Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (59 page)

But beyond her stood Rhiannon, all in black. Her clothes were of wool, not the fine wool of the fat sheep the Romans brought to the island, but the coarsest of coarse wool from the little native sheep that you don’t see any more except up in the wildest hills. Coarse as sacking it was, and not even dyed black, but shorn from black lambs, black as the earth coal. About her neck was a necklace of jet beads, strung on a thong of deer hide, and another of mussel shells. Her hair hung unbound, uncombed, on her shoulders. On her left wrist, where her gown, rough cut, unhemmed, sewn of one piece, left her arms bare, she
wore an archer’s wristguard, but this was of polished stone, of polished flint. And in her hands she held … what? A cauldron …? a dish …? a cup …?

Pryderi led me forward to the tree. I knew now, untold, what to do. I rolled up my shirt, tore off the bandage, hurt though it may, to show the bleeding, festering wound. Cicva reached forward the point of the spear and touched the wound. Rhiannon reached forward the cup, made, I saw, of turned olive-wood; I thought, a strange thing to find here, though common enough in Syria. She held it to my lips, and I drank the wine, sour as vinegar, bitter as defeat, sweet as death. I felt weak and faint. I wished to go out through the farther gate, but Pryderi guided me to lean against the wall behind the tree.

There I sat, for hours and watched the crowds go by. I saw the colours of every kingdom in Britain, and outside it. I saw the shields and badges of every clan and every family. There were lead-miners and copper-miners and diggers of the earth coal, and smiths in iron and bronze and Gold. There were fishermen of salmon, and men who went out on to the wide ocean to catch whales and men who dived to take oysters for their pearls and men who dredged limpets and mussels for food. I saw the old women who dig for cockles, and glean in the fields, I saw men who earn their bread as shepherds, and those who spend their lives hunting bear and wolf and the tall deer. There were men who break horses, and men who drive cattle along the Green Roads to feed the cities. There were merchants and innkeepers and brothel-keepers from the towns, and men who had sold themselves to the Romans to collect taxes, and men who hid in the hills rather than pay them, weavers and dyers and fullers, money-lenders and bankers. And above all there were the peasants, men who grew oats for themselves and wheat for the Army, and wore themselves into the grave trying to satisfy tax-collector and rent-collector and wife and child.

They were of all ranks. I saw King Casnar the painted Pict go by, in his red and green, and I thought that there were Romans enough who would give a year’s pay to take him alive inside the Wall. I saw Leo Rufus, who had been so proud of being almost a Roman, yes, he came. I saw Gwawl go by, in his black and white
shirt, and he saw me, and did nothing. Each came past, and drank of the cup, and if he was ill or hurt or deformed or maimed, there he was touched with the spear. And all came in silence, and – this I have never seen in any temple or at any rite before – no man was asked to pay. You may believe that or not as you wish, because it is the greatest wonder I ever saw, but it is true.

Only one man broke the silence. He was a short man with a squint. He saw the cup and touched it – and then he did not drink, but shouted in his barbarous Greek:

‘False! False and unclean! Be not yoked with unbelievers.’

And he ran out into the night, but as he went Cicva lunged at his eyes with her spear, and he never squinted after that.

At last, the sky in the east grew pink, beyond the hill. Still the column pressed on, hurrying now. Then, of a sudden, the cock crew. Taliesin stepped forward and bolted the gate in the face of the men next in line. From the crowd outside there came a low moan of disappointment: nothing more. The ceremony was over, that was all. Anyone else could now wait for forty-nine years more. The last of the crowd passed through the far gate. Caw shut it after them.

The cock crew again. The Epiphanies of the Gods passed into the barn. After a little, the cock crew a third time. The two woman came out into the farmyard again, and the birds burst into a song in the winter morning. Now the two were dressed as I had always seen them. Cicva was in a plain blouse and skirt, but now, she too wore a belt of threefold Gold, Rhiannon hid her splendid clothes beneath her even more splendid cloak of white and yellow silk.

The women came to where I sat. Caw and Taliesin, themselves again, followed. They all sat down. We huddled together for warmth, pulling the sealskin cloak over us, shivering for weariness. We slept beneath the dying torches.

Suddenly, we all came awake together. The sun was not high, we could not have slept more than an hour at most. We all stood up, rubbing the sleep from our eyes and remembering how long it was since we had eaten, and shivering in the cold winter air and eyeing the grey cloud that was beginning to drift in again from the sea, for the wind was now from the north-west. The
wind has changed, I thought, The world has changed. There is something strange and new about me.

I turned to look down at Rhiannon. She was on her knees. I reached down and drew her to me, to her feet. I made her lean on my left arm: she was frail as a bird from her long fast. Then I realised what was strange about my world. Half a day before I could have supported nobody. I held her a little way from me. With my other hand I rolled up my shirt. I looked at my side. The running sore was healed, and my side showed the old scar as it had been when I first came into the Mere.

I let Taliesin help Rhiannon. I drew my sword and cut off the hem of the long silk cloak. I sheathed the sword and went into the barn.

Inside, it was just like any other barn, bare-walled, with bales of hay and straw lying about. I looked up into the rafters, and there I could just see the shaft of the spear. The wooden cup stood on the floor in the corner. I went to the rock face. I looked for the signs, for the stains of libations of wine and fat. I pushed aside the hay, and found the sacred place, a crack in the rock, a deep dark hole. I greased the blade with goose grease and lions’s fat from my wallet. I sheathed it again, and I wrapped the scabbard in the gleaming silk. I thrust the weapon, point down into the hole. It went well down, but when it grated on the bottom I could still touch the hilt. The crevice was narrower at the mouth than inside. I could curl my hand around the hilt, but I could not then draw the blade out. The sword would stay there till the Gods willed someone should take it. At least,
I
had left some offering for my cure.

I went out again into the open air. Caw opened the gate, and we left the farmyard. The hillside was still full of people, all the people who had been there the night before. Every group had lit fires. We joined Madoc and Hueil, who were cooking, with a group of people from the houses in the Mere. There must have been a hundred fires close by, and from each of them came the smell of cooking, and a smell that I never thought to meet in all the Isle of Britain. Everywhere I could smell roast goose!

I sat down beside Pryderi, who had a black pudding in his fist. Everyone was handed a platter of roast goose, everyone except
me. They brought me something else, that looked like goose indeed, but when I tasted it, I knew it – I was eating swan.

Everyone was laughing and blaspheming as they ate the sacred foods of their clans. Caw was telling Rhiannon, without shame, the story that had won him the crown among the Western Picts. It was like Saturnalia, that I knew well all my friends in Rome would be keeping that day. After the rite comes the time of laughter; when the strain of piety and sacrifice and of touching holy things that may blast and obliterate the unclean, is past, then forbidden acts are lawful and the topsy-turvy feast begins. We in the south have forgotten the rite, and keep only the topsy-turvy time. I leaned across Rhiannon, who was eating roasted skylarks on a spit, and I asked Caw, when he had finished:

‘What does the rite mean? To whom are the spear and the cup sacred?’

He replied, ‘We haven’t the least idea.’

‘What, you don’t know?’ I looked incredulously at Taliesin. He belched – his platter had been full of all kinds of meat and he was now sucking the marrow bone of a sheep – and told me:

‘No, not these in particular. All cups and bowls and cauldrons are all weapons, especially spears, are or may be sacred here. Many places had their sacred cauldrons before the Romans came. But until, oh, just ninety-eight years ago, there was no cauldron here on the Glass Mountain, and even if there were there would have been no such great ceremony made, because there were so many at other shrines, and this place is inconvenient to get to. But, of course, the Romans have destroyed the other shrines, and that is why we hide this last vessel and worship it only in secrecy, and we pay it the same respect as we would to any other cauldron of life. That is the meaning of this rite, of the Druid, and the pregnant queen and the virgin princess.’

He paused to suck his bone, and Caw took up the tale:

‘But as to how this cup and the spear came here, it is a strange story. Soon after the Venetii my fathers came here, not long before the Roman conquest, there came here by sea an old man, a Syrian, I think, who said he wanted to find a place where he could settle and fast and pray till he died. Now that is just the kind of thing a Druid will often do, and so they let him build a
little house under the rock, where the barn is now. He brought with him three things: he had the spear, and he had the cup, and he had a sprig of the thorn. He said they were precious and holy, and there is no reason why we should not take his word for it. And he worshipped them till he died, and that was not very long, and now so do we. But he never told us why they were holy.’

So that was all, I thought. They were not even very old, or anything to do with the spot, or even with the ceremony. But I was certainly healed.

When we went back to the houses in the Mere, life was quiet for a few weeks more. Rhiannon lived in Cicva’s house, because she had been much weakened by her long fast and the emotional ordeal of the midwinter night. I lived with Caw still, and I went to see Rhiannon frequently, and heard her tales of the great days of the kings of the Isle of Britain, such as how the Great King Lear had two good daughters who cherished him in his old age, and how he was set against them and tempted to his death by his youngest daughter, and how she came herself to a violent and well-deserved end. But while I listened and tried to put these tales in poetry in their own language, I wondered what I was to do with Rhiannon when she was well. I could hardly take her home to the Old City, even if she had been granted to me, and in return I had been granted to her, and I could not be hers, I was Phryne’s and I had sworn to Phryne, jocularly, but validly enough, in parting, that I would sleep with no stranger till I saw her again.

But in less than a month after the Midwinter Feast, Pryderi came to me and said:

‘Is it not seeing your other friends you ought to be?’

‘There’s no hurry,’ I told him. ‘It can wait until the spring comes.’

‘It is necessary for me to go to that region,’ he replied, ‘and there may be no other chance, and true it is, and you know it, that unless I take you there is no finding the way.’

That was true. I looked at the black winter and I shuddered, but go I had to, saying goodbye to Rhiannon. First, Pryderi took a log boat, and we slipped down through the Mere towards the sea. The snows had melted – Britain is not like Germany, where the snow comes and lies for months. The Mere now was full, all
the lagoons were great lakes where a man might drown a dozen times before he reached the bottom. The currents ran strong, and tree trunks and branches and dead sheep and all the other rubbish bobbed around us. We paddled hard into the north-west wind all the short day till we came near the mouth of the river, and there we found an empty hut on the shore where we slept the night.

Pryderi knew where to look for a skin boat. At the dawn we set off again in this, and I now realised that he proposed to paddle it across the Severn Sea. A man well may think hard before he sets out to sea anywhere in February: to go out on to the Severn Sea, and to do it in such a frail vessel – well, I kept on thinking that we must be both mad. But Pryderi kept on telling me that the skin boat was the only craft that would stay afloat.

I could never understand why a skin boat did float at all. It is a companionable way to travel, as the Britons’ boats are nearly round, and the two men sit side by side on the single thwart. But how do they float? Everyone knows that a ship floats because the weight of the timbers press down on the water and the heavier the ship the better she will float, which is why you must make the keel of a ship out of the biggest and thickest tree trunk that you can find. And skin boats really have no weight to press down on the water, being made out of wicker and leather only.

We went down towards the smell of the salt water, past the backwater where the ship was hidden, or had been hidden, and between the high banks of the river. Soon, perhaps we were at sea, because the water was brackish, but in a maze of channels among wide banks of mud. It was the tides, of course. There is no rational explanation for them. It is quite untrue that, as some say, they are governed by the moon, because in that case they would always happen a definite time after the rising of the moon, and they do not; they vary in time from place to place.

In some places, too, the sea goes away only a little between the high and low tides, but in the Severn Sea we must have been near to whatever is the source of the tides, because the sea receded about four and a half miles.

We paddled out cross wind, over the sullen waves, bobbing about like a sea bird. We were more than a mile past the last
green growing thing and I thought the water was deep, when we met two men walking up to their ankles only in the water. They had come out across the mud, with boards tied to their feet to stop them sinking, and they were pulling a sled behind them: they had stakes set in the mud even further out, to stretch nets between, and they were taking the night’s catch back to the land. We left them behind, and in the slackening wind we paddled out into mist. After a while, when the grey water all round melted into the grey sky, I begun to feel even more depressed than I had felt alone in the Mere. We were now well away from the mud. I was completely dependent on Pryderi.