Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (43 page)

I hope, I thought, that one day I will meet this obliging monarch. But now I knew that the Irish were all mad, for no Greek would so bind himself. It was only necessary to find a man’s Gesa, to see a way to destroy him. Pryderi snorted.

‘Easy it is for them to take on a Gesa, and to think it so meritorious to accept odds. They are still a free people. If ever they are conquered, they will realise that victory is the only thing that matters. And then it will be too late. But come you down with me into the Summer Country, Photinus, and ask the Master yourself for a ship.’

I hesitated. Perhaps as far as that, but no farther. And quickly, so that I could get back to the Old City before the end of the summer, before the baby was born. And no farther. That was tempting. And I would not make myself any promises. I had told Uncle Euthyphro that I would see the trade started, and if it meant a month or two extra in Britain, then I would bear with it.

‘Now, if it’s there you’re going,’ warned the Setanta, ‘it’s not as a Roman you can go. You can be a Galatian if you wish, because you speak British with a strange accent.’ This annoyed me: I was sure that no one could have guessed I was not born and bred in the island.

‘With a new name,’ Pryderi added.

‘No, no,’ corrected the Setanta. ‘Clan first, name after.’

‘All right, Clan then,’ agreed Pryderi. ‘Now, do you know your ancestry on your mother’s side?’

‘Not very far,’ I warned them. ‘Not more than twenty-one or twenty-three generations.’ And I recited it, going back in the male line only but of course naming all my grandmothers as they came and inserting their fathers too. My two companions listened with care to my pronunciation of these outlandish names, now and again correcting me. And when I finished, the Setanta said:

‘Plain, isn’t it?’

‘Obvious,’ agreed Pryderi. ‘Son of Lear, he is.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘Oh, a great house it was once,’ Pryderi told me, ‘and ruled all the island of Britain, but few are they and rarely met with.’

‘But in the Isle of the Blessed,’ added the Setanta, ‘it is an O’Leary you will be, and plenty of them there are and eager to welcome any kinsman from over the sea, especially if he is rich.’

‘But what is it I can’t eat?’

‘Swan, of course.’ They both answered together. I felt rather disappointed, because there is nothing I like better than a nice roasted swan. It is nearly big enough to serve as a dish for two, but if you are giving a party I advise you to cater on the basis of one swan per guest, since this avoids disappointment. Then Pryderi, in a doleful voice:

‘This is all nonsense. There is no possibility, Son of Lear or not, of taking you down into the Summer Country as if you were one of us. It would be better, Photinus son of Lear, if you stayed here in Londinium and let me do all the work for you in the Summer Country.’

And let you have all the money to control, I thought. Not on any account. But I could hardly sound as distrustful, so I answered as ceremonially as I could:

‘I come of a great and ancient House. Beside it your House of Lear is young and of little account. And I have sworn to all the heads of the House that I would go as far as the port for Ireland and bring back the Gold of Ireland. You talk of a Gesa which binds you. I also am bound. I can no more turn back from this journey than you, Son of Mil, could refuse me your cloak if I asked you for it.’

‘Asked for it you have,’ said the Setanta. ‘And have it you shall.’
He stood up. He was a head taller than Pryderi and me, and well built, though not gross or corpulent like Gwawl. He was, indeed, the kind of man I would have been pleased to have as Mate on any voyage. He went to the cupboard in the corner of the room, stepping gently over Elaine who had long since sunk into a drunken sleep. He turned to me again, his arms full of fur. ‘Take my cloak, Photinus, that I cannot refuse you. And I will take what I think you have offered. You have offered me the head of the King of Connaught, to hang on the pole’s end.’

I took the cloak, a splendid garment of blue-grey fur, strange to the touch and warm, lapping me from neck to heels, and hooded. This is what every sailor who can afford it wears in thunderstorms, for there is nothing that wards off lightning like seal fur. I turned to show Pryderi. He knew, as the Irishman knew, that I had no more suspected that such a cloak was in the room than I could fly. And that is why Pryderi looked at the cloak with open mouth.

‘There is no further we need be looking for a name. Seal cloak asked unknowing shows that you are Mannanan.’

