Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 theGerman 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