Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (45 page)

The sight of the gold, Hueil’s action, paralysed me for as long as a man might take to count to twenty. Then I sprang up, seizing Pryderi by the arm. All through my conversation with the Lady he had sat there, his back to us, huddled up, as if trying not to be noticed.

‘Come on!’ I cried to him. ‘Follow the Lady! Find her!’

He looked up at me.

‘Mad you are, Mannanan, I always said you were mad. There’s no following her, not for a sane man.’

‘Why? Do you know her? Who is she?’

‘Know her? Of course I do, and so does every Briton who sees her go by. My own first cousin she is, daughter of my mother’s sister, and named after my mother. Rhiannon of the Brigantes, she is, and a great Princess, and a wealthy one, because it is the Brigantes that have made their peace with Rome, and they get all kind of favours. But I would not have you talk with her, for that very reason.’

‘Making your peace with the Emperor seems to be profitable,’ I observed, holding out the gold coin.

‘Ach-y-fi!’ he said, which is the Brits’ expression of disgust. ‘And would I be touching that, knowing where it has come from?’

I thought this was a trifle extreme a way of showing that he was not on good terms with his cousin. I said as firmly as I could:

‘Well, whoever she is, I must find her.’

I stood and I was about to make off into the crowd, where I could still see Hueil pushing along, when there was an interruption. Pryderi was gathering up the knives and needles and last and the rest of the shoemaker’s tools, when two fat and scarlet men came puffing up to us like a pair of roosters in the spring.

‘Look here,’ said the redder and fatter of the two. ‘And what do you think you’ve been doing?’

‘And who do you think you are, when you have stood still long enough for your manners to catch up with you, and running hard they must be because they are so far behind.’ Pryderi could be insolent when he chose, and I decided that as it was his language the men were speaking, I would leave him to carry on the conversation, which promised to become a little acrimonious.

‘This is a formal complaint. We are the co-equal Chairmen of the Shoemakers’ Guild of Pontes. We have been told, and informed, and warned, that you have been making shoes within the boundaries of the unincorporated Municipality of Pontes, contrary to the Charter agreed between the Guilds of the Town, and amended by, in particular, the by-law of the Fourth Year of Domitian, Chap Six, Clause Four, Para Two.’

‘We were not making shoes. It was slippers we were making.’

‘It is the same thing.’

‘It is not at all the same thing.’ By the light in Pryderi’s eyes, it was clear that there was nothing he would like more than an argument at the end of his long silent day sitting at my feet in the market, his mouth full of waxed thread and needles, and if necessary, I could see, he would keep an argument of the type of ‘You did’ – ‘I didn’t’ going for hours. The two men could see it too. The spokesman avoided the trap. He merely said:

‘The terms “shoes” is general, and subsumes under it all slippers, boots and other footwear.’

‘It does not,’ Pryderi snapped back. ‘Slippers are most clearly defined and distinguished and differentiated from shoes by a Law of Lud Son of Heli that was King of Londinium in the years before the Conquest. And it is known to every thinking man that it is precisely these laws treating of the definition of terms that are by the laws of the Empire and by the grace of the Caesars deemed to be the basis and the foundation and the substratum of all local municipalities and corporations, especially of unincorporated federations of Guilds.’

‘Careful, you. It is our town you are in, unincorporated or not, and you will do what we say.’

‘Force is it now? You can always tell if a man has a bad case
that he would not argue in a court of law, when he begins to talk in terms of numbers and of possessions.’

‘Another word, and you will be in front of the Magistrate, and there is little chance you will have in front of him, being as he is my brother-in-law, and treasurer of the Potters’ Guild as well. Hand it over, we want every penny you have made by cheating this afternoon.’

‘And there is not a single denarius we have made by cheating. That is defamatory, and it is before the Magistrate we will be arguing that, I tell you. I rely on the help of my friend here, who is familiar with the law and the Rescripts of the Empire covering this very point, and has the more important of them by heart, seeing he is a Citizen – of Rome, I mean, not of any little hamlet like Londinium or Pontes.’

There was a short pause. There is an advantage in having the kind of influence being a Citizen gives you out in the more distant provinces of the Empire, where Citizens born are rare outside the Army. The second of the co-equal Chairmen, seeing his chance, muttered something about ‘never sue a Citizen, they’ve always got some pull somewhere,’ which is true enough. The two officials of the Guild muttered more furiously after that, but so quietly they could only be heard by each other, and when Pryderi tried to put his head in between theirs they cursed him so roundly that even he stood back. At last the first Chairman said:

‘All right, then. Keep what you’ve got, but clear out of town now. I mean now, straight away, this instant.’

Pryderi began to look fierce, but just in time the second co-equal Chairman said himself:

‘No, not this afternoon, but tomorrow morning. We want to send a man ahead to warn all the other Shoemakers’ Guilds ahead as far as Glevum.’

We didn’t object to that. I was tired of making shoes. But the interlude had done the damage. The Lady had vanished, and try as I would, walking about the town, I could not find her again. I was able to do a little shopping, against the next town, investing the proceeds of the morning’s work, the silver, that is. Not the Gold: I kept that.

It was dusk when I got back to the inn. Pryderi was in the
main room, drinking cider with a rather motley set of companions. I joined them.

‘I think there’s a story here you would like to hear,’ was Pryderi’s greeting. ‘It’s about Gold. You buy old Blino a mug of cider, and you shall hear it.’

I obeyed. It was a very old man who sat there, very old indeed. As soon as he was satisfied that I really was going to buy him cider, he drew me into the darkest corner of the taproom.

‘Not everybody I would show this to, you understand,’ he whispered, suffocating me with the foul wind from his decaying teeth. ‘But since you are a friend of him, then I will.’

He fumbled in his pouch and brought out a twist of black and yellow cloth. He untwisted it, and showed a ring, a Golden ring. It was made of Gold wire, fine as a hair, twined into a sixteen-fold strand like rope, big enough to go on his now shrunken little finger.

‘That’s Irish Gold,’ he told me.

‘How do you know?’

‘Why, that’s where I got it.’

‘From Ireland?’

‘No! nobody alive goes to Ireland. I got it out of a grave. Dug it out with an iron spade, I did, so I was safe enough. They won’t never come back from Ireland to find me that way.’

‘Who won’t?’

‘The dead, of course. That’s where the dead go, to Ireland. I’m keeping this, like they did, to pay my passage, where every labouring man is paid in Gold, where there is neither hunger nor thirst nor pain, nor cold nor the bitter sadness of defeat, where age rusts not away the spring of youth, where men and women are for ever young, far in the Golden Island of the Blessed.’

His voice died away. I wondered how the rest of the poem had gone. He was past asking now. Cider and age had done their sleepy work. I raised my eyes from the Gold in his hand, and I looked over his shoulder into the face of a man with a squint. He made the Sign of the Four, as the Druids do, on face and chest, and was gone in the flickering light. I put the ring back in the pouch, and the pouch firmly into the old man’s hand. If he had nothing now, why should he not have his youth again?

Next morning we took the road again. Pryderi looked suspiciously at the big packages I loaded on my horses and on his, big and awkward, but light as a feather. However, he said nothing, probably thinking that anything I told him would only spoil his peace of mind, if he had any left.

The road from Pontes to Calleva soon leaves the river valley, and goes up on to higher ground, a long belt of barren sandy soil, sour and good for nothing but growing timber for charcoal. Where the country was more open it was covered with gorse and heather. Sometimes the sun shone, and then I felt at home. It was good adder country if ever I saw it.

Calleva we reached at sunset. It is quite a pleasant town, in a provincial way. The only trouble with it is that there is no reason at all why it should exist. Usually a city has some reason for being where it is. Either there is a bridge, or a ford, or two roads cross, or there is a good site to build a fort. But there Calleva stands in the middle of an oak forest, on the edge of that adder country, with not so much as a little stream close by to give it an excuse for being.

Why was it there? Well, there had been the day, back in old Claudius’s time, when the Legion had first pounded along into the wilderness, laying down the road as it went. Now it so happened that in that month the King of the Atrebates was spending the time eating up his rents in that particular dirty shabby little village, as he had spent the month before in another shabby little village, and as he would move on to a third when the country around Calleva was eaten bare. If you have no roads, and your wealth is in food and cloth, then it is much easier to go where your wealth is to consume it than to have it brought to you. So with the great decisiveness an Empire expects from its
commanders, the legate of the legion decided that this must be the capital of the Atrebates, and that the country of the Atrebates must be governed from a great city here on this spot.

The kingdom, therefore, became the country, and the King became the hereditary chairman of a local senate, and his nobles became hereditary senators. Nothing else was changed at first, only the names. But the country had to pay a corn tax, and in wheat, too, which up to now they only grew to make a kind of beer out of.

Then there came the development. Under the pressure of the Procurator and his staff, the local notables marked out wide boundaries for the new capital they hadn’t realised they wanted. They built walls, of earth first, with a stake fence on top, and they put a gate in each of the four walls, just like a legionary camp. Then they laid out two straight roads across the town, from gate to gate, just as in a camp, and where the Praetorium of a camp should be they built a basilica to serve as a senate chamber and as a court. It was a mud-and-wattle hall at first, but when I came to Calleva they had just rebuilt it in stone, and they were very proud of their marble barn.

Now, if the nobles were going to sit in the local senate they would have to live in their capital for some months of the year, and so each one built himself a house in the town. Of course, each one thought he would not settle there, but he would still live most of the time in his own farm-house in the country, which gave him his income. But the nobles reckoned without their ladies. You know how women are when they get together. They soon find out the pleasures of gossiping, and they object when their husbands begin to suggest that it is now time to return to the country. That is an end to the free and lonely life. So now the nobles live in the town all the year round, and their stewards bring them in their rents by the fine new road. Nowadays the nobles never see their farms at all, and their people who would once have followed them into battle even against the legions forgot what they looked like or even who they were. Only in a few wild regions, where the kings had refused to submit to Rome, or to live in towns, did the people still follow their ancient lords. But kingdoms were one thing. Clans were another,
and even if a man forgot who was his king, he would remember who were his ancestors, and accept his relations, even to seventeen generations. And that, I thought, was why Pryderi was so careful about choosing his inns, and why he was so calm about leaving our property unguarded.

Very few people, however, would come and live in a town like Calleva, because there was nothing for them to do there, except to satisfy the demands of the nobles and their families, and of the lawyers who would come when the courts were sitting. There were a few craftsmen, protected by the nobles’ insistence that there should be no market in the county except in Calleva itself, where they could easily collect the market dues and share them out equally. It was in the market place that we got into trouble. But that was on the third day there.

On the evening of the first day, we only put up our horses and carried our packs into the room we had been given. Then we went into the public room of the Inn, in the hope of supper. There were a number of people there, including the two middleaged men with the boy that I could remember from Pontes. They were sitting together in a corner playing Fichel. The rest of the clientele were discussing a particularly juicy rape case that was coming up the next day at the court. They went into a lot of circumstantial detail none of which had anything to do with the question of guilt or innocence, till I decided that the only possible verdict was an acquittal on the grounds of public entertainment. At last the landlady, who had been looking more and more uncomfortable as the discussion developed, said:

‘I
do
wish you’d stop talking about it. You’re all going on and on like so many querns, and it’s a dreadful headache I’ve got with it.’

‘Headache? I’ll tell you what to do.’ I must have been feeling a little drunk and very conceited, in my character of the wise and experienced traveller. ‘You ought to take three walnuts and crush them together in a pestle, but you must begin by cracking them so carefully that the meat comes out unbroken in one piece. Now, you must use a pestle of oak and a mortar of elm to mash the meat of the nuts into a paste, and the paste you must then spread on a platter of wood and divide into five exactly equal parts with a sea-shell – an oyster shell will do. Now one of these
parts you must offer to the Sun, and one to the Moon, and one to the Wind, because there you have the three greatest causes of headaches, namely walking too long in the Sun, sleeping where the Moon can shine on your face, and facing into the cold Wind. Of the remaining fifths, the fourth you must put on your head, and fasten it there with a bandage of linen, spun from flax sown at the waning, and not at the waxing, of the Moon. The last fifth you shall eat. And then you will find that the headache is gone.’