Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (74 page)

‘Find me a Fichel board.’

And they routed about among the ruins of the strong-hold, and they came to us with a Fichel board, the board of the Fichel of the Nine Men.

Now this Fichel is played on a board that is nine squares to the side, as other Fichel games are played on boards that are of seven or eleven squares each way, or on oblong boards of different sizes. And it is played without dice or the least interposition of chance or of divine favour. In this game, one player has the king, who at the start stands in the middle, and the other has the eight men who stand in the four corners in pairs. And the king must move one square at every turn, and the men one square only at a move. The task of the men is so to hem in the king that he cannot move, but the king, if he can, may kill the men if he catches them alone. Now the object of the game is not the same for the two sides. The men can win only if they kill the king. But
if the king is still alive by the end of whatever number of moves the players have agreed, then the king has won.

So it was that I sat at the Fichel board to play against Gwawl. And it was I that took the king for each game, since, I pointed out, I had come alone into the rath as the king into the Fichel board, outnumbered and shut in.

Now, the first game we played was a Fichel of seventeen moves, the Game of the Warrior, and a speedy game was it with a sure end. Because Gwawl was not used to my style, in twelve moves, six to him and six to me, I had killed four of his eight men, and there was no hope that the others could hem me in. Still, he would not surrender, being a king himself, and he played out the last sterile moves while his men watched by the flickering light of the fire, because the dusk had now fallen.

When all the seventeen moves were played, Gwawl glared at me. He asked:

‘What then is it that you are wanting of me?’

‘That instead of giving me to Queen Maeve, you send me and my man here’ – because it was easier to pretend that Aristarchos was someone of no importance – ‘back alive to Cuchullain.’

‘That I will do,’ said Gwawl, because he was bound by his Gesa to respect his wager and to pay it, whatever other promise he must break. But there spoke a voice from the darkness beyond the fire:

‘That you cannot do.’

We stood, and we all looked into the shadows, and it was Cathbad the Druid who stood there, and we knew him by the white of his robe and by his voice and not by his face, which was swollen with weeping for all the dead of Ireland that had fallen because I had come to seek Gold. He stood there, and he began to intone a poem, in the terse evocative style that was even now old-fashioned and dying out in favour of the complex rhythmical metres that imitated hexameters:

There was a long silence. When we looked again, Cathbad was gone. I pulled myself together. Who was dead, was dead, I told Gwawl, as harshly as I could:

‘If you cannot pay your debts, King, then you must play again.’

And this time, we sat down to the Fichel of fifty-one moves, the Game of Champions, the longest that is commonly played. It must be obvious to you, now, that the more moves the less chance there is that the king will live. Yet it is possible to play the game of the fifty-ones moves, if you play well, and not to lose, if you hold the king, and if you are wise and cautious and at the same time bold. And play well I did that evening, with the circle of savage warriors to watch us, breathing over me and watching my style with interest, because there was not a man of them but was fair mad on the game.

After twenty-three moves, I killed one of Gwawl’s men, though now he had played me once before it was harder to catch him. After forty-seven moves, I killed another. And at the fifty-first move, when he thought he had me, I wafted the king gently out of his grasp, and that was the end, and all the Leinstermen who stood behind me saw it.

‘Pay your debts, King Gwawl. Let us both, my man and I, go to Tara, and let us stay there in the Plain and be fed by the people of the village till there come an Eagle to feed us.’

‘Aye, and it is a long time that it is that you will be waiting,’ Gwawl sneered at us, laughed at us. ‘What makes you think that the Eagles will ever come now?’

‘Now?’ I echoed.

‘Aye, now. Do you think that you are the only one to know that the Eagles follow trade? The nightmare it is that follows all
the Kings of Ireland, and not the High King only, through all their waking watchful nights. That is our terror, the thought of a Roman in every village of Ireland, stealing all our poor pennies to send back to enrich your incense-filled temples in Rome. No that shall never be while there is an Irish King alive.

‘It was only by chance that I heard of it. If Cuchullain will go to Eboracum and to Londinium, to learn wisdom, I thought, why should I not go to Rome itself, and see for myself what made the oil-eaters so greedy? And so I did … And even there I should not have learnt what was going on if my Gesa had not driven me to gamble, and to meet that pretty fool with the Monopoly in his pocket. Ready he was to boast about it. I soon settled him. But you, Photinus, you were more trouble, and yet I would have done for you too, if not for Pryderi … If you had stayed in Londinium, I would have had you when the nights got dark. But I had no chance out there on the road, and in the Mere, with all
his
friends about you. Pryderi!’ Gwawl spat. ‘That two-and-a-half-obol king of a half-obol kingdom, and even that in pawn to the Roman, for all he is so proud of his crown and so careful of his people. Just because my young men have been raiding along the coasts of Dyfed, and how else shall they marry without heads to buy their brides with, and because the Romans have not been able to stop us as they promised, he takes it into his head to help any scheme that will bring down all the thrones of Ireland, and have us all in the same state that he is in. There was no hope of defeating him to get at you. But in spite of him, we knew all about you, we learned every detail of your plan and every change in your mind.’

‘That cannot be,’ I told him, and yet I knew it was true, that he did know everything, and I knew, and I
would
not know, and yet I did know, who it was that had told him, that had sat with Pryderi and me so long and so often by the fireside in the Mere, who knew all that Pryderi knew – and yet there were things she could not know, because I had not even told Pryderi.

‘Rhiannon told us,’ he shouted at me, in triumph. ‘She sent us news of everything you said, by this messenger or that, men or birds or spirits, how should you know or how should you care? And when she knew the time, then she came to me, and I brought
her off safely into this land of all her kinsman. And then, there was nothing to do, but to wait till you and Cuchullain came to waste both the armies of the North and of the West. When that was done, I could come out myself and become High King of Ireland, and who better for it than I who had saved the Island of the Blessed?’

‘And what good will it do you?’ I asked him. There was no harm in talking now, he knew enough. ‘It is little comfort being the High King will be to you when the legions come. It happened to Vercingetorix after Alesia fell, and it will happen to you. A short walk in the Triumph, and then – into the Mamertine. Do you know it? A stone box, thirty feet square, with a spring in one corner, that keeps it always damp. But you will not feel rheumatism there, oh no, you won’t stay long enough. Four men to hold you and one to twist the rope, slowly … slowly … and your eyes burst out … and the noise in your ears … and then, into the Great Sewer with what is left.’

He still laughed at me, strutting and threatening.

‘And what makes
you
think that the legions will ever come? How do you think they will sail now? Aye, we knew that they would come soon, who wouldn’t know, with the hammers and the axes going and the ships building in every creek? But the day that Cuchullain held the white mare for Conchobar to mount, that day Rhiannon did our business for us. That day she raised the Brigantes, that day she set all North Britain aflame from sea to sea. How can the Second and the Twentieth sail, if the Sixth is threatened?’

Aristarchos spoke for the first time.

‘There are legions and to spare in Gaul and in Germany to hold down the Brigantes and let the others sail.’

Gwawl went on.

‘Do you think we Barbarians are as disunited as politicians in Rome? On that same day, there was war from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Danube. That very day, the Marcomen sacked Vindabonum, and now they are pressing to Aquileia. There are no reinforcements for Britain.’

‘Oh, my regiment!’ said Aristarchos. ‘Oh, my Rangers! To go to war, and I not there to lead you!’

‘The regiment you raised among the Brigantes? How else do you think Vindabonum fell but when they deserted? Mutiny against Rome to them was loyalty to Rhiannon. They will pass across the land of the Chatti and through the Friesians across the North Sea, and will fight against the legions before the harvest.’

‘I do not believe it,’ said Aristarchos. ‘It is not true. There is no rebellion. You are lying to make us despair.’ He did not say ‘Frighten us’; he did not know the word.

Someone stepped forward. I knew him, stout and middle-aged. He had been the other of the two men with the Mouse. Now he had a sword cut on the face, his ear was hanging by a strip of skin, and the unwashed blood was black. He held a bundle on his outstretched forearms, a scarlet Roman cloak folded under and up and over what might have been a great dish. The cloak was a fine one. It was not what the quartermaster issues, but made to measure of close-woven wool, light and warm together, fit for a tribune, or for a very senior centurion.

‘This one died well. I killed him myself.’

He turned back the edges of the cloak. It covered a shield, oblong and convex; the leather was hacked and gashed. In the hollow of the shield was a sword, legionary pattern, the edge gapped, the point turned. There was half of a staff of vine wood, snapped off. There was a bundle of Phalerae. I had seen them before. And black and woolly haired, the lips drawn back from the shining teeth in an awful grimace of rage and shame and pain, I saw the head of Caius Julius Africanus.

‘It is true. When the Primus Pilus carries a shield and fights in the ranks, the legion is all but lost.’ Aristarchos wrapped his cloak about his face, and wept. The middle-aged man went on.

‘Now there is no one to stop us in the Island of Britain. We have burnt every ship on the Western Coast. The legions will not come.’

Now I knew why the army of Leinster had not come against us at Tara, why they had not been there to hold back the host of Callum the Hairy, so that their villages would not be burnt and their cattle not stolen. They had been at sea, saving Ireland, whatever the cost to Leinster, as Rhiannon had saved Ireland, whatever the cost to Britain.

I had no time to weep, not for the hand of Cuchullain in the dust, not for Africanus, fallen in the front rank. I had no time to weep for the treachery of Rhiannon. It is the surest mark of love, that it betrays, and how could I ever think otherwise? I could only face Gwawl and tell him:

‘If you cannot pay your debts, King of Leinster, then you must play again.’

It was well dark when we played our third game of Fichel, the Game of Kings, the game of a hundred and nineteen moves. The Leinstermen stood round with their flaring torches, that brought smoke as well as light to the gaming board, and they counted the moves, shouting the numbers.

‘Twenty-one!’ and the king moved away in his constant circling.

‘Twenty-two!’ and one man came to back another that would have been killed otherwise.

The king turned and twisted, the eight men dodged and shuffled like wolves about an elk in winter, but I had too much of the wolf in my blood to die like an elk. Let me tell you this, it is easier to control one man on the board or on the battlefield than eight. It was late. Gwawl was tired from days of pursuit, by land and by sea, from battles and marches, from judgements and decisions. He played most of the time with half his men, he missed his chances.