Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (56 page)

‘So our fathers were Lords of the Sea, and carried their cargoes of tin and of copper, of corn and wine and Gold, and all the nations knew that they were proud and rich. But then
he
came, the bald old man of the South, eager and grasping to steal the whole of the world. He did not know the meaning of decency, no not he, and he did not even dare to meet us fairly. He came at us in rowing boats, whatever the wind. His men tied sickles on their long poles, and then whenever they got close to one of our ships, they would cut the halliards and bring down the great leather sail and if they could cut the stays the mast would go too.

‘Conquered were the proud Venetii, beaten was the hope of the world, bankrupt and ruined and broken the kings of our nation. Those who were willing could stay and pay homage to bald-headed Caesar, the stinking oil-eater. But some of us said we could not abide it, we would go out and find a new country. We sailed to the north and we came to the marshes, a desolate land that no nation governed, and we built a town beneath the Glass Mountain. When we thought that all was recovered, Claudius came to conquer the island. How could we live in a settled city, where tax-gatherers might come to count and to number us? We left our town, we left our temple, we moved a few miles to live in the marshes. Here are we safe to live out our days, in hunger and hardship and bitter poverty. We are too poor and too insignificant for noble or tribune or quaestor to see us.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, spitting out the stone from a dried plum from Dalmatia. ‘Poverty is a dreadful thing.’ I remembered the talk I had heard in Londinium. It was not conquest that hurt the Venetii – it had harmed, say, the Atrebates little. No, it was the Roman fiscal policy which insisted that all trade with Britain should go through the Channel ports, where it could be taxed, and the dreadful penalties inflicted not only on any Britons who dealt with smugglers but also on any merchants who might try, in Gaul, to hire a ship in the West and trade any other way. The Venetii had seen their ships destroyed, and even if they had been able to rebuild there would have been no further employment for them. But some of those ships still remained – I knew, I had once stolen one from Caw himself, and there might be others. If there were no others, what was I doing here? Oak-planked they were indeed, and pegged with elm, but on to frames of ash, and elm-decked, and these two woods had no quarrel with iron: and they were not rowed, but driven by a great lugsail of leather, that would let them beat into the wind. Were there indeed any left? And if not, where did Caw’s wealth come from?

I wondered about that all through the evening. We were all very merry. At the end of the evening, Grathach and Nerthach complained, as we made our way to the house where we were to sleep, that I was very drunk: I must have been – they dropped me twice.

I must say that Caw stood up to the drinking very well for his age. We drank till two hours before dawn, and the sun was scarcely beginning to rise when he woke me and hurried me out into the thin rain, clutching my cloak and sword.

Silently he led me along past the sleeping houses, set far apart, because it is a characteristic of the Britons that they hate their kinsmen and each man’s ambition is to live where he cannot see his neighbour’s smoke. We did not walk far, only to an arm of the marsh where there was a small boat, hollowed out of a single log, hidden under the branches of a willow. We got in and paddled away from the houses, north-west. I had the choice of either wearing my cloak and being hot and wet, or of taking it off and being cold and wet, in the strong west wind and driving rain. I was dead weary from lack of sleep. I soon had corns over my bottom from sitting on quite different places from the ones you use to ride a horse, and all the rest of me was stiff – there were so many muscles I had not used since I sailed into Ostia. After hours, all I wanted to do was to lie on the bank and die, but Caw hurried me on.

When we cleared the north edge of the Apple Hills, we could see the edge of the Lead Hills east of us, like a long cliff, and the column of smoke from the Mines, but only when we came, as sometimes we did, out of the patches of willow and alder that stood up out of the waters. Well after noon I was ready to refuse to go any farther, and the only thing that gave me any hope was the strong smell of the salt sea.

Neither of us spoke much, except what was necessary to keep her head the right way, and among the willows it was more like choosing roads in a city than steering a boat. But at last, of a sudden, Caw barked:

‘Up there, left, up that backwater!’

We came left, into a narrow channel, which widened out as such inlets often do, into a broad expanse of shining mud. And there, beached, was a ship. A real ship, I tell you, not a skin boat or a single log, but a ship. This was one of the Venetii, all right. High she stood out of the water, or would stand when she was afloat, with sides of oak planks, and decks of elm, and a high poop to help her ride a following sea. She had a single mast stepped a little forward of amidships, and the yard was down on the deck, but there was no mistaking it – she was rigged with lugsail.

There she lay among the leafy willows, with a couple of men scraping the barnacles off her timbers. We pulled ourselves up a rope on to her deck. A man sitting at his ease in a shelter under the poop got up to meet Caw, bowing to him. He had First Mate written all over him, mainly in his attitude of extreme indolence while his men worked. Caw said to him:

‘Keeping well is it you are, Madoc? This is him.’

‘Oh, you, is it?’ said Madoc to me. ‘Here, have something to eat.’

He held out a plate, full of gobbets of some anonymous meat. On the bank, someone had a charcoal brazier and was frying some more. I looked at the food cautiously. You never know what Barbarians may, or may not, give you. They might well have been trying me with Swan, just for the fun of it. I asked:

‘What is it?’

‘If it’s wearing it you are, then it’s eating it you can be,’ Madoc told me. ‘Seal this is. Fresh, too – only killed three weeks ago.’

So I ate it. I looked around. The hatches were off, and there were a couple of men in the hold, trimming cargo, for the ship was obviously ready for sea, though where the water was that could float her was a mystery. On the bank, men were loading panniers on to packhorses. The strange thing was, that the cargo being trimmed in the hold and the cargo in the panniers was the same – dull grey bricks. Lead, I thought. I asked Caw:

‘Where do you get it?’

He knew what I meant. He grinned.

‘From up there.’ He pointed to the smoke on the Lead Hills.

‘Buy it?’

‘Aye … in a way. You see, there are men we know who go in and out of the mines, and carry in the earth coal they use to smelt the ore. And there are other men there, in the mines and in the melting shops, who will do a great deal for very little, because it is very little they have, nothing at all, you might say, except their lives, and a twist of rag about their loins. So they will do, you understand, anything for a bite of decent food, or a jug, or even a sip, of cider. And there was once we even smuggled a woman in, and she stayed a week, and made her fortune, but she said she wouldn’t do it again – too tiring.

‘So men who carry earth coal in carry lead out, and lead in again. I suppose you know, there is more in lead than lead.’

‘Silver,’ I breathed. ‘There is always silver in lead.’

‘Aye, silver, and that is why the legions work the lead here and farther north, and if it were not for the silver they get out of it they would not stay in this island at all. So we take, let us say, perhaps one ingot of new smelted lead in five, and north we go to the Picts, and there it is arrangements I have with men, kings mostly, who will cupellate it for me. But we have to cover it over somehow, because book-keepers and centurions would come very expensive to bribe, as you may imagine, so it is pure lead we bring back, and send it in with the coal.’

‘No wonder you live so well in the Mere,’ I told Caw. ‘A very pretty scheme. It does you credit.’

‘As long as no one finds out. The tax-collectors don’t notice what you have if there isn’t Gold or silver on the table. And why shouldn’t we live well? It is our land, and our hills, and our silver, and our lead. Why should we not charge a little rent?’

Then he drifted off into conversation with Madoc, and I sat down a little against the bulwarks, and somehow or other I fell asleep. When I woke up, my head now thoughtfully pillowed on a cushion of swansdown, we were, where I most love to be in ordinary times, at sea!

I leapt up, reaching for my sword, and cursing at Madoc, who was at the steering oar, and at Caw, who was conning us between the mudbanks, and this was difficult because we were, in general, working in the opposite direction to the one where the wind came from.

‘What are you doing with me?’ I demanded. It was clear that they were still on speaking terms because they had left me my sword. Caw answered, in his careful way, between orders to Madoc:

‘It was thinking, I was, that if it is proposing you are to trade on the Northern Seas, then it is the realities of the situation you should be knowing, before it is any obligations you are taking on yourself and on your family.’

‘Whatever the realities,’ I replied, ‘I am in too deep now to draw back.’

‘But I am not,’ said Caw, flatly. ‘I have not yet decided whether I will entrust a ship of mine to you, and it is more I am wanting to know about how you behave at sea. And so I thought a short voyage would be a fine experience for you.’

‘A short voyage? And what good will a short voyage do?’ For I thought he meant a day and a night aboard. But he answered:

‘We will be back for Samain. Seven weeks let us say.’

‘Seven weeks? Seven
weeks! No!
Take me back! I have traced Rhiannon all this way, and now I have found the Lady, then I will not lose her again for you.’

‘Quiet, boy,’ said Madoc. ‘It is in the Mere that Rhiannon must stay now, till Samain and past Samain to midwinter.’

‘And there is no going back now, Mannanan,’ added Caw, ‘either for you or for us, because we held the ship a week to wait for you, and if we stay another day the weather will be too bad for us to return.’

There was nothing for it. A-voyaging I went, and if I were to tell you the whole story of the voyage, you would hear only the usual travellers’ tales. We went to the land of the Western Picts in lead, and from there in wool and tanned leather to the Land of Norroway, and brought back walrus ivory and the hides of the tame deer to the land of the Picts where we loaded again with lead and silver, now separate. And I found, and it is true, that in these parts of Ocean, the waves at the end of the summer are as high, and the winds as wild, as anywhere in the Mediterranean in the depths of winter, when we prudent captains will not leave harbour. And more, I found that it is a common thing for the ships there to go altogether out of sight of land, not merely for a
day or half a day, as we often may to cut across between two capes with a perishable cargo and an expensive crew, but for four or five days together between one island and another. And at the end, beating home south into a south-west gale, it took even all my strength and skill to hold her steady.

And you would not believe even the most ordinary stories I could tell, how we married Madoc to a mermaid when he was drunk, and how Caw won the crown for telling the saltiest story at the Salmon Feast of the Picts, and how we moored at an island so that Coth the son of Caw could cook for us, and it sank beneath him and left him floating, spouting out a cloud – oh, I could tell you tales for seven weeks of what we did in those seven weeks, and of each of them you would say, ‘Oh yes, but I heard that tale of so-and-so.’ So I will not bother.

But in seven weeks’ time, we returned to the Mere, and we beached the ship where no man would find her. Then, in a skin boat, Caw and Madoc and I paddled back to Caw’s house. And it was two days before the Samain Feast.

My bad luck came at the Samain feast. It had to come, because there is no good luck lasts for ever. Samain is the feast at the beginning of November, when the Britons bring in their sheep from the hills to fold them in close to the farmhouse, safe from wolf and bear. And just as the animals are folded in, so the family and the nation are folded in, and the house is full not only of the living but also of the dead and those who are yet unborn.

Most people believe that the dead go down to Hades. There they exist for ever in dirt and rottenness, envious of the living, and therefore most people fear the dead. But not the Britons. Why, they say, should a man be afraid of the mother who bore him, and the father who fondled him and taught him to live? Why should he fear the grandmother who nursed him to sleep as a toddler and wiped away his tears when he fell over his own feet and kept for him the best titbits of the kitchen and the sweetest apples? Why should a man fear the comrades who fell at his side in battle or slipped from his outstretched hands into the waves, or the loved ones who died in his arms of fever or dysentery?

No, the Britons know better. Their Samain Feast is a feast indeed, and the Happy Dead are welcome. And so are all wayfarers. That is why I sat at the feast next to Caw, who as befits the head of the house sat with blackened face upon a ploughshare. And next to me, coming out of the mists the day before, only a day after we had landed from the northern seas, was the Setanta.

Towards dawn, when we had drunk and eaten everything in sight and were too full to go to the larder for more, the Irishman turned to business, as was his custom, always optimistic that other people would be more fuddled than he was and easier to do business against, and always wrong. He said:

‘I am ready. I have a fianna in the Hills. I could move now, if you had the arms, but I would rather you waited till the spring.’

‘I must wait till the spring,’ I told him. ‘The arms will not be ready till then.’

‘But have you a ship?’

I looked at Caw. I waited to hear. It might all have been in vain. The Master of the Western Seas said: