Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (10 page)

He carried no sword, and I tell you, he was clean. He wasn’t as clean, say, as an auxiliary trooper going on duty, but he was about as clean as the Polyani who spend all their time in and out of the water. The Polyani, though, never bothered to brush the mud off. Loki was a great deal cleaner than the Marcomen.

Loki was more like a Greek than any German I ever met. Not, of course, like one of those stupid dolts from Attica or the Peloponnese, but one of your bright lads from Rhodes or Alexandria. He was a merchant, and there he sat at the gate in a kind of booth, with his scales and his measures on the table. He spoke to Tawalz, as soon as we appeared, in the good old beat-’em-down-below-cost manner.

‘What do you think you’re doing here? Far too late, far too late.’

Tawalz was used to this. He said,

‘Furs. Fine furs, you never saw better. Such you never see again.’

‘It’s been a bad year, all down the river. Poor stuff, take it away.’

‘No, all good fur, first rate. It surprised us all.
He
brought it.’

‘Who’s ‘he’?’

I had been standing carefully withdrawn from the scene. With my old grey cloak pulled around me, I leaned on my spear and looked round, inside the palisade. It was a big enclosure, a hundred and fifty paces each way, and all as neat and tidy as a legionary fort. At my right, along one side, was a double row of barns and stables. At the other side were huts, obviously for people. In front of me, at the far side, was a great hall, twice as big as Haro’s, with a huddle of kitchens and larders behind. In the open space in front was a kind of market with stalls, and a great throng of men buying and selling.

But Outgard was not a city. In the first place, there were no women, and certainly no confused crowd of children who get under your feet in the smallest German village. Secondly, that palisade was no wall, but a frail fence, built to keep horses in, not thieves out. Like all the houses, the fence had a temporary look. Even the fresh coat of tar merely made it look newer, less rooted. But it was something to look at while I withdrew my gaze from Tawalz who was whispering to Loki about ‘Nine days … wolves … bear … honey.’ Then Loki called out,

‘Hey, you! Greybeard!’

I just didn’t hear him, till he used my name and asked, ‘Votan! Where do you come from, and where are you going?’

So I paid him for his calculated discourtesy with a long stare, and then:

‘If I fight with Mamunt below the earth, or ride the sky beyond the clouds, what is it to you where I go?’ And to illustrate, I swung my spear point in a great arc from ground to sky to ground, and everyone watched the shining arc, and nobody saw my hands at all.

Loki didn’t try to answer that, he just wanted time to think, now that the rumours he had heard had come true. So he returned,

‘No gossiping in business hours. Eat at my right hand tonight. There will be a hut for you, for you alone. Tawalz will show you.’

I turned away, but Loki hadn’t finished.

‘Hey, that spear. No one goes armed in Outgard. Leave it with the Vandals at the gate!’

There was no harm in leaving him the appearance of authority. I leaned over his table and stood the spear in the corner of his booth, behind his back.

‘Take care of it,’ I said. ‘A God gave it to me. The last man who touched it without leave is dead.’

Off I went toward the market. Nobody who tries to sound as businesslike as that should be allowed an inch of latitude. Five paces from the booth, I turned and called to Loki.

‘Keep your eyes on the stock, merchant! Catch!’ And I threw him the Amber globe.

Now how was I to dine with the Lord of the Amber Road in my rags? I had only two or three silver coins, and my silver cup and plate which I would need. It was like taking a cake from a blind baby. Those poor Germans never knew what hit them.

The first group I came to were playing the old game with three cups and a pea. Now I will not ask you to believe that I invented it; but Autolycus did, and he was staying with the Family at the time. I watched a bit, and gossiped.

‘Come far?’

‘Thuringia. Back tomorrow, thank heaven.’

I lost a diplomatic denarius.

‘What did you bring up?’

‘Usual. Linen out, back in furs. Ferdi there, he came up in glass. Risky trade that, but profitable.’

‘Any Amber?’

‘Not here, you’ll have to go to Asgard for it. Loki buys it in from the forest dwellers, and the furs, but he only sells furs. The Amber all goes back to Asgard, and Njord only sells for silver.’

I put the rest of my own silver down. The dealer covered it and I took him. In another four passes I cleaned him out. Then I took the cups and won what the rest of the school had between them. Then I allowed everybody to win something back, and even let the dealer have enough to start again, so I went off letting them all think that the game had been fair.

The next pair were playing the finger game. You know, I shoot out fingers and you shout a number at the same time. If you are right, you win. This sounds like pure chance, but you watch people playing. They think they are shouting at random, but everyone has favourite numbers, and if you watch a man for a little you can always work out his system. Then you can take him as far as you like. I did. I didn’t clean them out, just took enough to do the job.

What they lost was mostly silver jewellery, and a very few coins. I went to one of the market stalls. There was a Vandal behind it. All the stalls belonged to Loki. There were Vandals behind them all. I got a grey tunic, grey trousers, good boots, a soft belt. Then something caught my fancy, and I bought a big grey hat with a floppy brim. I asked about a cloak as long as the one I had on, and I was promised delivery next morning. They were fairly popular, the man said, but not in grey, the colour wasn’t really worth stocking. No German will wear grey, or that dark blue the Vandals used, if he can possibly help it.

I thought of the two Polyani. I had given Olen my blue tunic because he hadn’t got one at all, but his trousers were all right. I got a suit for Tawalz, nothing fancy, but tough, and boots for the pair of them. Then I added a few iron fish hooks and a dozen iron arrow points. You know, they were used to going in after boar with bone-tipped arrows, and they haven’t got the penetration to slow the beast up at all.

Then I was down to my last few silver pieces again. But at
least I was respectable. With three silver pieces I could start again. I had a set of loaded dice in my bag. There were two or three likely prospects I’d marked down. There was even one who might go for a gold brick – or would it be a silver one up here? That could wait till an emergency. Did I tell you, once in Alexandria I sold the Pharos to three different people in one day, and another day, the whole Library?

So, decent, we went into the hall. And though they firmly settled Olen near the door, the Vandals put Tawalz fairly well up, and me, of course, they led to sit with Loki at the top table.

No, Loki told me, he wasn’t a Vandal. He seemed pleased to talk to me, to have somebody new to talk to must have been rare. He said he was an Aser.

‘Yes, I came out here some years ago, and I took Outgard over completely when my uncle Bergelmir … left. It’s a bit lonely, but quite comfortable.’

Loki was comfortable. On the top table we had silver-mounted drinking horns, and silver plate. And we had wine to drink, only Italian of course, but still better than beer. I was telling Loki how much better the wine would be with a lacing of sea-water, when a big man, rather drunk, but not so drunk he wasn’t nasty, stood in front of us and threw down his cloak on the floor. That, I knew, was a challenge to fight any man in the house. I tried to ignore it, but he didn’t ignore me. There were no takers – the man on my right whispered that Grude was a notorious bully – so he leant on the top table and taunted me with cowardice, age, and stupidity. None of which was true. I don’t like to say that Loki had arranged this, but there would have been no fight in his hall without his approval, and it was an attractive chance of getting rid of two nuisances at once.

Grude leant over and leaned his elbows on the table and breathed beer all over me with a stream of insults that would have withered the whiskers off a boar. When I sat there like a log, Loki helped by sneering:

‘You’ll be all right, I’ll lend you a mail shirt.’

Of course, I was fool enough to say, ‘I have no sword,’ and at once there was a Vandal at my elbow with a whole bundle of them which their owners had deposited with him at the door for safe keeping. He offered me the hilts, and I shut my eyes and took one at random.

The God guided my hand. There was a roar of laughter in the hall, and Grude snatched the weapon away from me. It was his own sword. For a moment he looked as if he were going to throw it away, but then he must have felt a bit sheepish and he kept it. Still, it unsettled him for the evening, and I think it was really the death of him.

I turned my head away again, and took another, and again the God guided me. This was no German sword, I thought, this was a Greek Kopis like my own, not too long, pointed, one edge sharp, the other finger-thick, the bone breaker. I had heard that they had been once in fashion all over Germany. Now they only lingered in the far west.

This I could use. The weight of the blade was a little far forward for my liking, but otherwise the balance was perfect. I passed it from hand to hand, tossed it up and caught it, and tried a few wrist flicks. It was then that some people began to realise that this was a real contest, and I heard the odds shorten. I looked around to get a few denarii on before it came down to evens, but somebody got in the way, holding out an oilstone and saying,

‘Make her sharp, make my little Jutta sharp.’ He was a middle-aged man with a thick north-western accent. ‘Treat her well, she is thirsty, my sax.’

It was obvious that he was a little afraid of having the costly blade damaged.

‘She’ll be all right,’ I told him. ‘I shed no blood.’

He caught my eye and my meaning. With the look of one craftsman meeting another, he held the sword up and breathed on the blade, below the hilt.

‘Look, a snake sword,’ and, sure enough, in the torchlight little snakes twisted in the iron.

I held Jutta comfortably and stood on a stain at one corner of the cloak. I kept my back to Loki; I didn’t want those eyes on
mine. Someone gave me a shield, and I threw it away. This gave Grude first stroke, although he was the challenger, but it forced him to throw away his shield too. He wasn’t used to fighting like that, but I was, and what use are rules if you can’t use them?

I had to think of tactics. I couldn’t try to tire him out, I was still weak from the tree. I didn’t want to go moving around over the mutton bones. I knew what to do, but a lot of people were shouting advice, and examples of excellent wit like, ‘Show him your stuffing, Votan.’ Nobody seemed to be shouting for Grude, and it was just as well, the whole thing didn’t last long.

We took guard, Loki shouted, ‘Ready!’, and Grude tried a downward cut. He was a bit clumsy, and I just pushed his sword away and instead of cutting myself I carried the parry on into a jab-jab-jab at his eyes. I thought I might force him off the cloak, but he’d met this before, and now he tried a cut, roundarm, almost horizontal. So nothing was easier than to counter by bringing the blunt edge of Jutta down on to his wrist, so that we heard the bone crack. The sword went flying and I followed through with all my might on to his kneecap.

He went down like a log, and lay there screaming, which drew some comment, but you will admit that a broken wrist and a smashed kneecap together are rather painful. And then I found out the kind of people I was living with.

A couple of Vandals picked Grude up.

‘How is he?’ asked Loki.

‘His wrist is smashed, and he’ll never walk straight again.’

‘What use is that to us?’ Loki said, and they heaved him up over a bench and somebody cut off his head with his own sword. I believe Loki got hold of his farm after that. They carted out the body and threw sawdust on the floor to stop the dogs licking the blood.

They brought me Grude’s belongings, as was right. There was quite a lot of silver coin and a few pieces of gold in a wallet, some scraps of Amber, a gold neck chain, and a gold ring with a big yellow stone in it. Next day, I took Cutha, who owned Jutta, to a goldsmith and he opened the ring and closed it again tightly around the grip, so that shapely sword at last had some adornment. I recited twenty lines of Homer over it, Hector’s speech to
Andromache which seemed appropriate, and scratched my name in the soft gold, so that Cutha thought Jutta had a real healing stone at last.

But that night, most of the western Germans crowded around me, laughing and shouting congratulations, and so did some of the Vandals. Some of the others said I had not acted fairly in going straight from a parry into a stroke without waiting, but nobody now dared say it close enough for me to hear.

They brought me Grude’s sword and shield. I said I didn’t want them, though I did keep the belt, which was better than the one I had bought. When I pushed Grude’s sword away, Cutha offered me Jutta in exchange, saying, ‘She likes you, she’ll go with you,’ but he was quite drunk, so I said I would have no sword till Donar made me one. At this, some of the Vandals laughed, as if Donar, some Donar, was dead and done for, but the westerners looked very impressed.

In the end I gave Grude’s sword, and the shield, to Tawalz. He was the first of all the Polyani to bear arms like a free man, and the first to make his authority felt over more than one band. Trouble and blood came of that gift and little else.

The chain and the silver I used to buy more gifts for the Polyani, spear heads and axes and iron pots, and bolts of linen and woollen cloth. No pottery or glass, which they would dearly have loved, since there was little chance of their getting all the way back unbroken; but I did send bronze brooches for the old ladies who had nursed me, and a bronze mirror that they might see what one looked like.