Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (27 page)

This year we’d got a lot of the fishing boats to come straight in to us, and with salt that came up from the Saxons we did the pickling and packing ourselves. This meant crowds of Vandal and Lombard women gutting and cleaning herrings. This needed supervision, and who was there?

Bragi said he was a carpenter and not a cooper, and so he refused to have anything to do with making casks. Besides, he also supervised the work in the black sheds where a hundred Scrawling slaves watched the Honeydew pots, gagged all the day that they might not steal a drop.

Donar and Tyr had spent the summer off looking for me, or so they said. A likely story. To judge by the tales they had to tell that winter, they had been enjoying themselves. Frederik was about as much use around the place as a wet scrubber.

Freda did what she could, but although she had a fine way of talking, the men only did what she told them in the hope it would keep her quiet. As soon as she wasn’t there, they forgot all about her. Anyway, she had enough work, with her girls, making all the sausages and beer for the Amber Feasts. Njord and Heimdall were a fine pair of old dotards, not influencing the world any longer except by ornamenting it.

I soon had them all to work, and I was even able to introduce two new lines. All the fashionable kings in Germany we sold
hunting dogs, that I got from Britain through a Friesian agent, and they were all eating that tart, thin British cheese.

Siggeir was the first king to come, and Jokuhai-inen with him. I tried to ignore the Scrawling King, but he came after me in the courtyard, and caught my arm and said in the awkward German he had learnt from Donar:

‘Good winds, Votan, good winds, eh?’ He pulled me round to face him, and for the first time he saw my ruined eye. He whistled.

‘In the eye of the Sun, in the face of the day, was it? An eye pays for all, Votan, the light of man pays for all. When next you need a wind, whistle, and you shall have any wind you want, all the wind you want.’

There came with Jokuhai-inen in his ship a pair of little brown men, tinkers they said, tinsmiths or bronzesmiths, or even silversmiths if you would trust them with any silver, patchers of pots or botchers of bronze buckets, welders of broken slave-chains or sharpeners of goads. They stayed behind when the Scrawlings left. They built for themselves a little hut on the edge of the village, and they made themselves a nearly honest living by doing bits of metal work for Vandals or the men from the ships, any little job too small or too menial for Bragi or Donar.

They’d told poor Jokuhai-inen they were Romans, and he may have believed them, but they didn’t try it on me. They would never own to being citizens of any one place, but my opinion was that they came from India, and this tale of their being Roman came from their being left over from Alexander’s army.

Well they settled there, and they did their bits of tinkering, and the money piled up, silver at first, and then we found they were changing it for gold. I had a few words with Tyr, and we agreed that none of the bullion should go out of Asgard, and certainly none to Loki. We never could tell them apart either. One day I was wandering round the village, as usual, making sure there was no illicit selling of Honeydew, and that meant I had to
look twice as hard with my one eye, so it was no wonder I saw what I saw.

One of them had flung open the neck of his shirt as he worked over his fire, and round his neck was a necklace. It was made of that hard green stone I told you about, that I had in a ring, where a man could spend his life carving a thing as big as a cherry stone. But this wasn’t one stone in a ring, this was a chain of thirty-six links. Each link was in the shape of a fish with its tail in its mouth, passing through the next rings on either side, so that the whole chain must have been carved out of one block of stone. And each fish was green, but its fins were white. One carver? This would have taken a score of men all their lives to make.

I stopped and I looked at the chain, and I knew that it was the one thing in all the world to give to Freda at the Yule Feast. She would give me no thanks for anything I had taken by force. I would have to buy it.

I knew better than to go for it myself. I found a Saxon trader, not a man of straw but a man who might well have wanted to buy it for himself. I sent him with a gold armlet, good stuff, dug out of a barrow, and a gold chain of twenty links, to use link by link if he had to. But he brought it back to me, and said they wouldn’t sell.

‘It’s not even as if they want more than this,’ he said. ‘When I asked about it, they looked at me as if I were making an indecent suggestion, and me a respectable man as well you know, Allfather. They said it wasn’t for sale.’

