Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  The Setanta looked at me as if I were a child.

  ‘Oh, you merchants. Why is it always only the end you look at, and never the means? It is how a thing is done that is important, not only what is done. Whoever is to be High King, he must show it, not by walking into Tara in the dark, but by killing his rival before the eyes of all the Island. If we shed no blood, no one will believe we rule.’

  This is the way of the Barbarians. I knew he would never rule, not with all the four armies of Ireland broken against each other, and the legions wading ashore and the Eagles flying over Tara. That he did not know. He went on:

  ‘But if it is any comfort to you, tomorrow the High King will indeed be at Tara, and we will be going that way too, and the day after that we will fight him, and the armies of the West and of the South.’

  You’ll fight him, I thought, not me. I’m not going into any mélêe with only one eye. Nevertheless, while the others sharpened their swords, I honed the edge of my axe. You never know.

  Chapter Three

  Next day the Army marched. Our troops had come down from the North in skin boats, or by foot along paths that clung close to the sound of the breaking wave, to steal the well-broken horses and come at the High King from a direction he did not expect. Now, therefore, we marched north of west, to Tara.

  We must have been five thousand strong, all told, and we covered a great square of country. For besides the men, we had the cattle we had stolen in the country round about, and the horses, and droves of swine, and all the women we had stolen as well, and who now wouldn’t be left behind, after the way of women in a land at war, and their children came, and children who didn’t belong to anyone who would own them now, but who had to come with the Army because there was no other way for them to beg a few scraps to eat.

  We trampled over the grass of May and left it a great scar of mud, because it rained the day we marched, as one might expect, after weeks of dry weather. We strewed the countryside with half-gnawed bones and worn-out shoes, piles of ordure and dead babies and all the other litter an army leaves behind. This, I thought, is what Pryderi would like to see again in the Island of the Mighty: I wish he were here to see it now.

  The chariots had been painted in gaudy colours, and hung about with bronze and silver bells, and charms of all kinds, in place of what they usually hung on them. For the journey, the colours were covered against the dust with sheets of coarse cloth. And men pulled them, because it was important that the precious horses should not be tired out or cast shoes or break legs before the battle.

  We covered about fifteen miles in the day, and when we halted we were, they told me, in sight of Tara, but there was never a city I could see where they pointed, only a few scattered huts between me and the distant hills where the sun was setting. But what I could see only too well, and see better in the dark, was the long line of fires that answered our own. From our farthest right to our farthest left the fires shone hard and bright in the clear dry air, for the hard east wind now blew the rain away. I could see clear and harsh the figures of men who passed between us and the flames. So we lit our own fires, and we made our force look bigger, as I was sure the High King had done, by lighting two fires for every man and a fire for every woman.

  We cut down a forest to feed our fires, and we slaughtered all our cattle, so that every man could have the hero’s portion, the thigh, to eat, and the rest we threw away as not juicy enough. The women stuffed themselves on what was left and then the straggling children, and the dogs quarrelled over the bones, and the mangy wolves crept out of the thickets and scavenged at the edges of the camp, and wished it were the next evening, because they knew, they knew.

  There was mead enough for every man to get drunk, and stay drunk till Doomsday, as indeed a man will if he thinks Doomsday is tomorrow. So get drunk they did, all of them, before midnight. I went to the Setanta, who was still sober enough to speak, and I suggested that he should get a line of pickets out, in case the High King tried to rush us in the dark. He laughed at me. The Irish never do such things, he told me. They have no sense of prudence at all. Now you or I, if we had an enemy, would have used some intelligence when he left himself vulnerable, would ambush him with a knife in the dark, or put an arrow in his back in a narrow way, or burn his house over his head – or safer, when he was out of it. But the Irish believe in meeting their foes face to face. No, said the Setanta, there was no need to be afraid of anything.

  I did not agree. I looked for Heilyn, or Callum, or any of the men who had come with us in the ship, but they were not to be found. Drunk, somewhere, I thought. Will there be no sentry in the night over all this army of the North? No, none but I.

  I remembered how our army lay. Before us there was a wide level plain. It is only on such ground that you can fight in chariots. About midway along our front was a mound, a burial mound of the men of old. On our right, there was a thicket, and between the mound and the thicket was an area of scrub willow, knee high or higher. Our left flank was quite open.

  I moved through the host, my sealskin cloak open to show my mail coat, one eye black and one glowing red, ruby red. Nobody was sober enough to ask what I was doing, or to deny me anything. From one group I took a jug of bull’s blood, hot and steaming from the heart, and from another I had a jar of mead. In a bowl I put the fat from around a bull’s kidneys, and the thigh of a porker. These I balanced on my shield, a round bronze shield, enamelled, once set with garnets. I balanced the shield on one hand, and in the other I had a black cock.

  I turned my back on the host of Ulster, and I walked towards the host of the High King. I went over the open ground in the dark, and there was not the least silver of moon nor any star to be seen; yet I did not step into a molehill, nor trip over a drunken sleeper nor an amorous one.

  I came to the top of the mound, a low mound raised perhaps five or six feet above the level of the plain. I set down the tray. I took from my bag a knife, a bronze knife, broad of blade, and I began to dig. I knew where. It was an old grave and much honoured, the grave of one of the long dead kings of the country, and full, if only I had had the courage to open it, of Gold and jewels. But I found the funnel between the stones that led down to the mouth of the King. First into the funnel I poured the bull’s blood, hot and still steaming, full of life and strength, and after that the mead, full of the warmth of the sun and the busy stirring of the bees. Then I offered the fat and the meat, and I put them into the hole, that the waking Dead might eat and be filled, and not hunger after me. Last of all I took the morse that fastened my cloak, a Golden pin, Indian Gold, not Irish, and I threw it into the hole. Phryne gave it to me. Phryne was dead. I gave it back to the dead. I did not fill in the hole.

  I stood on the mound that led to the land of the dead, the grave mound that all the British and all the Irish believe is a gate to the Land Below, where we who live may meet those who are dead and those who yet may live. I had paid my private debt to Those Below. That would have whetted their appetites. Now I would show them how to feast, now I would draw out life for them. Now they would have a feast indeed.

  I stood on the mound in the blackness, and I looked toward the host of the High King, where the fires died uncovered and the filth of men was poured out on the earth, and I saw that they were ready. And I took the High King and all his host, and I devoted them to the Gods Below, I sacrificed them to the dead who sought their lives. I sang in the ancient tongue the rite of the Gods Below, that our ancestors first brought over the mountains out of the plain, when Greek and Trojan, Persian and Egyptian were one nation. I asked the questions, and I answered them too, for want of anyone to answer them to me.

  ‘And you came to the crossing of the river, and what found you there?’ I asked myself, and I answered in the dark:

  ‘Waters swift to the knee, waters cold to the belly, waters bitter over the head.’

  The fires opposite me guttered and died as if the waters indeed rose over them. The host of the High King lay down drunk to sleep,
and they dreamed: oh, yes, they dreamed. Their dreams did them no good.

  ‘And you came to the crest of the mountain, and what found you there?’ I chanted, as I have chanted it before in the Temple of the Old city. And I sang the response, as I have sung it to my Father, and as my nephews have, and my son will sing to me:

  ‘I found the heart out of the chest, and the liver out of the trunk.’

  The darkness was thick enough to touch, thick enough to feel. This was a darkness that I called upon myself, a darkness that felt and thought and knew. With this darkness I cursed the host of the High King. The black cock lay still at my feet looking at the Holy Line. I asked:

  ‘And you came to the gate of the pass, and what found you there?’

  And who was it, then, that answered:

  ‘I found the flesh of a thigh, and the marrow of a bone.’

  For Those Below now stood beside me on the mound. First came those who had gone below and returned, before they died for ever. Ulysses and Aeneas, who spoke with the dead across the stream, my kinsmen both – the same blood ran in our veins and one flesh, living and dead, we stood upon the mound.

  Next, but farther off, stood Orpheus who went below to seek his love, and lost her again, through love, and Gilgamesh, who was before him, and Persephone who stands half of every year before the throne below, and Pwyll the Old, Pryderi’s forefather, who ruled a year in Hell in Arawn’s place. They all came, and stood beside me on the mound. They held up my arms, and with me cursed the host of the High King.

  To bring the friendly dead was one thing. To bring the just Gods was another, those who favour no man, who cannot be persuaded. Thoth and Adeimantus. But all the night I stood upon the mound in the cold dark, the worst May frost in a man’s life, and the sweat upon my skin froze within my clothes. I sang the words I may not here repeat in the language none may know I speak, and at last the great Judges of the Dead stood beside me to judge the High King and all the host and condemn them for all the evil they had done. But they judged the host of the North, also, and they judged me. But that I did not know.

  Last I sang up the named and the nameless Gods Below, the gods who do not care for justice or for right or for any man, and it is these gods above all who rule the world from their place below, rule the Sun and the Earth and all the other gods. They hate all things living, and they seek only to draw us down to themselves and suck out our life. These are the gods that no man worships, but the gods do: that men and gods fear, and will never tell their fear. They feed on souls. I promised them food in plenty.

  And at last, they too came to me on the mound, and the ice crackled in my eyebrows as they came past. It was the last frost of a mild winter, and it blasted all the fruit blossom throughout Ireland, so that there was no cider pressed that year. And who ever before knew of frost out of a starless sky?

  There came a gleam of light over my right shoulder, and I heard a rustling and a scraping before me. The light became stronger, and the cloud faded from the sky, and at last the sun shone full over the horizon behind me, and all the cocks of Ireland crew, as they had done under the Glass Mountain on Mid-winter’s eve. Before the cock at my feet could crow, I bit off his head with my teeth, and I tossed the struggling body into the hole in the mound. And then those in front of me saw and heard the head in my hands crow louder than ever a whole bird sang. And then the head too I threw into the hole, and I pushed the earth back over it with my feet.

  Behind me, I knew, there lay the host of the North in a drunken sleep. They would not stir for all the ghosts of the world. But in front of me, men came gently forward over the frost-white grass. The High King was a wise man, wise as I, and a worthy enemy, for he knew what war was about. He had thought, as I thought, that a determined rush by a few determined men would settle the matter for good and all, and so it would have done. If the Setanta were to die, who would stand here?

  There were about two hundred of them, young men and strong, the High King’s household troops. They came steadily and stealthily on, looking up at me as I stood before them on the mound, my arms stretched in prayer, so that they knew well enough what I was about. I sang my hymns to the Gods Below as loudly as I had done throughout the night, and yet they took no notice of me, they did not so much as throw a spear. They would see to me later.

  But when they were well within a spear’s cast from me, when their line stretched out to lap round the mound on both sides – then I stopped singing, and I dropped my arms. Their whole line stopped as if they saw another line rise up from the ground to meet them. And so they did. Had I not worked all night for it?

  Each man of the household looked at the line that rose before him, and each man cowered behind his painted shield. Each man looked into the face of the man who stood against him, a sword’s reach before him, shield to shield. And each man saw himself not as he was, as he might see his image in a pool, or even in a mirror if any man could cast and polish a sheet of bronze large enough to reflect a whole man. No, each man saw himself as he would end. This man saw his own ribs thrust up and out from a spear stabbing from the ground, and that one saw his own gut pour out on the earth from a slashing sword. Men saw their own skulls smashed by axe blows, their eyeballs hanging down on their cheeks, and their brains grey in their hair. They saw their faces shorn away, they saw severed arms held in good arms, they saw themselves try to hop on one leg and the stump of a thigh.

  Now many a man, and a brave man too, is sickened by the sight and smell of his own blood steaming on his arm, or at seeing a limb of his, or even a finger, warm on the ground. But hot blood is one thing. Stale blood is another. The High King’s household did not see themselves as they would be that night, fresh dead. They saw themselves as they would be in a week ahead. The clay of the grave clotted on their rusted mail, those that had not been rudely stripped. Their rings were torn from their fingers and their ears. Their clothing hung in stinking rags. Maggots teemed in their gaping wounds. Worms writhed in their empty eye-sockets, those that still had their heads. Their bellies swelled, and their navels showed the green spot of corruption. The stench of the grave hung like a curtain before them. And worst of all, it was not only the edge of the iron that had emptied those eye-sockets or laid bare the teeth within the cheek, or cracked the marrowbones. The wolves howled in the woods, and the crows hung in great cawing crowds above us and filled the trees. The household of the High King looked at themselves, and they knew themselves by their painted shields, and by their garments, what was left, and by the scars on their bodies. They looked at themselves, and they did not stay to look twice.

  If I then had had a hundred men ready to follow, there would have been no battle that day. The household rushed back through the ranks of their own army, and spread the tale of terror, and not a man of them struck a blow in the battle that day, though all of them died before the sun set.

  Then the crows rose from the grass and circled above us, and from the South and the East there came in the kite and the buzzard, the souls of those who have done evil and are condemned now to live on carrion. And there was only one who could have sent the birds, and it was for her that I did battle. I would not have raised Those Below on the mound for all the Gold in Ireland: I did it because only thus could I conquer all the land and find the mistress of the birds, the Lady of Those Below. And with Rhiannon’s birds, my own wolves came howling on the flanks. All the birds and beasts were working their way towards the rear of the High King’s army, so as to have a shorter way to go for their dinner. And the host of the West saw this, and it did not make them more eager to fight.

  The noise and clatter of all this, the cawing of the birds, the shouts of terrified men, a dawn chorus of a kind we seldom hear, woke all our army as nothing else could have done. There was a great shouting and blowing of horns, and in less time that it would take a stammering man who was not very sure of his arithmetic to count to a couple of thousand or so, they had formed a line of sorts, but well behind me, leaving me alone on the mound. An
d there I stayed.

  Our warriors did not look very well, most of them. That is one reason why Barbarians fight so savagely. Usually they have been drunk the night before, and there is nothing like a raging headache to put venom into your sword strokes. Or so they tell me. I don’t have headaches. Going into a fight drunk is quite another thing. I’ll fight a drunken man any day, but a man who is sobering up – never!

  The line of foot soldiers was not very straight or very steady, I looked for the men who had come in the ship, especially for Heilyn and the Gauls, but they were nowhere to be seen. I decided that they had deserted, as Barbarians often do, and mercenaries usually do, before a battle. But, if our army had formed a line, so had the High King’s, and what a line. It overlapped ours at both ends, not because there were many more men in it than ours, but because their men were spreading out so as to have room to run away, while ours, having nowhere to run to, were clinging together for warmth. But that was the enemy’s first line, and there were three more of the same strength behind that.

  Later they made songs about that day which claimed that we were outnumbered by twenty or thirty to one. It always feels like that, even if they’re only three to two, because all the spare men go loose and you never know where they’re going to come from next. At my best count, they were four to one at most, and fifty chariots to our forty, and we were better off for chariots because we had all the trained horses. Men were running about, pulling off the covers to show the painted sides, and harnessing the horses and fitting the scythe blades to the sides – not to the wheels, of course – which discourage anyone from getting close enough in to hamstring the horses. Of course, someone always tries it and ends up in seventeen pieces.

  The few chariots we had ready were already out in front of the foot, and to my surprise they were singing the old song we so often hear at the Circus before a race, when the charioteers are trying to get their spirits up. The words were a reasonable translation of what we are used to: