by Talbot Mundy
She reddened in the firelight, stood up very proudly, biting her lip. Her eyes glittered, but she managed to control herself; there were no tears.
“Shall I bear a coward’s children?” she demanded.
“I know not,” said Tros. “You shall not bear mine. I will save you, if I can, from Caesar.”
Tears were very near the surface now, but pride, and an emotion that she did her utmost to conceal, aided her to hold them back.
“Forgive me!” she said suddenly.
Her hands dropped, but she raised them again and folded them across her breast.
“Forgive me, Tros! I was mad for a short minute. It is maddening to be a coward’s wife. I tempted you, to see how much a man you truly are.”
Conops’ knife hilt tapped the floor in slow staccato time.
“Kiss me, and say good-by,” she coaxed, unclasping her hands again.
“Nay, no good-byes!” he answered, laughing. “We shall meet again. And as for kissing, a wise seaman takes no chances near the rocks, Gwenhwyfar!”
Stung — savage — silent, she gestured with her head toward the door, folding her arms on her breast, and Tros, bowing gravely, strode out into darkness. Conops shut the door swiftly behind them.
“If this isle were in our sea, she would have thrown a knife,” said Conops, twitching his shoulder-blades. “Master, you have made an enemy.”
“Not so,” Tros answered. “I have found one. Better the rocks in sight than shoals unseen, my lad! Let us see now who our friends are.”
He strode toward the torchlight, where the old High Druid was still holding forth, swaying back and forward on the summit of the rock as he leaned to hurl his emphasis. More chariots had come and horses’ heads were nodding on the outskirts of the crowd — phantoms in the torch-smoke.
Tros kept to the deeper shadows, circling the crowd until he could approach Commius and Caswallon from the rear. He was stared at by new arrivals as he began to work his way toward them, but the Britons had too good manners and too much dignity to interfere with him or block his way.
The women in the crowd stared and smiled, standing on tiptoe, some of them, frankly curious, but neither impudent nor timid. Most of them were big- eyed women with long eyelashes and well-combed braided hair hanging to the waist. Nearly all had golden ornaments; but there were slave women among them, who seemed to belong to another race, dressed in plain wool or even plainer skins.
It was a crowd that, on the whole, was more than vaguely conscious of the past it had sprung from.
Glances cast at Tros were less of admiration than expectancy, to see him exhibit manners less civilized than theirs — the inevitable attitude of islanders steeped in tradition and schooled in the spiritual mysticism of the druids; proud, and yet considerate of the stranger; warlike, because decadence had undermined material security, but chivalrous because chivalry never dies until the consciousness of noble ancestry is dead, and theirs was living.
Commius the Gaul, who, when he was not deliberately controlling his expression, had the hard face and the worried look of a financier, was seated beside Caswallon. The chief was standing in the chariot, his gold-and-amber shoulder-ornaments shining in the torchlight. He smiled when he caught sight of Tros, and with a nudge stirred Commius out of a brown study. Commius, adjusting his expression carefully, got down from the chariot, took Tros’s arm, and led him to the chief.
“Tros, son of Perseus, Prince of Samothrace,” he announced. Caswallon stretched out a long, white, sleeveless arm, on which strange pagan designs had been drawn in light-blue woad. It was an immensely strong arm, with a heavy golden bracelet on the wrist.
They shook hands and, without letting go, the chieftain pulled Tros up into the chariot. Britomaris, from about a chariot’s length away, watched thoughtfully, peering past a woman’s shoulder.
The old High Druid was talking too fast for Tros to follow him; he was holding the rapt attention of the greater part of the crowd, and it was less than a minute before Tros was forgotten. The old druid had them by the ears, and their eyes became fixed on his face as if he hypnotized them.
But his eloquence by no means hypnotized himself. His bright old eyes scanned the faces in the torchlight as if he were judging the effect of what he said, and he turned at intervals to face another section of the crowd, signing to the torchmen to distribute their light where he needed it.
Moreover, he changed his tone of voice and his degree of vehemence to suit whichever section of the crowd he happened to be facing. There were groups of dark-haired swarthy men and women, who looked consciously inferior to the taller, white-skinned, reddish-haired breed, or, if not consciously inferior, then aware that the others thought them so. He spoke to them in gentler, more persuasive cadences.
Caswallon watched the druid in silence for a long time; yet he hardly appeared to be listening; he seemed rather to be waiting for a signal. At last he lost patience and whispered to a man in leather sleeveless tunic who leaned on a spear beside the chariot.
The man whispered to one of the younger druids, who approached the pulpit rock from a side that at the moment was in darkness. Climbing, he lay there in shadow, and, watching his opportunity when the old man paused for breath, spoke a dozen words.
The old druid nodded and dismissed him with a gesture. The younger druid worked his way back through the crowd to chariot wheel and whispered to Caswallon.
The man with the spear received another whispered order from the chief, and he repeated it to the others. Without any appearance of concerted action, the torchmen began to edge themselves in both directions toward the far side of the rock, until the near side was almost in total darkness.
Then Caswallon took the reins without a word to Tros, and the man with the spear spoke to Commius the Gaul, who climbed into another chariot. The horses began to plunge, but Caswallon pulled them backward, edging the chariot gradually into deeper shadow.
Two other chariots followed suit; and in one there was a woman, who drove, and who had magnificent brown hair that reached below her waist. Conops jumped in and, curling on the floor, made ready to cling to Tros’s knee in case of need; being a seaman, he had no love and less experience of chariots.
Suddenly Caswallon wheeled his team and sent it at full gallop toward the end of the lane that led into the forest. She who drove the second chariot wheeled after him; and a third, in which Commius the Gaul was clinging, bumped over the rotting tree-roots in the wake.
The pace, once the horses sprang into their stride, was furious. Tros, forever mindful of his dignity, clung nevertheless to the chariot side, setting his teeth as the wheels struck ruts and branches, feeling as if the dimly seen milk-white of the horses were foaming waves, and himself in a ship’s bow on the lookout for unknown rocks.
They plunged into the forest, where the oaks met overhead. There was a sound, that might have been the sea, of wind in the upper branches — a sensation of tremendous speed — and nothing visible except the sudden- looming tree-trunks, which seemed to miss the wheel by hair’s breadths.
There was a thudding of wheels and a thunder of pursuing hoofs, a splash now and then where shallow water lay in unseen hollows, a smell of horse-sweat, and of rotting leaves, and a whirring of unseen bats. One bat struck Tros in the face, and fell to the floor of the chariot, where Conops drew his knife and slew it — believing then, and forever afterwards, that he had killed a devil.
The horses appeared to be frantic and out of hand, and yet Caswallon managed them with art that concealed all method, standing with one foot resting on a sort of step, no more than feeling at the horses’ mouths, balancing his weight as if by instinct in advance of sudden turns and low obstructions that the horses took in their stride but that threw the chariot a yard in air.
Long — endless to Tros — darkness, and then moonlight silhouetting ghostly tree-trunks, a splash through a shadowy ford, then through a mile of stumps and seedlings at the forest’s edge into a belt of fern and lush grass g
listening with dew, and at last a rolling down, where patches of chalk gleamed milk-white under the moon and the track swung around a hillside under a scattering of fleecy clouds.
Then Caswallon glanced at Tros, and Tros forced a good-natured grin:
“O Chief,” he said, “you are the first who has made me feel that kind of fear!”
Caswallon smiled, but the ends of his long moustache concealed what kind of smile it was. Instead of answering he glanced over his shoulder at the second chariot, not fifty yards behind. There was a woman driving it.
Then, with one swift look into Tros’s eyes, he shook the reins and shouted to the team — a trumpet shout, that held a sort of note of laughter, but not of mockery to which a guest could take exception. He seemed pleased to have shown his prowess to a foreigner, that was all.
