Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (25 page)

‘Taliesin bribed them to go away so he could get me out. You would pick tonight. What are you doing here, anyway?’

‘I’ve been raising a cavalry regiment. We’re off to the Danube
next month, this is my last training exercise for them. At least it’s productive. Now, here’s the beginning of a path. Keep south-east on this for a mile and a half, and you’ll find something. Good luck.’

I made all the speed I could along the path. A mile and a half, I thought, and there’ll be one of Aristarchos’s patrols, or at least a horse holder, and then a night’s ride and I’ll be back in the Empire, safe. Nothing will ever tempt me to go back to the north again, good riddance to the lot. I didn’t want to see a Briton again as long as I lived, or a German either – somebody jumped on me. He wasn’t a very good wrestler and I was on top almost at once before I found he was swearing in Saxon; it was just in time to stop me putting Morien’s knife into his ribs. I got off him. Osbert sat up, and the other Saxons came sheepishly to me.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked them sternly. I’d had a severe shock.

‘There was a man named Gwalchmai, cloth merchant he was …’

‘Auxiliary sergeant-major, you mean.’

‘Well he did seem to have things organised. He woke us up one by one, and said that if we went two nights’ march to the south, and a night lying up in between, there’d be a boat to take. But when we got to these birches we’d better wait for something to happen. I suppose he meant you, but these Brits never say anything straightforward, and he couldn’t speak German properly anyway.’

Off they’d gone, straight for the coast, never a thought for me. Just selfish, that’s what, looking after their own skins, and never a thought for their brave leader who had brought them for his own purposes across the sea to this place of plenty and now had raised the whole Roman Army to send them safely on their way. I was shocked, and I told them so. They had the grace to look ashamed.

We lay up for a day on a hillside overlooking a valley with a cattle road. We’d found a havod, quite deserted, but everyone’s belongings still scattered about, so as well as blankets for the day we all found some stray trinkets to remember Britain by. We watched through the morning as bands of angry men, armed, came through hurrying southwest.

‘They look fierce enough to eat you, indeed,’ said Edward.
‘We did hear the nobles were going to eat you. The peasants don’t do that kind of thing, they say it’s too old-fashioned.’

No men came in the afternoon, so I started off before it was properly dark. We reached the shore, the banks of a big river really, about an hour after dark, with the moon coming up.

We were near a village. I took stock of the boats. There were a number of leather boats beached, two of them big enough to take us back to Germany, but I didn’t mean to do any more rowing, it was too much work, and too chancy. I pointed out under the moon and said,

‘We’ll take her.’

She was anchored out in the stream, too far for a spear to carry, but not too far for swimming.

‘The south-wester?’ said Edward. ‘Who’s going to sail her?’

For this was one of the big ships from the west of Britain, the kind the Veneti used to sail that gave Caesar so much trouble. She wasn’t a galley.

‘You take her,’ I said. ‘I’ll sail her.’

Oswy and Egbert were already stripped. They slid into the water and swam out without splashing. They might have been seals for all anyone could see. In a little while one of them was standing by the mast and waving. Osbert went around and slashed open most of the leather boats. We all got into the largest, and paddled our way out to the ship with our hands; of course all the paddles were hidden away. We were well afloat before anyone remembered the swimmers’ clothes, and we had to go back for them, giggling.

We heaved over the bulwarks on to the deck, Osbert remembering to slash a hole in the last leather boat. This ship
had
a deck, too, and a high poop, with a shelter under it full of things. She was oak built, great thick timbers, iron bolted, and a big leather lug sail on a mast stepped well forward. She was big enough, and roomy, three times as long as she was broad. None of the Saxons had ever
seen
a ship like her, let alone sailed in one.

I picked out the brightest, and stood them with ropes’ ends in their hands. The stupid ones I set to holding the standing rigging; they heaved away at the shrouds and backstays like mad and thought it was important, and it kept them out of mischief.

‘Edward, take the steering oar. Now all of you, listen. Edward as well. Listen to me all the time. When I tell you to do anything,
MOVE
! If you don’t hear your name called, stand still. Anyone who misses a call or pulls out of turn, I’ll kill him, I tell you, I’ll kill him. Now, listen while I call out what I’m doing.’

