This novel is almost a 'historical' detective story, in which the detecting team are a Pictish shaman and his gang, and the Roman officer who employs them to find a kidnapped girl. It's sort of Stevenson on acid, with a nod to the heroic fantasy Pictland of Robert E.Howard, and a touch of Satyriconic kinkiness thrown in, just in case.
1.
It was in a small inn three day’s ride from our most northerly camp that I first clapped eyes on the so-called shaman, Dan Bleflum. Not that it corresponded to anything we would call an inn, being more of a cross between a hut and a tunnel, a black centipede of a place you practically had to slide down the throat of to get into. If you could bring yourself to do so -- and I had no choice but to steel myself to it -- you would then find yourself bent double in grimy, wattle-walled darkness, with a few lamps on the stamped-earth floor burning down the oil of what smelt like some well-rotted sea creature. The roof was uneven, hardly-worked beams, and there were no tables, no chairs – just bodies sprawled here and there and not one of them as much as lifting their head to look at you.
This was one of the ill-reputed heather ale houses, where the Picts would descend into week-long stupors of communal drinking, sometimes because of festivals in their incomprehensible calendar, sometimes in the face of calamities with their crops or their interminable skirmishing and thievery, but most often in response to some sullen secret impulse which that people has to curl up like dogs in their own dirt, indeed to roll in filth as dogs most like to do. And so it was I found the famous wizard, so incoherent I couldn’t tell whether he was in a genuine trance or simply, like the wretches around him, stupefied with drink.
I could not distinguish him by his garb, which was as begrimed as his fellows’, simply a long stretch of some thick wool twisted about him like a parody of the toga, with faint traces of some rectilinear pattern upon it under the layers of grease and the plentiful spatters from both ends of his digestive processes. But I had been told he always travelled with a small retinue, and these were distinctive enough guardians to tell me that between them lay what amounted to a priest of these Northern savages.
One was a bald walrus of a man, his beard and moustaches parted into two greying forks like dull fangs. His pate was tattooed with two great stags' heads, which I had read were central to their religion, their horns locked in the rut, and his bare arms were wrapped around here and there with what looked like dried intestines -- possibly, given their fixation on masculinity, ram or stallion. A couple of dagger hafts jutted from his belt. This one sat upright, apparently unaffected by the horns and bowls strewn around the den, though I later found that he was so intoxicated he could neither speak nor stand. This was Pechem, a notorious former highwayman, who was Bleflum’s sworn bodyguard, able to maintain the appearance of ferocious alertness even when barely conscious.
The other figure was a curled-up, waif-like figure, head swathed with a black ragged scarf, who made my heart lurch with hope – had he somehow found my target by some Hyperborean magicry before I had even declared my most desperate mission? Then memory soberly rebuked my over-eagerness: this was only the woman who always travelled with him, the obscure Nel-Ebri, who, it was variously rumoured, was his sister, his slave or his wife, not that Picts seemed to make much distinction between these categories in their dealings with women lower than royal blood. Those were quite another matter, and so, I rapidly discovered, was Nel-Ebri.
She alone of that narrow hall of drunkards was regarding me with a black and intelligent eye. I immediately realised my attempt to appear civilian would not fool that regard, and bared my head, so that my military crop made my status clear, and squatted down before her, glancing at the lolling figure between her and Pechem, the great Bleflum himself, who lay nipping at the smoky air with finger and thumb like a crab on its back, and rolling the whites of his eyes (even these were discoloured as the tusks of a boar), muttering rapidly in so guttural a voice I was unable to catch a single word.
‘Is your master wrapped in visions?’ I asked her quietly. ‘I have a good coin I would like to show him, and a question I need to ask.’
‘He’s sleeping,’ she answered, ‘or as near to it as he can get. Come back in three days.’
My report had covered this type of response. Agents who had taken Bleflum or his associates at their word invariably returned to find not only no trace of the mage or his retinue, but also that no-one could remember ever having seen any persons of that description.
‘My coin is so heavy and so devoted to its new owner that it will not let me leave his side. Perhaps it is my question that he dreams about.’
‘He dreams about the Drowning, as always. Let me see this loyal coin.’
‘I have its little sisters, just for you,’ I countered, and held out some coppers.
By way of response she lifted up her skirt with a weary gesture, and exposed her genitals. These were cleaner than I might have expected, had I expected to be shown them at all. The pubic hair was also neatly trimmed in an unusual manner, so that instead of the dark lateen one might expect, there was an oval, almost an orb of thick black hair. The absurd impression occurred to me that it looked compellingly like a sea urchin. I was later to learn that there were fashions among Pictish women in this matter, some favouring squares, diamonds, or even rudimentary silhouettes of trees and fish.
'No, that wasn't what I meant,' I hastened to say, pushing her hand and the garment down. I'd had an unpleasant encounter with a Pictish whore before leaving camp. It had ended in bloodshed, albeit minor, over some incomprehensible slight -- how can you insult a whore?
In any case, it had left me far from eager to repeat the experience. As if being deliberately obtuse, she then exposed the shaman's genitals, still with an air of bored enquiry, as though we were bargaining. His member was partly erect, spindly, rather bulbous at the tip, and far from clean. It kept twitching with an unpleasant air of prescience, as though it were sniffing something out. Again I pushed her hand down, then pulled it towards me and pressed into it twice the amount I'd intended.
This seemed to have been her aim throughout, as she smiled to herself, tucked the coins away and appeared inclined to pay me no further attention. I ventured another look at Bleflum, whose face was momentarily bared by his restless turning. He was no longer a young man, but by no means as old as I’d been led to think. Somewhere around fifty, he was, unusually among a menfolk much given to facial hair, clean-shaven, with a matted crown of grey receding from a beetled, much-creased brow. The eyes were deep-set amid many wrinkles, and there were more lines around the thick-lipped mouth, and great bunches of muscles at the stubbled junctions of the jaws. All this either implied much determination, or much effort at determination. He was also dribbling copiously, a side-effect of the ale.
‘Tell me about this drowning,’ I asked Nel-Ebri, who seemed to have fallen into a small trance of her own. She gave me another shrewd glance, and indicated a half-empty bowl with her foot.
‘Have you tasted the heather ale?’ she asked, in a bright voice, as though we sat in sunshine at a fine table. ‘Here it is brewed well – more dreams, less blindness.’
This was hardly a selling point, but she leaned in and added, ‘There are stories which you cannot hear from outside an intoxication, and this would be one of them.’
I picked up the cheap clay dish and tried not to sniff at the contents, which were milky and lethargically fizzy. There was a layer of greenish-yellow looped over the surface of the liquid I refused to think of as sputum from its last drinker, who may well have been Bleflum. I also tried not to think of the state of his teeth, and sank the bowl in one, thus saving myself the prospect of revisiting it.
As it made its ropy way down my gullet, I was reminded of swallowing shellfish, that acrid, brackish quality that climbs the back of your throat and makes you wonder if, this time, you’ve swallowed the off specimen. It tasted sweet enough, but with a sickly, sour butter edge. I reminded myself, if you’ve tasted troopers’ wine, cut with vinegar to an inch of its life, and if you’ve (barely) survived your uncle’s grappa, then heather ale should hold no fears. Nonetheless, it did.
‘When Himself was still a boy, and a bright boy at that, the darling of the most blessed clan, which we no longer name; when the Fisherman was able to take up herring with a dip of his hand into the lightest wave, and the Forester could fell a fir by looking at it with his sharpest glance; when the Smith could smelt a sword simply by breathing upon it his hardiest breath, and the mushrooms gathered thick among the cattle’s hooves and gave our people the truest dreams, he was taken to the great well at the Court of Gruoch, for he was rumoured to have great potential for the Seeing, and held up by one heel by a Princess of the Firth, and she was more beautiful than the dolphin, mightier than a lonely shark, and she held him below the water of the sacred well firstly for the span of five breaths, but he glimpsed nothing of the Guardians, so then…’
As she spoke, she let the scarf fall away so that I could see her profile for the first time. This was nothing spectacular: she had a long thin nose that dragged on the groove over her lip, so that both twitched as she spoke, and the teeth thus revealed were prominent and twisting. But her eyes had that same flash as the dreaming Bleflum’s, and I could hear the lilt that intoxication gave to all their voices, as she let the incantatory coils of the story wind around her brain. I could already feel the same thing catching faintly at mine, a kind of drag within the trunk and the skull, as though your skeleton is somehow sinking into the floor although your flesh has not moved at all. I realised I’d slipped into a daze, and the story had advanced somewhat.
‘...after the fourth hour’s immersions they laid him out along the clean sea-grass and told his father he would never be a shaman, and the old man covered up his head with mud and weed and went from that place. Towards the sunset he expelled the holy water from his stomach and gullet and sat up to see cold night coming in, and understood he had no future within the college of the shamans, and so no home among the people of his own clan, and thus began his wanderings…’
At some point a figure I supposed must be the inn-keeper had pressed another brimming bowl of heather ale into my hands and extracted some coins from me I had not meant to give him, and this bowl had followed its predecessor far more easily down a throat that felt both far too warm and far too numb. As she carried on the apparently endless tale of his meanderings, I found myself slowly collapsing toward its sleeping subject in such a manner as to feel almost part of his story. I too seemed to be on the prow of the fishing boat where his first vision struck him, as, leaning out over the water to haul on a net, he found himself staring into the face of his first familiar, what we call a porpoise, but the Picts have a somewhat different concept of.
I was looking at the fish’s broad flat face as it poked from the collar of the water, and it seemed to me it was my own reflection, but somehow crossed with that of Bleflum, and I could no longer tell if it was in the inn or in the dream that the face of the fish or the shaman or my own reflection suddenly sat stark upright and yelled, ‘Faker! I know your true name!’
I struggled to make a coherent reply but instead found my head speeding towards the floor with an irresistible, almost exhilarating momentum.
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