Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  ‘We’ll wait till the morning,’ Owain decided at the last. ‘When we are ready to move, I’ll tell them. I’ll give a gold chain to the man who kills Bladulf.’

  ‘You haven’t got a gold chain,’ Peredur pointed out.

  ‘No, but Mynydog has,’ and Owain giggled like a girl, and spilled his drink on to his cloak and tried to brush it off, clumsily.

  ‘Never mind, boy,’ Morien shouted. ‘Plenty more here.’

  He leaned across three or four people to slosh more mead into Owain’s cup, and over the table and over everybody and everything in between. And in the state we were all in, we laughed and thought it funny to see the liquor, over the table and over the floor, shining in the light of Bladulf’s eandles, forty alight at a time. That night we used the tallow of a hundred oxen.

  I saw Bradwen lean over to Owain.

  ‘Now, if you had a gold chain, you’d give it to me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘And how do you know I haven’t? I was the first in here, wasn’t I?’

  ‘No you weren’t,’ shouted Hoegi from the other end of the table, because Owain, for all his air of telling a secret, leaning over to Bradwen’s ear, had forgotten to lower his voice. ‘I was the first in here, don’t you forget it, and you came next, and ordered me out. Anything you found in here belongs to me.’

  Owain and Hoegi shouted at each other from end to end of the table, and Bradwen alternately urged Owain to reply or rolled with helpless laughter at Hoegi’s sallies. While this went on, Caradog the Huntsman swept the plates and horns from the table in front of him, and jumping on the board began to dance, keeping time to a wordless song of his own that he sang loud. And nobody took the slightest notice of this, or of the men who had found Savage women somewhere – women will always come where there are soldiers, whoever they are, friend or foe – possessing them wildly on the straw of the Hall floor. And other men slept on the same straw, or bowed across the table, because there is nothing but exhaustion after battle, not only from the heat of moving in armour and the labour of striking and running and riding, but also from the sheer numbness of the cessation of fear. Every man is afraid in battle: but there are few who find that fear strong enough to stop them from fighting.

  There were at least three different groups singing in different corners, competing in their various songs to see who could drown the others. In one place, some Mordei men were disputing the possession of a Savage woman, or rather the order of precedence with her, with three lads from Carlisle, and each group were calling their kinsmen to join in, while the woman, unnoticed, crept off, and might have got clear away, but that she stumbled over a man from Aeron, who, too drunk to stand, was still alert enough to pull her down on himself and ravish her there.

  I looked round the Hall, and I felt the clear sight of the poet return to me, against all the Law. This, I thought, is where triumph has brought us. This is the prize for victory. There sits Owain in the glory of a battle gained, and barters insults with the bastard of an Irish pirate, to the greater glory of Cornwall, whose King he will be. And Bradwen, the wise Virgin, hangs drunken on his arm, haggling for trinkets, that might have had all the land of Bernicia as well as Mordei to run her horses over, and she with men’s blood on her hands. Now, for the first time since I left Eiddin, I heard voices of Romans raised in anger, man against man, regardless of squadron, Mordei men against men from Dyfed, Cardi men against all the North.

  Only Precent, I thought, only Precent does not change. He sat opposite me, looking moodily before him. I leaned over to ask him, ‘Who is on watch outside? By the noise we are making, every Savage in the island knows what is going on here.’

  ‘On watch?’ Precent muttered. ‘Why, Gwion, he always takes the watch.’

  ‘But Gwion is dead.’

  ‘What’s that you say?’

  ‘Dead! Gwion Catseyes is dead. We saw him killed. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Oh, aye, dead then is he? Watch all the better from up there, then, won’t he.’ And Precent giggled foolishly and suddenly turned aside and spewed up all his supper on the floor, soiling Bradwen’s skirts, and she didn’t care.

  14

  Uyg car yng wirwawr nyn gogyffrawt

  O neb o ny bei o gwyn dragon ducawt

  Ni didolit yng kynted o ved gwirawt

  My friend, in distress we would not have been disturbed,

  Had not the white dragon led forth the army,

  We should not have been separated in the hall from the banquet of mead.

