Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (82 page)

A whole Squadron, fifty men, would eat in the Hall each night. The other Squadrons would eat in the houses where they slept, or outside on the grass. They had as much meat as they could eat there, served on platters of oatcake, and mead to swim in. They did not cook for themselves, or serve themselves. A crowd of young men like that, all unmarried, to look after themselves when they were just about to go off to the wars? Never! Every girl in the Kingdom came drifting down to the Rock of Eiddin, sooner or later, to hang round the huts trying to get herself a soldier. So, anything one of our lads wanted done, the girls would do for him. They’d mend shirts, sew up leather seams, wash clothes. If you walked down between the huts any summer evening before supper, you fell over men everywhere, lying with their heads in the laps of the girls combing out their long hair for lice.

Then, after supper, the stars would come out in the clear sky, and even in summer the darkness is cool and the dew is wet. The
Household had their long houses to sleep in, that Mynydog had built for them so that they would not catch cold. But as for those poor motherless girls, so far from home, who cared where they slept? Who cared, indeed? Why, the Household cared, they cared all right. Out of charity, they took them in, they sheltered them, they lavished on them all the affection of which, obviously, their mothers had deprived them. If they were not deprived, what were they doing here? Why else would they have come down, relay after relay of them, walking purposefully down from the hills and over the river. And then they would, after three days, or a month, go walking for days home again, back to the farms they came from. There they could boast to the boys who were left of how they had seen the Household of Mynydog, how they had seen for themselves what
men
were like. They might boast to their mothers, or even to their fathers, though this last is doubtful. But as they walked back they would certainly boast to the other girls they passed, latecomers, hurrying down to the rock of Eiddin, all haste and anxiety to reach the huts before the Household rode out against the Savages.

Oh, yes, it was a fine life in King Mynydog’s Household, a fine life indeed. Many of the young men had been there since the year previous, coming in for the barley harvest or just after it. Life was a perpetual feast, night after night. They said that the best girls had been the ones who came down in the early days, when the Household was new and small, and there were only a few men to work themselves to death lavishing love and affection on the poor things and run off their feet to do it. Oh, those were the days, Graid and Hoegi told me, cherishing the memory, licking their lips.

And for all this fine living, what in return? Nothing very much, riding on fine horses, hunting in the hills, always hunting. Because at the end of the year, on top of all this good treatment, all these luxuries, they would have the honour and the glory of a battle, and the name of the men who had driven the Savages out of the Island of Britain. Mead, Mynydog gave his Household, and we in our turn would give him our strength and our glory, so that his name would live for ever, and ours with his because we were
his
Household.

So we hunted. We hunted, day after day, because Owain said we should.

‘This is how we will fight them,’ he told us. ‘We will round them up like deer on the high moors and hunt them down, throwing our spears at them. There will be no difficulty.’

‘But it won’t be like that,’ I objected at last. ‘They don’t live up there on the high moors. They stay close around their farms. If we meet them, they will be in large bodies. They will stand and form a shield-wall.’

‘So perhaps they did when you saw them,’ Owain corrected me. ‘But then they were attacking, banding together to make war on us. We will catch them when they are not ready to fight.’

‘But you will need infantry to break these shield-walls,’ I persisted.

‘We will have infantry for all the good they are,’ sneered Owain, and everyone within earshot laughed at men who fought on foot like Savages. ‘They will do for mopping up and consolidating afterwards, or for holding the spare horses. You can fight with them if you prefer, Aneirin.’

I held my peace. It was always the same in the Hall, too, where I dined every night, being of the Family, as did those of Royal blood. The other warriors dined each once a week, so that every man could say of his King that he was on dining terms with him. Some, of course, were used to dining in a Royal Hall. Others had won their way into the Household by their own skill and strength, as had Morien the Charcoal-burner, and nobody knew who his father was. And it was a question even as to whether he was more use back in the woods than in the Household. To make a sword from the bars Evrog had sent would take the weight of two sheep in charcoal: and ten times as much to caseharden the bars beforehand, and twenty times as much to smelt the ore before that again. Still, he was admitted of the Household and was honoured by eating with the King and being called by name in the Hall.

Most men would wash and put on their clean shirts for this day in the week, but we who dined in the Hall every night did not take so much trouble. Except Cynrig of Aeron, who was always dainty, cleaning his nails always with his knife before he
cut his meat. He washed his arms and feet almost every day, and would often put on a clean shirt for no reason at all but that he had slipped in the mud or put his elbow into a pile of horse-dung. Or if he had tumbled in the marsh and the shirt was wet through and spattered with slime, instead of drying it by the fire and putting it on again like any ordinary man, he would not be satisfied if he could not have a clean shirt to wear and persuade someone else to wash the old one. He was quite shameless about that, and would even, if he could find no one else, try to coax Gwenllian to wash it for him. But she never would. She always washed mine, every week, and said that was enough for her, taken up as she was with looking after her half-brother. But Cynrig had plenty of shirts, being a wealthy prince, and he could afford it.

Oh, they were fine evenings in Mynydog’s Hall. Every evening was a Whitsun Day. The King would have them light as many rush dips as did Evrog the Wealthy, and on Sundays or on Ascension Day he would have lit candles of wax and tallow all around, so that the light should be clear and steady. The clear gleam lightened the hangings on the walls, so that they seemed to float above us like clouds, or close us in like shimmering mists; and through the mists the armour glittered like lightning on the mountains. By that light we could eat and drink, and Mynydog could see how each man behaved himself when the mead was set before him, a cup when he sat down, and a cup when the meat was set before us, and a cup when the platters were cleared away and the singing and the story-telling began. For every man, sometime in that year, spoke or sang in the Hall, so that we should each learn all the songs of the Island and understand that all of us who speak the tongue of the Angels are one nation.

Bradwen always sat at Mynydog’s table and poured the mead first for the Captain of the Household and then for the King, Mynydog’s Queen long being dead. Yet I thought it was Gwenllian’s duty by right, since she and not Bradwen was of Royal blood. Perhaps she was ignored because she had come among us from the South as almost a child, and it was as a child that people still treated her, out of habit. Only I, who had been away so long, saw that she was now a woman.

She still behaved, often, like a child, standing back timidly to let an older man go first, not taking her proper precedence like a lady of rank. She was always surprised to see a warrior stand back to let her pass. She was still very shy of strangers, however familiar they showed themselves with the court – or with her. She always came running into the Hall late, from putting her little brother to bed in the house on the north side of the court where they slept. Sometimes, even, the little rascal would not settle but would evade the maidservant who minded him and come creeping himself into the Hall and insinuate himself on to her knee, or even on to mine, because I always sat next to her.

She would sit by me till late. If the little boy had come sliding out to listen to the stories and the songs, she would wait till he fell asleep on her lap or mine, and then slip off with him to his bed and come back to me again. After the third cup had been poured, the Household would drift away from the Hall, each man coming up to bid the King good night and receive from the Royal Hands a jug of the King’s own mead, made from the heather honey with a taste of its own. We older men would stay, those sitting lower in the hall moving up to it on the lower side of the high table, opposite the King, so that we formed a ring. Bradwen would stay with us, and talk. And Gwenllian would stay, too, watching Bradwen.

We would all listen to Bradwen. Wise as a man, Bradwen would talk like a man and help us to plan the war, where we who were princes and nobles sat with the King and with Diarmaid, the Irishman, the wild man, who alone was able to pass between the King of Eiddin and the King of Elmet in Lincoln, crossing the Irish Sea twice to avoid the Savages. This man was a close friend of Cynddelig, riding and talking with him a great deal in those days. He knew the King’s plans as well as any of us. Mynydog would tell us again and again what he wanted us to do, how we should strike south while the host of Elmet came north.

‘We will have them,’ he would say, ‘like a horseshoe, between hammer and anvil.’

‘I have never seen the horseshoe move on the anvil,’ I told the King at last one night, when we were all there. ‘The Savages will move. They won’t stay to be attacked.’

‘They won’t realise what is happening,’ Bradwen told me at once. ‘We will be too fast for them. The news will spread only slowly from farm to farm, not as fast as we will move.’

‘It’s not a matter of news spreading,’ I objected. ‘They have a King, Bladulf, to call them together.’

‘All the better,’ said Owain. ‘If they were to come together, then the first army to attack will hold them so tight that the later comers, whether they be Elmet or Eiddin, will take them by surprise from behind. Then they will run.’

‘They won’t run,’ I warned him.

‘They will. It’s only in fables that Savages will stand in line to fight. Who ever heard of it in real life?’

‘Who ever heard of a real battle in this Island?’ I retorted. ‘There have been raids, of the Savages on us or of us on the Savages. But never a full battle with one army drawn up against another in open field. That is what we must – no, not expect, this is not a foreboding I have – what we must bring about, somehow. If we cannot bring their men together in such a battle, then we cannot destroy them.’

‘They’ll never come together,’ Owain insisted.

‘They will. I know, I have lived with them.’

‘Oh, you have only lived in one place. Perhaps you only met the boastful ones. They won’t come together to face us. You’ll see. I’ve had more wars than you have had hot dinners. You come along and see what really happens, and then you can start to sing again, and sing about that. That’s your trade.’

He laughed. Bradwen laughed too. Precent grinned. There was laughter everywhere after so much mead. Why did I not argue on, insist, bellow at him, ‘But that’s why you wanted me to join you, to tell you what they were like, to tell you the difference between these Savages and the Irish you are used to fighting’? Because it was Owain who spoke to me, and there was nothing Owain said that I could not believe, did not believe even against the evidence of my own senses and my memory.

Only Gwenllian did not laugh at me.

When we were ready, we went on Patrol, Squadron by Squadron, down the coast from Eiddin. I went under Cynon, whether to give Cynon practice in Command or to give us practice in obeying Cynon I was not quite sure. The decision was Owain’s. On this ride, Cynrig, like me, obeyed Cynon.

We rode easy, unworried. On this ride we stayed within Mynydog’s Kingdom, where no Savages had settled, and where they raided little. It was good practice in itself for the great journey. We rode in the Roman fashion. Owain had drilled us again in riding abreast, in a long line, in walking or trotting or galloping together with no man falling far behind the line or pushing ahead. But on the march we went in Roman fashion, in column, always riding in pairs, to guard each others’ backs. Aidan always rode with me on this journey, since he knew me best of all.

We slept each night at farms. Fifty strong, no more, we could always find room to sleep in the stables and the barns. Roofs were not absolutely necessary that summer. It was a long, fine, hot summer, a better summer than any I have seen since. The people were glad to see us. We showed at least that Mynydog was willing to help them guard their fields from the Savages. It was not merely a matter of the King demanding things from them, though he demanded enough, and all Kings did that. He would guard them in return, and there were few Kings to do that.

We did not need to carry food with us. We hunted the high
moorlands inland of the farms, and most days we could count on sighting deer, and then we would ride out in two long wings, one starting the deer into the other, so that we could thin out a few of the bucks. Other times we could loose our greyhounds at hares, or fly our hawks at grouse or duck or a variety of other birds, all good eating. The barley harvest had started, and the people on the farms had no time to hunt, so they were glad to have the fresh meat we brought them. They gave us oat cakes and lettuces, onions and radishes to go with the meat. And they would always be ready to roast us a sheep or three, or bring out the great cauldrons for a mutton stew, to put new life into dead men. You need a hot meal after a day in the saddle, however hot a day it has been already. It is dusty on the road in summer, but when you dismount, and the sun is beginning to go down, you remember now that you have been sweating all day into your flannel shirt, and the cold and the shivers grip you. That’s when you need the hot soup and the meat in it, and the fine sharp taste of onions. We would be so eager for it we would hardly strip off our mail: we always rode fully armed, so that our horses, as well as we, could get used to the weight.