Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  ‘They will sing our deeds and give them to Cuchullain,’ I told him. ‘Almost every Bard has made his own song, and altered the plain truth of the deeds to fit his own metre. Did you ever see the Setanta able to tell one horse from another? But a hero must have a horse that can be named. And each Bard makes his song fit what his Lord wants to hear, and there will in one generation be a hundred songs of Cuchullain. Yet each Bard will swear that he sings the true and authentic facts of the case, handed down word-perfect from eyewitnesses. At last, someone will write the song down, as Homer did, and write one particular Bard’s song among many. And then there will be only one song about Cuchullain, and every other Bard will alter his own song to accord with the true, the written word. All the other tales will soon be forgotten, and we with them.’

  ‘Forgotten and accursed, because defeated.’

  ‘What kind of Briton are you dressed up to be? If you were really a native of the Island of the Mighty, then you would say that defeat is the surest sign of virtue and that failure shows how you enjoy the favour of the Gods. Gwawl has succeeded. He has challenged the might of Rome all across Europe, and he has saved his island, and there is little doubt that he will rule it when Maeve and Conchobar have torn out each others’ throats. But no one in Ireland will remember him, and the Britons will know his name only as someone that Pryderi rolled in the mud, and they will invent reasons why that is how the game of the Badger in the Bag was first played. And Pryderi the King will be forgotten, except that as a king he wandered unknown through cities that did not know him, and that with some shadowy companion called Mannanan he cheated shoemakers and shield-makers. And there will be a shadowy memory that Madoc was a sea captain and that Heilyn once sailed in a ship, Caw will only be remembered as the father of his many sons. All will be forgotten, except that dying man bound to the standing stone.’

  We spoke no more. By night we lashed ourselves to the single thwart by our belts, and clung on, besides, wakeful, lest we be overturned and drowned in our sleep. By day we took it in turns, one to sleep and one to beat off the birds who would have taken the bread from our mouths if we had had any bread, and the eyes from our heads if they had a chance. It was the salmon mallet we used for this.

  We were drifted north by the winds and the tides. We passed close enough to some shore, to the eastward, to see great mountains, miles high. Another time we came near to a rocky coast with seals lying on the beaches, but the tide carried us off, and we watched it dwindle bluer and bluer through the day.

  Then, on the eighth day, when we were very weak and not inclined to talk even had our lips been dry enough, I was awake and Aristarchos was asleep, and I realised that we had some peace. The gulls and the gannets had ceased to torment us: they no longer dived at our eyes. Instead, I could see them circling ahead of us, a tower of white feathers above some object moving across the water, as yet invisible from our little boat so close to the surface.

  And then, as the seabirds came nearer, I began to see it all, lifting above the close horizon. First the tip of a mast, flying a pennant chequered with yellow and black. Then a great dark lug-sail, the sail of a ship on a broad reach, crossing us from starboard to port, and heading east across the north-west wind.

  ‘A ship!’ I shouted to Aristarchos. I shook him awake, I thrust the paddle into his hand. ‘A ship! A ship, paddle to it, paddle to the ship!’

  And paddle to it we did, and we shouted through our cracked dry throats, and now we could see the gunwales and heads above them, and she lost way and came round towards us into the wind, finer and finer as they made towards us as best they could. And what other ship would we see so far out at sea, and what other ship would we meet at such a time? A ship of the Venetii, a ship built long ago on the coasts of Gaul, a ship that Aristarchos knew as well as I. We shouted, we shouted, and we tried to believe we recognised the voices that shouted back to us.

  We came alongside, under her lee, crossing her bow, and someone threw us a rope. I looked up into his face, and it was a face I had not expected to see on the salt water. He no longer squinted, but it was the man I knew, from the inn at Bonnonia, who drew fish and made strange allusions. He helped us aboard, first Aristarchos; and I could hear his cracked cries of surprise and then the gurgling as he drank – he was never very dainty. Then I hauled myself up the side on a rope, and hands clutched me to help me over the bulwarks.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ said Madoc. ‘Saved us a lot of trouble them birds have. Thought it was I did we’d have to go all down the coast of Ireland to find you.’

