Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (75 page)

‘Seventy-eight!’ and the men stood on three sides of the king.

‘Seventy-nine!’ and the king moved to threaten two men at once.

‘Eighty!’ and Gwawl saw the danger, but imperfectly, and moved one man back to where he was safe, when he should have brought a third man to guard them both.

‘Eighty-one!’ and the king struck, and a man rolled on the ground.

This reminded Gwawl that he had four men he had hardly used at all, and he began to move them to where he thought they might be of help in containing the king, and soon he lost another. But now my eyes were smarting from the smoke of the torches and the fire, and the sweat on my face had little to do with the heat of the logs and turf. My king dodged and feinted and moved spasmodically from edge to centre and back again to edge.

‘A hundred and nine!’ and I erred, and the king was stopped, trapped, if only Gwawl had wit to see it, he was dead next move, and I had lost, lost for myself, what was worse, lost for Aristarchos.

‘A hundred and ten!’ and he had learned his lesson too well, and he was more eager to guard his own piece than to attack mine.

‘A hundred and eleven!’ and the king was away, and safe for another move.

But there was still time. The six men pressed and pushed. The king was harried. Three moves left now, to each side, and he was too near the edge of the board for comfort or confidence. Two moves each side, and he was pressed back towards the corner. One move each. Gwawl’s last, and had he been more alert he would have seen his chance. But the very man he moved to block the king’s way exposed another to vengeance.

‘A hundred and nineteen,’ cried all the Leinstermen together. The king, in his last move, struck, and struck true.

Gwawl sat rigid, looking at his board. Aristarchos sighed a long sigh. I could not move. We all three slept a little where we sat. I felt as empty as I had on the Night of the Thorn. The Leinstermen stood around us and watched, silent. Africanus stared at us from glazed, unclosing eyes. Suddenly, there was the sound of a cock crowing, the only cock left for miles uneaten, his neck unwrung. We all three blinked our eyes open into the new day. I said to Gwawl:

‘Pay your debts, King of Leinster. Give us a boat, sound and dry, and food and drink, that we two may return to whence we came.’

‘Go, then, to the Gods Below,’ he answered. ‘I give you the mercy you showed me at Rutupiae.’

But he was more merciful. They brought us down to the sea-beach where we ate a scanty meal of stale barley bread, and mouldy beef, and water from the river, muddied and fouled by the crossing of great armies high inland. The corpses of men and horses bobbed past us into the salt water. The Leinstermen ate no better than we two did.

They found us a big skin boat, and there was no saying it was not good enough, because it was in boats like this that the army of Leinster had crossed the sea to the Isle of Britain. More bread
and meat they put in it, and a big jar of beer they found, the only beer for miles. They left us all we had, our weapons, and my bag with my spare eyes and my dice and other trifles. And then Gwawl came to me with my cloak, my sealskin, and he apologised that it was soiled, because he had had to kill the man who picked it up to get it back for me. And his own cloak, of bearskin from the edge of the Summer Country, he gave to Aristarchos.

Gwawl and his men got into other boats. The middle-aged man took Africanus’s white shield, and stood on the beach. The Irishmen paddled out to sea, towing us with them. Far out beyond the ninth wave they took us, till, low as we were in the water, we could no longer see the white shield on the shore. All the boats but one left us. Only Gwawl remained, and he leant over to me. He shouted against the south-west wind: ‘One last thing. What was the answer to that riddle?’

‘What riddle?’

‘The one you asked me on the judgement mound of Arberth? What is both black and white and neither in earth or in sky?’

‘Oh, that,’ and I laughed, because it was such a little thing to remember through all the months of context and plotting and battle. ‘You’ll never be a Druid. Why, that was yourself, black hearted, white-clad, standing head in clouds on the mound above the Earth. And another thing, King of Leinster!’

‘What?’ He was drifting away now, towards the shore.

‘Give up gambling – you haven’t got the head for it.’

For seven days and nights we tossed on the seas, between the Island of the Blessed and the Island of the Mighty. At first we tried to head the boat eastward, across the south wind. We paddled silently, our teeth clenched in the bitterness of defeat, saying nothing because neither of us would admit aloud what we both knew, that we could no more paddle that boat to Britain than we could fly.

