Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (9 page)

Toward dawn, the God stood before me again, and spoke.

‘Go north, and begin the End for me. But do not call upon my name till you come again within the cities of the Empire. For long ago I left the Hyperboreans. Where you find peace, you will leave war, and where stability, confusion, and where trust, deceit. But in all you shall do my will.’

Then I felt that the snag at the back of the limb was broken, and the chain ran smoothly up and down the tree. I saw myself alone and wounded and hungry on the great plain, and I thought that it no longer mattered.

I was very far gone. The whole world seemed far away. I stood back and looked at myself. I saw how slow I was in thinking and I marvelled at it. I saw that my limbs trembled like an old man’s. I watched my own mind work slowly through the argument that if my chain was slack I ought to be able to reach the key. After an hour or more, I saw myself decide to try. Very slowly I worked the chain down the tree. For some reason I was afraid that I might fall.

Little pieces fell out of my time of life, little holes of blackness. My side was a dull glow that fanned into flame every time I moved. There was still some water in the hollow. When I had reached the bottom of the chain’s movement, I allowed myself a mouthful.

I touched the key once or twice. I hardly believed it was still there. I put the ring on my finger. I opened the lock.

The chain fell away. I let my spear fall after it. I finished the water in the hollow; now I could walk, crawl, to more. I slid to the ground, my feet touched the earth; then my face.

When the blackness was over again, I found my spear and leaned it against the tree. I climbed up it, to my knees, to my feet. The men were there, a dozen of them, big men, with shaven heads and long yellow moustaches, dressed in the German fashion but unbelievably shabby. I waited to be killed.

They stood about ten yards from me. They had no weapons at all. One of them, the oldest, I thought, came forward and said something. I could not understand a word. I said in German:

‘Drink … drink …’

One of them, a boy, brought forward a pot. There is nothing like bitter beer for quenching your thirst. I drained it.

The older man then said something in German, very thickly accented. At first I thought he was talking about the Old Father Mountain, and I said ‘Yes, Yes’ and pointed. He talked on, and I slowly began to follow. He was calling me Old Father – no, he was calling me Allfather. This was wrong. This was what they called the God in Germany. I said: ‘No, no, Photinus, I am Photinus,’ and the man said,

‘Yes, yes, Votan, Votan Allfather. Come, Allfather, come and eat.’

I was too ill to protest any further. I tried to step forward, but I could not move. Some of the men ran back to the edge of the wood, and returned with a litter made of boughs. They helped me on to it, and carried me away. One of the boys carried my spear erect before me. Another picked up my bag, turned it inside out, and under the horrified gaze of his seniors gobbled up the end of sausage left in it. Before the older men, crimson with rage and shame, could begin to scold, I said, ‘Eat, eat it all!’

Another man picked up my two water bottles and shook them. There was a swishing sound. One of them still had about a pint of water. Had I, in my delirium, always gone to the same bottle to drink, and always found it empty?

They carried me some miles along the river edge to where they lived in little huts of boughs. They were a wandering people with neither king nor cities nor any possessions, not even any iron, who lived on what they could gather and catch along the river and in the woods. For their clothes and pots, and even for corn, they traded the furs they caught through the winter.

‘We take them,’ said the headman, who said his name was Tawalz, ‘to the Asers, and they give us the good things of life.’

‘Who are the Asers?’ I asked him, for this was a name I had not heard before. But all Tawalz would say was, ‘We take you to Asers, you meet Asers, first you heal.’

In one of the huts, Tawalz and some old women cut and soaked away the shirt from my wound, and – and this shows how poor they were – one of the old women took my shirt away and carefully darned up the tears, and washed it and brought it back
to me. First they cared for the scabby weals the chain had made on my chest, and the scratches from the branches and the insect bites. They brought ointment to smear on, but I would not let them use it till I was sure that it was not bear fat.

Over the great festering wound in my side they were more concerned. Tawalz said:

‘It is not deep but it will remain open till we can find the healing stone that is upon the sword and lay it upon the wound.’

‘It was no sword,’ I said. ‘It was a spear, and my own spear, that the lad carried into camp.’

So they brought the spear, and just like any civilised doctor Tawalz put ointment on the head and bound it up and vowed the hurt of the wound to the God, and then cleaned the wound itself and bandaged it.

I wanted to sleep, but the old women, all anxious, said through Tawalz that I must eat first. They brought me stewed meat in a bowl, and when I tasted it, it was something that I had not tasted for years, it was horse. I asked them why horse, and Tawalz said:

‘Allfather, it is a horse for you.’

They had caught a horse loose in the forest, and while you or I, if we found a stray horse, and there was no danger of being caught, would use it or sell it, they knew no better than to take it to the tree, which was all the temple that they had, and sacrifice it. But to my horror, it became clear that the horse was sacrificed to me, and now they expected me to eat it all. Have you ever tried to eat a whole horse? The old ladies were very insistent that I should. First I could eat it fresh, and then I would have it salt, and with the offal and the intestines they could make sausages, and they were busy cleaning the skin to make a blanket for my bed. I forget what they were going to do with the hooves.

I managed to get over to them the idea that if the sacrifice were to me, then I could do as I liked with it. So I would give a feast to the whole clan. And since it is no use eating flesh alone, I gave some of the silver pieces from the wallet for two of the young men to run twelve hours each way to the nearest German farm, where they had an arrangement, to buy corn, salt and beer. Then they let me sleep.

But before I slept I looked at my hair as it lay on the pillow,
and I grew afraid. I asked for a mirror, and of course they had no such thing, but when they understood at last they brought me a bowl of water. When it was still I looked at my reflection in the water. My face was lined and haggard, as I expected. What I did not expect was this, that in those days on the tree, my hair and my beard had changed from black to white. From that day to this, I have been as you see me, a white-haired man, and for years I bore an old man’s head on a young man’s body. It is not at all a bad thing in many ways. It gives you an authority, a reputation which you would not otherwise possess, and old men and chieftains bow to you and call you Father, or even Allfather. White-haired Photinus I have been ever since, and it was as a white-haired man that I came to the Northern Sea and faced the Asers.

I slept for twenty-four hours, as far as I could guess. When I woke, they brought me my clothes, all washed and pressed with smooth stones, and they also brought me all the horse furniture. This was not only the rope harness and iron bit and a few iron fittings, but the blanket too, red and blue check, and my own kit-bag. So I went to their feast in all dignity in my best blue tunic, and I drank from my own silver cup, and I ate off my own silver plate. We ate the horse; forty of us left little of a horse, or of a couple of deer and a few dozen carp with it. There was enough beer for all the adults to drink their fill, and even for the children to taste. The women, as well as the men, sat round the fire to eat.

These people are used to eating but once a day, and that not every day. Their bread was the worst I tasted in the north, being over half acorn and birch pith mixed with the flour. They called themselves the Polyani, from their word for the river meadows in which they lived; and they were proudly distinct from the Rus, who spoke the same language and lived in the same way, but farther east on the wide plains of grass, next to the yellow men, or the Lesny, who lived in the forests between.

I tried to find out who or what they thought I was.

‘Joy led us to Allfather, joy told us he was here,’ said Tawalz, and I was never sure if I had understood him correctly. ‘We come to the tree, and we see Allfather chained there to hunger and to thirst. Yet there is water in his bottles, and there is food in his bag. We see the wolf dance to Allfather, and we see the bear come to feed Allfather and bring him honey. And at the end we see Allfather bend down for his magic and unlock his chain and step from the tree.’

‘How many days was I in the tree?’ I asked.

‘Oh, many days, many days,’ said Tawalz. ‘Many days – nine days.’ But later I realised that nine was an indefinite number to them, more than several and less than many. I was never sure how they regarded me, as the epiphany of a God or as a Holy Man fulfilling a vow. We talked of other things. I told them of cities. They listened, and then said:

‘Oh, yes, like Asgard.’

‘What is Asgard?’ I asked, but they had never been there, they only knew it was where the Asers, most of them, lived, and if it were not a city then it was recognisably like one. I talked about Egypt, and I told them of the elephant. They said, yes, they knew all about elephants, and they drew one in the sand to show that they knew exactly what I meant. They said that far to the north of them was a desert, but a desert of ice, not of sand, and this is reasonable, for the earth is perfect and symmetrical and there must be deserts of cold to balance the deserts of heat. In those deserts too, it seems, there live elephants, but they do not wander about the earth. There they burrow underground, seeking in the heart of the earth the warmth they cannot find on the surface. When they come to the surface the light kills them at once, and so they are often found at the end of the winter, which is one long night, dead half-way out of their burrows in the ground. The Polyani and the Rus call them Mamunt.

The Polyani had no real Gods, only a few spirits of pools and woods and rivers, that were better bribed than worshipped. Where they felt the need, they borrowed the Gods of the richer people around, the Germans, or farther east, the Scyths, or in the south the Greeks. Tawalz said:

‘We knew you would come, Allfather, because long ago, in
Grandfather’s Grandfather’s time, a man came talking about a God, who hung on a tree, and was wounded with a spear. He said this God would come to us alive. We do not know it is Allfather.’

I asked who this man was, but they could not tell me, except that he would not eat wild boar. At the end, they had been forced to do what he seemed, to the best of their understanding, to be asking them to do. They ate him and drank his blood. This had been a most repugnant thing for Tawalz’s ancestors, and only their excess of courtesy, and their desire to do whatever their guest requested, had brought them to do it. Besides, the tradition was that he tasted vile, and most of him had been decently burnt. They hoped that this minor waste did not offend me. This was the only thing they told me that I found it difficult to believe.

It took another ten days or so after the feast before my side was healed well enough to travel. I was very weak, and I spent the time sitting at the river bank fishing. There are no Votan-born among the Polyani. I watched Tawalz and his brother Olen build the raft on which they would take the winter’s catch of furs, bundled up by kind, down river to, they said, Outgard, wherever that might be, to sell, they said, to Loki, whoever he might be.

‘Is he an Aser?’ I asked, and they hummed and hawed, and were of two minds.

‘Is he an Amber King?’ I asked, and of that too they were uncertain. They only knew that he was the man who would sell them iron and cloth and salt for their furs. They had very little iron. There was but the one axe in the whole band, and that among people who lived on the forest edge. The raft they built well, of logs jointed and dowelled together, with a little shelter, for us to sleep in.

In the end we went off, Tawalz and Olen and I. There was little poling to do, the river carried us on, and we would stop for the night near the camps of other little bands of Polyani. I could not follow much that they said, but I knew that the tale of the white-haired man who starved on purpose wounded in a tree, attended by wolves and snakes, was travelling well ahead of us. The further we got, the greater the respect with which I was treated, and of course some of this consideration rubbed off on to Tawalz. Later it profited him.

One afternoon we came to Outgard. The river was wide and shallow, fordable for a man on foot. We grounded the raft on a sloping beach on the east side of the stream. The two Polyani humped the bales of furs out on to the bank. Tawalz led me up from the water’s edge to the beginning of a path paved with logs. At the end of the path well above the flood level was the long black line of a palisade. Olen came behind. I looked back at the bales of furs, abandoned.

‘Will they be safe?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ said Tawalz. ‘Look, here come porters. And up there, see? Vandals.’

There were three or four Germans lounging at the gates, different from the crowd of Polyani who passed us as they went to carry the furs in. The men at the gate were big men in all their gear, with spears, shields, and, something I had not seen before in the north, mail shirts. They wore helmets, second-hand legionary pattern, and each had a blue cloak. I found out later that this was a batch of cloth that Loki had bought as a speculation and been unable to sell, so he had paid his Vandals in cloth.

‘Loki keeps them here. Nobody steals furs. Loki sits within the gate.’

And he did. By all the rules, looking back, I should have hated Loki. In fact I rather liked him. I kept on liking him, really, right up to the end. He was young then, about thirty, and my build, fair hair and blue eyes, of course. He was the first German I ever met who was a dandy. He was wearing a red shirt and blue trousers, and yellow puttees matching his yellow cloak. He had soft leather knee boots and a soft leather belt, two palms wide, worked with a pattern of silver wire. Round his neck hung a great globe of Amber on a golden chain.