Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (30 page)

‘Dedicated to yourself, yourself dedicated to yourself, that’s what you are, always been, dedicated to yourself.’

I went from the clamour of her voice into the clamour of Valhall, all confusion and terror. Sweyn Halffoot, standing for once, was banging his face against a golden pillar, viciously, trying to hurt himself. Edwin was trying to hold back Siggeir, who had young Sigmund in a corner and was trying to brain him with a silver tray. Donar was lying over a table, face down, streaming blood, snorting like a pig.

‘Quiet, everyone!’ I shouted. ‘Stand still where you are!’ They did, too. Anyone would have stopped for white-haired Votan, furious, with the one blazing eye.

‘Who’s sober and capable? Idun, you look all right, get a bucket of hot water. And a jug of Honeydew, and some shears, and a knife. A sharp one, out of the kitchen. Tyr, help me get his legs on the table and turn him over. How did it all start?’

‘He told him it was King Vikar’s chain. Then he went for him.’

‘Shears! we’ll get rid of some of this hair. Now, slowly, who told who and who went for who?’

‘Sigmund told Donar, the toad-brained turd. I’ll kill him, só help me, I’ll feed his guts to the rats, I’ll cut his—’

‘Let him be, Tyr, Siggeir will finish Sigmund for us. Save your curses for Loki. Idun, get some clean cloths. So Sigmund told Donar Sweyn had King Vikar’s chain. Who went for who?’

‘Donar rushed at Sweyn, had him by the throat. Sweyn had to hit him, he was being choked.’

‘What with, for pity’s sake? Pour some Honeydew over these tweezers, Idun, in this dish.’

‘Fists first, and then a pot and it broke, and then a whetstone.’

‘Njord’s?’

‘No, with his own.’

‘Donar must have a skull as thick as the Mamunt’s. Give me the tweezers. Look at the pieces of stone coming out, and the lumps of pot, right in the bone. Pour Honeydew over the wound. Go on, girl, don’t skimp it. Keep all the pieces in that cup. He’ll be proud of them when he comes round.’

‘He will come round?’

‘Of course he will.’ I said. I hope he does, I thought, but I shall be miles away by then. ‘Is this where – What’s all that noise?’

‘He’s got away, Sigmund’s got away, he’s running like a louse.’

‘Let him go. Stop there, Siggeir, he’s not worth it, stop – Oh, what’s the use, let them all go if they want to. Come over here Sweyn, feel this. There you are, only a bump, you’ve had worse yourself. Idun, thank heaven you’re here, get a bed made up. And throw some water over this drunken Dane, there’s nothing else to do when they start crying.’

Siggeir came back, swearing horribly and shaking snow off his clothes.

‘Lost him, blast his eyes, blast him. I’d have got him too, if this Saxon hadn’t hung on to my cloak, brought us both down in the marsh. I’d have got him if I’d been left alone. Off he went over the saltings and his men with him.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t have treated the poor old gentleman like that.’ Idun had come a long way from the forest into Asgard, and now she was at her best, not caring whom she scolded or mothered. ‘Come along, King Edwin, come along, sit by the brazier
and have some hot beer. Get your wet shirt off – Bragi, get him a dry one – and wrap this cloak around you till it comes.’

Idun had learned, and I think she learned it from me, that if you talk as if you are going to be obeyed, then people will obey you. She was in charge now, I could trust her.

I stood by the high table, and looked over the wreck of Valhall, the remains of the feast, spilt wine and scattered food, broken pottery, and glass, even precious glass, broken. Silver cups squeezed flat, splintered horns, benches upset, and the hangings dragged to the floor, and the gold leaf scraped from the pillars here and there. I stood and I looked at it all, and I picked up a piece of the broken whetstone, I absent-mindedly took Gungnir from the wall, and began to hone him. I honed the edge of the long blade, and I looked at it, and I felt sick of all the riot. The long night was over and the light was coming back. What was I doing here?

‘Saddle Sleipnir,’ I told the Vandals, ‘and a spare horse for my pack.’

Tyr watched me pull my grey cloak around me, and draw the hood over my head.

‘Hunting Burgundians?’ he asked. ‘Or Loki?’

‘Two little brown men. Tell your Vandals I shall need them.’

‘Call for us when you want us.’

I went out of Asgard. It was close to dawn.

All that winter, from Yule to Easter, I rode the roads of Germany. I went from the Friesians to the Quadi, and from the Cherusci to the Black Danes. Once I came to the very gates of Outgard, and heard the Burgundians and their women shrilling inside.

I had not known there were so many of the little brown men on the cold plains. Did I find the two I sought? How should I know? The first five I saw I killed quickly, out of hand. After that they heard of me, and they began to hide from me, and to keep to the woods. I only got eight or nine more, besides women, by the time the snow began to melt. I learned myself how to melt
into the earth, how to appear and disappear, never to be seen to come, or to go, but suddenly to be, or to be gone.

At intervals I would come into the palisades, and meet the Vandals of the packtrains. They always had news for me, and silver, and new clothes, and fresh horses, for I only rode Sleipnir when I went in to kill. They helped drive the brown vermin into my arms, though twice they nearly trapped me in the wild lands.

So, as I came into the palisades, I heard all the news of Asgard.

‘Njord is sick, he lies on his bed, he coughs and drinks Honeydew, and sits no more at the gate.’

‘Donar has begun to walk again, but slowly.’

‘Freda now lives in Valhall and tends them both.’

Then when the hyacinths bloomed again beneath the trees:

‘Njord is dying, Njord Borsson, Lord of the Asers, lies dead in Valhall.’

I rode back to Asgard. I stopped at Orm’s place. He said:

‘Only send Bragi back to me, and Idun. And let her bring the little girl, Brunhild. She looks after her now.’

I came to the place where Njord had chosen his grave. Ten paces west of the Standing Stone of the Men of Old, at the Gate of Hell, at the threshold of Those Below. There was no need of fire to thaw the ground. In the soft earth they dug. I saw that they threw up bits of burnt bone, and the ashes of men long dead, and pieces of broken pot. Yet I think I was the only one who saw this, the others were too busy digging, or thinking. I sat Sleipnir by the ash tree and I waited.

Out from Asgard, the blue-clad Vandals who had no King carried the body of Njord Borsson who was no King. What killed him?

‘The cold,’ Idun told me later. ‘The cold he caught going up to Baldur’s grave, he wasn’t fit to go all that way, not at his age, and all that Honeydew he drank to cure the cold, and that Baldur was dead, and that Loki came no more, and that Blind Hod had gone off to live with Loki, and that Donar walked slowly and talked thickly and smiled always on one side of his face, and that Freda wept all day, and that you, Votan, were gone in wrath and without a word. That’s what killed him, Allfather, that you were
gone, most of all, for he knew that without you, or against you, not even Asgard could stand.’

They carried him to the grave that he had asked for, leather lapped in his oak coffin. Who would go with Njord? Skirmir’s wife did not cry her question, who would have answered? But he did not, in the end, go alone. For pity’s sake, they caught the old woman who made pots at the end of the village, and knocked her on the head and threw her in. And is it not better to share the grave of a greater than a King, than to die in lonely misery, and rot unwashed, unwatched, on the floor of your hut till the roof falls in to be your grave mound?

No Kings came to Njord’s funeral. Their agents came. No King would show his face in Asgard after Baldur’s funeral feast. For their masters they threw into the grave their gifts, bronze, gold, bolts of cloth. From the kitchens of Asgard, they threw in roast meat, and sausages, and bread and stuffed salt fish. I saw someone throw in a handful of my olives. Njord never liked olives in life, why should he in death? What about the rest of the barrel, I kept thinking, what about the rest of the olives, as I watched the Asers come to the grave.

The Asers threw in their gifts. Heimdall in his fine Spanish boots I gave him, and he was so proud of. Donar, moving slowly on a stick. I looked across the heads of all the Asers. On the edge of the forest, beyond the village, he stood, in scarlet cloak.

Freda came forward. Into the grave she threw a chain, a chain of stone. A chain it was of thirty-six rings, each ring was in the shape of a fish that held its own tail in its mouth, and each fish was green but its fins were white.

I rode down from the ash tree to the Standing Stone, the only mounted man in all that throng. I rode past the Asers to the grave of Great Njord Borsson, Lord of the Asers. Into the grave I threw my golden armour, my cuirass of gilded leather. In that acid soil the hide would rot, the worms poke through the gold. All will rot, all will moulder away.

Then on the coffin I threw a clod of earth. As the peasants on Baldur’s coffin, so I threw in Njord’s grave a turf from my own field, that none but I would crop. From the centre of the Heath, I brought a turf stained with Varus’s blood.

Then I rode on, past the Asers, past the peasants. Slowly I rode over the causeway. I walked Sleipnir to the Gates of Asgard, over the path where a man might lead a packhorse, but where no man had ridden before. I rode into the courtyard of Asgard where no man before had sat a horse. I looked at the Kingless Vandals who filled the courtyard, and I heard their shouts, and I knew that now I was Lord of the Amber Road, Ruler of all the Asers. I dismounted and I went into Valhall.

The thrones of the Asers were no longer as they had bèen. They were no longer as they had been even that morning, when Frederik went out to the grave. What did I have Vandals for?

I took my place at the centre of the high table of Valhall. Tyr sat at my right hand, Hermod at my left. Freda, Frederik, Donar, Bragi, sat at the sidetables. Heimdall entered. He laid before me on the table Njord’s whetstone.

We ate Njord’s Funeral Feast. There was enough ham for all the Vandals who came crowding into Valhall. Good honest men, they were serving me as they once served Loki, hating Loki now, hating the Burgundians who filled their old places. Who would now dare say a word against Votan Allfather? I spoke an oration fit for a Funeral Feast.

‘Thus in wisdom spoke the great Asers at the first, that never should weapons go with them to the grave. The place for swords is in the bright dry air, not rusting with damp bones. Let all those swords hiss in the hands of men, who know how to fight for what they live by.

‘An enemy comes at us from the east. Treacherously he tries to steal our trade. He undercuts us when we offer furs, he overbids us when we buy our Amber. Soon he will go further and take to arms, and bring the Burgundians about our ears.

‘And so I call all loyal Vandals, and all the Lombards under both their Kings, about the Raven Flag of Votan, to fight for Freda, Frederik and Donar, led by farsighted Heimdall and wise Hermod, and by the bravest man of all, One-handed Tyr. This shall be the war to end all wars, to bring peace in the north for ten thousand years, the Aser Peace, Trade, Amber and Goodwill!’

So all the Asers, and all their allies, called for war on Loki. Yet I would not attack him. Let the blame lie at his door, that he marched upon us.

March he must. All through the winter we had planned, all through the spring we worked. We outbid Loki for Amber and furs, and we outbid him for all the wine and glass and cloth. Where men bought less than they sold, we promised them interest on what they left with us. When Loki too put up the prices he offered, we outbid him, and we lowered our selling prices. Even if for a whole year we barely doubled our outlay, cut our profits to the bone, still we could outbid Loki. We never sank to that low level. Soon we drained Loki’s stores of silver, and never made the least impression on our own. Loki had nothing left to pay his Burgundians, nor could they be fed except from their farms. He must attack us if he wished to live. Beaten in trade, he must turn to war.

We had, I reckoned, till August, till the Burgundians had gathered their harvest. No army would march till the harvest was in. To make sure, at that time the Polyani would burst out of their forests, raid the Burgundian farms, burn the crops, so that Sigmund must march or starve. However the raids went, the Asers and their allies would not starve. We had great stores of food, in secret places in the forest.

When was easy. But where?

Loki must march on Asgard. Asgard with its stores of treasure, its furs and Amber and food, must draw him. It would give him enough to feed the Burgundians through a dozen campaigns. Asgard was the trap. I did not fortify Asgard. Why should I frighten the mouse away?

No need, though, to lose all the cheese. The reserves of Amber, and much of the silver, I got secretly out and packed them south where I knew they would be safe, train after train to the south.

I packed the gold out too, all together in one train. There were twenty packhorses, and half a dozen Scrawlings, as few as I could do with. From Orm’s place we took the gold where it, too, would be safe. No one would go after it to the centre of the Heath. Nobody would ask dead Varus for it. The Scrawlings would never take it.

When they had piled the gold sacks on the ground beneath the ash, they turned and saw me with Gungnir in my hand, and knew. They didn’t resist, they didn’t even turn to run, they just waited. I laid the bodies on the sacks. I killed the horses too, and their breath mingled with the wind, and their blood flowed on the plain. Sleipnir stood still in all that smell of blood, and I rode him back.

We sat in Hoenir’s hall, Tyr and I, and we planned the battle. We would not hold Asgard. We would concentrate our own army, nation by nation, on the Aser food stores in the forest. Then, when Sigmund came to the village before Asgard, he would find us waiting on the far side of the common where the villagers grazed their cows. There he must fight us, before ever he could think of taking Asgard. We explained all this to the Cheruscan King.