Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (84 page)

‘Don’t go by yourself down there, not by yourself!’ Aidan was terrified. ‘They’ll bewitch you.’

‘Better they bewitch one than two,’ I laughed at him. ‘I’ll sing them a satire.’ But when he had gone, I remembered that I would sing no more satires. Yet, as I rode down to the beach among the marram and the sea holly, I thought what satire I would have sung, and what the rhyme structure would have been, and what pattern of alliteration would have been most effective in quelling a wizard.

When I had found a smooth way down through the dunes, firm for the horse’s feet, the ship had already grounded, some way out, stuck on a sandbank, with the water still all around her. The tide was near its peak, and soon would be hanging, as it does, for an hour. I watched the ship, leaning over on its side, till the leading riders, Aidan leading Cynon and Cynrig and a score of others, came galloping over the sand to me, screaming and shouting as if they were going into battle or driving deer into the nets. I shouted back at them to be quiet, and they settled down, some of them sitting with us and others wandering about up and down the beach on foot. They poked in the seaweed and driftwood, and filled their helmets with mussels and winkles. Caso spread out his red cloak on the sand and went to sleep in the sun. At least they were quiet, and let us alone to listen for any voices out of the ship.

‘
Is
there anyone in it?’ Cynon asked, when for a long time we had heard and seen nothing.

‘There must be,’ I answered. ‘I think I saw something from the cliff. Yes, I am sure that I saw people in it.’

‘How many were there?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Think! Were they men or women? Or both? Were they armed? Did you see their weapons shine? Did they move about? Did they look up at you, or wave?’

‘I do not know. I cannot remember.’

‘Did you not try to count them?’

‘I never thought.’

‘Then what did you think?’

‘I remember that. I looked down from the cliff, and I saw the water so blue, against the rocks so grey like shining iron, and spattered with the white foam so clean. And on that pure sea, the ship lay dirty brown, like a … like a turd, come floating in to foul our pure sand.’

‘Oh, a nice poetic thought that was, to be sure. But it’s with a soldier’s eye you’ve got to be looking at things now. Fine verse it would make, to be sure, but it don’t help the the first boys to go up there, now, do it? How do we know what’s waiting for them?’

‘All right,’ I said shortly. I was nettled by Cynon’s sneering, his blunt words. It was more like Precent. It was Owain we tried to be like; but in stress and action, it was Precent we imitated. ‘I’m going up first.’

‘Oh, no you’re not,’ Cynrig told me. ‘We’re not losing our Judge so early. I’m going into it first, I and … Caso. Caso!
Caso!
Kick him awake, somebody. Come here, boy, and bring your sword. Now, who else would—’

But at that moment the noise started, a blurred indistinct half-moan, half-grumble, from inside the ship. Then a head appeared over the bulwarks, two feet above our faces, and looked down at us. It was a man. At least, it had once been a man and not a woman. He was old, in his forties at least. His hair and his uncut beard were turning from yellow to grey in themselves, but over this they were streaked white with sea salt from the dried foam. The salt was encrusted too on his face, clinging in the layer of grease with which he had tried to protect skin from the drying wind and the sun. He hung there, his face just above the gunwale, and croaked at us, and croaked, and croaked. It was difficult, but at last I could tell Cynon, ‘He’s asking for water.’

‘Oh, it’s water he wants, is it? All right, boys, let him have his water.’

Cynrig and Caso rode out into the sea, as far as the ship. Mounted, they could have leant over the bulwarks. They did not go as near as that, only close enough to catch the old man by the
arms and drag him over the side, to drop him, face down, into the salt waves. He rolled over, spluttering and retching, trying to hold his head out of the water, which was only ankle deep. Everybody laughed. He got up on to his hands and knees, and crawled a little of the way towards the land. Then he collapsed again. Aidan ran barefooted into the little waves and, catching him by the legs, dragged him backward on to the dry shore. Then Aidan poured some water from his flask into the dry mouth.

‘Clean that bottle well after him, lad,’ Cynon advised him. Cynrig, dismounting by Aidan, asked me, ‘What’s he trying to say now?’

Even after drinking, when I was kneeling by him, the old man was difficult to follow. I was able, at last, to say, ‘An ox, he seems to be talking about an ox. He wants us to take care of an ox.’

‘Got an ox, then, have they?’ asked Cynon. ‘Have a look, boys!’

There were at least a dozen men now who had ridden or waded out to the ship. At Cynon’s word, they gingerly heaved themselves up to look into the ship. Then they began jumping in with shouts of discovery.

They were very gentle with the ox. First of all, Hoegi passed his helmet full of water up into the ship for it. Then they hoisted it out and down into the knee-deep water. It could hardly walk, but they urged it up the sand, to where Morein had lit a fire of brushwood. They brought out, too, three young pigs, and these men had to carry.

‘Anything more?’ Cynon shouted.

‘Lots of iron,’ Caso replied. There was, too, a great deal. Six or eight of the curved knives they used for wood-splitting or fighting came first, a little longer than a man’s forearm, single-edged and curved. Then there was a hay-fork, two wooden spades edged with iron, three axes, a hammer, two sickles and a scythe. A whetstone Caso thrust through his belt. There was a quern, which they threw into the water. Against it, our men broke a large number of pots and dishes, coarse and clumsy, and bad in colour. Hoegi cut the stays, and then Caso beat the tabernacle to pieces with his axe, so that the mast and yard, with the tatters of sail, fell over the side to be dragged to the shore.

‘Any people there?’ Cynon asked.

‘No, no people at all,’ Caso replied. ‘Some Savages, though.’

‘How many? Dead or alive.’

‘Some dead, some alive. Most betwixt and between.’

‘But how many?’ Cynon asked again.

‘How many?’ I asked the old man.

‘We were thirty,’ he answered.

‘Fifteen up here,’ Caso shouted. But Cynon looked down at the old man and snarled, ‘Tell us more!’

‘Tell us more!’ I repeated in his language. He shut his mouth, firmly, defiantly in a straight line.

‘All right, then, hold your tongue if you want to,’ Cynon shouted at him, and from the saddle kicked the old man in the back so that he fell forward again on his face in the sand. Meanwhile, men were bringing clothes out of the ship, and bags of household stuffs that they spread out on the beach for us to share out. There were cloaks and shirts, and instead of the togas we wear kilted around our bodies down to our knees the Savages use trousers of cloth to walk about in, as we wear leather breeches to ride. There were some pieces of jewellery in the bags, and I managed to snatch a ring with a stone in it, though what the stone was, and whether it was brass or gold or even bronze the ring was made of, I had not time to see.

Then the soldiers lifted out of the ship, with difficulty, two big leather bags, full to bursting with something that squeezed and shifted. They balanced the sacks on the gunwale, and Caso slashed one of them with his sword, bringing out a handful of grain which he passed over to me.

‘Seed corn,’ I told him. ‘For wheat.’

‘Let it grow in the sand!’ laughed Cynon. The old man watched as we emptied both sacks into the water. The grain floated, a scum on the surface, spreading out to hide the blue of a wide stretch of the shallow sea, dirtying it, stealing its beauty from us, just like the Savages who brought it.

Last of all, we could see half a dozen of our men heaving and straining till something of great weight fell over the side and splashed into the water. And there it sank into the soft sand, and proved very troublesome to those who tried to bring it out onto the firmer beach. But they did it, and pulled the heavy thing
up the beach to the fire. It was a Savage plough, with a beam of oak as thick as a man’s body, and a pole of ash: the wheels were iron-tyred, and the share of iron, too, three times the size of a real civilised share. It was built to cut deep furrows in the clay, so that the Savages could plant wheat, that evil plant, which grows in the bad soils where oats run rank and thick. It was too heavy for a horse: it was what the ox was for.

The old man followed us with his eyes as we pulled the plough towards the fire. When he looked up the beach, he gave a wail at what he saw. There they were butchering the ox, and getting the joints ready to roast on a spit that Morien the forest man had made out of the poles of the mast and the yard. Cynon dismounted and shook the old Savage.

‘Talk!’ he said fiercely. Like so many Eiddin men, he had a few words of the Savages’ tongue, not enough to carry on a conversation, but enough to follow, vaguely, what was said in common talk. ‘Talk! Where from?’

The old man looked blankly at him. It was wilful insolence, he must have understood Cynon, he had shouted loud enough.

‘It’s no good,’ I told Cynon. ‘He
won’t
talk, he just won’t.’

‘Won’t he then?’ growled Morien. He and Caso grasped the old man under the armpits and dragged him to the fire. Morien took hold of his foot and held it close to the flames, till the filthy cloths in which he wrapped his legs began to char and the leather in his bursting shoes, salt-soaked, curled back and singed and steamed.

‘Talk!’ ordered Cynon. ‘Here, push it right in! Talk! There, that’s loosened him. Give him some water, somebody, or Aneirin won’t be able to hear him. Now, then, what’s he got to say?’

‘He says they come from far across the sea, very far,’ I explained to my comrades. ‘They used to live in a very flat lowland, on the edge of the sea, by marshes and lagoons. He says it is not good land for men to live in. They cannot grow much wheat, and have to kill birds and animals for food. The water is rising. Some of the marshes used to be fields when he was a boy. They can no longer grow enough wheat to live. They cannot go away inland, because they are afraid of the people who live there. So they have set out to sea to find a new land.’

‘Then they had better think about another new land,’ ruled Cynon. ‘They have no place in ours. Let them try Ireland.’

I listened to the rest of the old man’s story, putting it as well as I could into the language of the Island of Britain. He said:

‘We bought this ship from our chieftain. We gave him all the amber beads we had, and two pieces of gold that my mother’s mother had stored away, and three silver buckles and a bronze pot. We were thirty in it, myself and my brother, our sons and their wives, and some children. We had never been on the sea before, any of us, ever, only on little boats in the marsh. We suffered on the first day, and some of us ever after, always being sick, spewing up what we had to eat, burning and blistering in the sun and the wind. We thought that it would be a short voyage, only three weeks, that is what they told us who had been here and come back, only three weeks to Britain with a good east wind. We thought we would have an east wind, because we had sacrificed to the Wind God a sow, and a white horse that we bought with our old ox and two cows. We drove them into the sea, and cut their throats so that the blood drifted out towards the West, and the way the ship would go, and we thought that would bring us an east wind and good luck in all the voyage.

‘Then, as soon as the wind began to blow from the East, at the end of the spring, we set out to sea. Oh, we thought it was a great thing, to be out on the sea, just to point the ship before the wind and glide to a new land, with no work, no effort to move us on. At first, it was all a long feast: we ate and drank as much as we liked, even though it all went to waste over the side. But after a week, the wind changed, and began to blow from the West, and the ship went every-which-way whence and whither. Only sometimes at night could we make out the stars, and never in the day did we see the sun through the cloud, the thick cloud that never rained on us, so we never knew, in the end, which way we ought to go.

‘And soon, there was no food. And after that, no water. The little water we had, the last of it, we kept for the ox and the pigs. The children died first. Then the old. My brother died the first, and then his wife, and mine. But towards the end, it was the young men and women who began to fall away and dwindle.
I was the only one who had still strength to look over the side when I heard you speak, and knew we were safe.

‘Still, in spite of all, we had kept the ox alive. It was all we had to help us break the ground and grow food. We brought all the tools we had, so that we could clear the scrub and plant our wheat. We were not afraid of the hard work in clearing the forests, but at least we knew there would be plenty of empty land we could settle on. Nothing el[[s]]e in this Island, but enough land. It was late in the season, we knew, for setting out, but as long as we had the ox alive, and the seed corn, we would be able to grow enough to keep us through the winter and begin early next spring. That work we were prepared for, and starvation through next winter. But not the thirst on the water: that was too much.’

‘How then would you live through the summer, till your harvest was gathered?’ I asked him. Oh, but I knew how they would live. We would see them all over the civilised land, little bands of them, sometimes only one or two men, sometimes whole families, in rags, drifting from door to door, begging for old clothes, for food, for drink, for anything. If there were children with them, oh, they were expert at pinching them to make them cry and draw pity from our women.

I had seen Bradwen herself feed them, a hundred times, down in Eudav’s Hall, and at the end they had come back and burnt the Hall for her charity. That was what they wanted, to find a woman alone in a house, all the men out in the oat patches or farther out with the sheep. The would sit, all quiet and still, not saying a thing, watching her every move till her nerves began to shred. Then they would start, picking up a few things here and there, always with one eye for the men coming back so that they would have time to run into the woods. And if she protested, they would threaten her, and seize whatever else they could see, and if she did not protest, they would take the same things, but more slowly. And at the end, if nobody came back in time to frighten them away, they would take her as well, raping her on her own hearth, often on her own bed, perhaps four or five of them in turn. Oh, yes, that was how we had seen the Savages live through the summer, before they went home to their own
harvest of wheat in August. That was how this man was going to live, dress it up how he might.