Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (34 page)

Well, if you really want to know how it was I came to be in that lugger, on a fine reach south-west in a north-west gale, with the north coast of Ireland on my left hand, in company with a Druid, a Colonel of Thracian Cavalry (misemployed), the King and Queen of the Silurians, a Priestess of the Gods Below, to whom I may or may not have been married, and a handful of Brits who alleged they were sailors, then I will tell you.

It all started in my Uncle Euthyphro’s house in Ostia, at dinner on a warm spring evening. It began with my Uncle Euthyphro saying:

‘Someone will have to get it back. And he may even have to go to Britain to do it.’

I made a face at him. Go to Britain? He might as well have said go to the waters of Lethe. After all, what did any of us know about Britain in those days? It was difficult enough for the ordinary citizen to go there, almost as difficult as getting ashore in Egypt, though of course it was simple to arrange for members of a wealthy family of merchant-priests like mine. But so far nobody in the family had wanted to go there, although we did some trade, in dogs and wool and oysters and mussel pearls. We had an agent in Londinium, and so we didn’t need to go ourselves.

Well, what did we know? It was an island where it rained a great deal of the time. A hundred years ago, now, His Sacred Majesty the Emperor Claudius had conquered the fertile southern quarter of the island, where the Brits live, and had left the Northern Desert, as huge as Africa, to the painted Picts, building a wall to keep them out. The Brits, we knew, were the same people as the Gauls, speaking the same language, and the Irish beyond the Empire were the same people also, Many of the nations of the Celts had been broken up long ago, and parts of
them lived in both provinces. For instance, the Parisii lived around Lutetia in the north of Gaul, but another branch of them were spread all around the fortress at Eboracum.

The Brits were a strange people, we had heard. Of course we all knew that every third Briton was a magician, and that they had strange things to do with the dead, though quite what nobody was sure. Yet there were plenty of men in Rome who in their youth had served their time as tribunes in the legions in Britain, and they would always tell you how fond they were of their little Brits. You often find this among men who have to go and live among primitive races – they fall in love with their charges. Literally, too. There had even been a few who had talked wistfully of how they would like to live in the island permanently, farming for wool. Going native almost, if only they could find the daughter of some great landowner, once a noble and now a Citizen of Rome, as some were by great and rare good fortune, to marry.

But go to Britain myself? I thought, that evening, in Ostia. Not if I could help it. Somebody else could do that. But there, if you could learn to stand the taste of butter, you could stand anything, and I could eat it without turning a hair. Not that butter would have stood very long, in my uncle’s house in Ostia that evening. Nor that it was really very hot, even for the first of May, but it was the last really comfortable evening I was going to have for a long time, though I didn’t know it. So it wasn’t the heat that made my cousin Philebus sweat. It was the talking-to that his father Euthyphro and I had just given him. All the names in my family follow the same pattern. It all started with my grandfather who had an obsession with philosophy, and believed that a thing partook of its name, that was part of its character. So he called all his sons and grandsons after dialogues of Plato, and I had uncles called Phaedo and Crito too. And if it had not been for my mother, who came from up in the hills and was half Galatian and so had a will of her own, and for the North Wind for whom she had a particular veneration and who therefore kept both my father and my grandfather mewed up in Alexandria for three weeks, I might well have been called Laws or Republic, or even Banquet. But even that might have been better than the name she gave me, Photinus. Neither good Greek nor good Latin, that
name, and perhaps Grandfather may have been right in holding that the name governs the character of the thing. I seem to have spent half my life looking for better names. Votan I’ve been called, and Mannanan, and so many others, and each new name has brought me some kind of profit and some kind of loss, some gain in knowledge, some loss of innocence.

Well, it was quite hot that evening, and the dinner had been quite good, all except the goose liver which had been spoilt, and that was quite easily remedied: we just sold the cook and bought another which improved the general efficiency of the kitchen. I mean, it’s not everybody who
wants
to go and work in the sulphur mines, is it? But my cousin Philebus wasn’t thinking too much about the food: he had other torments on his mind. I had brought one of the family’s ships in that morning, it being the easiest way from the Old City to Rome, where I had a good deal of business to discuss with my uncle. Clearing the port authorities and dealing with all the documents relating to the cargo had taken me well into the afternoon, and I had only got into the house just in time for dinner. I was very tired, and then I had been thrown into the middle of this first-class family quarrel. I felt that before I made any suggestions about future action, I wanted to hear it all again, quietly, this time. My uncle was one of those men who can never forget they aren’t at sea.

‘Now, Philebus, as I understand it, you bought some kind of monopoly from the Emperor, or rather from one of his Sacred Majesty’s Chamberlains.’

‘Yes. From Faustinus.’

‘And you paid?’ I knew it must have been expensive.

‘Twenty-five thousand sestertia.’ But not as expensive as that, twenty-five million copper sesterces.

‘How much …’ I began to ask, and then thought, it was no use now asking how much of that was for Faustinus himself. ‘You lost the deed gambling.’

‘Three cups and a pea,’ nodded Philebus miserably.

‘The method is immaterial,’ I said consolingly. ‘I could take any man alive by that game if I held the cups, and even if I didn’t I would never lose a game if only I could count my thumbs. But if you aren’t up to my standard, you shouldn’t play. Never stake
anything of value unless you can cheat, or have enough influence to buy your way out again. But do you remember who it was you were playing with?’

‘It was Gwawl. Everybody knows him, even though he’s only been around the tables in Rome for a month. He’ll play with anybody.’

‘That’s a strange name. Is he a Greek?’

‘Sometimes he says he is, and sometimes he says he’s not. Some people think he comes from a Lugdunum Greek family, and you know how Greek
they
are, been there for a couple of hundred years, and intermarried with the Gauls all the time. But if he is from Lugdunum, there’s nobody here who knows his family. He might be anything, Gaul, Syrian, Spanish, anything.’

‘But look here,’ I protested, ‘a Monopoly Deed like this isn’t a bearer document, not usually.
He
can’t use it.’

‘He made me sign a transfer deed. He had it all written out ready, and the witnesses as well, waiting. The deed itself was in my name, personal to me. Now it’s personal to him.’

‘A lawyer, then, is he?’

‘No. He lives by his wits, gambling on the Games, mostly.’

From this point on I ignored Philebus. He was grateful for that. I asked his father:

‘You’ve tried to buy it back?’

‘He wanted two hundred thousand sestertia.’

‘And the monopoly is worth …?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, Uncle, you don’t know? You’ve spent enough of the family’s money on it.’ I felt I could speak like that to Uncle Euthyphro, I was on equal terms with him, not like Philebus. ‘What about the man you took it over from?’

‘Well, the truth of the matter is, we weren’t taking it over from anybody.’

‘Not from anybody? But someone must have had a monopoly of the Gold trade with Britain.’

‘Not Britain.’ My uncle was almost squirming. ‘There’s Gold in Ireland. That’s what the monopoly was for. Everybody knows there’s Gold in Ireland, whatever else they don’t know about it.’

I looked so astonished at this that even my uncle noticed it
and stopped talking while I got my breath back. I tried to remember what I did know about Ireland, and there wasn’t much anybody knew. It is an island, not much smaller than Britain, and it lies thirty miles, or less, from the coast of Britain. It exports hunting dogs, now, and nothing more. Nothing at all. Certainly not Gold. And I had never met anybody who had ever been there. When I got my breath back, visibly, my uncle went on:

‘Of course, any Gold you get from there will have to go through Britain, and it will have to come in legally, as there’ll be too much to hide. There’s no difficulty there. But there’s been no Gold coming from Ireland that I can trace since the conquest of Britain. Even what used to come in was all worked up, and very old-fashioned too.’

‘So you mean to re-open the trade with Ireland?’

‘Well, I was chatting with Faustinus, and I thought it would be good for the lad.’ He jerked his head at Philebus, who was trying to corner the world supply of Falernian into his own gullet, that being his best idea of a commercial operation. ‘Every boy ought to have a chance to
do
something when he’s young: it sets the tone to his own life. I had that long trip south of Leptis Magna, that set the tone for me. I’ve been thirsty all my life since, and I’ve passed that on to Philebus. And how long was it … three years … four … you were away up on the Amber Coast? I know it made me, and look what it did for you.’

