Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (89 page)

If I had gone back, as I was tempted, I would have been a dead man. If I had dismounted, in mercy to finish him off, in greed to
recover my spear, they would have killed me. The screams brought the other Savages out of hiding. There
were
a score of them, nearly, and they rushed at us out of holes in the ground and from behind piles of leaves, from the bushes where they hid as we passed, hoping that we would pass and let them be.

Most of them went at Cynon, sitting his horse still, his head turned away from me, guarding me from that direction from which they did not come. They went at him when I should have guarded him. Before he had a moment to turn, they had his steed by the head and him by the legs, jerking and pulling him from side to side, rocking him out of the saddle. He stabbed at them with his spear, not having time to draw his sword, and they beat at him with what they had, billhooks and axes and cudgels.

I had time to draw my sword before the Savages reached me. I cut down the first who snatched for my bridle, and I spun the roan on her hind legs to scatter the others, giving myself space to ride to Cynon. I shouted a rallying cry:

‘I ni, i ni, i ni! Awn, Awn, Awn! dere ’ma!’ And from all round, I heard the forest answer

‘Awn! ’na ni! Awn! Awn!’

But they were still far away, and now the Savages had Cynon on the ground, cutting and hacking at him while he tried to cover his face with his shield and stabbed up blindly with his spear. But an axe put an end to that as I crashed into them, the mare pushing aside one man with blood streaming from his eyes and another doubled up and clutching his groin.

I cut to this side and that, caracolling my horse around Cynon where he lay bleeding, hoping that my mount would not step on him. I had to be sure that they did not play the same game with me. I found that the enemy were not mailed. My sword cut through shirt and flesh and bone, and I heard them scream. But, screaming, they still held on, beating at me in senseless rage that overcame their fear, and grasping at me from all sides as though nothing but physical contact, the violence of nails and teeth, would satisfy them. Then one of them had his fingers over the edge of my shield, jerking at me, and I nearly went down, but suddenly there were horses all round me, mail shirts and red plumes and words that I could understand. The hands slipped
from the rim of the shield, and suddenly there was no fighting, only Morien and a dozen others sitting their horses or sliding down to bend over Cynon.

We dragged the kill over by the heels to lay them in a long line, like hares or fallow deer at the end of the hunt. But this was the beginning of the killing, I knew. Twenty-two altogether, old and young: not a bad day, if only they
had
been deer. They had nothing worth winning – their patched shirts of soft leather, their worn-out blankets rolled and slung on their backs, tied with odds and ends of knotted string, their shoes, those that had them, with the dead toes sticking stiffly out. Only two of them had the long curved knives from which they get their name, the saxes which did Hengist’s work for him on the night of the long knives, and brought Vortigern the Great to ruin for a time. Otherwise, they had iron-edged spades, three hedging-hooks and five axes, and with that they had settled Cynon.

We stripped the mail from him, and cut the shirt from the bloody shoulder. He had been struck there either with axe or billhook, between elbow and shoulder, where it is hard to pad the mail without clogging the arm. The flesh was mashed and the bone, at last broken, thrust splintering through the skin. I had never till then seen such a horrible wound. I saw worse later. Cynon, however, drinking mead, was soon able to sit up and speak, gasping, which is better than lying still and groaning.

While a committee of those who claimed to know what to do about wounds debated their incompatible opinions, I cleaned the blood from my sword with the torn blanket that had been the cause of the fight. The first Savage had stopped writhing. I set my foot on his neck to pull out my spear. This was the first man I had looked on that I had killed: now I could never be a poet again, whatever was said. I looked at him. He might have been fifteen, or a little older. The flies were already gathering in his open blue eyes. The yellow hair was blackened with soot of some kind. A man poor enough to want that blanket wore no shoes.

Morien sniffed in the air for something other than blood. He called me:

‘Let us see what they were about.’

It was not far to a well-remembered clearing. Here were stacks of cut alderwood. The turves were piled ready. We followed our noses. A quarter of a mile farther, in the next clearing, the unwatched kilns smouldered. Charcoal they were making, for the Savage smiths to beat out swords against us. This forest, at least, from now on, we could forbid them.

This was the first skirmish of the campaign. Precent rallied the skirmishers to move on. Now I led the left wing with Morien: others could help Cynon. We found more stacked timber, more kilns, but no more men nor sign of any: it was just the one band that had come into our wood.

We rode down the slope from the edge of the wood to the paddocks above Eudav’s Hall. Now the grass in the paddocks grew high and thick because there were no horses to keep it down, or even sheep, only the shy deer and the hare. We stumbled on the dry-stone wall, now hidden under the green, that marked the edge of the inner paddock.

Here the angle of the wall was formed by a huge boulder of granite. It was one of the Dwarves that long ago came down from the North in anger to push aside the wall. But the Magician Vergil, fearing for his handiwork, had stood on his tower and turned them all to stone where they had slept. South and West from the Dwarf Stone we had stacked the thin slabs of slate to make the paddock fence, down to the river side. And standing on the Dwarf Stone, I looked towards the river – yes, there had once been Eudav’s Hall.

There was no Hall now. I rode across to it by the little stream. Nothing, now, but a mound of charred thatch and rotten beams, bright green now, the grass growing stronger and rank on it as it does when we have burnt off the heather. Below that rubbish, somewhere, was the hearth where they had cut off Eudav’s head, his blood spilling on me as I sang. In one instant the world had spun, from a happy night of song and dance and argument, and mead and mutton. The Savages had burst in, screaming and stabbing about them, stinking of wheat, filthy with grease. Before I could rise, my hands still on the harp, they had struck me down, with a cudgel, as they struck down Cynon.

We brought Cynon down to the edge of the wood above the
paddock, where we built our huts for the night. He was pale and sweating, biting his lips not to scream with the pain. Someone had bound the arm to stop the bleeding, and splinted it to save the smashed bone. To this day, Cynon stands as Judge beside Arthur’s chair with one arm stiff and useless. But on that morning he spoke as slowly and clearly and deliberately as he does now when he gives judgement, though his teeth chattered between the words. Owain debated what to do.

‘You must go back,’ he said. ‘Hard though it is. But you can go back in honour because you have killed two of the vermin. Your squadron can ride back with you as a Hero, to give you triumph.’

Cynon, sweating, looked at Owain in surprise.

‘Full of men you must be in Cornwall, then, and empty of glory, to talk of honour for killing charcoal-burners, and send fifty men to escort one.’

‘It is your due, to ride into Eiddin in triumph, in your shining armour, your shield at your side. And it is not safe to send you across the moors with fewer men than that: you might meet more of these scavengers.’

Cynon spat. ‘Shining armour!’ he grunted. He called, ‘Hoegi!’ This was a lad, a poor man from the heather hills, who rode in the rear rank of Cynon’s squadron because he had only a cape of mail over his shoulders, and had refused to take a whole shirt from the King if it meant one man less to ride with the Household. All the same, he had killed Irishmen on the coast. ‘I shall not wear this shirt again before the spring.’ Cynon pushed the bundle of armour at Hoegi. ‘My horse will run the faster without it, and it will keep your kidneys warm. I am sorry it has been torn a little: only sew up the leather of the sleeve and it will serve.’ Thus Cynon the Courteous.

‘I will not wash your blood from it with water,’ said Hoegi, knowing that a speech was called for, ‘nor yet with the blue mead, but with the blood of savages.’

Courteous as Owain was Cynon, but blunt as Precent he could be.

‘Wash it as you like, boy, but do it before it starts to smell, for your comrades’ sake. But call Graid, and the two of you ride with me through the wood and see that I do not fall off.’

‘Ride with him to Eiddin, and see him safe to his father!’ Owain ordered. But Cynon over-ruled him.

‘Just send me to the crest. Then I can reach a shepherd’s booth by night, if I ride this horse hard.’ He turned now to Owain. ‘I am one man wasted to this army already. We must waste no more.’ He stood up, holding to Precent’s arm. ‘If these boys are going to be back with you before night, then we will have to start now.’

I pressed his hand, and so did all who could get near him, because we all believed that he would die there on the high moors. Hoegi and Graid rode with him through the wood and over the crest on to the high moors, and watched him far across the heather. We all prayed that he would indeed reach a shepherd’s hut before he fell from pain and exhaustion; but we did not think he would. I have not seen him since.

I did not ride with him. I did not even wait to see him go. I rode the other way, south, across the river, with Morien and a strong patrol, to see what was there now. I splashed across the ford, where I had so often lain flat as a child to tickle trout under the flat stones, or netted salmon.

We went across the southern river meadows, that were flooded every winter and so came up fat and green every spring, food for horses though not for sheep. Then we entered the Brown Wood. I called it that to myself since I had first seen it that morning, lying a long greydun shadow below the Wall. When I was young we had called it the Cobnut Wood, because it was that we went there for in the autumn. It was, then, a place to go to hunt squirrels, if you wanted a good cloak of rich red fur for the winter; and it was good for the pigeons that eat so well in a pie. Then, if you could lie quiet for an hour or so, dead still, you would see them all come. The tree-creeper would spread himself flat against the bark and scuttle up and down, the wood-pecker would nod, nod, nod against the rotten bough. You might even see the mice run. And if there was anywhere to see the Little People, it was in that wood; though I never did.

That was before the Savages came. Now they had blasted and fouled the forest. It had happened the spring before, when they burnt Eudav’s Hall and dragged me off to pull their plough.
They had brought their single-edged knives, two feet long from hilt to tip, not pointed, but heavy, curved, for hedging or reed-cutting. They had cut the saplings and the lighter trees, the cobnuts above all, and stacked them, and burnt them down for charcoal to beat more axes to kill more forests.

They had not the strength to cut down the larger trees. Instead, they had gone from tree to tree, from oak to ash to elm, from each stripping the bark, from as high as they could reach down to the ground, all round the trunk. If you do that in the late spring, after the leaves have sprouted, then through the summer the tree will dry slowly and the leaves will turn brown and fall. Before the autumn, you will look at a winter forest, seeing the summer sun through bare boughs. The next spring, the leaves will not bud again. The trees will be dead.

This forest, now, in high summer, was a winter forest. So the Savages destroy the very seasons of the year. On some trunks the Dead Men’s Ears stood out, in places the rot was speckled and red. But there were neither leaves nor nuts nor acorns. Beneath our feet, indeed, the grass and the brambles grew, and the new shoots of the alder and the hazel were green, but one spring’s growth and no more. There might still be sparrows, and, if you waited to see, there were perhaps still mice. But all the life of the high forest was gone. The squirrels no longer quarrelled and shrieked, we could not hear the rattle of the woodpecker that carries so far. No dove called ‘Coo-coo-cooroo’ for deer. Wild cat and fox cannot live on mice alone; they too had gone. All this the Savages had done.

Nothing so devastating had happened since the Wall had been built. We came out of the Brown Wood and looked up, ourselves, at the Wall, standing as still and as thunderstruck as had the animals that found it first, the hare and the deer that saw it set across their feeding-grounds, across their ancient trails, the wolf and the bear and the badger seeing that it made safe the beasts that lived to the south. Five times the height of a man it stands, and twice as thick, all made of stones so heavy that a man cannot lift them. It was raised in one night, complete from sea to sea, by the Magician Vergil, at the bidding of King Hadrian. This was one of the works that Hadrian did for the pleasure of his leman Cleopatra.

The Savages, we knew, were afraid of magic, not being safeguarded by the Virgin: therefore they do not hold the Wall, and neither do they ever walk on it. They would not be watching us. There was, besides, nothing for them to watch except a dying forest. So we could in safety, turn our backs on the Wall, and see the dun swathe of death spread east of us and west, for miles. Beyond the river we could see the Household clearing the paddock around Eudav’s Hall, and building the huts in which we would sleep for several nights. Axes rang on timber and hammers on post and rail, as the horse lines were laid out. The law of Rome had returned to the land below the Wall.

Soon this land would be settled and Roman again. But before that we would ourselves carry the Law of Rome, the eternal Justice and the Divine Vengeance, beyond the Wall. Not only the Law of Rome: the Roman pipes sounded to us from the paddocks, chanters and drones made by skill and art no Savage can comprehend. And more than Roman music we would take: to the sound of the Pipes, Gelorwid sang the Virgin’s Hymn.