Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (8 page)

I opened my eyes on the pale light of dawn. Everything was pain – my head, my side. I saw life through a mist of pain. Carefully through my pain I felt myself beneath my cloak. I still had my knife, the one that had pointed to Joy. I held my knife in my pain. The horse stopped. He got down. I could not remember who or what had given me pain. I only knew that I must increase pain, breed pain, multiply pain, bring pain to its highest power.

He took me by the shoulders to pull me off.

I stabbed him through the cloak, under the ribs and up. The man screamed, the horse screamed. Through pain I knew where pain lived. We fell together. I was on top. I struck and struck as he screamed, to the groin, to the face I slashed at his eyes, he vomited blood, he jetted blood and pain. The knife had gone, I held hair. Through pain I beat his head on the ground, I felt bone break.

He had been a long time dead. He had been long out of pain. The painful river ran with painful noise. The painful sun was high. Somehow I must see what I was left with.

The horse had gone. He was still there. He had a bag, on the ground near him, with sausage. He had a water bottle, full. I washed my face, swilled out my mouth. A little farther was another water bottle; mine, empty.

I felt I could look at him. The flies crawled in his eyes. I took my knife from his armpit. I cleaned it in the ground, I washed the blood with water. I made myself eat some sausage. I brought it up. I ate more. I must.

I turned him over. He stank. His clothes were tattered. My cloak was bloody, but his was foul, drenched in blood and worse. There was a wallet on his belt. I cut it away; a few silver pieces, a lump of Amber. I knew what I was going to do. I wanted rope. I turned him over and over. Round his waist, not rope, a chain, an iron chain, a gang chain, with places for the necks, and a lock. No key. Where to look for the key?

He had a bronze ring. Why should a man wear a bronze ring? Those keys with a finger ring on the end are common enough
here, but I found it hard to think of one there. But even in this wilderness, the chain was Roman, the lock was Roman. The key must be Roman.

Those tales you have heard of cutting off a finger from a body to take a ring. They are true. I did it. I had the key. I put it on my own finger.

I could move a little now. I rolled him fifty paces to the edge of the river. It might have been a mile. We were on the outside of a bend, where the stream ran deep and fast and had cut the bank into a low cliff. I pushed him over into the water. He floated away. I never knew his name.

I lowered the water bottles by their straps and filled them. I soaked the shirt away from my wound. It was long and ragged but not deep. If I could lie up somewhere for a few days I might be fit enough to walk back to Haro’s farm. Cat men could follow the trail we had left, wolves could smell the blood. I must move on.

I reckoned that I could make perhaps a mile in the hour. It was slower going than that. After a few steps I stepped on my spear lying in the long grass, where it had fallen. I used it as a staff. It was easier then. I moved away from the river, through the scrub, alder and willow. I went up hill. There was nothing to my purpose. I had the set mind of the mad. No sane man would have done what I did.

I came out of the scrub. There was about half a mile of open space before the edge of the forest itself. There were charred stumps, spongy earth. The clearing had been burnt, frequently. No trees, nothing but grass had grown over it. In the centre of the clearing, too old and huge for a grass fire to harm, was an oak tree.

The oak in the burnt land should have warned. The scraps of rag and fur in the branches, the broken jars at the foot, the horse skulls around, should have told what it was. I was mad. Wolves could not climb a tree. Cat men could not see through a curtain of fresh leaves. Who sent me mad?

I got into the crown of the tree, a man’s height above the ground. Too high for wolves to jump? Every movement now tore at my knitting side, my brains flowed loose in my skull. I leant
against a limb. The chain I passed round my body and the branch, and I locked it. The ring was on my finger. If I could wake three days on the heaving deck pressing down on the steering oar, then I could sleep three days in the still tree.

The light was going. The chain hurt. My head ached, my side burnt. It was bitterly cold. It was dark, darker than night, darker than a cave, darker than death.

That night the Most Holy One, the God himself, came to me. There are many appearances of Apollo, and you who have been brought up here in Rome know only Apollo the Youth, the Singer. But you who have never been to the Old City cannot know the God as He stands there in the Sanctuary. The God came from the Islands long ago and chose his own Temple. The God, the Father of Aesculapius, is an old man, long-haired, long-bearded, as indeed I was in those days. He is the Healer and the Destroyer, Apollo Paeon.

He stood before me in the tree, in breech clout and scarlet cloak, as he stands in the Sanctuary. All the night long He stood before me as He so long stood before our Fathers. For He is our Father, we are His sons, and before His son the Father stood the night through.

Near dawn I asked Him:

‘Father Paeon, why are you here? Why are we here?’

He answered, ‘When you stood with Joy at the river bank, when you took Joy’s spear in your hand, did you not vow to go where I should send you? Now shall you pay your vow, and see the Hyperboreans from whence I came.’

‘And what shall I do there, my Father?’

‘Is not my name Apollo, and does it not mean Destruction? You shall bring destruction to all who are safe and contented. In the shadow of light shall you bring them the darkness of fire.’

Apollo brought the dawn as I hung in my chain. I moistened my lips as the sun came up, and I wished I could risk eating again, but the sausage was salty and my water would last three
days at most with great care. Toward noon, Apollo sent a sign. The cloud came over and there was a thunderstorm. My clothes were soaked, I drank the water that poured through my hair. I licked the water from the leaves and I ate. There was a hollow in the tree just in front of me that filled with water and I could just reach it, straining against the chain.

If I let the chain out, if I unlocked it and let it out a link or two, I would still be safe, I could reach the water without rasping the wound. I would – I had no key. There was no key on my finger, or in the wallet. Not on the ground beneath. There it was, a foot beyond my reach, below my reach. It hung on a twig as on a finger. And I could not reach it.

I wriggled and I squirmed. I could not get down to it. I tried to work the chain down, but it wouldn’t come, it was stuck on some snag behind the limb. I could not reach round to it. I fought and writhed, and every movement tore at my side, opened the knitting wound, let the blood trickle again down my side. I hung in my chain and looked down. In my agony Apollo had sent a sign. In the grass the hyacinths bloomed as once they bloomed for Amyclos, son of the hyacinth, killed in far Sparta by the disc of Apollo.

As night fell, the God came again, but not as a man. Apollo Lykanthropos came, great grey shadowy forms in the dusk. If you ever come to the Old City and stand in the Sanctuary before the God, you will know what the wolf means to our family.

There were a score of them, and that in the late spring, when they hunt singly. They came and went in the dark. Just before dawn, at the time when Apollo spoke to me, when I was almost asleep in spite of my fear and pain and fatigue, the first one leapt. His teeth tore the toe of my shoe. I pulled up my feet into the crown, but still they leapt, not singly, but two or three at a time snapping and slavering. I could smell them, I could feel their spittle on my legs. For an hour in the twilight, the wolves danced, and to my wrist was still tied the spear which I must not use.

Apollo brought the sun, and there were no wolves. I licked the dew from the leaves. There were no clouds. I struggled with the chain, and brought blood. I could not reach the key. When the sun was high, I risked a pull at the water bottle. It was then
that I saw the men. They stood at the edge of the wood, and they danced in my eyes so that I could not count them. I tried to shout, but I had no voice. They were not there any more.

Then it was dark again, and light again. I do not know how often the dark and the light came. Or how often the wolves danced. After a while there was no water in the bottles. Only the dew and sometimes the rain. And the pain. I hung forward on the chain in pain. My head was an expanding flame, my mouth a sea of dust. And there was hunger, the worst hunger of all, for I had food that I dare not touch, the salt sausage.

There were creatures in the tree that crawled on the leaves, the slimy and hairy and creeping things that no man may eat. Yet I think that I tried to eat, and I think I retched. There were squirrels and birds, yet not one that came within reach of my spear. Somewhere in the tree were bees. And there was something in the tree I never saw, though I heard him slither in the branches and once I felt his long body trail across my thighs. Yet he was a comfort, for how should any snake, python or not, harm a man vowed to Apollo?

The wolves danced, and the rain drove through my cloak, and the sun glared down on the empty land. And I saw.

How far can you see from six feet up in an oak tree, on the edge of a forest in the plain? I tell you, I saw from sea to sea and from beginning to end. And the ghosts of the dead may haunt you, and the dread of them bring you to madness; but the ghosts of them who are doomed yet to be born – I tell you what I know, I tell you nothing that I have not seen, and the dread of that is too much for any mortal man. Look at my hair and know how dread it was.

In the east there is nothing. Nothing at all. There are more men than ever you could dream of. But every man looks exactly like his neighbour, and every generation is exactly like every other generation. Nor is there ever any change or ever anything new.

But to the west, the whole land is a pot of porridge and the walls of the Empire are the sides of the pot. Every bubble in the porridge is a nation and nations are born as the bubbles burst. In the end the pot will boil over. For it is not the pot only that boils but the very air.

I told you that in those days it was warmer than it is now, and you thought that it was the delusion of an old man trying to keep his bones from freezing.

But I know that Apollo himself comes and goes as he pleases, and that sometimes he withdraws the Chariot of the Sun from the earth, and sometimes comes nearer, and between the warmest and the coldest times may be hundreds of years.

From six feet up in the oak tree, while the snake moved about me and above me and behind me, I saw the cold and the heat come and go, age on age, from the tree to the ocean, and beyond the ocean. For there are lands beyond the ocean. As I hung in my chains, Apollo let me see in my pain that he is even now withdrawing from the earth. As the earth got colder, the porridge boiled over and swamped into the Empire. And as porridge which boils over is burnt and charred and changed into ash, so the barbarians who will boil over into the Empire will be changed and transmuted and charred into new nations, neither Roman nor Barbarian. And every one of these nations that is changed will be led by the sons of Votan, who lead only because they are Votan-born. And the Votan-born will spread over the whole earth, and whatever people they conquer they will turn into something like themselves.

The colder it gets, and the farther Apollo goes from the earth, the more the nations of the Votan-born will turn to the sea, and go out to face the storms of the ocean, and the terrors that lie beyond the ocean. But when Apollo approaches nearer the earth, then they will turn to the east. And in the east they will have little luck. They will conquer no land, nor will they change any nation, but rather will they be changed themselves.

My tree, the oak tree, stood somewhere in the borders between east and west. Beneath it I saw the Votan-born lead their people against the east, and the east ride back over their bodies. And when they had any success and ruled for a time over the east, the east in time always swallowed them up.

Yet the Votan-born ride against the east again and again. Sometimes they ride in the name of an Emperor who was a God, and sometimes in the name of an Emperor who knew no God, and sometimes in the name of a God who could not be an
Emperor, because he was a God of Peace, and sometimes they ride in the names of no one but themselves. But whether they ride cased in furs against the cold or cased in iron against the arrows, whether they fight with swords or with fire, they ride against the east because the east rides against them. And always they die. Some die well, in battle or in bed. Some die ill, of dysentery or plague, or drowned in a ditch or crammed in a barn and burnt. And near the end of time, they will die not well or badly, but miserably, passionlessly, wretchedly, hopelessly, walking in naked columns to choke.

And at the end of time – there will be an end of time. After the Votan-born have made the greatest music, and have painted the greatest pictures and sung the greatest songs that can ever be, then the east will come against them for the last time. And then, knowing clearly what they do, but not knowing whose will they do, the Votan-born will dissolve the whole world in fire, and they will return to the Sun whose sons they are.

Out of that glare of fire I woke to the glare of noon. The men came, and I could not speak to them. They came to the very foot of the tree, and before my dry eyes they poured out cool, clear, bitter beer at the roots. Then they too were gone.

After that my head became very heavy. I saw every thing far away yet very clear as when you look through glass into clear water, at shells and little fishes. I knew I was going to die. I watched the empty land and watched myself die.

At sunset there was a thunderstorm, and the rain ran into the hollow, and I drank. Then I slept till I woke in the darkness. There was someone in the tree. You must know that there cannot be Apollo without Artemis. You cannot love the wolf and hate the bear. I heard her scramble into the branches, and the little twigs break beneath her. I heard her claws scratch on the bark. Then the bear turned to me, hairy chest against my chest, face against my face, breath mixed with my breath, cold teeth smooth against my cheek. She stayed while I might count a hundred. Then she climbed up, and I knew by the sounds that she had found the bees’ nest. Honey, wild honey, poured down on to my head and face, and I licked it off. The wolves did not come.