Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  Nor did Conchobar ever see his nephew again.

  I trudged south with Callum the Hairy, passing the river last of all, and while the host turned west up river, we turned east towards the sea. There were, as I said, about five hundred of us, and not a man whose name or whose face I knew except Callum. I had my axe in my hand, and my cloak on my back, and a little bag at my waist with my belongings, like a few spare eyes in case we were invited to a feast. I asked Callum where he came from.

  ‘From far up there,’ he said, pointing to our left. ‘It is on the coasts opposite the Picts that we are living and it is across the sea that it is we would rather be raiding, because it is a fine land that the Picts have, and easy it would be to take it from them, but it is silver in plenty they have that lets them keep men always under arms in case we come, and the bread that those men ought to be growing they can buy for them.’

  They were a crafty people, these men of Callum’s, part of a nation of the Irish who called themselves Scots. They did not worship any living being, but their sacred thing, they said, was a ship, a stout wooden ship that had once cast itself up on their shores and had given them much silver, and been the foundation of such prosperity as they had. Besides, they said, it was more convenient to worship a ship, since there was no chance of sinning by eating it.

  When we crossed the river, we passed into the land where Cathbad could no longer, as he said, protect me, but I remembered how little power he had seemed to have even in the land of Tara, and I laughed at him. There was nothing he could do to protect me that I could not do myself.

  We marched on, our men singing the rousing chorus of ‘Erch, the Bastard King of Leinster’. When we could smell the sea, we came to a village, a collection of huts by the water. We turned out the whole place in a twinkling, women and pigs and cattle. Beyond the village was a strong place, a rath as they call it, an earthwork around a circular farmyard, and a fence on top of the bank, and a gate in the fence that we easily broke in. The men in the rath we killed very easily, but there was nothing inside worth taking. The prince of the place was already dead across the river, and his women had fled to the west. Some of his own peasants had taken the rest of his belongings, mead mostly, and shut themselves inside the rath to enjoy them. Some of our men were for burning the place down, but Callum would not allow them.

  ‘For indeed,’ he told them, ‘it is bringing our families down here we will be, and I will be king of this place, and I will reign from this rath myself.’

  There we spent the first night, and when we went south we left a band of young men to hold it, and there we sent all the cattle that we stole, and there we agreed to meet if we were scattered. The young men had the women of the place to comfort them, and the pigs to eat. But we turned south into the narrow plain between the mountains and the sea, and all I could think of was Gold. I hardly remembered at all that down there in the South, by the sea, somewhere, was Rhiannon, and that is what Cathbad could not protect me from once I was out of the plain of Tara. For in the Plain, I thought of glory and honour and the rule of law and of love: but once I was across the river, there was nothing I remembered but Gold.

  There was no one in that plain that expected our coming. I wondered why. Callum listened to me wondering as one listens to the prattling of a child, and then in pity teaches it to wipe its nose.

  ‘Indeed, it is the country of the Eastern King that we are coming into, the country of Leinster. It was not to the taste of the king of this and to go to fight at Tara, for he has not been in this island for a year or two, but he has been wandering across the seas, and some say inside the Empire. But now he has come back, and he has brought him back a wife too, from among the Iceni, and a hard time of it he must have been having in making his rule felt again. For it is a proud people the Brigantes are, and impatient of any king.’

  ‘But – the Brigantes!’ I protested. ‘They live in Britain.’

  ‘So do some of them, and some of them live in Gaul, and the finest and oldest branch of the nation live here, although it is arguing and quarrelling they are always over which is the oldest and finest branch.’

  Now I began to realise why Caw had been so unperturbed when we told him that Rhiannon had been stolen away by the Irish. And now, too, I first began to wonder whether she had, in her own mind, been stolen or rescued. From now on, when I thought of her, as I did infrequently, I only wondered when I should reach her in her palace in the capital of the Brigantes, when we should at last fall, as I thought we would, into each other’s arms.

  We went south, like a thunderstorm. We slept each night in the villages we sacked, with the widows and daughters of the men we killed, if we could catch any to kill, which was not often, or if not, then with the wives and daughters they kindly left us. And we ate their cows and pigs, but not many of them, because our real interest was in collecting a great herd together on the banks of the river beneath the fence of Callum’s new rath. We spread out too, and covered all the country between the mountains and the salt sea, and we were no longer an army of five hundred men, but a scatter of companies of fifty or so, each just enough to settle a village. In these villages there were few men, I noted, however many women we might find. But almost every day, almost every hour, I would ask Callum:

  ‘When do we come to the rivers of Gold?’

  And he would answer in that ingratiating way that Barbarians have, when they know that the answer will be unwelcome and they do not want to hurt your feelings by telling you the truth:

  ‘Soon, soon. Tomorrow, the next day, the day after.’

  I realised, but slowly, that he had no more idea of where the Gold was than I had. Till at last we forded a little stream running east from the sea, as we did a dozen times a day, and I scraped my toes into the sandy bottom. I stopped dead there, with the mountain water icy cold half way up my calves, and I shouted in joy. Oh, yes, I’d seen sand like that before, the sands of the Maeander are like that, where Midas gathered his Gold, and gathered it all up, so that there is no Gold there any more. But this was Gold sand all right. I stopped where I was, I did that, and I bent down and I plunged my arms to the elbow in the bitter stream and I brought up a fistful of sand. I held it in my cupped hands, and then I swilled it round in my palm, watching for the glint of mica and I saw it, and then I knew that I had come to the Rivers of Gold.

  ‘Callum!’ I called to him. ‘Callum! Is this the first of the rivers of Gold?’

  ‘Rivers of Gold? Why, all the rivers of the Eastern Kingdom are rivers of Gold, that’s what they call them. Why do you think that this is the first?’

  ‘But look at the sand!’

  ‘Sand? Why, it’s just sand, like any sand. All sand is the same. What has that got to do with Gold? Come on, we’ll hurry on to the next river and you can play in the sand there.’

  I had no choice but to follow him. That afternoon we reached the next river, where it ran low among the rocks in the summer, cold from the mountain tops that we could see, and there was a big village. There were a few men there, whom we killed, because they didn’t run fast enough, and a lot of women. But while the rest of the party rearranged the politics, not to speak of the morals of the place, I took a flat platter with a high rim out of a house, and I knelt by the river bank, where there was a little backwater with a beach of clean sand. And there I washed for Gold. I knelt there and I put handfuls of sand into the platter and whirled it round till the sand and the water climbed the side and swished over, and I looked in the bottom of the dish for the heavier metal that should be left there. I knelt there in the gravel and I panned and panned, while the sun went behind the hills, and even on a June evening the air grew chilly. And at last, when some of Callum’s men came, to call me for supper they said, but they had never done such a thing before, and it was only out of curiosity that they walked so far out of the village, I was able to show them at last a tiny glimmer of Gold, a patch of Gold grains on my palm, enough to gild a third of the nail of my little finger.

 
It was Gold, real Gold, and all Callum’s men, and their leader, crowded to see it, Irish Gold that they had never known, only heard of and not believed in. They made a celebration of it, or tried to, though in reality they did not think as much of the Gold as they did of the cattle they found, since the cattle they were getting for nothing, and the Gold was taking work, that they could see, and the metal I had got in all those hours of kneeling was not enough to buy the hind teat of a barren cow. But because I was jubilant, they rejoiced with me, and we drank late into the night, and looked out over the plain between us and the sea that was dotted with our own fires, and the hills that were bare of the fires of our enemies.

  Next morning I went to Callum, because none of our men were in a condition to march, and it was not only the drink that did it, but sheer fatigue, overwork both on the road by day and in bed by night. I said:

  ‘I want some women.’

  ‘And wasn’t it enough women we were having last night? There was that fat black-haired bitch with the green eyes—’ twas a dreadful game she was having with me, a dreadful game. Oh, Mannanan, it is an awful thing for a man to have to say, but it’s too old I think that I am getting for this life. And anyway, what is it you would be doing with a woman in the daytime?’

  ‘No, it’s nothing like that, Callum. I want a lot of women, and I want them to work. You can have them all back for the night. Old ones will do. I’ll be staying here for a little, and I want them to work.’

  ‘And it’s staying here I think we will all be, for a little while too, the way I’m feeling.’ And stay we did, and the men were happy enough, for they had food and drink in plenty and women to wait on them hand and foot. But they let me have about thirty of them, assorted ages, to work during the day.

  That first morning of work, I had all the women out by the stream. I made sure that each of them had a trencher or a platter with a rim or a shallow bowl or something like that to work with, not always the best things for panning, but they had to do with what they had, and they soon learned not to bring what would only make hard work. I showed them what to do, whisking the pan around and around. They all looked at me blankly for a bit. Then one of them said, in a bright but witless way:

  ‘Oh, yes, like in the Gold dance.’

  ‘The Gold dance?’ I asked. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Oh, like this,’ they all said together, and straight away they began to dance, and to sing a wailing song. It was a very complex dance, with many figures and a great deal of repetition, and in between each figure, or when they were not dancing principal parts, as some of them did, they were all the time panning, panning with their hands, though none of them picked up the pans they had, or seemed to know that they should. The first few figures I did not see, because I was too busy scattering salt and chewing garlic, and crossing knives and generally making myself secure against any spells they might be weaving. It would, of course, have been foolhardy to have tried to stop the dance in the middle, or all the stored-up power from the first measures would have been split out on me, and there is no knowing what I might not have turned into. But it was tempting, because the dance lasted a full hour of a summer’s day.

  Some of the figures were quite intelligible. They panned, and they worked bellows, and they poured out of crucibles, and they beat leaf thin with hammers, oh yes, you could have been a goldsmith as good as any in the world to have done all they danced. Then half of the women became traders from over the sea, and brought things to trade for the gold. They had cloth, in long strips, and jars of wine to drink, and cattle to milk, and most welcome, it seemed, of all, they brought the cauldrons, of bronze and of iron, to boil the food in. For you cannot boil a dinner in a cauldron of Gold, any more than in a cup of wood. And all the time, they made this continual panning motion, while they made their sacrifices and poured out their oblations, and charmed the rain down on to the hills to fill their streams.

  When they had finished, I said:

  ‘Right, now! You know what to do. Get on with it!’

  They all looked at me, blank again.

  ‘What, in the river? Put our feet in cold water?’ They were horrified. ‘We’d catch our slow deaths if we did, and die coughing and groaning and spitting blood. If cold water touches your skin, then it is death, slow death, and if it is hot water, then it is a quick death.’

  Looking at them I could see how firmly they believed this. It was no time to try to convince them by argument. I had borrowed a whip of bull’s hide from Callum, and I cracked it in the air above my head.

  ‘I don’t care what you think, or how you die. Into the river you go.’ What I would have done if they hadn’t gone, I don’t know, I hadn’t the heart to flog them, they were too stupid, but first one and then another waded gingerly into the stream.

  ‘And what is it we are to do now we are here?’ one asked. Heaven preserve me from ever again having to make women work.

  ‘You know all about it. Get down there on your knees and wash for Gold.’

  ‘Oh, he’s mad,’ one woman said, and another, a pert lass and very good in bed, I found, but no use at all in a practical situation, giggled and told me, in a confidential way:

  ‘You don’t get Gold out of streams, dear. You get Gold from over the sea. You have to find a city, and then you can dig it up out of the rocks between the houses. And they say the Romans will give Gold for dogs. I wouldn’t mind seeing a few Romans around here, I wouldn’t, be a change from you Northerners.’

  ‘Oh, no you wouldn’t,’ another girl corrected her. ‘Those Romans all smell of olive oil, they drink it instead of beer, they do, whatever it is.’

  ‘Then if you can’t get Gold out of the river,’ I argued and that was a sad mistake, to argue with them, ‘where do you think the river got its name? Why do you call it the Gold River?’

  ‘Oh, that’s just its name,’ they all chorused. ‘There’s a Red River and a Black River, and so there’s a Gold River, or so the Bards tell us. Names don’t mean anything.’

  ‘But your dance – why do you call it the Gold dance?’

  ‘Why not? Every dance has to have a name, or you wouldn’t know which dance you were doing, would you?’

  The more they talked, the more I became convinced that it was true, that they had forgotten what the dance was about. It was all one with the fundamentally irreligious approach they had to dancing. They had really forgotten that the rivers were full of Gold. But they had danced the Gold dance so often, I thought, that it was a miracle that there was any room left for the waters to flow between the mounds of precious metal. They had danced it forty or fifty times a year, every year. The words didn’t matter, they told me, they made them up as they went along, about village scandals, and they would soon have some words sufficiently disrespectful to fit my case.

  I drove them down into the water, cracking my whip, and I split them up into small groups, choosing the most likely places. I went from group to group all the day, watching to make sure that they were all panning in the right way, and ducking those who weren’t. I was sure that they were doing it right. But there was not the glimmer of Gold in the pans, not a sparkle of bright metal, nothing but sand, sand, sand. I couldn’t understand it all. It was just possible that they had been filching it away and hiding the dust, but it didn’t seem possible after I had had the most likely thieves working naked for a few hours, so that they had nowhere to put the stuff. There was no Gold. Thirty women to pan a stream for a whole day and no profit – it was incredible.

  We washed that stream for four days, working from the sea back into the hills up to the source. Nothing, not a speck. Mica we found, and plenty of that, but no Gold. The sand was right. The rocks were right. The water was right. Perhaps the earth had stopped breeding it, I thought, but that doesn’t happen without the intervention of some God, and there would have been some memory, however garbled in the telling, of that.

  There might be Gold in other rivers, I thought, and the women might know of it. They said they didn�
�t. I threatened to have them tied and flogged, but by now our men were so demoralised that all they and the women did at this was roar with laughter. That was one of the troubles in Ireland, nobody took war seriously, and they had even less respect for trade. Irreligious, as I said.

  So we moved south, to the other rivers of Gold, and we panned a fresh river every day, with fresh women. Every village had the Gold dance, and we had them dance it till their feet nearly wore off. Perhaps the words of the song, I thought, were more important than the women said they were, but it was past trying now to find out what it was. And they didn’t know what the sacrifice was. I tried a number of things, pigs, dog, hen, child, and even once a sickly foal that would have died anyway but even so it was expensive. And yet there was never the smallest little nugget. I didn’t try snake, because there are none in Ireland, but if ever you are going that way you might take a snake with you and try. There’s not much hope, but at least it would be conclusive.

  And then it came to the sixth morning, and we were on the edge of the sixth river, and I had all the women of the village out on the bank, and we had danced the dance, and I was telling them what to do, and here were a couple of cracks of the whip to be going on with – and I was interrupted. Someone was laughing at me. I glared at the crowd, and they all edged away, in the way frightened people have, from the offender. And the worst of it was that they were afraid of her, not of me, that was plain. She was an old woman, very old, with not a tooth in her head, and not much hair on it, shrivelled and bent, and the very look of her frightened me as much as it did the women. For this was someone as old as the women who had cursed us as we landed, and much more evil, and it would not need any queen to bribe her to curse a man – she would do it out of spite and amusement. I snarled at her – my temper was wearing thin now – and I asked: