by John James
But you need more padding than that. Stiff leather does little more than muffle the blow and spread it over your whole trunk rather than on a narrow line. Even then, a well-placed stroke might leave you winded, rolling and gasping on the ground, and hoping in your agony that some one of your comrades would come up and stand over you. What we used to do was to wear two sheepskin jerkins under the mail, one with the fleece outside, the other with the fleece next to the body to soak up the sweat. You did sweat under all that, and when your shirt dried at night, you would find it in the morning white and stiff with the salt, to stop a blow on its own. I had to wash my shirt at the end of every week, and that is why Mynydog had given us so many. It was the fashion, too, to wear scarves around the neck, if you could get them, to stop the armour chafing as well as to soak up the sweat, and at the end of the day’s ride it was nothing for a man to take his scarf off and wring it out and see a stream of water pour from it to make a puddle at his feet. Men would get their sweethearts to make them scarves in the colours of their families or their kings. So because of the shirts we wore, and the sheepskins we had under the mail, and the saddle-cloths we sat on, and the leather jerkins they made for the infantry, the farmers down the coast and up into the hills had all to make do with their old coats a year longer, through the rain and the snow, or lie a layer colder in their winter beds.
These were the people who had paid for the Household. They had done it all with poor tools, and not enough. A year earlier, even before they had ridden down to rescue me and avenge Eudav, when Mynydog was still only planning this campaign in secret in his own mind, Precent and Gwanar had ridden around every farm in the Kingdom, looking for iron, taking away all the metal the farmers could spare, and some they could not. Precent picked up any old spade, or fork with broken tines: or if there were a farm cart that nobody was actually using at the time, and Gwanar could attract all the attention his way, then Precent would take the iron tyres and the chains and the swingle-rings. A broken ploughshare was a great find, and the nails out of a pair of shoes not too little to take. These farmers had paid, then, in iron as well as in labour. Later in the summer they would be ready, many of them, to pay in time, and in blood, because they were willing to march as infantry with the Household down to the South. They had paid all that the Household had cost, these farmers, and when we came riding by they were pleased to see how all their goods had been spent.
They were glad to see us. They had paid, they saw, for an army gathered from all the Kingdoms of Britain, and farther, because we had those men from Little Britain across the sea. They saw our army with their own eyes, riding up and down the coast as far as the edge of Mordei, to press back the Savages, however they came, by land or sea. This was what they wanted. Mynydog had not wasted all the taxes they had sent him, and they were satisfied, and more than satisfied, to see us. We meant to them freedom from fear and anxiety. So nothing was too good for us, who had come to fight for them, nothing too lavish even though they starved themselves. Just to see men who had come such immense distances, from Orkney or from Cornwall even, places they had only heard of from wandering poets like me, come just to defend them, why, it made them sing all night, even sober.
We rode an easy way, east and south, under the blue sky of a hot June, looking out over the blue seas, at a few white clouds, at a little white foam. The wind blew, lightly, from west of south. When at last we came to the end of our ride, to the border of Mordei, the debatable land, we saw smoke blown out over the sea.
We looked south, across the empty country where no one lived any more. The stone castles that our fathers had built were empty. Those walls can keep out the Savages all right, because they do not know how to attack them, or how to build them, and they are afraid of what they do not understand, instead of wanting to understand it and conquer it like a civilised man: but how can a man live in a castle when he dares not walk as far as his own cabbage-patch, let alone ride his sheep-walks, for fear of being killed without warning by men who sit all the time motionless in the woods, watching him. Nobody lived in Mordei, not our people, not the Savages. But somewhere down there, perhaps as far south as the border between Mordei and Bernicia, there was a fire, so huge a fire that though it was too far to see flames, we could watch the smudge of dirty smoke rising high in the air and drifting out to sea.
‘What is it?’ Aidan asked. ‘Are they burning up all the world?’
‘They would if they could,’ I answered him. ‘They have powerful wizards, who make their strong swords. I have heard it said that there is an Island in the northern seas where their demons have set the mountains on fire.’
‘It’s evil, whatever it is,’ Cynrig agreed. He never liked to talk about magic. Perhaps he was too ashamed of his family who had their own dealings with the Little People who live under the sea near Cardigan. He turned away from us on the hillcrest, and shouted to the rest of the Squadron who had not thought it worth the effort to climb with us, and were grazing their horses in the dead ground behind us.
‘Come up here! All of you, come on! Come and see the evil these Savages are bringing on us. They say you can burn the stones in Bernicia, and that is how the legions held the country. I think that this is what the Savages are doing, burning the land itself to spoil it for us.’
The men strolled up the rise to look, chatting as they came and falling silent as they saw the smoke.
‘Burn all the Isle of Britain, they will,’ breathed Aidan, full of a kind of pride at having been the first to see it. ‘Demons they are, indeed. What do they look like? Do they look anything like men?’
‘Never seen one, boy?’ Cynon smiled at him. ‘Like men, they are, only horns they do have, or so they say who never saw any, let alone killed any. And watch out for the females, they’re worse. You’ll see them, soon enough, horns and all. Come on, then, if you’ve all had a good look. We don’t want to spend too much time watching here for nothing to come. Cynrig, you get them mounted again.’
We straggled down the slope. Morien stayed longest, looking fascinated at the smoke till the last. We laughed at him. He looked seriously at me.
‘Burn the whole country,’ he breathed. ‘Aye, that would be a fine thing to do. Scorch them out of the way, I’d like to do that. And I will, too. You wait.’
We laughed at him the more. I pulled myself up on to my horse, a brown gelding that I had broken myself three years before and Eudav had given me, and Mynydog had kept for me. I walked out to my place, right marker, and waited while the others finished fussing over their harness and got themselves up into their saddles. Then Cynrig bellowed the orders like a true Roman, as Owain had taught him, trying to sound like Owain – we all tried to sound like Owain in those days:
‘On your marker, into line … walk! Right … turn! In extended column of pairs … walk! … March!’
Going north, for the first hour, I rode as Scout, Aidan as always by me.
‘No, never seen any of these Savages, I haven’t,’ he told me. ‘Have they got tails, then? Really? Have they really got tails?’
‘It all depends. If you are frightened of them, then you’ll see tails on them, if they’ve got them or not.’
‘And horns?’
‘Oh, yes, horns, of course.’ I smiled at him, smiled, not laughed. ‘And so have some of us. Why, Aidan, you’re a horned man yourself.’
He looked at me suspiciously, puzzled, while we rode a few paces. Then he began to grin.
‘Horns? On my helmet, you mean?’
‘Yes, on your helmet. And so do they on theirs. But we put whatever we like on our helmets, horns and wings and wheels and moons and stars. They always put horns.’
‘But … Aneirin, is it true that they boil living men in their big pots and eat them?’
‘Nonsense! Even Savages aren’t as bad as that. The Picts used to do that, once upon a time, but you’ve never seen Precent eat anybody, have you? And, anyway, who ever saw a pot big enough to boil a whole man in. You could never make one, not
even out of iron.’
‘But they used to have them in Ireland. Everybody knows that. The old Kings used to keep them, and they used to boil their dead soldiers to life again after battles.’
‘Tales, Aidan, tales. Men like me make them up.’
‘But you haven’t been in Ireland, have you, to see? I know people who have been, and they’ve told me about it. I hope the Savages haven’t got one of those Irish cauldrons. Still I hope too I get a chance to see one of those Savages alive before we start killing them. Just to tell about after, like.’
‘Little chance of that,’ I told him. But even so, he was the first, a few steps later, to see the ship, and the Savages in it. We had come to the head of a steep path winding down the face of the cliff into the bay. It was too steep for a horse, but farther on, between the rocky headland where we stood and the more northern spur of rock, both jutting out into the sea, with the waves breaking at their feet over the cruel stones, sand-dunes ran down to the water’s edge. From the cliff, we could look down into the ship, drifting in gently against the light wind, on the last hour of the rising tide, between the horns of the cliff its own dragon head horned.
It was a Savage ship, I could see that. It was bigger than any vessel we Romans build, huge, immense, fifteen or twenty paces long at least. They have wizards to conjure these ships together, making the sides firm with planks of oak because they have not the wisdom to sew leather as civilized people do. They glue the planks together with Roman blood, and sew them with the sinews of Christians.
Aidan, riding ahead, saw it first, and called me to look. He was amazed, saying it was some King’s Hall that had fallen into the water. He was more alarmed when he heard it was a ship. I shouted back to Cynrig, but he, leading the main body, was too far back to hear. I told Aidan, ‘You ride back and tell Cynon. I’ll go on, and find an easy way down there. I think we can ride over the dunes to meet it.’
‘Don’t go by yourself down there, not by yourself!’ Aidan was terrified. ‘They’ll bewitch you.’
‘Better they bewitch one than two,’ I laughed at him. ‘I’ll sing them a satire.’ But when he had gone, I remembered that I would sing no more satires. Yet, as I rode down to the beach among the marram and the sea holly, I thought what satire I would have sung, and what the rhyme structure would have been, and what pattern of alliteration would have been most effective in quelling a wizard.
When I had found a smooth way down through the dunes, firm for the horse’s feet, the ship had already grounded, some way out, stuck on a sandbank, with the water still all around her. The tide was near its peak, and soon would be hanging, as it does, for an hour. I watched the ship, leaning over on its side, till the leading riders, Aidan leading Cynon and Cynrig and a score of others, came galloping over the sand to me, screaming and shouting as if they were going into battle or driving deer into the nets. I shouted back at them to be quiet, and they settled down, some of them sitting with us and others wandering about up and down the beach on foot. They poked in the seaweed and driftwood, and filled their helmets with mussels and winkles. Caso spread out his red cloak on the sand and went to sleep in the sun. At least they were quiet, and let us alone to listen for any voices out of the ship.
‘Is there anyone in it?’ Cynon asked, when for a long time we had heard and seen nothing.
‘There must be,’ I answered. ‘I think I saw something from the cliff. Yes, I am sure that I saw people in it.’
‘How many were there?’
‘I do not know.’
‘Think! Were they men or women? Or both? Were they armed? Did you see their weapons shine? Did they move about? Did they look up at you, or wave?’
‘I do not know. I cannot remember.’
‘Did you not try to count them?’
‘I never thought.’
‘Then what did you think?’
‘I remember that. I looked down from the cliff, and I saw the water so blue, against the rocks so grey like shining iron, and spattered with the white foam so clean. And on that pure sea, the ship lay dirty brown, like a … like a turd, come floating in to foul our pure sand.’
‘Oh, a nice poetic thought that was, to be sure. But it’s with a soldier’s eye you’ve got to be looking at things now. Fine verse it would make, to be sure, but it don’t help the the first boys to go up there, now, do it? How do we know what’s waiting for them?’
‘All right,’ I said shortly. I was nettled by Cynon’s sneering, his blunt words. It was more like Precent. It was Owain we tried to be like; but in stress and action, it was Precent we imitated. ‘I’m going up first.’
‘Oh, no you’re not,’ Cynrig told me. ‘We’re not losing our Judge so early. I’m going into it first, I and … Caso. Caso! Caso! Kick him awake, somebody. Come here, boy, and bring your sword. Now, who else would—’
But at that moment the noise started, a blurred indistinct half-moan, half-grumble, from inside the ship. Then a head appeared over the bulwarks, two feet above our faces, and looked down at us. It was a man. At least, it had once been a man and not a woman. He was old, in his forties at least. His hair and his uncut beard were turning from yellow to grey in themselves, but over this they were streaked white with sea salt from the dried foam. The salt was encrusted too on his face, clinging in the layer of grease with which he had tried to protect skin from the drying wind and the sun. He hung there, his face just above the gunwale, and croaked at us, and croaked, and croaked. It was difficult, but at last I could tell Cynon, ‘He’s asking for water.’
‘Oh, it’s water he wants, is it? All right, boys, let him have his water.’
Cynrig and Caso rode out into the sea, as far as the ship. Mounted, they could have leant over the bulwarks. They did not go as near as that, only close enough to catch the old man by the arms and drag him over the side, to drop him, face down, into the salt waves. He rolled over, spluttering and retching, trying to hold his head out of the water, which was only ankle deep. Everybody laughed. He got up on to his hands and knees, and crawled a little of the way towards the land. Then he collapsed again. Aidan ran barefooted into the little waves and, catching him by the legs, dragged him backward on to the dry shore. Then Aidan poured some water from his flask into the dry mouth.
‘Clean that bottle well after him, lad,’ Cynon advised him. Cynrig, dismounting by Aidan, asked me, ‘What’s he trying to say now?’
Even after drinking, when I was kneeling by him, the old man was difficult to follow. I was able, at last, to say, ‘An ox, he seems to be talking about an ox. He wants us to take care of an ox.’
‘Got an ox, then, have they?’ asked Cynon. ‘Have a look, boys!’
There were at least a dozen men now who had ridden or waded out to the ship. At Cynon’s word, they gingerly heaved themselves up to look into the ship. Then they began jumping in with shouts of discovery.
They were very gentle with the ox. First of all, Hoegi passed his helmet full of water up into the ship for it. Then they hoisted it out and down into the knee-deep water. It could hardly walk, but they urged it up the sand, to where Morein had lit a fire of brushwood. They brought out, too, three young pigs, and these men had to carry.
‘Anything more?’ Cynon shouted.
‘Lots of iron,’ Caso replied. There was, too, a great deal. Six or eight of the curved knives they used for wood-splitting or fighting came first, a little longer than a man’s forearm, single-edged and curved. Then there was a hay-fork, two wooden spades edged with iron, three axes, a hammer, two sickles and a scythe. A whetstone Caso thrust through his belt. There was a quern, which they threw into the water. Against it, our men broke a large number of pots and dishes, coarse and clumsy, and bad in colour. Hoegi cut the stays, and then Caso beat the tabernacle to pieces with his axe, so that the mast and yard, with the tatters of sail, fell over the side to be dragged to the shore.
‘Any people there?’ Cynon asked.
‘No, no people at all,’ Caso replied. ‘Some Savages, though.’
‘How many? Dead or alive.’
‘Some dead, some alive. Most betwixt and between.’
‘But how many?’ Cynon asked again.
‘How many?’ I asked the old man.
‘We were thirty,’ he answered.
‘Fifteen up here,’ Caso shouted. But Cynon looked down at the old man and snarled, ‘Tell us more!’
‘Tell us more!’ I repeated in his language. He shut his mouth, firmly, defiantly in a straight line.
‘All right, then, hold your tongue if you want to,’ Cynon shouted at him, and from the saddle kicked the old man in the back so that he fell forward again on his face in the sand. Meanwhile, men were bringing clothes out of the ship, and bags of household stuffs that they spread out on the beach for us to share out. There were cloaks and shirts, and instead of the togas we wear kilted around our bodies down to our knees the Savages use trousers of cloth to walk about in, as we wear leather breeches to ride. There were some pieces of jewellery in the bags, and I managed to snatch a ring with a stone in it, though what the stone was, and whether it was brass or gold or even bronze the ring was made of, I had not time to see.
Then the soldiers lifted out of the ship, with difficulty, two big leather bags, full to bursting with something that squeezed and shifted. They balanced the sacks on the gunwale, and Caso slashed one of them with his sword, bringing out a handful of grain which he passed over to me.
‘Seed corn,’ I told him. ‘For wheat.’