Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (11 page)

The return for the furs Tawalz took in grain and beer. This was little in comparison to the furs, and he decided to leave the rest till later in the year. Loki not only did not allow him interest on this debt, but even charged him a fee for storage. He would have done well in Alexandria.

I gave the belt I’d bought to Tawalz. So I had little gain from the bloody affair, indeed I lost, for no one now would fight with me, and there was no chance of persuading anyone that I was qualified to sell him the Amber mines, or wherever they got the stuff. (I never did find out how you get it, and I think someone must have had a fine time telling Tacitus that tale about picking
it up on the sea shore.) So it was as a dangerous man and a well-known one that I left Outgard. And through the Vandals and their wives who lived in the village over the ridge, and through the traders who were there that night, all Germany soon knew of the white-haired man from the tree who had come out of the forest.

I had two nights at Outgard. The second evening was quiet, perhaps because I spent most of the day leaning on my spear in front of Loki’s booth, and just looking at him as he worked. This unsettled him so much that, in plain language, he offered me a horse to go away to Asgard and annoy somebody else. So I went.

I went in company with the Saxons who had been at the first dinner. They had a packtrain, and a packmaster, a big man with one hand; he had lost his right hand, and carried his shield on his forearm, and his spear in his left. They had been waiting for him to arrive; he came in the day after the fight. As we went the Saxons told me about the Asers. They appeared not sure whether to expect from me omniscience or universal ignorance.

I found out a lot that would have been useful to Otho. The Asers were the lords of the Amber roads. The Polyani lived beyond the river. Beyond them, and to the north-east lived the Scrawlings. North again, across the shallow seas, lived the Goths, who were Germans. It was these peoples who brought in the furs and the Amber. They would only trade with the Asers. The Asers held immense stocks of all they wanted, close to the river and the sea, so that we, if we tried, could never outbid the Asers. All trade had to be through the Asers.

On the other hand, to the traders the Asers supplied packtrains and escorts at low prices, and on the roads between the three great Aser posts, at Outgard, Asgard and Westgard toward the Rhine, they had stopping places for the packtrains.

At one of these we stopped the first night. We rode into a palisade, and there were men to take the horses and stable them, and Vandals to check every bale and put it into the stores. We
went into a hall, and we stood in line to receive great platters of stewed meat and vegetables, and bread, and each man his horn of beer. There was as much food as you could eat, as often as you returned for more, but extra beer you had to buy at a counter in the corner. I sat with Cutha and asked, ‘Is Loki an Aser?’

‘Some say he is, and some say he isn’t. He came from Asgard, sure enough, and Njord sent him. And it wasn’t long before he drove out Bergelmir, the old man, now he really was an Aser. Where Bergelmir went no one knows, but he strode away vowing vengeance on Njord and Loki and all the Aser house. But Tyr, there, the packtrain leader, now he is an Aser. Look, he’s going to tell one of his tales; up on the table, there he goes.’

And up Tyr stood indeed, to give what was always a popular piece, though this was the first time of many that I ever heard it. He had a sausage in his hand, and as he recited he alternately took bites and made obscene gestures.

‘It fell, a couple of years ago, at the end of a long wet summer, that Ulla and Hermod and I went to forage down in Thuringia. The pickings weren’t very good, not enough to live through the winter, just a few furs and some girls, that we sold off cheap to the Marcomen. All those goods that went straight down, to Carnuntum and Vindabonum, they sold for silver and glass and wine, and all we got was some sausage.’

‘What, sausage?’ shouted the audience, they weren’t subtle and this was the traditional response to Tyr.

‘Yes, sausage,’ and the one he had was as long as your arm and as thick as your wrist.

‘Well, the girls weren’t up to much, and we very soon finished the sausage. We hadn’t as much as a roof to our heads, when the leaves were beginning to fall. My trousers were full of enormous holes, and Ulla was hardly decent, so Hermod, who was respectable then, said we ought to go on into Dacia. There we’d meet no one who knew us before, and bring no disgrace to our families. At worst we’d beg bread from the peasants and slaves, and we might find a chieftain to feast us.’

‘But the people of Dacia are crafty and mean, the crows starve to death in their cornfields. The rags of my bottom were beating my brains out, and the cold struck chill to my liver …’

‘To your liver?’ and they all cheered.

‘To my liver. For a good square meal, I’d have gone past the river to ride for a soldier in Britain. It was then that Hermod found us a horse, a fine black horse with a saddle. The man who rode it was drunk in a ditch, he left us never a penny, and his trousers wouldn’t fit any of us, so we went on east by the river. We slept that night in a hole in a ditch, and the horse we hobbled and tethered. We slept in a ditch as beggars do, and that night a Roman robbed us!’

‘Robbed you?’

‘Aye, robbed us. We woke in the morning, our horse was gone, and our trousers were hung in a treetop. The thief left his runes in the bark of a tree, Aristarchos the son of Demos. Let Romans rob beggars as much as they like, but they ought to stay in their own country. We weren’t going to let them do it again, so we went north in a hurry. North we went in hunger and cold, for the snow had come and the winter, till up in the mountains we came to a hall that belonged to a noble named Fenris.’

‘Named Fenris?’ they all bawled.

‘Yes, Fenris. We told him the tale of how we’d been robbed by Romans down by the river. They’d taken our horses, our silver, our gold, they’d taken our horns and our trousers. Only our swords that we slept on at night were left to show we were noble. They’d driven us out in hunger and cold to trudge our way home through the mountains, when all that we wanted was freedom to go, to the east to try Scythian women. But we’ll never see Scythian women now, the Polyani have got all the traffic.

‘Fenris was warm-hearted and generous, the fool, and he took us into his household. He had seven fine daughters and seven strapping sons, though these last had gone off to … forage.’

‘To forage?’

‘Yes, to forage.’ They passed Tyr up another sausage, he’d finished the first one.

‘Now old Fenris lived well, with Amber and bronzes, wine, furs and salt fishes, with silver and salt. He lived on the Asers, though little they knew it. He bribed men and bought men, he raided, he cheated, he swam across rivers and emptied the trap lines, and all that he got he sent down to the Romans, he passed
it through Otho to sell at cut prices. No, he had no morals and no sense of beauty, no rings or cartels could appeal to his soul. And so he grew wealthy on crumbs from the table of great Njord Borsson, the Lord of the Asers. Drink all to the Asers, drink to great Njord Borsson.’

Everyone drank, and then of course they went back to the counter for more beer.

‘Fenris had one daughter, a lass called Hedwiga, a tall wench and strapping, with skin smooth as marble. Her hair that hung braided in two yellow pigtails hung thick long and fragrant clear down to her bottom. They swayed and they bounced as she walked in the rickyard, her hips swaged, her breasts shimmered, a sight for the starving. I knew she’d come, the way she looked at me, once alone in the barn we’d soon have got … friendly.’

‘What, friendly?’

‘Yes, friendly. Another loved Ulla, and one wanted Hermod, we’d soon have been talking if not for their father. He had eyes where we had backbones, he had ears where we have toenails, he could hear the sun arising, he could see the grass a-growing, seven daughters on the rampage he could watch and never miss one. How then do you bed a woman when her father watches daily, when her father listens nightly, when she sleeps behind the hangings, and his bed’s across the doorway?

‘Then Hermod had a brainwave, he always was a genius, we’d get the old man drunk and pass him where he lay. Don’t ever drink with Fenris, it really isn’t worth it, his legs and feet are hollow, and the beer just drains away. So even drinking three to one, he had us on the floor.

‘Then Hermod had a brainwave, he always was a genius, we’d tie the old man up, and let
him
sleep upon the floor. And we said that night to Fenris, when the ale horns were half empty, “Fenris, we know you are a mighty man. You walk the forest with a giant’s strength. Oak trees your fingers pluck from out the earth. The winter wind is not more powerful. Has no one ever tried to bind your arms?” “Many have tried,” said Fenris, “none succeeded. Tie up my arms with any cord you like and I will break it.”

‘So we tied him up first with a short length of fish line, thin light and strong – he broke it at once. Then we took twine that
we use for the corn sheaves, doubled, re-doubled, an eightfold cord. He strained for a moment, then jerked, and behold it, the eightfold cord was snapped clean away.

