Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (15 page)

On the back panel of Freda’s chair, he carved Myself in the Tree, with the wolves dancing around me, and it was much admired and craftsmen came from far away to see it and copy it. The other side of that panel he worked with an Amber ship, and a distaff and a spinning wheel on the arm panels. Above each of Freda’s shoulders rose the pillars of the chair, and each of the pillars ended, like the arms, in the life size head of a maiden with streaming hair. The pillars of my chair were bare.

How many kings will come to your wedding? Listen, how many kings came to mine.

No Vandal king came. The Vandals were poor, a few thousand starving families, too poor to afford a king. But the whole horde of Vandals came, hoping for a free meal, and we fed them all on the shore, men and women and all the children.

Two Lombard kings came. They themselves were very poor. One owned a sword, and looked down his nose at the other who carried only his big axe. The latter spent his time talking to any
other king who would listen about the importance of keeping up the old traditions like this of having one trouser knee always patched in an odd colour. But I noticed that when Baldur gave him a new pair, he wore them, without a patch. Both tried to persuade the wealthier kings to buy mercenaries from them.

A king of the Cherusci came, from beyond the Lombards. He took great pride in being sophisticated. He had once been a sergeant in an auxiliary regiment, and knew the military roads and the inns nearly as far as Milan. He spoke rather bad Latin, slowly, and he kept trying to practise it on me, which made the other kings jealous.

A king of the Friesians came. A rich king this, rich on the herring trade with Britain. He swaggered and clinked with gold chains. He threw chains around my neck and Freda’s with a lordly gesture, but with one eye on the Cheruscan, who brought a hundred jars of wine. He swore it was Falernian, but it was only that filthy Gaulish stuff, not much better than ration red. Still, I don’t think he knew the difference himself.

The Saxon king didn’t come. He sent one of Cutha Cuthson’s men with a very tactful message, saying I would understand if he did not sit at the same table as Sweyn. And since he had heard that I always wore grey, he sent me a bridal suit of dove-grey silk, and gold combs set with garnets on which he hoped that Freda would pile her hair.

Sweyn himself stayed. He rarely moved, he spent most of his life sitting on his throne or on his ship and here he always had a chair on the jetty. As a result he had grown now so fat that no horse would bear him. His main interest was in food, and he would sit all day watching the ships and chewing sausage and salt herrings to work up an appetite for supper.

Sigmund did not come. He sent another of his brothers, Gylfi; he died the next year, too, more’s the pity. Sigmund, for all he was the eldest, was the runt of that litter. He asked pointedly to be excused since he was needed at home to defend Bornholm in case of an attack by Siggeir.

Siggeir came. He came with only three fast ships, having left all his other ships under Lyngi in case the Burgundians should raid Scania. He brought his Queen, Signy, and this in itself was a
wonder, for the Ladies of the north seldom travel, except to their own weddings, and never by sea. But Signy said that it was unthinkable that Freda would be married with no one better than Skirmir’s wife to attend her. As if Freda had not governed all the household of Asgard herself for years.

Siggeir also brought a little yellow man who was, he said, a king of the Scrawlings. This peculiar creature spoke no word of any known language, except a few conventional phrases like ‘Fill ’em up’ or ‘Pass the herrings’. Siggeir told me that at home this man ate nothing but a kind of tame deer that gave him milk and meat and horn and leather and served him for both horse and cow. At any rate he wore clothes and shoes of deer skin, and brought us great robes and cloaks of the same material. His name sounded like Jokuhai-inen. A thin man, he ate as much as Sweyn, but it never seemed to do him any good.

Siggeir brought me the shield. A round shield, covered in leather, it had a rim of bronze worked in dragons’ heads with garnet eyes. The boss was of iron, and we gilded that ourselves later, with some of the gold leaf we had over after we covered all the pillars of Valhall. Above the boss, in bronze and enamel, flew the raven Siggeir spoke of; below the boss in enamel and bronze crawled a dragon.

Loki did not come.

