Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (83 page)

What we did not eat hot in the night, we took away with us cold in the morning. In the middle of the day, with four hours riding behind you, and another four hours ahead, there is nothing to keep your heart up like a slab of cold roast mutton, with the crisp white fat in it, firmly breaking between your teeth. They were wonderful days, that summer. We would sit out in the noon sun to eat, the hobbled horses grazing around us. We lay on our backs, and watched the high clouds over us. We played ‘She loves me – she loves me not’ with the daisy flowers, and blew dandelion fluff into other men’s faces, and covered our friends’ backs with the bared seedheads of the grass. We would practise the songs we knew, and dance, men with men, the dances of every Kingdom in the Island of Britain. For songs are the same everywhere, since we speak the same language, from Wick to Cornwall, but every Kingdom has its own dances.

They were peaceful days, and we were all friends. I had little work as a judge, because there were no disputes. You may find it difficult, nowadays, hearing of all the quarrels and rivalry of Arthur’s Household, to believe that there were no quarrels ever
in the Household of Eiddin: but it is true. It is easy enough to keep from quarrelling, when there are enough girls to go round, and meat for everybody, and enough mead but not too much. Sometimes there were arguments about precedence of families or the pride of pedigrees, and it was then that I had to work my memory to bring back the order of the Houses of the Island. But above all, what kept us from quarrelling was the thought, always, that we were the greatest Household that any King had ever raised, and that it was our destiny to ride South and deliver all the Island from the Savages. And if that was our aim, then why should we quarrel over lesser things? We were consecrated, set aside, for this great enterprise and for this holy aim. The Virgin kept us in peace.

What we practised thus in harmony in the day, we sang and danced in earnest at night, in the fenced farmyards with the girls around us to join in, to learn the new choruses we brought them, and to make themselves perfect in the new steps and unfamiliar rhythms of Gwent or Little Britain. Oh, they were merry nights indeed, around the big fires the people lit for us, coming in from three or four miles away, from their own farms to the places where we slept.

Yes, the nights were merry, and the farmers poured out the mead for us, what mead they had left, and they gave it willingly. They had paid, already, that year, a treble tax of mead to Mynydog, and a treble tax of grain for three years, and of wool the same. This had fed and clothed the whole Household for one year, giving each man his feasts, and his three shirts and his saddlecloth and his red cloak. And mutton, too, besides wool: they had sent their sheep in to mix with the game we hunted for ourselves. They had thinned their flocks for the Household, and never grudged it.

Besides the meat and the wool, there was the leather too. The mail of a coat will keep the edge or the point from tearing the skin. It will not stop the force of a blow. A good stroke with an axe, or even with a staff or an iron bar, landing on a body protected only by iron, will break a bone. You see men, too, dying slowly from a ruptured spleen after a blow in the back, or coughing up frothy blood with their ribs splintered into their lungs,
and dying just the same, and even men with their backbones broken, who live, may live a long time, but cannot move. And sometimes a blow will not itself break the skin, but force the broken ends of the bone out into the air of day.

So when the smiths have made you a mail shirt, you must stitch it to a lining of boiled leather, stiff and unyielding. Always remember to have five or six more layers of boiled oxhide over the shoulders. This will save you from a downward stroke to break the collarbone: also, it stops you raising your arm too high in excitement, and taking a point into the armpit. The farmers all down the coast, now, went without shoes, and they guided their horses with ropes of straw, because for three years they had sent all their ox-hides to Mynydog. All this had stiffened our mail: because of this we could afford, every man of us, to ride in high leather boots, and tuck into them breeches of two thicknesses of leather to keep our shins safe in battle or in the briars.

But you need more padding than that. Stiff leather does little more than muffle the blow and spread it over your whole trunk rather than on a narrow line. Even then, a well-placed stroke might leave you winded, rolling and gasping on the ground, and hoping in your agony that some one of your comrades would come up and stand over you. What we used to do was to wear two sheepskin jerkins under the mail, one with the fleece outside, the other with the fleece next to the body to soak up the sweat. You did sweat under all that, and when your shirt dried at night, you would find it in the morning white and stiff with the salt, to stop a blow on its own. I had to wash my shirt at the end of every week, and that is why Mynydog had given us so many. It was the fashion, too, to wear scarves around the neck, if you could get them, to stop the armour chafing as well as to soak up the sweat, and at the end of the day’s ride it was nothing for a man to take his scarf off and wring it out and see a stream of water pour from it to make a puddle at his feet. Men would get their sweethearts to make them scarves in the colours of their families or their kings. So because of the shirts we wore, and the sheepskins we had under the mail, and the saddle-cloths we sat on, and the leather jerkins they made for the infantry, the farmers down the coast and up into the hills had all to make do with
their old coats a year longer, through the rain and the snow, or lie a layer colder in their winter beds.

These were the people who had paid for the Household. They had done it all with poor tools, and not enough. A year earlier, even before they had ridden down to rescue me and avenge Eudav, when Mynydog was still only planning this campaign in secret in his own mind, Precent and Gwanar had ridden around every farm in the Kingdom, looking for iron, taking away all the metal the farmers could spare, and some they could not. Precent picked up any old spade, or fork with broken tines: or if there were a farm cart that nobody was actually using at the time, and Gwanar could attract all the attention his way, then Precent would take the iron tyres and the chains and the swingle-rings. A broken ploughshare was a great find, and the nails out of a pair of shoes not too little to take. These farmers had paid, then, in iron as well as in labour. Later in the summer they would be ready, many of them, to pay in time, and in blood, because they were willing to march as infantry with the Household down to the South. They had paid all that the Household had cost, these farmers, and when we came riding by they were pleased to see how all their goods had been spent.

They
were
glad to see us. They had paid, they saw, for an army gathered from all the Kingdoms of Britain, and farther, because we had those men from Little Britain across the sea. They saw our army with their own eyes, riding up and down the coast as far as the edge of Mordei, to press back the Savages, however they came, by land or sea. This was what they wanted. Mynydog had not wasted all the taxes they had sent him, and they were satisfied, and more than satisfied, to see us. We meant to them freedom from fear and anxiety. So nothing was too good for us, who had come to fight for them, nothing too lavish even though they starved themselves. Just to see men who had come such immense distances, from Orkney or from Cornwall even, places they had only heard of from wandering poets like me, come just to defend them, why, it made them sing all night, even sober.

We rode an easy way, east and south, under the blue sky of a hot June, looking out over the blue seas, at a few white clouds, at a little white foam. The wind blew, lightly, from west of south.
When at last we came to the end of our ride, to the border of Mordei, the debatable land, we saw smoke blown out over the sea.

We looked south, across the empty country where no one lived any more. The stone castles that our fathers had built were empty. Those walls can keep out the Savages all right, because they do not know how to attack them, or how to build them, and they are afraid of what they do not understand, instead of wanting to understand it and conquer it like a civilised man: but how can a man live in a castle when he dares not walk as far as his own cabbage-patch, let alone ride his sheep-walks, for fear of being killed without warning by men who sit all the time motionless in the woods, watching him. Nobody lived in Mordei, not our people, not the Savages. But somewhere down there, perhaps as far south as the border between Mordei and Bernicia, there was a fire, so huge a fire that though it was too far to see flames, we could watch the smudge of dirty smoke rising high in the air and drifting out to sea.

‘What is it?’ Aidan asked. ‘Are they burning up all the world?’

‘They would if they could,’ I answered him. ‘They have powerful wizards, who make their strong swords. I have heard it said that there is an Island in the northern seas where their demons have set the mountains on fire.’

‘It’s evil, whatever it is,’ Cynrig agreed. He never liked to talk about magic. Perhaps he was too ashamed of his family who had their own dealings with the Little People who live under the sea near Cardigan. He turned away from us on the hillcrest, and shouted to the rest of the Squadron who had not thought it worth the effort to climb with us, and were grazing their horses in the dead ground behind us.

‘Come up here! All of you, come on! Come and see the evil these Savages are bringing on us. They say you can burn the stones in Bernicia, and that is how the legions held the country. I think that this is what the Savages are doing, burning the land itself to spoil it for us.’

The men strolled up the rise to look, chatting as they came and falling silent as they saw the smoke.

‘Burn all the Isle of Britain, they will,’ breathed Aidan, full of a kind of pride at having been the first to see it. ‘Demons they
are, indeed. What do they look like? Do they look anything like men?’

‘Never seen one, boy?’ Cynon smiled at him. ‘Like men, they are, only horns they do have, or so they say who never saw any, let alone killed any. And watch out for the females, they’re worse. You’ll see them, soon enough, horns and all. Come on, then, if you’ve all had a good look. We don’t want to spend too much time watching here for nothing to come. Cynrig, you get them mounted again.’

We straggled down the slope. Morien stayed longest, looking fascinated at the smoke till the last. We laughed at him. He looked seriously at me.

‘Burn the whole country,’ he breathed. ‘Aye, that would be a fine thing to do. Scorch them out of the way, I’d like to do that. And I will, too. You wait.’

We laughed at him the more. I pulled myself up on to my horse, a brown gelding that I had broken myself three years before and Eudav had given me, and Mynydog had kept for me. I walked out to my place, right marker, and waited while the others finished fussing over their harness and got themselves up into their saddles. Then Cynrig bellowed the orders like a true Roman, as Owain had taught him, trying to sound like Owain – we all tried to sound like Owain in those days:

‘On your marker, into line … walk! Right … turn! In extended column of pairs … walk! …
March!
’

Going north, for the first hour, I rode as Scout, Aidan as always by me.

‘No, never seen any of these Savages, I haven’t,’ he told me. ‘Have they
got
tails, then? Really? Have they really got tails?’

‘It all depends. If you are frightened of them, then you’ll see tails on them, if they’ve got them or not.’

‘And horns?’

‘Oh, yes, horns, of course.’ I smiled at him, smiled, not laughed. ‘And so have some of us. Why, Aidan, you’re a horned man yourself.’

He looked at me suspiciously, puzzled, while we rode a few paces. Then he began to grin.

‘Horns? On my helmet, you mean?’

‘Yes, on your helmet. And so do they on theirs. But we put whatever we like on our helmets, horns and wings and wheels and moons and stars. They always put horns.’

‘But … Aneirin, is it true that they boil living men in their big pots and eat them?’

‘Nonsense! Even Savages aren’t as bad as that. The Picts used to do that, once upon a time, but you’ve never seen Precent eat anybody, have you? And, anyway, who ever saw a pot big enough to boil a whole man in. You could never make one, not even out of iron.’

‘But they used to have them in Ireland. Everybody knows that. The old Kings used to keep them, and they used to boil their dead soldiers to life again after battles.’

‘Tales, Aidan, tales. Men like me make them up.’

‘But you haven’t been in Ireland, have you, to see? I know people who have been, and they’ve told me about it. I hope the Savages haven’t got one of those Irish cauldrons. Still I hope too I get a chance to see one of those Savages alive before we start killing them. Just to tell about after, like.’

‘Little chance of that,’ I told him. But even so, he was the first, a few steps later, to see the ship, and the Savages in it. We had come to the head of a steep path winding down the face of the cliff into the bay. It was too steep for a horse, but farther on, between the rocky headland where we stood and the more northern spur of rock, both jutting out into the sea, with the waves breaking at their feet over the cruel stones, sand-dunes ran down to the water’s edge. From the cliff, we could look down into the ship, drifting in gently against the light wind, on the last hour of the rising tide, between the horns of the cliff its own dragon head horned.

It was a Savage ship, I could see that. It was bigger than any vessel we Romans build, huge, immense, fifteen or twenty paces long at least. They have wizards to conjure these ships together, making the sides firm with planks of oak because they have not the wisdom to sew leather as civilized people do. They glue the planks together with Roman blood, and sew them with the sinews of Christians.

Aidan, riding ahead, saw it first, and called me to look. He was amazed, saying it was some King’s Hall that had fallen into the
water. He was more alarmed when he heard it was a ship. I shouted back to Cynrig, but he, leading the main body, was too far back to hear. I told Aidan, ‘You ride back and tell Cynon. I’ll go on, and find an easy way down there. I think we can ride over the dunes to meet it.’