Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (55 page)

I came across the open meadow towards him. We were under the bluff edge of the hills on the Western side of the Summer Country. The scarp sheltered houses scattered along the side of the marsh, above the flood level. Three hundred paces from the place where the path came from the woods stood a crowd of people, men, women and children, not in a shapeless mass, but ranked in order. And in the centre of the line Pryderi stood at the right hand of the Master of the Western Sea.

For who else could it be, seated there on a throne made out of the beak of a ship. The jutting forefoot was heaped with cushions, and the figurehead, a flying goose, spread its wings above him. He answered my belt of elephant Ivory with one of plates of the walrus’s teeth. His boots were not of soft leather of the cow, but of the hide of the whale. The Gold chain about his neck suspended on his breast a pearl the like of which no man has ever seen, for it was as big as his fist. Instead of a sword, he held in his right hand a grapnel, three-pronged, of silver, the handle set with sheets of mother of pearl, and in his left hand he had the horn of a wild ox mounted in Gold. And his hair and moustaches were as white as the skin of the great white bear he wore for a cloak. But in all his splendour, I knew him, and he knew me. I walked steady and straight towards him, not looking round though I knew that a score of men had followed me in the marsh and were now behind me in the meadow. I halted three paces from him. He spoke first:

‘Photinus-Votan-Mannanan, whoever you are. What is it you want of me?’

I knew I must stand up to him now, or never again.

‘Caw!’ I addressed him. ‘Caw! Master of the Western Sea I know you. I stole your ship once, and I stole its cargo, and I even
stole you. Now I have come again to you for a ship, and this time I am willing to pay.’

‘And I tried to kill you myself,’ he answered calmly. ‘I spoilt your water and your food. These things happen at sea, where there is no law except that a man may live if he is strong, and must live if he is wise. But are you indeed the man I knew then?’ He turned to Pryderi. ‘What kind of man is he?’

Pryderi looked at me dispassionately.

‘On land, I grant you, he is a man of skill and resource, a man who is not too proud to work with his hands, and to produce works of art according to his lights. And he is a keen bargainer in the market-place, and able to turn anything into money, even rotten rags and green rushes.’

‘What else do you expect?’ asked Caw. ‘He is a merchant. Is he nothing more?’

‘He is a man who will take a Gesa upon himself, and will keep it, even when he is in danger of his life.’

‘Any man may keep his Gesa, for fear of the Gods, or even for fear of the vengeance of men,’ said Caw.

‘He is a man who will keep his word when there is no profit in it,’ said another voice. I knew this voice. I turned to it. There was a wreath of coral in her hair, and about her waist was a belt of silver chains, the equal of Rhiannon’s, linked as it was and buckled with Gold. But even today she wore above her nineteen petticoats, an apron I had bought her. ‘He kept his promise and he set me free, though he did not know who I was or where I came from or what vengeance he was giving me. Hey, Photinus,’ cried Cicva. ‘Have you finished the hyena’s hair?’

‘But that was a little thing,’ said Caw.

‘There is more,’ Pryderi told him. ‘When he was tempted to follow the love of his life, he did not, but he still pressed to the West, wherever she might go.’

‘And so might any man for money,’ objected Caw again.

‘But time was when he was offered all he has worked for, and that he refused, to redeem his love. And he did not redeem her only, but his friends too.’

What he meant by that I could not think, because I could not remember I had refused anything of importance. But Caw asked:

‘Where is the man I used to know? He was one who would do nothing except for profit, and who would run after any woman in sight, aye, and catch her too. What has happened to you, Photinus? Is it only that you have grown old like me?’

I thought a little. Perhaps I had changed. I was not conscious of it. But perhaps in the old days I would not have left Pryderi to chase Rhiannon, I would have redeemed her alone and never thought of Taliesin, I would never have left Cicva, or Lhygod for that matter, unviolated. Was I becoming more temperate, less realistic in my prime? There was more than that. I answered:

‘When I first went into the North, I went for no reason but to save my skin, and I had no one but myself to please and no one to answer to. That I gained great profit from it was an accident. Then I did not know it, but I followed the great plan of others, and I was a tool in the hands of the Gods. But now, I have come into the West to carry out my own great plan, and I will do only what I will. And I do not will that for my own sake, but I am doing it for the sake of my family, and to them I am responsible. I may not follow my own desires, no matter how attractive they are. I am not my own master, but I tell you this, I am master of my own grand design, and that I will carry out, though thrones fall and kings die, yes, even though I die.’

