Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  ‘Courage, my comrades,’ he shouted to us. ‘Have courage, be cheerful. Our war has just begun. Do not let our hearts go down. The best of our lives is to come.’

  We sat up again from where we had thrown ourselves. The sound of his voice was enough to give us hope again, and to persuade us that we could win this war we had come on. Aidan, kneeling by me and binding up the slash in my thigh with my scarf, the only thing I had for him to use, began to smile again. I looked closely at him, and saw the tracks his tears had cut through the dust-caked sweat on his face.

  ‘Now we have an advantage again, greater than we lost with our horses,’ Owain continued. ‘Savages cannot overcome stone walls. We can hold out here till they grow tired and melt away. Then we can continue our march down to Elmet.’

  I believed him, we all believed him. I knew well enough that it was not true. We had not between us food for one square meal all around. We did not know where there was water in Cattraeth. We were no more than a hundred and fifty, half the strength that had marched from Eiddin, half of us wounded, all of us tired, many sleeping still where they had fallen. Now the light was strong enough for us to look through the gate, and see the red cloaks scattered over the field outside. There were one or two heaps that stirred, and yet we were so spent that there was no one willing to go outside and fetch the dying men in. Any man of the Household who could reach Cattraeth on his own, we would be glad to see; but we could, would, give them no help. Still, Owain was Owain. What he said was true for us. What he said, we believed, though it was counter to the plain evidence of our senses.

  We had silence and a kind of peace for the time between seeing the first rays of the sun on the clouds till the time when it was light enough to tell a red cloak from a green scarf, for the break in the cloud closed in. And then, from far away, we heard them coming. Far away, faintly, the horns blew and the spears beat on the shields, and Savage voices shrieked their strange war cries. Owain stood up, bold, defiant, on the wall to see them come. Precent called men to him, sent them to stand here and there all round the city, to see where the attack came from. But the greater number of us he concentrated by the gateway. Morien and Hoegi took axes and cut down some of the young birches that already stood between the houses, and we pulled them to block the gateway with a breastwork of timber and stones.

  The noise of the Savages came closer, resounding through the woods, sounding from all sides, trying to frighten us, to show us that we were surrounded, that they could come at us in overwhelming strength from all sides and bury us in bodies. Yet, we knew that Savages will not rush at walls, cannot scale them and have not the patience to undermine them. If they attacked us at all here, if they did not prefer to sit around and starve us out, they would attack the gate, as they did at York.

  And so they did. The noise of the enemy fell silent. For a long period, the field before Cattraeth was so still that the first crows settled on the dead outside the walls. This silence was deliberate. They were testing our nerves, hoping that our hearts would fail with uncertainty. And even in that silence, there were some of us who were so tired, or so calm, that they went to sleep where they waited.

  At last there came what we waited for. Out of the woods around us they came, not too many, perhaps a hundred of them. But that hundred was more than enough to threaten us, for all giants they were, the big ones. They pranced on the side of the field, along the hedges, shouting and singing spells and hymns to their demons, winding in and out of each other in long lines, beating their swords on their shields. For besides their shields, these men wore no mail, no helmets, no shirts or breech clouts even. They were stark naked, erect, entranced, rigid as if they were the dead walking. And so they counted themselves. They danced and gyrated senselessly, generating strength and momentum, losing their consciousness, their individuality, their imagination, their fear. These were the poets of war, possessed by the Muse of Hate, composing a satire of destruction, selecting their alliteration of attack, their metre of murder, before they flung themselves, of a sudden, up the slope at us.

  These are the most dangerous, men who in their own minds are already dead. A sane man, a whole man – thrust at his eyes and he will sway away his head, cut at his neck and he will guard with his own sword. But men like these naked entranced warriors cannot be deflected, do not waste effort on defending themselves. Their only thought is to kill till they drop, themselves killed. Straight against the gate they came, in a horde, but they did not pass. Some of us sprang on to the breastwork and thrust down at them: others, like myself, stood close to the timbers and pushed them away with spears. Ten men stood higher still, on the walls, while the rest of us passed up to them big stones, torn from the houses and the paved streets, to throw down into the press. The enemy was forced to concentrate all his strength against the gate, where never more than twenty of his men could approach us at one time. There we could hold the Savages, however mad for blood they were. It was a hard fight, a long struggle before the last of the shirtless ones lay dead in the way. They had been able neither to pull down our barrier nor to cross it. But scarcely had the last of them crawled away across the field, than we heard again the rhythmical singing, the tuneless chanting of the Savage army.

  They stood in a great horde, as always, on the edge of the woods below us, a long dun line of mindless, faceless blocks, clashing their spears against their shields and thundering out that six-syllable line, whatever it was, again and again. They stamped their feet on the ground till it shook, and the ox-tail tassels that they tie to their spears and on their belts and around their knees waved like marsh reeds in a gale. They shouted, louder, and louder, not moving, as if they wanted to frighten us: to frighten us not enough to run away but enough to draw us out from the shelter of our walls. But we did not move. Owain stood at the centre of the barrier, and the Raven banner still waved over his head. Bradwen still stood firm.

  And then, like a ripple of water over the sand, the dun mass began to come nearer to us. Slowly and insignificantly nearer at first, because as fast as they came out of the wood, so others thronged behind them, filling in the space, and soon all the green of the field was turning dun. But they were learning, these Savages. They knew, from that one attempt, that no charge of unsupported men could break into Cattraeth.

  Therefore, their wizards came out of the line, and danced against us, trying to harm us with their magic, but they could not, because the Virgin watched over us. But they could bewitch our eyes, and with their posturings and gestures they drew our attention gradually to one end of their line, as Owain had drawn their attention to one end of their line on the Bloodfield. I had climbed, now, up on to the wall, six feet above the ground, and I too watched the dancers, till of a sudden movement the other way caught my eye. I shouted, but by then everybody else had seen it. A crowd of the Savages had taken one of the abandoned carts, full of stones, that lay scattered about the field in front of the gate, the filed they were clearing to plant wheat in. Instead of bringing oxen to pull it, they themselves took it by the pole to push it. More and more of them clustered around it, as we had around the ship, and they rolled it across the ground towards the gate. This was how they had taken York: not able to scale the walls, they had broken in the gate by night, while the garrison slept and thus treacherously murdered them all in their beds. Now they pushed the wagon towards the gate as fast as a man could run, and it was heavy, too, full of stones. We saw at once that if it hit the barricade square on it would scatter the birch-poles and leave a gap for the Savages to rush in by. Clinging to the wall, I lifted stones from the crumbling parapet and threw them at the cart. But Morien had a better device. Who else but he, at this bitter time, would have lit a fire? And it was armed with flame, a flaring torch of his own red cloak, that he leapt on the parapet with me. He waved it round and round his head, till the cart was near enough to throw it. The torch landed on the cart, and flared into the faces of the men on the farther side, running as fast as if they were racing for a pig, and they jer
ked away, some of them burnt, but most only frightened. And the cart swerved, and turned towards us, losing little speed, and hit the wall below us with a terrible crash.

  The ruinous wall crumbled under our feet. I saw it coming, and I jumped away, but my wounded thigh robbed me both of the power to leap and the agility to land. I sprawled on the road of the city beneath the tottering wall. Morien leapt a moment later: but he had already left it too late, and he jumped from a moving surface, so that he covered no distance at all. The stones came down around us, thundering like the tide on a rocky coast in an autumn gale: I felt my ribs crack under the shower, and my knee twisted under me.

  And then, following on its thunder, the tide did come in, racing between the horns of the gate as it had between the horns of the cliff, a tide of Savage feet, of Savage voices, of Savage smells, that swept above me as I lay on the ground, as I rolled over and over upon my crushed ribs, the desire to get out of the way, somewhere to safety, overruling the pain. I expected to be stabbed as I lay on the ground, but the men who rushed over me, stepping on my back, were too fixed on a distant prey to bother me. I pulled myself to the wall for a backing, and watched the Savages charge against the line of the Household. Owain held the centre, but, laying about him, as furious as Bladulf with his flail, he was still pressed back. But when I thought he was sure to be overwhelmed, his flanks being eased away from where they depended on the house walls for protection, I heard the cry of the Virgin’s name, and Precent charged past me, leading the men from the circuit of the walls. He did not assail directly the backs of the men facing Owain: instead, he flung his force into the gateway, separating the Savages inside the walls from those outside, sending the attackers outside fleeing from the gate by the sheer ferocity of his face and voice. Then, while some hurriedly piled up stones in the gate, others turned on the Savages trapped inside. They killed them all, in time.

  Silence came again. It is a vice of the Savages, that, repulsed once, they do not repeat the attack, but withdraw and then come at you again in a different way. Now, there was nothing to remind us that there had been an attack but the piles of dead in the gate, theirs and ours. Aidan came limping to me, and Precent with him, in their own time. It is the first rule of war, to settle with the enemy’s wounded before you help your own. I asked them, ‘How is Morien?’

  Aidan helped me to sit up, and pointed. From under the heap of stones that had been the gatepost of Cattraeth, protruded Morien’s feet. No more of him could be seen. I wept. I had brought him to Cattraeth. Morien, who had spread fire upon the enemies of the Romans; now his spark was quenched, the fire of his eyes, that used to dazzle the Savages in battle, was now put out.

  It was painful enough to be lifted up to sit. When Aidan put his arm beneath my shoulder and helped me to stand, the pain of my ribs and my leg, when I stood on it, ran through me worse than any sword. I wept aloud, and fainted. I do not know how long I was unconscious, but it was long enough for my comrades to carry me a little way, and take off my mail and bandage me around the body to give some support. They washed my cuts with mead, which was all we had, there only being one well in Cattraeth, and that dry. I looked around me, to see how many of the Household were left here in Cattraeth. I saw only how few we were. Only, Owain still led us, still the Raven banner flew over us. Still Bradwen, unwounded, knelt beside me. Owain came to talk to me.

  ‘There is an end of fighting for you,’ he told me. ‘There is no weapon you can lift with broken ribs.’

  ‘I can see one weapon I can use,’ I replied. I pointed to Owain’s crossbow, with a leather bag holding dry strings and twenty quarrels tied to the stock. ‘I brought that with me, through the night. At least we have that, whatever else has been lost.’

  ‘Aye, I have lost heavily,’ Owain agreed. It is true, I thought, near on two hundred good men have gone, that had mothers and sweethearts to weep for them: all lost, all lost, and the land of Mordei lost with them. But he went on, ‘All my baggage, with my two silver cups, and the coronet of a Prince of Cornwall, all lost. And, worst of all, my greyhounds – I have not seen them since the middle of the night march. My poor dogs – I wonder if I will ever see them again.’

  That was the measure of Owain, of his humanity, that made us love him – in the wreck of the Household, it was his greyhounds, which he loved, that he wept for. And I? I asked Aidan, ‘When you carried me, and I fainted, I did not cry out, did I?’

  ‘Indeed you did, Aneirin,’ he answered, ‘but any man would have cried in that state.’

  ‘What did I cry?’

  ‘You cried one name.’

  ‘I called for Bradwen?’

  ‘You called for Gwenllian.’

  And she, at least, knew nothing of Cattraeth.

  16

  Disgynnwys en affwys dra phenn

  Ny deliit kywyt kywrennin benn

  Disgiawr breint vu e lad ar gangen

  Kynnedyf y ewein esgynnv ar ystre

  He fell headlong down the precipice,

  And the bushes supported not his noble head:

  It was a breach of privilege to kill him on the breach,

  It was a primary law that Owain should ascend up on the course.

  The Savages’ Herald stood on the green grass before the walls, a scarlet stain on the green. His cloak was red as ours. More scarlet than the poppy was it, more crimson than the brave red blood. Redder it glowed than the flame in a man’s thatch, than the sun on a fine morning that tells of evil weather to come. There he stood on the green grass, livid against the green trees. When I closed my eyes to shut him out, I could still see him, a magic green against a curtain of red.

  We stood on the wall in the breach where the gate had been, where we had first made a barrier of birch-poles, and which we now had stopped with stones. I sat on a stone, leaning against the parapet, because it hurt me too much to stand.

  The Savage came slowly towards us. In his right hand he waved a green branch. His left hand he held empty above his head. Now we could see his clothes beneath the cloak. Once, perhaps, his tunic and trousers had been red also, but now they were patched and darned and scattered with pieces in all colours, yellow and green and blue and brown. Through the unmended rents, and there were many, and few of them new, we could see the flesh. He wore no armour.

  No, this was no Judge, no Bard that Bladulf had sent to us as a Herald. The hand that held that green branch had never held an ivory staff, nor played on the man-high harp. On days of audience and at feasts, this man would be close to the throne, without doubt, but he did not sit at the King’s side, nor stand behind his throne. Instead, he danced and tumbled before the King. He turned somersaults and walked on his hands. He juggled balls, and balanced sticks on his nose. And when he had finished, he did not even have a seat at table, or a dish and cup to eat and drink from. No, he would sit on his haunches and beg like a dog, and the King would throw him a half-picked bone and a crust of alesoaked bread to gnaw on, if he were pleased. But if the King were not pleased, then the courtiers would know it without telling. They would pelt this man with broken pots and oyster-shells, thrown with malice, to hurt, and laugh to see him leap and dodge and bleed and beg for mercy. This was no Herald who came to talk to us, under the signs of truce, across the field where our dead lay tumbled on the broken stones of the walls of Cattraeth. I told Owain, ‘Bladulf has sent us his Jester.’

  The envoy came closer, to within shouting distance. He walked daintily, his feet close together. He stopped and called out, ‘Frith! Frith!’

  ‘What is that gibberish?’ asked Precent. ‘It is like the barking of a dog.’

  ‘He says, “Peace, Peace,”’ I told him. ‘He wants to parley. Should we let him come any closer? I would not, myself. What will you do, Owain?’

  But Precent spoke first, spitting. ‘A Jester? I would not soil my tongue. Do not disgrace yourself, my Prince. Let me take a bow and kill him where he stands. It is a weapon I would not use on a man, but on a jester—’

  I had
a sudden thought. ‘No, Precent, if we kill their messenger, will they not then kill one of ours?’

  ‘A messenger to them? A Herald to them?’ This was Owain who spoke at last. ‘How would we ever wish to send a Herald to those Savages? What would we want to say to them? We have no need to worry about reprisals. All we have to do is to keep ourselves safe here and kill as many as we can, till the Elmet men come up. We can kill this Herald, if we want to, with impunity. But I do not wish to kill him.’

  ‘If we are safe, then we may as well kill him at once,’ said Precent. ‘It will be one fewer for Elmet to deal with. If we are so safe.’

  ‘Safe or not safe, it makes no difference.’ Owain was firm of voice. ‘There will be no killing of a man who carries a green branch. It is below the honour of a Prince, or at least of a Prince of Cornwall.’ He did not say ‘whatever the Picts do’, but he meant it, and we knew that. ‘I will not kill that poor harmless creature.’

  ‘But I am not a Prince of Cornwall, or of anywhere else,’ I insisted. ‘And this is no poor harmless creature. Look how tall he is. He would not come up to my breast, if I were able to stand. He is a dwarf. And now look again at his face. Do you see it as clear as I do? Hairless and plump it is as a woman’s. There was never need for a razor on that face. It is neither man nor woman. It is one of those sexless things that a real man would die rather than touch. Filth is what they are throwing at us. Give me the bow, Precent. You are right. We ought to kill him – it would be an act of virtue before Heaven and the Virgin. A thing like this cannot be a Herald. Let me do it. I am the better shot.’