Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  Some of the drunker centurions laughed, but the soberer ones sat up and asked for the words to be repeated. I asked, as innocently as I could:

  ‘Who is Pryderi?’

  ‘Pryderi?’ said Africanus. ‘Why, he’s a thorn in our flesh and no mistake. Down in the far West, there’s the Demetae, and they’ve never submitted to Rome, they haven’t, though nobody would mind if only they kept quiet, as most of them do. But the King there is called Pwyll, and it’s his son Pryderi who does a lot of damage, cutting up wagon-trains and burning small posts. Then the nation here are the Silures, and they submitted all right, and we built them a city a few miles east, at Venta. But now some of them have quarrelled with the ones who submitted, and they follow another branch of their Royal House, and there has been a rumour that Pryderi has married into that family. If that’s so, then there’ll be trouble around here next. He has done us a lot of harm already; I swear, if ever I have him inside this post, then Pryderi will take a long time to die.’

  ‘Do you think it’s true?’ asked one of the younger officers, who was itching for promotion as was clear from the way he had been flattering Africanus – he thought Africanus couldn’t see what was going on, but the Primus Pilus was an old hand. ‘I could take a century down there and find out.’

  ‘True or not, they’re shouting so loud you can make out the words, “Pryderi, kindle the fire,” ’ said the Duty Centurion, and one of the Gaulish Centurions opened his eyes wide and told us:

  ‘Sounds like the old man is dead. It’s the head of the family kindles the fire on Imbolc night.’

  The ambitious young man still pressed:

  ‘I could go down there at the run, and we’d have him in half an hour.’

  ‘No, stay here,’ said Africanus. ‘If you did go out now, you’d want half a cohort at least, and all you’d do would be start a riot, if not a revolt. This is how it usually begins, and we’re not here to start risings, we’re here to prevent them. If that means staying in here and not giving offence even if the Brits call us cowards, then that’s what we’ll do. If it’s fighting you want, there’ll be enough of that by the summer’s end.’

  I thought it better to change the subject. I asked:

  ‘Is it your custom not to ask the Legate to your feast?’

  Everyone laughed. The Centurion from the borders of Armenia explained:

  ‘We never ask tribunes, not since Carantorius insisted on billeting half a cohort in a village for Imbolc, about forty miles west of here, where the Via Julia meets the sea, and they were slaughtered in their beds. “Making them realise the Army are their friends,” was what he used to say, but they weren’t friends of the Army. We gave him a good tombstone, but there were two hundred and odd other good men dead as well. Forty years ago that was, but still … And we would normally ask the Legate, but this one …’

  ‘Useless,’ put in Africanus shortly. ‘Perfectly useless. What does he, or any of the Tribunes either, know about this legion, or how to handle men? Look at old sourpuss up there. Fifteen years ago he did a year as tribune with … the Seventeenth, wasn’t it, and everybody knows the Seventeenth. Since then he’s been wearing out his toga in one office after another in Rome, counting the obols for cleaning the drains. Now, here he is, just because he’s from a Senatorial family he finds himself a Legate, with a legion, and four regiments of cavalry, and the government of a quarter of the Province. That’s all he’s interested in, feathering his nest to pay his debts so that he can go back to Rome and have his year as Consul.’

  ‘It’s not as if he even tries to be a good general,’ added the Duty Centurion. ‘We’ve only had him out on an exercise once since he came to us. We took two cohorts on a long march up the valley. End of the first day, what happens? We halt, and I’m Senior Centurion, and I get on with my job, digging in, and you want to, up there, with Pryderi about. Then I look round. Where’s his nibs, and the young Tribune he had with him, you know, little Peach-bottom? Are they placing pickets, noting routes of attack? Not a bit of it. They’re finding a pretty place by the stream to pitch their mutual tent, where the rude dirty soldiery won’t disturb their idyllic night out. Sets the troops a bad example, too. I hope he’s not with us if ever we have to go into action.’

  ‘If ever we go.’ Africanus stood up. The rest of us who had been wandering about and chattering now the serious eating was over, resumed our places, and lay down properly. The Standard-bearers and their escort had returned to the chapel, and the slaves left the room. The most junior Centurion shut the doors. Africanus went on:

  ‘My comrades, honoured guest, it is time for the toast. Remember, as you drink it, that our brothers of the Twentieth at Deva, a hundred miles away, are drinking it with us. A hundred years ago, we two legions came into this savage land. For forty years we fought against the savages, till at last we made peace and brought all this fertile quarter of the island into the Empire, and the great northern desert we left to the Picts. The Sixth at Eboracum can hold the Wall.

  ‘All this time, we two legions have waited for the word to move forward to add the next province to the Empire. Here on the shore of the Ocean we have built our fortresses and amassed our stores, ready for the last great invasion to carry us to the edge of the Ocean. We have waited long for the word to march. It has always been our pride that whenever the word would come, we would be ready, if need be, to march into the very sea itself. If this winter we are cold, we must cheer ourselves that we need not march into the water, and we may warm ourselves by going into the saw mills to work and turn the wood that should have been our fuel into ships that will keep us dry. For I can tell you now, the word has come at last. Soon we will march. Gentlemen, I give you, in greater hope than formerly, the annual toast. I hope that I now give it for the last time, and with it I couple the name of our guest, Photinus the son of Protagoras. Gentlemen, I give you – Next Year in Tara!’

  I felt a tear in my one eye as I looked around. There they were, thirty-five centurions, from rear rank to front, of all ages, of all levels, and all men of action, hard and ready to fight. The lamps flickered on the brackets on the walls, and showed off the splendour of the plate. The officers were in their dress uniforms, each man in a cuirass made not of iron and boiled leather, but of scarlet velvet, padded to look like armour and trimmed and faced with Gold thread. Because it was Imbolc, and they were ready, each man reclined on his scarlet military cloak, and on the floor behind him each had laid his dress sword, and his parade helmet, and these last were gorgeous things, with face masks like you see gladiators wearing in the parade before the Games, gilded all over and each waving its plume of scarlet horse-hair. Several of them wore Phalerae, those medals of silver and Gold given only for bravery in the field, fighting against savage Britons, or the more savage weather.

  They all stood, and I sat. All these brave men, to whom honour and the eagles meant more than Gold or power, men who knew what it was to endure, they all stood, and they drank to me, to Photinus, who was granting to them the prize they had always sought. They lifted their wine cups and they shouted:

  ‘Next Year in Tara! Long live Photinus!’

  And then they cheered and called for a speech. When there was some kind of order, I stood and said:

  ‘Gentlemen, I am making you a bridge across the Sea. I have made the way clear for you, and I have done that without going there. But I want to come to Ireland in the end. You have invited me to one feast, gentlemen. May I now invite myself to another? Next Imbolc, I will feast with you in Tara!’

  ‘Never, with old Pig’s Bladder in command,’ hissed the Duty Centurion, who was rather coarse-mouthed, being an Illyrian.

  I turned on him.

  ‘When you go, you shall have a real general.’

  I saw to that next morning. I went back to the Praetorium, and wrote a letter to Uncle Phaedo, sending it off with the military mail, partly for safety, partly for speed. It was short. I said: Rejoice. Foreclose.

  I had sent him the contents
of Gwawl’s wallet. Already my uncle would have bought up all the Legate’s debts. Within two weeks, now, the Legate would be broken.

  While I was about that, Africanus suddenly came into the Registry saying:

  ‘I’m very sorry, I quite forgot this. Aristarchos left this letter for you when he came through.’

  ‘What was Aristarchos doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘What does Aristarchos ever do? He just passed by. It is my belief he was going native again. He’s done it before. All I know is, he borrowed a Standard-bearer and five other good men – all Gauls, and, come to that, all from the same nation. All Setantii. After Pryderi, perhaps? With Aristarchos, you never know, and you don’t ask. Here it is.’

  I took the letter, and I went aside a little where no one could hear me read it. It was from my father. He had sent it to Uncle Euthyphro, and he to Leo Rufus, and he sent it on through Aristarchos, as he had no idea where I had gone, only a suspicion, and Aristarchos knew. It was quite short. I read it through twice. Then I threw the end of my toga over my face and stood silent for a while.

  Africanus watched me, also silent. When I uncovered my face again, he asked:

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  I stood there, mechanically cleaning the vellum with a piece of pumice, to use again. When I could speak, I answered him:

  ‘I have a son. My wife died in August.’

  Chapter Nine

  I went from the fortress gate alone. As Africanus said, it was better that he should not know where I went or to whom. I walked out of sight of the sentries among the houses of the British village. True it was that some had been burnt the night before, but not the one where I had changed and left my British clothes.

  Pryderi was waiting for me. We went in silence, as soon as I had changed, down to the riverside. There were a number of men to see us off. I had not met them before, but I could tell their rank. After a winter in the Mere I knew the subtle differences of dress, and I would no longer confuse a noble in his hunting clothes with a peasant in his market-day best. Not since I had seven kings at my marriage have I had such august helpers to steady me into a boat. Nor did they speak to us. Anything they had to say to Pryderi, any agreements, any plans and policies, they were the work of the night before. They were committed.

  We paddled all that day in silence, and in silence we spent the night on a beach as before. We had no breath to spare, trying to make the most of tide and current as we crossed to the south side of the water. Besides, I mourned a wife: Pryderi had taken possession of … a patrimony? … a dowry? … both?

  On the morning of the second day, however, we felt less numb. We paddled with the shore close on our left hand, and we were caught by the current of a great river, wider and stronger than any river of Italy or Spain, wide almost as Nile itself, and I was glad we had cider enough to pour a libation to Sabrina. And then, as we paddled, Pryderi began to sing, a sad and lovely melody, and the words were old, but there was little doubt that he had chosen them carefully:

  We listened in the sedges to the song of the birds of Rhiannon,

  The song of the thrush and the nightingale, and the ever-ascending lark:

  Yet there is no living bird on the wing that sings like the birds of Rhiannon,

  The songs of our loves who died long ago, who wait for us yet in the dark.

  Blackbird and finch still sing to us on the banks of the Summer River,

  But the song of the dead who loved us will never be heard again.

  Love that is given for no return will return to the giver, Love that demands love in return earns no return but pain.

  We paddled ever south-west on the lead-dull waters. We heard the cries of the gulls and the slap of the water against the paddles and against the side of the boat, and we panted in our haste to drive the craft with the current and against the tide. I thought of Phryne, now dead, and I wept till fresh Sabrina merged into the sea. Perhaps she was no Helen, no Juno, but she was – I found it impossible to be coherent. Flung innocent into marriage with a man who knew worlds, who knew Hells she could not imagine, a man who at first had thought of nothing but his dead love in the North, she had been quiet and peaceful and forgiving and tolerant, and obedient, not as a slave, but as a partner. And she had always been there. There had never been a moment while I was in Britain when I had not known that Phryne would be still there waiting for me. I knew all the time that the moment I walked up the quay from the ship and came into my house she would be offering me her bread and oil. Nobody baked bread like Phryne, she always baked her own bread; she even ground the meal herself if it was for me. She said slave girls never would, no not could, would, grind the wheat flour fine enough for me. And it would be ready when I came home, however long I was away, a month, three months, two years … Now it would never be ready again.

  And what of my children? My sister Xanthippe – my grandfather had won there – would take little Euphrosyne fiercely, proudly, to her own house, defying any claim by Phryne’s parents: Xanthippe had five sons. But the baby – how could he survive? My grandmother would scour through the houses of all our friends and through the markets to find a newly delivered slave who could suckle him, even if her own child died: they would try to make him suck goat’s milk on the end of a rag. But there was little hope. I am cursed in my children. I have two sons, and a daughter in the North whom I will never see again: and no son in my own home.

  And no wife. There was no one now to wait for my return. I need never return. Only as long as the Gold came back, I might stay here for ever, or go where I pleased, might live or die. Now, I might please myself.

  The grey waters, the grey sky, the colourless gulls that swooped and passed, all made my mood. I dug my paddle with fury into the swirling tide, keeping her steady in the wilderness of currents. I cursed the useless birds that jeered at us. Now I was at the deep point of the mood that had possessed me all through the grey and misty land of Britain, the land of twilight and soft shadows, the land of deception and melting form, the land where nothing is what it seems to be or claims to be. Now it had struck me down when I seemed to be most successful, most secure. The Army was at my disposal, I could dismiss a Legate who was more powerful than any Barbarian king, and I would soon bring down not one but four Barbarian kings. I had a ship that would live on that stormy sea even in the spring when no skin boat, no galley, could keep it, or carry an army. And my enemy, Gwawl, was defeated, dismissed, made harmless as he had been on the night of the thorn. All the Gold in Ireland was in my hands. There was nothing more I need do. I could rest here, or wherever I liked, and wait for the treasure to come to me, and I could do what I wished with what I had.

  In the grey dark that succeeded the grey day we came to a landing place in the reeds, and climbed a gentle slope to a hut. It was not empty. Three men sat there, waiting for the hard dawn that should come, men that came from the confines of Hell. They had fire for us, and food. We ate and ate in silence. At last Grathach asked:

  ‘Will they come, my Lord?’

  ‘Some,’ answered Pryderi. ‘Not many. Enough.’

  ‘Silurians?’ I asked. I did not know how far I might go, I was overbold, I thought.

  ‘They are beginning to see now,’ Pryderi told me, ‘how they have been cheated. They submitted, and that not after a hard fight, on a promise. The Romans said they would protect them from the Irish. And that they have not done. The Irish still raid. Last year they came under the walls of Venta itself. All along the coasts of the Severn Sea they come, except in the Mere. They do not come along the shores of the Irish Sea, either. We Dematae are not disarmed, and north of us, in the Rainy Hills, they dare not face Howell. But the other coasts – they raid as they please, and the Romans can’t stop them. Now, Mannanan, see if you are more powerful than a legion. They are yours, now.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Leinster men who raid, from the south-east of the island, they are the men you want. It is in their country, in Wicklow, that the Gold was
found. They have the streams rich in metal. Turn them back to mining Gold, and they will be too busy to bother us.’

  ‘And then, Pryderi, you will submit, and go to live in Venta, or build a city just like it far in the West, or in the Mere?’

  ‘I will never submit to the Romans.’

  ‘The future lies in the towns, Pryderi. It is the Guild of Shoemakers and the men who peddle earth coal who will rule this land in the end. Submit, Pryderi. There is no other way to power.’

  ‘I will never submit. I am a king.’

  ‘I know what it is. You are jealous of the Irishman, the King’s nephew, the Setanta. You want to be like him, to lead a fianna, to ride into great battles, to topple monarchs and empty thrones. It is too late, Pryderi. Submit and be rich and happy and have power.’

  ‘I might be richer than I am, and have more power, but I would not be happy.’

  ‘Is it only the luxury of your pride, then, Pryderi, that keeps you in rebellion? Is it the mere pleasure of knowing that you are doing what you like?’

  ‘Here my Gesa, Mannanan, to which I have been obedient since I was a child. It is this: it is never to forsake a friend, or forget a wrong, or forgive a Roman.’

  He said no more: he rolled himself in his cloak and lay on his bed of dry bracken. There was no more to be said. I too slept.

  They woke me a little before dawn. Grathach brought me hot mutton soup and bread, and as I scoured my bowl he said.

  ‘Up the slope straight, and there is a path. Follow it to the end, not turning to the left nor to the right—’

  ‘Will you now forsake me?’ I asked.

  ‘No, you cannot be forsaken here.’ Pryderi on his bed was calm, not offended. ‘Do you not know where you are? You are at the south end of the Apple Country. When you reach the north end of the ridge, turn to the west, and in the reeds by the huts at the end of the path, you will find boats moored. Then you can cross the marsh to Caw’s house. As for us, we have no time to take you, and we trust you enough to let you go alone wherever you wish. We have other business that will not wait.’