Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (24 page)

There was laughter from the bed. Bithig was laughing at me. She lay there, all blue and white and blotchy, and she laughed at me, damn her.

‘Water only makes it worse,’ she got out at last. I went over and emptied the bowl over her head.

‘Now get it off yourself,’ I told her. I rolled her over and beat her on the buttocks till there must have been some genuine blue among the blotches. She wriggled out of bed, tripped me, and sat on my face to rub the stuff into my legs. I got my head round far enough to bite her in the bottom and as she sprang howling across the room she cannoned into the serving-woman, who showed no surprise at the yelling wrestling pair who bounced off her and covered the room with fried eggs and sausages.

‘Get some more milk, Myfanwy,’ said Bithig. ‘This Mesopotamian idiot drank the last lot.’

‘I’m not a Mesopotamian.’

‘Greece, Mesopotamia, India, what’s the difference?’

Myfanwy came back with more milk.

‘Nothing else will take it off. Shall I do the gentleman’s back, dear?’

‘It’s a wife’s prerogative to wash her husband’s back,’ I insisted. After all, she ought to do something.

‘And vice versa,’ snapped Bithig. ‘Have you got some butter for the hard bits, Myfanwy?’

‘Two big pats, best salted. Dreadful it is when it gets wet. You have to scrape and scrape. Would you like some more egg and sausage?’

When she brought it, and we were both clean down to the navel, Bithig asked her again what the weather was.

‘Well, it was quite fine first thing, but it’s raining again now.’

‘Heavy?’

‘Pouring down, sweetheart.’

‘Oh good, now we don’t have to go out all day. Mackerel for lunch, and a few gobbets of everything for dinner. Now, back to bed.’

And that was how three days went by, in rain and bedding, in lechery and luxury, bigamous and entrancing. We once or twice came up for air and conversation.

‘But I thought you were tattooed.’

‘No, only men. Women used to be, but it’s quite impossiblé. Just think of being saddled with the same face for life.’

‘Or the same body.’

‘That’s only for special occasions. It takes so long to put on and off. It’s very good for the milk trade, though. There’s a limit to the amount of cheese we can find a market for.’

‘What do you do it with?’

‘What do you think? Woad and goose grease, of course.’

The fourth morning it had stopped raining. We spent a couple of hours putting on Bithig’s tattoo, and then we went hunting.
We spent all the afternoon careering through the forest after a stupid hare that hadn’t enough sense to climb a tree or dig a hole, and even then we never caught it.

We went hunting nearly every day. The days we didn’t go for hare we hunted deer, which meant crawling about on your face in the wet woods trying to get a crossbow shot in. We never actually got a deer either.

None of this was very good for my grey suit. In the evenings I would cover it up with Taliesin’s second best toga, but with the soup stains and the drips of beer that too was getting to look grey. I didn’t dare get it washed, it would have taken two months to dry.

Then one evening, in hall – the royal family dined in hall once a week – I was moving around late in the evening trying to find someone to play dice with when I got into conversation with a stranger, who said he was a cloth merchant, and had a couple of suits in grey that would fit me without much alteration. He reminded me of Occa, somehow, his Latin was good, and he’d come up from south of the Wall.

‘Those suits aren’t much, but they
are
grey, and you only want them for a year and a day, don’t you?’

‘A year and a day? What do you mean?’

‘Don’t know much about the Picts, do you, boy. They’re old-fashioned up here. They still pass the kingship down from uncle to nephew, you know, and they still choose fathers for their kings by chance. Any stranger passing by who’s moderately royal, they marry him off to the king’s sister, and after a year and a day, when they’re sure he’s done his duty, or not, off he goes.’

‘Off he goes? Where?’

‘Nobody knows. Some do say that he don’t have no proper burial.’

‘You mean …?’

‘They eats him. Still, you never know, not with Picts.’

Well, I didn’t take much notice of that, there are all kinds of strange things they say about the Picts, and I bought the two grey suits, that is, I played him dice for them, and they were both quite a good fit. But a few days later, we were having a quiet dinner in the king’s diningroom, and I was trying to get out of them when there would be fair winds to get back to Germany, and
they were trying to wheedle out of me where the Amber came from, and Morien and Evrawc were there. Bithig got up to leave and I got up too, and she said,

‘No, Photinus, not in my condition,’ and she went! That’s all she said, ‘Not in my condition,’ and I didn’t see her again. Instead Morien and Evrawc stood very close to me, and Evrawc said,

‘We’ve moved your things into another room.’

They took me there, and Annwas was already outside the door, with a big shield and a spear. It was a good room, better than the one I had had the first night. There was a great big bed, chairs, table, seal-oil lamps. For some reason the rafters were full of sealed jars. It was a good room, but it was quite clear I couldn’t get out. I didn’t try. I went to sleep.

In the morning, Evrawc woke me up with an enormous bowl of porridge, and enough fried food for three. I looked at it wanly.

‘Come along,’ he said. ‘Eat up. How much do you weigh?’

‘About a hundred and sixty pounds.’

‘You’d better eat well. We’re counting on at least two hundred dressed for the oven, by next spring. Morien won’t be pleased if you fall short.’

‘Why Morien?’

‘Well, you came up on his land, and he gets paid by weight. There’s only been a deposit put down on you yet, the King won’t settle till after the feast. I think we’ll have to be putting a German in to make it go round. This Edward of yours, is it royal he is being or only noble?’

‘Just noble. Why?’

‘Well, thinking of him for next year, Bithig was.’

I got worried.

‘Is this all serious, about eating me?’

‘Of course.’ It was obvious that Evrawc could conceive of no other way of life. ‘Of course most of us nobles don’t really like the taste, but the peasants expect it.’

‘But you can’t do it to me. I won’t have it!’

‘Nobody’s ever complained before.’

‘I’m complaining now. Get Taliesin!’

‘He won’t help you. He gets the best bit, as a Druid, you know.’

‘Tell him I want the consolations of my religion.’

Evrawc went off and left me to breakfast. How anyone could eat in such a situation, being fattened up like an ox! To treat me like this, Photinus, Votan Aser, to treat me as a piece of flotsam cast up on the beach and sell me off to the highest bidder, not even for cash but on some kind of credit arrangement. The porridge was better than usual, it had pats of butter floating in it. And sold for what? I was practically incandescent with rage. Not for the sake of my muscles which were in fair state. Not for the sake of my intellect, keener than any they had in the dun – the bacon had been too long on the grill – not for the sake of my store of priceless knowledge, or the dexterity of my fingers. Sold as a sexual chattel – the sausages were quite fair, why weren’t there any more – solely for some lewd woman’s pleasure. The night she danced, Bithig practically raped me. The indignity of it! Was that the last of the cheese? It should never happen to anybody. And when it was all over, to be thrown away, useless, missing all the fun, fit only for food …

Taliesin came with my lunch. It was quite a good one and would have been enough for two people if there hadn’t been two people, and one of them an ascetic vegetarian Druid.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘You can’t go breaking up traditions like this.’

‘Your tradition,’ I told him, ‘not mine. Where I come from, royalty dies peacefully of old age and overeating.’

‘General tradition, my boy. The King must die for the harvest, we’ve got a good king, let’s have the next king’s harvest instead. Break the chain, and the world will come to an end, all starve.’

‘We won’t. The world will end in fire, and not for a long time yet.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I had a vision.’

‘Tell me.’ Taliesin was all professional interest. I let him have as much as was good for him of my nine days in the tree.

‘Now, if there won’t be a cataclysm at once, and if we can have
enough pork in the pot, and one of the Germans too … I could get you as far as the grove tonight, and down south at the end of the week. But why should I? I mean, the festival is the only chance poor men like me have of tasting meat.’

‘You great solar hypocrite, sitting there with a leg of hare in your hand, my hare, that ought to go into fattening me up … and anyway, you get the best bit.’

‘I do not,’ he was indignant. ‘I only get the right thing, Merlin gets the right buttock, that’s the best bit.’

‘And Bithig? What does she get?’

‘What do you think? Anyway, we keep your head, look, up there. That one was your predecessor, a man from the outer isles, called Fergus. A bit salty, I thought. When we first saw you, we were on our way back from the ceremony. First of May, you know. But still you haven’t said, what’s in it for me?’

‘When I landed I had a waterbottle, on a strap.’

‘I’ve got it.’

‘Come round after dinner, and bring it.’

At least he did come after dinner, and gave me a chance to eat a meal for three men in peace. He gave me the bottle. I pulled out the bung, and offered it to Taliesin. He refused.

‘You might be going to turn me into anything.’

‘Then I shall.’

‘No! Who knows what powers it might not give you. I’ll call Morien. Any change there would be an improvement.’

I poured Morien four fingers of the Honeydew in a silver cup. He tossed it down, looked puzzled, and then stood up very straight and sang what I took to be several stanzas of the song about purity of heart. Taliesin looked interested.

‘It is a great deal of good that it has been doing to his versification. But as for the matter – there has been a developing, and an expanding, and a flowering of his imagination. In his own verses he has touched depths of depravity I did not think he has as yet plumbed, and he has reached heights of obscenity of which
any man might well be proud. At some convenient occasion I will tell you of how I was consecrated, and initiated, and made secure against all the temptations of gluttony and strong drink.’

‘I’ve noticed the effects.’ I poured Morien a second drink. He finished it, and with a happy expression lay down by the fire, and went to sleep.

‘To think I had that, and wasted money on bribes,’ said Taliesin. ‘What does it taste like?’

I poured him some. He savoured it, and tried a few stanzas.

‘The effect on the flow of ideas is very good, and on metre, but alliteration is only slightly improved. Still, you can’t have everything. How do you make it?’

‘You start off with a mash,’ I began. ‘This is honey, but barley or apples will do …’ I went through it all carefully, once. Taliesin’s trade, mainly, was in memorising immense long poems, and he had the whole process of Honeydew off pat at one hearing. But I had no fear that he would ever be able to make it. Setting up the stills calls for a great deal of technical skill, and the most he had ever done was to cut mistletoe with a golden knife. He didn’t realise the difficulties.

When he had memorised the recipe, he said,

‘Let’s make the grove.’

‘Now you have the secret, how do I know I can trust you?’

‘I give you my word as the priest of the Unconquered Sun—’

‘Stop it,’ I told him. ‘We both know how much that word is worth.’

Silently he laid his hand on his mistletoe. That was good enough for anyone to believe.

I motioned Taliesin to leave the room before me. Before I went I took Morien’s belt, and his cloak fastener, and a few other worth-while trinkets. Then I followed the Druid along the long stone passages and through the courtyards. When we were in the last corridor and I could feel the air on my face, I saw Taliesin straighten up in the doorway. There was rather a nasty sound, and he fell down. Hit his head on the lintel, I thought, but the body in front of me suddenly slid quietly to one side. There were voices in Latin. The first was native, sibilant and adenoidal, and I could swear it was the cloth merchant.

‘Now look what you’ve done. It comes very expensive out here, killing a Druid.’

‘Well, well, Gwalchmai, there’s nothing you can do in this island that a couple of sheep for Cernunnos won’t put right.’ And this voice, too, was familiar.

‘Well, now I look he is not dead at all. An ox to Mapon will be best, and I can introduce you to a very reliable dealer, my second cousin.’

‘I’m sure that the transaction will be free of all trace of self interest. We can arrange it later. Now how do we find Photinus in this jumble of rooms?’

It was time to say something. I whispered very loudly in Greek,

‘If you have quite finished your theological speculations, I’ll show you where I live.’

I came out. It was the cloth merchant, and the other … well, who else, it was Aristarchos, and he only said,

‘I think you’ve met my troop sergeant-major. Now, Gwalchmai, what do we do with Taliesin?’

‘Easy. I take this jug of beer, which I providentially happen to have with me, and I pour it over him … so … and the jug in his left hand … so … and in his right this half-gnawed ham bone, which I brought in case I might be hungry in the night. And there is your abstemious vegetarian Druid, dead drunk on his own doorstep, and no one will ever believe a word he says.’

‘Back we go,’ said Aristarchos. ‘You ought to get away easy. I’ve got eight hundred men out here tonight, and by dawn every cow for twenty miles will be milling round in one enormous herd close to the Wall. It’ll take the Picts the whole summer to sort them out, and a generation to settle the blood-feuds. Peace in the north for thirty years, and not a single silver coin to Casnar. That’s where he got his wealth, subsidies not to attack the Wall. Let’s see how rich he gets on farming when he’s quarrelling with all his neighbours. By the way, there was no sentry on the gate of the dun, or in the village either.’