Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  I said that there was no evidence of poverty in the houses in the Mere, and no expense would have been spared if there had been anything to spend on. However, it was plain that the Britons here were doing as well as any civilised doctor.

  ‘Now, what I really would like to do, and what would do you good,’ said Cicva, ‘would be to tie up both your arms so that you can’t scratch. It’s scratching that opens it every time, whatever we do.’

  ‘I don’t scratch.’

  ‘Indeed you do, you scratch like half a dog with two dog’s fleas.’

  ‘Well, and how do you expect me to behave with this itching like it does as long as I lie still? And as soon as

  I move it tears, and then I can’t feel it itching for pain and bleeding.’

  ‘Then shall I tie your hands? There’s not much you can do with them, lying here.’

  ‘No, you may not tie my hands. I refuse to have anyone tie my hands.’

  ‘All right,’ she said crossly. ‘There’s no need to make such a fuss about it. It’s not good for you – or for me, either.’

  Well, I know that it is quite common for a doctor to prescribe restraint for a patient, but I wasn’t an ordinary patient, I knew too much for that. Besides, I knew very well that no human means could heal the wound. I had offended the Sun Above and the Gods Below. Only those Gods together could heal me.

  All the human attempts followed the same pattern. First the side felt better, the pain subsided, and then the itch. Next, there would be a firm clean scab over the wound. All would be going well. Then I would get up to walk. And in a moment, all would be undone, the wound would be open, and the blood run down.

  ‘Nothing there is for it now,’ said Pryderi, after two weeks of this, ‘but seeing Rhiannon.’

  ‘If it comes to that?’ I asked angrily, ‘why isn’t she here? Either she belongs to me, or I belong to her, as Taliesin said, and in either case she ought to show a little interest.’

  ‘And is it not for you to be showing a little interest in her!’ countered Taliesin. ‘It’s carrying you we’ll be doing.’

  Hueil and his brother Coth the Cook took the ends of the bed on which I lay, and moved out of the house into the rain. Cicva threw my sealskin cloak over me. I could not remember now how long it had been raining; I could not remember when it had not been raining. The edge of the Mere was now nearer to the houses. My bearers’ feet splashed through what had been firm meadows. We took a narrow path between the flooded fields, between clusters of willows that stood leafless out of the water. We came to the Deep Pool of the Mere.

  Many are the gates to the World Below. Out on the green sea there are whirlpools, that engulf ships and men, and spin them down into the green dark, and these are the least known, and the greatest and the most powerful, because there is no return. But on land, there are the mouths of volcanoes, spouting fire and lava, and into these men had leapt to seek those who have gone before. There are caves both in the mountains and on the seashore, and it is in these that men have buried their dead, and it is into these that wise women have gone to speak with those who have left us and who now speak with the wise of all the ages. Out on the level plains there are marshes and bogs and places of Green Moss, and on the level shore there are sinking sands and into all these men have thrown their sacrifices to those who rule our deaths, believing, as some do, that no ordeal is as grim as death, and that those who rule our lives may hurt us as they wish, if so be they do not kill us. Life, say some, is worth the clinging to in spite of all indignities. I do not agree. I have lived long and I have travelled far, and I have seen men suffer things to which death is a feast. But whatever one’s opinions on this, who can doubt the wisdom of making offerings by casting booty into a bog?

  Of all the gates into the World Below, the surest and the deepest and the swiftest are the Black Pools in rivers and lakes and marshes. Bottomless beyond reach of plumb-line, their surface smooth and unruffled by storm or rain, they lie beneath steep cliffs or smooth banks, and there for many generations wise men have come to make their offerings.

  Such a pool there was in the Mere, where the river flowed against a bluff. In a backwater, the water gleamed no more than lead, the surface stirred no more than does a mirror. Only sometimes the great pike moved, hunting for what he could catch, and there was enough, for it was to the hungry Gods Below that the Britons of the Mere gave the scraps of food that even the dogs left. And here, on the bluff above the Deep Pool, Rhiannon sat.

