Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (13 page)

I rode west from Asgard. I spent a night at Orm’s place, one of our palisades. There I talked with a party of Batavians. They said the
same thing as all the other Germans. South and west of Orm’s place was the Heath, and across the Heath no packtrain would go.

‘Why not?’ I asked this party, just looking for confirmation. They all answered, everybody trying to get his own little phrase into the conversation.

‘It’s haunted.’

‘The whole place is a sacrifice.’

‘Ghosts walk there.’

‘Long, long ago, there was a great King, a great King, greater than all Kings. Out there on the Heath there is a tree. There he sacrificed an army.’

‘Aye, with his own hand he devoted them all to the Gods. The men he killed, the horses he killed, all their weapons he broke, and their treasure he scattered before the Gods. And no living men go there.’

‘How long ago?’ I asked, as I so often asked, but no German has any sense of time.

‘Oh, long ago, long, long ago,’ they said, as usual.

‘Who was the King? What was his name?’ and they all went on,

‘A great King.’

‘Long, long ago.’

‘Tall as the sky.’

‘Long, long ago.’

‘Tall as the sky.’

‘Long, long ago.’

‘His arm was strong as the sea.’

‘At the beginning when the earth was formed.’

‘With his own arm he sacrificed them all, thousands on thousands.’

‘Long ago.’

‘A great King.’

‘Long, long ago.’

Once I had thought it all tales. But there were so many who told the same tales, and from so many different places. Next morning, at sunrise, in sight of them all I cast my spear into the face of the sun, into the eye of the day, and I vowed to ride to the centre of the Heath. And they all said,

‘It’s all right for you, look who you are. But no mortal man has ever been there since.’

I asked Orm:

‘What
is
at the centre of the Heath?’

‘How should I know better than you? Some say there’s a tree there, and some say there’s a serpent. Some say there’s a dragon guarding treasure, and some say there’s a hole to the centre of the world. I think there’s nothing; no, not just empty land, just nothing, no sky, no land, just nothing.’

It was a bad day to start across the Heath. When I cast my spear into the eye of the sun, I had to guess where the sun might be, for the mist covered everything. You couldn’t see far, and you couldn’t make much speed. I wrapped my cloak around me and I made south-west as far as I could guess. About noon the sun began to break through, and I could see the kind of place I was in.

It was sandy, gravelly country. The lower places were boggy. The higher ground had some fir trees, but mostly it was heather and coarse grass. There were snakes, too; it was adder country if ever I saw it. They were out sunning themselves on the stones, everywhere. Later, there weren’t any trees. There were no people, no birds or big animals. Only snakes. It was dead quiet on the empty heath. There was only Sleipnir to make a sound. Yet I heard things as I heard them on the tree. I didn’t see anything, only heard them, the sound of a beaten army, men groaning and shouting, wagons creaking as they turned and twisted along roads not yet built. Pressed from all sides, they sought room and space not to fight, not even to die but only to surrender and have rest.

When the sun was north of west and below my shoulder, I came to a boggy pool. Beyond was a plain, and in the centre of the plain, a mile in front of me, at the very centre of the Heath, was a tree. Here the silence was more silent. The beaten army had at last found its rest. The water, yellow in the evening light, looked evil, treacherous, but Sleipnir bent his head and drank. I drank too, and I filled my old water bottle. I ate some of the bread and sausage I had brought, and I wrapped myself in my grey cloak. I turned Sleipnir loose. I did not light a fire, nor in
that barren place did I expect wolves or bears. I slept. In that place Apollo sent no dreams.

But in the hour before dawn, the God himself stood before me, in scarlet cloak and breech clout, in long hair and uncut beard, as he stands in the Sanctuary in the Old City.

‘Father Paeon,’ I asked him, ‘do I do thy will?’

He answered:

‘Here in my secret place you seek me out. Take what you will to do what I will. What you will take, you will return tenfold when all I will is done.’

He went in the mists of the dawn, the dawn I could not see for mist.

After dawn I drank and ate. Sleipnir came where I knelt at the pool and nuzzled my neck. I mounted and rode toward the tree.

A furlong from the tree, Sleipnir stopped dead, and I could not get him to go farther. In such a case you can’t make the horse go any farther, even if you get down and pull, so I dismounted and walked forward.

I walked on the things that Sleipnir would not step over. In the long grass things unseen shifted and cracked under my feet. They had been there a long time. The bones were mouldered and etched into the sour soil. The iron helmets rusted into the skulls. Here and there the bronze of armour or cloak fastenings remained, green and greasy, the leather and the cloth long rotted away.

Those bronze strips came from shield rims, oblong convex shields. These had been horses, long rows of them, little but the teeth remaining.

They all lay, men and horses, where they had fallen. Some had gone down quietly, others had writhed or struggled. But the bones were not disarranged, no wolf or bear had feasted, nor vulture nor crow. Only the adders slithered among the bones or sunned themselves on the skulls.

How had they died? No bone was smashed, no skull split, no
neck severed. They had died as the white mare died at the gate of Asgard. Each had faced the tree, and then the quick slash of the knife, the hot blood on the ground and the hot breath in the air. But then not burned, not buried, just left. With all their arms and armour, all their clothes, their boots, even their jewels, just left.

Here a heap of rusty corruption, with fragments of bronze, enamels, jewels, that had been a bundle of swords, every blade broken. That pile of old iron – that had been a mass of spear heads, the shafts broken. This was booty, the plunder from a great battle. They had brought the prizes of war to a sacred tree, and sacrificed it to Wude, to Tiwaz, to all the gods. They killed the horses, they killed the men, they broke and blunted the weapons, they hacked the leather of the shields. Here they had been the pioneers of a legion. The axe edges were turned, the saws heated and their tempers spoilt, the faces of the hammers scored with a cold chisel. In the north they would have thrown it all into a peat bog. Here they had to let it lie on the heath.

How many? The survivors of three legions. The others were up in a peat bog. There had been many nations at that victory, and the plunder was shared. There
were
others, indeed. There was an eagle missing. Two standards, the shafts broken, had been left to lean against a tree.

An army is too big to hang. Some men had been hanged, though, hanged and left to rot in the air. Their bones lay in jumbled heaps on the ground; after all the years you could still see the rope marks on the bough. Not so many years, though. I had known old men who had heard at first hand about old Claudius raving through the palace when he heard, how he cried,

‘Varus, Varus, bring me back my legions.’

Well that was Varus now, by the look of the jewels. Just a shapeless pile of rubbish.

Herman was dead now, that great King, whose arm was strong as the sea, who stood tall as the sky. He was no pile of rubbish. They had burned him, and perhaps the dust of his ashes had blown over Varus’s bones. Now after three or four generations no one could even remember his name. He had driven the Romans back to the Rhine, he had thrust through the Marcomen
to the Danube, the nearest thing to an Emperor the Germans ever had or ever will have. But all forgotten now, dead and forgotten. You have heard those tales of the long memories of people with no writing. False, all false. Who remembers Herman but his enemies?

This was no place to stay, where no wind blew, where no bird or beast moved, only the adders. Varus had a fine gold brooch, with a cameo, the Judgment of Paris. I took that for a gift. Behind the tree in an untidy mound, under the cups and mirrors and trappings of the officers’ baggage, were the regimental pay-chests. Into my saddlebags I shovelled the great piles of gold coin, as much as Sleipnir could carry, as much as I could lift. From the regimental plate I took one piece I liked, a boar, silver gilt, a foot long. I went to the standards. The shafts were broken. I couldn’t take everything, the crosspieces, the chains and crowns and plaques. I unscrewed the eagles themselves, and put them in my bag. Was there anything else I wanted? I could always come back for it. Only the Holy One of Wude would touch, would receive Wude’s sacrifice.

It was most of a day and a night again and some of the next day, to Orm’s place. That evening I went into the hall and sat at the centre of the high table. I could tell by the language that the room was full of Saxons, and I looked around for a face I knew. I found it and called,

‘Cutha! Cutha Cuthson! Come up higher.’

He sat at my left hand, since Orm was on my right, as was only proper, it being his house.

‘Well, Allfather,’ he said; I was used to being called that by men twice my age and more, it is something that happens when you go white in a night. ‘It is good to see you in your proper place at last.’

‘All the same, Cutha, you can do something for me, or perhaps Orm can. I want a smith, a good one, a man I can trust.’

‘Want one? Buy one?’

‘Buy one, hire one, steal one, I don’t care. And I’ll want a carpenter too.’

‘What kind of smith?’ asked Orm. ‘Blacksmith? Sword-smith?’

‘No, bronze, and gold. And the gold mostly leaf beating, weeks of beating.’

‘I have a nephew,’ Orm said. ‘He is a maker of anything, in any substance. He would go with you. For wood, look, he made this table, all that carving on the legs. And in bronze, here, Gand …
Gand!!
Too much noise in this hall; Gand! pass me your horn; see? Good enough? His name is Bragi.’

‘He’ll do you,’ said Cutha. ‘I knew his mother, Saxon she was. And his father is a Vandal, Orm’s brother, and what more do you want?’

The Saxon half would guarantee loyalty, the Vandal half … well, the Vandals are a byword throughout the north for their sensitivity, their love of beautiful things, their craftsmanship. The table and the horn mount were good enough. I saw the man, and he agreed to come with me, and he brought his apprentice, Ingelri, who wasn’t so good on the wood but was a promising worker in metal.

It took us days to get back to Asgard. We worked through the forest, marking down stands of timber for charcoal. At the last we went through the woodyards and the piles of weathering timber near Asgard.

‘You’ll want oak for the frames, and limewood for the back and panels,’ Bragi said.

‘Here, this oak looks well weathered,’ I told him.

‘Yes, but not that branch. It’s had mistletoe growing on it. You can still see the scar. You couldn’t sit on that, it wouldn’t be proper.’

‘Take it all the same,’ I told him. We kept that branch apart, and worked it down into a spear shaft, taking care that the scar showed still. Then we sweated a spear head on to it, a good one, and Bragi made a bronze ferrule, and we gave it to Loki at the next Yule. He was very pleased with it, and called it always his Mistletoe Twig.

That night I went into Valhall late, when I knew that Freda was already at her place. I swaggered in and I strutted up the Hall to stand before Njord. To Freda I bowed and I said,

‘I bring you a brooch, costly in craftsmanship, in gold and glass cast and carved.’

To Frederik I bowed and I said,

‘I bring you a boar from the bushes, gold from the Ghost Land, fetched from the forest and chivvied across the causeway.’

There was a long silence. Then I bowed to Njord, and I began,

‘To you, my Father, King of the Amber Road …’ I paused. ‘… Before the winter is over I will give you a house of gold, and columns that glisten.’

And as I went to sit by Freda I prayed that Bragi was as good a worker as he said; and then I cursed the way that now I could hardly speak ordinary prose, but had to keep on spouting alliterative nonsense, whatever I had to do to the sense.

I looked at Freda, and I caught her eyes. I knew that she might look with interest on any fresh face in the wilderness, that you might take her ear with strange tales or make her wriggle her toes with a kiss, but the way to get at Freda’s heart was to satisfy her greed. For jewels she would do anything. That great morse she pinned over her breast. And Frederik proudly placed the golden boar on the table before him, as pleased as if he had won it himself. As Njord his whetstone, so Frederik his boar. What for Votan?

I looked at Freda, and I caught her eyes. I knew I might ask for her when I would, or even take her without asking. But before I asked I had more gifts for the Asers, and they must be ready before the Amber Fleet came in.

Next morning, Bragi and I went through the bronze stores, and found sheets of copper, easier to work. We had some Vandals
fence off a place on the ridge, and Bragi and Ingelri began to beat out copper tubes.

I went into the village and found the potter. Just as in Vindabonum, the merchants brought up Samian pots, but this was too expensive for the peasants, and they used a local gritty ware, rather nasty. The women made it themselves, and I could never persuade any of them to use a wheel. The potter, as she called herself, was the old woman who owned the kiln, and charged others for using it, and made little pottery herself, except for her own use.

I bargained with her for space in the kiln. The first pot I turned out set her quite aback. She stared at it. Then she just squashed it with her foot. Pots, she let me know, were not like that. Pots were like this … and she made one. I told her no. I wanted magic pots, like this, and this. Now would she please dry them in the sun, and then fire them as usual. Just to show goodwill, I’d make a couple of pots of her shape, like this … and she could have them to sell, or keep if she preferred. Now for more magic pots … no, they wouldn’t hurt the kiln, or the pots in the rest of the batch. I’d make sure of that with a spell, and I recited another twenty lines of Homer. I thought Andromache’s lament for Hector most appropriate in the circumstances.