Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (17 page)

They took the ship and they caulked her, for she was old and leaky, and they put in some food, but not a lot for they had not much money even then, and they did not want to take anything they might have to bring back. Then they took her to sea, and they worked her north, overloaded, to the coast of the Land of Norroway.

Now whether the Land of Norroway is a part of Germany or an island no man knows, but if the shallow sea balances our central sea, as it must if there is any logic on the earth, then that great desert land, where a man may walk to Scania, must be a Northern Africa. And that is why there are elephants in the north that burrow beneath the earth to escape the cold.

They made the coast of the Land of Norroway, and they were glad to see it, and thought it more than they had hoped to do. They rowed along the coast till they came to King Vikar’s hall, where it stood over a large village, on a harbour. There they beached the ship, and half of Starkadder’s men came to the shore, but the rest stayed hidden under the bulwarks, and a Scrawling watchman kept everyone away.

King Vikar knew Starkadder as a hard man to have work for you, a man to send to collect your debts. Starkadder had been the King’s man once, and eaten his bread, and in his band had learnt the arts of war. When the King saw it was Starkadder, he was pleased, not afraid, and bade him and his men feast in his hall. Starkadder told him that they had been on their way to raid
the Scrawlings on the Amber beaches, but that they had been deceived in the mists. King Vikar thought he might have use for Starkadder, and wanted him to go north, and raid another king who had been interfering with Vikar’s herring fisheries.

They sat down in the hall, Vikar’s men and Starkadder’s men together, one and one. Vikar’s two daughters carried round the ale, Alfhilda, and Gambara that should have married Harold Edwinson. After the ale had gone round, and Vikar’s men had drunk much, and Starkadder’s men had drunk little, and I do not know how he managed that, Starkadder brought out four jars of Honeydew that I had given him; his hardest task on the voyage had been to stop his men from drinking it. The Honeydew they poured into the horns of King Vikar and his men.

Then they began to play the games that the Germans like to play after their dinner, and one of Starkadder’s men slipped out to give the signal to the ships. It was only twilight, for it was the night before the Midsummer feast.

Starkadder said to King Vikar,

‘We have a new game. We call it the game of Votan.’

‘What kind of game is that?’ asked King Vikar.

‘First,’ Starkadder told him, ‘you must stand with one foot on the table and the other on a bronze bucket.’

‘So I will,’ said Vikar laughing. ‘Bring a bucket,’ for if you tell them it is a game these men will submit to any kind of indignity.

‘Now you must take a live cockerel in your right hand and a horn brimful of ale in your left.’

King Vikar did so, and in the twilight the men from the ship were coming ashore into the village, with their swords drawn, and ropes coiled round their waists, and their bare axes held before them, axes with two foot blades and cherry wood handles.

‘Now,’ said Starkadder. ‘Let your two principal chiefs make a rope of twisted juniper withies, and put it around your neck,’ and this too Vikar had them do, not thinking any harm.

‘Now, when I call Go! you must drink the horn of beer at one draught, not spilling a drop nor letting go the cock nor touching the withies with your neck. And I wager you a jar of Honeydew to a piece of silver that you cannot do it.’

‘Done,’ said Vikar, for he thought that more complex and
absurd the rules, the more likely it was to be a game of skill, worthy of a king, that called for no exertion, but only for dexterity. And now the men from the ships stood all round the hall.

‘Go!’ said Starkadder Eightarms, and the King began to drink the beer. Then ‘Pull!’ said Starkadder to the two principal chiefs, and they, overbalancing with laughter, pulled, for they thought it a trick to make the King spill his beer. The King choked and let go the cock as he tried to keep his balance with his face in the horn, and his men laughed and they all watched the cock as it fluttered up to the rafters. Then each of Starkadder’s men took the knife with which he cut his meat, that King Vikar had laid before him, and killed his neighbour, King Vikar’s man, and Starkadder took a spear from the wall, and said, ‘Now I give you to Votan.’ And he thrust the King through the body, and then killed the two principal men, so that their blood flowed on the ground and their breath went up into the air.

Then Starkadder and his men went through the village and every man that they found they killed, that there might not be a blood feud against them. But all the women and the boys they drove together, and they collected all the gold and silver and bronze, all the furs and Amber, for Vikar was a rich King, and fit to marry his daughter to the Saxon King’s son.