CHAPTER 4. Fflur
Mark my words, ye who are deceived and undone and betrayed by women; ye who fight each other for a woman’s favors; ye who value women by the numbers and strength of their sons, and by their labor at the loom. Lo, I tell you a secret. There is laughter in the eyes of some — aye, even within their anger, and beneath it. Those are the wise ones and the worthy. They are not ambitious. They know ambition is the yoke-mate of treachery. They will not betray themselves. How then can they betray another?
— from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan
WOLVES worrying a kill yelped and vanished into shadow as the chariot thundered around a shoulder of the down and passed a cluster of low, flint-and-mud-built cottages with wooden roofs, surrounded by a wall, within which was bleating and the stifling smell of sheep.
Beyond that the moonlight shone on a big thatched house surrounded by a wooden paling. It was high and oblong, but of only one story with projecting eaves, built of wooden beams with flints and chalk packed into the interstices. Light shone through the chinks of the shutters. There were no trees near it.
They were expected, for a gate was flung wide at the sound of their approach and a dozen men with spears and shields formed up in line outside the entrance, raising their spears as Caswallon drove full-gallop past them.
Within the paling there was a smell of horses that stamped and whinnied at their pickets under a lean-to roof. The house door opened, showing a blazing fire on a hearth exactly facing it. Caswallon drew the team up on its haunches, and almost before their forefeet touched the ground again he let go the reins, jumped along the chariot pole, touched it lightly once with one foot, and seized their heads.
Six women stood in the doorway, with three children clinging to their skirts.
Some one with dark, shaggy hair, who wore nothing but a wolfskin, led away the horses just in time to avoid the second chariot that thundered through the gate and drew up as the first had done.
And, as the horses pawed the air, the woman who was driving dropped the reins and exactly repeated Caswallon’s feat, springing along the pole to the ground to seize their heads. There was no sign yet of the third chariot and Commius. A man stepped out behind the chariot the woman had been driving and held the horses until another man dressed in skins came and led them away.
“O Tros, this is Fflur. She is my wife,” said Caswallon, taking her by the hand.
She stepped forward and kissed Tros on both cheeks, then stepped back to her husband’s side, and Tros wondered at her, for she was good to look at — strong, modest, matronly, gray-eyed, and dressed in embroidered woolen stuff, with a bodice of laced leather that showed the outlines of her graceful figure. There were pearls in her hair and in the big round brooches on her dress.
It was she who led the way into the house, scolding the dogs, throwing an arm about one of the women in the doorway, asking why the children were not asleep in bed — a very gracious lady, full of dignity and laughter and sincerity.
“This is not my house,” said Caswallon, taking Tros by the arm. “I am the chief. They pay me tribute from the fen-land to the sea. It is a good kingdom. You shall tell me about Caesar.”
He did not wait for Commius’ chariot but followed his wife into the house and shut the door behind him, pushing away the dogs, rolling one of them over playfully with his foot — then tasting a tankard of mead that his wife took from a woman’s hand and brought to him.
He only sipped, then handed the tankard to Tros, who drank the half of it and passed it back. Caswallon swallowed the remainder, gave the empty tankard to a woman, wiped his wet moustache on a woolen towel that the woman passed to him, smiled and handed the towel to Tros.
“So one of us clove your chin? Was it a good blow?” he asked, laying a big white hand with rings on it on Tros’s shoulder.
“No. A blow in haste,” said Tros. “He was not strong.”
“He is very strong. His name is Erbin. He can throw a good-sized bullock by the horns. You broke his ribs,” said Caswallon. “Can you break mine?”
“I will not,” Tros answered.
Caswallon laughed, half-disappointed, wholly admiring Tros’s strength, flexing his own great shoulder-muscles as he led to where two high-backed oaken seats faced each other on opposite sides of the hearth.
He threw himself on one, shoving the dogs away as he thrust his skin-clad legs toward the fire, signing to Tros to take the other. Then he unbuckled his long sword, and Tros followed suit, each man setting his weapon against the wall. Conops sat down on the floor beside the hearth, within reach of Tros’s legs, and a woman brought him a tankard of mead all to himself.
It was a high, oblong room, with great black beams overhead, from which hams and sides of bacon hung in the smoke that rose from the hearth and lost itself up in the shadows below the thatch. There was no light except from the fire, but one of the women prodded that to keep it blazing, and when she disappeared Conops assumed the duty.
Three sleepy children, two boys and a girl, came and clung to Caswallon’s legs, begging him to tell them stories, but after he had tousled up their hair and rolled one of them on the floor among the dogs, he dismissed them, calling to one of the women to make them go to bed.
His wife Fflur was already busy with her women in another room; there was a clattering of dishes.
“And Caesar?” said Caswallon. “I am told you know him? We can talk here.”
He leaned against the back of the seat with his hands on his knees and looked at Tros confidently. His was the gift good breeding produces, of putting a guest mentally at ease. He spoke as to an equal, without any fuss of dignity.
“Has Commius not told you?” Tros asked, and Caswallon nodded.
“Commius also is a guest,” he remarked. “But the chariot in which he rides will come more slowly. I ordered it.”
“Commius,” said Tros, “owes his life and his wealth to Caesar. If I know anything of men, then Commius hates Caesar, but is thinking of the Atrebates and the other Gauls. If Caesar should invade this island, Commius might persuade the Gauls to rise behind him. If that is not his plan, at least he thinks of it.
“He is a Gaul at heart, but afraid for his own skin and his own possessions. He does not dare speak openly, lest some one should betray his speech to Caesar. Commius is a watchful and secretive man. He will stop at nothing to help the Gauls, provided he can save his own skin.”
Caswallon nodded.
“And you?” he asked. “Did not Caesar send you?”
“My father is a hostage in Caesar’s camp. I was to show the coast and the harbors to Caius Volusenus. I risk my own life and my father’s; but I warn you to oppose Caesar — to resist his landing in all ways possible.”
“Why do you do that?” asked Caswallon. “If you were my own brother, or my wife’s son, I could understand it. But you are neither a Briton nor a Gaul.”
“Ask the druids,” Tros answered. “They will tell you, if they see fit.”
“You are a kind of druid?”
“No,” said Tros.
“Perhaps you are a greater than a druid?”
“If you speak of my father — yes. As for me, I am you
ng. Most of my life I have spent voyaging. In that way a man learns one thing, but not another. I am not deep in the Mysteries, but my father Perseus is a Prince of Samothrace.”
Caswallon nodded again, but did not pretend to understand more than vaguely.
“I have heard of the Mysteries of Samothrace,” he said respectfully. “I am a king. The druids say I am a good enough one. If Caesar wants my kingdom, he must fight for it. I have said so to Commius.”
“Have you quarreled with Commius?” asked Tros.
“No. He is my guest. He brought presents from Caesar, a lot of trash that the women laughed at. I will send him back to Caesar with some valuable gifts, to show him how a king is generous.”
“Thus whetting Caesar’s appetite!” said Tros drily. “If you send a gift like that to Caesar, lay your plans well, Caswallon. Good enough, if you bait an ambush for the Roman wolf. Be ready for him, that is all! Be sure what you are doing!”
The humorous, middle-aged-boyish face of Caswallon began to look puzzled. He was plainly meditating a blunt question, and yet too polite to ask it.
“Some men seek revenge, some fame, some riches, some authority,” he said at last, twisting at his long moustache. “All men whom I ever met sought something for themselves.”
Whereat Tros grinned.
“I seek to keep my father’s good opinion and to earn the praise of Those who sent me into Gaul,” he answered.
“Nothing else?” asked Caswallon, watching his face steadily.
“I need a ship.”
“I have ships.”
“So has Caesar. Big ones, that can out-fight yours.”
Caswallon pushed a dog out of the way and stirred the fire with his foot.
“Do you propose to help me against Caesar if I offer you a ship?” he asked, looking at Tros sideways, suddenly.
“No,” said Tros. “I swear no oaths. I make no bargains. I will help you if I can, and freely. It is Caesar who owes me a ship, having burnt mine. If a day comes when I think you owe me anything, I will demand it of you.”