Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (76 page)

‘I might have been the death of one man at any time,’ she answered, ‘and saved all other blood. There was never a moment, Mannanan, from the day you saw me first in Londinium to the day you set sail for Ireland, when anything but my word stood between you and swift and silent death. There were men enough ready to kill you, Mannanan, eager to kill you. But I took an oath from Gwawl, and from all the men of the Brigantes, that there should not be a hair of your head touched. How do you think a
one-eyed man lives in battle? You were safer facing the host of Gwawl than leading the host of Ulster.’

‘And Maeve?’

‘A hard woman she is, and cruel, and not one to give up her prey. But I made her swear, at the least, that if she had you in her power, she would keep you alive till I came, and then, we stand together, Mannanan – what can prince or queen or emperor do to harm us?’

I heard her voice and I looked into her eyes. I took her hand and I turned to my friends.

‘Whither do we go now?’

‘Not back to the Picts,’ said Aristarchos. ‘They will have my head, and I still have my own uses for it.’

‘If we continue south,’ Madoc declared, ‘we will be on the shores that belong to Callum the Hairy, and it is already one ship of mine that he has trapped and looted, and I do not want to be in a second.’

‘If we go south east,’ Pryderi told us, ‘then it is neither I nor Rhiannon nor Taliesin will live long, nor die slowly, if we meet the legions in the field.’

‘And they are looking for me in Britain,’ said the man from Bonnonia, to whom this conversation was of interest, ‘for blasphemy and treason combined, in that I refused to burn incense before the statue of the Emperor.’

I ignored him. If a man could bring himself to do such a horrid and unprincipled thing as that, then what did he deserve but the punishment decreed by law, whatever that may be. I spoke only to the others.

‘I have seen a map, and I have spoken to astronomers who know. Ireland lies half-way between Britain and Spain. Let us then sail west, passing north of Ireland, and in a few days we shall be in the harbour of Gades.’

I took the steering oar from Grathach’s hand. They then trimmed the sail. I had the breeze on my right cheek.

‘West, then,’ I cried. ‘West, due west, and home!’

THE END

Men Went to Cattraeth

John James

www.sfgateway.com

This is a work of the imagination, not of history, nor yet a translation. We know nothing about the Battle of Cattraeth, neither when it was fought, nor against whom, nor where, apart from what we read in the surviving ninety-seven elegies which go under Aneirin’s name. We do not even know how long after the battle they were written down in their present form. But this is the setting in which the battle must have taken place.

The chapter headings and their translations are taken from the edition of John Williams ab Ithel, published in 1852.

I wish that I had been the first to shed my blood before Cattraeth. But it is now that I pay the price for the wine and mead of the feasts in Mynydog’s Hall. Late, indeed, I came to the feasts.

I came in the afternoon to sight of the Rock of Dumbarton. I had with me Aidan, son of Cormac King of the Northern Coasts, whose Judge I had been through the winter. Not a King like you find in the South. We walked across all his Kingdom to hear his people’s quarrels and judge them and settle the prices in five days. He had perhaps, in a desperate time, four hundred men who could bear arms, and those arms would only be their axes, or scythe-heads tied to long poles. There were only five swords in the whole Kingdom, and one cape of mail that Cormac wore. But he was a King, just as Evrog the Wealthy was King in Dumbarton, and Uther in Camelot, Theodoric in Rome and Zeno in Byzantium and Clovis in Gaul.

I climbed the rock of Dumbarton with Aidan before me and Morien the charcoal-burner whose father no one knew behind me. Steep that rock is, and the path is beaten earth, not stone cut into steps as they say is the path to Camelot. All the harder for an enemy, Evrog used to say. All the harder for his own men, labouring up with bags of salt and casks of water, with carcasses of meat and dried salmon and bales of hay for the horses. All the harder too for the horses when they were brought down to exercise in the plain. And hard for me.

Yet that hard climb up the rock was for me the beginning of my journey to Cattraeth. From this place, Evrog ruled his vast kingdom, Strathclyde and Galloway to the borders of Cumbria. He was hard pressed by the Scots who came flooding in from Ireland, and it was certain that if they did not come to stay this year, then they would some day soon. So had Cormac’s father come thirty years ago. In the East, Evrog was always at loggerheads with Mynydog King of Eiddin, although they never came quite to open war: their enmity was more a matter of pinpricks and cattle-raids and hiring poets to sing satires and scurrilous verses against each other. And now, the Savages who had taken the attention of the King of Eiddin for long enough were come far west enough to attack Galloway from the South. This was, I thought a more serious thing than any settlements of the Scots from Ireland, because they were all Christian and worshipped the Virgin: and the people there are the same as we are, only differing in their way of speech, honouring poets and smiths and all makers far above any soldier or King. But the Savages do not live in this Roman way, and there is no understanding them.

Yet Evrog was cheerful enough all the time I knew him, saying that there was no other way for a King to live in such a situation. If once he stopped to shed a tear he would weep for ever.

Evrog’s Gatekeeper knew me well. He was Cynon, son to Clydno who was King Mynydog’s Judge. Cynon had been to the South beyond the wall, and had learned to read several words of obvious utility like
deus
and
rex
and
poena
and
tributum
from Cattog the Wise in the School of Illtud. He had seen great cities with his own eyes, Chester and Gloucester and Caerleon. But he had not wished to be a Bishop, as he could easily have been, since he had no wish to live walled up and at the beck and call of any little monk who wanted to be ordained, so he came home, and was now Captain of the Household to Evrog. Now, they tell me, Cynon is a great man, and for all that his arm is crooked at the elbow and cannot strike a blow, he stands as Judge at Arthur’s throne. Seeing me, as he was coming out of the Hall to blow the horn for the King’s dinner, he shouted out the words I did not want to hear, ‘Make way for Aneirin! Behold the Chief Bard of the Isle of Britain. Stand aside all, that the greatest Poet of Rome may pass!’

Once I would have thought that my due, less than my due
indeed, and everyone in the Island knew it, and there was no boasting in acknowledging the truth. But now – I was no longer a Bard, though the bitter words were spoken and could not be called back.

I walked through the gate into the Dun of King Evrog, all set around with spiked logs the height of a man, with stables for a hundred horses and three hundred men, safe against the Irish. Evrog’s Hall was not of stone as are palaces in the South, with pillars of marble and roofs sheeted with gold and the walls covered with magic pictures. Not even Evrog here in the North could pay for those workmen from far away to bring their magic to his Dun: no man born in the Island has the art now of cutting stone by spells. He had lately new built the Hall in the Roman manner, with straight sides and a rounded end in which he set his High Table. The logs of the walls were thick and the chinks well stuffed with mud and seaweed, and the thatch was of oatstraw, which is better than reeds.

Evrog was wealthy. He showed his wealth, hanging tapestry from the walls and weapons from the pillars. He showed forty swords, and with mail and axes and spears he could send forth a Household, mounted, of a hundred men, and this was, at the time, more than any King had ever done in the Island from the beginning of time. So the whole of this immense Hall, forty or fifty paces long, glittered with iron. It glittered, because beside the fire in the centre Evrog would burn rush lights, dipped in tallow, twenty or thirty at a time, to light the feast. You will understand therefore that a feast in Evrog’s Hall was a scene of magnificence such as few even in the South see more than once in a year.

I went in and sat low at the table. All Evrog’s great landowners were there, looking at me, and knowing me, and saying nothing, seeing that I was sitting where I wanted to sit. They thought perhaps that I was come to recite a Satire on Evrog paid for by Mynydog, or even by some Irish King, that would do half the business of a war. I have destroyed whole armies in my time with my verses: before I rode to Cattraeth.

Then Cynon, standing now at the High Table, for would you have him sit outside all the time and miss his supper, blew his horn again, and the great ones of Evrog’s Court filed in.

Evrog’s Judge came first, and then his Butler and his Treasurer, his Steward and his Manciple, his Bailiff and the Master of
his Horse, the more important coming later. There was a harper in the Hall, but no Bard, since Evrog’s Bard had died the year before, so that Evrog entered, and his Queen with him, and his principal guest last of all.

When the Queen went to pour the first cup for Cynon, and then for her King, as is right, I bowed my head low so that the man who now sat at Evrog’s right should not see me. But he did see me, and spoke to the King. Then Cynon, drinking, blew the Horn for the third time, and the King called out. ‘The knife is in the meat, and the drink is in the cup. Let no man enter but who is skilled in craftsmanship and preeminent in his art. And if there is any one such in the Hall, let him come and sit at my right hand.’

Now, these are conventional words which every King in all the Empire says when he sits to eat. But this evening, Evrog shouted it out, and Cynon answered loudly, because in those days he had knowledge and no wisdom, like myself, ‘Forward Aneirin! Forward the Pre-eminent Chief Poet of the Isle of Britain.’