Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (66 page)

Of course, the lack of communication could soon be remedied. I went to the Setanta.

‘I want a woman. Next girl you catch, a young one, I want her.’

‘Have one of these,’ he said, magnanimously. ‘Why didn’t you join in last night?’

I looked at the huddle of weeping, bleeding, naked bodies. This, I thought, is what Pryderi would want, this is what the other island was like before the conquest, when every king was as good as any other king, and any man as good as his master if only he were strong enough. But the legions would settle that; as brutal perhaps in the first months, but in five years there would be roads all across the land, and inns by them, and even Rhiannon could ride unguarded and unharmed wherever she liked. And, I swore it, if Rhiannon had been treated one-tenth as badly as these women, then there was not a man in the south that I would leave alive, I would not grant one his life, no, not for all the Gold in Ireland. But now I replied to the Setanta, as casually as I could:

‘No, thank
you
. They’ve been well used, too well used, overused I should say. Anybody may have been tramping about there. I want something … how shall I put it? I want something a bit cleaner and fresher.’

The Setanta called over our boat companion, Callum, who seemed to have a great following of his own, and translated to him, and I dangled a few links of Gold chain before his eyes. He was going off to forage anyway, and even if he had farther to go than the day before he was back not long after noon with horses and cattle, and half a dozen likely wenches to choose from. I picked the cleanest, to the accompaniment of a good deal of cheering and jeering from the warriors, and after a few days’ hard work – and it went as hard for me as for her – I could make out a great deal of what they were talking about, though I never got as far as being able to make poetry in Irish, as I had almost done in the British tongue. The two languages were not all that different, after all. The grammar was almost the same, only most of the words were strange. When I could understand what the warriors were jeering and could jeer back, I was satisfied, and I let her go
off to some of the best jeerers, and she could assure them that at least some of what they said was true, and the rest false.

After we had been there a week I began to get impatient. I had nothing to do, except sit still and learn Irish and watch them put together more chariots – we had nearly forty in the end. I also watched them training the horses. They had to be taught to run when they were told, and stop when they were told, and stand still whatever happened around them. One advantage of where we had landed was that some of the horses had been trained already. But there weren’t many of the men who had been in a chariot before, and so we had to find a number of the lightest who could learn to drive. This was a thankless task, because you had one driver and one warrior in the chariot. The driver had to control the horses and satisfy his master, and if anything went wrong it was the driver’s fault, and if there was success it was due to the warrior. And the driver had no way of defending himself. I thought that killing the driver was the easiest way of stopping a chariot, but the Irishmen assured me that wasn’t the way to go to war at all. Noblemen fought noblemen, and left the drivers out of it.

We had to train a dozen horses, at least, for each chariot, since no horse could charge more than once in a day. And a number of the younger men were as unskilled as the horses, and had to learn how to hold a sword or a spear or an axe or whatever else they had been lucky enough to get. But apart from this, we did, effectively, nothing, except to eat up the country. After a week I went to the Setanta and asked him:

‘What are we waiting for?’

‘We are waiting for the High King. What else would we be waiting for?’

‘Waiting for the High King to do what?’

‘To come to Tara, of course.’

‘What? Isn’t he at Tara?’

‘And why should he be now at Tara, seeing that it is neither the Feast of Tara, that they hold every seventh year at Samain, and it will be held again this winter. Nor is it the feast of his consecration as High King, for that was years ago, and it is ourselves will hold it, I am telling you.’

‘How far are we from Tara?’

‘Perhaps twenty Roman miles.’

‘Then – if the High King is not at Tara, why do we not just march there?’

‘What? Without a battle?’

I looked at him. I could not help saying what I did. It was in my interest to see a battle, to see as many battles as possible in the coming two months, and yet – something in me made me speak, made me want to show him how wrong his actions were, how absurd his manner of thinking, how – I could not contain myself.

‘Battle? Why do you Barbarians always want to fight battles? Battle is the last resort of politics, to use when all other ways are barred. Battle is waste: waste is effort, waste of health, waste of blood. Why fight at all if you can get what you want by any other means? Speed is all we have. We could make a quick rush to Tara now, could have done any time the last week, and make you High King, or your uncle, or anyone you choose. As for the present High King, we can send one or two of your Northerners to assassinate him under pretence of making their surrender, or better still, we could bribe his bodyguard to murder him privately. So all the waste could be saved.’

The Setanta looked at me as if I were a child.

‘Oh, you merchants. Why is it always only the end you look at, and never the means? It is how a thing is done that is important, not only what is done. Whoever is to be High King, he must show it, not by walking into Tara in the dark, but by killing his rival before the eyes of all the Island. If we shed no blood, no one will believe we rule.’

This is the way of the Barbarians. I knew he would never rule, not with all the four armies of Ireland broken against each other, and the legions wading ashore and the Eagles flying over Tara. That he did not know. He went on:

‘But if it is any comfort to you, tomorrow the High King will indeed be at Tara, and we will be going that way too, and the day after that we will fight him, and the armies of the West and of the South.’

You’ll fight him, I thought, not me. I’m not going into any mélêe with only one eye. Nevertheless, while the others sharpened their swords, I honed the edge of my axe. You never know.

Next day the Army marched. Our troops had come down from the North in skin boats, or by foot along paths that clung close to the sound of the breaking wave, to steal the well-broken horses and come at the High King from a direction he did not expect. Now, therefore, we marched north of west, to Tara.

We must have been five thousand strong, all told, and we covered a great square of country. For besides the men, we had the cattle we had stolen in the country round about, and the horses, and droves of swine, and all the women we had stolen as well, and who now wouldn’t be left behind, after the way of women in a land at war, and their children came, and children who didn’t belong to anyone who would own them now, but who had to come with the Army because there was no other way for them to beg a few scraps to eat.

We trampled over the grass of May and left it a great scar of mud, because it rained the day we marched, as one might expect, after weeks of dry weather. We strewed the countryside with half-gnawed bones and worn-out shoes, piles of ordure and dead babies and all the other litter an army leaves behind. This, I thought, is what Pryderi would like to see again in the Island of the Mighty: I wish he were here to see it now.

The chariots had been painted in gaudy colours, and hung about with bronze and silver bells, and charms of all kinds, in place of what they usually hung on them. For the journey, the colours were covered against the dust with sheets of coarse cloth. And men pulled them, because it was important that the precious horses should not be tired out or cast shoes or break legs before the battle.

We covered about fifteen miles in the day, and when we halted we were, they told me, in sight of Tara, but there was never a city
I could see where they pointed, only a few scattered huts between me and the distant hills where the sun was setting. But what I could see only too well, and see better in the dark, was the long line of fires that answered our own. From our farthest right to our farthest left the fires shone hard and bright in the clear dry air, for the hard east wind now blew the rain away. I could see clear and harsh the figures of men who passed between us and the flames. So we lit our own fires, and we made our force look bigger, as I was sure the High King had done, by lighting two fires for every man and a fire for every woman.

We cut down a forest to feed our fires, and we slaughtered all our cattle, so that every man could have the hero’s portion, the thigh, to eat, and the rest we threw away as not juicy enough. The women stuffed themselves on what was left and then the straggling children, and the dogs quarrelled over the bones, and the mangy wolves crept out of the thickets and scavenged at the edges of the camp, and wished it were the next evening, because they knew, they knew.

There was mead enough for every man to get drunk, and stay drunk till Doomsday, as indeed a man will if he thinks Doomsday is tomorrow. So get drunk they did, all of them, before midnight. I went to the Setanta, who was still sober enough to speak, and I suggested that he should get a line of pickets out, in case the High King tried to rush us in the dark. He laughed at me. The Irish never do such things, he told me. They have no sense of prudence at all. Now you or I, if we had an enemy, would have used some intelligence when he left himself vulnerable, would ambush him with a knife in the dark, or put an arrow in his back in a narrow way, or burn his house over his head – or safer, when he was out of it. But the Irish believe in meeting their foes face to face. No, said the Setanta, there was no need to be afraid of anything.

