Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  I sang through the night. As I sang, men answered. At first I wondered that there were so many still alive in the town, so many who called their names and demanded a last song while they still could hear it. But as the Plough revolved above the clouds, the voices were fainter than the owl. Still the rain fell softly on us, chilling to our backbones. And still no Savages came.

  With the day, I looked around. The scarlet cloaks did not move, scattered in mounds around me. I lay and shivered, coughing, hot with fever and cold with dying, my bones aching, my breath stabbing me as if it were hot iron in my lungs, my leg numb. I watched the kite and the crow settle on the stones, flutter closer. I did nothing. I needed my little strength for what now I knew only I could do. I could crown and complete all we had done in battle. Suddenly, one arm waved, one weak voice was raised, to drive away the approaching birds. Mirain, with his last strength, guarded us. Now I had time to think of those who had died outside the walls of Cattraeth, who would never hear the death songs.

  ‘At our first fight in the valley,

  It was we who set a meal for the birds of prey,

  And satisfied the hunger of the eagles.

  Of all Mynydog’s Household who rode out,

  In gold and scarlet mailed form the Dun of Eiddin,

  There was no Roman more renowned than Cynon.’

  Because I thought, then, that he had been the first to die.

  At last, even Mirain was still. I sang no more. I waited. I could not die yet: the work was not over. And I was rewarded for all my effort, in keeping off death, in refusing to go, at last, to my peace in the Virgin’s arms. What had I to do with peace? It was at noon that they came.

  I knew they were there, however silent they were, for even after Mirain ceased to wave his arms the birds still kept their distance. And this was an offence to me. These were our kites, our buzzards: why should we not feed them? I too lay as if dead. This was a thicket no hunter entered while the beast lived. There was no matter of courage here, or lack of it: only a common prudence. I knew they would not come too soon. But I knew, too, that they would come, and that only one man could lead them, for shame’s sake, if he lived, if Precent had not settled him in the night. And, at last, he came.

  I sat upright, propped where Precent had left me, against a pillar, and watched the Savages come to the gap in the wall. Weary men, bloodstained and filthy with two nights and a day of hunting their enemies in the woods and bogs. Huge men, yellow-haired and stinking with sweat and mud, who had fought a long battle, and won it. But they waited at the gap in the wall, till he came. Bladulf came, taller than any of them, wearier than any. He stepped, delicately, over Owain’s blood in the gap, and stood within Cattraeth, the first of all the Savages to stand there so long and live. He looked about him warily, expecting attack from one side or the other. He muttered charms and spells, and his wizard broke eggs before him, and poured out blood, more blood on that bloody ground, the blood of an ox, to chase away the magic of the Romans. And still I waited, huddled, still as death to the eye, my fingers busy beneath my cloak, my lashes a screen before my sight. I let him come.

  He walked forward. His men came behind him. One by one, they turned over the bodies of the Household with the butts of their spears, seeking life and finding none. And at last, he was two spears’ length from me. I slipped aside the cloak, and he saw the crossbow, cranked back, the string still taut and dry, my last bolt in the groove, a heavy bolt, fit for bear at this range, or wild boar.

  Bladulf did not flinch. He did not move in haste, or cry out. He only said, in a mild surprise, ‘There is one still alive.’

  ‘And one to die,’ I answered him. And as I jerked my finger to loose the quarrel, someone I could not see, round to my right flank, flung a handful of pebbles in my face, and another on the other side, with a long pole, knocked up the bow.

  I sat, in fury and shame, and looked at Bladulf, alive where he, or I, should have been dead. Weaponless, powerless, I had nothing left me but my hate for him. No sword, no long spear, no knife to throw, nothing left to touch him with. He looked at me, and said, ‘I know you. You killed my brother.’

  The man at his elbow spoke too. He said, ‘He killed my brother, too. And my father. And my son.’

  ‘I yield to you, Ingwy,’ said Bladulf. ‘He is yours. Shall he live or die? And if die, how shall he die?’

  Ingwy looked down at me. He was a fat man, streaked with dirt and sweat. He wore a string of amber beads around his neck and copper rings in his ears. He had been weeping, and the tears had made runnels on his face. Black blood was clotted on his arms, and on the naked saxe in his hand. His left ear was cut almost away from his head, and hung by a shred of skin. He hesitated a little. Then:

  ‘What is one more dead among so many? Let him live.’

  ‘I do not want to live,’ I replied. ‘Let me die.’

  ‘Death is a reward for victory,’ said Bladulf. ‘Those who are defeated must live, and regret it. Go back and thank your King for me. Where are you hurt?’

  I did not answer him. I still do not know whom he counted the victors at Cattraeth. He waved his hand. A number of his men came to me. Ingwy held a horn of beer to my lips, and Bladulf himself offered me a piece of wheat-bread and a piece of cold meat. The wizard knelt down and felt along my leg. He saw first the swollen, misshapen knee. He jabbered like an angry squirrel, and suddenly the men around me held my arms to my sides. I thought that Bladulf had relented, and would give me the death I asked. But the wizard jerked at my leg, and I bit my lips rather than scream at the pain and the sound of grating bone and twisting sinew. But after the sudden pang, the ache was now different in quality, the throb of twisted tissues resting, returning to their proper place, not the strain of muscles under tension, hauled from their proper path by misplaced bones.

  Then he looked at the gash in my thigh. He unrolled the bandage, and Gwenllian’s scarf fell into the mud, and was disregarded, trodden in. He mumbled his spells, and rubbed the cut with stones and bones and a sword that a man of Bladulf’s brought. Then he smeared the wound with grease out of a pot, and wrapped the whole leg in cloth.

  Bladulf looked down again at me where I lay and sweated with pain, and he asked me, ‘Can you walk?’

  I tried to stand. My sides were fire. I could not keep on my feet. Two young men lifted me. They supported me with their arms under my shoulders, pressing on my broken ribs, but I would not cry, even though I wanted to vomit. Slowly they helped me through the gaps in the wall, out on to the green field.

  This was a place of blood and death indeed. Here lay the Dwarf, and those who were killed with him: and not only those. From all sides, men were carrying in the dead, Savages and Romans, and laying them in lines, ours near the wall, theirs further away. Other men were working in the wood, cutting down trees. Bladulf asked me, ‘How do you burn your dead? What rites do you use?’

  ‘We do not burn. We bury them.’

  ‘Then we will dig for you.’

  He called Ingwy and gave him orders. He in turn collected a body of young warriors, and they with axes and spades deepened and widened the ditch beneath the wall, making a long trench. Then, as I watched, they carried into it the bodies of the Household, or those whom they had found.

  Precent I saw them bring, and Caso, Graid and Aidan, and put them carefully into the earth they had fought for. Bodies they brought from the Bloodfield, three days before, Gelorwid and Gwion. Bodies were carried wrapped in oxhide, that I could not recognise, from fights in earlier days, on the road. Caradog they brought out of Cattraeth, Angor and Geraint and Mirain. Morien they could not bring. Owain they would never find.

  There were others, more important, that I could not see. Arthgi was not there, nor Gwyres, or any of the Cardi men who had gone with Cynrig. Perhaps there were twenty men, at most, who had not been killed. No more.

  As each of the Household was brought to the long grave, the Savages, of course, stripped him of his mail. Why else had they searched for
the dead? At least, of this we had often cheated them. Each of us, then, they wrapped in his own red cloak: or, if he had no cloak, then in a cloak of their own, of cloth or fur. Precent they wrapped in a cloak of sable, ermine-edged.

  At the last, they took up Bradwen. As a man began to pull the mail shirt from her shoulders, Bladulf shouted, ‘Stop! Let her keep it. That at least she has deserved.’

  I asked him, ‘You knew there was a woman?’

  ‘We expected it. You are ruled by women. We were not surprised that you let a woman taste the luxury of battle. Among us, it has only been allowed, and that seldom, to Goddesses. She was mortal. She did not dishonour you. We will not dishonour her.’

  They laid her in the grave, still mailed. All was complete. The rain still fell.

  ‘What sacrifices do you make for the dead?’ Bladulf asked me.

  ‘We make no sacrifices. Has there not been sacrifice enough? We commend them to the Virgin, and lament their passing.’

  ‘Then do so!’

  I stood a moment, silent. The horde of the Savages gathered round me, looked at me, silent too. I collected myself. I sang:

  ‘In haste from the feasting and the mead we marched to war,

  Men used to hardship, spendthrift of our lives.

  From Mynydog’s Household grief has come to me,

  For I have lost my Chieftain and my true friends.

  Out of the comfort of a King’s Hall we marched,

  Where we had horses, and brides, and mead to drink,

  Yet only one man turned his back on battle –

  Cynddelig of Aeron, shame on him for ever.

  I know of no song of battle which records,

  So complete a destruction of an Army:

  Of the three hundred who rode to Cattraeth,

  None will return.

  Before we come to earth, we did our duty:

  Now may the Blessed Trinity take us home.’

  I wrapped my cloak around my face. The young men filled in the ditch. I could not weep. Then Bladulf said, ‘Turn and see how a warrior ends.’

  They had brought their dead together. If we had lost three hundred, as I feared, then they had lost three thousand. I had never seen so many dead men. No battle in this Island, since the beginning of time, had brought so many to a bloody end. They had cut down all the green wood that stood before the walls of Cattraeth. Because the timber was fresh and full of sap, they brought weathered beams and stakes, wagons of dry fir branches and brushwood, barrels of tar from the pine trees, and casks of tallow. They stacked the wood, and laid the bodies on it, layer after layer of timber and dead men. There were as many dead men as living in that place, and there had come, now, crowds of women and children to weep. Besides this, I knew that we had killed almost as many women, and children too young to burn.

  When the pyre was complete, there was a noise of trampling. The Savages drove into the place a herd of horses, our horses. They brought only mares, and of these all were either white or near enough to white not be any other colour for certain. And among them, I saw my own strawberry roan. They were of no use to the savages, who cannot ride, and who use ploughs so heavy only an ox can pull them. The wizard, then, cut the throats of all our horses with a spear, and dashed the blood over the dead men. They piled the horses on the wood, and the wizard knocked fire with his spear out of the walls of Cattraeth. And from this he kindled the pyres, the one on which the horses, the ones in which the men lay.

  It was now almost night. The roaring flames stood up against the sky, and made all the night light as day. The smell of burning flesh enveloped us. The women wailed and screamed, and cut their faces with knives, and tore their clothes, dancing widdershins around the fire. There were even some who leaped, demented with grief, on to the fire and perished with their men, not quickly or without pain and screaming.

  In spite of the rain, the flames roared high into the heavens, so cunningly had the Savages built this pyre, with passages and chimneys to lead the fire from the bottom to the top. The thick smoke blew its stench over all, as black as thunderclouds, a smell of singeing cloth and charring wood, and, above all, of roasting flesh. The wind from the west strengthened, and fanned the heat till ploughshares would have melted in the furnace that was made. The wind, I said, was from the West: the smoke, which in the day a man could have seen from the Wall or from the edge of Mordei, blew east in the darkness, east and out to sea.

  And that, I thought, was just. Till the end of the Island, till they rise up on the Day of Judgement, the Household will hold Cattraeth, lying here in the ditch, whence no man will ever move them. They will become one with the Island which is ours, is ours and theirs, by right of birth. Here we are born, and here we die, and here we remain. But the Savages – nothing will be left of them in all the land. After they die, they are blown out over the eastern sea, back to the place from whence they came. The land is ours. They will pass.

  I stood there, on the grave of the Household, and watched the end of the Savages who had come to take from us the Isle of the Mighty. The flames flared out into the darkness of the night till it gave way to the greyness of the dawn: and the blackness of the night, displaced, became the blackness of my eyes, and of my soul.

  18

  Byrr eu hoedyl hir eu hoet ar eu carant

  Seith gymeint o loegrwys a ladassant

  Short were their lives, long the grief of those who loved them:

  Seven times their number of English had they killed.

  From the noise of the wedding feast in Bladulf’s Hall we awoke into the dead stillness of Cattraeth. From the noise of the funeral night before the walls of Cattraeth, I, only I of all the Household, awoke into the noise of Ingwy’s Hall. To him, Bladulf had given me, and to Ingwy, therefore, fell the task of keeping me alive, as the King had said that I should live. I had rather died, with the rest of the Household. Or, if I lived, I had rather lived for ever in Bernicia as a slave, as I had done before, because life then would not have been long. But Bladulf had said that I must return to thank my King, and that, therefore, I must do.

  I lay for weeks in the noise of Ingwy’s Hall. It was Bladulf’s Hall now, too, because we had burnt the King’s own village. His family now had to crowd in and sleep where they could, in the Hall or in the stables with the oxen, or in the barns on the unthreshed wheat. There were so many.

  Crowds came down, too, from the North. We had killed all we could find, but there were hundreds, thousands who we had not found, and they all came down to beg shelter and food for the winter from their King. We had burnt their houses and stables, and they had nowhere to shelter from the autumn which had started early with the rain which had fallen on us, dying, in Cattraeth, and which did not stop. They had nothing to eat. We had fallen on them at the end of the summer, when they were living on the very last of the past year’s corn. We had spoilt their harvest for them, burning the reaped grain in their barns, and the ripe wheat in the fields. They came South begging for something to eat. The seed corn was gone, and their fields were flooding as the rain came down, because we had blocked their ditches. They had no tools and no oxen, nothing but their lives, and little use they were to grow wheat with in a hurry.

  The nation of Savages, what were left of them, had only the crops of half their land to see them all through the winter. They fed me as they fed themselves. Each of us had a few slices of wheat-bread a day, and the wheat flour itself was bulked out with beechmast and acorns ground with the grain. But they had cut down the wide forests where any man of culture and civility, where any Roman, could find food and clothing for the taking at this time of the year.

  These Savages, being tied to one crop, and not knowing how to use the forests of the land, how to hunt deer or how to search for nuts and fruit, faced a whole year on half-rations. A whole year – perhaps longer, if they could not reclaim in that first winter the ruined lands in the North. Famine was near. I have seen famine. I know what it does. I could tell, among the crowds who came to shelter in
Ingwy’s village, who would die that winter.

  All the old people would die: anyone who was over forty would not have the strength for the bitter winter on a crust a day. The young children would die – that is nothing new. In any place, out of three babies born between May and September, only one will see May again. Out of those born between September and May, scarcely one in four will live to the first May. But among these Savages, none of the last year’s babies would survive. Their mothers would die, too, starving themselves to save their children, and saving none, nor themselves either. Most of the men wounded in the battle would die. That would have nothing to do with the famine. Their wounds would turn rotten, and stink, and they would grow weaker, and dwindle into death. But until they died, they would have to be fed, uselessly. There would be few Savages’ babies the next year: too many fathers had been killed. The raid to Cattraeth had killed far more Savages than had fallen in battle.

  Now, as I watched the Savages, I could see what a great victory we few had won, and yet I did not realise it. I realise it now. We had dealt Bladulf and his people such a blow that it would be years, generations perhaps, before they would be strong enough to come again into the debatable land of Mordei. Oh, yes, this defeat of ours had been a victory, a victory such as no King of the Island of Britain had ever won over the Savages. We had our battle: the war was won. I know now that if we had not then so weakened the Savages in Bernicia, then Uther would never have recaptured York as he did a few years after, when Elmet men at last came with him into the field; and Arthur would never have reconquered all the Island. The Household died so that all Britain again could be Christian, and so that the blessed language of the Angels could be spoken again from one sea to the other, in Bernicia as in Cornwall, in Kent as in Cardigan. And I saw the victory as I lay in Ingwy’s Hall, I saw the seeds of it, if not the details, and blinded by sorrow and shame I did not recognise it. But since then I have recognised it, and by the grace of the Virgin I have seen the seed sprout into a tree.