Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (53 page)

‘And bring them before the sun is set, to the road below this mound. And then let us see you go, vowing not to molest us again on this journey, as we will not molest you.’

And so we agreed.

How far from the Mound of Arberth to the Summer Country? Far enough, with five men wounded. Hueil had an arm broken, and his four comrades were hurt each in a different measure – this one had his jaw broken and most of his teeth knocked out, that one had been struck in the face with a burning log, and so on. Pryderi had merely been kicked many times in the ribs, so that he found it painful to ride far in a day. Taliesin had been tied up, no one daring to offer any more violence to a Druid, and indeed that violence had been enough.

‘For the first time in my life,’ he told us, ‘I regretted that the laws of my holy order forbid me to curse any man. But I did as well in my own way.’

‘How?’ we asked.

‘Why, I drew in the dust with my foot, and I told each man his fate, and how he would die. And there is not a man there who will not die a dreadful death, violent and horrible beyond belief.’

Now whether he truly divined this or not I do not know, but I have no doubt that his prophecies will all come true, because there is no surer way to drive a man to court disaster than to foretell it for him. What we believe, happens.

Rhiannon they had kept apart, and she told us that Gwawl had made sure that she was treated like a perfect lady. It would, of course, have been easy to trace her, had I let Duach go to fetch a band of men, by the hawk that hovered above her all the day.

We moved along the old Green Roads, crossing the new stone roads of the Romans, but not using them. This was for ease, not for necessity: no troops march along the new roads any more, except once a year the Pioneers, replacing cobbles and clearing out the ditches, in case it should be ever necessary to hurry the legions down into the West again.

We stayed in farms at night. The people knew that we were coming. These were big farms, set well apart, because the Britons live thus and not in villages. Often the farms would belong to nobles, who now lived all the year round in the County Town, like Calleva or Sulis. Of course, a noble would never now go near his farm, but he liked at least to think that he had a house in the country where he could, if he ever wanted to, entertain his important friends if he ever made any. And it was at least a good thing, ‘my house’ and ‘my estate’ and ‘my tenants’, to talk and exaggerate about.

A number of these houses were quite comfortable, by provincial standards. Usually they had changed from a cluster of round huts into a series of straight-walled rooms, like the rest of mankind build, and the farmyard had changed into a paved courtyard. Sometimes the owners had gone as far as building the walls of stone, or even brick, and in a few cases they had put on a layer of plaster in the slim hope that some day they would find someone to come and paint them with some civilised scene. And in one case, the floor had been made ready in the dining-room in case the owner could ever afford to have a ready-made mosaic put down.

Heating, of course, was still primitive, charcoal braziers set wherever it was convenient. Still, they were somewhere to stay, since the stewards or bailiffs or what you like to call them were always eager to take us in, and as far as I could see never charged a denarius, or complained about the bird droppings in the room where Rhiannon slept.

We went west, and then south, and after that west again, to skirt the Lead Hills. You could, on clear days, make out the haze of smoke from the smelting furnaces at the mines. There were the nearest Roman soldiers, and not many of them: they would be little interested in the surrounding country, but would only be wondering how long it might be before they were relieved. And these men, and their lead, came and went by the new road, north of the Hills, that went through Sulis to Londinium.

All the hills were quiet now. The Army had gone from village to village and from house to house a hundred times, in the few years after the conquest, and seized every sword and helmet and
mail coat. The chariots, too, belonged to the nobles, and they had also been brought in. You never saw so much as a real shield now, not the stout lime-wood panels, three-layered, bronze-faced and iron-rimmed: only the flimsy painted leather screens that Rhiannon’s escort still carried. This was an old-fashioned area, but, even so, you never saw a Roman here either. Only, once every seven years or so, the surveyor came through, re-assessing for the wheat tax. Now
he
needed an escort. Otherwise, the peasants obeyed their lords as they had done before the conquest, or rather they obeyed their lords’ stewards, because their lords never came any more.

Still, there was no need to go inviting trouble, in such a big party of ours, and that was why we travelled by the old Green Road, and spread out into small groups between farms, coming together for the night. We met few other travellers, and most of them were rather curious. We so often overtook or met single men with packhorses, two horses to a man, and each horse with two baskets, not big so they must have been heavy, or so I thought. What was striking was that always horse and man were black from head to foot: not black by nature which would have been understandable, but black with some dirt or other, grimed into white skin and brown hair beyond any hope of washing. The baskets were black, too. I took them for charcoal-burners, and I said so to Pryderi, one day. At this, he laughed, and the next time we met one of these men, he stopped and called him over.

He was a short man, and close to you could see the sweat running channels in the dirt, and the hands and arms covered with the scars of labour filled with the black and looking blue underneath the skin. The man came to us, and we got down to talk, as is only polite, while he sat down, balancing himself delicately on the heels of his feet, and doubling the backs of his thighs against his calves, so that only his feet and not his back side touched the ground. It was the art of a man who works hard, and does not spend his strength unnecessarily on standing up.

‘Go on, ask him what it is he carries,’ said Pryderi. Hueil and Nerthach, riding ahead, reined back and waited for us. The Dirty Man looked at my blue clothes, and nodded to them, not to me, politely, but respectfully, as though granting through
good will and not through obligation, some slight deference to a social superior. I asked him:

‘Is this charcoal?’

‘Charcoal? Wood coal? Would I be selling you the worn-out ashes of other men’s second-hand fires? No, this is earth coal, the best.’

‘Earth coal?’

‘Easy it is to be hearing, and understanding, and knowing, from your question, though it is very well you are speaking the language of the Gods, and only making a few mistakes in the grammar, and in the order of the tenses and in the mutations, and sometimes being indistinct in your appreciation of the fine gradations of meaning, that it is from far away and from foreign parts and from a distant land that you have come, and travelled, and ridden.’ He spoke in a thick accent that I could hardly follow, but he had that easy flow of language and wide vocabulary and subtle sense of rhythm which are common to all Britons. ‘No, it is not charcoal, it is the earth coal.’

‘Let me see it.’

‘Aye, I will let you,’ he began, and it was obvious that he was about to launch out again into one of his interminable sentences, the only saving quality of which was that like all the Britons he was careful to begin each one with the main verb, but Pryderi passed him a leather-bound flagon of mead. The Dirty Man took a long, long swig. When he lowered the bottle from his mouth, he began to undo the basket with his free hand, saying as he did so:

‘Aye, sweet it is, the mead of the bees, sweeter than water, sweeter than death. But not so good it is as water to quench thirst. There is nothing like pure water from the spring to wash out the dust of the tunnels and the grit of the caves. In return for this, I will even let you have a piece of the earth coal. For it would not be right, nor fitting, nor lawful to give you a piece without payment and without price and without exchange. Into the very guts of the earth we go to gain it, and we cut it out from the roots of the hills. Into the heart of the rock and into the liver of the world we make our tunnels to find it, and there we hear the friendly spirits of the earth our mother. They warn us, when it is time to close our tunnels, and when they wish to bring down
the roof so that the earth may rest fallow. And it is only the foolish man who stays when the spirits warn.’ He took another long draft at the mead. ‘Aye, here is a lovely piece for you, and worth the buying.’

Now, what he said about it being wrong to give the stuff away I could well understand, having once been a doctor myself. When you have some skill or access to some commodity, and this has cost you a great deal of work in the past, then it is an act of impiety to the God who gave it to you not to show how much you value it by asking for it the highest price you can get. And if a man will not pay the price you demand, then he must go without. If he cannot pay for a fire or for food or for a doctor’s knowledge, then let him die of cold or hunger or disease. It is blasphemy for him to ask for food or firing or treatment free, and it is blasphemy for anyone to have pity on him and help him for nothing. This is the basic law of all religion, and the foundation of the science of medicine: no man is entitled to life unless he can pay for it.

Anyway, this man looked into his pannier, and brought out a lump of something, I couldn’t see what at first, it was only a small piece and he hid it in his closed hands. With a look of complicity in some dark deed he put it into my hand. It was, to all appearances, a piece of stone, black, and sharp in contour, newly broken or quarried. It was soft, though, as stone goes. I could break it into little splintery pieces with my thumb-nail, pushing along straight cracks to split it into layers. It stained my fingers with black. When I split it along the cracks, the fresh surfaces caught the light. I was puzzled.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘If it is not knowing that you are,’ the Dirty Man replied, ‘then it is guessing you will have to be.’

I turned it over and over.

‘It is too friable to be building stone. Likewise it would never serve for paving, even as occasional black pieces in a mosaic. It might, however, do for the black in a wall mosaic. Instead of using it as it is, perhaps you grind it down and use it to colour plaster black for wall designs. Or is it a dye?’ I spat on it. ‘Probably not, since it doesn’t dissolve in moisture. It might, though in
oil, though I haven’t any and I can’t try it. I know it isn’t jet, since it is much too brittle to turn on a wheel. So, I suppose it must be an ore of some kind. What kind? Not iron, or lead, it is not heavy enough. But … tin is light. That’s it, I have it. It’s tin ore.’

It was rather humiliating, I must say, to show a fine example of the methods of the sophists as I did then, and to be laughed at, but all the same Pryderi and the Dirty Man did laugh at me. Pryderi said, when he could.

‘Not to worry, you weren’t to know. I’ll show you tonight, you won’t believe me otherwise.’

At that moment, the next section of our party came round the bend in the road behind us. The Dirty Man looked at them, moving on with the clusters of birds singing in the bushes at either side, and he asked sharply:

‘Who’s that?’

‘Well, boy,’ Pryderi seemed to be ready to settle down for one of those irritating riddling chats the Britons are so fond of, and he was using his peasant voice to do it in, ‘that one in front, well, Taliesin that is, Taliesin of Mediometon.’

‘Oh, aye,’ said the Dirty Man, unimpressed. ‘The Druid. I seen him before, I did, and not much to look at now, is he? But her – who’s she?’

‘Her? Oh, well now, that is …’ Pryderi paused, savouring it. ‘Her, well she’s …’ and then it came in a rush – ‘Rhiannon of the Brigantes, Rhiannon herself, that is.’

‘Rhiannon herself? Herself? Here? Already here?’

The Dirty Man was of a sudden out of breath. Rhiannon clearly was a different kind of being from us, or from Taliesin. He stared as she came nearer. As she approached, the wood on either side of the path was full of the scurrying of wood-pigeons, and jays, and tree creepers, and the songs of the thrushes and the warblers. The Dirty Man had pulled his old horse to the side of the road, and now he stood beside it, his hands raised level with his face, spread out, palms forward, his head bowed, the universal attitude of prayer. Rhiannon came level with us and reined in her horse. The birds fell silent.

‘What is it, my son?’ She gazed down at the Dirty Man, who did not dare to look her in the face. Rhiannon at this time was,
perhaps, twenty-two or twenty-three, in the grand flush of her beauty. The Dirty Man was at least forty, nearing the end of a hard life. His drooping moustache was flecked with grey.

‘Bless me, my Mother, Mother of Those Below,’ he asked her. ‘Give me good fortune. Let me find the seams below, fat thick seams, rich and good, that will kindle and burn and give warmth to make men live and cook good food. Keep the choking mist from my lungs a few more years, and let me not be burnt in the great floods of flame, nor drowned in the blaze of waters. Let me not be caught behind the falls, and let your messengers tell me when the roof comes down. Only for a few years, my Mother, only for a few years, till the boy is old enough to come into the seam and feed himself, and his mother if need be.’

‘Be content my son,’ answered Rhiannon, speaking slowly and with ceremony. ‘Those who toil below are not forgotten by those who dwell below. You shall not come to your end till the boy can dig for himself. And this you have not asked aloud, but only in your heart and I will grant it you. You shall not die like the common run, standing or lying and in the light of sun and moon. You shall die like a man, crouching amid the falling stones and in the dark. When it is your time, I shall take you to myself in the bursting roof, quickly in noise and fury and in the blackness. This I grant you, my son.’