Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (46 page)

And this is in my experience an infallible cure, because by the time you have done all this most headaches will have worked themselves out, and the cares of making the spell will make you forget the sickness if any remains. Now that I had my audience, I thought I would impress them some more with my Galatian wisdom, especially the man in the corner with a squint, who merely sat there saying, ‘That is all magic and nonsense and an invention of evil spirits.’ I thought it would be worth my while silencing him, to show the difference between real medicine, which is founded on logic, and magic. I explained:

This is a most efficacious remedy which had never been known to fail. And why is it so effective, I hear you ask? I will explain it to you, I who am a philosopher who am used to examining the causes of things and the reasons behind the motion of the world, and in making things clear to even the meanest intellects, as I see here tonight. You are all aware that the ague springs from the marshy places, and is given off as a mist and as an effluvium from the stagnant waters. Now, I am sure that you all know that the surest way to cure the ague is to chew the bark of the willow that grows in marshy places. For every disease carries in itself the sign of its own cure, and every cure carries the signs of the disease proper to it, as if it were written thereon.’ I am afraid that I allowed my language to become pompous, because the Brits are most impressed with this. ‘If you ask me, doctors spend too much time examining the diseases they know, and then seeking cures to fit them. They would be better advised to find the cures first, and then to seek out the diseases against which they are effective.’

I drank some more wheat beer.

‘Now, for any disease of the outside of the head, for the skull,
for complaints of the scalp or for falling out of the hair, the best cures are made from the flesh of the Indian nut, which perhaps you have seen.’ I was quite sure that nobody there would have seen one, for at that time I myself had only rarely set eyes on it. ‘This nut is the size of a man’s head, and it has hair that grows on it. Beneath the hair, you will find on the skin of the nut three marks that signify two eyes and a mouth, so that the nut is in every way the sign and symbol of the head of a man.

‘But this nut is only good for ailments of the outside of the head, for if you open it, you will find inside a hollow filled with a little sickly juice, though I am sure that there are heads in this very room’ (and I looked straight at the man with the squint) ‘which are like the Indian nut in all respects.

‘But for pains of the inside of the head, you must always use a cure made from the walnut. And why is this? If you crack a walnut as I have told you, so that the flesh comes out in one piece, then, as I would show you if the nut were in season and there were any walnuts here to be had, you would see that the surface of the unbroken nut within the shell is an exact copy, and simulacrum, and model, of the brain of a man when you have carefully removed the skull. Now, it is no wonder that you should not know that, because I doubt whether there is anyone here who has ever looked on the surface of the uninjured brain—’

And a man at a table in the corner murmured, not loud, but very clear:

‘I have.’

I looked at him. I peered into the shadows where he sat, and I began to have my suspicions. I went over to him, and I raised a lamp and I looked close at him, in his shabby clothes, all spattered with the muck of the roads and the straw of the stables where he had been sleeping till the russet of the cloth hardly showed. He was a good deal taller than either me or Pryderi, but he was very slender, emaciated almost, as if he had been fasting a long time. He was clean shaven all over his face, and that in itself was strange in a land where all men wear moustaches. His hair was red. I knew him all right. I looked at his plate, grilled kidneys and boiled beans, and at his mug of cider, and I said:

‘Come, come, Taliesin. Last time I met you, you would eat no
meat and drink no strong drink’ – in public, I meant, and he knew it – ‘and I wonder to myself, how it is, since it is a paying trade, you have given up being a Druid.’

And at once everyone in the room, Pryderi and the landlady and the middle-aged men and the youth and everyone else except the man with the squint said ‘Sshh! Ssshhh!!’

The landlord, who had up to now left the running of the place to his wife, came over and pulled me down on to the bench between Taliesin and himself. He said to me:

‘Fine times it must be you are having in Galatia, and a liberty far beyond what we enjoy. But here we must be careful. Do you not know that the Romans killed all the Druids they could find when they first came here? It is unlawful for any Druid to do his holy work of judgement and sacrifice and prayer, or even to be seen within the confines of the Empire, or to walk abroad in the sight of men in this unhappy part of the Island of the Mighty. And plenty there are who claim to be Britons born who yet would betray this sacred patronage to torture and to death for the sake of money and for the favour of the oil-soaked wolves that are now so powerful. Some of our young men do still go over the seas to learn the Holy Law from the Druids of Ireland, but I do not need to tell you that of these brave lads there are none that do return. So, if we do hear, and suspect, and surmise, that there is a Druid travelling about the roads, in whatsoever disguise he may present himself, then there is nothing we do say about it to anybody no, not even to the Holy Man himself. And we understand, and it is essential for you to understand, that it may be necessary for such a Holy One to defile himself in the sight of the ignorant so that he may live to carry out the will of the Great that are invisible.’

‘Aye,’ confirmed Taliesin. ‘It is for the sake of the fulfilment of my most holy vows that I must undergo all kinds of pollution.’ He stuffed his mouth again with kidney. The landlord filled the resulting gap in the conversation.

‘A virtue it is, and rewarded in this life, and in the time of transmigration, to give charity to a Druid. Therefore, it is incumbent on us all to assist this Holy Man on his pilgrimage to the Summer Country.’

The landlord was so pointed about this that I hastened to order another pot of cider for Taliesin, and one for Pryderi who joined us, as well as wheat beer for myself. I ordered our three dinners – for Taliesin agreed that his first dish of kidneys, being interrupted, had been a false start – to be brought to us in the corner. The landlord took this for an index of my desire to attain virtue, because when I went to pay our bill some days later I found he had not only charged us all double, but had made me pay for Taliesin as well. When I protested, the rogue said it showed how virtuous he was himself, in allowing me to assume a burden of charity which would certainly assure me future bliss.

I looked again at Taliesin’s dinner, his second. I remembered what we all hear, that the Druids of Britain, like those of Gaul, are Pythagoreans, believing in the transmigration of souls, and living on vegetables alone without the taste of meat. I therefore had great pleasure in telling him something it had been obvious he had not known at our previous meeting.

‘I’ve found out something about the Pythagoreans,’ I told him with relish. ‘I got drunk with a lapsed one in Byblos the year before last, and he tells me that the Bean is not a sacred thing to them, but unclean, and therefore they never eat it, while you, as I remember, used to live on them. And those kidneys you are eating, besides being made of meat, good solid meat, are bean-shaped and therefore instead of reducing the sin, as you imagine, they are adding to it.’

‘And whoever said I was a Pythagorean?’ asked Taliesin innocently. ‘Indeed the vile slander has been spread by the Romans, who know no more of either doctrine than does my grandmother’s cat. But we have little in common with the Pythagoreans except one element in our doctrines, and that little I shall reveal to you as the night goes on, or at some other convenient time.’

‘As the night goes on?’ I asked him. ‘And where do you think you are going to sleep tonight?’

‘Why, with you two. And it is not possible that you should be worse company than the horses.’

I could do little about it. I had to let him sleep in our room. I wanted to make him lie on the floor, but Pryderi, full of a reverence that did him little credit, gave up his own pallet to the Druid.

‘I don’t know why I allow it,’ I grumbled. ‘The last time I saw you two together, you were both ready to eat me. Going to quarrel over the marrow bones, I shouldn’t wonder.

‘Appetising he looks, doesn’t he, standing there without any trousers?’ said Taliesin dreamily. Pryderi agreed.

‘The right thigh, the champion’s portion. Promised it I was.’

‘But even so,’ went on the Druid, ‘I was not expecting such a welcome, seeing I came out of my way to travel with you.’

‘Travel with us? Certainly not! It’s too dangerous. Citizen or not, I’ll be in real trouble if the Government find out I’ve been concealing a Druid.’

‘And who is there to tell them but yourself?’ asked Pryderi, logically. ‘You will be safer by far travelling with him than if you were in the midst of a legion, in the country.’

I changed the subject.

‘In any case, I don’t believe you were trying to travel with us. How would you have known we were on the road together?’

Pryderi, not Taliesin, answered me, too readily for my liking:

‘Shoemakers’ talk. Of course, you can’t understand half what they say, their mouths being full of nails all the time, but still – it gets around.’

‘True,’ agreed Taliesin – you might as well try to shout down a waterfall as to get a word in edgeways into a conversation with the two of them together. ‘If it is hearing you are about one Pryderi the Ingenious, and a young man from far away with only one eye who sells slippers to shoemakers’ wives when they don’t want slippers, then there is easy it is to come to a conclusion. By the way, when it was knowing you I was, there were two eyes you were having. Caw told me you’d lost one. What’s that you’ve got there? Amethyst?’

‘Yes. There’s a little man in Corinth who does them for me. I’ll give you his name if ever you need it. Do you like the carving?’ I slipped it out and put it on the palm of his hand.

‘Oh, indeed, and lovely it is, too. Hercules cleaning the Augean Stables, isn’t it? Oh, the detail in that heap of manure … poetry in stone, I call it. An original design, mind you, seeing what it is for.’

‘Perhaps. I have several others, but I like to suit my eyes to the occasion. I put this one in today in case we met Rhiannon again.’

That meant something to Taliesin, and nothing that he liked. He sat straight up in bed.

‘Not Rhiannon of the Brigantes? Is she on this road?’

‘He sold her some slippers,’ said Pryderi: he seemed to think it funny. ‘Hueil the son of Caw told me that she was going south to Dubris to spend the winter in Gaul. But there, you know what his Gesa is? He may never receive a gift, nor give one, nor speak the truth except in jest.’

‘Why,’ I asked, ‘do you know this Hueil?’

‘My second cousin on my father’s side,’ said Pryderi contriving by his tone to imply that I had asked a stupid question, carrying in itself its own answer. I wondered. Caw was a common enough name … But Taliesin was worried.

‘Well, let’s hope that he was jesting when he said it. Principal Chief Bard I have been to Casnar the Painted Pict King, and Bithig the Bitch. Trouble and tribulation and trial, shortage and scarcity and starvation I saw there, but ruddy Rhiannon is worse. I will say no more. It is not a subject I wish to pursue before I dream.’

Perhaps Taliesin dreamed. I did not. I lay awake for hours listening to the most tremendous snores. Kidneys were not his ideal supper.

In the morning Pryderi went down and brought us a breakfast of beer and oat bread. While he was about that I unpacked my bundles.

‘Shield frames?’ he asked. ‘Where did you get those?’

‘In the market at Pontes,’ I replied. ‘And finished shields they were selling, too, there, so plain it is that they will sell here. But what I did not understand was this, why men in a disarmed country, and women too I saw, should want to buy shields.’

‘For decoration,’ Pryderi told me. It didn’t matter to me, of course, why people bought them as long as they would sell. ‘It is hanging them up people are, inside their houses and outside them too. It is their family badges they are painting on them, to proclaim to all that pass their ancestry and their nobility, and the less noble they are, and the more obscure their ancestors, the more shields and the bigger and the gayer they will hang up, and the more they will pay. So I understand the thinking there has
been behind your purchase, but it is, indeed, the policy I am questioning. It would be more politic for us to travel with as little fuss as possible, and the fewer men that see us, and see us to know us, the better it will be.’

‘Indeed, and that is nonsense,’ I told him. ‘There is nothing more suspicious than the traveller who has no reason for travelling. But who will notice or remember or think the worse of the travelling craftsman? No, the more things we make and sell, the fewer men will remember us.’

Pryderi grudgingly agreed to join in. I looked at the shield frames. They were great flat baskets, oval in shape, that would cover a man from shoulder to knee. How anyone would use such a thing in battle I could not think. I found out, later. But of course these shields were not meant for war, and so, instead of planks of lime and sheets of gilded bronze, they would just be covered with leather.

‘Do we know anything about shield-making?’ Pryderi asked me.

‘We can try,’ I told him.

‘Well, the best thing we can do is to cover the frames with leather, dyed in a variety of colours. Then if we paint a sample pattern on one, we can paint the rest to order in the customers’ own patterns.’

We set Taliesin to dyeing the leather, while Pryderi and I cut it out with our shoemakers’ knives and stretched it on the frames and stitched it. By noon, all the frames were covered and the leather was drying. We ate a light midday meal of a sucking pig between us, and then I told the others that I would work on a sample. I took a blue shield, the same beautiful heavenly blue as the shoes, and I made up dyes and colours from the variety of substances I carried in my bag.