Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (21 page)

After an hour or so, some children came out with food for the guards. After a lot of giggling and encouragement from their big brothers, they brought some into the circle for us. There was beer, good beer, and plenty of boiled bacon, and big flat cakes of bread, hot, baked on stones, and not of wheat, but of some other corn, millet I thought.

It got warmer, and some of the Saxons went to sleep, and some of the spearmen looked as if they wanted to. One or two of the other Saxons were talking loudly about not being ordered about and one Saxon being worth ten Scrawlings. I spoke to them pretty sharply.

‘Once outside this circle and I will no longer protect you. Stay here and do what I tell you, and you will be safe.’

That seemed to calm most of them down, but of course it had to be Albert who would keep on walking about and going up to the spearmen in an experimental way. None of them so much as looked at him. Then, all of a sudden he was out of the circle and running like a hare for the edge of the woods. The spearmen didn’t follow him, they all came up to their feet and to the ready. The dogs moved, though, and before he had gone a hundred yards they had him down. A crowd came running out of the village, and we could hear Albert yelling. A man came out of the crowd carrying Albert’s clothes. We realised that the rest of the crowd were all women. Suddenly the yelling stopped, and all the women came away. There was no sign of Albert. We remembered it was the first of May.

Our guards seemed as frightened as we were. The Saxons realised that these men were there to protect us, not to restrain us. The man came up and placed Albert’s clothes in front of me. He seemed very concerned about the way the dog had torn the trousers. The belt and knife were there, and two rings and a neck
chain, and Albert’s ear-rings that he always wore, with blood on them. We all sat down again. We didn’t talk about it.

After another three hours or so, Morien came down from the village. He made a face as he passed the stain on the sand where we had last seen Albert. We all wondered what happened next. I remembered the shipwrecked sailors we had thrown into the bog.

When Morien came close to us, we saw that his face was not really blue. It was tattoed in a close and intricate pattern of blue lines so that little pink skin showed. On each cheek was a crescent moon, on its back, with a line that went up to each corner of his eyes. On each jaw bone, around each temple, writhed a snake with a horse’s head. Eels wriggled up his arms, five headed eels, a head on each fingertip.

He took me by the arm.

‘Rex, Rex,’ he said. ‘Ad Rex Venite.’

I went with him toward the water’s edge. The Saxons and the spearmen followed. I wondered if we were going to ford the river, which looked a mile wide, when I saw men running down from the village carrying boats, big boats, two men to a boat as if they weighed nothing.

When we came to the water’s edge and got in we found they did weigh nothing to speak of. They were made of a wicker frame covered with leather. Seal, I found, is the best leather for the purpose, which is why we hardly ever got any seal fur through Asgard. The boats were short and round, with two thwarts. This meant two Saxons and four spearmen in each boat, except that Edward and I each had five Saxons to look after us. Morien came in my boat. He tried to keep as far to windward of me as he could; I suppose he found the smell of my pig fat strange.

It was now clear that we had been waiting for the tide to turn. Villagers held bobbing boats for us to get in. They ballasted them with stones. Old millstones are the best, with no sharp corners. If a Briton tells you he sailed the seas on a millstone, that is what he means.

Yes, a Briton. I was already quite clear about that. Tattooed men, great brindled dogs, patterns like the Gauls wear, where else could we be? The only question was whether we were inside
or outside the Empire, going to a British puppet king or a real Pictish one?

With the tide and the paddles, for the rowers faced forward and scooped the boats along, we went up stream as fast as a man might walk and much more comfortably. We kept it up for hours, and at sunset we pulled in to a village. We had to; we were well out of the influence of the tide, and the stream was getting too shallow.

The headman came down to the shore and greeted Morien with great deference. A crowd of people and animals were turned out of a house to make way for us, and all the Saxons were ushered in. It was a big house. The spearmen turned paddlers turned back into spearmen again, and slept outside. If I am any judge, Morien had the headman’s hut, and his supper and his wife into the bargain.

We got the same supper as our guards, and like them nobody’s wife, though after what had happened to Albert we had no wish to meet any more British women. They gave us porridge, like the stuff the legionaries eat, but not wheat. It was a grain called oats, and they grow it in the Land of Norroway too, where the weather is always too wet for real corn to ripen.

The spearmen put salt on their porridge and ate it like that, but the Germans found it unpalatable. The spearmen laughed and brought pitchers of honey and warm milk which we mixed with it, and then the stuff was edible.

We curled up to sleep on the floor, wrapped up in our cloaks and what blankets had been left. There was more left than blankets, and we were soon scratching; new fleas came to avenge their comrades drowned at sea.

At dawn we were awakened with platters of bacon and a black greasy substance fried up with oatmeal. I wondered what it was, being so tasty, and in the end it turned out to be the boiled seaweed I had always refused to look at, let alone eat, at home in Valhall.

We got outside the house and mingled with our escort. The huts were round. German huts are square, or oblong, foursided anyway. In Britain the smaller houses are round. These particular houses looked flimsy and ramshackle as if they were only
intended to last for a few weeks, and that was just the case. It was what they call a Havod, a summer place, where the young lads and girls lived looking after the cattle through the summer. The young men, the nobles of course I mean, go to spend three years at the king’s court in his warband. There they learn to make war, and they ride the forest and guard the havods, and catch cattle thieves from other tribes, or perhaps steal a few cattle themselves. There is small difference between keeping and taking.

It was of course a party of these young men, from the king’s family as they say, who had been ready to catch us on the shore, and now, under Morien the head of that village, were taking us to their King.

After breakfast, we were mounted on shaggy little ponies, smaller than the German horses. The Saxons kept on falling off; they are the worst horsemen I have ever seen, and proud of it. But we moved away from the river along a great ride cut through the wood, for cattle droving I suppose.

After a long day’s ride, with a stop at another havod for a meal of oat cakes and cheese and cold bacon and warm milk, we came in sight of a city. Yes, a city! Not a city like Rome or Athens, but a city that Homer or Hesiod would have recognised. There were a hundred or so houses gathered around a market place, and above it on the hilltop were the walls of an Acropolis.

We reached the market place and stopped, and we took another step back to Homer. There was a blowing of horns, and Morien waved to us to dismount, and some of the Saxons slid off, and others fell off. Then we saw something that only lives for us in legends. We saw chariots!

These were not racing chariots like the ones you see at the games, those are only coachbuilders’ fancy. These were real war chariots. I saw plenty in later years, but these were my first. They had wicker bodies, and bronze fittings, and six-foot wheels to go bounding over rough ground. Each had two horses harnessed to the pole. That, of course, is the trouble. You know you can never get cavalry to charge twice in one day; even if you can get them all back together again, they’re blown. You’re lucky if you can get chariots to charge once, certainly not if you have to cover more than two hundred yards. It chokes the horses. There’s
absolutely no future in trying to use horses to pull vehicles, unless you can find some way of not tying the harness around their necks, and if nobody’s thought of a way by now they never will.

Each of these was a three-man chariot. The first and the last were purely military, even if they had unshipped the long knives they fasten on the sides to discourage anyone getting too close. They each carried a very small driver, and two other men, bowmen, again very small.

The second was more ornate. The driver was very small. The other passengers were both quite big men, one old, one fairly young. Each of them was dressed in loose white clothes. They were clean-shaven and short-haired, both red-headed. Each wore on his head a garland of oak leaves. Each had on his breast a fresh sprig of mistletoe. These then were the priests of Britain I had heard of, the Druids, the Pythagoreans.

The third chariot, though, was the important one. The driver was a big middle-aged man, in patterned clothes, the same pattern as Morien. There were gold bracelets, gold chains, gold armbands enough to show that he was rich. The great gold collar above his neck and breast showed that he was royal, the gold diadem in his hair showed that he was a king. The brindled hounds that followed the chariot wore collars of gold. Spearmen pressed about him. If ever there were a king in Britain, this was a great king, and a Pictish king at that.

And with him there was a woman. She was small of build, neat and trim in all her movements. Her hair was black, yet not the same black as our Greek girls. Her eyes were a light, innocent cornflower blue. But what her skin was like or how old she was, how could I tell? Her face, like the king’s, like Morien’s, like everyone else’s in the whole company, except the two Druids, was covered in blue tattooing. A procession of crabs went clockwise round her forehead. An oystershell was on each cheek, and on each finger a sea horse’s head was joined into one neck that ran up her arm beneath her sleeve.

The king, and the lady, stopped and looked at us. I thanked heaven that I was wearing a good suit of clothes, even if it had been four days at sea, and some gold. I stepped forward ready to
act as spokesman for the whole crew, but the woman pointed at me, said a few words I couldn’t understand, and they moved on. Still, I thought, it was something to catch the eye of royalty. I don’t know how I’d have felt if I’d known then that what she said was,

‘The one with white hair, he looks tasty. I’ll have him.’

There was then a good deal of confusion in the market place, as is usual after the great have gone by. Somehow I got separated from the Saxons, but the noises I heard later that night showed that nothing very dreadful had happened to them. Morien took my arm, and a few spearmen jostled me from behind, and before I knew it I was inside a house, and that is more difficult than it may sound. For these houses were like none in Germany; they were of stone. They were round, and walls of unhewn stone fitted together without mortar rose to shoulder height, and a pointed roof of poles and thatch rose twice as high again. There was a hole at the peak, to let the smoke out and the light in. There was a fire of peat, and even in May we needed it in the evenings.

The spearmen crowded in too. There was a stone bench around the walls, and they sat on that. They kept on changing over, but there were always enough there to make sure I stayed.

After a while Morien came and they brought me food, porridge and bacon and baked meat and cheeses. I ate sucking pig, and lamb, and veal. I ate kid, and so I pushed aside one of the cheeses, which, by the smell, was goat. I left bear and goose. I ate duck. There was a dish of vegetables. I fished about in it with care, and I laid out eight beans on a plate, for the bean is sacred to the Pythagoreans and it would have been imprudent, at the least, to have eaten it with meat. Then I had another thought, and I went back to the dish, and I found another bean, and I laid them out on the plate in a square, three beans long and three beans wide and three beans from corner to corner, three and three and three, the perfect number in the perfect form. Morien watched
every move, and I hoped that he knew no more of the Pythagoreans than I. But at least he learned that I knew something.

When Morien and the empty dishes, for there was not much difference between them in attractiveness, went away, and we were left with a big pot of beer, I began to get bored drinking with people I couldn’t talk to. So I wandered about the room, and after a little I was sitting looking at three cups and a nut, and the spearmen were looking at me. I remembered having an argument with a man in Alexandria as to whether you can do this if you haven’t a chance to say anything. I found it is possible, but rather difficult; it even helps to talk away earnestly in a language your audience don’t understand.

I did quite well at first. I got a new pair of shoes, for mine were ruined with the salt water, and some leg wrappings, and a bone comb, and a mirror, and an embroidered belt, and an armband, silver set with polished pebbles. Then we all lay down to sleep round the fire, though some of the lads stayed awake all night arguing over how it was done.

They woke me at dawn with lots of food, porridge and bacon and seaweed. Never confess to a liking for anything in a foreign country; they try to ensure you live on nothing else. After a little while for digestion I turned my attention to a young man who hadn’t been at the session the night before and wanted to know what we had been playing. I showed him, and won his cloak fastening; I didn’t want it really, except on principle, but he
would
wager it against mine, and I suppose he thought he was cleverer than the rest. Suddenly the laughter of the game stopped abruptly. Among the players there was the young Druid from the chariot. He reached out and touched the cups.

He was good. Quite quickly he won from me the cloak fastener, the armband, the belt, the comb and the mirror. With a pointed gesture he left me the shoes. I passed him the cups. With a little difficulty – I said he was good – I won back the cloak fastener, the armband, the belt and the mirror. With a pointed glance I left him the comb.