‘And what is my place in this grand design, Photinus-Mannanan? What do you want of me?’

‘I told you. I want a ship, and for it I can pay.’

‘No, Mannanan. You want of me more than a ship, and for what you want, no man can pay enough. Sit here, and watch, stay with me a winter, and see what it is you are asking.’

Men brought a chair, with arms carved in the shape of swans, and placed it at Caw’s left hand, and there I sat, and looked across the meadow to the edge of the wood. And from the wood I saw Taliesin come.

Now he was dressed again as a Druid, in white from head to foot. His oak-leaf crown was on his head, and the sickle and the apple were in his hands. In stout shoes he came across the grass, and I looked at the people expecting them to kneel before him, but they did not. They cheered, they waved their arms and shouted:

‘Taliesin! Taliesin the Blessed, the Radiant Brow.’ The women sighed and whispered and oohed and ahed and said:

‘Oh, the Holy One, how beautiful he is, oh, there’s lovely he is.’

The little children ran forward to touch the edge of his white garment, while their mothers warned them not to dirty it, and there was small danger of that, because their hands had been washed a dozen times that morning in readiness. And the men, oh, the men, they began to sing, intricately lacing together their Pythagorean patterns of sound, they sang the cauldron hymn I had heard before, and why it was appropriate to a Druid I could not think.

That was the song they sang as I watched Taliesin come to us, and sit on the chair prepared for him on Caw’s right hand, a great throne all carved with dragons and sea-horses, and painted and gilded. The voices rose to a fortissimo, and then stopped, suddenly, cut off. Out of the wood came Rhiannon.

Had you ever seen, even in your dreams, the ship of Theseus beating back to Athens from flaming Cnossus, you would know how she looked. For on that voyage, you will remember, the Athenians failed to change the black sails for silver. When Aegeus saw that black ship of mourning, he flung himself from the rocks for sorrow. And it would have been understandable for any man to have died for the love of Rhiannon as I saw her that day. She came to us, barefoot across the grass, wrapped in her splendid cloak of white and Gold; and in the midst of the space, as Theseus should have struck his black sails, so she threw down her cloak, and we saw her clad from head to foot in black; her blouse, long-sleeved, was of black linen, and her skirts sweeping the ground were of black wool. Her shawl about her shoulders was of black silk, and she lifted her arms and arranged it about her head to hide her glowing hair.

She came to us, and Caw stood to let her pass. Taliesin and I remained seated. She came to us, and as she came, all the men knelt. Caw knelt. Pryderi knelt, Grathach and Duach and Hueil knelt. I slipped from my chair and I knelt. And most wonderful of all, Taliesin knelt. The great Druid, the Most Holy One of all, he knelt. Here amid the men and boys of the Summer Country, the great priest of the Unconquered Sun knelt before the Mother of Those Below.

The men knelt. The women stood. They closed about Rhiannon as she went towards the house prepared for her.

Now you may think that I had had enough incident for one day, and that it was by now too near dark for anything else to happen, and so did I, but to my surprise, no sooner had Rhiannon vanished than someone brought me a fresh horse.

‘What for?’ I asked.

‘Wedding, of course,’ answered Grathach, laughing so evilly that I was afraid for a moment that it was to be mine, since the Britons as a whole, Picts or not, are wont to make such arrangements without consulting the main actors. However, it was Pryderi’s wedding, to Cicva, and I was honoured by being allowed to take part in the chase. For the Britons maintain the fiction, and fiction I assure you it is, that every woman is averse to marriage, and will flee from it as from a wolf. Therefore, Cicva mounted a horse of her own, a white one to be the more easily visible, and rode three times around her own house, while Pryderi and a dozen of us rode after her, whooping and screaming, till at the end of the third circuit, Pryderi rode up alongside his bride and struck her on the shoulder with a twig at which she collapsed into his arms. I must say that running your wife to earth is a good deal less dignified than buying her.

At the ensuing banquet I sat on Caw’s right, the happy couple, as I hoped that they would be, having the top table to themselves. Now one expects a wedding feast to be lavish, with imported delicacies, like chestnuts and olives, and enormous quantities of staple foods like mutton and oatbread, and enough drink, cider and beer and mead, to bath in. But there was more to the feast than that, held as it was in Caw’s great roundhouse. And I don’t mean Taliesin, who ate only boiled beans and drank only water, for now he was among friends and no concealment was necessary.

I lay back and belched towards the end of the meal, for it was the first food I had had since dawn, and I had had a long hard ride, and then a rousing gallop to give me an appetite. And I wiped the sweat off my face with my napkin, and then I looked at the napkin. Fine linen, it was, and there were enough of them matched to give every guest the same, not merely to use but to take away afterwards. Egyptian they were, but not fancy, nothing to look at till you did look at them. They were expensive, and I ought to know, because I had handled them myself, or a batch very like them, the year before, and I remembered thinking that I couldn’t afford them for my house, and I am not a poor man. Caw’s clothes, too, were very good, not only the furs but the linen and wool, and Cicva’s; and the old lady who bustled round and waited on them was using the remains of a silk dress for a duster, and in most places I knew, if a silk dress had gone that far it would still have been worth while to unravel it, thread by thread and weave it up again into something else. It puzzled me.

I looked at the plates we ate from, and the cups we drank out of. They were not silver, they were only pottery, but when you looked again, what pottery! No Briton ever threw those pots. They were made in Gaul, or perhaps even in Italy – I was too polite to turn them over to see the potter’s mark, but I could see they were expensive, and yet nobody was upset when a cup was broken. It costs a mint of money just to transport the stuff, mostly on the packaging. The hangings on the wall were in good heavy wool, thick enough for blankets, woven in the spiral patterns I was used to now, and I know well how much time it takes to set up a loom to weave it – dearer than embroidered. And the tables were painted too, and the chairs, in those patterns, and not amateur work.

And yet there was a lot missing. All the things that strike the careless eye as signs of wealth were absent. There was no silver on the table, and no bronze either except a few spoons and a wine strainer, which was merely an ornament as there was no wine, and no pile of broken empty amphorae outside either. There was none of the rich and splendid enamel work that I had been seeing so much of, except for personal pieces like the belts that more important people wore. No, the casual eye, for instance that of the ill-trained and well-bribed local tax-collector, would
not have seen any indication that this was not the house of an ordinary marsh farmer.

I said nothing about this. I would have liked to know but the easiest way to find out was just to say nothing. So I said nothing. That is the only way with Barbarians, just don’t ask. Ask them anything and they freeze up and don’t say a thing, or else they take pleasure in telling you the biggest lies they can imagine. But, of course, they
do
want, really, to tell you about how wonderful they are, and how clever, and if you don’t ask them anything they finally burst, and they are so put off by this display of non-curiosity that they will often tell you the plain and simple truth. So I asked nothing, and at last, when everyone else was singing dismal cauldron songs, Caw, that tough old man, broke, and began to tell me the tale of the people who lived in the Mere.

‘You will be wondering, doubtless, as so many do, how it is we live out here on the edge of the world. Pleasant and happy is life, and decent is death, though far we are from our homes and the graves of our kin. In Gaul once we lived, our fathers were men of power, on the edge of the Ocean that nobody ruled but we. We sailed our ships up and down the rim of the world, from Spain to the Scillies, to Ireland and Anglesey, and up to the land of fire on the edge of the ice. Great were the ships we built, and stout were their sides, of oak beams dowelled together with pegs of elm. Never use iron in ships or your end will come soon. The oak and the iron are foes, that fight to the death, and we who worship the oak would never dare to take an iron knife with us into the grove. See how the Holy Man, who is priest of the oak, never touches iron, though he may hold Gold or bronze.