  She sat on a tripod, looking to the east, over the dark water. Above her head they had built a booth of alder boughs, thatched with the rushes of the Mere. Her food was the broth of nettles, and a fungus that grows on the trunks of trees, thrusting out in a fleshy shelf. I knew it as a boy: we called it Dead Men’s Ears.

  Rhiannon looked out across the flooded, sodden Mere. Little pools were become great lakes. Lagoons where in summer a man might wade a mile and never wet his knees would now float a trireme. The river, in the dry of the year a faint drift of leaves and twigs across the marsh, was now a strong current, sweeping whole trees to the sea, faster than a man might run. As a galley of pleasure is beached for the winter, her mast unstepped, her oars unshipped and stacked against the eaves of the boathouse, her sail of scarlet linen furled and carried under shelter, her cushions of velvet and of cloth of gold taken to grace my lady’s boudoir, gilt flaking and paint peeling from her sides – so sat Rhiannon above the Mere. She was dressed in rough sacking, black, all black. She wore no jewels. Her hair had ceased to shine. Her hands, through hunger, were transparent, only the blue veins opaque. Above the waste, hardly sheltered from the rain, unwashed, uncombed, her nails uncut, she fasted for …? She waited for …?

  Only the birds did not forsake her. The rooks cawed in the trees across the pool, the heron stood and watched. The kingfisher dived as if to seek out the sleeping swallows. Starlings hungrily combed the grass.

  The sons of Caw put down the bed. They went away. I spoke:

  ‘Help me, my Mother.’

  Rhiannon did not answer. She sat and looked across the marshes. I asked her again:

  ‘Help me, my Mother, for your birds’ sake.’

  Still, she did not reply. I waited a very long time, an hour or more. Then, I took courage.

  ‘Rhiannon, my Rhiannon. By him that gave you to me, I challenge you. Speak to me. Who are your birds?’

  Still, for a moment she said nothing. Then we heard the sound of wings in the east, and we both watched as the great birds went over us as an arrow. And after that, she sang: at last I heard that splendid voice again.

  Spirits now wending

  At full life’s ending

  As Wild Geese flying

  Not regretting, sighing,

  In trust advancing

  Through low clouds dancing

  Faint like stars glowing

  To new lives going

  Passing and fleeting

  Sounds of wings beating

  Living, not dying

  As Wild Geese flying.

  That was all she sang, and she sang it only once. Yet it was not an hour after dawn when we heard the wings, and when she finished singing it was the grey twilight of a December afternoon under the clouds of Britain. Then she spoke, not sang:

  ‘Tell Pryderi: the goose has flown.’

  ‘Have you no word for me? Can I not be healed?’

  ‘Oh, Mannanan, my son, my father, my brother, my husband! Come to me at midwinter. Come when the Thorn flowers.’

  Uncalled, Hueil the son of Caw and Coth the son of Caw came forward. They picked up my bed, and they carried me back to the house.

  I spoke first to Pryderi.

  ‘The goose has flown, Pryderi. Rhiannon said, the goose has flown.’

  He bent down, and he took ashes from the fire and threw them on his head. He smashed a pot that stood by, and with the sharp edge of a broken fragment he slit open the front of his shirt. He said:

  ‘I am going to the Demetae.’
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  Madoc, who stood by, spoke:

  ‘You cannot face the winter seas alone.’

  They went out. Cicva, silent, threw the end of her shawl over her face, and followed. Caw watched them go, then:

  ‘It is no kin of mine. They will lay him in his house, new built, on his bed new made. Every man who comes will bring a stone, and they will fill the house about him with stones and earth, and they will build the house about outside with walls of cut stone and they will whiten it. And that is an end of him. And an end of much more, too.’

  ‘An end of whom?’ I asked. Caw did not answer. Suddenly, with the air of a man throwing off unpleasant thoughts, he asked:

  ‘And Rhiannon – did she say nothing to you?’

  ‘She sang one short song, that lasted a day. And she showed me the birds, and what they are.’

  ‘But for yourself?’

  ‘Caw – when do the thorn trees blossom in this country?’

  ‘If Rhiannon told you – well, then, it is a secret thing above all the other secrets of the Mere, and there is not a Roman who knows of it. Listen to me.

  ‘Below the Glass Mountain there is a tree, and to look at it, you would think it no different from any other thorn tree, growing where it do on the firm ground on the edge of the Mere. But every seventh year, something strange do happen, and every seventh seventh year, it is something wonderful that happens. Because, every seventh year, the thorn do bloom, and blossom, and come into flower, and that not in the spring, but at the middle of winter, and strange that is because there is no reason for any feast or worship of the Gods at midwinter which is a dreadful and bitter time. Now every seventh year, it is one branch or another only that flowers, and anyone may come and see the tree, and the tree alone. But every seventh seventh year, then it is the tree that blossoms, every branch, and it is then that the other holy things are shown, if the right people are there to show them.’

  ‘And the right people are …?’

  ‘Think, boy. They must all come by land, because the thorn came to us from the sea. And the people are a virgin princess of the days of long ago, and a priest of the days that are lately gone, and a pregnant queen of the times that are.’

  ‘And this year is a …?’

  ‘A seventh seventh year, and then the thorn is given great power over all those who come to it. And come to it you shall, Mannanan, though it was some pretext we were going to find to send you away for the midwinter. But if it is bidden you are, then bidden you are. Lie still, boy, lie still in my house till midwinter, because it is no more than twenty nights to go.’

  The Britons, unlike all the rest of mankind, count their time not by days but by nights, and all their feasts are feasts of nights and not of days. And in the winter it is understandable, because the night is longer than the day. So I lived in Caw’s house, and in the days, Hueil and Coth took me out, on my bed, to the lakeside, and I fished for pike, and never caught one. And in the evenings, Cicva would come from her empty home and sup with her grandfather and me, and she taught me to play the games of Fichel, that the Britons play in preference to all games of dice. And in truth I did not really enjoy Fichel, because there is no chance in it at all, or delightful uncertainty, but a game of Fichel is played on a board with men, and is entirely a matter of skill and wit. There are a hundred different kinds of Fichel, and Cicva taught me to play them all, in return, she said, for my teaching her to palm dice and lose the pea under the three cups. And again and again she said to me:

  ‘Be careful, Mannanan: you think that you have found your Lady, but watch in case someone does not move the cups again.’

  Chapter Seven

  The solstice came and went, and the lengthening of the days became noticeable, just. Before the solstice, the rains stopped, and the wind came round slowly through north to north-east. This wind blew cold, and there were one or two clear nights, and in the mornings the frost was thick on the grass, and there was a thin film of ice on the little pools. And yet, the time of year being what it was, it was mild, compared with the winters we had up on the Amber Road. Then, on the solstice, the sky covered over with low grey clouds, and the wind dropped, and all was very still and quiet, and I wondered how Rhiannon could still live there in her house, open towards the east, above the Dark Pool.

  Towards evening, the snow started to fall. It fell steadily, in great light flakes, like the feathers of the wild geese. It covered everything, and made the grey light of the morning look dimmer still. In Britain, you get used to living in a perpetual twilight: but the white snow makes it less bearable. It fell all through a night and a day and the night after, till it was, as Caw said, the depth of a chariot wheel, or as I saw, up to the top of a man’s thigh, if he cared to step into it.

  Then we had a day without snow, and the sky was blue and it was bitter cold again, so that although the sunshine melted the snow on the surface, at night the moisture froze to leave a layer of ice over it. We lay close around the fire that night, with all the blankets and furs and sheepskins we could find heaped over us, and yet we were all cold.

  In the first light, Madoc wakened me. He had a lamp, and I looked round to see that I was in an empty house. Madoc had been the last to try to treat my side, and he had merely made me lie still, and told me to wash it well each day with warm water. Then he had gone out into the winter sea, and I had not seen him nor heard that he had returned. But here he was, making me take my shirt off so that he could see the healthy scab forming.

  ‘That will do,’ he said. ‘You will just be able to walk to the Glass Mountain.’

  ‘I am not in any fit condition to walk,’ I told him. ‘You can say what you like, but do you know what it feels like when that place tears open? If I’m going that far, I’ll have a horse, or there ought to be enough water now to float a boat almost up to it.’

  ‘Everybody walks to the Glass Mountain at midwinter.’ He was firm on that, and as it seemed to be matter of religion, I agreed to try.

  ‘I’ll come when I’ve had my breakfast,’ I told him.

  ‘Decent people go to this rite fasting,’ and as he seemed as ready to insist on that, I pulled on all the clothes I could find, with my sealskin cloak over everything and my sword handy under it, and I began to walk. At least we didn’t have to go barefoot, as some mysteries would have had us do.

  We crunched across the icy surface of the snow, watching our breaths before our faces. Then, into the marsh. We pushed by willows, and the icy twigs cut across our faces like iron wires. The log road beneath our feet was covered in a layer of glass, and I feared to slip and tear my side again. The streams and pools were edged with ice, but never fully covered in, or strong enough to take a man’s weight. Most of the paths we had used to come from the Glass Mountain were under running water, and we had to take awkward twisting ways, known only to the cattle and the deer, and the badger even, who made them. To push through a maze in twilight, with never a firm footing, with nothing dry, with the clouds threatening new snow, oh, there are better ways of spending a day in midwinter. Even when, at noon, the clouds cleared, it became no pleasanter, because it got even colder.

  Sometimes, now, we could even see the Glass Mountain standing up in front of us beyond its screen of bare branches. A little column of smoke rose from before it, vertical in the still air, white against the blue sky. We walked in silence.

  We were not the only people on the road. There was no one before us, but here and there, at forks in the way, we would find little bunches of men, and women and children, waiting to fall in behind us. They were all laden with bundles of wood, and with bags. They too went in silence, except that now and then, from behind us, we would hear voices raised in a melancholy hymn to the Cauldron:

  Cauldron our hope, in frost and snow,

  Bring warmth in plenty from below.

  O’er flowing panniers, laden carts,

  Flame out of blackness warm our hearts.

  I could not have sung. My face was so stiff with the cold that I
could not move my lips. I could feel that the end of my nose was dead. My moustaches froze to my cloak so that to turn my head hurt. My side was throbbing and hot: I waited for the tearing pain, the warm that I now knew so well. Let no one say that what I won on this journey I won without pain.

  At last, at last, we came out of the Mere, we climbed the sides of the Glass Mountain. We came close to the farm built against the rock. Now, I noticed what I must have seen before, that the branches of a tree showed above the fence. Leafless they were and winter-barren, but, plainly, a thorn. There were people standing about outside the closed gates. Closest of all, I saw Pryderi sitting on the snow by a brazier in which a fire of earth coal was burning. Hueil was with him. I came to them and sat down. It was nearly evening, and I was hungry and tired, sweating from the walk and yet freezing with the cold.

  More groups of people sat down around and behind us, each group with its brazier, or lighting a fire of wood on the bare ground, sweeping up the snow into windbreaks. They sat, quietly, waiting. Even the children were silent, and did not run about or play. When I was a little warmer, I stood up and looked the way we had come. All the side of the hill, all the firm ground around it, all the road by which we had come, was speckled with fires, mirroring in the cold clear air the stars above us. It was now quite dark. There was a constant murmur from the people. Not the angry shouting you hear from a mob in riot, not the cheerful turbulence you hear from the crowd waiting in an arena for the Games to start, not the hubbub you hear from a market crowd: it was the gentle hum of voices lowered in reverence, saying meaningless things simply because the burden of keeping silent was too much.

  Neither could I keep silent. I asked Pryderi: ‘Who guards the shrine? Is it Druids?’

  He turned to me. It was the first time I had spoken to him since he had heard me tell him Rhiannon’s message. Now, as his cloak opened, I saw he wore a new belt, a simple one, only a threefold chain of Gold. Only that, only Golden links that would have held a bull, only the price of half a province. He answered me seriously. Gone now was his usual air of bantering superiority: