Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (22 page)

He combed his thick short red hair. He combed out of it a flea, a snail, a lizard, a mouse and a squirrel. They all sat on the table. I threw the end of my cloak over them, and they changed
into a flock of pigeons which fluttered away through the chimney hole, leaving two eggs on the table. He stroked the comb, which turned into a centipede and wriggled off among the floor straw. I put the mirror on the coiled belt, and it turned into a frying pan full of sizzling fat over a crackling fire. I broke the two pigeons’ eggs into the pan and had a second breakfast. I didn’t offer the Druid any; I didn’t think he deserved it.

None of this is very difficult if you know how, and so, having shown each other our professional credentials, we were free to talk. The Druid spoke first, in Latin, with a dreadful provincial accent and full of tricks of speech carried over from his own tongue.

‘I am Taliesin. I am Himself, without Father, without Mother, born of the Oak, I live of the Oak. Photinus, Man without Kindred, are the Kindred that you are without the Kindred that I am without? Are you come of the tree I am come of? What then do you here? Man brought on the Wind, what did you there?’

‘What does it matter to you what I have done, or what I will do?’

‘Nothing, indeed, what you will do, for that is as much in our destinies as in yours, but it is out of interest and out of curiosity and out of inquisitiveness that I ask you what you did do, for you brought the Sun with you, and it is seldom enough that we see him, and three days running is unheard of. And it is known, and it is patent, and it is obvious, that the wind was your wind, for there was a singing in your praise all last night by your crew, and your shipmen, and your sailors.’

That I knew was an exaggeration, since the last thing I had heard Edward singing was a dreadful song called ‘Knut, the Bastard King of Scania’, and I will not trouble you with the words, except to say that even the Saxons will only sing it when they are out of earshot of land. Taliesin went on:

‘They sing of how there was a leading of them out of the sea, and out of the weather and out of the wind, into a land of beef and bread and beer, a land of meat and milk and maidens, and there was a wishing and a desiring and a longing on me to see, and to perceive, and to observe this mighty man of marvels.’

I said no word till I had made the sign of the four in the air,
and had plucked out of it the beans by one and three and five. Then I answered as proudly as I could:

‘How can we talk, such as we are, under the turf of the roof, in the stench of the peat? Let us talk, let us walk, in the face of the day and the eye of the sun.’

And that was how he knew that I like himself was vowed to the unconquered sun, though I was no Pythagorean dedicated to the rule of numbers and harmony and abstinence from meat and from pleasures.

‘Once there was a throwing,’ said Taliesin, ‘and a casting and a projecting of a spear into the face of the day, into the eye of the sun. No good came of that, no good will come of it, but what is that to me? Walk with me then, if you wish, in the face of the day, in the eye of the sun.’

And he motioned me before him, to go out through the low stone passage with an elbow in it to break the force of the winds. But I motioned him politely in front of me, for I did not want a golden knife in my ribs. And when we came to the doorway, I stood close to him, that no man with an axe or sword might strike me without hurting him. But I wronged him, for there was no one there.

We walked down through the city, and the people stood aside for the Druid. I saw Edward sitting on the step of a house holding his head in his hands while a girl washed his feet. There was no need to worry about my Saxons.

As we walked in the Grove, beneath the oaks coming into leaf, and the mistletoe with its leaves never old, never young, and the berries just ripening, Taliesin told me where I was.

‘If you had gone from the river south-west as far as you have come north-east, you would have come to the walls, and the fortifications, and the ramparts, of the Romans. And if you were to stay here for five years, or ten, or maybe half a lifetime, you would perhaps once in a generation see the Romans march by on a raid, and an expedition, and a foray. And there it is proud they are of it,
but even when they are here they hold no more of the land than their boot soles cover. And Casnar whose dun it is on the hill and who is king of this place, even he does not try to stand against them in battle, but he and all his family and his kin and his cattle go into the wild places till the Romans are gone. Yet no Roman dare walk in this country unless a hundred more walk with him.

‘Casnar who is the king of this place is a great man and a rich man, and above all he is a hard man. Tonight we dine with him in his hall in the dun. Listen to what he says, Photinus, and take what he offers, for he seldom offers much to anyone. And if you do not take what he offers, you will be soon left with nothing, no, not even your head. If you want him to offer you anything at all, even your life, come with me and wash, for you stink.’

And that was true, for I had still on me the pig fat of the winter. We went down to a bath house the king’s young men had built for themselves by the river, and found there a number of young men oiling themselves after drill. They were all eager to copy Roman customs. They welcomed me as a sailor, and therefore as a fit person for soldiers to talk to, even if I sometimes had to depend for my life not on my strength alone, but on my knowledge of winds and currents and the balance of forces and the strength of pulleys.

They brought me hot water and soap and oil to wash off the pig fat and the salt and the road dust, and rough towels to dry myself and wrap myself in while they took away my clothes. Then I sat in a steam room where they dashed cold water on red hot stones, and I was more comfortable than I had been in Vindabonum, for many of these men spoke Latin, more or less, and they were all great talkers.

We sat on the river bank in the unwonted sunshine, and fished with long lines and bronze hooks, which small boys baited with a paste of bread and cheese. We ate more bread and cheese, and washed it down with beer, and made bets on the size and shape of our catch, though in fact we none of us caught anything, and I sang them, in Latin, the tale of how when I was recovering from the wound in my side I sat by the river in the forest and fished. They thought it a beautiful story, and indeed I have heard several versions of it since, with magical additions.

Then Taliesin recited, in Latin, in prose, the song he intended to sing that night, in his own tongue in Casnar’s hall. It was all about how he began life as a poor boy, little Gwion, and about how he had escaped from his wicked stepmother and became a great bard, a Druid of the great line of bards, and a credit to his teacher Merlin, whom we had seen with him in the chariot the day before. Now Merlin had gone off to sponge on some other poor king, leaving Taliesin to squeeze Casnar.

Now, mark this, every bard in Britain has just such a tale of how he started life as a poor little Gwion or Gwynno or Ianto, and of how he rose to power by his own unequalled intelligence, and gained some such title as Taliesin, which means Radiant Brow, and indeed hair of that colour demands such a name. But this man had a tale to tell worth hearing, of all his transmigrations, and of how his unconquered soul went from one thing into another. For he had been a hare, and a fish, and a grain of wheat, and a sparrow, and a black hen, and at the last an egg, hatched of the black hen, from which there came at the long last little Gwion, already a half grown youth. And he had floated in from the sea in a leather boat and been cast up at the feet of his Master.

‘And now I am left alone,’ he told us. ‘Now Merlin is gone into the cruel west, where there is neither bread nor light nor moderation nor true learning nor number nor respect for sacred things. Only I remain to sing, of all the Druids that once sang their hymns to the Sun in the Great Temple of the Isle of Britain. Raised it was, and built, and constructed, by the men of old, and their kings lie in a circle around it. Those were the kings that built the Temple at the beginning of time, at the foundation of the world, at the first going forth of the Chariot of the Sun. Stone are the pillars of it, and of unhewn rock are the columns and of the bones of the earth are the uprights. Of oak and of ash and of elm were the rafters that lay from pillar to pillar and from column to column and from lintel to lintel. Of reeds and of rushes and of barley straw was the thatch that they laid on the roof. Now all is departed, the rafters are burnt, the thatch is rotted away. The legions march by the roads of the men of old, and they go past the pillars of the House of the Sun, and they march by the Hill of the Sun, and they see them not.’

Now that is all true, for although a few Romans talk of the Temple, none claims to have seen it, nor has any one of them heard of the Hill of the Sun. But there is no need to believe the tale I have heard, that the Druids hide the Temple and the Hill in the mist, for why should a magician labour to raise mists in that island that is full of mists all day and all year long?

When the sun – for that was one of the rare days that we saw it – began to sink, they brought me my clothes, still a trifle damp in places, but clean and a few tears mended, and my boots new greased. Then we walked, Taliesin and I arm in arm, and a cloud of young soldiers behind us, and a bagpiper in front of us, and it was a wonderful thing to hear that civilised music in a savage land.

We climbed out of the village up a long flight of steps, each step made out of a single stone, to the great stone wall of the dun, unworked stones framed in timber. The side-posts of the gate were two great boulders, man high, with a stone lintel above them, and on each face of each boulder was grooved, incised, in one deep line, the figure of a bull, strong and proud, the head down to charge, the tail in motion. I wondered where I had seen before such a way of drawing with a chisel, why the bulls looked so familiar. Then I realised that the man who drew that bull on the rock had first drawn it on skin, had used the tattooist’s needle before he brought his hands to the rock.

Njord lived in a warehouse. Edwin lived in a farmyard. Casnar lived in a city, and in that city he lived in a citadel, and in that citadel he lived in a palace, a palace of many rooms. True, each room was a separate house, and these houses were connected by low passages, shoulder height, and small courtyards.

The citadel, the dun they called it, was oval, and the palace took up scarcely a third of it. There was room enough within the walls for all Casnar’s people and their cattle to take refuge.

I never found out how many rooms were in the palace, or how many people lived there. To the end I kept on bumping into
strangers. The Great Hall, and it was a great hall, though, was built on the German fashion, and it stood at the front of the palace. It had the usual high table and sidetables, but inside it was the most hideous hall I have ever seen.

King Casnar was rich, richer than any king I had ever heard of. He was master of flocks of sheep and spinners and looms, of dyers and fullers without number. That pattern of red and yellow on green that Morien and the spearmen wore was King Casnar’s pattern. In the hall I saw it everywhere. I mean quite literally everywhere. The walls were hung with it, and the rafters were hung with it, and the tables were not bare and polished but covered with patterned cloth. You could never rest your eyes in that hall.

There were a lot of men in the hall. Most of them were in King Casnar’s pattern, but some of them were visitors and wore other colours. You’ll never see anything like that among the Germans. Uniformity in dress is utterly foreign to their nature.

All were standing up. Taliesin led me to the high table, and we all waited till King Casnar entered. Then we remained standing, King and all, for a full hour by anyone’s reckoning while Taliesin sang his song of Little Gwion’s metamorphoses.
He
sat, of course, in a great chair that four other bardlets, apprentices I suppose, in blue, brought in for him, while we remained on our feet without food or drink or any chance to relieve ourselves or our feelings.

When Taliesin finished, he was not muttonboned as he so richly deserved, but he was loudly applauded and deigned to accept from the King’s hand a gold oak-leaf wreath.

Then great bowls of steaming soup were brought in and set before the diners, who waited while the King made a speech, quite incomprehensible to me. The soup went cold, and the only comfort was that they hadn’t even given me and the King that, only a glass of wine each.

When the King had finished he turned to me and bowed and tossed off his drink. While I was bowing back he vanished. I was still trying to work out what had happened when Taliesin seized my arm and steered me through a slit in the hangings into one of those low passages. I kept on bumping my head on the lintel,
but after three courtyards and the intervening rooms, we came into the King’s private dining-room. Somehow the bardlets had got there before us with Taliesin’s chair, for this was the very symbol of his bardity.

It really was a cosy little party. We didn’t go as far as couches, but we had chairs with padded leather cushions. The main dish, that night, after a first offering of mussels, was a pie, a wonderful pie, top and bottom crust full of suet, to soak up all the gravy from the filling of beef and oysters and onions. Such a pie I never saw in all Germany. The heavenly texture of it, the smell, seduced me from all thought of my predicament. I was drugged with food; I would have agreed to anything.

The servants who emerged from the stone passages whenever Casnar shouted for them brought Taliesin a silver plate with seven beans, boiled, pink, revolting, and a silver cup of cold water. When he had finished this, and we had finished the mussels, the servants took away his chair. This done he hung his oak leaves on an antler nailed to the wall, put his mistletoe on a side table, and, having thus gone off bardic duty, proceeded to make us fight him for every last scrap of the pie. I must say, I appreciate asceticism under those conditions. However, each time the servants came back, he would spring to lean against a pillar with an abstracted air.