ‘Oh yes, but I heard that tale of so-and-so.’ So I will not bother.

  But in seven weeks’ time, we returned to the Mere, and we beached the ship where no man would find her. Then, in a skin boat, Caw and Madoc and I paddled back to Caw’s house. And it was two days before the Samain Feast.

  Chapter Five

  My bad luck came at the Samain feast. It had to come, because there is no good luck lasts for ever. Samain is the feast at the beginning of November, when the Britons bring in their sheep from the hills to fold them in close to the farmhouse, safe from wolf and bear. And just as the animals are folded in, so the family and the nation are folded in, and the house is full not only of the living but also of the dead and those who are yet unborn.

  Most people believe that the dead go down to Hades. There they exist for ever in dirt and rottenness, envious of the living, and therefore most people fear the dead. But not the Britons. Why, they say, should a man be afraid of the mother who bore him, and the father who fondled him and taught him to live? Why should he fear the grandmother who nursed him to sleep as a toddler and wiped away his tears when he fell over his own feet and kept for him the best titbits of the kitchen and the sweetest apples? Why should a man fear the comrades who fell at his side in battle or slipped from his outstretched hands into the waves, or the loved ones who died in his arms of fever or dysentery?

  No, the Britons know better. Their Samain Feast is a feast indeed, and the Happy Dead are welcome. And so are all wayfarers. That is why I sat at the feast next to Caw, who as befits the head of the house sat with blackened face upon a ploughshare. And next to me, coming out of the mists the day before, only a day after we had landed from the northern seas, was the Setanta.

  Towards dawn, when we had drunk and eaten everything in sight and were too full to go to the larder for more, the Irishman turned to business, as was his custom, always optimistic that other people would be more fuddled than he was and easier to do business against, and always wrong. He said:

  ‘I am ready. I have a fianna in the Hills. I could move now, if you had the arms, but I would rather you waited till the spring.’

  ‘I must wait till the spring,’ I told him. ‘The arms will not be ready till then.’

  ‘But have you a ship?’

  I looked at Caw. I waited to hear. It might all have been in vain. The Master of the Western Seas said:

  ‘You have a ship. You have a ship for this trade, and for all trade you may wish to do across the Irish Sea.’

  Far in the east, the dawn had begun, over the Lead Hills. In my impiety and joy and pride I forgot the Gods Below that all in Britain worship, and I forgot that Apollo had bade me worship him no more. I stood up on the bale of straw that had been my seat, and I lifted my hands to the advancing Chariot, and I called as I had done all my two-eyed life:

  ‘All Hail and Blessing to the Unconquered Sun!’

  And fate came on me, and I slipped from the edge of the bale. The hilt of my sword tore at my side, and I knew that the old wound was opened. I felt the blood run down, and I screamed, and I fainted with the pain.

  Chapter Six

  That day after Samain, they took me to Caw’s house, where he lived now alone, a widower. I lay on a bed, my shirt off, while everybody who had any pretensions to medical skill or knowledge – and the two do not always go together – fussed around me like so many broody hens.

  Taliesin had the first try. He looked wisely at the nasty gash, oozing blood and yellow pus through the bandages.

  ‘The sword is no use. I suppose the weapon that did the original wound—’

  ‘Lost long ago, on the Amber Road,’ I groaned. It hurt me to breathe deeply.

  ‘Then I am sure you will not be having the gallstone of a male ass, which is a sure cure for such afflictions.’

  ‘In my wallet.’

  Taliesin looked a little disappointed. However, he picked it out, and examined it for a while. I said:

  ‘Have you used it before?’

  ‘I know all about it.’

  ‘Perhaps you do, but have you used it?’

  ‘Well, no, not in the … well, it isn’t flesh, is it. Should we say in the lava? Rub with it, don’t I?’

  ‘And not too hard. It’s got a surface like pumice stone. Aaaaah!’ It hurt, too.

  ‘I’d better put something soothing on it. I don’t suppose you’ve got any lion fat …’

  ‘The yellow pot.’

  ‘Oh. Powdered ostrich egg-shell?’

  ‘In that twist of parchment – the one with the green lines on it.’

  ‘Ground mummies’ testicles?’

  ‘In the small phial. Be careful, it’s hard to come by.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that? And Phoenix ash?’

  ‘The vulture-skin bag.’

  ‘At least, I’ve got a pestle and mortar. I think I know the right proportions.’

  He beat together the ointment in fury, using some very appropriate incantations. He laid across the wound two hairs from the head of a blonde virgin, and that is something very hard to find in the Summer Country, smeared on the ointment with nine strokes of a swan’s feather, being the proper instrument to my clan, and bound it up with a strip of the horseblanket last laid on the back of a white gelding. I must say that in their knowledge of medical science the Britons do not lag behind doctors in more civilised countries: they only suffer a great deal from shortage of quite elementary necessities, like bottled moondust and salamander skin. I made a mental note that the family might as well begin business in this field in the islands.

  For about two days, the wound seemed to mend, and at last I was so bold as to get out of bed and walk about. Nothing went wrong for at least an hour, and then I coughed, and the whole scar opened again. It hurt dreadfully. Now Caw came to look at it, and he had a remedy which was beautiful in its simplicity. H
e merely clapped on to my side a hunk of whale’s fat, blubber they call it, and tied it there with a length of whale skin, reasoning that the strength of the whale would pass into me and give me energy to resist all strains. The blubber was strong enough, all right. The fish had been dead for three months, and when at last I got up and went out of doors, people could smell me coming half a mile away, and all the dogs of the Summer Country came to the point of interest, and some even from farther away. And I did well enough, since the smell meant that I could endure to breathe only in the most gentle fashion, but at last, through sheer boredom, I yawned, and it was all to do again.

  Then Cicva decided she would take a hand. First she washed off the whale blubber, much to Caw’s annoyance, but she pooh-poohed him away.

  ‘Men!’ she said. ‘They think that they know everything.’

  ‘But instead, you know everything, my girl,’ I teased her, but of course she didn’t see it and answered:

  ‘The only things I didn’t know, you taught me.’

  ‘Thank you. Now what are you going to use?’

  ‘First of all, spider’s web, because although it is so thin it holds the weight of the spider, which is a great beast in comparison.’ So a whole web, taken with the dew on it, and lifted from the bush and brought in whole and unbroken – and how many webs the children of the place spoiled entirely I have no knowing, but there must have been mourning throughout the halls of Ariadne – she laid across the wound.

  ‘And now some soothing ointment we use a great deal where I come from, up in the Silures. Most of it is goose grease, and that provides the softening. But there are other things my grandmother taught me to use, such as meadow saffron and foxglove, and they will stop the pain and the itching. Now, we have that on thick, and then I will tie it up in a strip of linen – here, one of Caw’s napkins will do, if I tear it up like this …’