Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (77 page)

The men around me seized my elbows and pushed me forward. There was no use my protesting or refusing. They would only have lifted me up and carried me bodily to the High Table. They would have taken my denials only as posings, as if I were any common bard who earned his bread by measure, singing from Hall to Hall and Court to Court. I, Aneirin, never said that I was anything but a great poet: the truth was too clear for anyone to deny. Now I was no longer a poet. But to have explained that to the men around me was too difficult. It was easier to obey than to make a scene.

At the High Table, I sat where they put me, where
he
had first sat, though I had to wait a little while they brought in from the King’s sleeping house the Chair he himself had awarded me, the Chair in which no one else was ever allowed to sit. And they made
him
sit on the King’s other hand, who ought to have sat in the highest place of honour. For he was Precent.

A strong man was Precent. Not tall, he was a head shorter than I was, but strongly built. Heavy, and strong above all. Some men of that build are only fat, but Precent, why, he could carry off a young ox, and the yoke and chains on it. He used to have sport, seeing how thick a rod of iron he could twist like a rope. The short black hairs bristled on his arms, and his black curls
were blacker, sleeked down with goose-grease. His black eyes sparkled in the light of the wax candles they had placed on the table in front of the King, two of them in a precious bronze candlestick. There is no one now who knows where bronze is mined or from what kind of rock it is smelted.

Now the Queen was withdrawn, Peredur served us with mead; young Peredur that is, Evrog’s seventh son, who is now such a great man in Arthur’s Hall. He was named after his uncle, Peredur Ironarms, Master of Evrog’s Horse.

Oh, a strong man was Precent, in all civilised arts. A strong man for breaking a horse, for throwing a steer for gelding. A strong man was he for riding all day with the herd or for running the fells to gather in the sheep. He was a man strong for stalking deer all day in the drizzling rain, or for pitching sheaves into a wagon in the harvest sun. Today he had ridden from Eiddin all the width of Alban, and still there he sat at table, bright as a button. He was young, and so were we all then, young and strong.

Precent talked to Evrog all through the meal, or across us both to the Queen who sat by me. I kept my head down and said nothing. The others did not find this strange, even though they had not seen me all winter. They did not ask me where I had been. Only Precent said to the King, ‘Aneirin’s got the awen on him tonight. There’s a fine poem we’ll get from him when he has finished eating.’

But I knew I could never have the awen on me again.

When the meal was finished, Evrog beat on the table. While the mead went round again, and the Queen withdrew, as was the custom in Strathclyde, the King said loud so that all could hear the distinction between conversation overheard and an announcement made. ‘Now that the great and principal guest, unexpected though he was, has been fed, tell me, Precent, King of the Picts: why is it you have come tonight into the Kingdom of Strathclyde seeing that for so long you were gatekeeper to my rival Mynydog?’

Precent went red in the face, and cleared his throat loudly, and drowned the frog in mead. He was always longwinded in his speeches, and clumsy in his choice of words, so I hoped that he would offend nobody: and while he talked I would withdraw my mind and think of Bradwen in Eiddin. Precent began well enough.

‘A man I am, a man. Gatekeeper to Mynydog I was, and it is
some of you I have kept out of his sheepfolds before now, as well you all know. With what little strength I have, I did what I could.’

‘Who stole the gadflies off Morddwydtywyllon’s cow?’ someone shouted. I think it was Peredur Ironarms, because he was always put out to think there could be anybody stronger than he was. It rather put Precent off his speech, and he shouted angrily, losing his composure and thickening his Pictish vowels.

‘It is not a matter of cows I am come about, but the matter of the life and death of the Isle of Britain.’ His bellow cut through the laughter, and the men below us quietened, sensing in his tone some emotion they had not expected in him.

‘It is more than cows you will get if you listen to me. Glory and honour and praise I am come to tell you about, and offer to you all for little effort. Mynydog King of Eiddin is a generous man, though no one calls him “wealthy” to his face, and a proud man too. Those who do him service in one campaign may swagger and be proud all the rest of their lives and tell their children, “I was there”. It is men he wants, warriors excelling in weapons, youths exulting in war.’

‘Aye, he wants us to steal our own cows for him,’ sneered someone from lower down the hall. Precent pretended he didn’t hear it, but nevertheless he countered at once.

‘In battle against the bloody Loegrians let us loose our blades, not shedding brothers’ blood. Savages from over the Ocean, in the salt seas washed, not in sweet baptism bathed, they neither serve the Holy Virgin nor venerate her saints. They persecute her Bishops and betray her priests, thieves of bells are they and burners of thatch. There is nothing that the Holy Virgin desires more than that we should kill them and drive them from this Island.’

A noble of Mynydog’s ought to know that, I thought. There was a hermit in the wood behind Mynydog’s Hall, and the King had spent good silver to send this man to Iona and have him made a priest, and had bought a book for him to read, so that he could tell Mynydog the days for Easter and Assumption and the other great feasts, and so that he could have his dead prayed for. Not to be outdone, Evrog had sent one of his nephews, Gelorwid, to Iona, but him, for some reason, I could see sitting in the hall that night, not dressed as a hermit. Precent went on.

‘I know that now the Savages trouble you little. It is the Scots out of Ireland who, you think, are your only foes. But believe you this. If the Savages from over the sea are not fought and beaten and crushed and driven utterly out of this island, then when the Kings of Ireland come again with their armies, it is the Savages they will fight before this rock, and not Romans. Because we will be dead before our time. And that will not be in ten generations or in two, but it will be the year after next if they wait so long. Carlisle has fallen. Will Dumbarton be the next?

‘Strike not at the nearest foe, but at the most dangerous. Mynydog will fight them, whether you wish or not. If there is any man here who thinks himself skilful and strong enough to come and fight the Savages with us, let him stand up and ride out with me, to share in the glory and honour and profit of this war. But do not come if there is any thought in your minds that it will be an easy campaign against a weak foe. Cunning in the field they are, and ruthless in war. How cruel, let Aneirin tell you. Silence for Aneirin, Pre-eminent Chief Bard of the Isle of Britain!’

I did not stand. I looked bleakly at the table before me, seeing the grain of the scrubbed pine. I had known it, I ought not to have come into a King’s Hall, or into the company of anyone who knew who I was, till I had come again to Bradwen. I sat and stared at the backs of my hands on the table. At last I said, and they all hushed to listen to me, as if I had been singing for an englyn, or intoning a triad, ‘I am not a Bard. I am no longer a poet. I will make no more songs. I have sung for the last time.’

The silence continued, only for the sound of indrawing breath. Evrog asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean what I say,’ I told him. This was the first time I had told the truth about this in public. It was the first time I had told a King I would make no more poems, no more music to glorify his Kingdom, no more satires against his enemies. I still looked at my hands on the table. I would not look into the faces in front of me. To think that I, Aneirin, who had sung to every King in the North, was abashed in front of this audience.

‘You all know the law as well as I do. Naked weapons must not be brought into the presence of a Bard. More. If a sword is drawn before a Bard, and blood is shed in his sight, then he is unclean,
and he may not sing again that night. Think, then, what happened to me. More than swords were bared before me. Spears and saxes fought above me. The blood of my friends and my kinsmen flowed over me. The blood of Savages stained me. And that not once but twice. How then can I be a poet again? How can I ever sing again in all my life?’

‘Nonsense,’ Evrog told me. He could treat it lightly. The generous King had never felt terror, shame, pain like this. ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘I’ll have my priest up here to cleanse you in the morning. And if he can’t do it, we’ll take you to the Monastery, where they have a Bishop, and he will be able to do something. You have been baptised, haven’t you? If we have to do that all over again, then I’ll stand Godfather and the Queen will be your Godmother. Then you can come here and be my Bard – I can’t get used to being without one.’

I shook my head. Even if it were possible, was he really thinking that he could get the greatest poet of the Roman world to be his household Bard, to write satires on his enemies and lullabies for his grandchildren in return for bed and board? It was not possible.

‘Priests and Poets have nothing to do with each other. The Church hates poetry. Priests are men of writing. Bards sing, they do not write. A Priest would only read something over me out of a book. What good would that do?’

Precent spoke quickly. Trying to cover my embarrassment, unerringly he chose the wrong thing to say.

