Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  ‘Let it grow in the sand!’ laughed Cynon. The old man watched as we emptied both sacks into the water. The grain floated, a scum on the surface, spreading out to hide the blue of a wide stretch of the shallow sea, dirtying it, stealing its beauty from us, just like the Savages who brought it.

  Last of all, we could see half a dozen of our men heaving and straining till something of great weight fell over the side and splashed into the water. And there it sank into the soft sand, and proved very troublesome to those who tried to bring it out onto the firmer beach. But they did it, and pulled the heavy thing up the beach to the fire. It was a Savage plough, with a beam of oak as thick as a man’s body, and a pole of ash: the wheels were iron-tyred, and the share of iron, too, three times the size of a real civilised share. It was built to cut deep furrows in the clay, so that the Savages could plant wheat, that evil plant, which grows in the bad soils where oats run rank and thick. It was too heavy for a horse: it was what the ox was for.

  The old man followed us with his eyes as we pulled the plough towards the fire. When he looked up the beach, he gave a wail at what he saw. There they were butchering the ox, and getting the joints ready to roast on a spit that Morien the forest man had made out of the poles of the mast and the yard. Cynon dismounted and shook the old Savage.

  ‘Talk!’ he said fiercely. Like so many Eiddin men, he had a few words of the Savages’ tongue, not enough to carry on a conversation, but enough to follow, vaguely, what was said in common talk. ‘Talk! Where from?’

  The old man looked blankly at him. It was wilful insolence, he must have understood Cynon, he had shouted loud enough.

  ‘It’s no good,’ I told Cynon. ‘He won’t talk, he just won’t.’

  ‘Won’t he then?’ growled Morien. He and Caso grasped the old man under the armpits and dragged him to the fire. Morien took hold of his foot and held it close to the flames, till the filthy cloths in which he wrapped his legs began to char and the leather in his bursting shoes, salt-soaked, curled back and singed and steamed.

  ‘Talk!’ ordered Cynon. ‘Here, push it right in! Talk! There, that’s loosened him. Give him some water, somebody, or Aneirin won’t be able to hear him. Now, then, what’s he got to say?’

  ‘He says they come from far across the sea, very far,’ I explained to my comrades. ‘They used to live in a very flat lowland, on the edge of the sea, by marshes and lagoons. He says it is not good land for men to live in. They cannot grow much wheat, and have to kill birds and animals for food. The water is rising. Some of the marshes used to be fields when he was a boy. They can no longer grow enough wheat to live. They cannot go away inland, because they are afraid of the people who live there. So they have set out to sea to find a new land.’

  ‘Then they had better think about another new land,’ ruled Cynon. ‘They have no place in ours. Let them try Ireland.’

  I listened to the rest of the old man’s story, putting it as well as I could into the language of the Island of Britain. He said:

  ‘We bought this ship from our chieftain. We gave him all the amber beads we had, and two pieces of gold that my mother’s mother had stored away, and three silver buckles and a bronze pot. We were thirty in it, myself and my brother, our sons and their wives, and some children. We had never been on the sea before, any of us, ever, only on little boats in the marsh. We suffered on the first day, and some of us ever after, always being sick, spewing up what we had to eat, burning and blistering in the sun and the wind. We thought that it would be a short voyage, only three weeks, that is what they told us who had been here and come back, only three weeks to Britain with a good east wind. We thought we would have an east wind, because we had sacrificed to the Wind God a sow, and a white horse that we bought with our old ox and two cows. We drove them into the sea, and cut their throats so that the blood drifted out towards the West, and the way the ship would go, and we thought that would bring us an east wind and good luck in all the voyage.

  ‘Then, as soon as the wind began to blow from the East, at the end of the spring, we set out to sea. Oh, we thought it was a great thing, to be out on the sea, just to point the ship before the wind and glide to a new land, with no work, no effort to move us on. At first, it was all a long feast: we ate and drank as much as we liked, even though it all went to waste over the side. But after a week, the wind changed, and began to blow from the West, and the ship went every-which-way whence and whither. Only sometimes at night could we make out the stars, and never in the day did we see the sun through the cloud, the thick cloud that never rained on us, so we never knew, in the end, which way we ought to go.

  ‘And soon, there was no food. And after that, no water. The little water we had, the last of it, we kept for the ox and the pigs. The children died first. Then the old. My brother died the first, and then his wife, and mine. But towards the end, it was the young men and women who began to fall away and dwindle. I was the only one who had still strength to look over the side when I heard you speak, and knew we were safe.

  ‘Still, in spite of all, we had kept the ox alive. It was all we had to help us break the ground and grow food. We brought all the tools we had, so that we could clear the scrub and plant our wheat. We were not afraid of the hard work in clearing the forests, but at least we knew there would be plenty of empty land we could settle on. Nothing el[[s]]e in this Island, but enough land. It was late in the season, we knew, for setting out, but as long as we had the ox alive, and the seed corn, we would be able to grow enough to keep us through the winter and begin early next spring. That work we were prepared for, and starvation through next winter. But not the thirst on the water: that was too much.’

  ‘How then would you live through the summer, till your harvest was gathered?’ I asked him. Oh, but I knew how they would live. We would see them all over the civilised land, little bands of them, sometimes only one or two men, sometimes whole families, in rags, drifting from door to door, begging for old clothes, for food, for drink, for anything. If there were children with them, oh, they were expert at pinching them to make them cry and draw pity from our women.

  I had seen Bradwen herself feed them, a hundred times, down in Eudav’s Hall, and at the end they had come back and burnt the Hall for her charity. That was what they wanted, to find a woman alone in a house, all the men out in the oat patches or farther out with the sheep. The would sit, all quiet and still, not saying a thing, watching her every move till her nerves began to shred. Then they would start, picking up a few things here and there, always with one eye for the men coming back so that they would have time to run into the woods. And if she protested, they would threaten her, and seize whatever else they could see, and if she did not protest, they would take the same things, but more slowly. And at the end, if nobody came back in time to frighten them away, they would take her as well, raping her on her own hearth, often on her own bed, perhaps four or five of them in turn. Oh, yes, that was how we had seen the Savages live through the summer, before they went home to their own harvest of wheat in August. That was how this man was going to live, dress it up how he might.

  ‘We would live somehow,’ the old man told me. ‘Somehow. There are some of our own people settled, they told us, almost everywhere along this coast, wherever we came ashore. We would go to the nearest chief, and ask him for protection and food, and promise him support in return – as we promise you our loyalty for the food you will give us. That will ensure us a little wheat, enough to keep us alive through the winter, just alive. But besides, there are the forests. Oh, yes, they are full of food for the taking, everybody knows that. There is fruit there, hanging from every tree, and honey, as much as any family can want. The pigs run where they wish in those woods, and belong to no one, and they will come to be killed when you call. And deer, too, so tame that you can catch them with your hands as you walk in the woods, and they would do, though there is no human being who would eat deer meat for choice. Nobody can starve in this great and empty land. It’s fertile, too. It has
never been tilled. A man has only to scratch a furrow with his plough, and plant six grains of wheat, and at the summer’s end, even if it is a bad summer, he will have six bushels. We have heard all about it from men who have been here, and returned to being over their sweethearts or their children or their parents. And the weather here, we know about that too. It is never bitter cold here, like it is in the homeland, and the snow never lies for weeks together, deep as a man’s thigh. And there is never drought, never a lack of rain to swell the crop. Oh, this is a glorious land, a splendid land – and all empty.’

  And then he turned angrily, sweeping us, myself, Cynon, Cynrig, Caso, Morien, with a furious look.

  ‘And what have we done to you? What has changed? When first our people came here you welcomed us. Those first comers, you took them in, and fed them, and let them wander far into the country, up to the source of the great river in the South, till they found good clay land to plant their wheat. You were glad enough to have them then, to have more men in your empty Island. And they were no different from us, no better, no worse, three generations ago, I remember, myself, the talk about Hengist, how he sailed, in my grandfather’s time. He came, and your Kings welcomed him, too, and made him a King like themselves. The poorest Prince in Jutland, he was, a laughing-stock all over the mainland, and yet you welcomed him and gave him a Kingdom. If you took men in before, why do you not now?’

  ‘There is no room for you,’ I told him. ‘The land is full. There is no land to spare.’

  ‘But no, but no! This island is empty. We know that. All the world knows it. All the Romans have gone. They went away, by tens of thousands, by tens of tens of thousands, in our grandfathers’ time, all of them streaming away across the narrow sea, back into Gaul to quarrel among themselves and fight the Franks and the Goths. They left the Island empty. The Romans pulled down the walls of the cities, and stripped the gold from the roofs and the silver from the gates, and they sailed away with all their wealth. We have not come hoping to find treasure to carry off ourselves; we know it is all gone. But the Romans left the land, they could not carry that off. We need the land to grow our food. Give us the land, so that our children will not starve, like those we left behind in Jutland. Why will you not give us the empty land the Romans left?’

  It was Cynon who answered him. I translated as he spoke, even running on ahead, sometimes, because there was only one answer, whoever framed it.

  ‘There is no empty land. The Romans have not left. We are Romans.’ He stood there, in his red cloak, the red feathers blowing in his helm, proud as Owain. ‘The legions, yes, they left, and that was fifty, sixty years ago, to conquer all the world. What does that matter? What does it mean? North or south of the Wall, this Island is Roman. Roman it shall ever be. From Wick to Cornwall we keep the Roman faith, the Roman laws. We live and think as Romans. And this Roman land is not yours to settle in, nor ours to give you. It is a land we must keep for our children, so that they can live as Romans live. If we were not Romans, we would live like wild beasts, in the woods, as you do.’

  The old man looked at us. At me, the go-between, still thin and frail after the year I had spent as the Savages’ slave. At Cynrig, fastidiously picking the lice out of a Savage shirt, and flicking them into the fire. At Cynon, rock steady, his feet wide apart on the sand, one hand on his sword, the other holding the rib of beef from which he picked the meat with his strong even teeth. At the rest of the Squadron, eating beef around the fire, cooking mussels in a bucket, paddling in the sea, collecting more driftwood, or even just sleeping in the sun. In the heart of the fire, the ploughshare glowed red through and through.

  He asked: ‘What shall we do now? How shall we live? You have stripped the clothes from our backs. You have broken our plough, and killed the poor ox that was to pull it, that was dearer to us than our children, because we kept it alive though they died. You have scattered our seed corn into the sea, that we thought dearer than our own lives, because we starved rather than eat it. You cannot do all that to us, and not feed us. Let us have water, at least, just a little water – there are some still alive in the ship. Give them water! And then, food! You must give them food, you must let us have food. How else shall we live?’

  I gave him Cynon’s answer, before Cynon spoke it.

  ‘We do not care how you live, so long as you do not live here.’

  At Cynon’s sign, Cynrig and Caso took the old man by the arms and dragged him down the beach again to the water. Those of us who were still awake followed, in a jeering, shouting, mocking throng. Some were on foot; others, like myself, rode. By the ship, now almost surrounded by wet sand, because it was a little past the ebb, we stopped. Four men took the old man by the arms and legs, and swung him back and fore, back and fore … and at last, they flung him high into the air. He fell limbs threshing, into the bottom of the ship, landing on the loose planks with a rattle and a crash, screaming in pain and then moaning.

  ‘Push her off, boys!’ Cynon shouted. Men crowded to put their shoulders to the sides and slide the vessel down off the sandbank into the water. I looked down from my horse into the ship. There was a huddle of bodies lying in the bottom, half in and half out of the bilge-water showing where our men had torn up the deck-planks in their search for treasure, or iron.

  The Savages looked back at me. They did not move, they did not speak, they only looked at me with drying eyes that had little life left in them. One was a man of about my own age, hardly covered by a few rotten rags, his lips puffed and scarred, his body scattered with open sores and running boils. There was a girl of, perhaps, fifteen – it was hard to tell, she was so dried out, but I judged by the budding breasts under the strands of matted yellow hair. There was an old woman, with no teeth left. They were all starving, pot-bellied, their ribs showing, their skin hanging loose on bodies grown too small for it, and dried and shrivelled and peeling. They did not cry for help, or moan in their misery. They did not move even. Only the old man writhed on his broken bones, head lower than his feet. They just looked at me, all of them, with their great empty eyes, blue stones sunk in dark pits. There may have been fifteen: I did not count.

  I dropped from my horse into the water. I linked arms with Aidan, and we too put our shoulders against the side of the ship to shove. She was moving already, but even though more and more men came down to help us, she was heavy, sinking into the soft sand. But the half liquid sand soon began to help us much as it hindered, and suddenly she began to feel lighter, to lift as she slid farther and farther off the sand and into the ebbing water that began to snatch her from us. She would drift away from us now, out to sea, out to the narrow gap between the two arms of the cliff which fell grinning into the waves. Pushing, we were up to our waists as we fell into the deeper water, and we laughed and splashed and ducked our friends’ heads and played like children.

  Then, as the ship began to pull out of our hands, so that not all our weight now could hold her straight, then, with a scream and a shout, Morien came riding down the beach and into the sea. He had rubbed his face with charcoal, so that he looked like a Pict. He flogged his mare into the waves; when the cold sea touched her belly she whinnied and voided herself. In his left hand, Morien whirled a torch, made of dry wood and wrapped round with some of the old rags out of the ship. He waved it violently to keep the flames alive. He flung it up high into the air, and we watched it circling and falling into the ship as it moved slowly out of our reach.

  I stood with Cynon by the fire where the soldiers were now burning the offal and the bones and scraps, raising a stench and a cloud of black smoke. Cynon said, ‘There was no need for what Morien did, no need at all.’ He had grown up on this coast. ‘Watch her go, now.’

  We did watch her, as she spun slowly round in the ebb, the smoke rising from her steady and black in the air. There was no sound from her, not that we could hear from that distance, over the laughter of our men dancing on the sands. The ship was moving faster and faster, towards the gap between the cliffs, to
wards the open sea. Morien and Caso were using the poles that had once been the mast and yard to push the ploughshare out of the fire. The wood had all burnt away from it, leaving only the metal, a huge lump of red-hot iron for which our smiths would be glad. It, with the iron tyres, would make ten or twelve swords, or at least twice as many spearheads. The ploughshare glared its heat into our faces, and the air danced between us and the ship, so that she seemed to shiver already on the calm water. Cynon murmured to me:

  ‘Now, it takes her.’

  We watched her, and it did take her. The current took her, and whirled her faster and faster, not out through the gap to the open sea, but towards the rocks, the fire racing down to the waterline with the draught her own motion made. Caso threw a bucket of water over the ploughshare to cool it to carry, spoiling its temper so that it would never now cut into our Roman land. The steam rose in front of us, hissing and whistling like mussels alive, stewing in their own juice in a bucket: for a moment it hid the ship from us completely. When it cleared, she had struck, on a rock still hidden by the tide, twenty paces from the foot of the cliff. She had struck hard, with the fire now down to the rubbing strake, and in an instant she had broken apart, and the fire quenched, and that steam, far from us, rose silent.

  That was the end of the Savages, men, women, and, if there were any, children too, though I never heard one of them speak, or even saw them move, except the old man, and he was no loss to us. A meal we got out of it, a snack rather, for the noon halt, for a young ox, half starved, and three little pigs fed no better will hardly give a mouthful between fifty men. And we got out of it some iron, and the hide of the ox would cover a shield for someone, and the pigskin would give a pair of shoes for riding. And there was enough tallow for a night’s candles in Mynydog’s Hall, and clothes to give away to the farmers we passed on the way back. And best of all, the Savages were gone with the ebb, drowned, or burnt before, and not to come in again till the next high tide. But by then we would be gone, too, dancing around the fires in a farmyard, and flirting with the girls for whose safety we had gone to war. We at least left the beach clear, the ashes buried, the sand swept over all.