I did not agree. I looked for Heilyn, or Callum, or any of the men who had come with us in the ship, but they were not to be found. Drunk, somewhere, I thought. Will there be no sentry in the night over all this army of the North? No, none but I.

I remembered how our army lay. Before us there was a wide level plain. It is only on such ground that you can fight in chariots.
About midway along our front was a mound, a burial mound of the men of old. On our right, there was a thicket, and between the mound and the thicket was an area of scrub willow, knee high or higher. Our left flank was quite open.

I moved through the host, my sealskin cloak open to show my mail coat, one eye black and one glowing red, ruby red. Nobody was sober enough to ask what I was doing, or to deny me anything. From one group I took a jug of bull’s blood, hot and steaming from the heart, and from another I had a jar of mead. In a bowl I put the fat from around a bull’s kidneys, and the thigh of a porker. These I balanced on my shield, a round bronze shield, enamelled, once set with garnets. I balanced the shield on one hand, and in the other I had a black cock.

I turned my back on the host of Ulster, and I walked towards the host of the High King. I went over the open ground in the dark, and there was not the least silver of moon nor any star to be seen; yet I did not step into a molehill, nor trip over a drunken sleeper nor an amorous one.

I came to the top of the mound, a low mound raised perhaps five or six feet above the level of the plain. I set down the tray. I took from my bag a knife, a bronze knife, broad of blade, and I began to dig. I knew where. It was an old grave and much honoured, the grave of one of the long dead kings of the country, and full, if only I had had the courage to open it, of Gold and jewels. But I found the funnel between the stones that led down to the mouth of the King. First into the funnel I poured the bull’s blood, hot and still steaming, full of life and strength, and after that the mead, full of the warmth of the sun and the busy stirring of the bees. Then I offered the fat and the meat, and I put them into the hole, that the waking Dead might eat and be filled, and not hunger after me. Last of all I took the morse that fastened my cloak, a Golden pin, Indian Gold, not Irish, and I threw it into the hole. Phryne gave it to me. Phryne was dead. I gave it back to the dead. I did not fill in the hole.

I stood on the mound that led to the land of the dead, the grave mound that all the British and all the Irish believe is a gate to the Land Below, where we who live may meet those who are dead and those who yet may live. I had paid my private debt to
Those Below. That would have whetted their appetites. Now I would show them how to feast, now I would draw out life for them. Now they would have a feast indeed.

I stood on the mound in the blackness, and I looked toward the host of the High King, where the fires died uncovered and the filth of men was poured out on the earth, and I saw that they were ready. And I took the High King and all his host, and I devoted them to the Gods Below, I sacrificed them to the dead who sought their lives. I sang in the ancient tongue the rite of the Gods Below, that our ancestors first brought over the mountains out of the plain, when Greek and Trojan, Persian and Egyptian were one nation. I asked the questions, and I answered them too, for want of anyone to answer them to me.

‘And you came to the crossing of the river, and what found you there?’ I asked myself, and I answered in the dark:

‘Waters swift to the knee, waters cold to the belly, waters bitter over the head.’

The fires opposite me guttered and died as if the waters indeed rose over them. The host of the High King lay down drunk to sleep, and they dreamed: oh, yes, they dreamed. Their dreams did them no good.

‘And you came to the crest of the mountain, and what found you there?’ I chanted, as I have chanted it before in the Temple of the Old city. And I sang the response, as I have sung it to my Father, and as my nephews have, and my son will sing to me:

‘I found the heart out of the chest, and the liver out of the trunk.’

The darkness was thick enough to touch, thick enough to feel. This was a darkness that I called upon myself, a darkness that felt and thought and knew. With this darkness I cursed the host of the High King. The black cock lay still at my feet looking at the Holy Line. I asked: