Along the reed-fringed margin of the shore, across the Little Sea that separated the island of the flint-men from the vast lands of the herdsmen, there had arisen a great commotion.
Cows lowed to their calves, in fear of being hustled together and of losing them among the many tossing horned herds that clustered nibbling at the coarse salt-grass; sheep bleated in terror in the strange smell of the sea waters; horses whinnied, stretching their nostrils wide, their red-rimmed nostrils, as though they smelled battle from afar and were both anxious to be a part of it and yet afraid of the whining arrow, the upthrust javelin that brings ruin to the proudest stallion born.
And above them the sea-birds wheeled and screamed, white in the morning sunlight, frightened of the many men and many four-footed creatures that met together on the flat mudbanks which were usually so bare, so desolate, so comfortingly deserted to a gull.
They could not land there now, printing their pronged signatures in the slime, sharp-eyed for eels, as they were used. These birds smelled the biting smoke of wood-fires; with their sharp salt-hardened eyes they saw the black fumes rise; with their curiously hidden ears they heard the high yelling of herdsmen, the sudden thwacking of sticks on patient hides. This was strange and different and frightening. They wheeled higher into the salty airs for safety, then whirled about the place, screeching that they did not like this, that they wished these men would go back to the Baltic, to the great inland forests where they had come from—anywhere, so long as they left the shore-reeds, and let the white birds grub for elvers, crack open the shells of sea-snails, as they had done since the sun first rose above the hills.
But the men below them hardly noticed their protests. It was a bloody bitter East wind, they thought, clapping their red raw hands about their thin and hungry chests, and cursing their leader for bringing them so far on a dreamlike quest, when they might still have been eating beef under the great green trees and thanking the wind-dried horse-skull on the sacred oak for their good fortune.
‘May Barduca’s bones rot inside his flesh and let him fall from the saddle as he rides,’ some of them swore, half meaning it, half in jest. ‘May this happen to him, and may his bastard son Vedrix try to catch him, and be crushed in the tumble!’
Then they laughed and drank again of the raw fermented corn-wine, their eyes running from the wind, their red noses dripping with northern cold. Some of them, the more prosperous chieftains from the easy-lands, wrapped their thick woollen gowns about them and ran their fingers along the sharp edges of their copper swords, as though they resented being hurried along by any tyrant, and would as soon use their expensive weapons on him as on the simple folk they had been promised they would meet.
Yet many of the common fellows, the cattle-men who loved watching the steers mount and the cows bring forth and suckle their young, rejoicing in these feats as though they shared them, these men followed their tyrant leader without any wish to kill him, believing that he knew best, and that they would come at last to a land where they might graze their cattle and rear their calves and lambs without any interference.
‘Barduca is a fat bull,’ they said. Then they would pause. ‘But he knows how many teats a cow has got. And that’s more than most of these lordly sun-worshipping swine do. All right they are, for a basin of ale and a plate of meat, and riding round the country on a horse’s back. But when it comes to calving a cow, Barduca makes fools of them.’
Under a great horsehide awning, with its back to the bitter winds, Barduca held his court. He did not know that his lords wished to cut his throat with their metal knives; he did not know that his hundred herdsmen wished him well and thought him a good judge of cattle. If he had known, he would not have cared. He was above the judgment of common men of any sort. He was almost a god, he considered; that is, after the Hornman and the Bard. They were nearer gods than he was, he admitted. But then came Barduca. And if Barduca said that milk came out of the oak-apples and rain out of the sun’s backside—then that should be good enough for anybody.
Although, Barduca would not have said that thing about the sun without smiling up into the sky and crossing his fingers as he smiled. For, whatever a man might say in jest, he knew that without the Sun-god’s help, there was nothing possible on earth.
Barduca lounged in his great oaken chair covered with bear’s pelts and sheepskins, a beaker of mead in one hand, his long copper sword in the other. He sipped from the one and contemplated the other, his eyes red, not with the East wind but with drink; his tongue slow with drink and with the tiredness that had come upon him from his age and from the long journey he had forced upon his many tribes.
They had come a long way; ten days of fast-travelling, over the upland roads, each tribe meeting the main body at the junctions of hill and valley, until they had formed a great gathering of wanderers, the men of the cows and the sheep, and the metal knives.
Barduca looked at the men before him in the wind-tent, but he could hardly focus them, for the mead was strong and he was getting too tired to bother about looking closely at folk. He did see the Bard, an old fellow, grey-bearded and dressed in his greasy black rags, mumbling to himself and counting his fingers to match the rhymes, for he was blind. Bards were blinded, when once they had given evidence of their talents—otherwise they went away to other tribes, discontented, as poets are, and gave others the benefit of their gifts, their communication with the source of life itself—HIM, the sun man, the smiling warmth-giver who brought life to everything—crops, cows, beetles, men.
‘Poor blind bastard,’ muttered Barduca, stroking his long red-golden beard. ‘I can see my sword, my finger-ring of gold, my jug of mead. I can see the women as I lie on them and make them squeal!’
He smiled inside his beard and long moustaches and took another suck at the beaker of honey-ale. He thought for a moment of his son’s betrothed wife, Isca. The Bard would not be able to see Isca. He would not see her corn-coloured hair and her heavy white breasts with the little blue veins, oh so tiny, in them. He would not see . . . Oh, he would miss so much, thought Barduca, glad that he had not the gift of poetry.
He wiped his long red nose on the long sleeve of his red gown. He looked at the Hornman, the fearsome one of the tribes, the man—if one dared call him such—of the sacrifices, the one who cut the mistletoe, cut the man, too, on the flat stones at Midsummer morning. The Hornman!
‘Poor simple devil,’ thought Barduca, drinking again. ‘He thinks so much of his sacred black flint knife—but if I cared to step down from this platform, I could lop off his head with one sweep of my sword. Oh, the darling sword!’
The Hornman lolled on his sheepskins, already drunk, his stag-antlers wagging loosely, for his votaries had been careless in tying them on; his white clay paint already peeling off with the sweat that came from his unexercised body. Yet, even so, he was frightening; a man dedicated to sacrifice, one born to death and the sun, cut by his master-Hornman so that he would never be distracted towards creating a family, made to learn score upon score of spells and incantations, herbal remedies; organs, ligaments and bones, of man, beast and bird; punished in his apprenticeship, until he knew every phase of moon, every name and quality of rock, every plumage of bird, every feeding-stuff of beast. One who knew so much should have great possessions—yet this Hornman possessed nothing but his red-deer’s antlers and the stinking cowhide that only half-covered his obese body.
A chieftain dared to say, ‘The wind bites cold today, Barduca. Is this the day we sail?’
Outside, the sea-birds croaked for a century and the cows lowed for another century after that. Then Barduca spoke.
‘When Bard and Hornman say we sail—then, we sail. Unless I decide that we do not sail.’
He rubbed his thick forefinger down his streaming nose and looked blankly round him in the smoke of the wood-fire. He held his cow-horn out and the slave-woman ran forward and filled it again. She gasped even with this effort, for Barduca was a constant drinker, and she was his hand-woman. She was heavy with his child too, and knew that he would not suffer it to live. That made her resent his mead as much as anything. He should have killed her six months before: that would have been kinder, and easier. But Barduca was not noted for his gentleness. A King must never be gentle or his lords would think him weak and would kill him as he slept, or as he rode carelessly back after the hunt.
The Bard sniffed the air, raising his head like a dog, his nostrils twitching, his eyes still closed. He began to intone in a high and sing-song voice.
‘Lord of oak and ash,
Of fire and of water,
Of bird in the air
And worm under ground,
Give us a sign!
Give us a sign,
Lord of the stone and the snake!’
Barduca glared at him impatiently. The Hornman shifted his clumsy bulk, spilling the sticky honey-mead over his thighs and then chuckling, waving his grotesque head from side to side, his eyes, ringed round with red, fluttering stupidly.
He made passes in the air and it seemed for a moment that the wind dropped, for the tent sides stopped flapping, and in the silence they heard the mournful sound of a horn.
Then there came a great clattering of hooves and a small party of riders swept about the wind-break, led by a young woman. She dismounted with a laugh and a sudden flurry of garments and then ran forward to touch the back of Barduca’s hand with her lips. He smiled down at her indulgently, tipsily.
‘Uncle,’ she said in a full deep voice. ‘Look! the wind is changing! It is sweeping the white birds out to sea! It is a wind to carry us on our way! let us go!’
The Hornman nodded above his dripping cup. He looked towards the Bard and snuffled, ‘There is your sign, blind one! Listen and be satisfied.’
Isca, the niece of Barduca, looked round at the men in the wind-break insolently. They bowed their heads. She was a fine woman, little more than a girl, yet heavy in her limbs, though well-formed. A thin fillet of gold held her rich corn-coloured hair in place; bars of black jet pierced her fine ears, dragging their lobes down. About her throat and arms, she wore spirals of heavy copper which jingled as she moved. Everything about her was rich and arrogant, the painted heavy-lidded eyes, the full lipped mouth, the thin and slightly curved nose, even the splash of red blood that streaked the front of her long white woollen gown.
Barduca saw it and said smiling, ‘So you killed today, my child? I had expected Vedrix to do it, but you have beaten the fool to it. What was it, my Queen? A roebuck?’
She showed her even teeth in a sneering smile. ‘Nothing so useful, uncle,’ she said. ‘Nothing but a black bear, with teeth so small I’d have given him my own breast to suck; if there’d been any milk there!’
Barduca leaned forward and stroked her heavy breasts. She pushed against his hand, smiling, her eyes half-closed.
Then suddenly the old man roared, ‘Where is the fool Vedrix? Why does he not come before me? Is he afraid, the dolt?’
Isca placed her arm about the King’s neck and pushed one hand down into his shirt, caressing him. ‘He is ashamed, I think, uncle,’ she said, ‘for his blow did nothing more than anger the animal. I had to strike it dead when it leapt on him and tore his horse’s neck!’
Barduca stood up in his fury, almost flinging her from him. ‘He let the bear maul his horse, did he?’ he shouted. ‘The misbegotten fool! How did such a thing ever come to spring from my loins? Did the Sun-god wish to drive me mad? Did he wish to punish me for all the faults of the world? Vedrix! Come in, Vedrix, you little suckling!’
A young man ran round the side of the hide wind-break, his thin face pale and smiling uncertainly. He twitched with fear as he stood before his father, the mask and paws of a young bear hanging from his belt, fouling his linen breeches with blood.
The King glared down at him for a while, relishing the young man’s fear of him. Then, waving his hand so as to include all the lords he said, ‘So, here we greet the great hunter, eh? The great warrior, the slayer of bears! Look at him, my lords, and fear his wrath—this lordly one, this killer of wild boars—this eater of dung!’
Vedrix fell before him on his knees, holding up his hands. ‘Father,’ he said in his high voice, ‘may the gods take me, but I thought it was a full-grown bear. The wind had made my eyes water and I could not see.’
Barduca began to smile wickedly, and repeated the young man’s words in mockery, imitating his voice with such cruelty that they all laughed openly, even the Bard. ‘Well, and so you could not even kill a bear-cub cleanly, you fool? You had to put your woman in danger so as to save you, eh?’
Vedrix looked up for a moment towards Isca, who was smiling at him as wickedly as the others. His face was bitter towards her. ‘Isca it was who told me to kill the thing,’ he whined. ‘She told me to clasp it to me as I rode, and hug it to death as its father would have hugged me. She said that so I could prove my valour and deserve her love!’
For a moment Barduca was silent, then he shouted, ‘If Isca told you to cut off your thumb, would you do it, you fool? And what valour does that show? To let a bear cub savage a good horse for the sake of showing your crow’s valour, what good is that?’
Vedrix lowered his eyes and began to snivel, waving his head from side to side in misery and humiliation.
Now the lords began to feel some pity for him, though they dared not show it before Barduca. Vedrix had always suffered thus, they thought; had always been made the scapegoat of any misfortune. Why did not Barduca kill the fool and put him out of his misery, they thought. He would never be a King and yet Barduca still spoke as though he would, one day, when he had shown his manhood, a manhood that did not exist and never would exist.
But Isca felt no pity. Her only feeling was of an immense contempt that amounted almost to hatred, hatred that she was bound to this fool, this coward, promised to him as wife since she had been a little child.
Momentarily she recalled the betrothal ritual, the circumcisions. She shuddered to remember it again, how the folk had watched, smiling, as she and Vedrix suffered it; how the parts were pressed together so that their blood mingled and they were made one. She passed her hand over her forehead and found that a light sweat had sprung on to the white skin. Bound to this stupid coward! Had it been a warrior, a hawk-eyed man with great arms, the cutting would have been a pleasure, something to recall with passion—but this fool . . .
She suddenly spat at him as he knelt in the tent. ‘Vedrix is a fool, uncle,’ she said. ‘He is such a man as will expect his wife to father her own child!’
Barduca laughed thickly. ‘Must I kill myself to show the fool how to do everything?’ he asked.
The lords nudged each other at their King’s wit. It was no secret to them that Barduca had lain with Isca many times, for in accordance with the custom of their folk he was sworn to protect her from all other men until her marriage was celebrated with his son, and that meant keeping watch over her by night as well as by day. To make that easier, she slept in his bed while Vedrix lay outside the door, fulfilling his tribal function, too—that of protecting his father. It was a convenient arrangement for all but Vedrix.
As for Isca, a King was to be preferred to a thin-legged dolt, even though the King was an old man, and the dolt a young one. So she made no bones about her preferences, in public as well as in private.
Barduca leaned forward and pushed his son over with a sudden blow of the foot. The young man lay where he fell, looking up at the King with fearful eyes, wondering what he might do next.
And when they all went from the wind-break to see whether it was time for their great voyage, Vedrix was still left alone, lying among the straw and filth that littered the place where they had camped, afraid to rise and risk his father’s taunts any further.
But when they were out of earshot, he punched himself bitterly in the groin and said, ‘You bastard, Barduca! May your bones rot inside you. May you die! May you die in agony! You swine!’
And after a while, when he had vented his anger sufficiently on his own body, he grew more controlled to think of Isca. ‘May she bear his children,’ he said coldly, ‘and may they come out of her as pigs and creeping snakes!’
Then he heard the King’s great horn blowing, a sign that this day they would sail. He got up quickly, anxious to show that he wished to help in the preparations, desperate not to be found wanting again.
Those who watched him running after his father smiled to each other and pointed. ‘Look,’ they said, ‘there goes Vedrix. He doesn’t know a boat from a latrine-bucket! What good does he hope to do?’
All the same, they pitied him as much as they feared his tyrant father.