‘Now Fenris was fuddled and hazy with drinking, so we took some boat line as thick as my thumb. We tied him and wrapped him to look like a parcel, and all was set fair to get into bed. Then Hermod had a brainwave, he always was a genius, said, “Let’s put him out, let him sit in the cold for the wolves to eat him,” and when he said wolves, old Fenris went mad. He stretched and he strained, he wrenched and he wriggled, his face it went red and his wrists they went white. We three men stopped laughing, the girls they stopped giggling, and then in the silence we heard the knots burst!’

‘The knots burst?’

‘The knots burst, the rope burst, the hemp strands went flying, the benches went flying, and Fenris went mad. With an axe from the wall he chased us and flailed us, he splintered the tables and split all the stools. He shivered the pillars, he broke up the braziers, he cut up six rats and bisected a dog. The tables were scattered, the floor straw was scattered, and we all were scattered before that big axe. He chopped first at Ulla, overbalanced and missed him, he cut hard at Hermod and cut off – some hair. Then he went after me, all round the tables, and he hacked and he slashed and he
cut off my hand!’

There was a moment of hush so that you could hear the rats in the roof. In German eyes, Fenris had done something unmentionable in striking a guest. It was Tyr who had behaved honourably in running away, resisting any temptation to strike back or defend himself, the very embodiment of virtuous self-control – or so we were supposed to think.

‘Then in the morning we’d all got sober; they cleaned the wound and they sewed up the stump. Poor old Fenris, he
was
broken hearted, and we had to tell him what we’d been about. That started him laughing, he near burst his gut. “What, sleep with my daughters, is that all you wanted? Why didn’t you ask me? I’ll fix it tonight.”

‘We did it in style with the horse and the cockerel, with priest and with fire, corn mother and knife. Fenris no more raids the
lands of the Asers, we pay him a pension, he stays at home. But I have a wife now, down there with the Quadi, and four healthy sons, one each time I go home.’

In the pandemonium that followed, Tyr came and sat down beside me.

‘I always do this some time on the trip,’ he told me in a confidential way, while a Vandal came round and poured beer for the pair of us. ‘No, no,
you
don’t pay here. I take half the profit on the beer sales, and a show like this always improves the trade.’

There were crowds of men around the beer counter, where the Vandals had effectively put up the price by simply not filling the horns so full.

Tyr went on:

‘If things are flat tomorrow night, I’ll do ‘How the Ash became the World Tree’, profitable that one, I can manage five toasts in it. The night after, I’ve got something I’ve been working on for some time, about Loki and a horse, rather indecent, but quite funny. The next night, Asgard.’

Tyr never asked me anything, who I was or where I came from, he just accepted me as someone who had a right to be there.

The night before the packtrain reached Asgard, I said good-bye to the Saxons. They all urged me to come out to the west and visit them in their islands and marshes.

‘You shall have the best seat in the hall, and the saltiest of the salt fish to make you want to drink more of our beer, the finest beer in all Germany,’ said Cutha, ‘and if I am out on the roads, as well I may be, mention my name to the King, or better, to the Queen.’

‘Aye, better to the Queen,’ they all said, and laughed; ‘better to the Queen.’

The next day, as we rode through the pinewoods, I kept changing my place in the packtrain, and cutting across corners, both ways, through the trees, so that no one could say, ‘I was the last to see him, and it was there.’

Late in the afternoon I slipped into the wood, and they did not see me go. I found a little hollow where I might sleep, fasting for I came to the judgement time of my life. But the white mare, that Loki gave me, I hobbled and turned out to graze, for she had taken no vow.

But how, unless Apollo watched and counted the days, did I choose, for that Night-Before-Asgard, the night of the Summer Solstice? All across the fields beyond the forest the fires burned, and men and girls leaped the flames till dawn.

An hour after dawn, when I knew the Saxons would be well out on the road again, I rode out of the forest. First I came to the Palisade by the trail, empty now in the morning, except for the Vandals lounging by the gate. And I knew that was not Asgard. And I turned north, at a fork, and in a hundred paces I came out of the scrub to a cluster of houses on the forward face of a ridge. But I knew this was not Asgard.

The path led through the village, past the dirty houses, to the crest of the ridge. Where the path went over the ridge, there was an ash tree on one side, and on the other a Standing Stone, raised by the Men of Old.