Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  I made west along the path, among the orchards of cider apples. And now I knew why the Apple ridge was sacred, for though every tree was bare of leaf, yet each in the winter dark shone golden green and silver dotted. On every tree the mistletoe hung down.

  I came in mid-afternoon to the edge of the ridge, where the Mere in winter flooded round on all sides. There I did find a boat, though I had to look for it, and in the end pick the smallest and lightest from a cluster cleverly hidden under a willow. The rain came down on me, and splashed in great circles into the marsh, as I pointed the bows up stream and paddled hard against the current in order only to make track straight across it. I waded to push the boat through shallows and lay flat to creep under low branches Where we had walked in the summer the flood would now drown a man. At last, I came to the edge of the main stream, rushing down from the hills inland with the force of a herd of frightened cattle, roaring and tossing. I struggled to hold her head, I saw lost all the way I had so painfully made north along the ridge. All the knowledge I had ever had of the sea, all the skills I had learnt in ships, all were useless against this sweet fresh water, whirling me back to the sea. I strained down to my heart, my back cracked, handsbreadth by handsbreadth I moved towards the opposite bank, taking first one mark to head for, and then losing it far up stream, and then another, and losing that too. And suddenly, as I thrust away a log that playfully butted me and almost turned me over, I was in calm water, and close under the opposite shore, under the west bank, on the surface of a calm black pool, a backwater where the water did not stir. I had lost my paddle in that last struggle with the ash tree. Now I splashed with my hands till I came near, and grounded on the mud beach. I did not think, I just pulled the boat up far from the water, as one always does. Once a sailor, you never forget. Then I climbed, foot by foot, ledge by ledge, up the bluff till I came where Rhiannon’s hut had been, where she had sat for so long fasting and gazing out over the marsh. I sloshed soaking down the hill and by the last path to Caw’s house.

  Later, fed and warm and full of cider in the lamplight, I said to Caw:

  ‘But would not cider pay you better than silver? There is no cider even in Britain like the cider of the Summer Country. You could sell it from here to Londinium, to Rome itself. I could arrange it all, act as your agent, and once it came into fashion at the Imperial Court, it is Gold you would be handling and not silver, and it would not take too much influence then to free you from the wheat tax. And it would be safer, too.’

  ‘Attractive you make it sound, don’t you?’ He laughed. ‘No wonder it is rich you do get by buying and selling. No, boy, it’s the sea that is my real love.’

  I changed my tack.

  ‘How many of those great ships have you left now, Caw?’

  ‘Well, there was another, but that one you stole from me. Now – to tell the truth, we only have the one.’

  ‘After this one voyage for which you have promised her to me?’

  ‘Back to the silver.’

  ‘Why don’t you build another?’

  ‘It takes time to build a ship, time and space and skill. We could never do it, even in the Mere, with no one knowing. And what would we use another one for now? We cannot trade except as I do.’

  ‘But if I were to trade with Ireland, then would you not think of building more? And then, you would not be a hunted pirate in the Mere, but you would have a style and a title and a place in the Empire, and under the Emperor it is you only would be the Master of the Western Sea.’

  Caw sat silent, cracking walnuts with his teeth – fancy, a man at his age with his own teeth! Finally he said:

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  We went to bed. I was almost there, I thought, almost there. Soon I would be able to trade across the Irish Sea in all weathers and all the year, with an Ireland peaceful and settled and pouring Gold, rich Gold into my hands.

  All I wanted in the Mere, almost all I wanted, was in my hands. Now there was no thought of home, no obligation, no loyalty, no promise to keep me back. I was free to take what I wanted out of all the island, to take what was mine, what had been given me and what had been promised me.

  I walked along the edge of the Mere in the grey morning. I came to Pryderi’s house, where Cicva sat grinding at her door, grinding flour fine enough for Pryderi, and Rhiannon with her.

  ‘Where is Taliesin?’ I asked.

  ‘Gone,’ replied Cicva. ‘He is walking back alone through the land as he came, from nation to nation, judging the people and telling them what is right and just to do, whether it please the oil-eaters or not. Why should you want him now?’

  ‘I wanted a witness,’ I told her. ‘I have come to claim what is mine.’

