Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  ‘Ride with us, then,’ said Owain at last. ‘Carry my banner instead of Cynrig, so that in battle the host will rally round you and keep you safe. Ride with us, Bradwen, the Wise Woman, sign sent from God.’

  So it was for pride, and the love of Owain, that we rode at last to Cattraeth.

  11

  Bu trydar en aerure bu tan

  Bu ehut e waewawr bu huan

  Bu bwyt brein bu bud e vran

  There was a noise in the mount of slaughter, there was fire,

  Impetuous were the lances, there was a gleam like the sun,

  There was food for the ravens, there the ravens did triumph.

  At dawn we rode forward, towards the Wall. Where the road passed through the Wall there had once been a City, a place of great houses and castles and palaces, raised in the twinkling of an eye out of the ground by the Magician Vergil, when the King’s Mistress saw here, on the Wall that she had demanded, no place of pleasure for her to spend one night. And she had slept there one night, and one night only, in a city peopled only for that one night: and when she had awakened in the morning, and passed on, all the people that had come to the City rode away likewise. And so the whole place fell into ruin.

  What this town had been called by the woman who had asked for it, no one knew. We called it Din Drei. All the gold had been stripped from the roofs, stolen by the soldiers of false King Arcady. Only the walls of the houses were left. The plaster had fallen in heaps, and the grass grew in the earth of the floors. Some say that if you will scrape away the beaten earth of the floors of the Roman houses, you will find there buried beneath them flat pictures of their gods in coloured stone. It is an act of virtue before the Virgin to find them and destroy, but here we had no time. Only we found in many places stone figures of those devils, weather-beaten and green with moss. Where we could without too much trouble, we broke off their hands and their noses, to the glory of the Virgin and her Son and the Dove.

  Nothing moved now in Din Drei, Only rats lived there, and foxes, and wild birds. It was twenty years since any civilised men had passed through the Wall here at the Eastern end, though until the Savages burnt Carlisle there had been occasional traffic at the West. We rode through the dead city, the first Roman Army for many years, and out into Bernicia.

  I rode with Precent now, always at his stirrup behind the line of scouts, who spread out on either side of the road. So, we agreed, he and I should ride every day, whichever squadron were the skirmishers. Behind us, close in front of the first squadron of the line, Owain would ride. Bradwen was always with him, the raven banner sewn to a light spear, not the stout staff. Behind were the other squadrons, in line ahead, Cynrig now leading Cynon’s squadron. Gwion Catseyes always rode behind the last squadron.

  Beyond the town, we followed the Roman road at first, though after a day or two we left it and kept across the open moorland. The road was overgrown now with grass, but it still felt and sounded different under the horses’ hooves. If you got down here, and scraped with a knife, you would find the big stones of the old road-surface. We left this paved way to head West of South, while it went East of South into the valleys.

  The skies were grey and clouded early in the day. By noon, however, when the Wall was far behind, there was only blue above, and the sun in our eyes. We all rode armed, now, of course; we were ready to fight. Our flank scouts were half a mile to either side of the road we followed, looking for prey, like the booths of shepherds. As I had told Owain, they did not find any. Savages do not keep many sheep, and only for the wool: instead of lads, they have grown men, who follow the flock on foot and keep them in sight of the farm all day. But what was strange was that we caught none of the usual bands of straggling Savages, bound one way or another across the hills to beg and scavenge on the West coast. At this time of the year, we ought to have caught scores of them going back for the wheat harvest. But there were none, as if, for some reason, they had all rushed home already.

  All that first day we rode quietly, not singing, and we found nothing and saw no one. There was not a living soul up there on the high moors to give warning of our coming. North of the Wall, in good sheep country like that, we could have seen the flocks everywhere, and twenty times in a day we would have had the youngsters come out of their booths to welcome us, to talk to us and ask who we were, and who we were related to, and if we had any news of their families. But Savages do not send their children to be fostered by friends and relations far away, as all civilised men do, even Irish, but they allow sons to grow up alongside their fathers, knowing them well, and having no one tied to them by blood and fosterhood in strange places. The Savages do not love the high moors as we do. They leave them desert.

