Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (20 page)

Late in the afternoon we went down the steps. I put on my bronze buckled shoes and someone had waxed them. I picked up my bronze fastened cloak, and someone had wiped the mud from it, and ironed it. I left the gold armband where it lay. We walked to the gap in the hedge, and I saw it was a hedge of thorned roses, and the buds that had been when we entered were now full flowers.

Eventually, I got my day of sea fishing. I went down to the jetty in the grey and chilly dawn and looked at the boat. It was quite big, about twenty paces long, clinker built, with overlapping planks, not nailed or dowelled together, but sewn, rib to keel and plank to rib with juniper withies. She was undecked and there was a rickety tabernacle for a mast, but no mast or sail in the boat. I asked Edward, the owner, if he were going to take them. He looked at the grey sky and spat.

‘Good fishing day, and it’ll be dead calm. No use taking mast or sail. You know the great rules up here for foretelling the weather?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not up here.’

‘Well, the first is this. The best forecast for tomorrow’s weather is a description of today’s, whatever that may be. The second is this: any change will be for the worse for your purpose, whatever that may be., Stands to reason, any change will mean an offshore wind, to make us row back against it, and what use will a sail be then? Unless, that is, you have any other ideas.’

It is sometimes embarrassing to be a manifestation, however imperfect, of a weather god. I declined to interfere, and we got in.

This was the only time I went anywhere without Gungnir.
I left it leaning behind Edwin’s high table. I had good clothes on, too good to go fishing in Edith had said, with a gold chain and a couple of rings and a big morse of gold and garnets to fasten my grey cloak. I had no sword of any kind, only my knife.

There were twelve Saxons in the boat when we pushed off. There was the usual jumble of gear and fishing lines in the bottom of the boat, looking in complete confusion the way it always does at sea, till the time comes to do anything, and then you find how carefully it was all stowed. Ten men rowed, with light chopping strokes. The oldest man, Ethelbert, leaned over the bow and took us out over the shallows and the sandbanks to where we could expect fish.

I sat in the stern with Edward, who had the steering oar, of course, and we talked about the sea. After a while he grasped that I had handled ships before, though quite different ships in another sea, and he let me handle her for a bit. You couldn’t tell in that flat calm, but the whole boat felt too limber by half. All the time I was in her, I was expecting those withies to wear through, all together, all at once, and leave us floundering in the water.

Now just when Ethelred had picked up the anchor, which was a courtesy term for a big stone with a rope tied to it, the wind came. It came just as when you tilt the jug and the liquid comes rushing out of it all at once. One moment there was no wind at all, just a flat calm; the next moment it was blowing from hard astern, just a little off the sirocco, south of south-east. It was howling and blowing, and we were going up and down enormous waves. I had never seen or heard anything like it, and neither had the Saxons. Edward and I laid on the steering oar.

‘What about getting her head round?’ I shouted. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being pooped?’

‘No,’ he bawled back. ‘Pooped we may be this way, but if I come round we’ll be swamped for sure broadside on.’

‘Your boat,’ I told him. ‘You know how she handles,’ and I hoped he did.

He was right. We found we could hold her fairly steady with two men on the steering oar. Ethelred came aft, and tied a line on a bucket and threw it overboard. We all gasped as we saw the
way the line whisked out, and we never did get the bucket back. It was a good bucket, too.

After an hour we were out of sight of land. The sky was still overcast, not raining, but grey, and there was still that wind. A little later we could see a blue smudge to port. Edward waved his arms at it.

‘That’s the Holy Island. Nobody lives there. Past that and we’re in the great sea.’

Nobody ever likes to be out of sight of land, certainly not on a strange sea. There were all kinds of tales about this sea, how it was solid with fish and so on, and by logic if you went across it you should reach Britain. But who wanted to go to Britain that way when all you needed to do was to go down the coast to Boulogne, slip across and then coast north or west to wherever you wanted to go?

But drifting out to sea had happened to other people before, always to other people. If it happened to you once and you ever came back, it usually put you off going to sea again. Therefore Edward had been careful to bring drinking water and a little food, sun-dried beef and twice-baked bread. The water casks were full; I had seen that done before we went aboard.

A little way outside the Holy Island we saw something horrible. We came to the crest of a wave and we saw another ship. She was about half a mile away. She had a sail set, and drawing, and she was making reasonable way, not fast, but enough, and right before the wind – her wind. For while our wind drove us west of north, she was making north of east. We went across her bows, our tracks at right angles.

Out of Richborough for the Saxon coast, the Saxons agreed, and they argued among themselves about her cargo, and all this to drown the thought that this was our own private wind, blowing for us alone. Only one man came aft, called Osbert, and he asked,

‘Has any of you wronged a Scrawling?’

‘No,’ said Edward, and Osbert went on,

‘Because the yellow Scrawlings in the east, they keep the winds in a bag, and when any one wrongs them they let out for him an evil wind.’

‘And then?’

‘He gets blown out to sea, and over the edge of the world. And that’s the end.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, in as superior a tone as I could manage. ‘Why do you think I came fishing today?’

I leant back in the stern and looked as confident as I could and occasionally said things like,

‘Hold her steady there,’ or,

‘That’s fine, dead on course.’

I remembered how Jokuhai-inen could bring the winds to his whistle, and I remembered the Scrawlings that brought back Donar and that Loki had sold for me. I knew that if I let the Saxons think that this wind was sent against me I would be overboard in no time. I dared not, therefore, ask if they had any salt or garlic on board. If I had brought Gungnir I might have tried to cut the wind, I remembered the proper things to say, but I didn’t want to try with only a knife. So I sat back and let them think, without my saying so, that the wind wasn’t sent against us, but that I had brought it.

Toward evening, Edward issued a ration of water, not much. I had my old waterbottle, on its strap, full of hydromel, and we didn’t dare let the men know about that, so Edward and I hid it under the nets and sat on it. Albert, who was a careful dresser, came aft and went on the oar.

For the night we tied ourselves to the thwarts, for the boat was rolling and pitching together in a most unpleasant spiral motion. Some of the Saxons were sick. At dawn we had water and dried meat, and at noon we had water and some fish we had caught, raw. During the nights we were kept awake all the time by men clambering over us to relieve the steersmen and to hold us end on, any end on, to the howling wind that blew out of nowhere. Yet no one suggested offering a sacrifice of what we had to Wude.

Toward noon on the third day we saw land, quite close, for the boat was very low in the water. It was a low green shore, with two or three strange green hills like upturned buckets, and an island a little offshore of the same shape. There was more land visible to starboard. We were in the mouth of a river. Suddenly
the wind dropped, stopped, just like that. The Saxons left off arguing whether we were off Britain or Ireland or the Land of Norroway, and with one accord began to row for the nearer shore. I said nothing; I was sure our troubles weren’t over.

When we were close in, the current changed, the tide began to tug at the boat, and we were carried out to sea again, the oarsmen crying and cursing as they heaved. It was no use. Out we went, north and east, out of sight of land. We spent another night at sea, still under that black blanket of cloud, with nothing to tell us even which way we were going.

By now the lashings that held the boat together were in a bad way. Edward and Ethelred had spent most of the voyage crawling about in the bottom finding frayed withies and replacing them from a supply that they carried, but now there were no more fresh withies left. We had had two men baling all the way, but now we had four. We were no longer rationed on water; we were more likely to drown than to die of thirst.

Now and then through the night we thought we heard waves on the beach. Once Albert said he saw a light, and we tried to believe him. When dawn came, we found we were in an estuary, but either further in or in a different one. Now we had flat land with sand dunes on either side. The clouds had changed into a thin haze through which we could see the rising sun.

It was the tide that was carrying us in, said the Saxons, though what these tides are or how they are produced I could never understand. They do not happen according to any regular rule of time. Anyway, this tide carried us in over the shoals and glad we were to be in water that at least we would be able to wade through, for at the first oar stroke the boat creaked and let in water at a dozen places.

We were now sitting up to our waists in water, and yet we were reluctant to get out of our boat while it would still carry us. When at last it grounded we got over the side and we were no wetter than we had been. We couldn’t get the boat afloat again,
for the tide had left her stranded on a sandbank. Once the support of the water was taken away she began to break up under her own weight. The wonder was that she had held together so long. I noticed that it was only now that she was dying that I began to think of the boat as she and not as it.

We took what was worth salvaging, knives and saxes and what food we had and my flask of hydromel. We had a long walk ashore, from ankle deep water to slushy mud, but it would have been much farther had we not come in at the highest point of the tide. When we reached the line of seaweed and wood chippings and rubbish on the high tide mark we looked back. Our boat was already in ruins. Farther out on the water there were half a dozen other boats, big ones, full of men. We could see the glint of metal.

In front of us, about half a mile away or less, there was a village, a cluster of huts. We could hear all the land noises we had not heard for days, dogs barking, children quarrelling, and the wonderful noise of women grinding corn. We could hear them at that distance, and that was a wonder seeing what lay in between. There stood a long line of spearmen, about a hundred of them, and on their flank, on our right flank, at right angles to their shield wall there was a long line of bowmen strung out to enfilade our charge on the shieldless side.

The weapons were the ones we were used to, spear, long sword, shield. The man who walked forward in front of his soldiers to address us was clad in familiar clothes, trousers, tunic, cloak, but his cloak came down almost to his heels, not to the hips like the German cloak. All his clothes were worked in an intricate pattern of red and yellow lines on a green ground. That much was strange, but his face was stranger still. As he came forward his face looked dark. At his nearest we saw it was blue!

A few yards from us he stopped and drew his sword while his little army stood stock still and waited, the spears at the ready and arrow feathers back to the shoulder. He placed the weapon carefully on the ground and drew back. The meaning was clear.

‘Do it!’ I said.

‘May as well now as later,’ grumbled Edward. He unbuckled his sword belt and laid it on the sand. We all followed suit. I laid
down my knife. Then we stepped back a few paces. There seemed a general agreement among the Saxons to leave me nearest to the arrows.

Another man came forward and picked up all the swords and tucked them under his arm. Blue Face seemed to be keeping a tally, notching a piece of wood. They took the swords only, they even left the sheaths, some of them beautifully ornamented, and they left our knives, the kind of things you use for cutting your meat and trimming your toenails.

Blue Face came further forward. He spoke to us. He spoke at length with considerable eloquence. With fine gestures of his sensitive fingers, with exquisite modulations of tone, he went through a complex reasoned argument. It took some time. It was a pity none of us understood a word.

When he had finished I stepped forward. I told him in German that we were simple fishermen, shipwrecked by no fault of our own, and that we were men of substance at home, and I for one had enough gold on me to buy another boat.

He explained, unintelligibly, but perfectly clearly, that I was just as unintelligible to him. I tried in Greek, but this got no response. Then I spoke in Latin, and he brightened up. At least he recognised the language, even if he couldn’t understand it.

He pointed inland and said,

‘Rex, Rex. Venite. Tutti, venite.’

This I took to mean that he was going to take us to his King, and that we would be safe … safe there, or safe till we got there? I didn’t even bother to tell the Saxons, I just left them to trust me.

Then Blueface pointed to himself and said,

‘Morien.’

I took this to be his name, and I answered in the same way.

‘Votan.’

Morien thumped his own chest again and, as I found later, recited his pedigree which began ‘Morien map Seissyllt map Kynedr Wyllt map Hettwn Glavyrawc map Llwch.’ I only caught the first word, so when he finished I said again ‘Votan’.

Morien Blueface, who all this time had not approached nearer than twenty paces, motioned us to sit down on the dry sand,
which we did. Then he walked away, and so did his little army, back to the village. Only about thirty spearmen, young men, came and formed a circle around us. These men, all wearing cloaks of the same red and yellow and green pattern as Morien sat down, each man with his spear across his knees. Some of them had dogs, great ugly things, fit to tackle a wolf alone, two to settle a bear.