Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  That evening, in the hot and yellow August sunset, we came down to another farm. Here again we found food and drink waiting for us and for the horses. Again we lay to sleep by squadrons in the woods, making our beds as we wished. But this was not merely a second night like the first. Tonight, it was not the boys of the farm who watched our horses, and it was not only the wolves we were afraid of. Tonight, Gwion Catseyes and his squadron watched the horses, some sleeping in their mail while others lay awake out on the wide moor, turn and turn about.

  We did not light fires that night. The first night, the girls had come out from the farm to flirt with the men watering the horses. Some of them, too, did more than flirt, and slept close to our fires. But tonight we all slept alone, as well as a man may sleep alone in an army of three hundred, camped beneath the stone walls of a tower where no women live. There were worse than wolves to watch for, and these vermin no fires would frighten. The fence round the farm was not a matter of rails and posts, but a rampart of logs, seven feet high, the upper ends sharpened in the fire. This night not even Morien lit a fire, whether to cook food or to sharpen a stake: fires can be seen at night farther than smoke by day.

  We did not light fires that night. The first night we had been in Eiddin. This night, there was no certainty where we were: this was debatable land.

  In the misty dawn we rose to ride again. Now, too, we brought out of the barn what Precent had packed down there, load by load through the summer, to save us the trouble of carrying it ourselves. We packed more than mead now on our spare horses. Each of us had bacon and cheese and oatmeal to feed him for a fortnight. That kind of food is easy to carry: no man of the Household died of hunger.

  The heat haze lay before us as we rode south through the empty heather hills. Here there were no more sheep, and no more shepherds. Sometimes hunting parties came as far south as this, but not often, and if they did, they sang about it afterwards as if it were a battle. It was too deep into the debatable land. The deer thrived there.

  Still Precent led the skirmish line ahead of us: still Cynon and I led the rearguard. Any man who fell so far behind the main body as to hear our voices knew that he was too slow and spurred forward. We rode light enough, all of us, and no horse foundered. Now we were singing the other songs, the songs we knew were of older and bloodier wars, wars before the Romans. ‘The Hunting of the Black Pig’, we sang, and ‘Heads on the Gate’, ‘The Toad’s Ride’, and ‘Blood in the Marshes’. We were a happy confident Army, the Household of Mynydog King of Eiddin, and we did not care what Savages heard us coming. Besides, we were riding to Cattraeth, though we did not know it.

  7

  Ny wnaeth pwyt neuad mor dianaf

  Lew mor hael baran llew llwybyr vrwyhaf

  A chynon laryvronn adon deccaf

  No hall was ever made so faultless,

  Nor was there a lion so generous, a majestic lion on the path, so kind,

  As Cynon of the gentle breast, the most comely lord.

  On the last morning of our approach ride, we roused ourselves in the wood on the north side of the crest; we slept there in the dead ground, while Gwion watched beyond us to the South. We had slept in our mail, let it rust or not. Our horses we had hobbled by our heads, and we fed them on the oats we carried. We poured water from our flasks into our helmets for the beasts to drink. We did not show ourselves outside the wood till it was time.

  When we rode out again, it was Cynon’s squadron that, for the first time, rode in the skirmish line, and that for the same reason that it had kept the rear the other days, that it had in it the hardest and the toughest men, used to war and fighting and travel. Not all of them were like that. Precent, on the far right of the line, rode with Aidan, to cover him, as due to his Royal blood. I rode with Cynon, and we stayed on the far left, ahead of the others.

  We came to the edge of the wood, and looked across the valley to the Wall. It ran before us, miles ahead, a grey line across the green country. Below the wall there was a wood. A strange wood. In August other woods were green. This wood was brown and grey, as if in winter. The woods below us, this side of the stream, were indeed green. Between the edge of the nearer wood and the stream had once been Eudav’s Hall, and the paddocks where he ran his horses. Destruction had been complete: I could not be sure where it had been, the house where I grew up.

  We walked our horses down the moorland slope, over the grass cropped now by deer, and not by sheep. I rode as one does in the scouting line, on Cynon’s left, five horse-lengths behind him. The light changed as we passed beneath the oak trees, dappling patches of shadow with streaks of sun. Hard light, indeed, to see a deer, let alone tell the points: hard light to aim an arrow or a spear. Quiet, too: I have lain, before now, in the wood, and seen five horsemen pass twenty paces from me, and if I had not been turned that way to see them I would never have known it. Therefore our heads were never still as we rode, turning and twisting to see all round us, all the time.

  I knew every inch of this forest, in light or dark: I knew all the sounds there ought to be. There was not a hollow where I had not crouched to loose a bolt at deer or hare, or to watch the badgers playing in the full moon. I had ridden here with Bradwen and Precent till I knew every pothole, every soft place where a horse or a man might stumble. I knew, almost, every fallen branch that might crack underfoot, excepting only those of last winter. Our hooves hardly rustled the leaves, or broke the mushrooms, the millers and the redcaps, left to overgrow and turn gross. No civilised man had been here, or they would have been gathered. Cynon, too, had known these woods before, when they were still safe for a little girl to go out with the dawn to come back with a kerchief full of blewits.

  It was hard to see deer, here in the August woods. It was hard to see men, too. Sometimes I lost sight of Cynon, or he of me, as we moved or halted by turns, passing or repassing each other.

  There was no watching here for deer, or men. The deer had not gone by, we saw no droppings or the birds that would search them for undigested seeds. We would not see the deer here: we sniffed the air for them. Then I smelt it. I raised a hand to Cynon. He rode past me towards the smell of wood-smoke, halting by a hazel-bush, listening for anything that might have alarmed the birds. I came past him, a few yards farther, while he watched me.

  I leant down from the saddle to see what they had left. There was a live fire somewhere ahead, but not here: these ashes were too cold to smell of smoke. Last night’s? The night before? I rode a little farther, to where they had slept, curled up on heaps of bracken. At least a dozen of them by the space they had flattened. One had left a torn shred of cloth, half a blanket, ragged and dirty, the colour hidden beneath the crusted filth. And there was a scatter of bones too, deer bones, picked clean and polished. These had been hungry men, who had killed by chance at the end of a long and profitless day, and then gorged themselves on the meat, half-cooked, charred at best, and left nothing but the guts that the flies buzzed over. How many men to devour a small deer like that? A dozen? A score?

  I moved forward, into the stench. Man droppings, not deer droppings. Fresh. This morning’s. Last night’s fire, then, lit only to cook on, then prudently dowsed. But another one, somewhere, still burning? I sat still, still as I could, looking round me, listening, sniffing. Were there eyes on my back? Were men watching me from the shadows under the trees, or from the branches over me? And if there were would they stay hidden as long as I could watch? Some men say that you can feel eyes on the back of your neck. Perhaps you can if you are expecting them. I was not positively expecting them: I merely wondered if they were there.

  I waved. Cynon came forward, rode past me and halted well ahead. I did not expect eyes. But neither did I expect to find in all Britain a man so poor that he would risk his life for that filthy scrap of blanket. For the sake of that rag, he thought it worth the risk to run across behind me, from cover to cover, picking it up as he went. So fast, he thought he would not be seen. But I heard him come, and I turned to see him pull a
t the blanket where it had caught on a snag of a fallen branch. It held only for a moment, but it was time enough to end his life. It was an easy throw. The spear took him as he bent, in the back below the short ribs. I saw the point come out below the navel. He rolled on the ground, his knees jerking to his chin, clutching behind him at the shaft, vomiting blood, calling for his mother. There had been no mistake. This was no Briton.

  If I had gone back, as I was tempted, I would have been a dead man. If I had dismounted, in mercy to finish him off, in greed to recover my spear, they would have killed me. The screams brought the other Savages out of hiding. There were a score of them, nearly, and they rushed at us out of holes in the ground and from behind piles of leaves, from the bushes where they hid as we passed, hoping that we would pass and let them be.

  Most of them went at Cynon, sitting his horse still, his head turned away from me, guarding me from that direction from which they did not come. They went at him when I should have guarded him. Before he had a moment to turn, they had his steed by the head and him by the legs, jerking and pulling him from side to side, rocking him out of the saddle. He stabbed at them with his spear, not having time to draw his sword, and they beat at him with what they had, billhooks and axes and cudgels.

  I had time to draw my sword before the Savages reached me. I cut down the first who snatched for my bridle, and I spun the roan on her hind legs to scatter the others, giving myself space to ride to Cynon. I shouted a rallying cry:

  ‘I ni, i ni, i ni! Awn, Awn, Awn! dere ’ma!’ And from all round, I heard the forest answer

  ‘Awn! ’na ni! Awn! Awn!’

  But they were still far away, and now the Savages had Cynon on the ground, cutting and hacking at him while he tried to cover his face with his shield and stabbed up blindly with his spear. But an axe put an end to that as I crashed into them, the mare pushing aside one man with blood streaming from his eyes and another doubled up and clutching his groin.

  I cut to this side and that, caracolling my horse around Cynon where he lay bleeding, hoping that my mount would not step on him. I had to be sure that they did not play the same game with me. I found that the enemy were not mailed. My sword cut through shirt and flesh and bone, and I heard them scream. But, screaming, they still held on, beating at me in senseless rage that overcame their fear, and grasping at me from all sides as though nothing but physical contact, the violence of nails and teeth, would satisfy them. Then one of them had his fingers over the edge of my shield, jerking at me, and I nearly went down, but suddenly there were horses all round me, mail shirts and red plumes and words that I could understand. The hands slipped from the rim of the shield, and suddenly there was no fighting, only Morien and a dozen others sitting their horses or sliding down to bend over Cynon.

  We dragged the kill over by the heels to lay them in a long line, like hares or fallow deer at the end of the hunt. But this was the beginning of the killing, I knew. Twenty-two altogether, old and young: not a bad day, if only they had been deer. They had nothing worth winning – their patched shirts of soft leather, their worn-out blankets rolled and slung on their backs, tied with odds and ends of knotted string, their shoes, those that had them, with the dead toes sticking stiffly out. Only two of them had the long curved knives from which they get their name, the saxes which did Hengist’s work for him on the night of the long knives, and brought Vortigern the Great to ruin for a time. Otherwise, they had iron-edged spades, three hedging-hooks and five axes, and with that they had settled Cynon.

  We stripped the mail from him, and cut the shirt from the bloody shoulder. He had been struck there either with axe or billhook, between elbow and shoulder, where it is hard to pad the mail without clogging the arm. The flesh was mashed and the bone, at last broken, thrust splintering through the skin. I had never till then seen such a horrible wound. I saw worse later. Cynon, however, drinking mead, was soon able to sit up and speak, gasping, which is better than lying still and groaning.

  While a committee of those who claimed to know what to do about wounds debated their incompatible opinions, I cleaned the blood from my sword with the torn blanket that had been the cause of the fight. The first Savage had stopped writhing. I set my foot on his neck to pull out my spear. This was the first man I had looked on that I had killed: now I could never be a poet again, whatever was said. I looked at him. He might have been fifteen, or a little older. The flies were already gathering in his open blue eyes. The yellow hair was blackened with soot of some kind. A man poor enough to want that blanket wore no shoes.

  Morien sniffed in the air for something other than blood. He called me:

  ‘Let us see what they were about.’

  It was not far to a well-remembered clearing. Here were stacks of cut alderwood. The turves were piled ready. We followed our noses. A quarter of a mile farther, in the next clearing, the unwatched kilns smouldered. Charcoal they were making, for the Savage smiths to beat out swords against us. This forest, at least, from now on, we could forbid them.

  This was the first skirmish of the campaign. Precent rallied the skirmishers to move on. Now I led the left wing with Morien: others could help Cynon. We found more stacked timber, more kilns, but no more men nor sign of any: it was just the one band that had come into our wood.

  We rode down the slope from the edge of the wood to the paddocks above Eudav’s Hall. Now the grass in the paddocks grew high and thick because there were no horses to keep it down, or even sheep, only the shy deer and the hare. We stumbled on the dry-stone wall, now hidden under the green, that marked the edge of the inner paddock.

  Here the angle of the wall was formed by a huge boulder of granite. It was one of the Dwarves that long ago came down from the North in anger to push aside the wall. But the Magician Vergil, fearing for his handiwork, had stood on his tower and turned them all to stone where they had slept. South and West from the Dwarf Stone we had stacked the thin slabs of slate to make the paddock fence, down to the river side. And standing on the Dwarf Stone, I looked towards the river – yes, there had once been Eudav’s Hall.

  There was no Hall now. I rode across to it by the little stream. Nothing, now, but a mound of charred thatch and rotten beams, bright green now, the grass growing stronger and rank on it as it does when we have burnt off the heather. Below that rubbish, somewhere, was the hearth where they had cut off Eudav’s head, his blood spilling on me as I sang. In one instant the world had spun, from a happy night of song and dance and argument, and mead and mutton. The Savages had burst in, screaming and stabbing about them, stinking of wheat, filthy with grease. Before I could rise, my hands still on the harp, they had struck me down, with a cudgel, as they struck down Cynon.

  We brought Cynon down to the edge of the wood above the paddock, where we built our huts for the night. He was pale and sweating, biting his lips not to scream with the pain. Someone had bound the arm to stop the bleeding, and splinted it to save the smashed bone. To this day, Cynon stands as Judge beside Arthur’s chair with one arm stiff and useless. But on that morning he spoke as slowly and clearly and deliberately as he does now when he gives judgement, though his teeth chattered between the words. Owain debated what to do.

  ‘You must go back,’ he said. ‘Hard though it is. But you can go back in honour because you have killed two of the vermin. Your squadron can ride back with you as a Hero, to give you triumph.’

  Cynon, sweating, looked at Owain in surprise.

  ‘Full of men you must be in Cornwall, then, and empty of glory, to talk of honour for killing charcoal-burners, and send fifty men to escort one.’

  ‘It is your due, to ride into Eiddin in triumph, in your shining armour, your shield at your side. And it is not safe to send you across the moors with fewer men than that: you might meet more of these scavengers.’

  Cynon spat. ‘Shining armour!’ he grunted. He called, ‘Hoegi!’ This was a lad, a poor man from the heather hills, who rode in the rear rank of Cynon’s squadron because he had only a cape of mail
over his shoulders, and had refused to take a whole shirt from the King if it meant one man less to ride with the Household. All the same, he had killed Irishmen on the coast. ‘I shall not wear this shirt again before the spring.’ Cynon pushed the bundle of armour at Hoegi. ‘My horse will run the faster without it, and it will keep your kidneys warm. I am sorry it has been torn a little: only sew up the leather of the sleeve and it will serve.’ Thus Cynon the Courteous.

  ‘I will not wash your blood from it with water,’ said Hoegi, knowing that a speech was called for, ‘nor yet with the blue mead, but with the blood of savages.’

  Courteous as Owain was Cynon, but blunt as Precent he could be.

  ‘Wash it as you like, boy, but do it before it starts to smell, for your comrades’ sake. But call Graid, and the two of you ride with me through the wood and see that I do not fall off.’

  ‘Ride with him to Eiddin, and see him safe to his father!’ Owain ordered. But Cynon over-ruled him.

  ‘Just send me to the crest. Then I can reach a shepherd’s booth by night, if I ride this horse hard.’ He turned now to Owain. ‘I am one man wasted to this army already. We must waste no more.’ He stood up, holding to Precent’s arm. ‘If these boys are going to be back with you before night, then we will have to start now.’

  I pressed his hand, and so did all who could get near him, because we all believed that he would die there on the high moors. Hoegi and Graid rode with him through the wood and over the crest on to the high moors, and watched him far across the heather. We all prayed that he would indeed reach a shepherd’s hut before he fell from pain and exhaustion; but we did not think he would. I have not seen him since.