Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (41 page)

I tell you, it was the most beautiful voice I have ever heard in all my life. In it I heard the humming of the bees and the rustle of wind over the summer grass, the ripple of fresh water over shallows and the lap of salt water against the side of an anchored ship. It was a voice of cream and a voice of silk, a voice of honey and a voice of wine. It was a voice that brought the scent of roses,
and of honeysuckle on a sultry night. It was a voice that brought the feel of air heavy and hot before the thunderstorm.

I walked towards the gulls, towards the voice. Out of the flutter of white the words came clear, some old song of the Brits, from days of old.

I walked towards the voice. The birds rose in a great flock. She stood there, tall and slim and stately, wrapped from head to feet in a cloak that shimmered in white and gold. I stepped nearer. She slipped her shawl from her head to her shoulders, the tassels and fringes hung long and thick, to her knees. She showed her hair, red in the late red sun, shining like a helmet of copper, coiled in great braids and pinned over her ears. And as I approached her she floated away, gliding and smooth, but bobbing a little up and down as she went like a boat upon the water, light as a skin boat, and gleaming. And as she floated away, she still sang:

I remembered all that I had been told. The redheads are the worst, they had said, everybody had said. I remembered all this, and yet I went forward. She bobbed away from the river, down an alley. I followed. The thatched roofs above us were covered with gulls. I pushed my way between people and pigs, following the Lady in the Cloak. I could still hear her voice.

I knew no fear. I only knew that I must follow that voice through the crowds and through narrow streets, across courtyards and around corners. I wanted to find the Lady in the Cloak, the lady of the seagulls, Phryne or no Phryne, hyena hair or none.

Now I was quite lost. I did not know the way back to the river or back to the official quarter. It was nearly dark. I did not know, I did not care, what would happen next if only I could reach the Lady. I suddenly came out into a kind of open square, surrounded with houses of a better sort. A lantern hung outside a door. She stood under it, the light on her hair. She had thrown open her cloak, and I could see the gleam of her belt of enamelled bronze. I walked slowly towards her. I heard her:

I was almost on her, I could smell the fragrance of her hair, I could feel her breath, I could hear the sound of her breathing in the silent, empty square. And as I almost touched her, the door opened behind her, she passed through, and it slammed in my face.

And then, as I stood a moment, dazed, it came. It is very clever to attack a one-eyed man. All you have to do is to come at him with his blind side. But it is advisable to be sure that you know which
is
his blind side, and this was a precaution that Gwawl had failed to take. He came rushing at me, and I stood still to the last instant, and then I leapt away, and he thudded with all his weight into the side of the house. He fell back on to the ground, winded, and his knife skidded away across the pavement like a flat stone across water, the water that the Lady had floated on, boatlike. Of
course, if I had any sense, I ought to have run for my life; all I wanted to do was to stay and get into the house whose door had been closed against me, and I could not do that with Gwawl behind me. I flung myself on him, my knees into his black-and-white-striped stomach – or so I planned. But he was already recovering, and he rolled clear, and I nearly broke my kneecaps on the cobbles. He grabbed at my throat. I was worried about two things: I did not want him to get at another knife, least of all mine which was sticking in my belt, and I did not want to lose the other eye, so I gripped his wrists and hung on desperately trying to force them apart, the whiles we each tried to kick the other in the groin. As a result of this kicking, we rolled over and over in the dirt. At last I became conscious of a pair of feet close to my face. Next, I realised that the owner of the feet was waving a heavy stick, such as almost all the Brits carry, and he was obviously looking for an opportunity to strike. To strike whom? I had no friends in this country, and Gwawl had, I knew, at least two. And he had come prepared for this meeting, if he had not engineered it, and I braced myself for the blow. Of course, all this took scarcely enough time to repeat a line of Virgil. And then the blow came, and for all our mutual dodging it was Gwawl who was struck, and I rolled away and scrambled to my feet. I looked at my rescuer, idly swinging his cudgel and regarding the still figure of Gwawl with a satisfied air.

He was not a tall man or a heavily built one, rather spare and slender. He was about my own age. He wore shabby clothes of an indeterminate brown, but in the light of the lamp at the door I could see that he had round his neck a strip of coloured cloth, black streaked with yellow. As I looked at him and wondered what to say, the empty square suddenly filled with men, a score at least, and I realised that every one I could see near enough was wearing somewhere on his person a scrap of black and yellow. And it was then I began to wonder if those gay colours that Tacitus remarks on so idly had not some inner meaning. I had no chance to ask. One of the newcomers brought a bucket of water, and threw it over Gwawl, who began to stir. Another happened to be carrying a leather sack, and the first man took it, and when two others held Gwawl on his feet, the bag was pulled over his
head and tied down to bind his arms. Then the men formed a circle and the leader pushed Gwawl across it, singing out:

And they pushed Gwawl across the circle, and every man he bumped into hit him – hands only, though, no sticks or knives. The more he staggered and cursed them from inside the bag, the more they, no,
we
all laughed, till at last he bumped into someone who was laughing so hard that he just fell over, and Gwawl escaped into an alley, running zigzag and bouncing from one wall to another till he finally bounced around a corner and so out of sight. We were all laughing after him.

Then I pulled myself together. There was no time to waste in laughing. I turned to the door. I raised the latch and pulled it open. I looked through the doorway to nothing. There was no house. It was merely a facade. Before me an empty waste stretched down to the river, strewn with all the rubbish of a city, broken pots and oyster shells and the half-gnawed carcasses of dead dogs and unwanted babies. No Lady. No one at all.

My second evening in Londinium, Leo Rufus gave a dinner in my honour for a few of his friends, all men deeply involved in trade with him, and by what I had seen of his books, once a man got involved with Leo it was not easy to disengage nor cheap to remain involved. Still, they seemed to bear him no malice. They were all romanised Brits like himself, and they lay there, eating roast goose in a daring manner and making sly little jokes I could not understand over the roast songbirds on a spit, just to show how civilised they were.

All the same, they talked in the most atrocious Latin, with the accents vile and the vocabulary pedantic, and the slang at least a hundred years out of date, and while they even corrected my quantities, and corrected them wrong, I learnt quite a lot. They talked of how trade had fallen off since the old freebooting times before the conquest, which none of them could remember, and how heavy the customs were, and how the Army was interested in nothing but the silver they cupellated out of the lead they mined near the hot springs at Sulis. When at last they went, Leo said:

‘Come you down into the warehouse. I have someone you ought to meet.’

I followed. The warehouse was a big place, and at this time it should have been deserted, since Leo was a very humane man and insisted that all his slaves should get at least five hours’ sleep a night. But now there were lights burning at the back, and as we picked our way between the bales, I saw a man sitting, eating a cheese, slowly, deliberately, with the point of a knife.

He was wearing an old brown jerkin with a hood, patched with leather at the cuffs and elbows, but showing at the neck a flash of colour, of black striped with yellow. And he had a belt – I was beginning to learn, now. No Brit will be seen without a belt,
man or woman. The poorer people will wear belts of plain leather, and women girdles of the best cloth they can afford. But a noble by blood will wear a belt of Spanish leather with embroidery in gold and silver wire, and his wife a network of bronze chains. The more noble a man, the more expensive his belt. This man’s belt was of plates of bronze, the size of my palm, enamelled in bright red with strange patterns of stags and bulls, garnet-eyed, and joined with links of Gold – Irish Gold.

He stood up, this man of my own height, whom I had last seen swinging a cudgel in an empty square. His light brown eyes looked into my one black. He pushed aside his thick brown curls, and took my hand.

‘I had hoped,’ said Leo, ‘that the Master of the Western Sea might have come himself to meet you, but he cannot because he is at sea, or because he is old, or ill, or at a wedding, or for some other great and pressing reason he has failed to specify. But you may speak as you will to Pryderi, and not be deceived by his dress.’

‘So it’s you, is it?’ Pryderi asked. ‘Any enemy of Gwawl’s is a friend of mine.’

‘I am not so much concerned with Gwawl,’ I answered, ‘as with Bithig the Pict.’

I do not know what it was that made Leo look so concerned, the mention of Gwawl or of Bithig, or his discovery that I could converse in the language of the Brits, and might have heard anything in his house. And I had too, but that is another story. Pryderi continued:

‘Well, Bithig is far away, and will stay there. I remember seeing you at the wedding. Missed you we did, especially at the May Feast. A real gap you would have filled.’

‘I suppose that I would.’ I felt that the whole subject was rather distasteful to me, anyway, however Pryderi might look at it. ‘How is the … er … lady?’

‘Well, you know, well. A bit regretful, in a hungry sort of way. But it will give me a little personal satisfaction to keep you two apart. Now, the Master of the Western Sea has given me a little discretion to consider any propositions you may have in the way of trade. Tell me, what is it exactly you are wanting?’

I explained the whole situation to Pryderi more fully than I had to Leo, who looked gloomier and gloomier as he saw the road to ruin opening before him. We ignored him, and he was reduced to a mere putter-out of the fires that Pryderi caused by oversetting lamps with his eloquent swinging arms. Northerners need more room to talk than do we unemotional southerners. But at the last, he just sat still and quiet, thinking hard for some moments. At last he observed, sadly and quietly:

‘Mad. Mad you are, Photinus, and I always said as much. This is no easy thing you are proposing to do, like sailing across the Narrow Sea and selling a few pots of wine. If it were anyone else, I would walk out now and leave you. But seeing it is you, and seeing that your marrying Bithig makes you Royal, and seeing that all us Royals are brothers at bottom, then it is help you a little I will.

‘Listen to the situation. There are four kings in Ireland, of the four parts of the island, but there is always one of them is High King. Now, if it is trading you want, it is the High King that you must persuade. But at the moment, it is quite the wrong man who is High King. However, I can find you an Irishman to speak to …’

‘I’ll talk to the High King. I have had enough of middlemen.’

‘Politics is full of middlemen, Photinus. And this one – will it satisfy you to know that he is nephew to the King of the North, who is not High King?’

It did satisfy me a little. The King’s nephew might well be the King’s heir. I asked:

‘When can I see him?’

‘At the moment, he is the mate of a grain ship running between Lindum and Londinium, coasting and up the canals. Exiles, you know, have to do strange things. But he will be here on Friday night, and we can see him then.’

That would have to do. The interview was at an end. But not quite. As Pryderi stood up, I asked him:

‘And the Lady? Who was she? Where can I find her now?’

‘What Lady?’

‘The one who sang: the one I was following when Gwawl attacked me. The one who went through the door with the lamp.’

‘I didn’t see any Lady. I just came round the corner by chance, and there you were, the two of you, having a lovely fight. Pity it was to stop you, and if it had been anyone else but Gwawl I’d never have stopped it. But I saw nobody else. Friday at dusk, then – here.’

He picked another cheese off the shelf and went off with it into the dark street.

For three days, I led an exemplary life. Each morning I spent going over the accounts, till even Leo Rufus had to admit that I knew more about business than he did. Each evening, I stayed at home, and dined quietly, not even going with Aristarchos to one of the gaming parties he was so fond of: it would have been tame fare to me. Besides, I wanted to be so retiring that nobody would question my presence in Londinium, or notice when I left.