On the wedding day, we did everything. We leapt over the fire, and broke the jar, we killed the cock and rode the white horse, and ate bread together. We stood under the crown and we shared the cup, and followed every rite anyone present could remember. Where I should have sworn on the sword I swore on Gungnir’s point, and seven kings and a queen stood witness.

When all was over we went into the hall. For the first time the kings saw the thrones. For Freda and I sat at the centre of the top table, with Tyr at my side and Signy to support the bride. But now on each pillar of my chair, one above each shoulder, were the eagles I had fetched from the Heath. All looked at them, and the Cheruscan king, who knew well enough, said in his barrack-room grunt:

‘What d’ye call those? Tom tits? or black-cocks?’

And it was on the tip of my tongue to say ‘carrion crows’, but
then I remembered the great Goth shield that hung on the wall behind me, and I said,

‘No, ravens.’

So ravens they were called ever after, and they might well have been just that, for they were tarnished and black with age, and the filth of a century propped beneath a tree. King Jokuhai-inen got very excited, and babbled away in his peculiar language, and though none of us could understand a word we realised at last that he had names for the birds. The best we could make of what he said was Hoogin and Moonin, and under these gibberish titles the birds were known ever after. And all the better in that they had no meaning or history except in the mind of a Wizard King who could raise the wind when he wished; he showed us, later.

We all sat down together to the wedding feast. No expense had been spared. We had even hired a minstrel so that Blind Hod, who usually sang at our feasts, could join in the banquet without worrying about the effect of beer on his voice. We drank Honeydew from silver cups, with gold-mounted horns of beer or wine for chasers. One Lombard king drank beer, to show how he clung to the old customs. The other drank wine to show he was modern in his ideas.

We ate as I never ate before in Germany. We had oysters from Britain, that came up through Friesia, and Freda found a pearl in one of hers, which was thought to be a sign of luck. We had salmon from the land of Norroway, and eels preserved in a kind of jelly, and stewed seaweed, though I did not care to try this.

There was whalemeat, and that was strange because it was more like beef than fish, but with a rank taste to it. And a strange thing, for the whale, that huge fish that a man may take for an island at sea, has no fat at all in its body. I, who have eaten the meat, tell you that for truth.

There was wheat bread and rye bread and barley bread.

By special arrangement, a bowl of wheat porridge, legionary ration style, was served to the Cheruscan sergeant-king. He threw it at the Friesian king, but missed him and it splashed over Sweyn, who licked it off his sleeve and said it was very good and please was there any more?

I had brought quite a lot of food up from Gaul. The fruit
went quite well, figs, and dried plums from Illyria. Nobody else liked the olives, though, and I ate them myself, the whole barrel, as the winter went on. It took me all that time, too, to teach Freda how to fry in decent oil instead of in pig fat.

The Honeydew was a great success. I had flavoured the mash with juniper berries, which improves the taste a great deal. We gave a big cup to the minstrel, who was churning out one of the traditional stories. But under the spell of the Honeydew he, being a Batavian, gave us a highly original version of how the brave Batavians won the great Battle of the Wood, while Herman and the Thuringians only came up after all was over.

Then the Cheruscan king sang us the descent of the Lord Mithras, for he had gone as far as the Dog, but only because you couldn’t get promotion any other way.

Jokuhai-inen sang and danced, beating on a little drum, hung with silver bells. None of the others knew what it meant, but I had been watching what he had been refusing, and I knew that he was dancing the Death of the Bear. For his people, once in three years only do they sacrifice the bear in truth, but they may dance the sacrifice on any great occasion when they need good fortune.

Tyr gave us again the song of how he lost his hand. He had now added a great deal of personal and genealogical material on Aristarchos, some of which was to my knowledge untrue, and the rest of which may have been no more than wishful thinking.

Then they called for me to sing, and I think I gave them more than they expected. I sang them of how the Lord Apollo brought to men the gifts of song and music and writing, and when they were all entranced I ended,

And so they all agreed, and each of them left behind a noble, except the two Lombard kings, who stayed themselves to save themselves the cost of their keep through the winter, as well as to watch each other. One of them offered to hire out his wife to Jokuhai-inen for the wedding night, and was furious when he found the Scrawling king had already made arrangements with the other. But his rival was even more furious to find that Jokuhai-inen had sublet her to Sweyn and not only enjoyed her himself but made a profit on the transaction.

When all had agreed that a standard runic writing was desirable, and we had drunk all the Honeydew, and the minstrel had been mutton-boned, we went in procession to my house, lit by kings as torchbearers. Signy went in to deck Freda for the bridal bed, while the men made me drink a last horn of ale, and they had a final contest among themselves as to who could drain the biggest horn at one draft. It says a lot for Siggeir’s naivety that he thought he could pass me a horn half full of beer and half of Honeydew without my noticing, but I managed to exchange horns with a Lombard king, and he was so naive he drank it, and he was fearfully ill later in the night. So in the end only six kings saw me to my bed.

But as to what happened there, you may learn across the Styx. Whatever Ursa, or Gerda, or any of the others were, remember that Freda was my wife, and my first wife. So don’t expect to hear any more about that. In spite of what came after.

That first year of my marriage to Freda, the first year of my first marriage, was the best whole year of my life, complete and without flaw. Perhaps I was in the virginity of my powers. Perhaps it was the effect of that first bitter northern winter, cooped up on our pile-based deck above the frozen marsh. It was in that year that I learned how to command kings, how to send kings to their death and kingdoms to destruction. Hear then what I did.

First, in that winter I taught men to write. Asers and kings (even if only Lombard kings) and nobles and traders all sat down before me every morning through the winter, and learnt of me how to write. Of course I could not teach them how to write in Latin, for they cannot learn Latin, their tongues are too short. So I had to make an alphabet that would fit the German sounds. It was only then that I found out how many different kinds of the German language there are, and how many sounds. And, of course, I could not think of using wax tablets. I had to make letters that could be scratched on limewood panels across the grain.

Njord never learnt the trick at all. One of the Lombard kings was nearly as bad. The other learnt very quickly; his name was Hoenir. He had very little to do but work, for his wife, having tasted the sweets of wealth with Sweyn and Jokuhai-inen, had gone off with the Cheruscan king. He passed her on to other military friends, and when I saw her again a few years later, in Rome, she was mistress to a captain in the Praetorian Guard, and doing well on selling permits to beg around the Milvian bridge.

Loki came at Yule. He learnt to read in three weeks. This is their winter festival, when their custom is to burn a tree. This
was difficult in Asgard, living as we did on a wooden deck above the swamp, in wooden houses, but I had Bragi make a great tray of bronze and we piled a heap of earth to put it on and we burnt the tree in that.

We gave Loki his spear, and he was very pleased. He made no comment on the thrones, or on the marriage, till midway through the Yule dinner, when he produced a complete set of silver plate, cups, dishes, wine strainers, bowls, two of everything, all Syrian by the workmanship, and not more than ten years old by the style. I often wondered where he stole it. Still, it was a magnificent gift.

When the banquet was well under way, he tried to feed Hoogin and Moonin with crumbs. Then he got maudlin over the maidens on Freda’s chair, and called them his little Greek girls. And he used the Greek word too, Kyria, and then he called them Valhall Kyria, and the name stuck.

Among the men who had come in the ships with Sweyn was a noble named Starkadder. He stayed to learn the Runes, having nowhere else to go that winter but Sweyn’s hall, and ours was as good. He was a landless man, having lost his farm at dice, as so often happens. One night, in the hall, I sang the tale of Scylla and Charybdis, translating Homer as best I could. Starkadder was most impressed by my description of an octopus, for they do not live in the seas of the north.

He went away next day, and repainted his shield, which before had had the usual simple design of an eagle or a boar or some such thing. He painted on it what he thought an octopus might be. There was a human face, and from it there came out in all directions eight human arms, and each of these arms carried a weapon, one a sword, another a hammer, another an axe, and so on. The result was most distinctive, and ever after he was known as Starkadder Eightarms.