Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (23 page)

This was much better than eating in a noisy hall with drunken retainers fighting at the bottom of the table, and the minstrel groaning on. Instead, there was a choir of men in the courtyard who kept up a Pythagorean harmony. It may have been churlish of me to notice that they only knew three songs, which they sang over and over again, but when I had heard one verse often enough to memorise it I asked Taliesin what it meant.

‘It is,’ he told me, ‘a song, a most beautiful song, a most harmonious song, in praise of purity of heart. The particular line you asked me about means “The pure heart does nothing but sing, day and night”.’

‘And these singers?’

‘Pure,’ he answered, with his voice full of innocent candour and sincerity. ‘All pure, very pure indeed.’

The singing went on while our gay little party conversed in
Latin. I noted that efforts were always made to give me companions who could speak Latin, thus preventing me from learning the British tongue. We got on quite well in Latin, we four, I and Taliesin and the King and the lady from the chariot, especially by the time we were dealing with a suety dish full of apples and served in a sauce of honey and milk and eggs.

Now, Casnar was reciting his pedigree, which meant that we three were at leisure to eat. He went into some detail over his immediate ancestors who had moved north, he said, after Caesar had come to the south. Here, in the north, they still kept up the ancient customs, like tattooing. I reflected that he was better paid for his ancestral piety than was Hoenir, the poor Lombard king. Then, as we were moving on to walnuts from Italy, and raisins, very expensive, Casnar put his arm around my shoulder and said,

‘You are a man of wealth and power, power natural and power supernatural, and we learn from Taliesin that you are a priest of his own holy order.’ I gave Taliesin a look which showed I held him responsible for anything that might happen.

‘Here I sit, King of all the north. All the other painted kings owe me their allegiance.’ Owed, indeed, but paid seldom. ‘I receive rent and tribute from all around. Even the Romans pay me for the inestimable blessing of my good will. Yet I have no one left in my family to share my wealth with me. I have no kin but my little sister Bithig.’

I looked at little sister Bithig. I was wrong, it was seagulls, not crabs, that went in procession around her forehead. Casnar went on,

‘Her son shall be king here when I am gone. Photinus, I give you my sister in marriage. You shall stay with us as long as you live.’

And little sister Bithig opened her thin lips for the first time that evening, and said in a small innocent voice,

‘I am named after my great-aunt, whom you know as Boadicea, who sacked London and killed ten thousand Romans, beside many Syrians and Greek pedlars.’

She shut her little lips tight again, it was the only thing she said all the evening. I looked at Taliesin over the King’s head. He smiled happily and drew the back of his hand over his throat. I
made desperate choking noises, and they took this for acquiescence. All I could hear was Albert screaming, and then stopping screaming, while Taliesin stood on a stool and delivered a five hundred line epithalamion.

I decided that the only thing to do was to join the others and finish the Spanish wine. For them it was celebration, for me an anodyne. I determined to drink till the sea-gulls on Bithig’s forehead started going around the other way. Long before that I was unconscious.

I woke up next morning in a room in the palace. I had a frightful headache. A young man called Annwas brought me some hot milk and boiled seaweed. I asked him in Latin if I could go into the fresh air, and he led me to the nearest courtyard. It was raining steadily. I stayed inside.

In the middle of the morning we went to the hall. It was full of warriors, but they crowded around me and asked me to recite to them in Latin, for they were all eager for learning even if none of them could read. I gave them nearly the whole of Book Four of the Aeneid. Just as I came to the death of Dido, as I whispered,

I found I had no audience, because the first servants had come in with midday drink and food. I tried to forget it all again, this time with cider.

The next I knew Annwas was calling me for dinner. This time we ate in the hall. Bithig wasn’t there. Taliesin was furious and showed it in a thousand little hints. Etiquette forbade him to leave before his King, and as a result he was limited to his seven boiled beans and water. Casnar was amused, and told me so.

‘We’ve got to have him pure overnight. Can’t have him unclean in the morning, spoil it all.’

‘All what?’

‘The wedding, of course, Bithig is fasting too, and it always ruins her temper.’

I did a lot of drinking that night. I just hoped it would keep me fuddled through the day. It didn’t of course, it just gave me another headache. Annwas woke me early with a colossal breakfast, all salty. Have you eaten salt herrings and salt bacon when you have a dry mouth and a nasty taste to start with?

Annwas and another man named Evrawc argued for hours about how to dress me for the occasion. I refused to wear the red and green pattern, or any gay colour, and they insisted, and they were quite right, that my grey was in no condition for a formal appearance. In the end they stole Taliesin’s second best toga, and someone sewed a purple border on it, so that I went to my first bigamous wedding dressed as a Roman magistrate. But my long white hair was most un-Romanly dressed with goose grease.

We walked in a kind of rough procession down to the grove. The main part of the ceremony was my paying of a bride price, and the original intention was that this should have been a token offering, a small bag of gold supplied from the Royal treasury. However, my pride would not allow that, and I had had a hard day’s work with the three cups and the dice the afternoon before. As a result, the bride price I paid was a wild mixture of collars and armbands and brooches, but all gold and of good quality. My escort, however, though they carried their weapons with an air, had a rather bare and poverty-stricken look. While I was in Casnar’s kingdom, I got on to reasonable terms with the king, and I felt that by paying my gaming winnings into the family purse I was at least earning my keep.

After we had waited in the Grove for a very long time, so that Taliesin began to worry whether we should be able to start within the propitious hours, Bithig and her brother arrived in a chariot. She wore a veil. I was glad of that. I had spent most of the night dreaming of being married to Medusa, and I still had a headache. The ceremony was short and simple. We shared a cup of a rather horrid drink made out of dandelions, and paid the bride price: in fact the longest part of the whole proceedings was waiting for Casnar to finish counting and weighing it.

Then we got into the chariot, Bithig and I. She peeled off her
gloves and threw them into the crowd. She threw back her veil. I nearly leapt out of the chariot, but there was a double line of spearmen on each side. They
had
married me to Medusa. It was not sea-gulls or crabs that ran around her forehead, but an inverted crown of snakes’ heads. Snakes wriggled up her arms under her sleeves. And there was a dragon’s head on each cheek, that snapped at me each time she changed her expression. I tried not to think of the night, when those snakes would twine around me and throttle me.

Before us in the chariots marched bagpipers. It was wonderful in that desert place to hear real civilised music again. The pipes are the absolute peak of human achievement in music making. They played, and the crowd sang, a song I had not heard before, which, I was told, was a prayer to the Goose God to lead them through the barren land. We rode to the open space below the steps to the dun, and mounted a dais.

There, so near to civilisation were we, we watched a whole day of ritual games. They raced chariots and they raced on foot, and they had contests in throwing the javelin, and in throwing a great stone, and something I had never seen before, in throwing a tree. And they danced. These people do not dance as all other nations dance, for rain or dry weather or victory in battle. They danced for the sake of dancing, with no real religious feeling behind it at all. It struck me as almost blasphemous. They danced by ones and by twos and by fours, and by twos of fours and by fours of eights. They danced till the dusk came.

Then when it began to get a little chilly, and the pedlars were selling hot soup and mulled beer instead of cold boiled ham, we went into the hall for the marriage feast. I was rather glad that Taliesin took so long over his marriage song, and that he translated it line by line into Latin. After that, while we ate, the competitions went on, but now they were competitions in the composition of verse, and in singing and in playing the bagpipes and in blowing the horn. It would have been glorious, at least the pipes would have been, if I hadn’t had such a dreadful headache. Drinking did nothing to settle it.

Every time I looked at Bithig, the snakes flickered their tongues, and the dragon mouths opened and closed at me. This
was no place to stay, but it was worse to go. The pipes played louder, and Bithig’s lips grew more set and determined. It was a situation to turn a man’s hair white. Mine was white already.

Bithig began tugging at my wrist, under the table. Later, she got me by the elbow and pulled, not caring who saw. I pretended to be affected by the music and beat time with my hands on the table. Bithig went on tugging. I went on tapping. The pipers went on playing. My head began to fragmentate. Taliesin was nudging me. I took no notice. Finally Casnar leaned across the table, picking his teeth with his knife, and said very loudly,

‘This has been a long hard day for the pair of you. Especially for my poor little sister, always delicate she was. Feel like going to bed, now, don’t you?’

Taliesin was jerking his head toward the private door. Morien was stropping his knife on the sole of his shoe. Those Picts have no doubts about the main purpose of a wedding.

I got up rather unsteadily, and Bithig gripped my wrist with a hand hard and strong after years at the hunt. She heaved me after her through the private door, and through half a dozen more doors, and each time I hit my head on the lintel. Nobody in the hall took the slightest notice of our disappearance; I felt that there the fun was only just beginning.

I was dragged stooping through that maze of passages for what seemed an hour. It would have been pleasanter in the Cretan Labyrinth, for Bithig went first, and the Minotaur would have eaten her before me.

She got me into her bedroom, a much more comfortable room than the one they’d given me. It was done up with very good Roman furniture, all fifty years out of fashion of course, but they tell me that kind of thing’s coming back now. The whole room was ablaze in the light of at least two dozen candles.

‘All right,’ said Bithig. ‘Bed!’

‘Please,’ I asked her. ‘Can’t we put the lights out first.’

‘Who do you think I am? Psyche?’ She’d had a good education, I’ll say that. ‘Don’t you want to see what you’re getting? I went to a lot of trouble over this.’

She slid out of her dress. Her short sleeved bodice in red flannel showed the snakes peering from a forest of convolvulus that
went up to her shoulders. She took off five more underskirts, red and yellow and green and blue and purple. Finally she flung the bodice and the last skirt, a black one, at my head, and I saw it!

Before and behind, snakes and dragons’ heads and tails peeped out from the riot of intertwined briar and bindweed. Not an inch of space was wasted, not an inch. Out of the symmetrical cloud of blue patterns, beautifully designed if you like that formalised art, there crystallised a few close coarse spirals. One centred on her navel, one on each breast, one on each buttock, one on each knee cap. As I looked in horror, each spiral began to revolve, to open and shut, to expand and contract. The whole room shrank in on me, and swelled out to fill the Universe, and shrank again, and the candles flickered till you couldn’t see for dancing shadows.

‘I need a drink,’ I said.

‘Nonsense. You’ll be all right, as long as you don’t sit down.’ She was a hard woman, all right. ‘I don’t want you going to sleep here. Stand there and listen.’

Outside the bagpipes were playing. For a moment Bithig stood poised. Then she began to dance. Perhaps the people at the games didn’t dance anything in particular, but she did. They didn’t dance rain or barley, but Bithig danced bed. Bithig danced sex.

The pipes droned and throbbed in rhythmic surges. The dragons and serpents crawled and chased their tails among the rustling leaves. The spirals expanded and contracted, in and out, in and out. I never knew when I started too. I danced my clothes to the four corners of the room, I danced my clothes to the four corners of the room, I danced my wits to the eight winds of heaven, I must have danced my headache somewhere because I never had one again in all my life. I danced Bithig into bed in the pressing bounding beat, and as we rolled to a climax, the pipes and the harps and every singer in the palace joined in that song about the need for purity of heart.

When day came, and the candles were burnt out, a woman came in with a jug of hot milk.

‘There is a fine day it is,’ she said brightly.

‘Fine? You mean sunny?’

‘No, no sun. But it has not been raining for, oh, half an hour at least.’

Good weather is a question of what you are used to. Two days without rain are a wonder in that country. Two days of sun are a miracle, and I had brought three.

I drank most of the hot milk. Bithig was snoring. I never had a wife like her for lying in bed in the mornings. I summoned up courage to look at her. I took a good look.

This was not the woman I had married. There were no snakes, no dragons, no crabs or butterflies either. She was just a blotchy mess of blue and white. Blue and white blots, smudges, smears, stripes all over. I looked down. I was in the same state, blue everywhere. I leaped out of the bed. There was a bowl of water in the room, and towels; I washed, I rubbed till the blood came. It only spread the blue.