Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (48 page)

‘The making of shields.’ He rolled the words around his tongue. ‘There is a fine phrase for you. There is a fine legal phrase. It insinuates the activity of a trained man, who has passed through all the stages of his apprenticeship, and who can cut the wattles and plait them into a basket, who can plane the seasoned lime planks, who can tan leather and dye it, who can beat out sheets of the red bronze and emboss it and enamel it. All this is comprehended in the phrase “the making of shields”. No, there is no ambiguity there. “The making of shields”. A splendid craft.’ Pryderi looked sideways at the official, like a cat at a mouse it wants to make a move to escape. Then he struck, fast and accurate as a shark. ‘But we have not been
making
shields. We have been supplying them, and we have been assembling them from materials made for us by other trained and skilled shieldmakers in other towns: and it has been for citizens and councillors and senators and noblemen of your town and of all the County of the Atrebates that we have been doing it, and I can recite to you all their names, and their attributes that I painted on the shields which we
assembled
. So it will be all these gentlemen as well as us you will be having to prosecute if this comes to anything, if it is that there was an offence which it is not saying that there was I am there was.’

The official spent a little time disentangling Pryderi’s meaning from his syntax, which had grown a little wild, and that not by chance. Then he said:

‘Deceived it was they were, all these respectable people. They could not know that you were not members of our Guild nor of any Guild affiliated thereto nor licensed to act as if you were being members of our Guild, and they will so testify.’

There was a point there that Pryderi could have kept the pot
a-boiling on for hours if he had felt so inclined, but he was tired, and hungry, and, especially, thirsty, as he confessed later, and so he returned to an earlier point of attack.

‘It is showing, you will have to be, that your by-laws have been infringed by our making and supplying shields. Now in the first place, it is showing you will have to be that either of us both made and supplied shields, and that is difficult, because although you may be able to prove that one of us sold shields, you will not be able to show that he made or painted shields, or that the other, though it may be he painted shields, ever supplied or sold or even presented any shields. And it is then showing you will have to be that the painting of shields, which is all you will have any evidence for, is covered by that clause, and sentence, and phrase of your by-laws that concerns the making of shields, and it is tolerably certain I am that it is not, and that if you appeal to the by-laws of other towns on this point, then there is no parallel you will find. Now my friend here is of that opinion, and he has had experience of all manner of courts throughout the Empire, though it was always Not Guilty it was they were finding him, the Gods be glorified, and it is easy enough we will find it to hire lawyers, better than any that usually find it worth their while to practise in a hole like this. Now, is it willing you are, and only the hired treasurer and all, to commit the members of your guild to an expensive lawsuit when it is plain that it is not the by-laws of your own Guild you are knowing yourself?’

Well, the official, poor man, hummed and hawed to make a brave face of it, but of course in the end he agreed not to begin a prosecution, as long as we promised him not to do it again, and that we could easily do as we had used all the shield frames, though not all the leather and the dyes. And on top of that, Pryderi terrorised and browbeat him, by threatening to blacken his name to the Guild members, into giving us a silver denarius to pay for our dinner at the inn, to which we merrily returned, but not till I had myself made a few purchases in the market.

At the inn, we found Taliesin already waiting at a table for us. We called for our supper – the argument with the treasurer and my bargaining had taken more time than you might imagine. The inn was unusually luxurious for Britain. There was a real
choice of dishes for the meal. I could have sheep’s head, breast of lamb, shoulder of mutton, or a sheep’s stomach stuffed with mutton offal minced, and then boiled. I began to realise that by leaving Londinium I had entered into the land of the Sheep. It is mutton that the Brits mostly live on. Cattle they keep, but only for milk, and to boast about how rich they are. Their real life is based on sheep, which clothe them and feed them, although they will deign to eat pork when it seems appropriate. I remembered bitterly that at Pontes I had a choice of leg of lamb or stewed beef, and I had chosen the lamb as being more of a rarity in my life. Alas, alas, what we miss through ignorance.

However, I chose a dish of sheep’s brains, and beer with it, and we chatted on this and that, till suddenly, apropos of nothing at all, Taliesin said:

‘And if it is Ireland you are thinking of, then I am thinking it would not be a wise place for any man of this island or from farther east to be going to. For the Irish to come here is one thing. But for a human being to go there is another, because it is doubtful it is, I am telling you, whether the Irish are human in the sense in which we use the word.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

For answer, he turned towards the door, where looking timidly into the room were two people, an old blind man with a kind of lyre which is popular in those parts of the world, and an older woman. He beckoned them over.

‘Now, Tannwen, my daughter,’ he said with all the assurance of Priesthood and thirty years (or less – I was never quite sure), ‘sing us your old song about the Western Ferrymen.’

The blind man struck a few chords on the lyre – it was soon obvious that he knew nothing about music, but merely beat a rhythm and was there simply out of charity on Tannwen’s part – and the old woman sang, in a kind of monotonous repetitive melody:

Nonsense, I thought, just nonsense, as sensible as the doggerel metre it was sung in. But I wouldn’t be going to Ireland, not till the land was safe and settled and merely another good place for the family to have an agent. Then I might,
might
, go across and choose the agent. That could wait.

The next day we rode from Calleva to Spinae. There is, at least, some reason for Spinae’s being where it is. It is the place where the road to Corinium and Glevum leaves the road to Sulis and the Lead Hills, on the high ground above the crossing of the Kennet. But there is no real town there, although it would have made a much better place for one than Calleva. There are two inns, and a few small houses, and, where the roads part there is a kind of permanent market, where the peasants sit and sell off odds and ends of country produce to people who pass by. There is quite a good clientele, as a number of the travellers to Sulis are wealthy.

We clattered down into the village, Taliesin on his rather horrible horse, which kicked and bit everything and everybody in sight, and all of us loaded with the light bulky packages I had had so much trouble in picking up in Calleva, but which were, Pryderi noted with relief, the wrong shape for shield frames. We had an argument about which inn to stay at, and my two companions insisted for reasons of their own on our stopping at the dirtier and smaller of the two, even though I was paying. We unloaded the horses into a hut where we could all sleep on straw pallets on the floor. I stroked my parcels lovingly before I opened them.

‘These ought to sell well at the Forks,’ I said. ‘All we need is a few hours’ dry weather to sit out.’

‘What are you going to sell this time?’ Pryderi’s voice betrayed a certain loss of patience and confidence.

‘Saddles. We’re going to make some saddles tonight.’

‘Do we know anything about making saddles?’

‘We can try.’ I unwrapped a package. ‘I’ve got some saddle frames here, best second-quality beech, warranted well seasoned, at least three weeks since they were cut. Never mind, this leather
will cover it all. It’s a good thing I brought so much of it – I wonder why Leo Rufus couldn’t sell it. Now, if we can make up some of the blue dye, we can have a fair stock by the end of the evening.’

‘But you can’t sit on leather and beechwood,’ Pryderi objected. ‘What about the horsehair for stuffing?’

‘Horsehair? No need for that. Why do you think I cut all those rushes when we crossed the Kennet? Now, we can all start by cutting out, and then stuff later.’

‘No,’ said Pryderi. ‘Taliesin can do all the stuffing. I can cut and sew, but he can’t handle iron.’

I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I came to think about it, Taliesin always ate with a bronze knife and he always shaved with a sliver of flint, and otherwise he never did touch iron. But while he worked on the saddles by lamplight I asked:

‘Are we likely to have any more trouble with the local guilds?’

‘Am I going to have trouble, you mean. The answer is, no. Spinae isn’t any kind of municipality, incorporated or unincorporated.’

‘If it comes to that,’ I went on, ‘could we really have argued our way through a court on those charges? Were the charters as specific as you said they were?’

‘How should I know, boy?’ Pryderi laughed all over his fat face. ‘I can’t read.’

Luckily there was no one in the inn that night who could read or tell a story. I should have slept peacefully, but instead I dreamed. I had not dreamed in Calleva, and that is why I know that nothing will ever happen there, but in Londinium I had dreamed of fire, and here on the road to Sulis I dreamed of battle. I remember a little. All through a day, I dreamed, we had stood against an army that came at us from the East, and towards evening they had fallen back, exhausted, and left us holding the field. And yet at that moment, a new army came at us from the West, along the road, and though they were as many as we were, yet we laughed, because they were too late. And I woke from that jumble of weary men and dead horses to find the dawn breaking bright and clear on a fine day for sitting by the roadside and selling whatever we wanted.

Pryderi and I sat there at the Forks, and the first four saddles
we had made, and that Pryderi had painted, went very quickly and easily. But the last saddle stuck, and nothing I could say would persuade anyone to buy it. Of course, it was the old story you find all over Britain. Nobody will try anything new. This saddle was entirely my own work. I had painted it in the latest civilised style as I had the shield, with splendid details and gorgeous colours of the battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. This was much superior to the simple line patterns Pryderi used, and I’m quite sure that it wasn’t the art that people didn’t like. No, I know what it was. I had fitted the saddle out with an innovation just coming in then from Scythia. I had put two straps hanging down from the saddle, one on each side, and a loop on the end of each to put your big toe in. It was supposed to hold you on the saddle and let you use your hands more and give your knees and thighs a rest. Myself, I think it is a mistake in technology. I have tried it myself, and I didn’t like it at all. It took twice as much effort to stay on, and you couldn’t get off in a hurry if the horse fell or anything. Besides, there was all the trouble of riding barefoot.

Anyway, whatever the reason, nobody wanted to buy it. I began to think that I would never get rid of the thing, and that perhaps we would have to carry it on, or even use it ourselves. Besides, it was getting late, and I began to see us spending another night in Spinae. Then I noticed a scattering of birds among the sheep droppings. Even Calleva was a decently clean and cultured town, and they kept the streets quite tidy in a civilised way with pigs, who foraged everywhere and got rid of all the garbage people threw out of doors, just as they do in Londinium and Rome. But in Spinae, and in all the other little hamlets we came to after this, it was sheep they used, and the horrid things would come up and take the bread out of their mouths if people weren’t careful. I began to see why the Brits ate so much mutton – it was a way of getting their own back. But when there was a chattering of starlings among the droppings, I didn’t have to look up, nor listen for the chink of money bags. I began, automatically:

‘Great Lady, Great Lady, look here at this saddle. A masterpiece it is, a marvel of the saddler’s art, brand new and incorporating all the latest improvements and innovations brought straight from
Rome. This is the way to be in the fashion, Great Lady, to be the envy of all your peers. Buy a Scythian saddle, made for the men who ride the great plains of grass not only all day but all the year. On their horses they eat, and they sleep and do all that they wish to do, and that without fatigue, and it is all due to these straps which they use to stay on their steeds while their hands do other things …’

‘Let’s see a two-seat saddle, then,’ said Hueil with a snigger. ‘For otherwise one generation of Scyths will have to last the life of all the world.’