Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (78 page)

There was silence, a long silence. Precent would not have made such an appeal in that Hall, unless he had agreed it before with the King. Yet there was silence. Even after Evrog said, ‘If I were young, I would go. But now I am too old, and if I must die, then it will be on the steps of my own Dun,’ still there was silence. Precent looked
at me, asking me, silently, to speak. I looked at my hands. Wars had nothing to do with me. I was going to Bradwen in Eiddin, not to war. Someone asked from the bottom of the Hall, ‘And have anybody come to join you from other Kingdoms, real like?’

‘Oh, come and see them,’ Precent invited. ‘Men there are from Mona, who speak strange and sibilant, as if they had adenoids. Syvno has brought them, and you all know of him, whose father was Astrologer to Vortigern the Good. And men from the Mountains that look on Mona, who cannot understand how it rains so little in Eiddin.’ This caught at me, these would be my own people. ‘And men from Dyfed and Gwent, forest walkers who have stripped every hedge in Eiddin to make their ash bows. Don’t like wind, they don’t. And men from the Summer Country, where Uther Pendragon rules.’

This last took them all, caused head wagging and whispering.

‘More, there are men from over the seas. There are soldiers from Little Britain, in Gaul, who went over with the Legions to conquer Rome, and did it, and never came back till now. Not many of them with us, but some.’

There was more murmuring. But still no one said he would come. Peredur Ironarms put it bluntly, what the hindrance was.

‘Do you expect that we will come to ride under you as Captain of Mynydog’s Household? How many of my cousins have you not killed, Pict King?’

‘I am not the Captain of this Household. I will ride, but I will serve.’ There was a sound of astonishment. ‘There will be another Captain. His name I will not tell you. If you are too proud to ride except for a name, then it is too proud you are to ride at all.’

And then Evrog spoke again.

‘Too old I said I was to go. But if any man of my household wants to go, he may, and he can return to me when the campaign is over, and keep all his booty, and he may boast as he likes of what he did, and no man may contradict him, who did not go with him. And I will send Mynydog thirty suits of mail, and helmets for thirty men, and thirty swords’ – and here there was another taking of breath through the Hall, because this was a royal gift again, and would leave half the pillars bare – ‘and twenty billets of good iron to beat spearheads out of, and forty horses all broken with their
harness and saddles and three sets of shoes apiece. And this so that my Cousin may grant arms to his Household.’

Never had anyone thought that Evrog and Mynydog could be on such terms of friendship. There must be peace for one to send such gifts to the other, at this moment when the Irish raged along the coasts. Cynon stood.

‘If Mynydog raises such a Household, what do I do here?’

This, I guessed, had already been arranged. Evrog told him, ‘You need not ask arms of Mynydog. I have given you a sword and mail to guard my gate. Take them, and bring them back again to me.’

Peredur Ironarms was on his feet.

‘So long as Precent is not leader of the war band,’ he said in that lazy insolent way that his nephew, I hear, has after him, ‘it will be no objection my friends will be having if I ride alongside this Pict to look after him.’

There was a roar of laughter at this, and Precent went a purple colour, but still he sat chewing the ends of his moustaches and answered mildly.

‘We will ride together then, and count the heads of the Savages we drive on to each others’ swords.’

Now it was this mildness of Precent’s, this willingness to accept provocation, that convinced the men of Strathclyde that there was something special about the expedition. Gelorwid, Evrog’s other nephew, stood up, and talked like a hermit preaching a sermon, but that was the fault of the way he had been brought up. ‘There is the evil that Morgan preached, that a man can choose his life, and take good or evil as he wishes. But every man does only what God has laid up for him. It may seem to him that he chooses. God in the beginning laid out the world and fixed for every man the way he should go, and how he should die. Maybe, I will be a priest and a hermit after all, maybe not. God has already chosen for me.’ His face and his voice brightened. ‘I have learnt a few prayers, and I will come and say those to you. Looking at the men who insist on going, I am sure that a little virtue and sound doctrine will be necessary. And I have not forgotten the swordplay I learnt at my father’s knee, when I was able to beat Peredur when I liked, and I am sure that I can now—’

With that there was a hubbub, but several of the rougher
grooms bellowed from the back of the Hall, so as to cut down the opposition, ‘Quiet all of you, give the lad a chance, let him talk!’

They hoisted Aidan on to the table, and he cried out in his Irish-accented British tongue, his voice not long past breaking, ‘I am a King’s son, and I deserve a sword and a coat of mail, even if I have three elder brothers who are without arms. I will come with you and fight because I want a sword!’

There was a shout of applause, and now there were a whole crowd of men shouting to be heard. Among them, I could recognise Morien, shouting, ‘I shall burn them out, burn them out!’

Then the songs began, and the Harper tried to choose the tunes, but he was shouted down as they sang the old songs, songs of war made long before I ever sang of peace, ‘Heads on the Gate’, and ‘The Toad’s Ride’, ‘The Hunting of the Black Pig’, and ‘Blood on the Marshes’. Tomorrow would be the preparation, the saddling of the horses and the packing of soft bags, the farewells to mothers and the parting gifts from sweethearts, the choosing of clothes for riding and of clothes for feasting, and the giving away of things one would need after because they would be easy to loot and better for it. But tonight was the time for singing and drinking, and the old songs rolled in the rafters. Under the sound of the music and laughter, Precent and Evrog leant towards me.

‘Will you come too?’ Precent asked. ‘Foster-brother, dearer than a brother, will you ride into Mordei and the land of the Savages? Will you guard my back?’

‘In war,’ I asked bitterly, ‘what would I do? What place has the ox in the stampede?’

‘If you are a poet, come and sing for us and make our deeds immortal. If you are not a poet, come and kill Savages.’

‘I do not know,’ I said. It was true. I could not think what I would do, except that I would not ride to war against the Savages. ‘I will come to Eiddin, if I can.’

‘I will give you a horse,’ offered Evrog. ‘You may have it whether you go to war or not, whether you go to Eiddin or not. It is yours for all the pleasure you have given me over the years.’

‘Then I will come to Eiddin,’ I agreed. I meant that I would ride to Bradwen. I did not know that I was riding to Cattraeth. Gelorwid was right. It was our fate.

It was three days riding from Dumbarton to Eiddin, across the lowlands. It was the first riding I had done for more than a year. I rode the brown gelding that Evrog had given me, a good enough horse, not perhaps the best in his stable, but a steady beast under me as if he had sympathy with me. It did not hurt as much to sit astride him as I feared.

There were nine young men, beside Precent and myself. We did not ride, only, because we led the rest of the forty horses Evrog sent. Three horses to a man is not too great an allowance for a campaign. There would be none to steal from the Savages, because they find it hard enough to manage oxen – even oxen can escape
them. Even Arthur could not have defeated them had they been mounted, because they came about him as lice about a hairy dog.

The horses carried the iron rods and bars, ready for the smith to hammer out into spear-points. Axes and swords with their edges sharp to cut a wisp of lamb’s wool, they are different. You have to get a real smith to beat out those, who has served his seven years of apprenticeship and has learned to make the edge straight and beat in the charcoal to the spongy iron they bring us from the bogs of Shetland.

Swords are work for craftsmen, as are songs. They are not made by brawn and the hard striking of the great hammer, any more than by a sweet voice or the oft repeating of rhymes. In each the skill is knowing what to say, where to strike. Any man could beat out here the strips of iron that make the rim of a helmet and the arches to frame the hard leather cap. But sending iron for swords would be no use if Mynydog had no swordsmiths, and the likelihood was he had too few workers even to use the iron Evrog had sent him. So swords Evrog sent too, long horsemen’s swords of blue smooth iron, to give reach to a man who leans forward to strike at an enemy below.

Lighter than the swords and the iron bars were the shields. A shield-frame is not difficult to make, but it takes time to weave the great oval basket, lightly dished, and time Mynydog did not have. The frames were covered with leather, but unpainted. A man must decide for himself what he wants painted on his shield, and if he can get the iron, whether he wants it rimmed or not; most of us did not want iron on our shields, to tire our arms.

Swords take skill to make, and shields take time. Mail takes both. A mail shirt is not made in a hurry for one campaign. More jeweller’s work it is than smith’s. You hammer out the iron bars into long wires, a little thicker than oatstraws. Each ring has four more rings linked through it, and each of these into four more. A thousand rings are so linked and you have a little sheet like knitted wool, large enough to shield a man’s breast from the flight of an arrow. So weeks and weeks of work will make at last a strip of fabric in iron, and if you fold it you have a sleeve. A shirt has two sleeves, and the body will take as much work as a dozen sleeves. Then after a year, a smith, working small and
quiet, ring after monotonous ring, may have enough mail to clothe a man for war. And all that time, the smith must be fed.

A mailed shirt is a precious thing, not easily or cheaply bought, and I did not think that all the Kingdoms of the North could muster five hundred. Yet Evrog had been better than his promise, and had sent forty of them, each worth the purchase of a man’s life. I knew, we all knew, how bare he left his own armoury, with the Scots at his gate. These shirts he sent to Mynydog. He did not give them to his own young men. If they were to be Mynydog’s men for this campaign, then Mynydog must give them their arms. To Mynydog of Eiddin they went: I went to Bradwen in Eiddin.

We rode under the rock of Eiddin, beneath the steep North Face that rises sheer from the meadows and the marshes, a mile from the Forth. The watchers on the walls of the Dun, at the western end of Eiddin, turned their eyes from the fishing boats to watch us come and try to count us and guess who we were and where we came from. When they recognized the squat figure of Precent, never graceful on a horse, they began to wave and to shout at us, and we waved back.

By the time we had reached the eastern end of Eiddin, and turned south between it and the Giant’s Throne, as we called it then, to ride up the long slope to the village beneath the rampart, they were all out, women and children, shouting to Precent, throwing flowers at him, and beneath his horse’s hooves. The children fed the tired beast with handfuls of grass, and the smallest ones pulled at his stirrups and at his heels, and called him to look at them; and when he did, they were overcome with shyness and hid their faces or turned away.

They were all glad to see Precent. Nobody looked at the rest of us. It was plain that young men on horses came in every day, always fresh men, every draft like the last. There was no novelty in that, in men they had never seen before. But Precent coming home, Precent himself, oh, that was different, even if he had been gone only a week from Eiddin. Precent coming home, now, that was something to sing about. So they sang, and our young men sang with them. I did not sing. I did nothing. I did not even hide my face. No one looked at me.

We turned in between the two rows of little houses that edge the last mile of the path to the Dun, the King’s mile from his Hall to his farm. We heard a horn blow, Gwanar’s horn, I knew, who had succeeded Precent at the gate. It was noon, Mynydog would be sitting on his Mound of Judgement, before the gate of the Dun. Now any of his people, any free man of the Isle of Britain, could come to him where he sat with Clydno his Judge by his side to tell him what was true law and what was not. Every day he sat, like every King, to hear complaints of one man against another, or against the King, and do justice, in the Roman manner.

Precent led the file of men and horses up the slope. I dismounted, and let a small boy hold the reins of my brown gelding. This entrance had nothing to do with me. I would not ride up the slope behind Precent. I would not be his gift to Mynydog. I had as much right in Eiddin as any man, as much right as Mynydog himself. I was a freeman of the Isle of Britain, and I would give myself where I wished. I would give myself to Bradwen, and what she told me I would do. I let Precent ride on.

I looked about Eiddin from under my hood. It had altered little in the winter I had been away. But it had altered. The houses were the same. The people were the same, the women as talkative, the children as shrill, the men as silent, as they had been a year ago; only all a year older. A year makes a great difference to a child. You do not recognise a child you knew a year ago, he has changed; and he will not recognise you – he has more important things to fill his mind than the comings of grown-ups. But apart from the people, Eiddin had changed. Every other house was now a smithy, with men beating out spear- and arrowheads, and strips of iron for helmet-brims and shield-rims and for bits and stirrups. You cannot expect a smith who works on his farm and only lights his forge once a week, if that, and then only to straighten a bent ploughshare or edge a wooden spade – you cannot expect him to think of welding mail rings or beating the edge of a sword.