Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (19 page)

‘Then sudden without warning, the Serpent was on me. He kicked away the earth itself from beneath me, and pulled me down. I felt the huge snake body, cold as death, all round and thick and long. I felt his long smooth teeth, and I smelt his breath, all foul and stinking of death and cold as the dead. I shouted, to cheer myself, all the war cries I knew, and I struck with the hammer
again and again and again. I heard the bone crack and splinter, and the beast let me go, and flung me down on the ground – and by then I was sober.

‘I saw a light far off across the snow, and I thought another demon was come against me, so I took up Mollnir again and I walked towards it. But it was King Jokuhai-inen, sword in hand, come out to find my body in the snow. And none of all his warriors would come with him, except a small boy who came out to carry the torch. His name was Leminkai-inen, remember it, and he was the bravest Scrawling you ever will see. This summer I will make him a sword, and send it back when Jokuhai-inen comes in the Autumn.

‘We went back to the Hall, and I got drunk again as soon as I could, to forget the horrible smell of the Serpent and death. When I die, my brothers, do not lay me in Earth, for the Serpent to suck out my eyes and lick clean my bones. Let me go to water or ice, or even to air, or best of all, as a smith, let me go to fire. But not to the earth, my friends, not to the earth …

‘When Spring, or morning, had come, and every day had morning and eve, and something in between we could call day, we went out, the King and I, to find the Earth Serpent again. Where a river ran down through the winter wood, and the banks steeped down to the water, there the Serpent had burst from the earth and there the bones were lying. The wolves and the weasels and all the other vermin that feed on the carrion their betters have killed for them, had stripped away the flesh and gone off with full round bellies.

‘Only the tail remained, long, round and thick, and at the end an anus split into two passages for all the world like nostrils. There too the skull, the forehead stove in and shattered, where Mollnir had struck and broken through to the brain box. Greatest of all were the teeth that lay before the skull, and those I brought home to show that my tale is true.’

Then the Scrawlings and the Vandals and everybody shouted and beat on the tables, and Donar once again shouted all the war cries he knew.

But I for one never believed there was an Earth Serpent, but I did not dare say so lest I be accused of slandering Donar. I
remembered what I had heard among the Polyani, and I am sure that Donar came on one of the Mamunts as it broke from the earth, and that even as he came on it, it was dying or already dead. And he wounded it badly enough to kill again, and what he took for its tail, that was too tough to eat, was in fact its trunk.

The evening came to an uproarious end, and we played all the games and we muttonboned the minstrel, who left next day. Somehow we had difficulty in keeping our minstrels and we usually had to make do with Blind Hod, who wasn’t much good as a minstrel. Come to that, he wasn’t really blind either, but could see a little. Loki once sold him a bean-shaped piece of glass, which he swore was the emerald his late Sainted Majesty Nero had looked through, and indeed Hod found it very useful, but in the end Freda begged it from him to mount in silver and hang on a chain round her neck.

When the feasting was over, the Scrawlings took the silver for all the walrus ivory, and sailed back. But that silver was not wholly lost, for I sent a man to Sigmund, who caught them and their ship off Bornholm. He kept the ship and the silver, but the men he sold off south through Loki, who sent me my share. For we all three agreed that personal disagreements should not stand in the way of honest trade.

When I reached my own hall, Freda’s time was come. I took care not to be too much around, but not too near either, and while Freda’s birth screams filled Asgard I sat at the gate and haggled for pots of wine and bolts of linen. When Skirmir’s wife came out to tell me I had a son, I went and brought him out to show the Asers, not in my arms, but cradled in my great Goth shield. And that is why we called him Scyld, which is the Goth word for a shield. We placed a sword in his hand, a tiny sax that Donar had made ready, and then we put wealth in his fingers, and we rubbed his fingers with wine and oil and honey, and we made his shield cradle soft with silk and furs. But the first thing he touched was a weapon.

After that I was less in Asgard than ever, because there is nothing I like less than a crying baby at night, and I much preferred to sit up at feasts and earn my headaches that way, if I
had
to get them.