  ‘Who shall drink of this water shall thirst again, but he who drinks of the cup of life shall never thirst,’ said the man from Bonnonia. That, I thought, was a typical Brit saying, except that to my mild surprise he said it in Greek, a Greek with a Jewish accent, but the dialect of one of the smaller islands, Leros or Patmos or Cos. I snatched at the jug and half drained it before I saw whose hands had offered it.

  ‘Not too greedy, now,’ said Pryderi. ‘It wouldn’t be very dainty if we had you burst over the floor.’

  ‘Not floor, deck,’ I corrected him. I wasn’t going to have him treat me as if I were a landsman. Now I was in my proper place, as he had been on the road. I looked around that lovely ship, lovely as a woman, I thought, lovely as Rhiannon. Oh, a splendid place to be, on the open sea, clear of all the plots and double dealing of the land. My spirits were rising again, as I drank, and cleaned a chicken leg and tore at a cake of oat bread. Now, I was in a ship, and I was my own master again, and among seamen. The only real landsman I could see was Aristarchos, and it was only for him that Pryderi would have to choose his words. I looked aft. Beside the steersman, in a short white tunic, unspotted, of course, by the marks of toil, stood Taliesin.

  ‘What use is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Very useful he do be in recognising the stars,’ Madoc assured me, but he went on, ‘or at least he will be if ever we get a clear night and any stars to recognise.’

  ‘And how many more have you got like this?’ I asked testily. I felt I had a right to know. I had after all, been promised the use of this ship for the summer’s trade and I was at least entitled to have it for this return voyage.

  ‘Only four men forward, like this one here,’ said Madoc, waving at the man from Bonnonia, and speaking with the familiar tone of someone trying to delay the impact of bad news. ‘And aft, there’s five of us, and now you.’ He hesitated, unsure of how to explain himself, and he was saved the trouble. Out of the cabin under the poop came Cicva.

  ‘Well, at least we’ll have some good food in this tub, as far as the cooking goes,’ I admitted, grudgingly prepared to forgive the presence of a woman in a ship, seeing it was this sensible and competent queen. But then behind Cicva, yawning and stretching arms as if fresh from sleep, and shocking that was, too, being only a couple of hours before noon, why, who else would it be, with all those ghastly birds around us, but Rhiannon.

  ‘If she’s in this flaming ship,’ I told them angrily, ‘then it’s me for the skin boat again. Hoist it out!’

  ‘Shame on you!’ scolded Cicva. ‘And wasn’t it Rhiannon herself who made us come out to sea again after we’d all got safe into the North among the Picts, out of reach of those filthy Romans with all their pillaging and atrocities that they’re doing everywhere, delighted they are too that they’ve got an excuse. We took my little Mannanan up there to be fostered with his Aunty Bithig and home up there with my Grandfather Casnar I would have been pleased enough to stay, but no, out to sea she would go, and it was never letting her go by herself I could be, not with these old goats that call themselves sailors.’

  Rhiannon came up to me, all smiling and shining, and looked at me in a proprietorial fashion, as if she had never done me a wrong. I glared at her.

  ‘Why do you look at me like that, Mannanan, when I have saved your life a hundred times?’ she asked. ‘Did I not send all the birds of the sea to find you, and to hover above you like a tall mast with a fine flag on it, so t
hat we could see you from afar and sail down to pick you out of the water? I belong to you, Mannanan, and after all I have suffered I still return to you when I could so easily be free of you for ever.’

  ‘Traitor,’ I told her. I was not angry, this was past the point of anger. ‘You have betrayed me to my ruin, and may yet betray me to my death. And you have been the death of good men all up and down the edges of the Empire. What more trouble will you bring on me and on Caesar?’

