Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (85 page)

‘We would live somehow,’ the old man told me. ‘Somehow. There are some of our own people settled, they told us, almost everywhere along this coast, wherever we came ashore. We would go to the nearest chief, and ask him for protection and food, and promise him support in return – as we promise you our loyalty for the food you will give us. That will ensure us a little wheat, enough to keep us alive through the winter, just alive. But besides, there are the forests. Oh, yes, they are full of food for the taking, everybody knows that. There is fruit there, hanging from every tree, and honey, as much as any family can want. The pigs run where they wish in those woods, and belong to no one, and they will come to be killed when you call. And deer, too, so tame that you can catch them with your hands as you walk in the woods, and they would do, though there is no human being who would eat deer meat for choice. Nobody can starve in this great and empty land. It’s fertile, too. It has never been tilled. A man has only to scratch a furrow with his plough, and plant six grains of wheat, and at the summer’s end, even if it is a bad summer, he will have six bushels. We have heard all about it from men who have been here, and returned to being over their sweethearts or their children or their parents. And the weather here, we know about that too. It is never bitter cold here, like it is in the homeland, and the snow never lies for weeks together, deep as a man’s thigh. And there is never drought, never a lack of rain to swell the crop. Oh, this is a glorious land, a splendid land – and all empty.’

And then he turned angrily, sweeping us, myself, Cynon, Cynrig, Caso, Morien, with a furious look.

‘And what have we done to you? What has changed? When first our people came here you welcomed us. Those first comers, you took them in, and fed them, and let them wander far into the country, up to the source of the great river in the South, till they found good clay land to plant their wheat. You were glad enough to have them then, to have more men in your empty Island. And they were no different from us, no better, no worse, three generations ago, I remember, myself, the talk about Hengist, how he sailed, in my grandfather’s time. He came, and your Kings
welcomed him, too, and made him a King like themselves. The poorest Prince in Jutland, he was, a laughing-stock all over the mainland, and yet you welcomed him and gave him a Kingdom. If you took men in before, why do you not now?’

‘There is no room for you,’ I told him. ‘The land is full. There is no land to spare.’

‘But no, but no! This island is empty. We know that. All the world knows it. All the Romans have gone. They went away, by tens of thousands, by tens of tens of thousands, in our grandfathers’ time, all of them streaming away across the narrow sea, back into Gaul to quarrel among themselves and fight the Franks and the Goths. They left the Island empty. The Romans pulled down the walls of the cities, and stripped the gold from the roofs and the silver from the gates, and they sailed away with all their wealth. We have not come hoping to find treasure to carry off ourselves; we know it is all gone. But the Romans left the land, they could not carry that off. We need the land to grow our food. Give us the land, so that our children will not starve, like those we left behind in Jutland. Why will you not give us the empty land the Romans left?’

It was Cynon who answered him. I translated as he spoke, even running on ahead, sometimes, because there was only one answer, whoever framed it.

‘There is no empty land. The Romans have not left.
We
are Romans.’ He stood there, in his red cloak, the red feathers blowing in his helm, proud as Owain. ‘The legions, yes, they left, and that was fifty, sixty years ago, to conquer all the world. What does that matter? What does it mean? North or south of the Wall, this Island is Roman. Roman it shall ever be. From Wick to Cornwall we keep the Roman faith, the Roman laws. We live and think as Romans. And this Roman land is not yours to settle in, nor ours to give you. It is a land we must keep for our children, so that they can live as Romans live. If we were not Romans, we would live like wild beasts, in the woods, as you do.’

The old man looked at us. At me, the go-between, still thin and frail after the year I had spent as the Savages’ slave. At Cynrig, fastidiously picking the lice out of a Savage shirt, and flicking them into the fire. At Cynon, rock steady, his feet wide apart on
the sand, one hand on his sword, the other holding the rib of beef from which he picked the meat with his strong even teeth. At the rest of the Squadron, eating beef around the fire, cooking mussels in a bucket, paddling in the sea, collecting more driftwood, or even just sleeping in the sun. In the heart of the fire, the ploughshare glowed red through and through.

He asked: ‘What shall we do now? How shall we live? You have stripped the clothes from our backs. You have broken our plough, and killed the poor ox that was to pull it, that was dearer to us than our children, because we kept it alive though they died. You have scattered our seed corn into the sea, that we thought dearer than our own lives, because we starved rather than eat it. You cannot do all that to us, and not feed us. Let us have water, at least, just a little water – there are some still alive in the ship. Give them water! And then, food! You must give them food, you must let us have food. How else shall we live?’

I gave him Cynon’s answer, before Cynon spoke it.

‘We do not care how you live, so long as you do not live here.’

At Cynon’s sign, Cynrig and Caso took the old man by the arms and dragged him down the beach again to the water. Those of us who were still awake followed, in a jeering, shouting, mocking throng. Some were on foot; others, like myself, rode. By the ship, now almost surrounded by wet sand, because it was a little past the ebb, we stopped. Four men took the old man by the arms and legs, and swung him back and fore, back and fore … and at last, they flung him high into the air. He fell limbs threshing, into the bottom of the ship, landing on the loose planks with a rattle and a crash, screaming in pain and then moaning.

‘Push her off, boys!’ Cynon shouted. Men crowded to put their shoulders to the sides and slide the vessel down off the sandbank into the water. I looked down from my horse into the ship. There was a huddle of bodies lying in the bottom, half in and half out of the bilge-water showing where our men had torn up the deck-planks in their search for treasure, or iron.

The Savages looked back at me. They did not move, they did not speak, they only looked at me with drying eyes that had little life left in them. One was a man of about my own age, hardly covered by a few rotten rags, his lips puffed and scarred, his body
scattered with open sores and running boils. There was a girl of, perhaps, fifteen – it was hard to tell, she was so dried out, but I judged by the budding breasts under the strands of matted yellow hair. There was an old woman, with no teeth left. They were all starving, pot-bellied, their ribs showing, their skin hanging loose on bodies grown too small for it, and dried and shrivelled and peeling. They did not cry for help, or moan in their misery. They did not move even. Only the old man writhed on his broken bones, head lower than his feet. They just looked at me, all of them, with their great empty eyes, blue stones sunk in dark pits. There may have been fifteen: I did not count.

I dropped from my horse into the water. I linked arms with Aidan, and we too put our shoulders against the side of the ship to shove. She was moving already, but even though more and more men came down to help us, she was heavy, sinking into the soft sand. But the half liquid sand soon began to help us much as it hindered, and suddenly she began to feel lighter, to lift as she slid farther and farther off the sand and into the ebbing water that began to snatch her from us. She would drift away from us now, out to sea, out to the narrow gap between the two arms of the cliff which fell grinning into the waves. Pushing, we were up to our waists as we fell into the deeper water, and we laughed and splashed and ducked our friends’ heads and played like children.

Then, as the ship began to pull out of our hands, so that not all our weight now could hold her straight, then, with a scream and a shout, Morien came riding down the beach and into the sea. He had rubbed his face with charcoal, so that he looked like a Pict. He flogged his mare into the waves; when the cold sea touched her belly she whinnied and voided herself. In his left hand, Morien whirled a torch, made of dry wood and wrapped round with some of the old rags out of the ship. He waved it violently to keep the flames alive. He flung it up high into the air, and we watched it circling and falling into the ship as it moved slowly out of our reach.

I stood with Cynon by the fire where the soldiers were now burning the offal and the bones and scraps, raising a stench and a cloud of black smoke. Cynon said, ‘There was no need for what
Morien did, no need at all.’ He had grown up on this coast. ‘Watch her go, now.’

We did watch her, as she spun slowly round in the ebb, the smoke rising from her steady and black in the air. There was no sound from her, not that we could hear from that distance, over the laughter of our men dancing on the sands. The ship was moving faster and faster, towards the gap between the cliffs, towards the open sea. Morien and Caso were using the poles that had once been the mast and yard to push the ploughshare out of the fire. The wood had all burnt away from it, leaving only the metal, a huge lump of red-hot iron for which our smiths would be glad. It, with the iron tyres, would make ten or twelve swords, or at least twice as many spearheads. The ploughshare glared its heat into our faces, and the air danced between us and the ship, so that she seemed to shiver already on the calm water. Cynon murmured to me:

‘Now, it takes her.’

We watched her, and it did take her. The current took her, and whirled her faster and faster, not out through the gap to the open sea, but towards the rocks, the fire racing down to the waterline with the draught her own motion made. Caso threw a bucket of water over the ploughshare to cool it to carry, spoiling its temper so that it would never now cut into our Roman land. The steam rose in front of us, hissing and whistling like mussels alive, stewing in their own juice in a bucket: for a moment it hid the ship from us completely. When it cleared, she had struck, on a rock still hidden by the tide, twenty paces from the foot of the cliff. She had struck hard, with the fire now down to the rubbing strake, and in an instant she had broken apart, and the fire quenched, and that steam, far from us, rose silent.

That was the end of the Savages, men, women, and, if there were any, children too, though I never heard one of them speak, or even saw them move, except the old man, and he was no loss to us. A meal we got out of it, a snack rather, for the noon halt, for a young ox, half starved, and three little pigs fed no better will hardly give a mouthful between fifty men. And we got out of it some iron, and the hide of the ox would cover a shield for someone, and the pigskin would give a pair of shoes for riding.
And there was enough tallow for a night’s candles in Mynydog’s Hall, and clothes to give away to the farmers we passed on the way back. And best of all, the Savages were gone with the ebb, drowned, or burnt before, and not to come in again till the next high tide. But by then we would be gone, too, dancing around the fires in a farmyard, and flirting with the girls for whose safety we had gone to war. We at least left the beach clear, the ashes buried, the sand swept over all.

Other patrols found the same, almost every week now in the sailing season. That was the first duty of the Household, to scour the shore for the Savages. Cynddelig’s Squadron found a big party of them, who had come ashore the winter before, and built themselves houses close to the sea, and hung on there unnoticed till they had seen their new-sown wheat break the soil. Cynddelig killed them, he and his Squadron, every one. He brought back iron and bronze and silver, clothes and ox-hides, more than we had found. Yet, however we kept the coast, the smoke still rose from Bernicia.

On all that, I might have made a satire, if I had still been a Poet, and this is the satire I would have sung though I could not:

This was the satire I could have made. But whether I sang it or not, it was true. It was to keep our own wealth and power that we went to Cattraeth.

It was not every day we drilled, or rode out to the coast. We did not drill on Sundays, or on Holy Days, or Feasts, or when we had worked very hard the day before. There were many days when the Household did nothing, or when those who felt like it would ride out to hunt, to get some venison to eke out our mutton and salmon.

I remember the last time. I went hunting from Eiddin. I came from the Hall on a fine hot morning, for in that year every day of summer was fine and hot and dry. In the courtyard, Precent was talking sternly to Mynydog’s nephew.

‘So, as soon as anybody makes you a bow and arrow,
what
is it you said you were going to do?’

‘I a hunter, I going to hunt the cat.’

‘Oh, no! You mustn’t hurt the poor cat, now, must you. What has the poor cat done to you?’

‘But I a hunter, I shoot her.’

‘Why don’t you shoot a dog, instead? There’s poor old Perro, here, why don’t you shoot him?’

‘He’s too big. I a hunter, I shoot Pussy.’

‘But it’s the King’s Cat, lad. You know what you’ll have to do if you shoot the King’s Cat? You have to pile corn over her till she’s all covered up. Have you got enough corn to do that?’