I was doing this for my own benefit as well as theirs. I couldn’t afford to make a mistake.

‘My sail is – lowered. My steering oar is – inboard. My wind is – light west-nor’-west. Now! My cable is –
cut
! Oswy – loose, my steering oar is – put her in, Edward – outboard, my sail is – pull, Edwy, let out the line, Egbert – set and … drawing. My wind is on the … port quarter, my heading is … a little south of east.’

When I was satisfied that Edward and Ethelbert could hold her reasonably steady, I called Osbert, who was the stupidest.

‘Hurry along there, you’re at sea now, not on your farm. How much water in the well?’

‘What’s a well?’

The Gods gave me patience not to hit him on the spot.

‘You remember about baling, I hope?’

‘I baled all the flaming way over.’

‘And you’ll bale all the flaming way back if you aren’t careful. There’s the bucket and this is where you do it. Let’s see. Not much there, keep it up till you have to use a sponge, and then tell me.’

‘What’s a sponge?’ but I left him.

I called Oswy Karlsson, who had had enough sense to make the halyards fast.

‘What else did you find – or miss?’

‘She’s in lead, big pigs with a mark on them.’

‘I thought as much, from the way she’s handling. Any food?’

‘In the shelter deck. Monotonous, cheese and twice-baked bread, and a bit of bacon. Plenty of water, in two big casks.’

‘Good. I was afraid we might have to raid for it. Anything else?’

‘There was a watchman. We knocked him on the head and tied him up on the lead. Where’s she from?’

‘In lead? from south-west Britain. We’ll find out for certain when the watchman wakes up.’

‘If he speaks German.’

‘But you speak Pictish, don’t you?’

‘No, why should I? All these Scrawlings understand German if you talk it loudly enough.’

And it was quite true. The King had taken great care that I should have no chance to learn Pictish. The Saxons had had every chance, and just never bothered.

By daylight, we were well out of the river mouth, and standing out to sea. Edward asked me when we would turn south-south-east to follow the coast, which, he pointed out, would bring us dead before the wind like a ship ought to go. I just told him to hold her steady.

There was a bit of grumbling among the crew as the coast slipped out of sight. I must admit that it is never very pleasant to be out of sight of land, but I had to take these men where they had no choice but to do what I told them.

First I had breakfast served, biscuit and cheese and a cup of water. When we had finished, I put Oswy at the steering oar, and brought her round almost due south. This brought smiles to everybody’s faces. They soon vanished. I gave them a couple of hours of sail drill, tacking about a point on either beam of the wind. After that, even the stupid ones realised what we were about. Of course most of the Saxons were sick, the motion of that heavy ship wasn’t very pleasant, but they’d all been sick on the way over and they expected it.

When I was satisfied, I stood half the men down, and gave the oar to Edward. We had a talk with the watchman. In spite of a night tied up on the lead with an aching head, he was still glowing with rage, a crabby old man. He was obviously cursing us up and down in his own language, so we threw a couple of buckets of water over him.

He talked then, grudgingly, in very bad Latin. He told me he did come from the south-west. He seemed to be saying, as far as I could follow, that he came from a town in the water underneath
a glass mountain, where the Druids supped from a sacred cup beside a tree that bloomed at the Yule. Serve you right, I thought, for hoping to get sense out of an angry man.

The wind held steady into the night. I felt enough confidence in Edward to let him steer in the dark, and I slept on the deck beside him. I dreamt again, of ghosts, ghosts of men who were yet to die. lots of men in great grey ships, in a lost battle launching themselves in a desperate charge to save a fleet. I woke out of a nightmare of smoke and steam and fire to find Edward shaking me and saying,

‘There’s something wrong with the ship.’

It was near dawn. There was nothing wrong with the ship, but the wind had come right round, it was the wind that had brought us to Pictland. It came from near the south, in the end; we watched it back all the way from west-nor’-west through west to a trifle west of south in an hour, but I waited till it steadied before I made up my mind.

‘Right, Jokuhai-inen,’ I thought, ‘you did what you liked to poor Saxons in a rowing boat. Now try a real man in a real ship. You bar me the way to the south? South I will go.’

I turned to my crew.

‘Duty watch,’ I called. ‘The rest of you get some sleep, you’ll need it. I’ll call you later. Duty watch! Now you’ll learn what work is.’

They did, too. I know you’ll never make a sailor out of any Saxon, but I did my best. I took my direction from the sun, and brought the ship’s head round as near south-east as I could and held her there.

How close to the wind would she sail? Very close, I found. In the end I was able to make way with the wind a whole point forward of the beam. How? Well partly it was that great lug sail – I’d never seen a lug sail on such a big vessel before. Partly it was the way the steering oar was hung right at the stern, and partly it was just the way she was built.

The Saxons, of course, thought it was magic that I could sail against the wind. It was not magic that beat Jokuhaiinen’s magic. It was the mind of man – or rather several minds, the mind that built the ship and gave her that deep keel, the mind that set out
the sail plan and cut and sewed the leather, the mind that stowed and trimmed the lead, and the mind that held the whole picture of wind and sea and trim and draught and knew when to go about.

It took all day to beat Jokuhai-inen. By evening, the wind veered back to west of north, and at dark it dropped. So we threw out a sea anchor, and hove to for the night. In the morning we had a fair wind again. Now the crew were cheerful, but the day’s work tacking and changing course had done them a lot of good. They had even got quite used to moving about on a heeling deck; most landsmen, or people who go out in rowing boats, think of a ship as a floating platform they must keep steady, not as a living thing that must swim and find her own attitude in the sea.

So we made another day toward Germany, and a night and another day. Edward felt a bit light-hearted, and he untied Caw. The time on the lead without food or water had calmed the old tiger down, and we gave him a bucket and set him swabbing under the poop where some of the Saxons had been sick.

The wind was gentle, and the day sunny, and the motion of the ship easy, and I was sitting on the poop telling Edward about some of the finer points of sailing into the wind, and he was not believing a word I was saying, and most of the others were dozing; there was a sudden commotion. I jumped up.

‘Egfrith, get off Caw! Oswy, you fool, get back to the steering oar. Now what’s up?’

‘He chucked something big overboard. Then he was jumping in himself. I caught him in time.’

‘It was the cheese sack,’ said somebody. ‘It went straight down, he must have put a pig of lead in it.’

‘Let’s see what else he’s done.’ I took Edward into the shelter deck.

‘Yes, the cheese is gone. What about the biscuit barrel? Full of sea water. Now knock the water casks. That one shouldn’t be full. He’s topped it up with salt water. And the other one, too. No wonder he’d rather drown.’

I went back on deck. Two men were kicking Caw in the face.

‘Stop that, it never does any good,’ I told them, ‘not in those soft shoes. Go for the groin, like this.’

When Caw had reached the vomiting stage, we tied him to the mast, and everybody who passed him had a go with a rope’s end He was a reminder that we had no food and no water, and though we could have done without that reminder, there was no reason why he should die any quicker than we did, and if we didn’t die, there was plenty we could do to him on shore.

We had a night and a day and a night more running before that drying wind. Then about noon, everybody was very low. Nobody had had the heart to hit Caw since dawn. Ethelbert, the oldest, was played out. Then Egfrith, who was holding on to the forestay, said he thought he’d seen land.

‘All right,’ I told him. ‘Climb up the mast and make sure.’

‘I’m not going to climb up that. It’s impossible. Whoever heard of anyone climbing up a ship’s mast? I might fall. It’s dangerous.’

This was no time to lose my authority.

‘Get up that flaming mast!’

‘I can’t climb it.’

‘
CLIMB IT
!!!’

He climbed it. He called down from that dizzy height, fully ten feet above us,

‘It’s the Holy Island. I know the shape.’

At those words the wind dropped. The motion of the ship ceased. We wallowed. Caw, hanging from his ropes, opened his eyes and said, very clearly,

‘You’ll never sail this ship to a German shore.’

‘We will yet,’ I told him. I never spoke again in that ship.

For the rest of that day, and for two days more, we drifted about off the Holy Island. Carried about by the tides and the currents, sometimes we drifted to within a hundred yards of the shore, sometimes it was out of sight from the deck. I would send no other man to climb that mast.