‘We’ll see about this,’ I said, and a few days later, not to seem in too much of a hurry, I went down myself. Now you can’t bargain with these Asiatics, you have to beat them down to size straight away, and I came straight to the point with these half-naked beggars.

‘All right,’ I told the one with the chain, and I couldn’t tell whether it was the man I first saw with it. ‘How much?’

‘How much for what, Master?’ he asked. ‘Here I am mending a kettle for Tostig Gustasson, and for it he will give me a small horn of barley meal, though I will ask him for a large horn and let him beat me down and feel he is clever. And perhaps if he is drunk he will give me a large horn, or perhaps even two small
horns, which is more, thought he will think it is less. But, Master, if you have a kettle to mend I will do it special for you, for a small horn half full of barley, and I will do a better job than I do for Tostig, special for you, Master, special for you.’

‘I’m not employing, I’m buying.’

‘Buying what, Master? We have nothing to sell but our sack of barley meal and a few clothes and our tools that are our life: And you are our father and our mother, you would not take those away?’

And how much silver besides all that, I thought.

‘I want to buy that necklace.’

‘Oh, no, no, no, Master, you would not want to buy this piece of rough native work. It is all we have to remind us of our homeland so far away. Look, Master, you buy this, a fine clasp, bronze and garnets, special price for you, only six links of that chain, for anyone else nine links, but special price for you, Master.’

And somehow, without my knowing how, I bought the clasp and went away without the necklace. I tried several times, and they still would not sell. When I got testy, they said,

‘Oh, great Master, great rich proud Master, you are our father and our mother, we live under your shadow, do not be angry with poor men. We only wish to keep our little necklace, little piece of worthless stone. You would not wish to take it by force, Great Aser, all the north knows our little piece of stone, all would know if you took it from us, and who would trust Asgard then?’

That was true enough, and so disarming that somehow I sold them the cloak fastener back for one link of the gold chain. But there were other ways of changing their minds, and I passed the word, and no Vandal or anyone else brought them work. But they had enough furs to keep them warm that winter, and they could live if need be on a handful of barley meal a day, but even that they need not do. They knew the custom of the north, that they had only to walk into Valhall at dinner time and be fed. And so they did.

Of course Freda heard about it, and I told her that if she could buy it I would let her have the price. But with all her wheedling she could not make them put a price on it, though she even offered them the little yellow woman that Jokuhai-inen gave her.
And a good job they would not take her, for where could I have got another like her, unless I could have bought her back from the little brown men, and what a price they would have asked.

From the Amber Feast to Yule I had everybody at work taking stock, and trying to get some assessment of the year’s profits. We had decided, that is, I had decided, to stop this business of the Asers living like one big family, and each one taking what he liked out of the stock whenever he needed it. We’d split the profit in equal shares this year, but next year we’d work out what each one had contributed toward the turnover and share out in proportion.

At that rate, some people would suffer. Heimdall, for instance, who just sat at the gate with Njord and checked stores in and out, he’d have to go on a fixed wage, and not a very high one, either. Baldur was a bit doubtful, too. He spent most of the summer playing about with Blind Hod, instead of getting out around the farms. Hod, too – there was another one who wasn’t worth the food he ate. Maybe I could take the cost of his keep out of Baldur’s share before we paid him.

One thing puzzled me that autumn. An awful lot of Vandals came in on the packtrains from the East. They were looking for work for the next summer, and for advances of pay to let them keep their families through the winter. Some of them looked familiar, so I asked, and sure enough, they had all been working for Loki. Now they hadn’t a good word to say for him.

‘He’s getting rid of all us Vandals,’ they told me. ‘He’s hiring Burgundians.’

Did this mean he was hiring Sigmund, I wondered. The Vandals told me.

‘Sigmund’s left Bornholm. His brother Synfiotli is holding it for him. He’s afraid of Siggeir and the Goths in Scania, the cowardly squit. He’s gone to hide with Loki in Outgard.’

It came to the Yule Feast, which is a few days after the winter equinox, when you can just notice that the days are getting longer again. The Feast began just as it had the year before, when Baldur put the great log on its bed of sand on the fire.

Freda lit the first candle, and we all went round and helped to light the rest. Soon all Valhall was ablaze with light, that shone off the gold-plated pillars and the bronze shields and the gleaming spears on the walls, and off the gold boar before Frederik and on the gilded helmet above my chair, and all served to light up the dull whetstone and the two black ravens.

Then when we were all sitting down, Loki walked in. He just came in, without any fuss, or any warning. He just came in and walked up the hall, leaving his Mistletoe Twig leaning against the door frame. The Vandals looked first horrified, then apprehensive, and then angry. The rest of us were just gloomy, except the little brown men.

Loki came up the Hall as cool as you please, and as he was still on the way to the top table Freda signed to some of the servants who came forward with a spare throne Bragi had made in the hope of selling it to any visiting king, but it proved too heavy to pack on a horse, which was a pity because we could have done well selling thrones. The men planted the seat down where Freda told them, on the far side of the top table, central, his face to Njord and his back to the fire. Loki sat in it. We all began to chat as if it were the most normal thing to have Loki in Valhall, as indeed it once had been.

I began to wonder if Loki could help me get the necklace. The two little brown men didn’t know him, and he might do it, though I couldn’t see how. They wouldn’t gamble, and I doubted if even Loki could tempt them to get drunk on the Honeydew. I put it to him, in conversation, and he agreed to try.

When the meal was over, and the drinking had started in earnest and people were moving about, I saw him go over and speak to them, though what he said I couldn’t hear; I was in the middle of a conversation with Donar and Tyr, and watching Baldur cuddling up to Blind Hod in the usual disgusting way. I
didn’t know which was coming harder to Loki, to forget what Baldur said to him at the Feast of the Dead, or to forget that he and Baldur had lived together so long.

Now after dinner, as I said, we were all moving about, and we had the usual horseplay. There wasn’t any real fighting, of course, not in Valhall, but we had a lot of pickaback riding, and the leg game where two of you lie down head to foot, and hook your legs and try to pull each other over. Then Baldur, who had been drinking, but not nearly as much as Hod, got a big shield from the wall, and he and some Vandals began to play the Spear Game. They had another shield, still hanging up, as a target, and Baldur stood with his back to it, a little to one side. The Vandals took it in turn to throw spears at the target, and Baldur would try to turn their spears aside with his shield. The spears, of course, were blunted, but it was quite a game of skill to stop them.

Now I was talking to Tyr, and I had my blind eye to the shield game, so I didn’t see what was happening till too late. Loki, it seems, went to Hod and asked him why he wasn’t playing. Hod, very flattered, said, of course, that he couldn’t see the shield at that distance.

‘Never mind that,’ Loki told him. ‘Just hold this spear the way I show you, keep it steady. Then when I call your name, throw. Baldur will look my way, and you’ll hit the target before he knows anything about it.’

Hod thought it a huge joke. He held the spear carefully, and Loki edged round. Then Loki called out: ‘Hod!’ very loudly, and everyone turned to look at him, and Baldur dropped his shield to look at Loki, and Hod threw the spear, Loki’s Mistletoe Twig.

Baldur took it in the side of the chest, on the left.

For a few moments everything was very quiet. Baldur was on his knees on the floor, the spear hanging out of him. There wasn’t very much blood. Hod was peering at where Baldur had been, trying to make out what had happened. And then Loki began to laugh, to laugh.

I went over to Baldur, and I looked at Tyr, and we had both seen too many men like this. I held Baldur’s shoulders. Tyr took
the spear shaft and pulled. There was a lot of blood … Baldur coughed and retched, and vomited more blood, and said,

‘Loki … Hod … Hod … Loki …’

That was the end of Baldur.

Bragi cut up the shaft of the Mistletoe Twig and threw it on the Yule fire. Donar took the head and beat it out into a ball of rough iron, and later we threw it into a bog.

When we were quite sure that Baldur was dead, Heimdall went to the door of Valhall. Loki had gone long since. Heimdall put his hands about his mouth and shouted: