Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (73 page)

At first we formed a great square of movement, men and cattle, pushing north as fast as we could trot. An easy pace, you think? Oh, yes, easy enough for an unarmed man for an hour or so, with nothing at the end of it but a crown of laurel or a horn of ale. But to keep it up for days, with a coat of mail and a helmet, and a sword or an axe or a spear, and with your own life as the prize, why, that’s another thing.

Behind us as we went we left our trail, a great belt of land where the grass was eaten and trampled, and the houses burnt, the fences about the paddocks and the folds pushed over, the fruit trees cut down, the wells fouled and the fords muddied. Soon we were leaving other things, bags of food and water bottles, spare shoes and bronze bowls and cloaks, and mine among them. And then, more sinister, mail coats, and helmets, and at last shields and spears and swords thrown down by men who only wanted to run. We left men as well as women gasping by the wayside, with knees or ankles twisted in the mud, or their soles worn into raw blisters, or snorting or spewing blood. I could never understand what came over the women, for they ran as fast as the men even when no one guarded them. They urged the cattle on, they rushed forward to captivity as if it were the goal and object of their lives. Caught up, they were, I suppose, by the general frenzy around them.

I know that I was. I belted along for the first few miles as hard as I could go without falling over the cows in front of me. After
a while, though, I remembered Socrates at Delium, and I went faster till I could catch up with Callum.

‘We wouldn’t have to run so fast,’ I shouted to him, ‘if we could discourage the Brigantes.’

Callum considered this for a few hundred paces. He was a realist. He didn’t slow down till the next ford. Then he stopped at the water’s edge and looked at the men who were passing. We were by now well in the front of the retreat, being by nature more determined than our followers. Callum caught one man by the arm, and then another. He was not indiscriminate. He let most of the fugitives go by. He collected about thirty men. None of them were in their first youth, but they were strong men, heavy-handed and savage. Every man of them still had his weapons, and held them as if he knew what these things were for.

We waited in the bushes above the ford, on the south bank of the river, till most of the rout were over and the first pursuers appeared. Young men they were, running lightly and easily, scarcely out of breath, delighted at outrunning their elders, which experience had taught me is never a thing to do in war if you want to live. Their spears were already bloodied and they slung heads at their belts, taken from men too tired and broken to resist. We were different. Youngsters, I said. They had no chance. We charged down on them, and though they tried hard to remember how they had been taught to fight, we killed eleven of them before you could shout a warcry. We only had two wounded. We took the heads, of course, because it was the thing to do, not because we could afford to carry trophies, and indeed we dropped them down the next well we came to. You see, the sight of his friends’ bodies, headless laid out in a neat row across his path is enough to make any man wonder whether precedence is so important.

We pushed on. It had begun to rain, breaking the long dry spell that had begun with the Battle before Tara. I could only hope that the rain had the same effect on our pursuers’ spirits as it had on ours. I fought seven times in those two days and two nights. Five times we laid ambushes, and twice we were ourselves attacked, for the Leinstermen soon called back all the lads from the forefront of their army, and those who came on after us
were old warriors like ourselves. And what I could not understand was that some of them bore wounds already, sword cuts a few weeks old, and yet the army of Leinster had not come against us before Tara, and I wondered what had been happening in the Eastern Kingdom. I was glad that I had once been taught the finer points of using an axe by a Lombard, not named Bert, and I soon had heads enough to hang all round my belt by their long hair, if I had wanted them.

When we held the field, we took the heads of the enemy and also we picked up the bodies of our own dead. And their heads we took too, and carried them with us till we could scrape a little hole in the earth and bury them out of sight. Because you cannot leave your comrade’s head for his enemies to hack off roughly and insult, and at the last stick up on a stake for the crows to peck out the eyes.

But we ran most of the time, and there was nothing that I had to eat but a piece of dried beef that I picked out of the mud, and a quarter of a barley loaf and two raw carrots I took from some women who were fools enough to let me see they had food. We were no longer now a solid square of movement. The men in front were hastening to get their beasts out of the Eastern Kingdom and across the plain of Tara and home into the North, and each made the best speed he could and took the easiest path, while Callum the Hairy played the prince’s part and held back the pursuit, and gave them time. We were but the wreck of an army now, and the warbands of Leinster roamed among us at will and cut off first this herd and then that.

Sometime in the darkness of the second night, I fought for the eighth time. There were only six left with Callum then. Some had been killed, and some had fallen with weariness, and some were just lost in the dark or in the press of cattle. Men rushed at us out of the darkness, and split us, so that every one of us was fighting alone, and I the most alone, twisting and turning always the same way to guard my blind side and striking at shadows with my two-foot axe. I spun and dodged, and ran to escape, because there comes a time always when there is no more to do than run, and you must give up and acknowledge that there is no more that you can do. I blundered westward, or so I
thought, up hill and over bog and through copses, till at last I tripped over a root and I fell flat on my face into a hollow in the ground, and I lay there winded and sobbing with shame and terror and fatigue, and there at last I slept.

When it was well light I awoke. We had been on the left flank of the retreat. I had wandered far out, into the shoulders of the hills. I got cautiously to my hands and knees and looked down the slope. Far away was the great scar that the herds had cut across the pastures, and the ruin of dead beasts and dying men and wailing women, and the crows and buzzards and the wolves gaining all the profit of the night. But otherwise there was no army to be seen. The pursuit had swept on. There was nobody now to be afraid or to cast cowardice in my teeth. The host of Callum the Hairy had gone and so had the army of the King of Leinster, gone on north towards the river which I could see in the far distance. Across the river lay the Plain of Tara. There I might be safe. Cathbad would protect me there.

I began to make my way to the north, moving carefully from one clump of trees to another, trying to keep out of sight. I shivered for want of my cloak as much as from fear, and I turned my head this way and that lest anyone, or anything, should come up on my blind side unseen. I kept moving. I was not only afraid of men. There were wolves around.

But I did not look round enough for all my care. I came at last to a place where I could lie in a hollow and see through the parted grass the mound and the rath which Callum had marked to be his own, above the river. The rath looked empty enough. There was no movement above the fence. There was some smoke, but a fire need not mean living men: I had seen enough burning houses in my time, and families dead around their own dinner a-cooking. The pursuit had turned inland along the banks of the rivers hours ago.

I lay and watched for a time. When I was beginning to think it might be safe enough to go forward and see if there was anything to eat inside the rath, there was a noise behind me, of someone clearing his throat. I whirled round and on to my feet, my axe at the ready, blade vertical before my face, my hacked and battered shield on my arm. A man stood in front of me, ten yards away, his sword at his side, his arms folded. He was not really seven feet high, he only looked it, in his pointed helmet, centuries old, with a bunch of red ribbons threaded through the ring on top. Heilyn Aristarchos had given me warning of his coming lest I killed him. Lest
I
killed
him
– I laughed bitterly at the thought.

‘Well?’ he asked me in a dull toneless voice. ‘Where is all the Gold?’

‘There is no Gold,’ I replied. ‘Have you anything to eat?’

He brought a lump of roast venison, dried and dusty, out of the fold of his cloak. We divided it equally, every scrap. I told him my tale. His was the same. But at least all Callum’s men were of one mind, and they tried to drive together one huge herd to drive back to Ulster. But the men who went with Cuchullain into the West did not even do that. As each man found he had enough cows or women to suit him, he would leave the army and go home with them. And as the host went west, so they spread out and the whole army dwindled away, not to nothing, because Cuchullain still kept together his chariots, and the Gauls who had come with Aristarchos held with him, and another band of the Setantii, Irishmen. And these were all that were left to face the wrath of Queen Maeve as she came in a second cloud of chariots against them out of the West. And then Cuchullain had done as Callum did, and fought skirmish after skirmish to hold the Connaught men off the wreck of his army. But as he retreated so his army grew, because like a snowball it swallowed up the stragglers who had no cattle, and soon the skirmishes were more like battles, but the retreat went on for all that.

