Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (71 page)

Cuchullain now spurned the civilised luxury of a shirt. He wore only the long strip of saffron-coloured cloth wound round his body, held together by fine brooches of Gold and silver. This dress set off the muscles of his arm and back, rippling under the armlets and chains that he wore, of precious metals only; nothing so poor as bronze for him. The sword that had killed the High King he had given to Conchobar, and now he wore an old sword, brought down from the North, hidden away from the army of Connaught when it had tried to disarm the North as the Romans had disarmed all Britain. This was the oldest sword I had ever seen, a long chariot sword, double-edged for slashing, but this one pointed too. There was no ball to the pommel. Instead there spread out from the top of the hilt two wide horns of Gold, curling up like a new moon in the sky, and the tips of the horns studded with tiny chips of gems so that they glittered as the light came on them from all directions. And the bottom of the scabbard was likewise ornamented with horns, this time of gilded bronze for the harder wear as the chape bumped on the ground or the sides of the chariot, though it would be seldom that the sword would be worn except in the chariot. It was slung from a sword belt that went over his right shoulder, and was anchored to the garment he wore, but round his waist he wore a noble’s belt in the British fashion, a chain of bronze gilt that went round his body four or five times before it was caught by a clasp.

Behind him came his army. You have seen a civilised army on the march, or at least you have seen soldiers, small detachments marching to join their station or stepping out proudly in a review. Are you thinking of those straight lines, dressed from the right, taking their step from the standard-bearer? You will conjure up those scarlet cloaks, all of a length, the line of shields held, however it breaks a man’s arm, all level topped. You will imagine the helmets, shining like so many suns, the legionaries’ topped with spike or knob according to regiment, the centurions proudly tossing their scarlet plumes of horsehair. The breastplates shine, scoured smooth with brick dust, and the faces are shaved close as if they too were scoured, and every neck cropped, and crown too, so that no hair shows outside the helmet. Those are the two things that you will remember, every man is alike, and every man is clean.

That will not do for your picture of a Barbarian army, Irish or German. Every man is dressed differently, as he pleases, only that a fashion may run for a little through some clan or nation and give them at least a skim of likeness. The helmets they wear are of a hundred different kinds, knobbed or spiked or crested, round or pointed, with cheek-pieces or not, sometimes beaten out of one piece, sometimes built up of plates of metal on a cap of boiled leather, and whether it is of bronze or of iron is a matter of choice. Then some men will wear mail, and some do not, according to whether they have been lucky in war or in inheritance or in theft, and for cloaks they wear what length and colour they can catch. But you must not imagine this equipment as shining, because how can bronze shine when it is green with verdigris, or iron sparkle when it is pitted with rust? The cloaks hide their colours under dirt and grease, and every man wears his beard long for want of will to cut it, and his hair long as a challenge. And this army will not march in ranks, or in any order, but will push along in a great heaving crowd, every man only taking care that he is always near to his lord to recognise him.

So Cuchullain rode at the head of this crowd of warriors, by the way I knew that he would come, and there at the ford I waited for him. And when he stopped there, all his men came up and crowded close to hear what I said, as I knew they would.

Where the track came down to the ford, I had dug a hole. There was no need to seek out a standing stone of a burial mound: here was the boundary between the Plain of Tara and the rest of the Island of the Blessed, and every boundary is a place of mystery. Beside the road to the ford I had dug a hole, dug it with a stick sharpened in the fire. I dug the hole knee-deep before I was satisfied, and I heaped the earth on the south side, the unlucky side. I stood on the west side of the hole, and I barred the way to Cuchullain and his advancing army. He rode up to me in his chariot, and saw me there. The hood of my sealskin cloak was drawn over my face, but he knew me, and he knew too, and all his soldiers knew, why I held in my left hand a screaming black piglet, the runt of the litter, and in my right a knife roughly chipped of flint. Cuchullain saw the kicking squealing pig, and he stopped.

‘How then, Mannanan!’ he cried. ‘Have you not had enough blood?’ He gestured around. This was the way that the army of the West had fled, and the ground was covered with corpses. Some the wolves and the buzzards had torn: most had been stripped. Now the ribs showed through the rotting flesh, three weeks dead. The bellies had burst: there was a stench over everything. There was nobody whose duty it was to bury them. So they were not buried.

‘I do not drink blood,’ I replied loudly, so that all the host could hear me. ‘But I know those who do. Those Below, the thirsty ones, shall they be filled tonight?’ and I drew the blunt back of the stone knife across the piglet’s throat. Cuchullain looked long at me. He saw my hair plastered down with fat, and it might well have been corpse fat for all he knew, and stuck with the feathers of the black cock. One half of my face was blackened with the ash from the fire, and one painted scarlet with a dye I had with me. From my red cheek glared my one black eye, and from the black cheek shone the red of a ruby. And Cuchullain saw, and all his army saw, that the blood of the black pig would flow into the pit, and I would curse all his army and himself and deliver them to the Gods Below as I had delivered the High King. Cuchullain changed his tune, and asked what I wanted.

‘Pay your debts, Setanta, pay your debts!’ For he was still arrogant, with his army behind him. Now the battle was won there was no need for him to think that he could escape paying those that had won it for him. ‘Before you came here, before I armed you, before I gave you your triumph and your kingdom, you promised me my pay. All the Gold in Ireland, all the Gold of all the mines, you promised me. You promised, Setanta, and you have not paid it yet. What have you promised the men behind you, and will you ever pay it? Pay me my Gold, Setanta, and then pay them!’

He did not dare refuse me, or try to put it off, there in front of all his army who had heard it. There is nothing will make an army melt away as fast as the rumour that the pay chests are empty. If that happened, then indeed he would feast with the Gods Below. Every man watched him and watched me with my hand on my knife. Cuchullain turned to his host and called:

‘Who will go with this man into Leinster?’

A big man came forward, and beneath the hair it was possible to recognise Callum that had pulled the skin boat with me. Now his face was painted and his hair stuck with feathers so that he would have drawn attention anywhere in Britain, where he had before been merely an unusually hairy and dirty man. Now, though, he could dress for what he was, the prince of a little kingdom somewhere far away, and with him he brought his own kinsmen, perhaps five hundred of them, and almost every man of them had joined us on that first day. There was little enough attention he had had from the High King, though, for all that, or from the Champion till now.

‘Callum the Hairy,’ Cuchullain addressed him. ‘Ravage Wicklow, and take Mannanan to the Rivers of Gold.’

I stood beside Callum, and we watched the host of Ulster pass, great crowds of ragged hungry men, ill armed and ill tempered, even now, and looking not for excitement or for glory but for loot, only for loot. Only in the middle of them marched a dozen proud and fierce men, well armed, Heilyn and his Gauls. Close behind the leading chariot they strode, ready to keep each others’ back, or their leader’s back. And as they went, so I saw pass for the last time the Champion of Ulster.

Nor did Conchobar ever see his nephew again.

I trudged south with Callum the Hairy, passing the river last of all, and while the host turned west up river, we turned east towards the sea. There were, as I said, about five hundred of us, and not a man whose name or whose face I knew except Callum. I had my axe in my hand, and my cloak on my back, and a little bag at my waist with my belongings, like a few spare eyes in case we were invited to a feast. I asked Callum where he came from.

‘From far up there,’ he said, pointing to our left. ‘It is on the coasts opposite the Picts that we are living and it is across the sea that it is we would rather be raiding, because it is a fine land that the Picts have, and easy it would be to take it from them, but it is silver in plenty they have that lets them keep men always under arms in case we come, and the bread that those men ought to be growing they can buy for them.’

They were a crafty people, these men of Callum’s, part of a
nation of the Irish who called themselves Scots. They did not worship any living being, but their sacred thing, they said, was a ship, a stout wooden ship that had once cast itself up on their shores and had given them much silver, and been the foundation of such prosperity as they had. Besides, they said, it was more convenient to worship a ship, since there was no chance of sinning by eating it.

When we crossed the river, we passed into the land where Cathbad could no longer, as he said, protect me, but I remembered how little power he had seemed to have even in the land of Tara, and I laughed at him. There was nothing he could do to protect me that I could not do myself.

We marched on, our men singing the rousing chorus of ‘Erch, the Bastard King of Leinster’. When we could smell the sea, we came to a village, a collection of huts by the water. We turned out the whole place in a twinkling, women and pigs and cattle. Beyond the village was a strong place, a rath as they call it, an earthwork around a circular farmyard, and a fence on top of the bank, and a gate in the fence that we easily broke in. The men in the rath we killed very easily, but there was nothing inside worth taking. The prince of the place was already dead across the river, and his women had fled to the west. Some of his own peasants had taken the rest of his belongings, mead mostly, and shut themselves inside the rath to enjoy them. Some of our men were for burning the place down, but Callum would not allow them.

‘For indeed,’ he told them, ‘it is bringing our families down here we will be, and I will be king of this place, and I will reign from this rath myself.’

There we spent the first night, and when we went south we left a band of young men to hold it, and there we sent all the cattle that we stole, and there we agreed to meet if we were scattered. The young men had the women of the place to comfort them, and the pigs to eat. But we turned south into the narrow plain between the mountains and the sea, and all I could think of was Gold. I hardly remembered at all that down there in the South, by the sea, somewhere, was Rhiannon, and that is what Cathbad could not protect me from once I was out of the plain of Tara. For in the Plain, I thought of glory and honour and the rule of
law and of love: but once I was across the river, there was nothing I remembered but Gold.

There was no one in that plain that expected our coming. I wondered why. Callum listened to me wondering as one listens to the prattling of a child, and then in pity teaches it to wipe its nose.

‘Indeed, it is the country of the Eastern King that we are coming into, the country of Leinster. It was not to the taste of the king of this and to go to fight at Tara, for he has not been in this island for a year or two, but he has been wandering across the seas, and some say inside the Empire. But now he has come back, and he has brought him back a wife too, from among the Iceni, and a hard time of it he must have been having in making his rule felt again. For it is a proud people the Brigantes are, and impatient of any king.’

‘But – the Brigantes!’ I protested. ‘They live in Britain.’

‘So do some of them, and some of them live in Gaul, and the finest and oldest branch of the nation live here, although it is arguing and quarrelling they are always over which
is
the oldest and finest branch.’

Now I began to realise why Caw had been so unperturbed when we told him that Rhiannon had been stolen away by the Irish. And now, too, I first began to wonder whether she had, in her own mind, been stolen or rescued. From now on, when I thought of her, as I did infrequently, I only wondered when I should reach her in her palace in the capital of the Brigantes, when we should at last fall, as I thought we would, into each other’s arms.

We went south, like a thunderstorm. We slept each night in the villages we sacked, with the widows and daughters of the men we killed, if we could catch any to kill, which was not often, or if not, then with the wives and daughters they kindly left us. And we ate their cows and pigs, but not many of them, because our real interest was in collecting a great herd together on the banks of the river beneath the fence of Callum’s new rath. We spread out too, and covered all the country between the mountains and the salt sea, and we were no longer an army of five hundred men, but a scatter of companies of fifty or so, each just
enough to settle a village. In these villages there were few men, I noted, however many women we might find. But almost every day, almost every hour, I would ask Callum:

‘When do we come to the rivers of Gold?’

And he would answer in that ingratiating way that Barbarians have, when they know that the answer will be unwelcome and they do not want to hurt your feelings by telling you the truth:

‘Soon, soon. Tomorrow, the next day, the day after.’

I realised, but slowly, that he had no more idea of where the Gold was than I had. Till at last we forded a little stream running east from the sea, as we did a dozen times a day, and I scraped my toes into the sandy bottom. I stopped dead there, with the mountain water icy cold half way up my calves, and I shouted in joy. Oh, yes, I’d seen sand like that before, the sands of the Maeander are like that, where Midas gathered his Gold, and gathered it all up, so that there is no Gold there any more. But this was Gold sand all right. I stopped where I was, I did that, and I bent down and I plunged my arms to the elbow in the bitter stream and I brought up a fistful of sand. I held it in my cupped hands, and then I swilled it round in my palm, watching for the glint of mica and I saw it, and then I knew that I had come to the Rivers of Gold.