  Then I thought, if this is triumph, defeat is better. The fruit of victory is the death of the soul. Even though now Arthur has brought the Savages into subjection through all the Island of Britain, though Mordred rules for him in Bernicia Roman again, yet after this will come strife and greed and treachery. Because that is the nature of man.

  I got up, holding to the table. I stepped over to the wall, which was swaying back and fore, and hard to catch at so that I fell down. I found where I had left my mail, with my sword wrapped in it, and I put it on. And then I had to take it off and put it on again, right way round. It was only that night that I noticed what an ill-made thing it was, because there was an extra lacehole on one side, and when I laced it up and pulled it tight there was a fold in the mail which irked my neck. I stuffed Gwenllian’s scarf into the collar to ease it, and then with my helmet in my hand, still buckling my sword belt, I pushed my way through the throng of drinking men to the door.

  When I got into the cooler night air I felt better. I stood and thought, and then I looked back into the great Hall, and into the other houses where our men were sleeping. After a while I decided that the only man missing was Cynrig. Was Cynrig, then, the only man to watch over us, and more, over the whole herd of horses in the paddock?

  It was true. I found him on the far side of the paddock, moving cautiously from shadow to shadow around the resting herd, as I did myself. I whistled to him, the tune of a harvest song I myself had made. He came and stood beside me in the dark.

  ‘You would guard them better mounted,’ I told him.

  ‘There isn’t a beast that will carry me now,’ he replied.

  ‘We charged and charged again today, and pursued after it. These steeds are all worn out. Not one of them is fit to march tomorrow.’

  ‘We must march. Otherwise, the Savages will catch us here at their mercy.’

  ‘If the horses were fit, what about the men? Will they be able to ride tomorrow, let alone fight? What about yourself? Are you fit to go on?’

  ‘I shall be all right if only I can have some sleep.’ It was all I wanted. I was tired, my clothes were still damp with sweat, freezing me as they dried. My head ached, a drilling pain above my left eye. A Savage had stabbed at me with a long spear, to the stomach, and though he had not pierced the mail, yet my midriff was bruised. My thighs and back ached from the hours in the saddle, thrusting and striking. I wanted to sleep. And I was less tired, less badly hurt than many of the men who had ridden in the first assaults. We all wanted sleep.

  ‘If it were not for this banquet,’ Cynrig argued, ‘we could all sleep.’

  ‘There is always a banquet after a victory. How else would we know that it was a victory?’ I pointed out. ‘Without the spoils as immediate reward, how would we enjoy war at all?’

  ‘These spoils will spoil us.’ Cynrig pointed up to the black sky. ‘Pity about these clouds. Syvno would have wanted to forecast another victory for tomorrow. He died well.’

  ‘It is a law of God: men who foretell the fates of others never read their own.’

  We stood and watched. Far on the Bloodfield, lights showed, and women wailed seeking their men. Faintly, far away, sometimes horns sounded. Wolf and bear quarreled aloud over the slain. There were more animal noises than one would think. Were some of them not natural? We peered about us.

  ‘Some men,’ said Cynrig, ‘have slept enough. Cynrain is one. There are others, of my squadron, and of my country. Will you go and fetch them out to watch
with me?’

  ‘If I can wake them,’ I said, ‘I will.’

  I slid around the edge of the paddock, as silent as a man in search of badgers in the moonlight. But there was no moonlight, and I feared worse than badgers. Soon I was so near to the Hall that the sound of the feast drowned all the other sounds, rising like a river in spate. As I came between the houses, the doors of the Hall were opened, and half a hundred men poured out, shouting and singing, and seizing me as soon as they saw me.

  ‘A Marriage, a Marriage!’ they shouted. ‘Come, Aneirin our Judge, and make a Marriage!’

  ‘Put me down!’ I told them, because they had lifted me on to their shoulders. ‘This is no time for playing. The enemy are around us.’

  But they shouted the more. ‘A Marriage! A Marriage!’ Peredur clutched at my arm as I was carried, and shouted, ‘It is true. We are going to have a wedding to crown the day.’

  ‘Owain and Bradwen! Owain and Bradwen!’ Others shouted as the crowd bubbled like pot of porridge. Yet there was a little order. One small group of men carried me to the fire of ploughs and wagons, which they revived, and they pulled one cart over and put in it a chair, on which they set me. The rest came out of the Hall, in two streams, and one, carrying Owain, went in one direction, and the other party led by Gwenabwy with Bradwen on his arm went the opposite way. The Roman pipes played, and the marriage songs went up, as the two processions wound round and round the houses, and round and round each other, in and out in the dance we know so well.

  ‘I cannot do this!’ I shouted from the eart where I had been lifted. ‘I am no priest, I cannot marry!’

  ‘No,’ shouted Peredur. ‘But you are our Judge. You can marry, there being no priest or hermit.’

  This was true. How had this all arisen? Was it a drunken joke, or the outcome of some attempt by Precent or Peredur to change the spirit of the night, to take men’s minds off some quarrel? I could not think. I was helpless in the fever that caught us all, all except Cynrig, lonely out there with the horses. There was no sending any of this crowd out to him. They would not hear my voice, or if they did, they would ignore it.

  The two processions wound their way around me and about, sunwise and widdershins around the fire, passing away into opposite distances, and then returning to join and approach me, led by Morien carrying a flaming torch. Gwenabwy had Owain on one arm, Bradwen on the other. Adonwy was on the far side of Bradwen, Precent of Owain. They marched, slow and solemn towards me. Was this, then, to be my bitter fate, that I should marry Bradwen, my love, to Owain, her love, my leader? Should mine be the torch to light them to the marriage bed?

  What better guests to be at any man’s wedding, than the soldiers of Mynydog’s Household? In their dusty, bloody mail, their gashed shields, their tattered cloaks of red, they were the finest army that ever was in the Island. These were my friends, my brothers, for whom, with whom, I would fight and die, and yet, they hurt me more than they knew.

  But as the procession halted in front of me, seated as a Judge on the cart, the pipes were drowned by the horns. Far we heard Cynrig’s voice: ‘The horses! The horses!’

  The other torches glared on a sudden at the edge of the paddock. The Marriage broke apart before it began. Men ran from the procession towards the lights, towards the horns, to Cynrig fighting in the dark. All that saved us was this, that all the men who had come out in the wedding procession had put on their mail for it. They ran towards Cynrig, ran in one body, and that was their undoing, running into the paddock and across it. For in a moment, the paddock fence that they had put up that evening was broken down in a hundred places, and the whole herd of horses, terrified already by the horns and the shouts, ran away from the soldiers out into the night. At one stroke, we were left without our greatest weapon, our main advantage.

  But they found Cynrig, wounded but alive, for he had set his back to a tall tree by the fence where only one man could come at him at one time. And when they found him, when our army was split in two, the Savages attacked again, and came flooding at us into the village.

  Before we knew what we were about, they were all among us and around us. It was an attack, then, by an army on two hundred separate men, each one alone. In the first shock, each of us fought alone, trying to hold himself aloof in the strife, trying to take as much and as little as he could of the battle. But soon, the swirling surface of the fight, as I saw it from the cart, began to take some structure, some shape. Men found their riding partners, and set themselves back to back. And then there were groups of four or eight, and then whole sections. At first one section, and then another, set its backs against the cart on which I stood, and the Household began to return from its dissolution, to condense again into an army. This had been the Savages’ hope, to take us man by man and kill us each alone. And it was our weeks of drill, under Owain, that saved us from that. It was because we were a Roman army, used to discipline, that we remained an army in that awful night, worse than any dream.

  The men who had crossed the paddock formed a squadron around Cynrig, and they charged back as one unit, crashing into the backs of the Savages around the cart. Their effect, in the darkness, was greater than their numbers deserved, and in a short while we were free and clear, the enemy drawing back. We stood on our dead, and on those we had killed, a desperate band in the centre of the village, around the cart, on which now Owain climbed, and we lifted Bradwen up with us. The fire flared higher, and Owain suddenly shouted, ‘The houses! Precent, there are men in the houses!’

  I jumped down and kept Precent’s back, as he gathered two sections. We made a rush at the nearest Savages, and they did not wait for us, but fled out of the village, leaving us a space to enter the great Hall by the main doors. There were men in the houses, men that had been asleep or dead drunk when the attack came, and they were all dead now. Savages were flooding into the Hall through a door in the other end. We tried a charge, and threw them back for long enough to see that there was no one in the place to help. We snatched what fragments of our equipment we could pick up – I took Owain’s cross-bow, the only one in the Household – and then we fell back into the open air, while the Savages came in again to fill the room.

  But they gained nothing by it, because when the Hall was full of them, they heard a crackling, and saw that Morien had thrown fire into the thatch, and that while we held one door, Peredur and a dozen men had got round to the other, and though they could not hold it shut completely, they could at least delay the Savages in getting out. The night was cloudy and calm, yet the sparks from the Hall spread every-where, and all the village in a short time was ablaze.

  We concentrated again around the cart.

  ‘What now?’ Precent shouted to Owain.

  ‘We cannot stay here,’ he replied. But what to do he did not say. We none of us knew, but then Cynrig, pushing through to us, said, ‘Cattraeth. Let us get to Cattraeth. The Savages cannot fight against walls. If we can get there, we can defy them for a time, and then perhaps we can regain our horses.’

  Owain considered for a moment. Then: ‘To Cattraeth!’ he shouted.

  It was not a march I would have liked to undertake in daylight, or mounted, or with a clear head, or fresh. We had none of those advantages. We moved in a curious series of jerks. We would form into a wedge, and rush at the nearest front of the Savages. They would, perhaps, run before us, or, perhaps, they would stand till we pressed them back and broke them. In either case, we then had a little space and time to march in a column perhaps two or three hundred paces in the direction where we hoped Cattraeth lay.

  It was a bitter journey. The Savages were all around us. Bigger men than we, they were, and fresher. Their shields were better made for fighting on foot, and many of us threw down our light leather-covered baskets, meant for warding off the thrown spear, and picked up the heavy ironbound planks that stopped a sword thrust or cut with ease. Their swords were shorter than ours, and we could cut at men while out of their reach: their iron was better, though, and f
ew of the saxes would bend as our swords often did. Spears were no great trouble to deal with, because you could get inside the man’s thrust and settle him. Few of them were mailed, and there were hardly any helmets. If the Savages had been well armoured, as well as armed, we would not have lived, any of us.

  By rush and by stand, we made our way from the blazing houses, where Bladulf’s wealth and our own dead together came to ash. Any man who fell, fell. There was no time to help him, and if a man had not good friends, then a slight wound would do for him. It happened at last to me. I was in the front line of an attack, and as we trampled over the bodies of those who had tried to stand in our way, one of them thrust up at me from the ground. His spearpoint went up under my mail, into the muscles of my thigh, and I fell grunting with the pain. Then there were a dozen of them coming at me, and I would have been pegged to death with their spikes if Aidan had not returned to stand over me. Then Precent was with him, and Caradog, and they pulled me to my feet. Precent, the strongest, put my arm around his neck, and aided me to hop back to the main body, where there were helpers in plenty. And lucky it was, that we were then almost in Cattraeth.

  15

  Gwr a aeth gatraeth gan wawr

  Wyneb udyn ysgorva ysgwydawr

  Men went to Cattraeth before the dawn,

  But none of them received protection from their shields.

  Below the walls of Cattraeth, the Savages had cleared the woods away, and had heaved out the stumps of the trees. They were now busy, day by day, in clearing the scattered stones and bricks from the ground, ready for ploughing, and as we pressed along in the beginning dawn, our ranks were parted, like hairs by a comb, around carts, filled with stones picked up and abandoned where they stood, in mid-work, by men who had run to join a host.

  Over the last few hundred paces, the Savages let us alone. We found the gateway in the crumbling walls, and we passed inside, into a city that had been empty for generations. The houses had no roofs, and the grass grew up through the stones of the roads. Men fell down on the hard ground, bleeding, exhausted, sobbing with pain and weariness and disappointment. Owain looked around him in the growing light.