Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (47 page)

It was a beautiful picture, I must say. I chose as a subject the marriage of Thetis and Peleus. There they stood, their divine beauty scarcely veiled by their flimsy garments, but Thetis further hidden by the shimmering of her form as she changed from one shape to another. The muscles stood out on Peleus’s arms as, still at this late moment, he clung to the wrist of his unwilling bride, while Chiron prompted him over his shoulder. In the background were all the gods and goddesses, with their emblems,
and with only one exception. And She, too, was present in Her own way, for the Apples of Discord fell among the throng. It was, though I say it myself, a masterpiece of art, and it is a great pity that it has not survived to be handed down to all posterity as a supreme example of what the mind of one man can conceive in colour and form and balance and symmetry. And for sheer workmanship, too – there was not the space the size of a finger nail over the whole surface of that man-high shield that was not covered with some part of the story or other: here you might see the arms of Peleus, the gift of Zeus, there Thetis’ Golden urn, and in one place, the size of a man’s hand, I had drawn the city of Troy, and Golden Achilles in his chariot. And yet, as I looked at it, it seemed there were things that were not quite right, though I could not imagine what, in Peleus’s moustaches, in Thetis’ heart-shaped face and the swell of her lovely breasts. I looked and I looked, but I could not think what it was that should disturb me so.

This painting took me the latter half of the day, and when I finished, it was nearly dark. But there, in the twilight, Pryderi took another shield, and a tiny disc of scarlet paint, and a chewed hazel twig. He dipped the end of the twig in the paint, and on the azure surface of the shield he drew one line. It was a long sinuous line, and he drew it all in one movement, never lifting the brush from the leather. There we saw, when he finished, a great Pictish bull, head down, tail up, pawing the ground, ready to charge. I expected him now to fill in this outline with lights and shades and patches of colour, and to make the background rich with trees and grass and rocks. But no, instead he took the same brush and the same colour, and in the bottom half of the shield he drew a second bull, but this one facing the opposite way. Hideously bare and stark the whole shield looked, when he laid down his brush, just the two bulls in outline. Ah, I thought, tomorrow we shall see I will have to fill in that picture for you, when all the other shield blanks are sold and we want to get one off our hands. You will be coming to me, Pryderi, and asking for lessons in how civilised men paint pictures.

So in the morning he and I went into the market place. Taliesin excused himself, on the plea of business elsewhere. We
two found a comfortable place at the base of a pillar, and a couple of denarii to the market warden made sure that the lack of early booking would be overlooked. And I stood there, with my great picture shield covering my body from neck to ankle, as we see painted on old vases, and I began to talk.

‘Comrades and brothers, listen to what I say.’ Of course they always listen, it doesn’t cost anything, but once they listen they may, may perhaps, buy.

‘Proud am I of my ancestry. Proud am I of those who came before me. Proud am I that I can recite the names of my progenitors, to the fortieth generation. And so should you be proud, that can do as much. But do you show your pride in your houses? Do you hang on the walls the signs of your noble birth and the deeds of the great kings from whom you are sprung? I know you do. I know that it is only the cost, and the dearth of men who are skilled in handling the brush that holds you back from honouring each several one of your immortal ancestors. But now all your problems are solved. Here we are before you, shield- and sign-painters by appointment to His late Sacred Majesty. Out of pure piety, and love for our kinsmen, and desire to improve the palaces of our native land, we have come to offer to you shields painted and decorated in any pattern your ancestral piety requires, and that merely for less than the cost of the materials. And such a small sum we only charge because it is well known that no one values a free gift. But do not delay, because we wish to be equal benefactors to all the nations of the Isle of Britain, as much to the Silures and to the Coritani as to the Cantii and to the Atrebates. Come now while there is still time, and while we have any shield blanks left to paint on.’

And they came – oh, Zeus, how they came. They pressed on us to buy. But to my chagrin, there was not a man who wanted to buy my shield of Peleus and Thetis, even though we swore that it showed Dylan the Son of the Waves, nor did anyone want anything in that style. In fact, they said bitterly that it was rubbish like that which was all one could buy nowadays, and that good honest old-fashioned art like Pryderi’s bulls could not be bought for love or money. And indeed, when I thought of it, it
was
in pictures like his that the Brits embroidered their linen and
painted the outsides of their houses, in bright lines on the whitewash. So I talked and sold and haggled, while Pryderi sat with bowed head and painted bulls and sea horses and chariots and the geese flying high.

So, with great profit, we came to the end of the morning, and Pryderi was painting the last shield blank with a wild boar, and I was even wondering whether it would not be good trading to wipe out my Thetis and let him spread his swine over it, if only it showed a profit, when I realised that the crowd that had thronged about me all the morning had fallen back, and that in front of me instead of people were a flock of pigeons, all cooing and coocoorooing and sweeping the ground with their amorous breasts. And even as I divined what it was, I heard a voice say:

‘That’s a pleasant daub. I would have preferred Eurydice, of course, but there’s no choice.’

There was never a voice like Rhiannon’s, singing or speaking. Smooth and clear it was, like cream pouring out of a jug, whatever language she used, whether Greek or Latin or the tongue of the Brits. Sweeter by far it was than the murmuring of the doves, that still swarmed about her feet like bees upon a lime branch. A voice it was to make your hair stand on end with love and lust and desire for beauty in the dark as well as in the light. I looked up to where she stood, Hueil and four other men behind her.

Oh, have you ever seen the Imperial pleasure galleys on the Lake of Trasimene? Splendid they are in scented cedarwood, with figureheads of ivory and rams of bronze. Each mast is a single fir tree from the groves about Olympus, and the yards from strange and secret woods, from the sources of the Nile. Of cloth of Gold are their single sails, the shrouds and stays of copper wire, the dead eyes are carved from ebony and the blocks from the wood of life. The handles of the oars are lapped in the hide of the gentle unicorn, and the rowers’ benches cushioned with velvet stuffed with down. The tacks and sheets and braces they twist from the hair by virgins, vowed to the Great God Neptune in Colchis by the sea.

So I saw Rhiannon stand there in the market. The infrequent sun was shining on her Gold and copper hair. About her shoulders she had thrown, to hide her splendid bosom, and veil from
the eye of covetous man her silk and cotton blouses, a cloak of strange and shining cloth, of the fine, close silk from Samos, the warp of white and shining thread, and all the wool of yellow. Thus in that fine and shimmering Gold and white, fastened by a morse as big as a man’s two hands, of bronze inlaid with Gold and emeralds, Rhiannon bargained with me for my painting. So I began to talk, and I took my tune from some brown pedlers I once met, men from, I think, India. I told her:

‘Aye, this is a masterpiece, Great Lady, a painting fit for the Gods. It is on work like this that I rely to keep my children from starving through all their long lives, without their doing any work themselves, because all they have to do is to say that it was their father that painted this shield, and in any civilised place a grateful Government will feed them at the common table and clothe them out of the public purse, out of sheer joy that a man could exist who could bring such beauty to birth.’

‘That is as may be,’ she interrupted, and at the sound of her words I would have given her anything. ‘How much?’

But the inborn skill of a hundred generations of merchants was too strong in me at first. I answered, without thinking:

‘How much? You ask how much, Great Princess, for the work of all my life, for all my stored-up skill, for all the knowledge that went into compounding the colours and priming the ground? How much is the wisdom of all mankind worth? Think of the great emotional experience that went into it, that was necessary before I could conceive of such a scene’ – and looking at it dispassionately, I had to admit that I had given to Peleus a look of sheer lust that I would have given a great deal to have achieved: I mean, at my age it would have taken something pretty ripe to have aroused a response like that. I went on:

‘But let us be looking, Great Lady, at the hypotheses of the matter. Supposing that such a painting were for sale, where should we start the bidding? At two hundred denarii of silver? At—’

She looked at me coldly and said:

‘Three.’

‘Glory be to all the Gods. At last, Lady, for the first time in all my life, I have found someone who would truly admire and value
great Art, who would start the bidding at a price higher than even I would deem proper, at a price which would almost cover the cost of the materials and the hire of the splendid studio where I did the work. Hear, all of you who stand round’ – though it was painfully obvious that the only people within earshot were Rhiannon’s bodyguard, their cloaks much streaked with birdlime, for everyone else had retired to a safe distance, though whether to be safe from the men or the pigeons I did not inquire – ‘hear, all the men of Britain, this Great Queen values my work at three hundred denarii!’

‘Not three hundred, you fool. Three denarii. New ones.’

‘Oy-oy-oy!! Do not mock a poor artist, Great Lady, do not make game of a humble man who labours with his hands day and night to bring beauty into the world, and has nothing in his purse but what will bring him a crust of bread tonight, and a dip at the common fountain, and leave to lie in the corner of a stable seeking the filth of the horses for warmth! Look, Lady, look at these nymphs’ – and I traced the outlines of their bottoms lovingly, taking care, however, not to touch the surface in case the paint was still wet – ‘see the warmth of affection I put into them, the delicacy of the brush strokes, the vibrating movement of their draperies …’ The draperies seemed to vibrate because while I was painting Thetis’ attendants, Pryderi was telling dirty stories, and I laughed so much at the one about the Old Woman of the Bog and the Pedlar’s Mule that I couldn’t have drawn a straight line to save my life. ‘How could you think of such a paltry sum in the same moment as seeing these little darlings? Let us say fifty. Great Lady, a mere fifty, to anybody else it would be a hundred, but special to you, Lady, special to you, I will charge only fifty.’

‘I might pay twenty,’ she said cuttingly, ‘
if
I were buying it in the dark, and there was no other picture in the market, and I were anxious to cover up a bad spot on the wall in a room never seen except by candlelight.’

‘At twenty denarii you value it, my Lady? Then I will not ask you to pay twenty denarii for the great crowning glory of my life. I will not ask you ten, or even five. Lady, I grant it to you freely as a gift. I will take nothing for it. I say, I give it to you.
Take it away quickly before I repent and take it back again. I am already in tears at the very thought of losing it.’ And I pulled the hood of my cloak down over my face, but not so far that I could not see, and I wept bitter tears, most convincingly, loud and wet.

Rhiannon picked up the shield. She put her arm through the strappings. It looked, in spite of the painting, very martial – I still wondered why the Brits liked shields of that size and shape. She called over her shoulder:

‘Hueil! Pay him!’

Hueil came over. He looked me straight in the eye a moment. Then he flung a coin down into the dust. I felt outraged at this insult to my dignity, but I picked it up, all the same. I mean, Gold is Gold, and it can all be spent. Hueil walked away, brushing feathers from his cloak and all the pigeons flew off after Rhiannon in a swarm. I tied the coin in a corner of my shirt, and I looked around for Pryderi. He emerged from behind the pillar. I was about to start to discuss with him the disposition of the profits when a large and important-looking man came up to us.

‘Are you the two who’ve been selling shields here?’ he asked.

‘And lovely shields they were too,’ answered Pryderi, though I was pinching his arm as hard as I could, because this man had petty official written all over him. ‘Now, if you want one like that, then just tell me your name, and your clan, and your nation, and the name of your father, and I will have one designed and painted and executed that will tell all the passers-by unmistakably and clearly and plainly how rich and great and powerful is your descent.’

‘That is all I wanted to know,’ the minor official replied. ‘An obvious admission. I am the treasurer of the Guild of Shieldmakers and Armourers of the County of the Atrebates, and though it is disarmed we are, and have been for many years, and there is no making of weapons allowed, so that the main concern of our members is with the welfare of the poor and sick among us, yet still we have the monopoly of the making of shields in this Country, under the provisions of the municipal by-law “Whatsoever person” of the seventh year of the Emperor Hadrian. And this Country, which extends from the southern edge of the Oak Forest to the banks of the Thames, has for its centre and chief
place this town of Calleva. And I have not seen any record that you have paid a contribution into our common fund, as is good and right and proper.’

Now the last thing that I was willing to do was to pay for what by now amounted to a burial club of well-to-do tradesmen to eat an extra dish at their annual feast if there was any way out of it, but for the moment even I could see no way out. But Pryderi caught on something.