  That night we slept in our cloaks on the ground, as we had done since we left Eiddin. But from that night on, we took turns in hanging our cloaks on a frame of spears to make a tent for Bradwen. My cloak was always among them.

  There were more days that we rode south. Still the sky was grey at dawn, and cleared later and later every day. The Household could not sing when there was no sun. The emptiness of the moors that should have been full of life weighed on us. Only here and there a rowan showed where once there had been a house.

  ‘Have they fled before us already?’ Owain asked. ‘How did they know we were coming?’

  ‘This is how they live,’ I told him. ‘They leave the hills empty, and they farm the valleys.’

  ‘Perhaps they did where you were, because they were hiding in the valleys for fear of us. But people do not live in valleys when they have moorlands to grow their sheep on. There is nothing for sheep to graze in the marshy valleys.’

  ‘These are not people,’ I told him. ‘These are Savages. You must not expect them to behave in a human manner.’

  But Owain did not answer.

  Then, an hour before a dusk of an empty day, Precent and I sat our horses with the left flankers in a clump of bushes and looked down at last into a valley. The sun was behind us: nobody could look into it to see us. Precent waved, and Owain cantered over to us to look.

  ‘Look down there,’ I said. ‘That is how they live. You see? The oblong wooden houses, all in a square, round an open space with a pond in it. Then there are the fields, long and narrow, stretching round the houses. Not all of them are cultivated. I wonder why? That is wheat growing there. It is ripe, and they are harvesting. See where they have cut that field, and stacked the sheaves? They are loading the oxcarts to bring the sheaves back to the threshing-floor. The Savages are going home from the fields now. Can’t you smell the cooking-fires? The smoke hangs in a sheet above the yellow roofs—’

  ‘I can see what I can see.’ Owain was curt. But Precent marvelled. ‘What a way to live, all crushed on top of each other, hugger-mugger. Nothing but noise and people all the time.’

  Owain had waved his arm, and the squadrons had spread out on either side of us. Half a dozen men fell back from each to hold the spare horses. Precent gestured the flankers to spread out farther, much farther, to sweep round the village on either side. We still sat, watching the people down there walking home from work, singing, probably, though we could not hear them. It was all very still and peaceful. I thought of Eudav’s Hall before the Savages came, and I looked at Bradwen, holding the standard behind Owain, and Gwenabwy of the white shield behind her. No one there had yet seen us, and thought that we could be here. Owain drew his sword.

  ‘For One and the Virgin!’ he shouted. ‘Free the Isle of Britain!’

  Shouting and screaming, the Household charge forward, down the slope that formed the edge of the moor into the valley. We enveloped the village and its people, lapping them in on every side, as they stopped where they were and turned to stare at us a moment, before they realised what it was, and began to run here and there, each away from what he had been facing, like ants, aimlessly. They had never seen anything like this, a Roman Army all cloaked and plumed in red and sweeping against them out of the empty hills. They ran, they all ran, n
ot away from us, or even at us, but just in whatever direction they were facing when they started to run, till some random thing turned them to run another way, because there was no direction from which we were not coming at them, all furious with the vengeance of Rome. As our beaters had herded in the deer a few days before, so our flankers now herded them in for the killing. Among the deer, we had killed only the beasts we needed, and left the rest to breed. Not so here. We cut them down in the killing place.

  Sometimes there were men and boys who turned and tried to fight with their sickles and ox-goads. More often they ran, and in either case they died when we came on them. We left them lying, only bending to take back our spears or drag aside bodies which lay where they might frighten the horses. I saw where three or four of them stood on an ox-wagon with axes and hedging-knives, ready to defend themselves and do us what harm they could. I rode at them, finding Aidan with me, and we threw our spears from a distance and saw one fall into his fellows, upsetting them. And, not stopping, we were on them before they could push his body aside, being more concerned with his hurt than with defending themselves, and slashing at them with our long swords, we soon had them tumble into the oxen’s heels. We cut through the straps of the harness, and drove the oxen before us, leaving the men writhing on the sheaves till Morien came riding up swinging a flaming torch to set fire to the dried corn.

  We herded the oxen into a corner, and killed them, all of them. We brought all the wagons that were not already burning, and the ploughs, and all their weapons and tools into the centre of the village, and we had a good fire to roast our meat. We could find no oat flour, but some of our lads turned out wheat flour and tried to make cakes of that, backing them on the hot ploughshares. Few of us could stomach the stuff. We found jars of the yeast they use to turn the wheat into bread, and we threw that into the fire. We found some mead in the houses, and a great deal of beer, a drink that many of the Household had not seen before, and they were astonished at its strength. All in all, we had the means to celebrate our first victory. We fed our horses on the standing corn.

  We had killed all the men we found in the village, and anyone else who seemed too eager to run or fight. The rest of the women we penned in a corner with some hurdles, and let them watch us eat. Tow-haired sluts they were, greasy and ill-dressed, weeping and wailing. But after we had eaten, and drunk all the beer, there were a few of the House-hold who found lust overcame sensibility, and all night long there were screams and laughter to disturb those of us who slept in the biggest house.

  This house was divided into two rooms, and we made Bradwen a bed in the inner room, and Gwenabwy slept across the door. We leaders who were too proud to pollute ourselves in the pen sat by the fire, and passed around the mead-jar and planned the next day.

  ‘Let us reach the old road again,’ urged Precent. ‘Four days riding down there, easy going, and we will reach Elmet, and there we will find whole battalions of foot to support us on the way back. And on the way, one way or the other, we can clear the filth out of York.’

  Owain ignored him. Instead he asked us all, ‘Do you remember the songs they used to sing of this valley?’

  ‘Gloomy and wet it was in winter, so they say,’ answered Cynrig. ‘But in summer, pleasant and beautiful to hunt in.’

  ‘Ah, the summer game that was here.’ Gwion had heard this. ‘Elk lived here, the size of two horses, with horns that would have served as oars for a ten-man boat. Elks like that would feed a whole village. And stags of twenty points. Red deer and roe deer you could find too—’

  ‘And wild boar as well.’ That was Gwenabwy. ‘The taste of a wild sucking-pig! And where there was all that game, there would be wolf too, and bear, all the fur you could want.’

  ‘Birds of all kinds, too, winter and summer. You would never fly your hawk for nothing, in a place like this. And in the winter, with the streams in a sullen flood, and the whole valley a marsh – pike in the deep pools, roach and gudgeon ….’ Even Precent was drawn in, against his will.

  ‘Now, look what they have done to it. It is enough to make a man weep.’ Owain could sound as bitter as you liked, when he wanted to, and it was not all pretence. ‘All our lovely marshes they have drained away, to leave the ground as dry as the top of a table. And cut down are all our trees, and the groves where we used to wander. And what do they do, when they have killed the trees, and burned them, as we have seen them do this year in Mordei? They pull out the stumps and they plough the ground level, to turn the fruitful forest into barren wheatfields. And that is how they can live, on a handful of wheat a day, a swarm of brown ants, witless, blind, toiling away with no art, no poetry. It is a sin against the Virgin and against God, to multiply cattle, or people, or crops, without heed. For the earth is the Lord’s, and he gave it to us to keep, and not to destroy. It is only Christians who protect even the wolf.

  ‘And how else do they live? They do not keep sheep, nor do they spare any space for the gentle cow, that gives milk, and cheese. They only keep as few as they can to raise oxen to drag the plough. And when they have worn out the ox, they kill him for the tallow and the hide only, because they eat no meat, ask Aneirin if it is not true. And that is how they manage to live here, and to grow, so that in two generations they multiply from one boatload to a nation. They will swamp us if we do not stop them. We have to undo all they have done. After that, we must bring the Army of their nation to battle, so that we can destroy them utterly in one place. And, in a few years, we and our sons will hunt in this valley again.’

  For four days, then, we raged in the valleys, the one that runs East to the sea, and the one that goes South to York. We treated every village as we treated the first one. When we left that first village, we burnt every house. We had thrown the ploughshares and every weapon and tool that we found into the fire where we cooked our meat, and that not only destroyed the costly work of the wheelwright – ask Mynydog’s men how difficult is the wheelwright’s task – but it also spoiled the temper of the iron. What metal we could pick out of the ashes, the next morning, we dropped into the well, and threw in as many bodies as we could find, to pollute it. Others we flung into the pond where they watered the cattle. We burnt the corn in the barns, and smashed the querns with hammers – their hammers.

  Most of this was Morien’s work. After he had set the houses on fire, he made a bundle of clothes he had found in a house, and smeared them in tallow, and tied them behind his horse with a long, long rope. Then we lit the cloths, and he galloped, the flaming torch behind him, through the corn fields, and set the the evil wheat alight where it grew.

  We kept the spades that were in the houses, though, and we blocked up all the ditches along the edges of the fields, and broke in all the banks. We made the women work at this before we killed them in case they should breed, and for the sake of all the women the Savages had killed in the Mordei and Bernicia, in our time and in our fathers’, and who had had no sons.

  When Morien had shown how best to do all this, and he had given lonely thought to this in the woods by his kilns, we spread out by squadrons and did the same all across the land, till I grew tired of the sight of smoke and the taste of half-cooked beef and of wheat cakes, and the sight of the square houses in their long fields. In four days, a hundred villages burnt, and in none of them did we leave more than a few wailing children. The wolf and the bear, the kite and the buzzard came flocking into the houses for easy meat. Why should they not feast, and why should we not feed them? They were our wolves, our kites.

  We left a trail of death and destruction everywhere the Household of Mynydog rode, and there was no one more hard in vengeance, more cruel, more thorough in searching out anything that could be of value to destroy it, than Bradwen. She led us to make a ruin of fruitful fields and happy villages for the sake of the Virgin. In ten years, or five, when the trees and the grass had grown again, and the waters of the winter floods had passed across them, the ugly straight fields would be changed to pleasant marsh, a land that Romans
could hunt in and make their home. But first, what we did would be more hideous than anything the wheat-growers had accomplished. Before beauty could return, we had to make devastation.

  What people we found we killed, with their livestock, and showed them no mercy. Mostly we found that when they saw the smoke of the next village rise in the still hot air they would flee, hiding in the little woods they had left, seeking refuge in what they had wanted to destroy. They did not resist. There was a thing that puzzled me, though it did not seem of any importance to Owain.

  ‘There are no men,’ I told him, ‘or very few, and those either very old or very young, like those we left behind when the Army marched out of Eiddin.’

  ‘The men heard us coming and went away without waiting for urging, running faster than the women,’ he answered lightly. ‘Or else there are few men among the Savages, as we have few whole rams among the flock of sheep, because one male of them can serve a whole flock of females.’

  ‘This not to laugh at,’ I insisted. ‘No men, and, in the houses I have seen, never a spear, and not one shield or mail coat. And seldom even an axe or a hedging-knife.’

  ‘They are not used to proper arms. They fight naked, like the animals.’

  I was stung at last. ‘Perhaps that is how the Irish fight, and how you won your famous victories. I tell you, these Savages are as well armed as we are, and fight as well, and that you will find out soon enough. I have been asking the women where the men have gone.’

  ‘You got no answer. These witless brutes have no memory of anything that happened longer ago than yesterday.’

  ‘They said all the men have gone off to a war. Somewhere, Owain, the Savages have gathered a great many. It is true, the women don’t know where, North or South, but somewhere there is a horde of Savages on the march. Let us hope that they have gone south against Elmet, because if they have gone into Mordei by the coast road, and missed us, then we will never feast in Eiddin again.’