‘But he is a god of the sea,’ I objected.

‘And is it not meeting him we all have been at some time or another?’ asked the Irishman. ‘And what is the loan of a name between kinsmen?’

For I had forgotten that it is the Brits alone among all the nations of the earth who are so bold as to take the names of their gods and goddesses to themselves, and you must always be careful in telling stories there to make it clear exactly who or what you are talking about. And I remembered too all my grandfather had always taught us about the essential nature of every name.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘I will be Mannanan the Son of Lear, on sea and on shore in this island and in the other.’

We talked on and on, and later when I lay in bed and remembered what we had said, I was horrified. I had agreed that somehow or other I would provide the means for a change of government in Ireland, which only could give us terms of trade. And what had I as working assets in this undertaking?

First, I had one man, and now, when I could no longer see him, and was no longer overborne by his personality and the air of
power and menace in his stout arms and his massive fists, he did not seem such a great asset. I did not even know his real name.

And of Pryderi, my other asset, I knew nothing, except that he had found me the Setanta and that he only could help me to hire a ship that would face the winter on the Western Sea, for no Roman ship could float for long in the North except in the summer months, and then only in calm weather.

But, in the ship? We had talked of money, but in the end it was not money that the Setanta wanted, or at least not very much. But he did want what he could not buy, weapons. And it never struck him that I could not buy arms either. I had a permit for a sword, and one sword only.

I tossed in the darkness, and always in the night before me shone the Gold of Ireland, and I was frantic to think of it there, free for the taking, and not able to take it. And then, suddenly, I remembered something that Pryderi had said to the Setanta in one of the wrangles that had enlivened the evening. He had goaded the Irishman:

‘Why, we in this island will have thrown off the Romans and will walk in freedom, when you in the Island of the Blessed still lie beneath their yoke.’

And it came to me then, that I had another asset. He did not stand seven feet tall, he only looked like it. And he had the ear of the Procurator.

It took weeks of arranging, before Pryderi and I went off into the West. There was a lot of work, at the Office of the Procurator, because it was ruled that this was all a civil matter, and a financial one, and that the military were only there to obey. But whenever I could, at dusk, I would wander about in the streets by the river, looking for a cloud of seagulls and listening for a voice and yearning for a cloak of yellow and white and for a head of red hair.

There was, however, one day I went back to the scabbard-maker. I must say that he had done very well. He had covered the beechwood sheath with thin plates of bronze, patterned in scarlet enamel, and the bronze between the enamel plated with Gold. Not a scabbard for use, a scabbard for show, as I had asked. This was not now a weapon I would ever carry into battle, even though the blade was better than any you will find within the Empire, a blade to cut down elephants. This now was a sword to be borne before me, sheathed, point up, on that great day when I would come before the High King of all Ireland at Tara to tell him the terms on which my family would deign to trade with him.

I received the scabbard from the maker, and I looked at it. It was a real Brit pattern, all twisted lines and coils, but meaningless. I peered at it way and way about, and then I asked the maker:

‘What is this pattern?’

‘Why, bears. What else for you but bears?’

I looked again, and sure enough, if you knew, it was bears all right. And I looked again at the X-shaped hilt, and now it was less clear whether it was more like a man or more like a bear. But how should the scabbard-maker, or, more curious the blademaker, have known that bears were so sacred to my family?

Of course, when we left Londinium, I didn’t wear that sword, on the belt of soft leather from Cordoba all embroidered with
flowers in gold and silver wire that I found in a dark corner of Leo Rufus’s warehouse. I didn’t tell him about it, I just took it over. I wrapped the sword in my sealskin cloak, because there was no wearing that in the summertime, even though Britain is always as they say, two tunics colder than civilised countries. I didn’t wear a tunic either, but I was dressed as a Brit, in blue shirt and trousers, good boots of soft Spanish leather dyed blue, and a jerkin of soft brown sheepskin to keep out the rain. It
was
raining, of course.

We left Londinium at dawn, as soon as the city gates were open. I had been up early, shaving off my beard, or most of it. I was very careful about how much of it I did take off, and by judicious clipping of the hair either side of my mouth I was able to give myself a real British moustache which reached down to my nipples and made Pryderi so jealous he did nothing but grumble for miles.