‘Yes, look what it did for me,’ I agreed, as he passed me the wine jar in a hurry while there was still some left. ‘It turned my hair white in a night, and it took years for it to come back black again. And it gouged my eye out, and nothing will ever bring that back.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said my uncle, growing a little pompous as the wine jar emptied, ‘you will not deny that it gave you a certain confidence in your manner, a certain
élan
in your dealing with the world …’

‘If you mean that I seem to think that the worst has happened to me, then I agree: I think it has. No calamity I precipitate on myself from now on can be as catastrophic as those I have gone through already …’

‘Not merely that. Surely you admit that you learned a great deal from what you experienced?’

‘Well, yes. I admit, I did marry two queens, and seduce one, and that taught me to be very wary about Barbarian women. I’ll never bother with another one as long as I live. I did reorganise a trading firm, and I sent half Germany money-mad. I made one king and I killed another, and that has taught me to be sceptical about the basis of authority. I led an army in battle, and won, and I made up at least four hundred songs about it that you may hear in any barracks in the Empire where there are German auxiliary cavalry. That taught me to be very wary of what the poets tell us. But on the whole, I think the effect was on the North, and not on me: I remained a Greek, nothing more, nothing less. You think it would have done Philebus some good?’

‘Well, I did. I don’t think so now. He could never stand the pace, you can see that. Here we are, only two hours at table, and he’s out to the vomitorium already. Look what he’s got to do now. He’s got to get the Deed of Monopoly back first, and that’s only the beginning. Someone will have to go to Ireland, and set up a system for getting the Gold over that we can leave an agent to work. The man we’ve got in Londinium now, for instance, he can do all that, once it’s started, but as for the spadework – why, Leo Rufus couldn’t organise an orgy in a wholesale slave warehouse. Someone responsible will have to go there.’

‘But when you go,’ I warned my uncle, ‘you will have to leave someone just as responsible here in Rome. I wouldn’t like to think of Philebus in charge.’

‘Oh, I’m not going. I thought you might.’

I looked at him as bleakly as I could.

‘I’ve done enough travelling up there. I’ve got a bigamous wife among the Picts, waiting for a chance to eat me the first step I take outside the Empire. And I’ve a real wife at home in the Old City, and a baby coming in the autumn.’

‘You’ll be back home by then.’ My uncle was a good salesman.

‘Well, I suppose … I might as well have a last fling while I have the chance.’

‘You’ve had four last flings to my certain knowledge. This will have to be the very last.’

He blinked at me in a benign way, the look he used when he
was selling winded horses as racers. Philebus came back, his face the colour of the sea on a dull day. I asked him:

‘Do you feel like going to Faustinus and asking him to cancel that deed and to issue another one?’

The green of his cheeks turned a little paler. He shook his head miserably.

‘All right,’ I told him, trying to sound kind. ‘You can take the ship back instead of me. Have you been to sea before?’

‘No.’

‘Then there’s no way to learn like being in command. The mate is a Galatian, and he’s a good sailor, remember that. The supercargo knows what’s what, he’ll see you through. Then you can tell my father what’s happened.’

‘Oh no! I couldn’t face him.’

‘It’s him or Faustinus, take your choice. When you’ve done your sea time, then perhaps we can let you loose on land.’

‘But what shall I tell him?’

‘Anything you like. Say it was a whim of mine, to go back to the North just once more. The whole voyage is fixed up. Troops to Byblos, cedarwood to Alexandria, corn to Corinth and statuary back here. And if you see my wife, smack her on the backside for me and tell her it had better be a boy, this time. Now, about my business. How’s this Gwawl travelling?’

‘There’s a draft of Illyrians going up to join the Second Augusta in Isca. He’s going with them as mule-train boss with the baggage as far as Bonnonia.’

‘A man who has to work his passage across Gaul and you gamble with him for all the Gold in Ireland? What on earth was he staking against it – don’t answer that! You thought it looked so easy there wasn’t a chance of losing, and he probably put down an embroidered cloak or something. Now, Philebus, just you lose my ship like that, and I’ll gut you alive, I will.
And
your father will sharpen the knife for me.’ I never gave Philebus time to remember that he was only two years younger than I was. However, he might as well feel he could do something useful. I went on: