by Eugène Sue
“The test?” answered Albinik, with an air of sinister doubt. “The test? Who, here, has the right to test the virtue of my wife?”
“The thought of vengeance, which have brought you into the Roman camp, are the thoughts of a haughty soul, roused by injustice and barbarity. The mutilation which you have suffered seemed above all to prove the truth of your words,” resumed the interpreter. “But fugitives always arouse a secret suspicion. The wife often is a test of the husband. Yours is a valiant wife. To inspire such fidelity, you must be a man of courage and of truth. That is what we wished to make sure of.”
“I don’t know,” began the mariner doubtfully, “the licentiousness of your general is well known — —”
“The gods have sent us in you a precious aid; you can become fatal to the Gauls. Do you believe Caesar is foolish enough to wish to make an enemy of you by outraging your wife, at the very moment, perhaps, when he is about to charge you with a mission of trust? No, I repeat: he wished to try you both, and so far the trials are favorable to you.”
Caesar interrupted the interpreter, saying a few words to him. Then bowing respectfully to Meroë, and saluting Albinik with a friendly gesture, he slowly and majestically left the tent.
“You and your wife,” said the interpreter, “are henceforth assured of the general’s protection. He gives you his word for it. You shall no more be separated or disturbed. The wife of the courageous mariner has scorned these rich ornaments,” added the interpreter, collecting the jewels and replacing them in the casket. “Caesar wishes to keep as a reminder of Gallic virtue the poniard which she wore, and which he took from her by ruse. Reassure yourself, she shall not remain unarmed.”
Almost at the same instant, two young freedmen entered the tent. They carried on a large silver tray a little oriental dagger of rich workmanship, and a Spanish saber, short and slightly curved, hung from a baldric of red leather, magnificently embroidered in gold. The interpreter presented the dagger to Meroë and the saber to Albinik, saying to them as he did so:
“Sleep in peace, and guard these gifts of the grandeur of Caesar.”
“And do you assure him,” returned Albinik, “that your words and his generosity dissipate my suspicions. Henceforth he will have no more devoted allies than my wife and myself, until our vengeance be satisfied.”
The interpreter left, taking with him the two freedmen. Albinik then told his wife that when he had been taken into the Roman general’s tent, he had waited for Caesar, in company with the interpreter, up to the moment when they both returned to the tent, under the conduct of a slave. Meroë told in turn what had occurred to her. The couple concluded that Caesar, half drunk, had at first yielded to a foul thought, but that Meroë’s desperate resolve, backed up by the reflection that he was running the risk of estranging a fugitive from whom he might reap good service, had curbed the Roman’s passion. With his habitual trickery and address, he had given, under the pretext of a “trial,” an almost generous appearance to the odious attempt.
CHAPTER IV.
THE TRIAL.
THE NEXT MORNING Caesar, accompanied by his generals, set out for the bank which commanded the mouth of the Loire, where a tent had been set up for him. From this place the sea and its dangerous shores, strewn with sand-bars and rocks level with the water, could be seen in the distance. The wind was blowing a gale. Moored to the bank was a fisherman’s boat, at once solid and light, rigged Gallic fashion, with one square sail with flaps cut in its lower edge. To this craft Albinik and Meroë were forthwith conducted.
“It is stormy, the sea is menacing,” said the interpreter to them. “Will you dare to venture it alone with your wife? There are some fishermen here who have been taken prisoners — do you want their help?”
“My wife and I have before now braved tempests alone in our boat, when we made for my ship, anchored far out from shore on account of bad weather.”
“But now you are maimed,” answered the interpreter. “How will you be able to manage!”
“One hand is enough for the tiller. My companion will raise the sail — the woman’s business, since it is a sort of cloth,” gaily added the mariner to give the Romans faith in him.
“Go ahead then,” said the interpreter. “May the gods direct you.”
The bark, pushed into the waves by several soldiers, rocked a minute under the flappings of the sail, which had not yet caught the wind. But soon, held by Meroë, while her husband managed the tiller, the sail filled, and bellied out to the blast. The boat leaned gently, and seemed to fly over the crests of the waves like a sea-bird. Meroë, dressed in her mariner’s costume, stayed at the prow, her black hair streaming in the wind. Occasionally the white foam of the ocean, bursting from the prow of the boat, flung its stinging froth in the young woman’s noble face. Albinik knew these coasts as the ferryman of the solitary moors of Brittany knows their least detours. The bark seemed to play with the high waves. From time to time the couple saw in the distance the tent of Caesar, recognizable by its purple flaps, and saw gleaming in the sun the gold and silver which decked the armor of his generals.
“Oh, Caesar! — scourge of Gaul — the most cruel, the most debauched of men!” exclaimed Meroë. “You do not know that this frail bark, which at this moment you are following in the distance with your eyes, bears two of your most desperate enemies. You do not know that they have beforehand given over their lives to Hesus in the hope of making to Teutates, god of journeys by land and by sea, an offering worthy of him — an offering of several thousand Romans, sinking in the depths of the sea. It is with hands raised to you, thankful and happy, O, Hesus, that we shall disappear in the bottom of the deep, with the enemies of our sacred Gaul!”
The bark of Albinik and Meroë, almost grazing the rocks and glancing over the surges along the dangerous ashore, sometimes drew away from, sometimes approached the bank. The mariner’s companion, seeing him sad and thoughtful, said:
“Still brooding, Albinik! Everything favors our projects. The Roman general is no longer suspicious; your skill this morning will decide him to accept your services; and to-morrow, mayhap, you will pilot the galleys of our enemies — —”
“Yes, I will pilot them to the bottom, where they will be swallowed up, and we with them.”
“What a magnificent offering to the gods! Ten thousand Romans, perhaps!”
“Meroë,” answered Albinik with a sigh, “then, after ending our lives here, even as the soldiers, brave warriors after all, we shall be resurrected elsewhere with them. They will say to me: ‘It was not through bravery, with the lance and the sword, that you overcame us. No, you slew us without a combat, by treason. You watched at the rudder, we slept in peace and confidence. You steered us on the rocks — in an instant the sea swallowed us. You are like a cowardly poisoner, who would send us to our death by putting poison in our food. Is that an act of valor? No, no longer do you know the open boldness of your fathers, those proud Gauls who fought us half naked, who railed at us in our iron armor, asking why we fought if we were afraid of wounds or death.’”
“Ah!” exclaimed Meroë, sadly and bitterly, “Why did the druidesses teach me that a woman ought to escape the last outrage by death! Why did your mother Margarid tell us so often, as a noble example to follow, the deed of your grandmother Syomara, who cut off the head of the Roman who ravished her, and carrying the head under the skirt of her robe to her husband, said to him these proud and chaste words: ‘No two men living can boast of having possessed me!’ Why did I not yield to Caesar?”
“Meroë!”
“Perhaps you would then have been avenged! faint heart! weak spirit! Must then the outrage be completed, the ignominy swallowed, before your anger is kindled?”
“Meroë, Meroë!”
“It is not enough for you, then, that the Roman has proposed to your wife to sell herself, to deliver herself to him for gifts? It is to your wife — do you hear! — to your wife, that Caesar made that offer of shame!”
“You
speak true,” answered the mariner, feeling anger fire his heart at the memory of these outrages, “I was a spiritless fellow — —”
But his companion went on with redoubled bitterness:
“No, I see it now. This is not enough. I should have died. Then perhaps you would have sworn vengeance over my body. Oh, they arouse pity in you, these Romans, of whom we wish to make an offering to the gods! They are not accomplices to the crime which Caesar attempted, say you? Answer! Would they have come to my aid, these soldiers, these brave warriors, if, instead of relying on my own courage and drawing my strength from my love for you, I had cried, implored, supplicated, ‘Romans, in the name of your mothers, defend me from the lust of your general’? Answer! Would they have come at my call? Would they have forgotten that I was a Gaul — that Caesar was Caesar? Would the ‘generous hearts’ of these brave fellows have revolted? After rape, do not they themselves drown the infants in the blood of their mothers? — —”
Albinik did not allow his companion to finish. He blushed at his lack of heart. He blushed at having an instant forgotten the horrible deeds perpetrated by the Romans in their impious war. He blushed at having forgotten that the sacrifice of the enemies of Gaul was above all else pleasing to Hesus. In his anger, he rang out, for answer, the war song of the Breton seamen, as if the wind could carry his words of defiance and death to Caesar where he stood on the bank:
Tor-e-benn! Tor-e-benn!
As I was lying in my vessel I heard
The sea-eagle calling, in the dead of night.
He called his eaglets and all the birds of the shore.
He said to them as he called:
‘Arise ye, all — come — come.
It is no longer the putrid flesh of the dog or sheep we must have —
It is Roman flesh.’
“Tor-e-benn! Tor-e-benn!
Old sea-raven, tell me, what have you there?
The head of the Roman leader I clutch;
I want his eyes — his two red eyes!’
And you, sea-wolf, what have you there?
‘The heart of the Roman leader I hold —
I am devouring it.’
And you, sea-serpent, what are you doing there,
Coiled ‘round that neck, your flat head so close
To that mouth, already cold and blue?
‘To hear the soul of the Roman leader
Take its departure am I here!’
Tor-e-benn! Tor-e-benn!”
Stirred up, like her husband, by the song of war, Meroë repeated with him, seeming to defy Caesar, whose tent they discerned in the distance:
“Tor-e-benn! Tor-e-benn! Tor-e-benn!”
Still the bark of Albinik and Meroë played with the rocks and surges of those dangerous roads, sometimes drawing off shore, sometimes in.
“You are the best and most courageous pilot I have ever met with, I, who have in my life traveled so much on the sea,” said Caesar to Albinik when he had regained dry land, and, with Meroë, had left the boat. “To-morrow, if the weather is fair, you will guide an expedition, the destination of which you will know at the moment of setting sail.”
CHAPTER V.
INTO THE SHALLOWS.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, at sunrise, the wind being favorable and the sea smooth, the Roman galleys were to sail. Caesar wished to be present at the embarkment. He had Albinik brought to him. Beside the general was a soldier of great height and savage mien. A flexible armor, made of interwoven iron links, covered him from head to foot. He stood motionless, a statue of iron, one might say. In his hand he held a short, heavy, two-edged axe. Pointing out this man, the interpreter said to Albinik:
“You see that soldier. During the sail he will stick to you like your shadow. If through your fault or by treason, a single one of the galleys grates her keel, he has orders to kill you and your companion on the instant. If, on the contrary, you carry the fleet to harbor safely, the general will overwhelm you with gifts. You will then give the most happy mortals cause for envy.”
“Caesar shall be satisfied,” answered Albinik.
Followed by the soldier with the axe, he and Meroë went up into the galley Pretoria which was to lead the fleet. She was distinguished from the other ships by three gilded torches placed on the poop.
Each galley carried seventy rowers, ten sailors to handle the sails, fifty light-armed archers and slingers, and one hundred and fifty soldiers cased in iron from top to toe.
When the galleys had pulled out from shore, the praetor, military commandant of the fleet, told Albinik, through an interpreter, to steer for the lower part of the bay of Morbihan, in the neighborhood of the town of Vannes, where the Gallic army was assembled. Albinik with his hand at the tiller was to convey to the interpreter his orders to the master of the rowers. The latter beat time for the rowers, according to the pilot’s orders, with an iron hammer with which he rapped on a gong of brass. As the speed of the Pretoria, whose lead the rest of the Roman fleet followed, needed quickening or slackening, he indicated it by quickening or slowing the strokes of the hammer.
The galleys, driven by a fair wind, sailed northward. As the interpreter had done before, so now the oldest sailors admired the bold manoeuvre and quick sight of the Gallic pilot. After a sail of some length, the fleet found itself near the southern point of the bay of Morbihan, and knew that now it was to enter into those channels, the most dangerous on all the coast of Brittany because of the great number of small islands, rocks and sand banks, and above all, because of the undercurrents, which ran with irresistible violence.
A little island situated in the mouth of the bay, which was still more constricted by two points of land, divided the inlet into two narrow lanes. Nothing in the surface of the sea, neither breakers nor foam nor change in the color of the waters gave token of the slightest difference between the two passes. Nevertheless, in one lay not a rock, while the other was strewn with danger. In the latter channel, after a hundred strokes of the oars, the ships in single file, led by the Pretoria, would have been dragged by a submarine current toward a reef of rocks which was visible in the distance, and over which the sea, calm everywhere else, broke tumultuously. The commanders of the several galleys could perceive their peril only one by one; each would be made aware of it only by the rapid drifting of the galley ahead of him. Then it would be too late. The violence of the current would drag and hurl vessel upon vessel. Whirling in the abyss, fouling the bottom, and crashing into one another, their timbers would part and they would sink into the watery depths with all on board, or else dash themselves on the rocky reef. A hundred more strokes of the oar, and the fleet would be annihilated in this channel of ruin.
The sea was so calm and beautiful that not one of the Romans had any suspicion of danger. The rowers accompanied with songs the measured fall of their oars. Of the soldiers some were cleaning their arms; some were stretched out in the bow asleep; others were playing at huckle-bones. A short distance from Albinik, who was still at the helm, a white haired veteran with battle-scarred face was seated on one of the benches in the poop, between his two sons, fine young archers of eighteen or twenty years. They were conversing with their father, each with one arm familiarly laid on a shoulder of the old warrior, whom they thus held tight in their embrace; all three seemed to be talking in pleasant confidence, and to love one another tenderly. In spite of the hatred he entertained for the Romans, Albinik could not help sighing with pity when he thought of the fate of these three soldiers, who did not imagine they were so near the jaws of death.
Just then one of those light boats used by the Irish seamen shot out from the bay of Morbihan by the safe channel. Albinik had, on his journeys, made frequent voyages to the coast of Ireland, an island that is inhabited by people of Gallic stock. They speak a language almost the same as that of the Gauls, yet difficult to understand for one who had not been as often on their coast as Albinik had.
The Irishman, either because he feared that he would be pursued and caught by one of the m
en-of-war which he saw approaching, and wished to avoid that danger by coming up to the fleet of his own accord, or else because he had useful information to give, steered straight toward the Pretoria. Albinik shuddered. Perhaps the interpreter would question the Irishman, and he might point out the danger which the fleet ran in taking one of the passages. Albinik therefore gave orders to bend to the oars, in order to get inside the channel of destruction before the Irishman could join the galleys. But after a few words exchanged between the military commandant and the interpreter, the latter ordered them to wait for the boat which was drawing near, so as to ask for tidings of the Gallic fleet. Albinik obeyed; he did not dare to oppose the commandant for fear of arousing suspicion. Before long the little Irish shallop was within hailing distance of the Pretoria. The interpreter, stepping forward, hailed the Irishman in Gallic:
“Where do you come from, and where are you bound to? Have you met any vessels at sea?”
At these questions the Irishman motioned that he did not understand. Then he began in his own half-Gallic tongue:
“I am coming to the fleet to give you news.”
“What language does the man speak?” said the interpreter to Albinik. “I do not catch his meaning, although his language does not seem entirely strange.”
“He speaks half Irish, half Gallic,” answered Albinik. “I have often trafficked on the coasts of his country. I understand the tongue. The fellow says he has steered up to us to give us important news.”
“Ask him what his news is.”
“What information have you to give?” called Albinik to the Irishman.
“The Gallic vessels,” answered he, “coming from various ports of Brittany, joined forces yesterday evening in the bay I have just left. They are in great number, well armed, well manned, and cleared for action. They have chosen their anchorage at the foot of the bay, near the harbor of Vannes. You will not be able to see them till after doubling the promontory of A’elkern.”