And that boat
could
have flown. Light as a feather, wicker-framed and leather-covered, it hopped and bobbed across the wave tops in the hard wind. The seas broke beneath us. We could not be swamped, but we were covered in spray. Our clothes dried stiff and white. The barley bread was soaked in salt water, the dried beef was drenched in brine till it would have outlived a mummy. We drank mouthfuls of the beer. It was a diuretic which drained the water from our blood. Both Aristarchos and I had thirsted before. We licked the rain water from the bottom of the boat before the spray splashed in to pollute it. For want of pebbles we sucked spare eyes from my bag – he a ruby, I an amethyst, and that was a strange precaution, for how were we to get drunk?

Only, before we shut our mouths against speech and thirst, Aristarchos said:

‘Already they sing their songs about Cuchullain: they will sing none about us.’

‘They will sing our deeds and give them to Cuchullain,’ I told him. ‘Almost every Bard has made his own song, and altered the plain truth of the deeds to fit his own metre. Did you ever see the Setanta able to tell one horse from another? But a hero must have a horse that can be named. And each Bard makes his song fit what his Lord wants to hear, and there will in one generation be a hundred songs of Cuchullain. Yet each Bard will swear that
he sings the true and authentic facts of the case, handed down word-perfect from eyewitnesses. At last, someone will write the song down, as Homer did, and write one particular Bard’s song among many. And then there will be only one song about Cuchullain, and every other Bard will alter his own song to accord with the true, the written word. All the other tales will soon be forgotten, and we with them.’

‘Forgotten and accursed, because defeated.’

‘What kind of Briton are you dressed up to be? If you were really a native of the Island of the Mighty, then you would say that defeat is the surest sign of virtue and that failure shows how you enjoy the favour of the Gods. Gwawl has succeeded. He has challenged the might of Rome all across Europe, and he has saved his island, and there is little doubt that he will rule it when Maeve and Conchobar have torn out each others’ throats. But no one in Ireland will remember him, and the Britons will know his name only as someone that Pryderi rolled in the mud, and they will invent reasons why that is how the game of the Badger in the Bag was first played. And Pryderi the King will be forgotten, except that as a king he wandered unknown through cities that did not know him, and that with some shadowy companion called Mannanan he cheated shoemakers and shield-makers. And there will be a shadowy memory that Madoc was a sea captain and that Heilyn once sailed in a ship, Caw will only be remembered as the father of his many sons. All will be forgotten, except that dying man bound to the standing stone.’

We spoke no more. By night we lashed ourselves to the single thwart by our belts, and clung on, besides, wakeful, lest we be overturned and drowned in our sleep. By day we took it in turns, one to sleep and one to beat off the birds who would have taken the bread from our mouths if we had had any bread, and the eyes from our heads if they had a chance. It was the salmon mallet we used for this.

We were drifted north by the winds and the tides. We passed close enough to some shore, to the eastward, to see great mountains, miles high. Another time we came near to a rocky coast with seals lying on the beaches, but the tide carried us off, and we watched it dwindle bluer and bluer through the day.

Then, on the eighth day, when we were very weak and not inclined to talk even had our lips been dry enough, I was awake and Aristarchos was asleep, and I realised that we had some peace. The gulls and the gannets had ceased to torment us: they no longer dived at our eyes. Instead, I could see them circling ahead of us, a tower of white feathers above some object moving across the water, as yet invisible from our little boat so close to the surface.

And then, as the seabirds came nearer, I began to see it all, lifting above the close horizon. First the tip of a mast, flying a pennant chequered with yellow and black. Then a great dark lug-sail, the sail of a ship on a broad reach, crossing us from starboard to port, and heading east across the north-west wind.

‘A ship!’ I shouted to Aristarchos. I shook him awake, I thrust the paddle into his hand. ‘A ship! A ship, paddle to it, paddle to the ship!’

And paddle to it we did, and we shouted through our cracked dry throats, and now we could see the gunwales and heads above them, and she lost way and came round towards us into the wind, finer and finer as they made towards us as best they could. And what other ship would we see so far out at sea, and what other ship would we meet at such a time? A ship of the Venetii, a ship built long ago on the coasts of Gaul, a ship that Aristarchos knew as well as I. We shouted, we shouted, and we tried to believe we recognised the voices that shouted back to us.

We came alongside, under her lee, crossing her bow, and someone threw us a rope. I looked up into his face, and it was a face I had not expected to see on the salt water. He no longer squinted, but it was the man I knew, from the inn at Bonnonia, who drew fish and made strange allusions. He helped us aboard, first Aristarchos; and I could hear his cracked cries of surprise and then the gurgling as he drank – he was never very dainty. Then I hauled myself up the side on a rope, and hands clutched me to help me over the bulwarks.

‘Come on, boy,’ said Madoc. ‘Saved us a lot of trouble them birds have. Thought it was I did we’d have to go all down the coast of Ireland to find you.’

‘Who shall drink of this water shall thirst again, but he who
drinks of the cup of life shall never thirst,’ said the man from Bonnonia. That, I thought, was a typical Brit saying, except that to my mild surprise he said it in Greek, a Greek with a Jewish accent, but the dialect of one of the smaller islands, Leros or Patmos or Cos. I snatched at the jug and half drained it before I saw whose hands had offered it.

‘Not too greedy, now,’ said Pryderi. ‘It wouldn’t be very dainty if we had you burst over the floor.’

‘Not floor, deck,’ I corrected him. I wasn’t going to have him treat me as if I were a landsman. Now I was in my proper place, as he had been on the road. I looked around that lovely ship, lovely as a woman, I thought, lovely as Rhiannon. Oh, a splendid place to be, on the open sea, clear of all the plots and double dealing of the land. My spirits were rising again, as I drank, and cleaned a chicken leg and tore at a cake of oat bread. Now, I was in a ship, and I was my own master again, and among seamen. The only real landsman I could see was Aristarchos, and it was only for him that Pryderi would have to choose his words. I looked aft. Beside the steersman, in a short white tunic, unspotted, of course, by the marks of toil, stood Taliesin.

‘What use is he?’ I asked.

‘Very useful he do be in recognising the stars,’ Madoc assured me, but he went on, ‘or at least he will be if ever we get a clear night and any stars to recognise.’

‘And how many more have you got like this?’ I asked testily. I felt I had a right to know. I had after all, been promised the use of this ship for the summer’s trade and I was at least entitled to have it for this return voyage.

‘Only four men forward, like this one here,’ said Madoc, waving at the man from Bonnonia, and speaking with the familiar tone of someone trying to delay the impact of bad news. ‘And aft, there’s five of us, and now you.’ He hesitated, unsure of how to explain himself, and he was saved the trouble. Out of the cabin under the poop came Cicva.

‘Well, at least we’ll have some good food in this tub, as far as the cooking goes,’ I admitted, grudgingly prepared to forgive the presence of a woman in a ship, seeing it was this sensible and competent queen. But then behind Cicva, yawning and stretch
ing arms as if fresh from sleep, and shocking that was, too, being only a couple of hours before noon, why, who else would it be, with all those ghastly birds around us, but Rhiannon.

‘If she’s in this flaming ship,’ I told them angrily, ‘then it’s me for the skin boat again. Hoist it out!’

‘Shame on you!’ scolded Cicva. ‘And wasn’t it Rhiannon herself who made us come out to sea again after we’d all got safe into the North among the Picts, out of reach of those filthy Romans with all their pillaging and atrocities that they’re doing everywhere, delighted they are too that they’ve got an excuse. We took my little Mannanan up there to be fostered with his Aunty Bithig and home up there with my Grandfather Casnar I would have been pleased enough to stay, but no, out to sea she would go, and it was never letting her go by herself I could be, not with these old goats that call themselves sailors.’

Rhiannon came up to me, all smiling and shining, and looked at me in a proprietorial fashion, as if she had never done me a wrong. I glared at her.

‘Why do you look at me like that, Mannanan, when I have saved your life a hundred times?’ she asked. ‘Did I not send all the birds of the sea to find you, and to hover above you like a tall mast with a fine flag on it, so that we could see you from afar and sail down to pick you out of the water? I belong to you, Mannanan, and after all I have suffered I still return to you when I could so easily be free of you for ever.’

‘Traitor,’ I told her. I was not angry, this was past the point of anger. ‘You have betrayed me to my ruin, and may yet betray me to my death. And you have been the death of good men all up and down the edges of the Empire. What more trouble will you bring on me and on Caesar?’