Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (65 page)

The Morrigan may come upon any woman at any time, or on more women than one. Here she had come on three women, which is right, because anyone who has an upbringing like mine knows that three is the number for women, and seven for men, whatever the Pythagoreans may say.

‘What are they singing?’ I asked. It was clear enough, really, but after all the shadows and double meanings of the magical Isle of Britain, I was not ready to accept anything as simple and plain in its meaning.

‘They are forbidding us to land,’ he answered. He spoke to the other men, and they began to paddle us away from the shore. I had to take a paddle too, because it is very difficult to make way against the tide and the breaking waves. I looked a question at the Setanta, because I had no breath to speak.

‘We cannot land where the Morrigan has forbidden it. We must go back out to sea.’

‘Are you going to abandon your invasion because they tell you to?’ I was incredulous. Religion is one thing, but money is another, and I had invested a lot in this expedition. It was worth a curse, I thought. There is no curse that cannot be lifted for some appropriate payment. If Gold will not do it then blood will.

‘I will not abandon this,’ the Setanta answered, short of breath.

‘Go somewhere else?’ I panted.

‘No, we must land here.’

‘When?’

‘When we have made a new voyage.’

I liked that idea even less. We had now reached the cluster of skin boats, half-way between Madoc’s ship and the shore. We looked back to the beach.

‘Now,’ said the Setanta. ‘You may count the waves. We are out beyond the ninth wave.’

I counted. ‘So we are. If we return, it will be a new voyage?’

‘It will that.’

‘But if we make a new voyage, will not the Morrigan forbid us again?’

‘Now it is the witches of the Queen of the West that they are, and it is paying them well she had been to forbid us to land. It is earning their money they have been. Now it is earning their other money they will be, and it is not seeing us that they will be intent on. Witches are very expensive. The Queen cannot afford to hire them for more than one cursing in the day, and we can only hire them for the one abstention, but praise be to the Gods, abstention is a longer act than cursing, and it is good value we will be getting for our money.’

‘My money, you mean.’

‘If it is pedantic you are meaning to be – yes.’

‘So it is all a paid performance, and not the Morrigan at all?’

‘No. It is here they are coming to curse because they are paid, but it
is
the Morrigan that is on them, and she is my fierce enemy.’

I did not ask further after the habits of the Morrigan. I was too busy digging in my paddle and heaving the boat shorewards against the tide and the wind. The other boats came with us, holding back
a little out of politeness, so that we should be the first to land. Above us, the cloud began to break. The sun shone on us, clear and bright. At last I saw the colours of Ireland, and I saw them true and clear. In Britain I had lived half a year and more in twilight and in mist. There you will see no clear colours. Even the bright yellow of Rhiannon’s cloak, the scarlet of a centurion’s plume, everything in the Island of the Mighty, was seen as through a mist, the hues degraded, unsaturated, the outlines blurred, all hard edges softened. But now, as we came to the Island of the Blessed, everything was flooded in a clear hard light that took me home. The saffron cloaks and the green trees beyond the strand glowed bright and definite. I shook myself. I began to throw off the languors and the uncertainties of the Island of Britain, where nothing is as it seems, where every meaning is both doubtful and double, and I prepared to return to a life of logic and certainty and simplicity.

We beached the boat. The Setanta sprang first ashore, drawing his sword. I followed, waving my axe, and the other men from the ship, as soon as they had carried the boats up above the tidemark of seaweed, also brandished their weapons and shouted dreadful oaths in their own language, describing perfectly intelligibly what they would do to anyone who tried to bar their path. The Three Witches of the Queen of the West drew their hoods over their faces, and ostentatiously did not see us, only grunting a little when Heilyn went over and pressed purses into their hands.

We walked up the beach in a long line. The Setanta was in the centre with Callum on his left and myself on his right, and Heilyn came on my other side, and I was glad of someone to keep my back, being the first emissary of the Empire to set foot in the country, even if no one knew about it. We were ready to form a shield wall, but we were not attacked as I, at least, half expected. Instead, as we breasted the dunes at the edge of the beach, with the low sun at our backs, there was a great noise and a crowd of unarmed men came running to us out of the scrub ahead.

There must have been two hundred of them. This was why the Setanta had been so positive that we must land here, and now. They thronged around us, shouting and cheering, the weaponless men of the disarmed kingdom of the North. They offered us hunks of steaming meat, and barley bread and jugs of beer, but we
followed the Setanta in refusing them with flamboyant ritual gestures of abstention. And of course, we had had a hearty breakfast of cold mutton and oat cakes and mead in the ship. Still, we came ashore fasting till the time should be ripe for us to eat.

The Setanta stopped in the middle of an open space, and someone brought him a bundle of dry sticks and a bow. He tore off the edge of his garment for tinder, and twisting a stick in the bowstring, he made fire just as we do in the Temple at home on great occasions. In Ireland, if not in Britain, the meaning of every rite was plain to see. When the tinder smoked, nine naked men brought him each nine sticks from nine different trees – oak and elm and ash, willow and alder and yew, hazel and apple and rowan. They piled the sticks in a cone, and with a good deal of blowing by the Setanta they were able to start a real fire. Then all the men rushed to pile on the wood, so that they all had a hand in the blaze. When there was a good roaring pyre, the Setanta added a handful of straw, and immediately the Northern men piled on damp straw and green leaves, until a pillar of white smoke rose high in the air, to tell all Ireland that there was a new champion come to challenge the High King at Tara, and that he had kindled his own Beltain Fire.

Then, and only then, did the Setanta accept food and we ate too. Madoc, seeing the smoke, brought the ship in and beached her, and his crew rigged tackle to swing out the bundles of weapons. Then the Northern men came around and received their arms from the Setanta himself, to each man a sword, and to the more favoured a helmet or a mail coat or a shield, and to the luckiest all three.

But while this was going on, other things were being hoisted out, wheels and chariot bodies and poles. For this was the ruler of the battlefield in the Island of the Blessed, and if the King of the North had none of these, then he could not hope to face any other king in battle. Heilyn called round him the smiths and the carpenters among the Northern men, and set them to work assembling the chariots. I watched. The wheels were as high as a man’s waist, not the high frail wheels you see on the chariots in the Games. And while we fix tyres on our wheels in sections, nailed on to the rim, the tyres of these wheels were made in one
piece of iron, jointless, and shrunk in some magical fashion which nobody would explain to me, so that they hold hard to the rim without nail or rivet or any other fastening.

They fixed a pair of wheels on to the first axle to hand, and drove the lynch pins into the felloes. Then they lowered a body on to the axle and joined body and axle with leather straps. The pole, likewise, was hooked on to the front of the body, so that the whole vehicle was most alarmingly flexible. I asked Heilyn, who spoke the British tongue, but with a vile accent, as did a number of the other men with him, who appeared to be Gauls, of the nation of the Sentantii:

‘How many have we?’

He answered, without looking up from his task of fixing a pole into the first body:

‘Well, there’s nearly a hundred wheels, but mostly not in pairs, and forty-two bodies, and some in a dreadful state, and only twenty-six poles, but poles are easy to make, and I haven’t counted the harness – I should say we will be lucky to have more than thirty when we finish. And the work in putting them together – you know, they were all made originally by a group of double-jointed Scythian dwarves that old King Brutus bought specially for the job, and unless we can find some more of the same breed, and it’s expensive they come too, in any slave market, then it’s not much of a success we will be making of this.’

I left him, and returned to the Setanta, who had paused in his rearmament programme.

‘What will we do for horses? I can’t see any.’

‘Indeed, and isn’t it getting them we will be now? Wasn’t it in skin boats that those fine boys were coming down from the North, and how would you be carrying a horse in one of them?’

It was true enough, and now that everyone was armed, and it left great heaps of weapons and armour over, little groups of the Northern men were drifting off in all directions. Heilyn went on assembling his chariots, and all the day long more parties of unarmed men came straggling in asking for swords. Before noon, we could see other columns of smoke to answer ours, for we were on the seaward edge of a great plain.

By evening, the men were returning in their little groups, not
just men, now, but warriors, for their new swords were blooded and some of them were wounded. One or two were left behind dead and many more dead drunk, and these also were dead in truth before the dawn.

They brought us back the horses, all right, plenty of them, because we had landed on the horse pastures of the High King, and we were able to take the pick of his herds where they grazed. Not that the pick was very wonderful. None of them was big enough to carry a man. This is why the Irish have to use them in chariots, because any beast, however puny, will pull a cart. There is something in the air of Ireland which prevents any horse from growing to its full size. They will never be able to breed a horse in all Ireland that will carry a man on its back.

They didn’t only bring the horses. They had cattle, dozens of them, to be roasted at the fire that the Setanta had kindled, and others we had lit from it. We must have cut down half the woods of the province before we moved on. And they had mead, too, by the gallon, because they had robbed the village where the High King’s horse-herders lived, and burnt it, and thus lit the whole land in a Beltain fire such as no one had expected.

Yes, that was a Beltain night to be remembered. The Setanta had returned after … how many years of exile? One year, said some of the Barbarians, and three years, said others. Before I left Ireland I heard songs that put it at seven years. However long it had been, the Northerners were glad to see him again, and made it clear that he was even more welcome than their brothers and cousins who had gone to join him overseas and were now returned with him. Now I could see that about half the Fianna were real Irishmen, out of Ulster, but the rest were strangers, Gauls it seemed. They, and I, received dark and suspicious looks from the newly arrived Irish, straggling in by threes and fours to demand their weapons.

This is what Pryderi would like, I thought. Instead of creeping from a little boat in the very shadow of his conquerors, to land from a great ship on a beach, and be surrounded by stalwart, obedient, faithful warriors, so that he could give each one his arms with a lordly gesture. No wonder Pryderi was jealous of the Setanta. This, to him, was the true place of a king, and his true work, raising an army for a great battle.

All through the night, the Northerners came streaming in, drawn by the light of the fires and by the smell of the meat as much as by the glint of the iron and the skirl of the whetstones, and by the screams of the women dragged from the horse-herders’ village as they were mauled and raped and passed from man to man. Other women came in, too, of their own accord, as they always do when an army camps for the night. The Setanta, always a gentleman, had four of the younger ones passed in to the ship as a gesture of appreciation.

All in all, I thought at sunset, it was not a bad day’s work. Five or six hundred men, all armed, and thirteen chariots ready to use, and horses for them, and food for us all for a month if anyone would take the trouble to store it and issue it, not bad, I thought, not bad at all, for one day. For one day, the day that the Setanta began his war of conquest of the Queen of the West and of the High King of all Ireland, that would set all Ireland in a blaze of quarrels and disunity. Not bad, even if no one in the island knew it yet, for the first day of the Roman Conquest of Ireland. Two months now to set the pot a-boiling, and then the seas would be calm enough for the clumsy galleys the legions built, calm enough even for those to bring the Army across the wide salt sea, first the Second, and then the Twentieth in support, and four regiments of cavalry, big men sitting on big horses, that would settle the business of any chariots that survived the coming battles of Irish against Irish. But this would be later. Let the war come first.

When it was dawn, I saw we had the beginnings of a real army, two thousand men or more. The supply of swords and shields had long given out: the latest comers were given spear heads and told to go away and cut their own shafts. When the tide rose and the ship floated, I waved Madoc out to sea. Now, I was alone in Ireland, as far as anyone to talk to was concerned, alone amid these howling savages. In Londinium, the Setanta had merely looked a bit wild. Here, in the middle of a great crowd of men dressed exactly like him, and he now as dirty, with a winter in the hills, as the worst of them, he looked at once both horrifying and commonplace. Looking around, I could believe all the tales I had heard in Britain of the Irish cooking their enemies in cauldrons to suck their valour from their marrow
bones, and carrying the heads around their necks for years, till they rotted on the string.