Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (64 page)

I agreed. The thought of two legions going ashore in Ireland under a general that none of the senior officers trusted was chilling. But if the troops trusted the commander, then the battle, if there were so much as a battle, was won already. Africanus and I stood there in complete accord and watched the wagons unloaded into the ship.

‘I’m depending on you, coming down with all this material and only twenty men,’ Africanus went on. ‘We lost the half-yearly pay convoy a few weeks ago. Nobody’s attacked that for twenty years – we just didn’t expect it. There were only fifteen men, and a very junior Centurion. Pryderi ambushed them on the steep hill east of Glevum, and took the lot. Half a year’s pay for nine thousand men, all in silver. All the escort killed. As for the Centurion, Pryderi cut his head off and took it away. Horrible thing. Not been anything like that as far east as this for … no, not for fifty years.’

‘You are sure that it was Pryderi?’

‘He told the carters before he let them go. He boasted about it. “I’m Pryderi, King of the Demetae and of the Silures,” he said. “Tell Caesar to think again what he rules.” Now we can’t move anything along these roads without an escort. Pryderi! When I catch him …’ He changed the subject. ‘Are you keeping a count of this?’

‘No. I assume that you’re giving me all you’ve got.’

All he’d got? I’d never seen anything like the arms we were loading. For a hundred years, the Second Legion had been disarming the country. Swords and shields by the hundred they had confiscated and stored in the Fortress of Isca. They had stored them, and kept fifty men busy looking after them and greasing them and counting them every year, while the quartermaster grumbled about the work and how long it was taking Rome to make up its mind about them. Now Rome
had
made up its mind, and I had them.

You see, you cannot teach Barbarians to use Roman weapons, and on the other hand, you cannot ask Roman troops to use Barbarian weapons. These were Barbarian swords, not even German which the cavalry could use, but British. They were very long, three and a half or four feet from hilt to point, double-edged, and a palm’s width at the hilt. Why were they so long? You shall learn, in good time.

There were shields, too, of two kinds. Some of them were like the ones Pryderi and I had made. Roman shields are oblong and convex. German shields are round. These were big, almost as long as the swords, and oval. They were flat and very light, a thin
wood frame with a layer of boiled leather over, often covered again in the thinnest of bronze sheets. They had been, once, enamelled and set with jewels, like the scabbards and the hilts of the swords. But now all you could see were the holes where the Roman soldiers had wrenched out the gems. Who on earth would carry these into action I could not think: they were far too big to run with, and too light to stop a sword cut.

There were, however, a lot of smaller shields, round and a foot or a foot and a half across, just the thing for a swordsman. There was armour, too, mail shirts of iron rings sewn on leather, and other shirts of boiled leather which are almost as good as mail unless you are unlucky and get the full force of a cut with a really sharp blade. There were throwing spears, and a few pikes and axes. Besides this, we had helmets, almost laughably old-fashioned. Some of them were tall and pointed, others round like kettles, and many of them with horns or ridge crests of thin bronze.

And last of all came the things that made sense of the long swords and the big shields and the throwing spears. The wheels were about waist-high to a man, iron tyred, and light. There were great tangles of leather harness, and poles, and basketwork. All this we took aboard and stowed in the hold.

When we were loaded, the ebb tide was ready to take the ship out. I embraced Africanus.

‘Why!’ he said in surprise. ‘I thought you were coming ashore with me. I have a room ready for you.’

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I told him. ‘Someone has to do the thinking.’ I did not mention Rhiannon: how could I have explained?

‘Well, then,’ he warned me, ‘don’t get pricked with any of that sharp stuff. I want to see you there waiting for me on the beach on the first of August. And keep a few Irish wenches waiting for me.’

He stood on the wharf, waving his vinewood staff at us as we dropped out into the Channel. He was a good reliable man, was Africanus, and I wish I could have taken him with me on that voyage. But, of course, a Negro would have been
too
conspicuous on that expedition.

We beat down the Channel, against the wind that blew from the south-west. First we had a low marshy coast on our right hand, then high cliffs, and then sand dunes with great mountains close inland, their heads high in the clouds. The Alps are fifty miles high, we know that because Pliny has measured them, and I think that these mountains west of Isca must have been at least ten miles to the tops.

I took watch and watch with Madoc, heaving on the steering oar and bellowing at the men who handled the leather sail, a great lug fifteen feet square. Oh, there’s nothing like being in a ship of your own, handling the winds as if they too were your subjects. You have to woo a ship when you first have her, finding out her little ways and fads, discovering what will make her yield, what will best satisfy you. And at last she lies open to your every desire, your slightest whim is her command, you no longer have to show what you want her to do, she anticipates your demands before you make them. And the weariness that comes after a long trick at the helm, the fatigue that lets you sleep on the hard deck, although the spray drenches you and a battle rages over the bulwarks – the lion too, they say, the lion too.

But there is no joy in a whore you hire or a slave girl you buy for your bed. If you spend no effort, do not venture your pride, then what pleasure is there? Likewise, there is no satisfaction in steering another man’s course or carrying someone else’s merchandise, what you do not know. But as on that day in the Channel, steering a ship you have hired for yourself, carrying your own goods to make your own fortune, oh, that is joy, that is happiness indeed.

At noon on the second day we had the sun at our backs, when we saw it, and on our right hands we still had savage cliffs, that
soon gave way to a land of high mountains. And on the third day, the mountains were highest of all, higher than the Alps, though we never saw the tops, being wreathed in cloud.

We were near the estuary of a river, with wide sandbanks at low tide. We worked our way in to the south-east side, where a great rock rose sheer out of the water, the waves breaking at its foot. We would come in close, though, near enough to see people on the top of the rock and hear them shouting to us.

‘The Rock of Harlech,’ Madoc told me. We watched a crowd of skin boats put out from the shore, full of men. They reached us and swarmed aboard, shouting. I felt glad that I had taken the pick of the arms from the cargo for myself, a light mail coat and a helm, a small shield and an axe. No more swords for me. The men who came aboard were all Irish by their dress. I would have let Madoc push them back into the sea again if I had not recognised the patchy hair of the first Irishman, the Setanta, in the last boat to leave the shore.

As soon as they were all aboard, we made sail for the west. Madoc took her, tacking among the shoals. I stood on the poop and watched the Setanta as he handed out the first of our arms to his men. There was one man there the others called Heilyn, who took a tall spiked helmet with a ring on top, through which he threaded some red rags. He was not really seven feet high when he wore it, he only looked like it. I tried to hear what the Setanta was saying to him and then what the others were talking about. I listened hard. I received my worst shock of the whole voyage. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

For a moment, wild thoughts raced through my head. Were they drunk? Were they perhaps not Irish after all? They sat about in the waist, delousing each other and relieving themselves in the scuppers and chattering away, and I couldn’t make out a word of it. I turned to Madoc.

‘What language are they talking?’

‘Language?’ he asked in turn. ‘What language do you think? Irish of course.’

‘Irish? Have they got a different language?’

‘Of course they have!’

‘Not like yours?’

‘Not a bit. Quite different. I can’t manage a word of it.’

Different? Different! All these months wasted! I was going to land in Ireland, in a hostile Ireland, not speaking a word of their language. I might as well be deaf and dumb. I nearly wept. Cheated! Why had nobody told me? This was just the thing those accursed Brits would think was a huge joke. All those weary weeks learning British just so that I could talk with the Kings of the Irish, and now to find that they could not understand me! There was nothing to do but to whelm my sorrows in food. I ate myself to sleep.

Before dawn, Madoc woke me – I was sleeping curled up under a skin boat on the deck.

‘Wake up, boy. It is happy enough you ought to be, seeing it is a Holy Day that it is. Let’s make it a bright one and a happy one, for it’s standing away by noon that I would like to be.’

It was a Holy Day indeed. This was the first day of May, on which the British and the Gauls, and I supposed the Irish too, drive out from the farms the beasts that they have kept folded in close all the winter, out to the summer pastures on the hills. And this, being the end-of-winter feast, is the fire feast for them, when they build their bonfires on the hills and jump through them and wish. Beltain they call it.

Now, it was with a fire feast that I had come into the North before, and I had gained wealth from it, and ever after I had counted such a feast as a lucky day for myself. I stood there in the cold wind of early dawn, and I looked at the sky, the first time since the year before that I had looked up at all the stars, all of them shining through clear air with never a wisp of mist nor any haze to hide them. There was a clarity here I had not known in Britain. All the winter I had groped in the mists of double meaning, till I had myself begun to think not in logic but in riddles. But here, now, I knew, I would be myself again. Here I would think and reason as a man, coldly and economically, and
know
, not guess, what I was about. Here at last, I would not be at the mercy of others. I would be my own master – no, I would be master of all around, I would be master of all Ireland before I finished.

In the shelter of a tongue of land, we dropped anchor, still on salt water, though near a river mouth. The Irish, and there were
twenty-seven of them altogether, all armed, launched their skin boats and got down into them gingerly, weighted down as they were with mail. Armour does not float very well, in my experience. The Setanta tapped me on the arm.

‘Is it the courage to come with us you are having, or is it staying where you are safe that you will be?’ Of course he spoke to me in British, and as we had both had to learn the language deliberately, we understood each other perfectly.

‘Naturally,’ I told him, ‘I must be at hand to protect my investment.’ I was full of the confidence of the first flush of day. I went down into a skin boat with the Setanta and Heilyn and another smelly ruffian, a very hairy man called, it seemed, Callum, and we paddled towards the shore. At least they paddled. I lay back with an air of civilised polish. I had finished with manual work, I told myself. From now on it would be the Barbarians who did all the work.

Some way off the shore, the other boats stopped; that is they stayed in the same place while their occupants paddled like mad to save themselves from being carried out by the tide. We, however, went closer in till there was hardly room for a skin boat even to float.

As we paddled in, we could see three figures on the beach, and as we drew near to the shore, so they walked down to the line of seaweed and driftwood that marked the water’s limit. As we came in so that we would have been better advised to get out into the water and wade, I saw that they were three old women, tall and gaunt, hooded and cloaked in dusty grey. They threw back their hoods, and while the wind dropped to nothing, their hair streamed back horizontal from their heads, streamed grey and dusty as their cloaks. We bobbed up and down, not ten feet from them, and we looked at them and they looked at us.

Their faces were lined and old and lifeless. They might well have walked out from the houses of the Dead. They pointed their fingers at us, their left forefingers, bony and fleshless, and they began to sing. In a high wailing voice they sang, a mournful wailing tune, a tune full of sadness and foreboding and warning. I have heard sounds in my time that few men have heard and lived. I have heard the scream of the wounded
mermaid, and the cough of the crocodile in the night. I have heard the women wail for Osiris in the Sanctuary, and I have heard the rustle of the poison spider on my pillow. And nothing have I ever heard that chilled my flesh and raised my hair as did the sound of those three women, tiny, singing on the empty beach of Ireland. We sat there on the sea on the edge of the world, and in that song I heard all the gulf at the end of the Ocean open to swallow us.

I looked at the Irishmen. The Setanta was quite unconcerned. He explained to me: ‘It is the Morrigan.’

I knew a little about this, as much as any Greek does, and that was not much. The Morrigan is what the Irish call the Mother, but there in that wild land on the edge of Ocean, the Mother is still a conquered goddess, wild and unforgiving and hostile to all living men. The Morrigan is the wild spirit of all the women of the land, and the farther you go from the warm countries where kindly men rule, the more clear it is that men and women are two different kinds of being, as different from each other as dog from cat or horse from cow, and the fact that they can breed together, and that they both feel an unsuperable need for each other and a bitter hatred and rivalry, is as accidental and irrational as the tide. It was in answer to this impossible bond that I was coming myself to the land of Ireland, and here stood the Morrigan, the spirit of woman, to bar my way.