Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (58 page)

‘But for yourself?’

‘Caw – when do the thorn trees blossom in this country?’

‘If Rhiannon told you – well, then, it is a secret thing above all the other secrets of the Mere, and there is not a Roman who knows of it. Listen to me.

‘Below the Glass Mountain there is a tree, and to look at it,
you would think it no different from any other thorn tree, growing where it do on the firm ground on the edge of the Mere. But every seventh year, something strange do happen, and every seventh seventh year, it is something wonderful that happens. Because, every seventh year, the thorn do bloom, and blossom, and come into flower, and that not in the spring, but at the middle of winter, and strange that is because there is no reason for any feast or worship of the Gods at midwinter which is a dreadful and bitter time. Now every seventh year, it is one branch or another only that flowers, and anyone may come and see the tree, and the tree alone. But every seventh seventh year, then it is the tree that blossoms, every branch, and it is then that the other holy things are shown, if the right people are there to show them.’

‘And the right people are …?’

‘Think, boy. They must all come by land, because the thorn came to us from the sea. And the people are a virgin princess of the days of long ago, and a priest of the days that are lately gone, and a pregnant queen of the times that are.’

‘And this year is a …?’

‘A seventh seventh year, and then the thorn is given great power over all those who come to it. And come to it you shall, Mannanan, though it was some pretext we were going to find to send you away for the midwinter. But if it is bidden you are, then bidden you are. Lie still, boy, lie still in my house till midwinter, because it is no more than twenty nights to go.’

The Britons, unlike all the rest of mankind, count their time not by days but by nights, and all their feasts are feasts of nights and not of days. And in the winter it is understandable, because the night is longer than the day. So I lived in Caw’s house, and in the days, Hueil and Coth took me out, on my bed, to the lakeside, and I fished for pike, and never caught one. And in the evenings, Cicva would come from her empty home and sup with her grandfather and me, and she taught me to play the games of Fichel, that the Britons play in preference to all games of dice. And in truth I did not really enjoy Fichel, because there is no chance in it at all, or delightful uncertainty, but a game of Fichel is played on a board with men, and is entirely a matter of skill and wit.
There are a hundred different kinds of Fichel, and Cicva taught me to play them all, in return, she said, for my teaching her to palm dice and lose the pea under the three cups. And again and again she said to me:

‘Be careful, Mannanan: you think that you have found your Lady, but watch in case someone does not move the cups again.’

The solstice came and went, and the lengthening of the days became noticeable, just. Before the solstice, the rains stopped, and the wind came round slowly through north to north-east. This wind blew cold, and there were one or two clear nights, and in the mornings the frost was thick on the grass, and there was a thin film of ice on the little pools. And yet, the time of year being what it was, it was mild, compared with the winters we had up on the Amber Road. Then, on the solstice, the sky covered over with low grey clouds, and the wind dropped, and all was very still and quiet, and I wondered how Rhiannon could still live there in her house, open towards the east, above the Dark Pool.

Towards evening, the snow started to fall. It fell steadily, in great light flakes, like the feathers of the wild geese. It covered everything, and made the grey light of the morning look dimmer still. In Britain, you get used to living in a perpetual twilight: but the white snow makes it less bearable. It fell all through a night and a day and the night after, till it was, as Caw said, the depth of a chariot wheel, or as I saw, up to the top of a man’s thigh, if he cared to step into it.

Then we had a day without snow, and the sky was blue and it was bitter cold again, so that although the sunshine melted the snow on the surface, at night the moisture froze to leave a layer of ice over it. We lay close around the fire that night, with all the blankets and furs and sheepskins we could find heaped over us, and yet we were all cold.

In the first light, Madoc wakened me. He had a lamp, and I looked round to see that I was in an empty house. Madoc had been the last to try to treat my side, and he had merely made me lie still, and told me to wash it well each day with warm water. Then he had gone out into the winter sea, and I had not seen
him nor heard that he had returned. But here he was, making me take my shirt off so that he could see the healthy scab forming.

‘That will do,’ he said. ‘You will just be able to walk to the Glass Mountain.’

‘I am not in any fit condition to walk,’ I told him. ‘You can say what you like, but do you know what it feels like when that place tears open? If I’m going that far, I’ll have a horse, or there ought to be enough water now to float a boat almost up to it.’

‘Everybody walks to the Glass Mountain at midwinter.’ He was firm on that, and as it seemed to be matter of religion, I agreed to try.

‘I’ll come when I’ve had my breakfast,’ I told him.

‘Decent people go to this rite fasting,’ and as he seemed as ready to insist on that, I pulled on all the clothes I could find, with my sealskin cloak over everything and my sword handy under it, and I began to walk. At least we didn’t have to go barefoot, as some mysteries would have had us do.

We crunched across the icy surface of the snow, watching our breaths before our faces. Then, into the marsh. We pushed by willows, and the icy twigs cut across our faces like iron wires. The log road beneath our feet was covered in a layer of glass, and I feared to slip and tear my side again. The streams and pools were edged with ice, but never fully covered in, or strong enough to take a man’s weight. Most of the paths we had used to come from the Glass Mountain were under running water, and we had to take awkward twisting ways, known only to the cattle and the deer, and the badger even, who made them. To push through a maze in twilight, with never a firm footing, with nothing dry, with the clouds threatening new snow, oh, there are better ways of spending a day in midwinter. Even when, at noon, the clouds cleared, it became no pleasanter, because it got even colder.

Sometimes, now, we could even see the Glass Mountain standing up in front of us beyond its screen of bare branches. A little column of smoke rose from before it, vertical in the still air, white against the blue sky. We walked in silence.

We were not the only people on the road. There was no one before us, but here and there, at forks in the way, we would find
little bunches of men, and women and children, waiting to fall in behind us. They were all laden with bundles of wood, and with bags. They too went in silence, except that now and then, from behind us, we would hear voices raised in a melancholy hymn to the Cauldron:

I could not have sung. My face was so stiff with the cold that I could not move my lips. I could feel that the end of my nose was dead. My moustaches froze to my cloak so that to turn my head hurt. My side was throbbing and hot: I waited for the tearing pain, the warm that I now knew so well. Let no one say that what I won on this journey I won without pain.

At last, at last, we came out of the Mere, we climbed the sides of the Glass Mountain. We came close to the farm built against the rock. Now, I noticed what I must have seen before, that the branches of a tree showed above the fence. Leafless they were and winter-barren, but, plainly, a thorn. There were people standing about outside the closed gates. Closest of all, I saw Pryderi sitting on the snow by a brazier in which a fire of earth coal was burning. Hueil was with him. I came to them and sat down. It was nearly evening, and I was hungry and tired, sweating from the walk and yet freezing with the cold.

More groups of people sat down around and behind us, each group with its brazier, or lighting a fire of wood on the bare ground, sweeping up the snow into windbreaks. They sat, quietly, waiting. Even the children were silent, and did not run about or play. When I was a little warmer, I stood up and looked the way we had come. All the side of the hill, all the firm ground around it, all the road by which we had come, was speckled with fires, mirroring in the cold clear air the stars above us. It was now quite dark. There was a constant murmur from the people. Not the angry shouting you hear from a mob in riot, not the cheerful turbulence you hear from the crowd waiting in an arena for the
Games to start, not the hubbub you hear from a market crowd: it was the gentle hum of voices lowered in reverence, saying meaningless things simply because the burden of keeping silent was too much.

Neither could I keep silent. I asked Pryderi: ‘Who guards the shrine? Is it Druids?’

He turned to me. It was the first time I had spoken to him since he had heard me tell him Rhiannon’s message. Now, as his cloak opened, I saw he wore a new belt, a simple one, only a threefold chain of Gold. Only that, only Golden links that would have held a bull, only the price of half a province. He answered me seriously. Gone now was his usual air of bantering superiority:

‘No, boy. The Holy Ones are gone. Do you think we would have made poor Taliesin trudge all the way down from the other side of the Wall if there had been a Druid anywhere nearer in the island?’

‘And why Rhiannon?’

‘Family tradition. And once this is over, she won’t have to do it again, unless she’s still alive and a virgin in another forty-nine years.’

‘Do what?’

‘Very little. You shall see soon enough.’

‘And where did you find a queen?’

‘It is the wife of the King of the Demetae, that is Queen among the Silures in her own right, if she had her rights.’

There were too many people there, and too many people missing, for me to understand. I sat down and watched the stars go round. Sometimes people sang. Others came past us, seeking their places to wait. One man, squint-eyed, recognised me, and bent down to whisper into my ear, in Greek:

‘It began with a word.’

I was in no mood for riddles or mysteries, and I thought his accent vile, so I told him sharply enough, but again in a whisper:

‘The only word for you, brother, is
off
!!’

He went on. It was close to midnight. I looked across the eastern sky, from the Bear to Orion. They had reached their summit, they hung poised for the descent into morning. Others looked too. Everywhere, men and women were getting up, and looking
towards the farmyard. There was a smell in the air, a smell of anticipation, of excitement, as strong as woodsmoke, as distinctive as a mask. Pryderi stood, and I stood too. There was a sound of rattling at the gate. Everybody heard it. Now nobody was seated. We stood, Pryderi and I, in the very front of the crowd, and we saw the gate open.

Taliesin opened the gate. He shone there as he had shone in the temple in the Mere, but now he shone more splendidly. He wore his mistletoe, fastened by a brooch of Gold wire a span long. Above it he wore a collar, a Golden half-moon that covered all his breast. On his left arm he wore an archer’s wristguard, as if to take the blow of the returning bowstring when he had loosed the arrows of the sun, and this too was of Gold, and it covered his arm from wrist to elbow. His Golden sickle hung from a belt of a sevenfold Golden chain. The buckles of his sandals were of Gold. And on his head the oak-leaves were beaten of Gold.

He flung wide the gate. We saw into a farmyard. The ground was frozen, ridged with the coming and going of cattle, but cleared of snow. There were piles of hay and straw. The barn, built at one side of the yard, against the rock, was wattle sided and roofed with thatch, like any other barn. But there was another gate, in the opposite fence, and this too was opened. As Taliesin guarded one gate, so did Caw guard the other, dressed in his whaleskin and white bear fur, ivory-belted and ivory-crowned. But he, too, wore a collar, a half-moon of Gold. For tonight, then, he was divine, for this night, once in forty-nine years, he was, surely, Dylan, the Son of the Wave, that ruled all the seas of Britain. But if so, then tonight who was Taliesin? I did not ask, but Pryderi breathed the answer:

‘Mabon.’

I should have known. This was indeed the Glorious Youth.

In the middle of the yard was the tree, not a tall one, just an ordinary thorn. Somehow it all seemed full of a coming and going of people, though if you tried to look it was impossible actually to see anyone, only the general impression of movement. Then from Pryderi came the spark of light, struck from flint with an iron blade. He kindled a torch, and soon others were lighting
torches, fresh, not from their fires. The space where we stood, and somehow the farmyard itself, was now as bright as day.

And then, there was movement. Not in the yard, but above it. There was a breath of the east wind. The branches swayed. And even as we watched, the whole tree burst into blossom. We saw the buds open before our very eyes. In the time it takes a man to count up to a hundred, we saw the branches covered with flowers, white they must have been, but in the glare of the red torchlight they looked pink.

The two people came from the barn and stood before the tree. Taliesin stood back from the gate. Pryderi took me by the arm and led me through into the farmyard. We bowed to Mabon, but he was not the one we had come to see, nor Dylan-Caw, leaning on his eight-foot steering oar. We passed towards the tree.

The women stood on either side of the tree. First, I saw Cicva. She was dressed as a Roman matron, richly and splendidly, if a trifle out of fashion, and even there I found space to wonder, irreverently, whether the clothes had been stored away for forty-nine years. Her tunic was of white silk, with a Gold-embroidered hem and girdle to match, shining in the torchlight. Her shawl was of Indian cotton, trailing to her heels. Her hair was piled on her head, built up on a pad, adding half a foot to her height, and capped with a gleaming diadem set with emeralds and Amber. Her hands were loaded with rings set with the rubies and diamonds of India. Three months pregnant, she stood proudly there, and in her hands she carried a spear, a great long iron spear on an ash shaft. For a moment I had hope, but then I saw this was no spear I had ever handled. Just an ordinary legionary pilum.