  ‘And what is yours?’ asked Rhiannon. ‘I too may claim what is mine, what I too have been given.’

  ‘You are mine, Rhiannon. I will take you now. You can plead neither sanctity nor weakness nor strength. I will take you with me back, through Rome and through Ostia, past Brundisium and Athens, through Alexandria and Byblos to my own home in the Old City. Come, Rhiannon, I have children there who need a mother, and I have slaves who need a mistress. I have a great house in the town, Rhiannon, with a hundred rooms, tables of ivory and beds of ebony, laid with all the silks of India and scented with the strange woods the Arabs bring out of the Desert. There we eat well, Rhiannon, of bread and meat, and fruits and nuts you have never seen and have never heard of, and that not at feasts but every day. And wine, Rhiannon – we can drink a different wine every day for a year, and not exhaust my cellar. I have the wealth of ten kings in the Isle of the Mighty, Rhiannon, and in my own town I have the honour of a king. Roman Governors treat me as a man of importance, and merchants from all over the world bow low to me. And they will all bow low to you, Rhiannon, and bring you presents, because you are mine. I have an empty house that waits for you, Rhiannon, and an empty bed that waits for you. I will take you now, Rhiannon, back out of this land of mists and shadows into the real world.’

  ‘And would that honour me, that am a princess already?’ she asked. ‘Mannanan, you are mine, given to me. Now I will take what is mine. Come with me to the North, Mannanan, to my own people of the Brigantes. Come and live there with me, and all will honour you as a king, because I bring you. You will have mutton to eat all the days of your life, and oat bread, the fine fruits of the forest, blackberries and elderberries, cobnuts and blewits. You will have wool to wear and to sleep on, pure clean wool, through the hot summer days up on the heather hills, through the long winters in the dry cold air.’

  ‘I have a farm also,’ I told her, ‘up in the hot dry hills. I too have my herds of sheep, and I wear wool of my own breeding, that my own husbandmen have sheared, that the women of my own household have combed and spun and woven and sewn into cloaks and tunics, and into blankets for the winter nights when we shall lie warm together and listen to the wolves outside. There we shall smell the wood smoke, and drink the resined wine that we ourselves have trodden out, and on the bread baked of our own wheat we shall sprinkle oil we have pressed from our own olives. If you wish, Rhiannon, you shall never see a town again.’

  ‘If you spurn the throne of the Brigantes,’ she told me, ‘and will not be turned from trade, then stay here with me in the marsh. Here we will eat and drink in plenty, since it seems there is nothing you think of except eating and drinking. We shall have venison and hare, wild duck and moorhen, carp and salmon, oysters and mussels, snails and milk-caps and horns-of-plenty, And I will be kinder to you than you to me. I will let you go out and trade, wherever you will, up to the Picts and across to the Land of Norroway, anywhere.’

  I looked narrowly at her.

  ‘But not to Ireland?’

  ‘And what cause is there for you to go to Ireland? You have no need of trading there.’

  ‘I have no need to go to Ireland. All I want done is done by others. I have used the weapons that I know, money and persuasion and planning, to make a hundred men each work at what he
thinks he wants the most, and none of them even knowing the others exist, and by all that to bring about my desire. My work is done. All will now come about whether I go or not. I will only be an encumbrance. I need not go. We can leave now, Rhiannon, we will be home by the end of the spring, by the hot blue sea, listening to the first cicadas among the flowers in the grass, listening to the shephered boys piping. Come, Rhiannon, let me take my own.’

  ‘You are not going to Ireland?’

  ‘There is no reason why I should go to Ireland?’

  ‘There is no reason why you should seek the Gold in Ireland. You have been telling me of all the wealth you have. What more can you add to that?’

  ‘I must bring it back. I told my family that I would bring it. You will understand this, Rhiannon. This is my Gesa, that what I have said I will do, that I will do, and neither the love of women nor the fear of men will deflect me; no, not for all the Gold in Ireland will I break my word.’

  And then Cicva spoke:

  ‘And it would have been well if there were Brigantes who had taken that Gesa, for it was the Brigantes who said they would not submit, and then they submitted and the great castle of Stanwyck they surrendered without a blow struck.’

