Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (38 page)

‘Waste of a good axe,’ I observed.

‘Oh, no,’ Fat Bert assured me. ‘It’s on a line. We’ll haul it out by dinner-time and sell it back. We often have to do it.’

Lombard Bert’s curses were interrupted by some even more horrible cursing, and in a wider variety of languages. Gwawl had come out on to the poop, and was standing looking down at us in the waist. He was only wearing the apron for a breech clout,
but he was by no means cold in the clammy air. He was aglow with rage.

‘I ought to have known that your family was behind all this,’ he shouted at me. ‘Where’s my clothes? Where’s the money? Give me back my clothes! Give me back my letters!’

‘Not likely!’ Cicva was happy, taking off her wig and wiping the paint from her face with Gwawl’s best shirt. ‘I won it all, fair enough.’

‘How much did she get?’ asked Fat Bert in an innocent interested way.

‘Every penny. She’s cheated me out of every penny I had.’

‘In that case,’ ruled Goth Bert, who tried to sound like the captain sometimes, ‘you can’t pay your fare, can you? Chuck him over the side!’

And so they would have done, but Cicva asked, being soft-hearted, like all women:

‘Have you got a spare boat? Cheap?’

Of course, they had, a round skin boat like the Picts use.

‘How much?’ she asked them.

‘How much had he got?’ they chorused. Cicva counted out all Gwawl’s money, which only came to three denarii in silver and a few coppers.

‘Just right,’ they said, ‘but a paddle is extra.’

So for a paddle she gave them his clothes to share out, and that was worth having, because he had bought a lot of good tunics in Rome, and he had also picked up several pairs of Gaulish trousers in Lutetia. His best cloak they very generously put aside to take back for Marco, Goth Bert insisting on that. Those two scoundrels were already on very intimate terms of understanding, and I was afraid it might eventually turn out to their mutual advantage, as long as neither of them was hanged.

We put Gwawl into the skin boat, and passed him down the paddle. Someone wanted to give him a knife, too, to cut his throat with, but when I pointed out that he couldn’t pay for it they all remembered what a dreadfully unlucky thing it is to give a knife as a gift: a free gift of a knife always cuts friendship, they told him.

But we did give him a jar of beer, and a loaf of bread, and we
left him the salmon mallet to scare the birds with. We gave him a lot of good advice, too, like, ‘Britain’s that way’, or, ‘A fortnight to Jutland if you paddled hard.’

We weren’t so far from that elusive shore either. The Berts kept on pointing it out, but it all looked like mist to me, even though Cicva suddenly said that she could see a man holding a white shield. At that we pushed him off, and sailed away, leaving Gwawl sitting in his little boat, cursing us to the ends of all the world till we lost his voice far off in the mist.

In fog there is no wind, or very little wind, and it was the drift of the waves and Gwawl’s paddling that carried him out of sight of us. It got thicker. It is hard to tell at sea, but I do not think we could have seen anything fifty paces away, if there had been anything to see, or anything to pace on. We just sat there in the damp, soaking mist and waited for it to clear. We kept quiet. You never know who may not be about in fog.

About the middle of the morning we heard a ship. It went by close, but not close enough to be seen. It was a big one, I should have said by the noise, thirty oars a side. They were paddling and listening by turns, you know how. A long stroke, and then lie back on your oars while you count up to eight … nine … ten … and then the hammer falls for the next stroke. And in between the strokes the only noise is the hiss of the water under your forefoot, and you have time to listen for other oars in the mist, or men talking or laughing.

No one in the other ship talked or laughed. We only heard the oars. It might have been a Roman warship out looking for pirates, but Goth Bert thought it unlikely, and he ought to know. Cicva slipped into the cabin, and an awful lot of swords appeared from unlikely places. Someone gave Lombard Bert his axe back, free. We were safe enough, really. With twenty-nine of us altogether, counting Cicva with her cooking knife, in the old tub, there wasn’t really room enough for a boarder to get on to the deck, let alone do any mischief. However I was glad nobody had tried it.

By the time the long-spaced oar-beats had died away into the wet mist, I had had enough.

‘All right!’ I shouted. ‘Get the sweeps rigged.’

‘Oh, no, not that again,’ everyone said in horror, and someone suggested, ‘Why don’t
you
whistle for a wind?’

‘That I won’t. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, and I’m out of whistle. We’ll sweep her – that is, you’ll sweep her.’ They still argued till I bellowed, loud as any wind, ‘Who’s chartered this barge, anyway?’

Then they got out the long sweeps, two a side, three men to an oar, and worked in ten-minute relays, grumbling that this wasn’t what they had turned pirate for in the first place, and this was the penalty for descending to honest charter work. But they worked, all the same. We took a free vote on which way was north-east, and in that direction we made, I suppose, about half a Roman mile in the hour. I stood on the poop and gossiped with Goth Bert, who had made a study of his profession, about the general superiority of oars over sail, if only you can find enough men willing to row.

‘But that’s the trouble,’ he told me. ‘You can’t get free men to do it, not in merchant ships. Has anyone tried using slaves? You must have done it, down there in the Mediterranean. You can always teach us a thing or two about the use of manpower.’

‘It’s not worth it,’ I assured him. ‘I’ve not seen it done in ships, but when you have a gang on a mill, pushing the windlass around all day, you have to keep them chained night and day, and you have the most dreadful trouble with sanitation. If you do that in a ship, you’ll have the slaves dying off like flies.’

He agreed, and added: ‘Besides, if you’re boarded, with slaves you have fifty or sixty men you can’t arm. Real rowers fight.’ He changed his tone. ‘Look! It’s getting a bit thinner up there.’

It was, too. In another half-hour, it was quite clear and there we were, not half a mile out of Rutupiae. There was enough breeze to hoist the sail and start unshipping the sweeps – we had been rowing due south, as it happened – and so we slid in past the guardship. They shouted that we had been lucky to get in, that Starkadder Eightarms was cruising in the fog. The Berts murmured to each other that it wasn’t him, that they knew the sound of his oars, they’d pulled them themselves often enough, he never took anything off this coast, he wanted always to be safe inside the Empire, this would be some Black Dane masquerading. One of the Berts said it had smelt more like Irishmen to
him, but the others all laughed at him and asked who had ever heard of Irishmen so far east as this.

At least the guardship didn’t think we were pirates.

‘They know us well enough,’ Fat Bert told me. ‘There’s many a time we’ve brought in merchant ships that we’ve rescued from wicked pirates that boarded them at sea, and an act of valour that is: half the value of ship and cargo is what the Port Captain’s authorised to pay. Course, you have to be careful in the retaking that nobody gets hurt, and you’ve got to make sure that the merchant men don’t capture any pirates in their enthusiasm, and you have to have two ships before you think of it, but a very virtuous way of dealing it is.’

We had the sweeps rigged again, to pull us round between Rutupiae Island and the mainland, so that we could lie off the jetty. The customs came off to us in a small boat, and had a cursory walk around. They were expecting me – there had been a clerk from our family’s agent in London waiting for me for some days. They were very willing to take me ashore in their boat, while the Berts worked the
Gannet
round and into Londinium. I said a tearful farewell to them – they couldn’t think how they would ever get such an enjoyable and profitable and wholly legal commission again.

Cicva and I took our bags and left. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Rutupiae. There’s nothing to see on the island, only the customs post. Every ship going up into the Thames, or farther north up the east coast, had to come in there for clearance, otherwise they’re not allowed to unload. There’s no real town, except for the usual little cluster of small houses and a tavern or two outside the walls. Nothing to see? Yes, there is. Over everything is the great monument to the Emperor Claudius, marking where He first slept the night on British soil. His Sacred Majesty, three times life-size, stands on an eighty-foot arch of white marble, and out from under it leads the road that passes through Eboracum to the Wall. It is a beautiful gleaming sight. There’s not a square foot of marble that is left plain. It is all covered with the most exquisite carving. There are episodes from the Conquest, and from the Triumph, with supplicant Britons and chariots and camels and troops in campaign dress on one side.
The other side has the full regimental titles and badges of all the units taking part, each with a group of various ranks in their dress uniforms. There’s none of this monotonous white wall for you there, that’s old-fashioned stuff. Just think, in two thousand years it will still be there, dominating the sea just as it does today.

I would have liked to spend an hour examining the details, even though Cicva obviously didn’t like to see what to her must have been a symbol of national humiliation. However, the little clerk who had met us wanted to get us through the formalities of entering the province as quickly as possible. Of course, with him to vouch that I was who I was, and being who I was, it only took a few minutes to get past all the officials, and the main sensation was caused by the fact that I had a sword, and that I actually had a permit with me. The clerk was just explaining to me and to the officials that he had rooms ready for us in the village, when there was a sudden commotion in the doorway of the office, and there stood Gwawl, swearing in a mixture of Latin and Gaulish and British in a way which put me off wondering how he had got there so quickly. And there was the Port Duty Police Officer standing there listening to him as though he were being told the essential and total truth about the nature of the universe. Well, I know there’s a lot to be said for equality under the Law, but there are limits, especially for people of my importance.

Gwawl swore at us so much that the Duty Police Officer told him to moderate his language. It’s never good tactics to antagonise the Police over trifles. A serious offence it’s easy to get away with, once you’ve established a price, but with a little disorderly conduct, where you can’t easily conceal it, why, they have you at once.

Gwawl let off with a stream of accusations of how we’d tricked him into going on our ship, and then stolen all he had, clothes, money, everything, and set him adrift naked – ‘No, not naked,’ said Cicva. ‘You had my apron on’ – and that quite spoilt his flow. Anyway, he said, he’d been set adrift, in a skin boat, to die of thirst or be eaten by sharks or whales or sea-serpents. Was it our fault (and I agreed, privately, no it wasn’t) that he had got ashore and been able to sell his boat for rags to cover his nakedness and then begged his way all along the road from Dubris to Rutupiae?

At this point he paused for breath, and I managed to start talking. I assured the Duty Police Officer that this fellow had been only the usual kind of trickster, with all his capital in flashy clothes. He had wiled his way into our ship with a promise to pay later, and then settled down to cheat the poor sailors out of all they had by indescribable manoeuvres with the dice. But in that he had failed, and unable to pay for his losses he had stolen a boat, a good one, and made off with it in the fog. So I demanded that the Port Authorities should immediately undertake criminal proceedings against him for boat stealing, and in any case, with such an important and valuable cargo clearing, and with one of the most important merchants of the Empire passing through, why weren’t the Port Captain and the Officer Commanding the Garrison here as well?

The clerk wanted to go off to Durovernum, and warn our agent, who had a villa there and would be waiting for us, and bring
him
back to Rutupiae (in the morning, probably, I thought) to bail us out of jail where we would by then probably have spent the night. I told the clerk pretty sharply that he ought to be quiet, because if anyone was going to spend the night in a cell it was to be him as a surety for our answering any charges, and there was no likelihood I would hesitate to sacrifice my bail. In any case, why wasn’t the legendary Leo Rufus here waiting for us, instead of wasting his time at Durovernum?

In any case, I insisted on the two officers being brought, and when they came, I saw that my luck was in. I would not even have to use family influence. Most of these officials at the ports are officers from regiments of native cavalry, themselves coming from outside the Empire, and now, too old to command a squadron any more, they are granted Citizenship and a peaceful retirement in a post like this. Of course, the really stupid ones don’t get these jobs.

I’d begun to guess when I heard the Duty Officer speaking Latin, and when the two senior officers arrived I saw that I had been right. They were both Germans, born somewhere beyond the Rhine, Thuringians I should say, and I took it as a direct sign from Apollo that the Garrison Commander had his arm in a sling and a bandage about his wrist.

A gift from Apollo? But I no longer served the Unconquered Sun. Long, long ago now He had released me from His service, and I no longer practised the healing art, the art that I had learnt in the Temple in the days when I was a whole man and still had both my eyes. No, I had left His service, and in the years since I had healed no one. But here I stood to face the two senior officers, in my grey cloak with the hood thrown back a little to show my hair all crusted white with the salt, and my good eye flashing, and my bad one covered with a patch, as I always had it at sea, or on the road. I had little option, dressed thus, but to play the part I was cast for: but it was a great mistake, I know now, to deal thus in healing after I had been dismissed from Apollo’s service, and I am sure that it was the cause of all the trouble I had later.