We each had a horse to ride on and another to carry our baggage, done up in bundles. I had quite a lot, because I saw no reason why I should not turn an honest penny on the journey. The horses were native ponies, and the less said about them the better. They were small, and very strong: if you don’t mind your legs hanging down so far that your spurs hurt your mother the Earth and not the beast, then you can ride one of these ponies all day without a stop. But not two days running. I would have preferred one of the cavalry horses the Army use, with the Parthian blood, but it would have been so conspicuous, and Pryderi was dreadfully concerned with not being conspicuous.

Of course, I am disenchanted now with horses. I had one once on the Amber road, and he was a
horse
. He was a horse that would carry you a hundred miles in one day, and then again the next day, and then into battle on the third day, and in the pursuit on the fourth. He was a horse that understood the speech of man, and the very thought of man he would know unspoken, and obey. He was not got by any mortal stallion, I tell you that; he was by Divinity out of the Platonic essence of all horses. I rode him for three years, and at the end – I weep when I think of it. I killed him myself. I will not think of it.

But we had our packhorses, and they would cover, if they had to, thirty miles in a day on the hard roads. We went out by the
road on the north side of the river, which cuts out a great bight of the Thamesis. It was a very busy road. After we left the walls of the City, we found that we could count on meeting at least half a dozen travellers going the other way in every hour. Some of them were ox wagons full of vegetables, beans and carrots going in to the markets of the city, and looking at the poor innocent plants shrivelling away on the carts I began to understand why the food in Londinium was so bad. But we did come across one group that was different. It was a military convoy, the only troops we ever saw on the road. There were only a dozen of them, just enough to stop the Brits from stealing the oxen for meat at night, and to wait on the very junior centurion who was in charge. I recognised him, I had bought him wine at that inn north of Lugdunum, but he did not know me, hardly gave me a second glance, just another Brit on the road.

Pryderi, though, nudged me to look at what was in the wagons. They were light, you could tell that from the way the cattle moved, and so the big baskets, the fisces, in them were empty. I knew those baskets, all right.

‘Silver?’ I asked Pryderi.

‘Party from the Second Legion, at Isca, going up for the salt money for the troops,’ he told me. ‘There’ll be enough silver going back, all in coin, next week, to keep a kingdom going for a year, and no more escort than you see now.’

‘Easy pickings for someone,’ I hinted.

‘When the time comes,’ agreed Pryderi. ‘You see, they know the south is quiet. There are no troops in the interior at all. Anybody who takes on a pay convoy risks having all the civil zone under military law again for years. It will have to be done at the right time and in the right place.’

I said nothing. Perhaps there were comments I ought not to make, things I ought not to know. We pushed on. The road crosses the river at a place called Pontes, and in the little town we stopped for the night. There was an inn where Pryderi was known well enough to be asked no questions. Nobody asked about me, either.

‘It’s the blue,’ Pryderi assured me. ‘Wearing that, you are known as a Bard, and whatever you do, however eccentric, like
wearing a fancy eye, or a sword for that matter if you want to, people will pass over without a question, as being natural to the poetic mind. Respected you will be, and as a foreigner they will answer questions and tell stories that will astonish you, because they all know that the mind of the poet does thrive on marvels.’

I looked sideways at him. This is an island of deceit and duplicity and mists indeed, I thought, and if ever I hear the truth about anything, then it’s lucky I’ll be. It was easy already to fall into the Brits’ manner of speech, and after speech comes thought, and after thought comes life, and love. If you talk in Latin and think in Latin, you must be dignified, and think in dignity, because there is no short or easy or comfortable way of saying anything in that language. But in Greek, as we speak it all along the coasts of Asia and into Alexandria, from Massilia to Trapezus in the Caucasus, everything is easy and full of slang and comfortable ways of thought. And yet, in this unconventional tongue, it is always possible to say what you mean, and to know that it will only have one meaning to anyone who listens. But while the Brit’s tongue is also full of slang, it is vague and imprecise and soft at the edges, and behind the plain meaning of everything said you have to look for another hidden meaning. I decided to speak plain.