‘Then, two nights ago,’ he told me, ‘I took a small band off to the right of the road, to try to draw the Queen south after us. We fought with their right flank near dusk, and we were cut to pieces. We scattered in the dark, and here I am at my rendezvous, for it was at this rath that I promised to meet my Gauls. If any are alive: I am almost certain none are.’

‘Who were they?’ I was bold to ask.

‘Oh, Setantii, all right,’ he assured me, ‘all related to Cuchullain. But how was he to know that every one was a soldier, sworn to Caesar, three of them of the rank of standard-bearer, and every one anxious to hang on his breastplate such Phalerae as would make every legion and every regiment of horse in the Army salute us as we passed. And there is still hope we may have it yet. This rath – where better for the legions to build Praetorium, and govern all Ireland?’

‘Soon it will be done,’ I assured him. ‘Just think, now all the roads of Britain are scarlet with the marching troops, coming down to the boats on the edge of the Irish Sea. All we need do now is to reach the landing beaches before Tara, and wait till the
ships appear. When the Liffey itself is full of galleys, then we can come out and collect our praises and our crowns for settling all Ireland in such a turmoil they will never notice what is happening till they are conquered.’

‘I hope my Gauls will see it. But they know the ways of this kind of war as well as I do. Make for the rendezvous, and then carry on, and never wait for the men who may never come. But they may be in the rath.’

We trudged down, miserable, through the fine rain that never stopped, and we climbed the path to the gate in the long fence. The gate itself still lay on the ground where it had fallen when Callum himself, under a rain of stones instead of water, had cut through the leather hinges with his sword. The village between the rath and the river had been burnt, but inside the courtyard the houses still stood. There might be food there. We looked at each other. Then Aristarchos nodded.

‘There may be food. We’ll go in.’

We moved forward, through the open gate into the court. We could see nobody about. And then, there was a shout, and we turned to see a dozen men in the open gate, warriors, splashed with the mud and blood of a three days’ pursuit. And in front of them he stood. He was big and grossly fat. His black-and-white-striped shirt was stained with moss. His hair, now grown long down his back, was streaked with whitewash. Picking a chicken carcase he held in both his hands, his royal state made obvious by the massive Gold collar around his neck, stood Gwawl, the Badger King of Leinster.

There he stood, triumphant in the gateway. He spat chicken bones at our feet, and he laughed. He said, in Latin, to taunt me the more:

‘Well, Mannanan-Photinus! Who is it now that controls the Gold of Ireland? You have the Monopoly Deed: but I have the monopoly of you. This is my day of victory at last. You cheated me between Bonnonia and Rutupiae. You hid in the mists in the Channel, and my ships missed you. You rolled me like dung in the streets of Londinium. Now it is my turn to do what I like.’

‘Do what you will,’ I told him. ‘Your days are numbered.’

‘But at what a number,’ he insisted. ‘Soon your days will be
gone. Do you wonder why I do not kill you now, myself? I promised my cousin, Rhiannon, when I saved her from you, that I would not kill you, nor harm a hair of your head, and no more I will. But I have also promised my other cousin, Maeve, that I will send you to her, bound, and that I will do. And she has her own ideas of sport, and it is not quickly that you will die, nor easily.’

And there was no doubt that he would do it, and there was no knowing how long it would take the legions to bring the Queen to heel. And by then we would be dead. I still held my axe, and Aristarchos his sword, but there were a hundred men in the rath now, with poles and nets, to take us alive like wild beasts. My own skill with axe and shield had brought me alive out of the first stage of the retreat from the rivers of Gold. There was no cheating in Ireland. Now I must bring us both alive out of the Island of the Blessed with my own unaided brain. There was only one thing left now to fight Gwawl with. I called on the man’s Gesa. I said:

‘Gwawl, or whatever name the Irish call you, I call on you to play against me. Play me three games of Fichel. At each game I wager my head if I lose, but if I win, then you must give me what I ask, or play another game.’

Gwawl looked at me hard, and then he called in a tone of anger to his men: