Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) by John James Read Free Book Online Page A

way I could then. A slab of rye bread and a draught of beer, not the rich dark stuff I had been drinking, but the ordinary thin bitter brew, well beer we used to call it, and I was able to watch what was happening again. There was a minstrel now, standing by the fire and singing away, some long involved song about a hero who was killing a dragon, very slowly. For line after monotonous line the sword slid past one scale after another. I must have looked bored, for Haro leant across and said to me:
    ‘Good, isn’t he? But what does Greek sound like?’
    Now, when people say that to you, as they often do abroad, it’s no use saying something like ‘No, thank you’, because they always want a translation. I had to think of something to suit the company. This was hardly the time or the place for Sappho. Homer, in contrast, was both too near and too far away from them in spirit. I took something which would show them bothhow near the Greek mood could come to theirs, and at the same time how foreign to them was its precision. I spoke the two lines of the epitaph on the Spartans at Thermopylae:
    Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
    That here obedient to their laws we lie.
    ‘And what does it mean?’ they all shouted together.
    ‘Give me some quiet and I will tell you,’ I said. Now was the moment to see if I really could make verse in German. Wolf, with excellent aim after the amount of beer he had taken, threw a mutton bone at the bard, who fell into the brazier, and while some people poured beer over him to put the flames out, and others poured beer into him to revive him, Haro passed me his harp. I tried a few chords. It was not too different from a lyre, provided I only used it to beat out the rhythm. Anyone brought up on hexameters should find German verse easy, I thought, drunk or sober. Whether I was right or wrong is not for me to say, but as far as I remember this is what I sang:
    Men went to battle, there was no returning.
    Go tell in Sparta, low burns our pyre.
    We were three hundred, they ten times ten thousand.
    From sea to mountain set we the shield wall.
    Over the hill flank came the betrayer.
    Broken the shield wall, bloody the sea shore.
    Our Kings commanded us, bear no shield back again.
    Men went to battle, there was no returning.
    It didn’t leave a dry eye in the place. Men were weeping for their lost comrades, for their own lost youth, for the days when they too might have stood to die in a shield wall, not gone home as soon as they were outnumbered, like sensible married men. To break the ocean of sobbing, Haro shouted:
    ‘Bring a cloak, put down a cloak, let’s have a cloak and a couple of them on it.’
    Two of the retainers came forward with a cloak, an old thing, stained and torn, but a big one, a horseman’s cloak like mine.They spread it on the floor between the brazier and the top table. Out of the confusion at the bottom of the hall, two men were pushed, half reluctant, to stand on the cloak. Each had a shield, one daubed with an eagle, one with a bear. Somebody brought them their swords.
    You may not have seen a German sword, not to handle. They are different from ours. Ours have a point; the legionary’s is short and stiff, the cavalry trooper’s sword is long and springy, but each has a point, and you use them on the move, putting all your own fifteen stone or the speed of your horse behind it, to drive through leather or mail.
    Germans, on the contrary, like to fight standing still. They depend on the strength of their arms and the weight of their weapons to do the damage, and so their swords are two-edged, but rounded at the tip, not pointed. The sword is always long, four fingers broad at the hilt, and two fingers at the tip. Down from hilt to tip, on each side, there runs a groove, some say to collect the blood, some say to make the blade stronger, some say because blades were always made that way. The hilts they hang round with charms and rings, and they usually keep them