‘Look, all of you! If there is nothing else will make you angry, see what the Savages have done to the greatest Poet of the age. A Poet is the greatest ornament any Kingdom can have, and Aneirin is so great that he belongs not to any one King, but to all the Romans of the Island. Think of all he did in those first few years of his flowering, while still a lad. Who of you has never sung his songs at the reaping, or never recited his verses to the plough team? Who has not walked a dozen miles to hear him sing to the harp or to challenge him to compose on a theme at first hearing? And now, he sits here and says he will not sing again.

‘Look at him, Aneirin, Son of Manaw Gododdin, grandson to Cunedda, cousin to Mynydog Gododdin King of Eiddin. The
blood of the greatest houses of North Britain, of South Britain within the Wall, of Ireland, flows in his veins. Sent from the South to be fostered he was, as I was from among the Picts in the house of Eudav the Tall, who lived beneath the Wall. Safe we were there, our parents thought, from the Irish, to learn all the arts of civility. We grew up there, he and I and Bradwen the daughter of Eudav.

‘Ah, what a youth was Aneirin. Did you know there was one, once, who could outrun Precent? There he sits now as often he sat at the end of the long field, waiting for me to catch up. Did you know there was once one who could outwrestle even Precent? There he hangs down his head, as once he pressed my shoulders to the grass.’

Now, Precent was launched. Three cups of mead, we used to say, and Precent will charm the horns from a stag. Six cups of mead, and Precent will charm the moon from the sky. And not all by boredom, either, though partly – it is not a finished orator you would be calling him.

‘All this he set aside to be a bard. These hands you have heard on the harp-strings, how often have they guided the team across the headlands. That voice you have heard sing, it has called the cattle home many a time, or spread the news of cattle-thieves on the moors – aye, and raiders from Strathclyde at that. His first songs I heard when we were still children, when we spent the happy summers in the leafy huts, watching the sheep on the green fells.

‘It was to Eudav’s house that Aneirin would return, long after he became a man, long after he became welcome in every Hall and every Dun North of the Wall, long after the Kings in the South would have given much to have him live there, in Cardigan or Camelot; long after I had returned to my father’s seat among the Picts, long after Bradwen herself had gone to Mynydog’s court. And that was when the Savages first came so far North. They came through the Wall. They burnt Eudav’s house above Eudav’s bloody trunk, and his head they carried away before his cattle. And with the cattle they took away Aneirin, to be their slave and their butt.

‘That was a year ago. We heard of it, all of us, all across the Kingdom of Eiddin, across the lands of the Gododdin, into the realm of the Picts. Before the harvest was in the ear, I, Precent, made war. I brought my own men, Romans and Picts together,
and we gathered men in Eiddin. I led the Household of Mynydog the ever-victorious, pre-eminent in war. A hundred men in mail I led out, an invincible array. Who could stand before us? Who could resist us? The Savages fled, the Pagans would not wait for us. We swept across the land of Mordei, and brought the bones of Eudav for Bradwen to bury in Eiddin. And southwards from Eudav’s Hall, where they thought they were safe, the Savages were clearing the blessed forests to plant their vile wheat. There we found Aneirin, the greatest poet of the world. In fetters and in misery they kept him in a hole in the ground. We brought him gently back to Eiddin where we hoped to keep him and heal him. Before we knew, he had gone from us, into the North, silent. From then till now we have heard nothing of him. Now I find him in Strathclyde, and he says that he will not sing again because of what the Savages did to him. Do you want to hear him sing again? Then listen to me!

‘Mynydog has decided. For once and for all, the menace of the Savages must be driven from the borders of Eiddin and of Strathclyde. The House of the Gododdin will do that. The King of Eiddin has begun to call about him a Household of the young men of his Kingdom, and not of his Kingdom only. It is a Household such as the world has never seen before. Any young man from any place may come to join it, if only he is a Roman and worships the Virgin. If a man is thought fit to join us, then Mynydog will give him a sword and mail, a helmet, two shirts and a cloak. And Mynydog will entertain his Household in his Hall for a year and a day from the time he began to call them together. And when the time is over, and it will not be so long now, and not many feasts for you to take part in, then Mynydog’s Household will honour their vow and go down to clear the land of Mordei from the Savages for ever, and further all across Bernicia to meet the army of Elmet. There is still room at our feasts for those who are fit to join us. Who will come?’