Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (81 page)

‘I have been a winter as a Judge. Before that I was a Poet. I have had enough of telling other people what they ought to do, and letting them do it by themselves. I have had seven years in which I have taken part in no action. If I were to come with you, I would not come as a mere adviser. I would want a more active part. But there’s no need for me to come with you for that. I can tell you all I know before you set out for the campaign, and even teach half your soldiers enough of the Savages’ tongue for all your needs. But I will not come. I have had enough of wandering. I will stay here in Eiddin.’

Mynydog the King, who had been standing by all this time, listening and not saying anything, now spoke.

‘If it is an active part you want, Aneirin, then I can help you to one. I will give you arms. You can have my own shirt of mail, that I brought back from the South, when I rode in the Household of Vortigern the Handsome. And I have a helmet, too, I picked up after a battle against the Irish – oh, a bloody day that was, for we killed twenty-seven of them and lost seventeen men ourselves. Was ever such carnage seen in the Island? They will keep your head safe, and turn a spear. And a shield-frame and leather I can give you, to paint for yourself.’

I wondered a moment what I should paint on my shield. A wolf? An eagle? But why wonder. I would never paint a shield, nor carry one. I would spend the summer, all the campaigning time, here in Eiddin with Bradwen. She would be glad to have me here, whatever had happened to me, whatever other men did, whatever other men said. This offer of Mynydog’s was a trick, to make me feel a coward that I did not go. I told the King, ‘I will not take your arms. I have been a Bard too long to think of breaking what I have always preserved. Find some greater hero to wear your arms, King Mynydog.’

‘That is a pity,’ Owain came in. ‘I would have liked you to come with me. I know who I would rather take to war, if I had the choice – a clever man who is not used to fighting or a stupid man who is. I would take the clever man because …’

His voice went on. I did not listen. I looked beyond him, across the courtyard. Bradwen came from the Hall. She wore a dress of red, the colour she always liked. At the hem her feet twinkled in their shoes of red and yellow, leather of Cordoba, paid for with their weight in silver. She had a chain about her neck, that I had once given her, made of silver with an amethyst hanging from it, and I had had it from a Pictish Lord far in the North, on the shore opposite Orkney, for singing him a satire on the Lord of Orkney who was, let us not say his enemy because there are no enemies among Romans, but, at least let us say, not his best friend. She wore it still.

The bracelets on her wrists Precent had given her, bronze patterned with red enamel and set with garnets and precious red
glass. He had taken them from an Irishman who had come East under the Wall to the boundaries of Mynydog’s Kingdom. He ought not to have come so far from his ships. Precent had caught him and left few of his men alive. These armlets were the best the Irish had, and they were voted to Precent as the bravest of the Household that Mynydog had sent. He had come straight back to Eudav’s Hall and given them to Bradwen. That was what she was to me, even to men brought up with her as brothers.

She came down the steps towards us, her blue eyes shining with love and anticipation, her black curls blowing in the breeze as they always did, for gales haunt the crest of Eiddin. She came to us, stately and dignified, standing as she did only half a head shorter than me, and taller than Precent. Oh, she would have been a Queen in any Kingdom, she would have been the greatest lady in any Court, Caerleon or Camelot or Byzantium itself. This, I thought, is what I have been longing for, all this time in the North by the bitter sea. I had been ashamed to come and face her when they had brought me home from my prison among the Savages. But now, just to see her again was enough to show me that all I dreaded, all that made me afraid to look her in the face, all the pain and grief I suffered was only a construction of my own mind. It was a fiction of the Poet’s thoughts, that will seek out the complete and hidden meaning of any action, and find significance where there is none. She will welcome me, I thought, she who has been longing for me to return, thinking of me all through the winter, as she used to do, she said, in the old days when I wandered the length of the Isle of Britain, north of the Wall. Now, I could tell her what she meant to me, of how I too had been thinking of her and longing for my return. And I watched her come to me.

Bradwen did not see me. She reached out and took Owain’s arm. With the merest gesture of formal courtesy to the King, she drew away from him the Son of Mark, the Raven Shielded, the Glorious, the Supreme Warrior in his armour, his plumed helm in the crook of his other arm. She led off from us the Victor over the Irish, the Deliverer of the Kingdom of Eiddin. Together they walked away from us.

I said to Mynydog, ‘Grant me thy arms, my Uncle and my King.’

So I came home to Mynydog’s Household. Oh, it was a fine life in the King’s Hall. As one of the family, I slept in the Hall, where I had always been used to sleep: in a wall bed, on the North side, that they had kept empty all through the winter in case I should come back without warning. The new straw was clean and dry, the old being turned out on to the floor.

I know that a King’s Hall in the North is not like one in the South, in the twenty-eight cities of the Island; there were only twenty-six we counted in those days, because the Savages had slighted Carlisle. And they had taken York and burnt it, they had destroyed its Palaces and Churches, and pulled down the walls, and that they were to regret when Uther came against them: but that was later. Down there, in the Halls of common Kings, the roof-columns are of marble, all streaked in bright colours, and in the Hall of the Emperor in Byzantium the pillars are of gold, and in his private rooms they are of precious stones, garnet and diamond, ruby and pearl, sardonyx and opal, as is said in the book of the Blessed John which I have heard read. And the walls are painted with strange scenes, so that a man might think that there were no walls at all, but that he looked straight out into the woods and the pastures.

The pillars of Mynydog’s Hall were of pinewood, holding the stout oak roof-tree. The walls were of oak frames and willow withies woven tight, and the chinks well packed with clay. They
were hung with red cloth, and every pillar gleamed with mail and blades, helmets and bright-painted shields. Mine among them. Not perhaps that fine mail the Legions wear at Byzantium, fine as knitted wool and so light – in a coat of that mail, a man may run a whole day’s journey, and fight at the end of it, and pursue through the next day, and at the end be no more tired than if he wore a linen shirt over his skin. Our mail was heavier: but it served.

The walls of Mynydog’s Dun served us, too. They were not like the walls of the cities in the South. Camelot, they say, is a splendid place, and what is Camelot beside Cardigan, or Kenfig? Caerwent, I have heard about. It is only the port of Camelot, and yet there are walls about it seven times the height of a man, and as thick as they are high. The great bastions that look out over the Severn Sea are as high again as the walls. So great is Caerwent that a man may come into it by the North Gate and walk south. For a day he will walk through the entry of the city, and for a day he will cross the centre of the city, and on the evening of the third day, if he walk straight ahead all the time and never turn out of his way, he may reach the South Gate and go down to the water and get into his skin boat and sail away. From the water, he may turn and look back at the city, as we may look back at Eiddin from the Forth. The roofs of the houses are covered with tiles of shining gold, not the oatstraw we grow for thatch, and fixed with nails of silver, not weighted down with stones and ropes.

Eiddin was not a rich town like that, but a little huddle of houses on the hilltop. We heard of the great cities from men who came to us from the South, Cardi men who came with Cynrig, thin slight men with delicatesmall feet, used to treading daintily on the marshy mountain-tops where there is barely a fingernail’s depth of the soil on the hard and barren rock. They live nearest to the Irish and suffer from them most. They dare not leave a pin outside their house at night in case some roving sea thief leaps ashore to take it, smelling the slightest booty from the further shore. Saving and careful they have to be, from their poor land and their uncertain tenure, and so they have a reputation for meanness, for demanding full value for anything they give. But they give full value, too, let the dead testify.

The men who had come with Owain from Cornwall were
different again, and you could tell them by seeing them before you heard them talk. They were as fond of cream as the Cardi men of cheese, and they were the ones to ask for lobsters since they had a supernatural skill in catching them, knowing where to put the pots even on this strange shore. To mead they preferred a hard strong cider made from the juicy apples they grow down there in the far South, where, they told us, there is never snow or frost, and the summer days are always sunny and the winter nights are short. They told us true, and so did the men who came from Little Britain.

Most of the Household, for all that, came from Mynydog’s own Kingdom. Some were from Eiddin, the centre of the Kingdom, around the rock itself, south of the Forth. Others came from Mordei, the debatable land, that lay south of Eiddin and north of the Wall, north of the Wood of Celidon. Here waves of Savages came and went like the tide, and every sweep, like the tide, they receded a little less, and so they ate the Kingdom away. Men were still willing to talk of fighting for Mordei. None, until Owain, talked of fighting for Bernicia.

There were men in the Household who counted themselves as Bernician by descent. They were not born there, but anywhere in Eiddin, or north of the Forth in Alban to the borders of the Picts. At least they remembered the names of the farms their grandfathers had in Bernicia, or at most where those farms had been. The land was lost. The Savages had settled there, from the Wall as far as the Humber. It was a generation since they had laid waste York. They blocked the road that ran south from Eiddin, through the Wall, past Cattraeth and York, to Lincoln and the Romans of Elmet. And once, they said, it had even been safe for a woman to travel all along that road, with no more than a dozen armed men for an escort. That was the road we now had to open.

We still told of the great feat of Cynon, four years before, when he had returned from the South, all the way by land, bringing Gwenllian out of Uther’s Camelot, clutching her half-brother to her, a tiny baby. Now he was the thriving boy we all loved. Then there were still Romans living in Carlisle, but the Savages burnt the place hardly a month after Cynon had passed. Now it was only safe for single men, or parties of not more than two or
three, to travel up the west coast in skin boats, looking out for the Savages on land and the Irish by sea, making a detour around the lost shore to come from Mona to Strathclyde. But the Household would now regain Bernicia, and perhaps even Deira too, between us and Elmet. And then the road would run from Eiddin to Camelot itself.

No men came to join the Household from Elmet. Elmet men had enough to do.

Each Squadron had men from all these regions, all mixed together. Never before had any King raised such a Household, bringing in riders from all over the Island, and beyond. The most any King had done before was, perhaps, to have a man from a kingdom near by to be Captain of his Household, as Evrog had kept Cynon. Now we had so many different Kingdoms together, Owain insisted that each Squadron should include men from each region, all mixed up together.

‘If a Squadron come all from one place,’ he used to say, ‘then it will be full of relations. It won’t be long before we have Squadrons fighting each other instead of the Savages. We must learn to trust each other in war and peace. Quarrels between kinsmen are the curse of the Roman race and the downfall of the Island.’ So he said, glaring at Cynddelig and Cynrig. Owain was Tristram’s brother, King Mark’s son.

Because of this idea of his, Owain would frequently change us around in the Squadrons, taking whole sections of ten men from one Squadron and putting them into another, even in the middle of the day’s exercise.

‘In the middle of a battle,’ he would say, teaching us quietly and patiently, but never leaving us without the conviction that it was he who understood it all better than we did, ‘Squadrons break up, and men rally about whatever centre offers. You must always be able to depend on your neighbour in the line to do the right thing, even if you have never seen him before, and this is quite possible in such a huge army as this. Who ever saw three hundred and fifty men mounted in the field before?’

We always rode in pairs, of course. Usually I had Aidan with me, to keep my back, but Owain often had us change our riding partners.

The most noble of us all had command of the Squadrons. There were more of them than there were Squadrons, and they too took it in turns, by Owain’s order, to lead. At the beginning of each day in the field, I, as Judge of the Household, would draw tokens out of a helmet to see who should command that day and who should obey. So, not only did we all get used to the voices of different commanders, but we all of us, however noble became used to obeying. Even Cynddelig, on occasion, served under Cynrig: but it took all Owain’s arts to bring that to pass.

Always, Owain led the seven Squadrons together. No one ever took Owain’s place. Sometimes Precent or Cynddelig would exercise two or three Squadrons together, but never all seven. It was Owain who was Captain of the Household.

And then, after the heat of the field, after the confusion of the exercise through the morning, after the quiet of the afternoon when we sit and mend out harness or our armour or home our sword-edges, or just sit and watch the birds in the sky, then would come the feast in Mynydog’s Hall. That Hall was a vast building, as big, I am sure, as any Arthur has in Camelot. Seventy of us could eat there, sitting at the tables or perched on the beds fixed against the wall. Woe betide any warrior who spilt mead on my pillow. I have satirised men for less.