About that time, Donar made me a helmet. He remembered the great parade helmets he had seen south of the Danube – Aristarchos had a splendid one – and he made me the nearest he could to that. It was a cap of iron with a ridge from nose to nape. The neck piece came down to protect my spine, and side guard for my cheeks. It left plenty of room inside to pile my hair for padding, as was the custom. You could always tell a Vandal by his topknot in those days.

Then he made me a face piece, with a nose and moustaches. The eyebrows he worked with boars set with garnets, and the ends of the eyebrows were the boar’s head. Bragi carved shallow on wood the scenes of my own real life, Apollo and Artemis, the death of Grude and the treaty with the kings, and he beat out plates of bronze, thin as vellum and moulded them over the carved wood, and fitted them to the helmet, and gilded them.

This he did in the smithy next to the black sheds where a hundred now watched the Honeydew. Snake swords we sold, the swords that would cut two bodies at one stroke. Honeydew we never sold. We gave it away.

Yes, we gave it away, free. The Germans would give their eyes for a smell of the stuff, so we let them have it free, as a gift, after a sale had gone through. In hope of a cup, a sip of Honeydew, a man would cut short his bargaining, bring down his price, forget to weigh his silver, measure the cloth, look for moth holes in the furs. We gave the liquor away, it was more profitable. But no Aser ever gave something for nothing.

It was boring in Asgard that Spring. Freda was pregnant again, and I never got a chance to play with Scyld, Donar always had him. So when Cutha Cuthson came by and said I ought to go with him to the Saxons for some sea fishing, I went.

‘It’s not only the sea fishing,’ he told me one evening on the way. ‘It’s my daughter.’

‘The Queen?’

‘The Queen. Mad on horses she is, and she leads the women in the dance, like her mother did after the old queen, Edwin’s first wife, died. She wants Sleipnir for her mares, wants to improve the blood.’

I learnt more about the Saxons as we went on.

‘Edwin’s had bad luck. First of all there was his wife died giving birth to Harold, and he didn’t take another. Well that’s all right, there was always, let us say, the possibility of fertility that only a fertile king can give to a nation. But then Harold was going north to marry Gambara, and the Black Danes caught him in the Strait.

‘Then we were able to persuade Edwin to get married again, and he married Edith, reasonable, I’m the richest Saxon there is, not to speak of being Edwin’s cousin. But that was three years ago, and there’s no sign of any heir. Some people are beginning to grumble. In the old days, of course, there would have been no hesitation, he’d have been ploughed in to make the barley grow the first barren spring, but now – well, we know there’s a lot more to being a king besides the barley. There’s the herring shoals to foretell, and the whales to call to shore, and treaties to make with the Friesians, and the price of salt to fix … and besides,
Edith won’t have it, and if she won’t have it the women won’t have it.’

The first few days at Edwin’s hall on the edge of the salt beaches were taken up in games. Or at least in one game, the Head Game. There were two villages involved. They took a Batavian that had been shipwrecked, and that they had kept in a cage for the purpose, and someone cut off his head. The King threw the head up in the air, and the two villages fought for it. There were no weapons used, not even sticks, but three men died, two who burst when they were running, and one who got sat on by a couple of hundred men when he had the head in his hands. I had a busy week after that looking at sprains and bruises. The village that took the head within their own gates kept it and put it up on a stake and were proud of it.

This game lasted for three days. The two villages were unequally matched, which was why it took so short a time to finish.

Each night in hall we talked, and Edith sat with us at high table. I must say she was very taken up with her horses. She had grown up with horses – Cutha was the chief horse master of the Saxons – and she kept on bringing the conversation back to them, till at last I said to her,

‘You shall have Sleipnir for your mares, tomorrow.’

It was two days later that we went, riding alone, the two of us, with a gelding led behind for my return. The mares were, of course, in the Grove where they worship the Mother.

When we came to the fence of living thorns that surround the Grove, we dismounted. I wondered already that she should take a stallion into such a place. We unsaddled Sleipnir outside, and turned him loose to run with the mares. Then to my surprise and horror Edith took my arm and led me toward the gate in the fence. I stood still.

‘Come!’ she cried. ‘What are you afraid of? Little bears? I tell you, there is no woman here but me.’

‘Except the Mother.’

‘The Mother? I suppose you think there is no Mother, or that I am the Mother? I tell you, Votan, the Mother sleeps, and she shall sleep here till a man wakes her – a man, Votan, not a god, or a half-god, or an Aser.’

‘The guilt is on you,’ I told her, ‘for you, that profane this place, are a queen.’

‘A queen?’ She looked at Sleipnir galloping toward the white mares. ‘What is a queen? I am not a queen. I am only Cutha Cuthson’s daughter. I’ve never been anything else. Married to Edwin I may be, but a queen, never.’

‘But if you are the king’s wife, then you are queen.’

‘What is a king, then? A king is the luck of his people. It is the king who calls the fish to the shallows, or the ships to wreck. The king is the luck of his people. It is the king who charms away scabs and brings rain and makes the corn to grow. A fertile king makes fertile all the nation. And if he is not fertile?’

Ploughed in to make the grass grow, I thought. She read my mind.

‘Would you have that happen to Edwin? Would you have it happen to the Saxons? Without him the whole nation would split up, some to be Danes and some Friesians and some Lombards. Or worse, dissolve into a thousand leaderless families like the Vandals, and serve foreigners for a crust of bread.’

We watched Sleipnir among the mares. She spoke again, bitterly. She was nineteen; she was Cutha Cuthson’s daughter. She had grown up in a mist of riches. No bog woman, she had heard all the tales of the merchants, all the gossip of the trade roads, all the songs of the bards. She had led the women in the dance before the Mother, as her mother had done when there was no queen. She was bitter.

‘What then, is a queen? She is the living proof of the king’s luck. Her fertility shows forth his power. How can he crop the fields if he cannot crop her?’

She took my elbow. She sensed my reluctance, my fear.

‘What’s the matter, Votan? Do you think we will cut you in pieces, you who hung on the tree? Last night I burnt the blade bone and I watched the fat on the pot, and I know you will see lands the Riders never knew. I saw your life, Votan, and it will be long.’

We came to the cart, the Mother’s cart. It was high built on man-high wheels of foot-thick elm. The frame was of ash, and the panels of lime, carved and painted with the rites of the
Mother. The roof was pointed, and thatched, with barley straw. There was a door in the end and steps to it.

Outside the thorn fence I had left my spear and my knife, the only iron things I had. Here before the cart I laid aside my bronze cloak fastener and my gold armlet. The foot of the steps must serve for the threshold, and there I did what else was necessary. Edith had chosen as wisely as she knew, a stranger, a wandering man without father and without a nation, yet a man of wealth and power, known to be potent, his wife with child again. Now by what I did at the steps she knew that I was no stranger to the Mother.

We paid our duties to the Mother. She was here carved, roughly, no not even carved, chopped with an adze out of the ash whose shape She still kept. Before Her was Her bed, down mattress and down quilt, covered with sheets of linen.

Later I asked Edith,

‘Why a cart? Why, here, a cart?’

‘Votan! That
you
should ask.’ She laughed. All the tenseness and bitterness was gone. She stood naked and went to the door, and took from hands unseen cups, and a jug of barley beer, and barley bread, still warm, and deer meat, smoking hot.

‘Long, long ago, the Women tilled the earth and worshipped the Mother. The horse gave us no more than the cow, meat and hide and hair. Then the Mother lived, as we did, in houses, or caves, and, in the heat, in groves and woods.

‘The Riders came out of the east. They worshipped only the cruel sky that sends snow and sun to torment us. They swung their great iron swords from their high, high horses, and they took the poor Mother from her groves, and shut her in a cart to travel the roads of the world for ever.’

‘So now it is the Mother, and not the king who makes the corn to grow?’

She giggled.

‘So they say, so they say. What do the men know of what we do or whom we honour? Yet, the days of the kings who are kings because they make the crops are ending. Soon they will give way to kings who are kings because they are born of the Gods themselves.

‘I tell you, Votan, from this day on, there is no man in all the Saxon tribes who will move to bring down Edwin. No woman will let her man depose Edith’s husband. Yet the men will never know why the women are so much against civil war, when there have been other times … Votan, you came when the Mother called.’