  She spoke with venom. I had not realised that Cicva hated Rhiannon so much, that she envied, from here in the Mere, hiding from Roman eyes, this princess of a surrendered house. Rhiannon at least could ride across all the island unchallenged. But Rhiannon did not hear her. Staring at me, she shouted:

  ‘Then take their Gold back to them,’ and at my feet she threw three coins, three coins I knew well. I stopped to pick them up as she went by me, and then I followed her out.

  She ran across the grass, round Cicva’s house, towards the fence of the paddock. Hueil was there, acting as guardian of the Mere in Pryderi’s absence, and he was preparing to go boar-hunting in the thickets of the Deer Moors. He had two horses saddled there, and Rhiannon ran past him and swung up on to the one saddled for her. I could not think where she was going. Half I remembered the ritual chase when we had caught Cicva four months before: half I hazarded that in fact she had nowhere to go, she just wanted to run away, to escape, to flee from me anywhere.

  I rushed to the fence and swung up on to the other horse. Hueil, who had only just fastened the girths, looked at me in surprise. Then he grunted:

  ‘You never know,’ and before he slapped the horse on the rump he handed me up the boar spear.

  The horse twisted to bite me, and I recognised him. It was Taliesin’s evil-tempered brown again, a horse I hated. But it was the only one ready, and I belaboured his flanks with the butt of the boar spear and prepared to see if he would go.

  Go? Oh, yes, that brown horse would go. You can forgive anything to a horse that will go, that will run his heart out the day, the one and only day, when he must. There was only one horse I ever had that went better, and he was dead, long dead. Rhiannon looked back and saw me following.

  At first she thought she could play the old game, and keep just out of reach till my horse tired, while hers was still fresh but it was hardly a furlong before she saw that if once she hesitated, if once her horse pecked or stumbled, then I had her. She set her horse at the paddock fence and cleared it. Jumping is not something you do lightly if you have only one eye, but by now I was in such a state of suppressed anger and excitement and general rage with the whole world that I just pointed the brown at the fence and let him go, shutting my eye in case I lost courage. Every fence and hedge we came to the black jumped, but the brown, stupid blundering, marvellous brute, went through as often as over, and where the black cleared a stream, the brown went in and I was soaked. And this did not soothe me.

  We left the edge of the Mere, and climbed the hill up on to the open moor, where there were no sheep at this time of year, but only deer and wolf, and the chance of bear or boar in the woods. It was into the woods Rhiannon went, seeking a twisting path. The brown did not care for paths. He went into the scrub all right, but he galloped straight as an arrow. Very soon my clothes were torn to pieces by the thorns, and I was glad that I had flung my sealskin cloak to Hueil as I mounted. It was a wonder that the horse did not run head first into a tree, or that I was not brained on a low branch, but by cutting corners we stayed with Rhiannon as she went, went north-west towards the sea, away from the Mere. Did she choose the way on purpose, or by the accident of its giving us a firm path? I did not know. I followed. We were in sight of the sea now, a paler grey line under the line of the grey clouds. There was a thicket ahead of us, and Rhiannon made for it. I saw a disturbance there, and I thought ‘boar’ and then I saw men and I still thought ‘hunting party’. Rhiannon vanished into the thicket, and the nearest man was close to me, running towards me with a spear. I had scarcely time to think, ‘Funny kind of spear to go after boar with,’ when I was close to him, and I knew him. It was one of Gwawl’s friends, the older of the two middle-aged men who had escorted the Mouse from inn to inn. He came at me with his spear, and as he lunged, I pulled the brown horse round and down we came, knocking the middle-aged man flying. I fell clear: I wouldn’t have done that if I had been using one of my own saddles with a strap for the toes.

  I rolled away from the threshing horse, still holding the boar spear, and got up just in time to receive the charge. I sidestepped the spear point, and the shafts crossed as we pushed against each other, sweating and straining for the advantage. Suddenly, we both gave together and each went staggering back. He was quicker on his feet, for all his age, and came back at me with the spear levelled. There was only the one thing to do, and if it did not succeed I would never know it. I poised the boar spear, regretted briefly that it was not very well balanced for the job, and that I had no chance to find another, and threw it, with all my might, when he was barely two yards away.

  His run carried him past me. He fell on his side. The point of the spear stood out two fingers from his back. That, I thought, is the end of you, and who knows …? I bent to take his spear from his hands, and someone jumped on to my back from behind. There were a number of them, filthy men, smelling of dirt and fat, but of salt and the sea beside. They held my arms and turned me round to face the thicket.

  Gwawl stood before me. He wore still his black and white shirt, and a pair of trousers he had bought in Lutetia and Cicva had won from him and given to me, cheating the Berts, and I had given Pryderi and Gwawl had stolen back. He stood there and laughed in my face.

  ‘That was fair,’ he said, jerking his head to the body on the ground. ‘When a man armed meets a man armed, then there is neither blame on either for seeking blood, nor on the victor for drawing it. There is no call for vengeance here.’

  ‘Where is Rhiannon?’ I asked him.

  He ignored the question. He went on:

  ‘By every law of my people, I ought to kill you now, and save all the trouble that will come. But there was an oath I swore, and a bargain, and I must keep them. I may not kill you, Mannanan, in this land I may not kill you. So I must leave you.’

  Someone had unsaddled the sweaty brown horse, which had remained standing cropping the grass and watching the fight unconcerned. After all, what concern was it of his? They flung the filthy saddlecloth over my head, and wrapped me in it, and tied my arms to my sides under it. Then they spun me around, and someone, Gwawl I think, struck me half a dozen blows across the face, not hard, but sharp, contemptuous.

  I staggered about, trying to wrestle my arms free, trying not to breathe the sweat on the blanket, hoping that I would not step badly and break my ankle. I wrestled and struggled as if it were Gwawl himself I was fighting, and in a way it was. I wrestled as if it were Hercules I was faced with. Then suddenly, dimly through the blanket, I heard more hooves and shouting, familiar British voices, and in a few moments, someone was cutting through the rope and letting me breathe again.

  Madoc asked:

  ‘Who were they?’

  I rinsed out my mouth with the cider someone gave me. I said:
r />   ‘I don’t know, except that it was Gwawl.’

  Hueil was kneeling over the body.

  ‘Irish,’ he called. ‘Wicklow man here, I think. Nothing of value, though, except his knife.’

  They brought me the brown horse again, and handed me my bloody boar spear. Someone asked:

  ‘What, doesn’t he want the head?’ but I ignored that. We set off again, through the thicket, where we found Rhiannon’s cloak, of thick yellow wool, on the ground, and then down a steep narrow valley onto the coastal flats. The way was clear, with the marks of hooves and broken branches. The beach here, I knew, was shingle, with a bank above the sea. We could see a group of something on the bank and made for it. When we came closer, it was a group of horses. We reached them and went up the bank into sight of the water.

  Far out across the bobbing waves we could see the skin boats, a dozen of them, big ones, already setting the lug sails that they too used, all paddling hard.

  ‘Too late,’ said Hueil.

  ‘Wicklow men,’ said Madoc. ‘If you wish, we can be at sea in six hours. I will find a crew here, and we will pick up warriors in Pryderi’s country. Or we could wait for Pryderi, but I do not know how long he will be. Then we can raid the coasts of Wicklow till we find her.’

  I looked into the setting sun. Somewhere out there, on the leaden water, being carried across the February sea in a basket covered with a little leather, was Rhiannon, the glorious Rhiannon, that was worth the greatest ship that ever was just to carry her across a little stream.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I will see to it myself. I will go to Ireland and find her, at the proper time.’

  Chapter Ten

  Two mornings later, I stood on the bluff above the Dark Pool, where Rhiannon’s hut lay in ruins. I stood looking into the waters. To whoever dwelt there, to Those Below, I vowed, in bitterness, the whole of the Island of the Blessed. And as an earnest, to Those Below I gave, first, Gold. Three Gold coins, ancient but unmarked, I threw into the water, one by one, in order of age. And then I plucked the eye from my head and cast that in too. Not my real eye, you must understand, but my most expensive one, of diamond, carved with a scene of the judgement of Paris.