Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (40 page)

Over the dessert I showed him the Deed of Monopoly. He read it through. Then he observed, with the air of someone making a great discovery:

‘This is a copy.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I told him. ‘Do you think I would travel with such a valuable document as this on my person? I had the Chancery at Rutupiae make eight copies. The original went on by Imperial Mail to the Procurator’s Office, and others in the same way to the commanders of the legions at Eboracum and Deva and Isca. This is the copy for your own records. You will notice that it is certified by the Port Captain and the Garrison Commander at Rutupiae: they advised me on how many copies to make and where to send them.’

I left him to worry over who had the other copies. He didn’t like the idea of any of the business going out of his hands, but what could he do? I added:

‘I have made it quite clear in my accompanying letter how confidential this business is. Faustinus would be furious if it were to fall through because of any careless talk. He is waiting for his commission too.’

That made him even more disturbed in his mind. But I did not really expect what I said next to drive him so frantic.

‘Go to Ireland yourself? You must be mad! It’s quite impossible. No Greek could ever do it and return alive!’

‘Why should it be impossible? I have been up the Amber Road: why should the Golden Road to Ireland be any different? I am used to long journeys in savage countries. I can rough it with anybody.’

‘I am not thinking of your comfort.’ It was a change for him to be so frank. ‘Some Irish come here, a few, but all that nation knows what happened to Britain once the trade with the Empire developed. Therefore they have forbidden and prohibited and banned any Roman from setting foot in the island, and by Roman they mean any man from the mainland who talks any civilised language and wears boots and drinks wine. Wine, especially, they deny entry, for they believe that all the troubles of the Kings of Britain began with their thirst for wine, and indeed there is no denying that it happened so in Gaul, and in Gaul it all started with the Greeks of Massilia. So all the Kings of the Irish have agreed and compacted and decided that there shall be no trading nor bargaining nor intercourse of any kind between the people of the Island of the Blessed and us of the Island of the Mighty.’

Now these are the names that the Brits use in their language for the two islands of Ireland and of Britain, and I must say they sounded strange in Latin. Leo Rufus went on:

‘And since this agreement, there have been horrible things and objects and relics that it is that have been returning. For I do not mean the stories and the rumours and the gossip, because there were always dreadful stories that came from the Island of the Blessed, and difficult to believe. But it is the actual bodies, and the heads, and the ships that we have been finding tied up to harbour walls in the dawn, with no living man aboard to say how they have come: but we all know why.’

‘That is nothing to me,’ I told him, scornfully. ‘I once came alive out of the hands of the Picts, and out of the very teeth of their King.’

‘And it is thinking then that it is you are, that it would be making it any easier for you to go to Ireland and to return again?’ It was when you had him worried that you could hear the touch of the woad in his voice, in the adenoidal sibillants and in the collapse of all grammar into a continuous passive voice and a flood of impersonal verbs. The British tongue is one that is best spoken slowly by an old man, as Latin is by a middle-aged one in a court, and as Greek is made for the slangy arguments of the markets of Alexandria and Tyre. ‘The less that it is that it is that it is being said about it, that is the better it is that it will be.’

I thought that I had better appear to take some notice of his warning, though I knew quite well that it was the excuse of a lazy man for taking no action. It was quite clear to me now that any merchant with a grain of enterprise would have opened up trade with Ireland long ago. There is nothing a Barbarian king will not do for his own profit, and if all the kings had made an agreement, then certainly they would not have the slightest hesitation in betraying each other wholesale for the treasures of civilisation, for silk and bronze and glass and wine. Especially wine. It
had
been their greed for Roman wines that had split the great confederation of the Gauls, and brought down the walls of Alesia on Vercingetorix’s head, and laid the whole province open to Caesar’s armies. After he failed to conquer Britain as well, it was left open to the wine merchants to trade for two generations. Then when the Emperor Claudius came, the whole drunken country fell into His Sacred Majesty’s hands like a ripe apple.

‘I can hardly go back to my uncle Euthyphro – you know what he is like in a fury – and tell him that I had this monopoly in my hand and that even then I went no nearer to Ireland than Durovernum. I must go at least as far as the port for Ireland, even if I go no farther, for I must satisfy him as well as myself that there is no possibility of going any farther.’

Leo went out to his vomitorium, the pride of his house, which he showed to every visitor, and he went there not because he needed to but because he thought it was the proper and civilised and Roman thing to do, and he left me slightly fuddled and thinking of everything in threes and triples and thirds like a Brit. It gave Leo time to think, and when he came back and started on mussels in honey, he said:

‘Even if you are to go as far as that only, and to learn something that will sound convincing in Rome, it will do you no good to go as a man in the counsels of the Consuls, in the confidence of the Caesars, in league with the Legates of the legions. I think that I know a man who, it may be, will be able to take you as far as the port for Ireland, and speak for you to the Kings of the Irish, if only you will go with him and live as he does and do as he says, and trust him with your life. First, I will have to send and dispatch and instruct a messenger to find him, and bring him to
meet us in Londinium, and it’s lucky that it is not long since I talked with him, and I know that he is not in the Summer Country, nor at sea, where he is for a great part of the summer. So if we go to Londinium in a few days, then this man will come and meet us, and it may be that he will help us if he feels it satisfies a whim of his.’

I had two days’ rest in Durovernum, and then, the third day, Leo and I set out for Londinium, which is two days’ journey by road, though a messenger in a hurry, such as Leo had sent off immediately after dinner on the first night, may do it in summer between dawn and sunset. We had a dozen Pannonian troopers, borrowed from the garrison, as escort, although I felt safe enough. Surely Gwawl, about whom I had said nothing to Leo Rufus, was now in pursuit of Cicva. But then I remembered how she had ridden off, in her red and white checked shawl, with its long tassels, and a bronze chain about her waist instead of the embroidered belt, and I wondered.

Leo Rufus had a house in Londinium which might have been a town house in Rome, six-storeyed and tiled-roofed. The ground floor was the warehouse. He had the entire first floor to live in, and he let out the upper floors for rent. Again he apologised, when we arrived, late in the evening, that his wife had taken it into her head to leave that morning for Durovernum. Perhaps I have a reputation.

That evening, on arriving in Londinium, I went to bed early. Leo promised that I should have at least one quiet empty day, and the following day again he would invite some of his trading colleagues to meet me, as probably the most influential and wealthy visitor to Londinium for some years. However, just as I woke, half-way between dawn and noon on that first day, Leo came into my bedroom and announced:

‘You have a client.’

I thought he was being facetious, and I didn’t like it. I am never at my best on waking. I snarled something like:

‘If I’m a patrician, you’re a Pharaoh,’ but Leo stood back and the ‘client’ entered. This man did not really stand seven feet high. He only looked like it, in the undress uniform of his regiment, the Danube Rangers, Hadrian’s Own. I leapt out of bed, and embraced Aristarchos, the son of Demons. Tall and lean, he was, and always walked like a horseman. His black hair, black as Gwawl’s, and his cheerful black eyes, that charmed women everywhere, and his brown skin, telling of a sunnier home, were the best things I had seen for weeks.

‘Why are you not still on the Danube?’ I asked him. I remembered the regiment he had, patrolling the river frontier, and on the other side of it, usually. Horse-thieves and cattle-stealers they
were to a man, raised in Britain, and that is how he spoke the language like a native, though a rather disreputable native.

‘All good things come to an end,’ he replied. ‘I’m having a period on the Procurator’s staff. Oh Gods, I can’t stand these cities in the summer.’

I agreed with him. He was, I thought, too clever for anyone to waste at a place like Rutupiae, however he might have liked it. I asked:

‘What are you doing? I can’t see you in an office, checking other people’s claims for forage, though perhaps if you know all the dodges …’

‘That’s more or less the kind of thing. All this administrative stuff about trade and finance – you’d understand it, but I never will. Not that there aren’t some interesting cases on the Marine side. It’s funny how the rewards paid for rescues from pirates always go to the same people. But how about you? I heard a rumour, inside the service from someone in the Second, that you were on the way, but nobody seems to know why.’

I hesitated a moment. For an instant, I was tempted to tell him that I was merely broadening my commercial education and Leo’s as well; I was going to do that in any case. But then I relented. With an island full of people like Gwawl and Leo Rufus, it was as well to have somebody I could trust. I told him a little of what had been going on. He whistled.

‘Trade with Ireland? Now, if you could start that, it would be useful. The Eagles follow Trade you know, and the Second and the Sixth and the Twentieth are just waiting for the chance. You ought to come and talk with the Procurator.’

I shook my head.

‘I have my own troubles. I’ll start talking to officials when I have some taxes to pay and clearances to do. Faustinus’ name on the Deed ought to ensure that I can work undisturbed.’

‘As you like. Still, if you want anything done … or any entertainment, either … I can get you into half a dozen gambling clubs.’

‘Will I meet any influential Brits there?’

‘Not very likely. A sad lot, the Brits. Either they are trying as
hard as they can to turn into Italians, in the hope of getting some kind of hereditary post in the administration, if they haven’t got one already: or they’ve turned their backs on progress and are only interested in religion. And they are firmly convinced, most of them, that they are the favourites of the Gods, and that if they were conquered, then in itself it is a sign of the favour of the Gods. The reward of virtue is defeat. Odd, isn’t it, what people will believe, if it makes them happy?’

‘So all is quiet, except on the frontier?’

‘Oh, there are a few who still don’t believe the Empire is here to stay. They still pay taxes to the old kings. There’s one, up in the rain hills, who is most troublesome.’

I remembered what the old men had said in the mess at Rutupiae.

‘Pwyll?’

‘Pwyll.’ Aristarchos changed his tone, suddenly. ‘But would you like to come out tonight?’

I shook my head.

‘I have things to do. Later perhaps. Today, I have a little shopping.’

He laughed. ‘You’ll be soundly cheated, if you’re not very careful. You ought to learn a few words of the language.’

‘I’ll try,’ I assured him. He went out, off to the Office of the Procurator. I went in to the office of the family’s agent.

It was a long and hard morning going through the books. In the middle of the afternoon I had a bite to eat, and then I unpacked my sword from my bag. I thought I could remember the name of the scabbard-maker I had been recommended in Bonnonia, and I even thought I could find my way, with directions from Leo. I refused his offer to come as a guide. I even refused to have a slave come with me. I wanted to see the town myself, with nobody to affect my judgements.

Londinium, of course, is just like any other provincial town, with the big buildings of marble in the official quarter contrasting with the low thatched houses where the natives live. Down there a civilised gentleman in his bare legs and his cloak is out of place among all the trousers and the jerkins and tunics of soft leather the Brits wear over their coloured shirts to keep out the
rain. There are no people like the Brits for wearing bright colours. They move about like a bed of walking flowers, with their shirts and blouses and shawls in stripes and checks and patches. In my drab grey I felt most conspicuous. Still, a Citizen and a Greek ought to be able to carry off anything. I found the scabbard-maker in his little shop, and I told him who had sent me. He looked at the blade, and then he stroked the ivory of the hilt as if he could feel the lock of hair that Cicva had insisted on binding up within it, or as if he could hear the things, unintelligible to me, that she had crooned over it.

‘I am trusting,’ he told me in a soft voice, ‘that it is no firm idea that you have for the pattern of the scabbard.’

‘An artist,’ I replied, ‘must choose his subject.’

The old man smiled slyly at me. He asked, of course, when I was born and what stars had shone over me, and then:

‘What is the name of the sword?’

‘Name? Now, you may think it stupid, but in spite of paying so much for the blade, and taking so much trouble over the hilt and the sheath, I had quite forgotten the barbarian custom of giving a weapon a name. I thought a moment. All I could think of was the Brits’ word for a blow. I said:

‘
Burn
is all I will call it.’

‘Then a hard blow it will be to you,’ he answered. ‘It will be ready in a week.’

I left him, and wandered through the mean streets till I came out on the river bank. I strolled for a little, watching the men fishing for salmon. The salmon they catch above the bridge at Londinium are the best in the world. Here and there clouds of seagulls fought about the places where men cleaned the fish. And then suddenly, on that summer evening, with the sun below my shoulder when I could see it in the broken cloud, out of a cloud of seagulls I heard a voice singing.