Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (102 page)

It was now almost night. The roaring flames stood up against the sky, and made all the night light as day. The smell of burning flesh enveloped us. The women wailed and screamed, and cut their faces with knives, and tore their clothes, dancing widdershins around the fire. There were even some who leaped, demented with grief, on to the fire and perished with their men, not quickly or without pain and screaming.

In spite of the rain, the flames roared high into the heavens, so cunningly had the Savages built this pyre, with passages and chimneys to lead the fire from the bottom to the top. The thick smoke blew its stench over all, as black as thunderclouds, a smell
of singeing cloth and charring wood, and, above all, of roasting flesh. The wind from the west strengthened, and fanned the heat till ploughshares would have melted in the furnace that was made. The wind, I said, was from the West: the smoke, which in the day a man could have seen from the Wall or from the edge of Mordei, blew east in the darkness, east and out to sea.

And that, I thought, was just. Till the end of the Island, till they rise up on the Day of Judgement, the Household will hold Cattraeth, lying here in the ditch, whence no man will ever move them. They will become one with the Island which is ours, is ours and theirs, by right of birth. Here we are born, and here we die, and here we remain. But the Savages – nothing will be left of them in all the land. After they die, they are blown out over the eastern sea, back to the place from whence they came. The land is ours. They will pass.

I stood there, on the grave of the Household, and watched the end of the Savages who had come to take from us the Isle of the Mighty. The flames flared out into the darkness of the night till it gave way to the greyness of the dawn: and the blackness of the night, displaced, became the blackness of my eyes, and of my soul.

From the noise of the wedding feast in Bladulf’s Hall we awoke into the dead stillness of Cattraeth. From the noise of the funeral night before the walls of Cattraeth, I, only I of all the Household, awoke into the noise of Ingwy’s Hall. To him, Bladulf had given me, and to Ingwy, therefore, fell the task of keeping me alive, as the King had said that I should live. I had rather died, with the rest of the Household. Or, if I lived, I had rather lived for ever in Bernicia as a slave, as I had done before, because life then would not have been long. But Bladulf had said that I must return to thank my King, and that, therefore, I must do.

I lay for weeks in the noise of Ingwy’s Hall. It was Bladulf’s Hall now, too, because we had burnt the King’s own village. His family now had to crowd in and sleep where they could, in the Hall or in the stables with the oxen, or in the barns on the unthreshed wheat. There were so many.

Crowds came down, too, from the North. We had killed all we could find, but there were hundreds, thousands who we had not found, and they all came down to beg shelter and food for the winter from their King. We had burnt their houses and stables, and they had nowhere to shelter from the autumn which had started early with the rain which had fallen on us, dying, in Cattraeth, and which did not stop. They had nothing to eat. We had fallen on them at the end of the summer, when they were living on the very last of the past year’s corn. We had spoilt their
harvest for them, burning the reaped grain in their barns, and the ripe wheat in the fields. They came South begging for something to eat. The seed corn was gone, and their fields were flooding as the rain came down, because we had blocked their ditches. They had no tools and no oxen, nothing but their lives, and little use they were to grow wheat with in a hurry.

The nation of Savages, what were left of them, had only the crops of half their land to see them all through the winter. They fed me as they fed themselves. Each of us had a few slices of wheat-bread a day, and the wheat flour itself was bulked out with beechmast and acorns ground with the grain. But they had cut down the wide forests where any man of culture and civility, where any Roman, could find food and clothing for the taking at this time of the year.

These Savages, being tied to one crop, and not knowing how to use the forests of the land, how to hunt deer or how to search for nuts and fruit, faced a whole year on half-rations. A whole year – perhaps longer, if they could not reclaim in that first winter the ruined lands in the North. Famine was near. I have seen famine. I know what it does. I could tell, among the crowds who came to shelter in Ingwy’s village, who would die that winter.

All the old people would die: anyone who was over forty would not have the strength for the bitter winter on a crust a day. The young children would die – that is nothing new. In any place, out of three babies born between May and September, only one will see May again. Out of those born between September and May, scarcely one in four will live to the first May. But among these Savages, none of the last year’s babies would survive. Their mothers would die, too, starving themselves to save their children, and saving none, nor themselves either. Most of the men wounded in the battle would die. That would have nothing to do with the famine. Their wounds would turn rotten, and stink, and they would grow weaker, and dwindle into death. But until they died, they would have to be fed, uselessly. There would be few Savages’ babies the next year: too many fathers had been killed. The raid to Cattraeth had killed far more Savages than had fallen in battle.

Now, as I watched the Savages, I could see what a great victory
we few had won, and yet I did not realise it. I realise it now. We had dealt Bladulf and his people such a blow that it would be years, generations perhaps, before they would be strong enough to come again into the debatable land of Mordei. Oh, yes, this defeat of ours had been a victory, a victory such as no King of the Island of Britain had ever won over the Savages. We had our battle: the war was won. I know now that if we had not then so weakened the Savages in Bernicia, then Uther would never have recaptured York as he did a few years after, when Elmet men at last came with him into the field; and Arthur would never have reconquered all the Island. The Household died so that all Britain again could be Christian, and so that the blessed language of the Angels could be spoken again from one sea to the other, in Bernicia as in Cornwall, in Kent as in Cardigan. And I saw the victory as I lay in Ingwy’s Hall, I saw the seeds of it, if not the details, and blinded by sorrow and shame I did not recognise it. But since then I have recognised it, and by the grace of the Virgin I have seen the seed sprout into a tree.

But in those first days, in Ingwy’s Hall, I knew only the bitterness of defeat. I only knew that I lay a prisoner, and that I lived only by the will of my enemies, that I could not decide even my own death. There were Savage girls who looked after me. They turned me in my bed when I was too weak, and they brought me the bread on which we all lived, and they dipped it in the bitter beer when I could not even chew the crust. I was, they told me, days and days too ill to speak intelligibly in any language, days sweating and wasting, and I could remember nothing. The girls gave me brews of herbs the wizard had made to stop the sweating and bring down the fever. And they did all this as carefully and as gently as they looked after their own wounded. And some of us lived, and most of us died. Me, they
made
to live. I knew, if they did not, that this was my punishment, that I although a Bard had taken up arms, and fought and killed.

Bladulf and Ingwy I saw daily, at sunset, when the one tallow dip was lit in the Hall. Then they came in, with all the other men from the fields where it was now too dark for work. Bladulf dressed like the meanest of his subjects, though who was the meanest no one could say, and he worked as they did. He would come in from
the dusk, dropping with weariness, his shirt wet with the rain and sweat mingled, his face and hands thick with mud.

When I was able to stand, and walk a few paces, I was allowed – I could easily have been prevented, and was not – to go out of the Hall. Then I found out where it was, because I had been carried there unconscious. It lay north of Cattraeth, being one of the farms we had not had time to burn on the day of the first battle, though we had seen it in the distance. But not a thousand paces away, Morien had fired the corn, and further from it, towards our line of march, we had blocked ditches. The fields were now flooded from the rain, which could not run off. The farms beyond had been burnt.

Here it was that Bladulf worked, as one man among many, taking his part in clearing ditches, in building houses and barns anew, and raising fences. He worked with his hands. I saw him, himself, digging with a spade in a clogged gully, to let the water run down into the river. I saw him again, with axe and nails, setting together the framework for a house, a house for his people, not for himself. Nothing distinguished him from his people who worked around him, but that he did nothing to his own profit.

That is why I would not call Bladulf a King, whatever his birth. It is not the place of a King to work with his hands among his people, or even to tell them what to do from hour to hour. The mark of a King, beyond birth, is wisdom, and after wisdom, wealth. And wisdom cannot be shown in the heat of the day’s work, nor wealth gathered there. The place of a King is seated on his Judgement Mound, robed and crowned, listening to his suitors and to his Judge, and, when he has weighed the particular case and the universal law and the precedents, deciding what is now to be done. But the place of a King is to do nothing himself. It is not even the place of a King to ride out to war. That is the task for the Captain of his Household, who may himself be a King some day, although that is irrelevant. If the Captain of the Household of the Kingdom is defeated, then it is no shame to the King, and he can always be replaced. But if the King were to be defeated, then the luck of the Nation is gone, and the Kingdom is at an end. There is no place for a King to die in battle, but on the steps of his own dun, as Evrog Hael did. That is why the
Kings of the Island of Britain did not go out themselves against the Savages, until at last they could send all their Households out to war together, under the one Captain, Arthur.

Bladulf, here, worked as a common man, leading his people and doing himself what he would have every man do. He sent his men miles with the ox-wagons to bring back timber from the hills, because they had long cut down all the trees nearer to where they lived. And he sent the women down into the river-beds to cut reeds for thatch, because we had burnt the straw they would have used. I saw how he made his people work from dawn till the dark came, cheering them on when he needed to, or blustering and threatening them when it was necessary. That showed me how far we had been from victory. Had we killed every man of the Savages but one, and that one Bladulf, then still we would not have had a victory. Had we killed Bladulf, and no other man, then all the Savages would have been scattered and destroyed. Oh, if only Bladulf had stood to meet Owain in the fight. It would have been no trouble for Owain to have killed Bladulf: he could have done it with his little finger. I watched him, and saw that he did not understand the essence and dignity of Kingship. But I saw, too, how he recovered much of what we had destroyed. His life was our defeat.

How many poems have you heard when, after defeat, warriors forgive their foes, fall into sympathy with them, feel more comradeship with them than with those of their own nation who have not ridden to battle? It goes well in a poem. It does not happen in life: it did not happen to me. I watched Bladulf, and I grudged him his life, and I grudged every hour he worked to build his Kingdom new.

Each day, I could walk farther to watch the Savages’ Kingdom rise again, stand longer with the Savage girls around me. Slim and delicate, with yellow hair like braided buttercups, their blue eyes mindless, empty, they sported like so many squirrels, so many fauns, and had no more thought for the future. They had nothing to do but attend me. The boys with whom they should have been flirting were dead, or died while we watched them. The corn they should have been grinding was burnt. The querns were silent and the looms were still. War had brought idleness to
those who were too young, or too old, or too tender, to strain at raising timbers or digging in mud. These girls, Bladulf’s family or Ingwy’s, played with me, teasing and flirting, as if I were a toy provided for their pleasure; and indeed I might have been that in Bladulf’s mind, the only booty saved from the battle.

Theirs was the only gaiety. There were no feasts in that Hall. There was no food or ale to spare, and every man took what he was allowed and tried to find somewhere to sit to eat it, among the great crowd of Savages, men, women and children, who filled the Hall at night. In that continual stench of unwashed wheat-eaters, in the never-ending clamour of shouts and groans, the wailing of children and the quarrels of their parents, I almost lost my reason and my voice. I only kept myself in a whole mind by repeating beneath my breath, the verses I had already made on the men of the Household, and the names of those I would sing if, when I came again to live among men.

There were no feasts. Still, when Bladulf sat to eat, there was a moment of formality, and still, though he worked like all the others, he drank his ale, when there was ale, or his ditchwater when there was none, out of a silver-mounted horn. One night, then, in mid-September, he called me to him when he sat to eat.

‘Are you well now? Can you walk?’

‘I can walk,’ I answered him.

‘Then you must go. We can feed you no longer.’

It was true. But it was no thing for a King to say, to a prisoner or to a guest. The excuse was good; but the violation of the laws of hospitality was gross. I was, however, in no position to rebuke him. The men in Cattraeth had bidden me live. How else were they to have any memorial?