  ‘I might have been the death of one man at any time,’ she answered, ‘and saved all other blood. There was never a moment, Mannanan, from the day you saw me first in Londinium to the day you set sail for Ireland, when anything but my word stood between you and swift and silent death. There were men enough ready to kill you, Mannanan, eager to kill you. But I took an oath from Gwawl, and from all the men of the Brigantes, that there should not be a hair of your head touched. How do you think a one-eyed man lives in battle? You were safer facing the host of Gwawl than leading the host of Ulster.’

  ‘And Maeve?’

  ‘A hard woman she is, and cruel, and not one to give up her prey. But I made her swear, at the least, that if she had you in her power, she would keep you alive till I came, and then, we stand together, Mannanan – what can prince or queen or emperor do to harm us?’

  I heard her voice and I looked into her eyes. I took her hand and I turned to my friends.

  ‘Whither do we go now?’

  ‘Not back to the Picts,’ said Aristarchos. ‘They will have my head, and I still have my own uses for it.’

  ‘If we continue south,’ Madoc declared, ‘we will be on the shores that belong to Callum the Hairy, and it is already one ship of mine that he has trapped and looted, and I do not want to be in a second.’

  ‘If we go south east,’ Pryderi told us, ‘then it is neither I nor Rhiannon nor Taliesin will live long, nor die slowly, if we meet the legions in the field.’

  ‘And they are looking for me in Britain,’ said the man from Bonnonia, to whom this conversation was of interest, ‘for blasphemy and treason combined, in that I refused to burn incense before the statue of the Emperor.’

  I ignored him. If a man could bring himself to do such a horrid and unprincipled thing as that, then what did he deserve but the punishment decreed by law, whatever that may be. I spoke only to the others.

  ‘I have seen a map, and I have spoken to astronomers who know. Ireland lies half-way between Britain and Spain. Let us then sail west, passing north of Ireland, and in a few days we shall be in the harbour of Gades.’

  I took the steering oar from Grathach’s hand. They then trimmed the sail. I had the breeze on my right cheek.

  ‘West, then,’ I cried. ‘West, due west, and home!’

  THE END

  Places mentioned in the text with their modern names

  Bonnonia Boulogne

  Bordigala Bordeaux

  Calleva Silchester

  Corinium Cirencester

  Cunetio Marlborough

  Deva Chester

  Dubris Dover

  Durovernum Canterbury

  Eboracum York

  Glevum Gloucester

  Isca Caerleon

  Lindum Lincoln

  Londinium London

  Lugdunum Lyons

  Lutetia Paris

  Massilia Marseilles

  Noviomagus Chichester

  Pontes Staines

  Rutupiae Richborough

  Sulis Bath

  Venta Caerwent

  Men Went to Cattraeth

  John James

  www.sfgateway.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of the imagination, not of history, nor yet a translation. We know nothing about the Battle of Cattraeth, neither when it was fought, nor against whom, nor where, apart from what we read in the surviving ninety-seven elegies which go under Aneirin’s name. We do not even know how long after the battle they were written down in their present form. But this is the setting in which the battle must have taken place.

  The chapter headings and their translations are taken from the edition of John Williams ab Ithel, published in 1852.

  1

  Carasswn disgynnu yg Cattraeth gessevin

  Gwert med yg kynted a gwirawt win

  I could wish to have been the first to shed my blood in Cattraeth

  As the price of the mead and the drink of wine in the Hall.

  I wish that I had been the first to shed my blood before Cattraeth. But it is now that I pay the price for the wine and mead of the feasts in Mynydog’s Hall. Late, indeed, I came to the feasts.

  I came in the afternoon to sight of the Rock of Dumbarton. I had with me Aidan, son of Cormac King of the Northern Coasts, whose Judge I had been through the winter. Not a King like you find in the South. We walked across all his Kingdom to hear his people’s quarrels and judge them and settle the prices in five days. He had perhaps, in a desperate time, four hundred men who could bear arms, and those arms would only be their axes, or scythe-heads tied to long poles. There were only five swords in the whole Kingdom, and one cape of mail that Cormac wore. But he was a King, just as Evrog the Wealthy was King in Dumbarton, and Uther in Camelot, Theodoric in Rome and Zeno in Byzantium and Clovis in Gaul.

  I climbed the rock of Dumbarton with Aidan before me and Morien the charcoal-burner whose father no one knew behind me. Steep that rock is, and the path is beaten earth, not stone cut into steps as they say is the path to Camelot. All the harder for an enemy, Evrog used to say. All the harder for his own men, labouring up with bags of salt and casks of water, with carcasses of meat and dried salmon and bales of hay for the horses. All the harder too for the horses when they were brought down to exercise in the plain. And hard for me.

  Yet that hard climb up the rock was for me the beginning of my journey to Cattraeth. From this place, Evrog ruled his vast kingdom, Strathclyde and Galloway to the borders of Cumbria. He was hard pressed by the Scots who came flooding in from Ireland, and it was certain that if they did not come to stay this year, then they would some day soon. So had Cormac’s father come thirty years ago. In the East, Evrog was always at loggerheads with Mynydog King of Eiddin, although they never came quite to open war: their enmity was more a matter of pinpricks and cattle-raids and hiring poets to sing satires and scurrilous verses against each other. And now, the Savages who had taken the attention of the King of Eiddin for long enough were come far west enough to attack Galloway from the South. This was, I thought a more serious thing than any settlements of the Scots from Ireland, because they were all Christian and worshipped the Virgin: and the people there are the same as we are, only differing in their way of speech, honouring poets and smiths and all makers far above any soldier or King. But the Savages do not live in this Roman way, and there is no understanding them.

  Yet Evrog was cheerful enough all the time I knew him, saying that there was no other way for a King to live in such a situation. If once he stopped to shed a tear he would weep for ever.

  Evrog’s Gatekeeper knew me well. He was Cynon, son to Clydno who was King Mynydog’s Judge. Cynon had been to the South beyond the wall, and had learned to read several words of obvious utility like deus and rex and poena and tributum from Cattog the Wise in the School of Illtud. He had seen great cities with his own eyes, Chester and Gloucester an
d Caerleon. But he had not wished to be a Bishop, as he could easily have been, since he had no wish to live walled up and at the beck and call of any little monk who wanted to be ordained, so he came home, and was now Captain of the Household to Evrog. Now, they tell me, Cynon is a great man, and for all that his arm is crooked at the elbow and cannot strike a blow, he stands as Judge at Arthur’s throne. Seeing me, as he was coming out of the Hall to blow the horn for the King’s dinner, he shouted out the words I did not want to hear, ‘Make way for Aneirin! Behold the Chief Bard of the Isle of Britain. Stand aside all, that the greatest Poet of Rome may pass!’

  Once I would have thought that my due, less than my due indeed, and everyone in the Island knew it, and there was no boasting in acknowledging the truth. But now – I was no longer a Bard, though the bitter words were spoken and could not be called back.

  I walked through the gate into the Dun of King Evrog, all set around with spiked logs the height of a man, with stables for a hundred horses and three hundred men, safe against the Irish. Evrog’s Hall was not of stone as are palaces in the South, with pillars of marble and roofs sheeted with gold and the walls covered with magic pictures. Not even Evrog here in the North could pay for those workmen from far away to bring their magic to his Dun: no man born in the Island has the art now of cutting stone by spells. He had lately new built the Hall in the Roman manner, with straight sides and a rounded end in which he set his High Table. The logs of the walls were thick and the chinks well stuffed with mud and seaweed, and the thatch was of oatstraw, which is better than reeds.

  Evrog was wealthy. He showed his wealth, hanging tapestry from the walls and weapons from the pillars. He showed forty swords, and with mail and axes and spears he could send forth a Household, mounted, of a hundred men, and this was, at the time, more than any King had ever done in the Island from the beginning of time. So the whole of this immense Hall, forty or fifty paces long, glittered with iron. It glittered, because beside the fire in the centre Evrog would burn rush lights, dipped in tallow, twenty or thirty at a time, to light the feast. You will understand therefore that a feast in Evrog’s Hall was a scene of magnificence such as few even in the South see more than once in a year.