The next day they took King Vikar’s ships, and they filled them with prisoners and booty, and they put to sea. The houses, and the corn they could not carry, they burnt. It was midsummer night, and they left only the old women and the babies to leap over the flames.

Then in a day and a night, with a good north wind so that they dared to set the sails, and women and boys in plenty to row, they came down to the harbour where I met them, and which belonged to a trader called Elesa. There they sold all the booty and the people to Elesa, and the ships too, and Starkadder took half and his men half. Yet Starkadder never owned land, for no one would sell it him, nor would any king take his oath or hire him for more than one voyage at a time; for he had once sworn an oath to King Vikar.

I went with Starkadder to see my share of the plunder, four young women, and one of them was Gambara, Vikar’s daughter.
I took Gambara to bed that night, but she was so much trouble and so much fuss, that I quite lost my patience with her and told her I would sell her to a brothel in Gaul. After that I went out, and it was an hour before dawn.

The God stood before me as he stands in the Temple in the Old City, in scarlet cloak and his hair about his shoulders. I asked him,

‘Father Paeon, have I done what you wished?’

He answered:

‘I sent you to bring destruction to the north. Now the seed is sown, and the breeze has begun to blow.’

In the end I got rid of Gambara. I did not dare take her back to Asgard. I told off a couple of Vandals to take her down as a present for Hoenir, whose wife had gone off with the Cheruscan. Now he had a sword, he was pleased enough to have a wife, and a genuine princess at that, even though her royal father ruled over a fish market, died drunk and was flung on a midden. She never showed me the least malice afterwards. Why should she? A maidenhead she was bound to lose anyway was small price to pay for a kingdom, especially since till the Vandals rolled her still bound on Hoenir’s floor she thought she was bound for the brothel.

That, I said, was in the midsummer, and in the Spring she gave birth to two sons, Ibor and Agio. When they were of age, Hoenir died, and the other Lombard king came to the funeral. They killed him and his sons, and the heads they threw on the pyre. So the Lombards had two kings of the one blood, and that fresh blood, to hold against the Vandals who pressed them hard from the east. How the Vandals found a king I shall tell you later.

The other three women I took home for Freda, since I thought it wrong she should be less well served than Julia Scapella, and have only Skirmir’s wife and a few village girls to do her hair. Freda was delighted, and after she had flogged each of them a few times they became quite devoted to her.

Donar, however, was for some reason most displeased at this story, and let it be widely known, so that Starkadder came no more to Asgard, but kept the seas all the summer in King Vikar’s own ship, which was a good one, and in the winter he would go
down into the Empire to sell his goods among the Gauls. Alfhilda, Vikar’s daughter, he kept with him in his ship.

Donar spent a great deal of our silver in buying back King Vikar’s people. Gambara did the same, but what she spent was mostly Lombard blood. Most of the youths and some of the women came back at the last to found a new nation, though a few of the little boys had been gelded.

It was these youths and their sons who years later caught Starkadder on a lee shore on the Amber beaches and killed him and all his men. Alfhilda, who had gone with him willingly on all his voyages, they threw into the ship and burnt, and her children with her, and that satisfied Gambara, who was always jealous. But Starkadder Eightarms they flung dead into the waves for the fishes to eat.

After the death of King Vikar, Donar had little to say to me. He seemed bored even with making swords; Ingelri was perfectly capable now of looking after their production. Donar spent a lot of time playing with Freda, and then, when the Amber Fleets came, he went away. All the kings came that year. Only Sigmund did not come, sending one of his brothers, Synfiotli. Even Edwin came, early, with shiploads of salt and salted fish. Sweyn came, wearing King Vikar’s chain, for that was his price, but Donar did not know. Siggeir came, but Signy stayed at home, for she was near her time, and for once it had nothing to do with me.

Last of all, Jokuhai-inen came in his own ship. That is to say, he did not come in Siggeir’s fleet, but he had hired a Goth ship, and had mixed Scrawling spearmen in among the rowers to guard his cargo of walrus ivory and sealskins. For walrus ivory we had put up the price, and it was worth his while to come himself.

He had brought a gift for Freda, a gift of a Scrawling woman. Not of his own kind, but from somewhere farther east, sallow faced and flat chested, with coarse black hair, but good sport, I tell you that, who know. But Jokuhai-inen brought one and took
one, for he persuaded Donar to go back to the north in his ship with him. Donar tried to tell us all why.

‘Somewhere up in that land, they say, dwells the Smith God, in a land where fire spouts from the earth and the rivers run hot with steam.’ That sounded reasonable enough, for there must be a burning mountain in the north to balance Etna in the logic of the world. But who would want to live in a natural hypocaust?

‘So,’ Donar went on, ‘I will go up there and worship. Then Jokuhai-inen says he will teach me how to catch fish that swim in ice, and trap wild foxes, and milk deer. Up there the nights are half a year long. Think what feasts one can have. How much Honeydew ought I to take for a half-year’s feast?’

How Jokuhai-inen told him all that I never knew, for then Donar hardly had two words of the Scrawlings’ language, though when he came back he was fluent, and he had learnt it in the best place, in bed. How much sport there must be in bed when each night is half a year long!

We saw Donar go, in Jokuhai-inen’s ship. The King sat at the steering oar, much to the dismay of the Goth shipmaster, who protested that Jokuhai-inen had hardly spent two hours in control, and he was sure to run her ashore or foul a jetty or ram another ship. Donar said it would be all right, for he would stand in the bow and beat out the time for the rowers with his hammer on the side of the ship. What
he
knew about it we couldn’t guess. He knew only one rate of striking, and he soon had the rowers panting. We cheered and waved and they cheered and waved and the ship heavy laden wallowed out from us into the open sea. And winter came.

At the beginning of the winter, when the snow begins to fall, and the cattle are brought in from the forest to the byres to live, if they can, through the winter, the Barbarians keep the Feast of the Dead. This is not a feast of joy, to thank the Dead for their gift of life. It is a feast of fear, when the Dead prowl around the house, and the noise of the feast grows high to drown the noise
of the dead feet outside. And games are played, as crazy as the game that killed King Vikar, so that mirth for a moment will whelm the noise of the Dead, the fear of Death.

Yet all that bitter night, the doors of the hall stay open, that the Dead may come in. At the end of Valhall we placed a table, and on that table the plate was of gold and the cups of glass. There was the strongest of the beer, and the whitest of the bread, and the fattest of the meat, and the sweetest of the honey. All this was set out for the Dead to eat. King Vikar, and Grude, and the Cat king’s men, and the men they threw in the bog, all dead, dead, dead, and all eating in Valhall.

Then as the minstrel was singing a cheerful doggerel, and the boys were ducking for apples, and everyone was laughing for fear that they might scream in terror, someone did scream in terror and something came into the hall out of the Night of the Dead. The noise stopped as a man’s voice stops when the water goes over him. There was a long silence as it stood there, bulky and bloated and white with furs and with snow.

Then while the hall sat in silence, great Valhall sheeted with gold and hung with shields, so silent that the fire ceased to crackle and the straw to rustle, and the very rats in the roof stopped running, the being at the door raised his arm and put back his fur hood. And we should have known that no man but an Aser would have walked abroad on the Night of the Dead, and no Aser but Loki. Yet such was the shock of his entry that it was still in silence that he walked up Valhall, past the silent benches and the silent fires. And the very smell that came to us was not the smell of wet furs but the smell of death.

Four of the Great Asers sat on the top table, Njord and Frederik and Freda and I. At the sidetable nearest the High Table sat the lesser Asers. At my left hand sat One-handed Tyr, and next him Bragi, and his new wife Idun that he had only lately brought in from her village. Opposite Tyr sat Baldur, with his arm around Blind Hod, and between Frederik and Baldur was an empty chair. Not the chair that had been there when I first came to the hall, but one carved and patterned with tongs and hammers and anvils and all the instruments of a smith’s art.

Loki then entered the hall, for the first time since Yule. In
silence he walked up the hall, past the silent packmen and traders, to the silent Asers, toward the silent High Table and the empty chair. And when he was within three paces of it, when he had only to pass between the tables and take it, someone spoke: Bragi spoke: