Praise for John James:

‘a first-rate historical novelist’ Oxford Times

Votan

‘The narrative is terse, the colours vivid, the events barbarously splendid … an imagination as rich as it is vivid’ The Times

‘… excitement, mythology, the splendour and barbarity of the Dark Ages, and vividly imagined adventures’ Northern Echo

Not for All the Gold in Ireland

‘A thoroughly enjoyable novel, full of exuberance and colourful fantasy’ Manchester Evening News

‘Crackles with atmosphere and splendidly imaginative writing’ Guardian Journal

MEN WENT TO CATTRAETH

‘A novel of stark imaginative fire’ The Observer

‘Rich and fascinating and intense’ Western Mail

VOTAN AND OTHER NOVELS

JOHN JAMES

VOTAN

NOT FOR ALL THE GOLD IN IRELAND

MEN WENT TO CATTRAETH

www.sfgateway.com

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were — and remain — landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

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Introduction by Neil Gaiman

The hardest part of being a writer, particularly being someone who writes fiction for a living, is that it makes it harder to reread a book you loved. The more you know about the mechanics of fiction, the craft of writing, the way a story is put together, the way words work in sequence to create effects, the harder it is to go back to books that changed you when you were younger. You can see the joins, the rough edges, the clumsy sentences, the paper-thin people. The more you know, the harder it is to appreciate the things that once gave you joy.

But sometimes it’s nothing like that at all. Sometimes you return to a book and find that it’s better than you remembered, better than you had hoped: all the things that you had loved were still there, but that it’s even more packed with things that you appreciate. It’s deeper, cleaner, wiser. The book got better because you know more, have experienced more, encountered more. And when you meet one of those books, it’s a cause, as they used to say on the back of the book jackets, for celebration.

So. Let’s talk about Votan.

I’m really late in getting this introduction in, mostly because I’ve been trying to work out how to introduce Votan without giving it all away. One does not want to explain the jokes, nor does one feel the need to assign homework before one gives someone a book to read. But it will not hurt if you are familiar with your Norse myths. They will make Votan a deeper book, a game of mirrors and reflections and twice-told tales. It might be a good thing to read the Mabinogion, and the Irish Taín. They will make you smile wider and shake your head in wonder when you read Not For All The Gold In Ireland.

So. First of all, you should feel free to skip this introduction and go and read the book. You are holding a beautiful book here, written by a remarkable writer: it contains three novels. Two novels about a Greek Trader called Photinus, who is at least the equal of, and, dare I say it, a finer rogue and tale-spinner than George McDonald Fraser’s Flashman; and a darker retelling, or recreation, of a Welsh epic poem.

I read them as a young man – they were republished as fantasy novels in the early eighties, having been published in the sixties as historical novels. They are not fantasy novels, nor are they strictly historical novels: instead they are novels set in historical periods which people who read fantasy might also appreciate. The Photinus novels (there are only two, with a third novel implied but, alas, never written) are based on mythic and magical stories. (Men Went to Cattraeth is bleaker, and based on an old Welsh poem, the Y Goddodin.)

Photinus’s mind and his point of view, his voice if you will, is not ours. It is this voice that lingers longest for me. His attitudes and his world are those of the past. Occasionally he commits atrocities. He does not have a twenty-first century head. Many characters in historical novels are us, with our point of view, wearing fancy dress. Votan’s dress is rarely fancy. The conceit that all protagonists in historical novels should share our values, our prejudices and our desires is a fine one (I’ve used it myself), and it is much more difficult and much more of an adventure to create characters who are not us, do not believe what we believe, but see things in a way that is alien to us and to our time.

My own novel American Gods has a sequence where the hero, Shadow, spends nine nights on the tree, like Odin, a sacrifice to himself: I did not dare to reread Votan in the years running up to writing American Gods, then once my book was written, it was the first thing I read for pleasure, like a chocolate I had put away as a boy until the perfect time. I was nervous, and should not have been. Instead I discovered a whole world inside a book I already knew. (And yes, I am sure that Shadow’s tree-hanging owed a huge debt to Votan’s.)

So. Here are the things I will tell you, that might make reading this book more pleasant for you.

Votan is the story of a man called Photinus – a young man, a Greek trader, a magician, heartless and in it for profit – who seeks amber, and finds wealth and companionship and also finds himself Odin Allfather, the Norse god. The sagas and the tales and the poems that tell us about the Aesir, about Odin and Thor (Donar is Donner is Thunder) all reconfigure here, as if seen through a dark mirror: bleak tales they are, and dark.

It is not that James demythologises the stories, strips off all the beauty and the magic. It is more that he gives us reflection. As their best, these books are like holding a conversation with somebody from two thousand years ago. Occasionally, James can be too knowing or too wry (it is worth observing how many of Photinus’s observations are common sense and utterly wrong – where amber comes from, for example, or the commercial possibilities of coal) but these moments are swept away into the next glorious story.

And the more you know, the more there is to find. I do not want to give away anything that James hid so well in his text, but here, I shall give you a couple of early ones for free: Loki is of the Aser, but not of them, trading on their behalf from his base in Outgard, not Asgard. In one of the most famous stories, we visit, with Thor, Utgard, where the giants live, and meet the crafty trickster who is also King of the Giants, Utgardloki. (Loki is half giant, half Aesir.) In the Norse sagas, Fenrir (from old norse, meaning fen dweller) is a monstrous wolf, the offspring of Loki, who bites off the hand of Tyr: here, our own Tyr tells the story of his own encounter with Fenris.

The stories of the Norse Gods are dark stories, and they do not end well: there is always Ragnarok waiting, the end of all things, the destruction of Asgard and the Aesir and all they hold dear. While Photinus/Votan become a god, he is doing it as a servant of another god, in this case an aspect of Apollo, who desires chaos, and who is laying, in his own way, the steps that will brng about the end of the world, in fire. We meet the gods in this book, in a way that reminds me of Gene Wolfe’s Latro tales.

Remember, when reading these books, Google is your friend. Wikipedia is your friend. If you are curious, look it up. Were there really Celts in Galatea – modern Turkey – that the British would have recognised as cousins, speaking a similar tongue? (Why yes, there were. Wikipedia tells me that three Gaulish tribes travelled south east, the “Trocmi, Tolistobogii and Tectosages. They were eventually defeated by the Seleucid king Antiochus I, in a battle where the Seleucid war elephants shocked the Celts.”) Were there really vomitoria, where Romans went to vomit? (No, there weren’t. It’s a common misconception. A vomitorium was actually kind of hallway. But this is a rare slip.)

Not For All The Gold In Ireland brings us an older Photinus. I’m not sure that he’s wiser, but he’s softer, less monstrous. And he’s funnier (both books are funny, although the humour of Votan is gallows humour). He’s off to get back a document, and on the way he’s going to wander a long way into a number of stories. He’ll become Manawyden, son of Llyr, the hero of several branches of the great Welsh prose work known as the Mabinogion (as are many of the people we will meet on the way – Pryderi, for example, and Rhiannon. Taliesin turns up too, centuries before we would expect the legendary Taliesin (but it is a title, we learn, not a name, handed down from bard to bard)).

And there’s a strange and glorious achievement here: for the people are human, yes. But they are also mythical, larger than life. Not always in the way that we expect culture heroes and gods to be, but in a new way: they are avatars of gods, avatars of heroes: are these the Odin and the Loki and the Thor of legend, or do they echo them? Do the gods and heroes have a separate existence from Photinus and his crew, and are our protagonist and his friends being pushed through tales that will need to exist?

As the tale goes on, we meet other heroes (is Photinus a hero? He is the hero of his own story) and when we encounter Setanta, the given name of the Irish hero known as Cú Chulainn, we can predict that we will slip, as we do, from the Mabinogion into the Taín. And Not For All The Gold In Ireland concludes itself in a manner that is both a valid conclusion to the book we have been reading and is also a cliffhanger, and perhaps also a set up for another book, one in which, I suspect, Photinus would have found himself Quetzalcoatl of the Azteks and Kukulkan of the Mayans.

That book was never written. John James did not return to Photinus: he wrote other novels, fine and powerful, and different. These are books that have been brought back into print by people who love them, and would not let them be forgotten. If you are willing to walk and ride with Photinus, who was called Votan and Manannan and many other names, and who only wanted to increase his family’s wealth, and to bed the willing wives of absent officers, then he will repay you, not with amber, or mammoth ivory, or Irish gold, but with stories, which are the finest gift of all.

Neil Gaiman
New York

VOTAN

JOHN JAMES

www.sfgateway.com

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Vindabonum

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

Germany

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

   Chapter 6

   Chapter 7

   Chapter 8

   Chapter 9

   Chapter 10

   Chapter 11

Asgard

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

   Chapter 6

   Chapter 7

   Chapter 8

   Chapter 9

   Chapter 10

Lands Beyond Asgard

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

   Chapter 6

   Chapter 7

   Chapter 8

   Chapter 9

Pictland

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

   Chapter 6

   Chapter 7

   Chapter 8

   Chapter 9

   Chapter 10

   Chapter 11

   Chapter 12

   Chapter 13

   Chapter 14

The Waste

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

   Chapter 6

   Chapter 7

   Chapter 8

   Chapter 9

The Amber War

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

   Chapter 6

   Chapter 7

Vindabonum

1

Well, if you really want to know how it was I came to be chained to an oak tree, half-way up in the middle of nowhere, with wolves trying to eat me out of it, I’ll tell you. Of course, it’s not nearly as interesting as what happened afterwards, but you can piece that together yourself if you go down to any of the taverns around the Praetorian barracks and listen to what the soldiers sing. If you can understand German, of course. They sing things like:

High the Allfather

Hung in the hornbeam;

Nine days and no drinking,

Nine nights and no nurture …

or:

Alfege the Earl, Odin-born,

Great in guile, wise in war …

I often go down there and listen. It never crosses their minds that it was only me all the time. Half the songs are about me; the other half I made up myself, anyway.

I thought that would make you sit up. It isn’t every man you meet who can remember being worshipped as a God – and who still is. And it isn’t every day you meet someone who has fathered half a dozen Royal Houses. I haven’t spent all my time in the counting house, you know. As a matter of fact, looking back, I seem to have spent most of it in bed. That’s where I learnt my German, in bed, with Ursa, in Vindabonum.

I was young, then. We went up to Vindabonum, my father and I, during the reign of his late Sainted Majesty. It was not altogether by our own volition. We were priests of Apollo in the Old City. Not Apollo the Sun only, or Apollo the Music-maker at all, but Apollo the Healer, who is a very specialised God indeed and not to be found in very many shrines. There was a great deal to do there in those days. People came to be healed from quite a distance, sprains and bruises and such like, mostly. My father was very good with these.

‘Yes, yes, Photinus,’ he would say, ‘it’s all very well to do these spectacular cures, trepannings and amputations and visitations of boils and sores. But how often do you get a chance to see them? Not often enough to get any practice in, let alone make any money. No, it’s these little jobs that are the doctor’s bread and oil. They come in every day by the score. They’ve got to come in, you see. You can follow the plough with boils or even if you’re raving mad – you can govern a province like that, you know – but not with a swollen ankle that you can’t put to the ground. You’ve got your choice: come in to the doctor and pay, or lie up for a fortnight, and you can’t afford to do that. In you have to go, half a day in the ox cart, see the doctor, pay up your half piece of silver or your pair of chickens, and zut! he jerks it back into place for you. The next day, back you are behind the plough or pitching sheaves into the wagon, and you know that the next winter you won’t starve. Time’s everything in sowing and harvest; do it when you have to or never do it at all.’

Not that we were too worried about the pairs of chickens. Some of the hill farms had been in the family since the Persians, and a lot of the other charters weren’t much later. And there was some confusion, very often, about what was Temple property and what was family. So long as we lived in Vindabonum, the silver came up regularly. From the farm rents, from the olive presses, from the shipping line, from all the agencies we had. Not a bad organisation really. It all came through keeping out of politics.

But it was politics sent us up to Vindabonum. Keeping out of politics is always a bit of a risk. It isn’t so much supporting the wrong man as not supporting the right one, and there had been a bit of trouble about not joining up with the right people.

Now doubtless in the days of their late Sainted Majesties Nero or Galba we might have all been killed where we sat, but by my young days we’d run out of violence. Besides we had a lot of influence in odd places, and it was enough for someone to suggest, quite firmly, that it might be better if we went and lived elsewhere for a time. Not necessarily Vindabonum. They offered us a choice of several places, all quite horrible, like that place south of Leptis Magna, on the edge of the desert, and York. I never did get to York.

Anyway, they were all on frontiers, and we happened to have an agent in Vindabonum, a man called Otho who did a lot of buying of furs and timber and wax across the Danube, and selling cloth and wine and pottery and oil. That’s a good trade; you sell the oil and wine in the pots, saves carriage. So we went there, up with all our furniture and plate in the wagons from Aquileia, we weren’t going to be uncomfortable, and our own servants. We had a dreadful time with them, and in the end we had to send them back and stock up in the local slave market.

That’s how we got Ursa. She was a Thuringian who had been carried off by a party of scavenging Marcomen, a big hearty lass, blonde and blue eyed. Don’t you believe it when they tell you all Germans have yellow hair. A lot of them have, enough to impress you, but most of them are more mousy. As for red hair, that Tacitus talks about, that’s rare too, except among the Picts. Fair skin, though, mostly, and nobody quite as black-haired or black-eyed as we see here in the south.

When we got Ursa, she was none too worried about what had happened. Being hauled off to Vindabonum and sold for rough work in the kitchen was, for her, an entry into the great world. She didn’t stay in the kitchen long. I was nineteen at the time, and very much at a loss, and there wasn’t anything much she could do about it, even if she had objected. In fact, she seemed really pleased at my picking her up, and somehow the other Germans in the household always treated her as something special. And that’s how I learned German.

Once I began to get fluent in German, Vindabonum, too, began to wake up. Hardly any of the locals spoke Greek. A lot of them could be understood in a rather horrid kind of Latin, but mostly it was German or nothing. Once I could get along in German it was different. It was another world, their world. It was a world of small shops and taverns, open markets and bustling people. Savages at bottom, of course, like their cousins across the Danube, noisy and uncontrollable.

I was nineteen, I told you, and there wasn’t much of what you might call entertainment. There was a kind of theatre where they had regimental sports twice a year, second-rate gladiators and beasts nobody would risk on a more sophisticated audience. There was a tale locally about a party of actors who had come with some Sophocles, but nobody turned up, and they were last seen walking back to Aquileia, having sold all their costumes to pay their debts, and lucky nobody sold them too.

So the only things to watch were the religious ceremonies, not that there were very many of them either. There were the usual official shrines and the troops had a Mithraeum, but that was private, of course. No use trying to see that unless you’re willing to take on more obligations than anyone would in their right minds. I wonder how long it takes to get the bull’s blood out of your hair. The Jews were just as private; there were two kinds, the orthodox ones, and the ones who eat anything and worship an ass’s head.

There was more fun where the Germans lived, outside the walls, in nasty little slums along the river and the roads. They weren’t anything like as bad as the German villages I’ve seen since, but they shocked me then. They were alive, though, with their little clusters of square thatched houses, and their cooking fires outside and naked children in the dust. If it rained, of course, it was a different matter, and when it snowed it turned quite nasty, especially inside with everyone huddled around the open fires, or braziers if your house doubled as a tavern. But most of the summer and autumn we could sit on the benches outside those taverns, drinking the local brews of barley or rye or plum, and looking at the way these people lived, not lived, camped really, not living in any settled way, squatting under the ramparts.

What did they live on? Well some of them had bits of land out on the edge of the woods, and a lot lived by heavy labour, hauling barges up the Danube or building in the barracks. A lot of them were craftsmen, heavy workers like smiths or potters. It’s always a sign of civilisation when you find men doing the potting. The men who worked the wagons up from Aquileia, with all that lovely red Samian, couldn’t afford to buy it and they used the local rather gritty ware.

Most of these people had relations across the river on the Marcfield, as they called it, or even farther north. On feast days we would go to one of the riverside taverns, Rudi’s usually, and watch them coming across on the ferry. There were peasants in their best clothes come to see the great city, and a very great city that filthy Vindabonum must have seemed to them. They only saw the native quarter, of course; we never let them within the gates.

There were mothers and fathers up to see their recruit sons in the cavalry barracks, because by that time nobody was very choosy who you recruited for an auxiliary regiment, and they brought in pies and sausages. Sweethearts too, sometimes, but not many of those, because half of the recruits were running from some girl they’d got into trouble, and the other half were eager to see if it felt any different to get a southern girl into the same state.

There were pedlars with leather and carved wood, and cheap silver ornaments beaten out of silver coins, and men with Amber, and there were Holy Men. We usually had a line of legionaries across the quay, picking out at random perhaps one traveller in five or six and making him turn out his bundle for concealed weapons. The people didn’t seem to mind this, and we never saw anybody caught with anything, although often enough the odd pie or apple changed hands. It made the job worth while, and was one of the reasons why duty on the river was popular even after ten years of peace. But nobody ever filched a piece of Amber, it wouldn’t have been worth it, too much scandal. And nobody ever searched a Holy Man.

You’ve probably read about the German’s religion in authors like Tacitus. But none of these men ever went across the frontier. None of them ever spoke to more than one or two Germans, and those were Latin-speaking civilised ones, and being properly brought up and full of Homer, they tried to make some sense out of what they heard. The fact of the matter is that there’s no sense in it at all. No two Germans will agree on who their Gods are. Mostly they have two. One is called Tiwaz, and he is a fine-weather Wind God, and the other is called Wude, and he is a bad-weather Sky God, and you hear him riding overhead with all his dogs howling in any storm. In the north, they also have a kind of Vulcan, a Smith God, who must be very comforting in the winters they have there. And there are a lot of minor Gods for streams and trees and suchlike, but nobody agrees about them at all.

They haven’t any real temples; they make offerings at rocks and trees where there has been an epiphany of a God. And they haven’t any priests, only these Holy Men. Being a Holy Man might happen to anyone. It starts with an epiphany of the God, a waking one like being struck by lightning, or in a dream. And the God lays a charge on you, and out you are driven to fulfil it. These Holy Men, of course, happen in a lot of lands where the people aren’t really settled on the soil or haven’t enough to eat. The Jews had them, and some of them wrote down the charges the God put on them. I’ve seen the Celtic ones, and they are very given to being holier than anyone else, and talk a lot about it. India is full of them. In Germany they are rare.

There are some Holy Men who eat no flesh, and some who live on nothing but fresh blood. There are some who may not touch women, and some who are, conveniently, driven by the God to sow their seed where they can. There are some who wash and some who don’t wash. The one I am going to talk about didn’t wash.

2

We were sitting outside Rudi’s Tavern one day, the last fine day of autumn. There was Aristarchos, prefect of a cavalry cohort, and Meno, from the Legion Headquarters, who was drowned in the Danube the following year. There was a lawyer called Polycleites, who didn’t tell anyone why he had come up there on the edge of nowhere, though my father knew. We were, in fact, a little Greek club, all speaking Greek, and we were drinking beer and eating hot sausage; sometimes I think I lived on hot sausage in those days.

This Holy Man was worth looking at. He was well over six feet, and he had matted greasy yellow hair down to his waist. He had clothes on, and not all of them bother: a leather breech clout, and a scarlet cloak down to the hips in the German fashion, and that was new and clean.

He walked past the troops as if he didn’t see them and they were glad to let him alone; some of these gentry have uncertain tempers. He came to the top of the bank, and he very carefully turned till he was looking straight into the eye of the sun. Then he put up his bare arm, and plucked something large and shining out of the empty air. That’s not too difficult if you’ve been trained to it, as I have. It was too far off to see what. Then, whatever it was, he threw it straight at the sun. We followed its course in the air. Whether it was the wind or some God that held it I do not know, but I swear it changed its course, and it fell, quite gently, on to our table. It didn’t even spill anyone’s beer. We looked at it. It didn’t roll. It was a great piece of Amber, twice the size of your two clenched fists. A king’s ransom.

‘Generous, isn’t he?’ said Aristarchos. ‘Oh, no, he’s coming for it. You can smell him from here.’

You could too. Over he came, and he sat down at the table, pushing in between the two soldiers and opposite me. I felt a bit of a devil, so as he sat down I made a few of the right passes and vanished the Amber, on to my lap under the table.

‘Careful,’ said Aristarchos. ‘You’ll be turned into a toad in another minute.’

However, the Holy Man didn’t seem surprised. He just sat. There was no harm in being polite.

‘Beer, Holy Sir,’ I offered.

‘Tiwaz has laid it on me. I drink no strong drink.’ He had a strong northern accent. One of the tavern servants brought a jug of water, and filled him a beaker.

He’d drawn it half an hour before out of the river. Never drink water unless you’ve seen it drawn; usually then you don’t want to any more. The Holy Man must have had a stomach made of pottery; the water was darker than the beer.

He looked at the knives on the table. He leaned across and picked up Polycleites’s knife. Polycleites opened his mouth and the other three of us all kicked him under the table. The Holy Man said, in German, ‘Iron, iron, iron,’ three times, just like that. He spun the knife on the table. When it stopped, the handle pointed to him, the point to me. He did the same thing with Aristarchos’s knife, then with Meno’s. Each time, the point of the knife looked straight at me. Last, he took my knife. He spun it. This time, the point came to him, the hilt to me. He drank again.

He looked at me. His blue eyes bored into my black. After a while he looked away. He looked at my hair. At that time, it was still possible that I might follow my father in the Temple, and my hair and beard had been uncut since birth. My hair was long as his, black and clean against his dirty yellow.

He asked, ‘What is your name, Roman?’

I didn’t feel like arguing about Romans and Greeks, they all looked alike to him, anyway. I said,

‘I am Photinus.’

‘Photan, Votan, Woden, Odin,’ he repeated, trying out all the variants which the Germans used. Germans can’t learn to speak Greek, their tongues are too short, and they had great difficulty with the initial Ph of my name, turning it sometimes into a digamma, sometimes into a double u and sometimes a single u, sometimes dropping it altogether.

‘And what is your name, Holy Sir?’

‘I have no name.’

‘How do men call you, then?’

‘I have no name. Men call me Joy.’

He stood up. He had the Amber in his hand. I had not seen or felt him take it back. It worried me. I stood up with him. I did not want to, I just felt I would. Always, in the north, whatever I did, even when I must have been obeying the command of a God, I felt I was doing what I wished.

He went back to the quay. He stood where he had stood before, this time most carefully placing his back to the sun, so that his shadow fell straight before him. Again he flung the Amber straight up into the air, straight above his head, and the sun caught it and it shone so that we could all mark it and see it curve down into the waters of the Danube. There were a dozen legionaries who spent the next week, all day and every day, diving for it, but they never found it.

There were a lot of people watching, mostly German. Joy turned away from the river. I had been expecting him to go back across the ferry, but no, he walked away, across the German quarter. I followed him. I had to. We came to a place by the Carnuntum road where there was an oak tree in an open space.

When he stopped there were about thirty or forty Germans with us. Two had spades. Without a word they began to dig. They dug a grave, seven feet long and two feet wide. When it was about four feet deep, others came and spread a layer of brushwood and twigs in the bottom. There was a great heap of brushwood too that they left by the graveside.

Joy turned to me and said in quite beautiful Greek, with no trace of an accent:

‘I go to my Hesperides. I go to renew my youth.’

Another German came forward with a long rope. Joy tied a noose in it and placed it round his own neck. It struck me that there was something wrong. Joy’s vows were to Tiwaz. But hanging was how you sacrificed to Wude, the Wind God; you hanged the victim from a branch, wind about him, wind beneath him, the wind squeezed from his body.

Joy climbed into the tree. He sat astride a branch about ten feet up. He looked about him, and then threw me the end of the rope.

‘Hold!’ he said.

I passed the end of the rope around my body and braced myself. I felt the jerk as he jumped. The strain lasted a moment. Then a knife flashed and someone cut the rope. I turned to see. A dozen Germans held Joy’s rigid body. The face was swollen, the tongue protruded.

I touched him. Born in Apollo’s house, I knew where to touch him. In the temple, in the throat, there was the pulse of a day-old chick.

They laid him in the grave. Over him they heaped more brushwood. They covered all with a few inches of earth. We all went away.

Each day I went back at noon to the oak tree. The grave was untouched, the earth drying on the brushwood. On the ninth day the grave was open. In it was a layer of ash and charred twigs. There was no body alive or dead, burnt or unburnt. Where Joy was I did not know.

None of my friends ever mentioned again that struggle in the tavern. None of the Germans under the tree, many of them men I knew, ever mentioned it again. Otho never spoke of it at all. But he knew.

3

There was just one other thing wrong with Vindabonum. Or right, depending on your point of view. There were an awful lot of men, gentlemen, that is, and not many ladies. There were plenty for the legionaries and the Germans, I mean, but not so many that you could really associate with. There were a few local gentry, if you had a low standard for gentrydom, and some of the auxiliary and legionary officers were married, but too many of these had picked up their wives in the fish-market when they were in the ranks. So the really attractive ones were rare, and those honey pots drew a lot of wasps.

The effect of this was not altogether what you might imagine. There wasn’t really anything for either men or women to do a great deal of the time. Nothing for the women, except to run small houses with cheap slaves. Very little for officers in third-rate regiments on garrison duty. A few, like Aristarchos, would go out to find something to do, and they didn’t stay long, even if they lived. But even that kind of garrison life entails a fair amount of detached duty at isolated posts and all kinds of chances to get out into the country. This didn’t mean that the ladies were more accessible. It only meant that the ladies made all the running.

There were a fair variety of doctors in Vindabonum. There were half a dozen Greeks, a couple of Jews, and a whole crowd of Germans, who might be anything from properly trained priests to witches hung with charms. Any of them was perfectly capable of looking after broken arms or sprains or the occasional stab wounds. After every tavern brawl, one of the Greeks, who had been in Egypt and was a specialist, a real specialist recognised by the military, would have a spate of business relieving skull fractures. Most of these were due to Rudi’s chucker-out, a man called Donar. He was something of a mystery. He sounded like a northerner, and had been working as a smith, but had thrown this up on a sudden in the autumn to work for Rudi. He was not tall, but burly, very muscular, and he had a fine crop of red hair and beard.

So for routine medicine the town was well provided. But when my father arrived, and they realised that he wasn’t going to practise, in spite of all his prestige, the local doctors adopted him as a kind of elder statesman of medicine. The way they showed this was quite simple. When they got anything that was quite incurable like visitations of boils or sores, they would pass it on to him as a superior operator. Once Milo, the trepanning specialist, even sent around a skull fracture he wasn’t keen on, just alive, with the brains oozing out. Of course the man died. Luckily the family chose to believe it wasn’t my father who killed him, but the bouncing around in the ox wagon from door to door. So they sued Milo, and Polycleites was drunk again that day and lost the case for him. Nobody ever tried to sue Rudi, or Donar.

A lot of other odd cases arrived. There were facial tics and cases of paralysis and just plain madness. Most of them came from citizens, not from Germans. Those were probably afraid that they’d have to pay. Once my father found he was practising again, he began to charge on a swingeing scale.

‘Patients don’t trust you if they don’t pay,’ he would tell me. ‘If they want to get well, they have to do something about it themselves. The only thing they can do is pay. So I make them pay.’

He would never have me around when he was dealing with these cases, but there was one winter evening when he began to explain his methods.

‘There’s not much you can do to tics, and so on. I just ask them how it got started. They become so interested in telling me about it that they forget to tic. First of all they have short spells of not twitching. Next they get to the stage when they don’t twitch at all in the surgery. Then they get so excited they stop twitching an hour before they get here, in sheer anticipation, and they forget to start twitching again till a couple of hours after they leave.

‘There are other things, too. Do you know how these ailments start? Take Julia Scapella, for instance. How much older do you think old Scapellus is than she? Twenty years? There he is, senior centurion of the Legion. Not only that, it makes him chief of staff for six thousand infantry, four cavalry regiments, and heaven knows how many minor posts and storehouses. Think of the pickings.

‘Well, now he’s static, he begins to think he ought to have a wife to suit his dignity, none of these early marriages with fishwives for him, and off he sends to a broker in Rome, probably the one he got his name through. Up the girl comes, never seen him before, doesn’t know a thing, and it comes as a bit of a shock. Then she begins to get boils on her … well, she gets boils. So he begins that round of staff visits, and they get longer and longer, and she begins to appreciate the good things of life she’s missing. And now she’s looking for treatment. The treatment is obvious. But not to her.’

It was to me, though, and it didn’t take long to begin it, not with that bit of inside knowledge, and what I could easily pick up about Scapellus’s roster of visits. Not long, either, before Julia was paying a good fee for the complete cure of her boils, and I am pleased to say that my father made no attempt to avoid splitting it two ways. But this was what started all the trouble, in the spring.

4

It was one of the nights Otho came to dinner. He often came to dinner, or we went to him, as he had rented us the house next door to his, close to the west gate. This was a quiet affair, not like the big parties my father often used to give in those days for the other doctors, and people of better standing. There were just the three of us, and we were discussing the general state of trade.

‘So what are we in business here for?’ Otho asked. He knew more about the situation than anyone else on the river, which was why we employed him.

‘We trade in timber and hides, and wax. Some slaves, ragged savages, some furs, ragged pelts from moth-eaten bears (I will tell you some day how the mother moth finds her way back to her nest in the moving bear). Marcomen bring them down to the ferry, ragged Marcomen. We pay them in pots, wine, silver. Good round silver, beautiful shining silver. We pay them in coins, silver coins. They don’t want coin because they want to spend it, it’s just that when silver comes in coin they know how pure it is. If those oafs in Rome knew how much trouble they cause each time they debase it. They know all about that, out in Germany. ‘We want old denarii,’ they tell me. ‘Two-horse denarii, one of those or two of the new kind.’ They want wine … wine … wine …’ I filled his cup.

‘They want wine, red wine. They want pottery, red Samian pottery, the lovely red shine of the glaze. And glass, too, glass from Campania, glass they want more than gold. Gold? What do they want with gold? A little piece of gold pays for a lot of hides, and there it is, a little piece. But for the same hides you can have enough silver to make into the mount for a drinking horn or a morse to fasten your cloak with. And if the silver you start off with is coin, two-horse denarii that you melt down, then you know you’ve got good silver.’

‘Silver as a raw material for an industry,’ mused my father.

‘But there is something that comes down, but not often, and for that I always give silver. It glows … it shines …’

‘Amber,’ I breathed. ‘Perhaps once a month, perhaps less often you see that. High profit, perhaps, but not what you’d call an important article of trade.’

‘Not now, not now.’ I gave Otho more wine, it was worth staying in for, to hear this kind of thing.

‘Sixty, seventy years ago, this was a great place for the Amber trade. Those days, the Romans came up from Aquileia, up the Marc River, to trade for Amber with the Marcomen. There were real Marcomen there, then, my fathers. The Amber came down, Amber by the wagon load, think of it, by the wagon load, red glowing Amber. They paid for the Amber, and then they paid our wagoners to take it down to Aquileia, and then we sold them the oxen out of the wagons, all thin and tired from the journey, as fat stock. Ah, those were the fine days …’

‘How did they end?’ I asked.

‘Herman came. First he beat the Romans up in the north, three legions he cut up and not one word heard of them again. We had our Good King then, my grandfather Maroboduus. Herman defeated him, drove him out. All our fine warriors dead, our women raped, our children sold, all our nobles driven out, scattered, dead, dead. The Good King, he died in Ravenna. They made us all citizens because we hated Herman and so did the Romans, but the Marcomen are ruled now by renegades, people of low birth. And Herman and his Thuringians joined with the Cat King, and they hold all the centre of the great plain, and all the Amber they make goes through their hands and through the Thuringians, and to the Rhine. And it is paying the two sets of duty on it, to the Cat King and to the Thuringians, that makes Amber so expensive. But if we could open the road east of the Cat men, and bring Amber down without paying the dues, if someone could go to the Kings of the Amber Road in the north, why then, think of the profits …’

We thought. It was enticing.

‘Could you get anyone to go?’ my father asked.

‘I’ve got someone,’ said Otho. ‘Two men. They know the way to the north and I can trust them. They will take a little silver, but mostly they will go to meet people and find out the way. Occa will go.’

I knew Occa. He was a sergeant-major in Aristarchos’s regiment. I had heard he was due for a long leave.

‘And the other?’

‘Donar.’

A chucker-out? I stopped thinking about the scheme, there was nothing in it, nothing at all.

We gave Otho more wine, and left him crying into his cups that he couldn’t find anyone of spirit willing to go, no one of intelligence or learning. He kept looking at me, and I kept ignoring him. There was nothing in the plan at all. Only wind.

5

Two days later it was the first fine day of spring. I had nothing to do, exiles usually haven’t. I had watched old Scapellus ride out on a long tour down river, all the posts to Carnuntum. That would keep him out of the way for a few nights, and I had already arranged how to occupy them. Then I had a work-out at the cavalry gymnasium. I had been having a few lessons with the cavalry sword, the long springy one. There’s quite a different technique with it. As I came out of the barracks I saw two off-duty legionaries. I wouldn’t have noticed them if they hadn’t been so obviously taking notice of me.

I went off to Rudi’s tavern; I was peckish after the exercise, and as it was so sunny I sat on a bench outside sheltered from the wind, and ordered beer and hot sausages. It was a bit early and while the girl was getting the sausages heated up I ate a couple of salt herrings out of the barrel; they came down from the north too. After a while I looked across the street, and the two legionaries were there, not doing anything but standing against the wall of the house opposite and looking at me. Just looking. They were the same two. Their look made me feel a bit uncomfortable. After a bit, I called the girl and had her move me indoors by the fire. At least it didn’t look as if they had chased me away.

It was more cheerful inside. I gossiped with Rudi’s number one wife. He made the best of both worlds; he told Romans that polygamy was a German custom, and to the Germans he said that was how the Romans lived at home in the south. Then she chivvied the number three wife, who had just brought me the hot sausages, to go and look after two new customers. I looked over, and they were the same two legionaries asking for beer. They bought half a pint each, the cheapest kind, and one of them made an entry on his tablets as if he was keeping account of his expenses. Then they sat nursing their pots and looking at me.

I looked back. They weren’t very formidable in themselves, rather mild in fact. I knew them both by sight. That one looked after living-out permits for legionaries with native wives in the German quarter. The other was with the quartermaster, dealing with arrowheads and other warlike expendable stores. Not the kind of men to beat anybody up, but conscientious, pedantic, reliable, just the kind to use for following. Literate, too, could write a report afterwards.

In this position, how do you get rid of your follower? Easy, I thought, I’ve never known the soldier yet who’ll pass up a free meal. When I finished my sausage, I called over the number three wife.

‘Those two gentlemen over there by the door, nearly through their beer. Get them a good big dish of hot sausages, bread, onions. Any radishes? Good, those too. And a quart apiece of best beer, the strong black stuff. Don’t mention my name, and keep the change.’

I suppose she thought I was mad, but that didn’t matter. She was glad of the tip, since she was saving to buy Rudi another wife so that she’d no longer get all the kicks.

As soon as she got the tray over to their table I got up and slipped out past her. There was enough on that tray to keep them busy for a quarter of an hour at least, even if they gobbled like pigs, and I was barely a furlong from Otho’s house, which had a side door into ours. But as I came to the gate, I looked behind me, and there they were on the street corner looking back at me.

When I got into the house, I found Otho was not alone. Donar was there, and another man. If Donar was burly, this one was cubic, the same measurement tall and wide and deep. It was Occa. I don’t know what his cavalry regiment rode on; elephants, I should think. He had scars all up his arms; rumour says that he had once tackled a bear single handed, and it was the bear that ran away. Looking at him you could believe it. He was rubbing pig fat into his face. Donar was putting a last edge on a sword with a strop. Otho was weighing out silver pieces into bags, fourteen pounds in a bag.

I stopped and looked at them.

‘Off this afternoon?’ I asked.

‘Tonight,’ said Occa.

‘Over the wall,’ said Donar.

‘Over the wall in the dark?’ I asked. It was fairly easy, if nobody spotted you; the town wall was one side of Otho’s courtyard. ‘Why not just walk out of the gates in the morning?’

The three Germans looked at me in a pitying way, as if I had missed the point of something obvious.

‘Nonsense,’ said Occa. ‘No story ever started by stealthily slipping through gates unguarded in day undiminished.’

‘Have you no piety?’ asked Donar. ‘No sense of achievement? A feat at the first gives the Gods greater glory.’

The Germans speak like that when they want to be formal. I could talk their language fairly well by now, and I thought I might try my hand at ceremony one day. At that moment I was content with saying, ’Watch out for your necks on the other side.’ And I went up to my room. I had a couple of hours’ sleep, and then I began to dress for my visit to Julia. I was still thinking about Donar sneaking out of the town in the dark, probably leaving behind a handful of bad debts and a couple of sweethearts in the family way.

I had some dinner in my room, and then I set out for Julia’s. I crossed our courtyard, and the gate keeper opened up for me. I stepped out into the dark street and stood for a moment with the open gate at my back. I looked about. In a sheltered alcove a little way along there were two men standing. They were not in the least concerned with keeping out of the moonlight, but only with keeping out of the wind. They were easy to recognise, even at that distance. As I looked at the two watchers, someone seized my arm from behind and pulled me back into the courtyard.

‘Have you no sense?’ asked Aristarchos. ‘Haven’t you seen them?’

‘Seen them?’ I tried to be reasonable. ‘They’ve been on my trail all day. I paid for their dinner, but they didn’t eat it.’

‘Two of my lads did. They told me about it. Do you know who they are?’

‘Yes. Two clerks from Headquarters Century.’

‘Scapellus’s century.’

‘So? Who’s afraid of that weedy pair? I didn’t even bring a sword out with me. I don’t think either of them has handled a weapon since they did recruit drill.’

‘No,’ said Aristarchos very slowly, as if he were speaking to a foreigner, or to a child. ‘No, not that kind of man. You don’t use that kind of man to kill. I don’t, anyway, and that’s my job, and it’s Scapellus’s job too, and he’s been at it a lot longer than I have. No, that kind of man you use for following and watching, because they do it so well. You use others for killing. I know I would, so Scapellus will.’

‘Do you think that illiterate squarehead can get the better of Greeks like us?’ Scapellus was half German, they said, and the best part of his education he’d got in the barrackroom. Aristarchos was sounding a bit scornful, so there was no harm in buttering him up a bit, even if he was only a Thracian with a thick accent.

‘I don’t know what they’re watching for, and anyway, Scapellus hasn’t any civil jurisdiction … has he …? I’ve got a week before he comes back, and I never knew a quartermaster who couldn’t be bribed.’

‘Let us look at this in detail,’ said Aristarchos smoothly, very much one Greek to another. ‘First of all, they’re watching for you to call on Julia. You’ve been seen before, you know. All Scapellus wants to do is catch you on the premises. Secondly, you haven’t got a week. Scapellus didn’t go to Carnuntum, he only went as far as the tenth milecastle on the river, and he’s coming back by dawn. I did the ration documents for the escort, so that’s how I know. And thirdly, it isn’t only that pair watching. When Scapellus comes back tomorrow, he’s going to find you trussed up and waiting for him.’

‘Now, now,’ I said, ‘that’s going a bit far. Julia wouldn’t let me down like that. Nor the house slaves either, they’re under the thumb.’

‘House slaves don’t come into it. They’re under lock and key. So is Julia, and she’s got that Syrian, Publiolus’s wife, to chaperone her. You didn’t know you’d been seen there too, did you? And then there’s Manlius’s wife, in our regiment, to chaperone them, and that’s how I know. So look, Photinus, don’t go up the street tonight, because a couple of those boys will hustle you in through that door whether you like it or not. And if you don’t go up the street tonight, walk carefully the next few days. If Scapellus comes home and finds the trap sprung and empty, he might come calling.’

‘So what do I do now?’

‘Sit tight and stay indoors for a bit. Now it’s clouding over, I’m going to run for it. If they let Scapellus think I tipped you off I’m for it.’

He slid through the gate into the dark. I knew that when he had been farther down the river, he had had a reputation as a horse thief. Now he moved like it.

I closed the gate and thought hard. If Julia was crying her heart out with the Syrian, there was no knowing what they were plotting between them. I might not have Scapellus round at once, but I’d probably have Publiolus at the door first thing in the morning. How long was I to stay indoors? A week? A month? Even if I did stay inside, there was nothing to stop Scapellus and his bullies from pushing the door in. And once husbands began to think over Julia’s troubles – nothing could hide Scapellus coming back five days early – there was no knowing who might be coming round.

So what was I to do? I could hardly leave Vindabonum; I was, however you looked at it, under arrest. Anywhere else I could just have got out of town, just like I did at Ostia, when the husband came back, and after that unfortunate affair with the pimp in Alexandria, and as for Tyre, I never thought I’d find a Levantine who’d play with my dice. But in each of those places I had a ship to get back to and comrades who were at least as deep in it as I was. But there was no travelling about the Empire for me, with a pack of vengeful husbands all eager to put me under arrest. I was trapped, with the river at my back. Then it struck me. A river is a road, water is a way. I slipped through the internal gate into Otho’s courtyard and went into his office. Otho and Donar looked at me curiously. Occa was greasing his boots.

‘Don’t go for an hour or so,’ I told them. ‘I’m coming with you.’

Germany