by Talbot Mundy
The man with red hair showed his teeth and leered with puckered eyes, but Caswallon beckoned him and clapped him on the back, pulling him up into the chariot beside him, bidding him make friends with Tros “who knows Caesar well.”
“Tros, this is Figol, whose grandfather came like you from over the sea, although from another quarter. He is a better man than Britomaris, for he looks like a lean fox but he acts like a fat Briton, whereas Britomaris looks like a Briton but acts like a fox. Figol pays me tribute of all between this forest and where Britomaris’ land begins; and the old fox doesn’t cheat me more than I permit for the sake of his young wife!”
With that he lifted Figol with one arm and hoisted him over the chariot- side into the crowd, waving him a merry good-by, and was off almost before Conops could scramble into the chariot. They plunged into a forest at the outskirts of the village and drove amid gloomy oaks for leagues on end, with clearings here and there, and well used tracks at intervals on either hand that evidently led to villages.
Caswallon had lapsed into silence again, for a long time studying the new team and then whistling to himself. He seemed to think he was alone, until suddenly he turned to Tros and grinned at him.
“Figol is a fox, but I out-fox him!” he remarked. “If I had let him keep a hundred men at hand, he would have dared me to come and fetch the tribute that is nine months in arrear! He would have talked to them against me, instead of making ready against Caesar. But now they will get the harvest in, and when they have it I will have my share! We will deal with Caesar when the time comes.”
“When Caesar does come, you will find he has made all ready in advance,” said Tros.
“This is a good kingdom,” said Caswallon. “Let Caesar come, and he shall have a bellyful of fighting for it! But if I should raise an army too soon, they would grow tired of waiting; and first they would race the horses on the downs, and then they would drink all the mead, carousing through the night.
“And after that, because there was no more mead, they would say I was mistaken about Caesar. Whereafter they would laugh a great deal, and they would all go home. I know my Britons. And when Caesar came there would be no army.
“Some day you shall see my town, Cair Lunden, and when you have stayed there awhile you will understand how crafty a king must be, if he is to earn — and also get — the tribute money.”
“Crafty!” said Tros. “Are you crafty enough to trust me to tell Caesar that if he comes soon, with a small force, he will find you unprepared?”
“Fflur trusts you. She knows,” Caswallon answered. “I never knew her to be wrong in the matter of trusting a man.”
CHAPTER 7. Gobhan and the Tides
Knowledge? Any fool can have it. But wisdom, with which to interpret knowledge and to use it, that is something that each one must learn for himself in the school of existence. It is a mark of the wise man that he can listen to fools and learn from them, although their speech is folly.
— from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan
THE SUN had crossed the meridian about two hours before, and they were still cantering through lush, green forest when Tros smell tidewater and nudged Conops, who smelled it too and grinned. Four of the escort had been cantering behind them for an hour, screening the view down the track to the rear, and it was not until the horsemen maneuvered into single file to avoid a mud hole that Tros knew the other chariots were missing. When he asked where they had disappeared to, Caswallon merely motioned toward the northwest and said:
“Home. Cair Lunden.”
“And we?”
“I will show you the longships.”
But first they met Gobhan, in a house of logs and mud that overlooked long marshes where the snipe swarmed between the forest and the river Thames. In places the forest crept down almost to the water’s edge; and there were creeks innumerable, crowded with wildfowl that filled the air with mournful longshore music. There was another huge forest on the far side, more than two miles away. The river rolled between the mud-flats, lonely and immense, with only one small boat in sight, working its way with oars and sail across the tide.
“Our weakness!” said Caswallon, pulling up the team where the trees ended and they could see the vast expanse of river. “If Caesar only knew this river he could sail up with his hundred ships and have us at his mercy! The Northmen come now and then, which is why we hide our ships.”
There they left the chariot, with the horses nibbling at the trees, and walked, all seven in single file with Caswallon leading, toward the mud-and-log house in the foreground, that stood with its front door almost in the marsh. There was smoke rising from a hole in the wooden roof, but no sign of an inhabitant until they reached the front by a narrow foot-path, and Caswallon shouted:
“Gobhan! Come out there, Gobhan!”
Almost instantly through the door showed a face that made Tros want to laugh, but that rather frightened the four members of the escort. It was comical, and yet immensely dignified, without a single feature that explained the dignity, old beyond calculation, toothless, nearly bald — there was a forehead that mounted so high it resembled a waxen skullcap with a gray-haired tassel on the top — and bearded, but with the beard enclosed in a leather bag and tied back behind the ears. The nose nearly met the chin. There were no eyebrows; a pair of lashless eyes as bright as a weasel’s peeped alert and inquisitive from sunken sockets.
“What do you want?” the face asked, mumbling the words because of toothlessness.
Then a body followed the face; lean, scrawny, twisted, suffering apparently from ague caught from the marsh. He was dressed in a long brown smock with a leather apron over it and nothing to proclaim his rank in life except a plaited woolen girdle such as druids wore. He showed no respect for Caswallon, but stood and looked at him, his hands shaking, his hollow cheeks moving as he worked his gums.
“Such a host you are, Gobhan! Such welcome you offer us! Such courtesy!” said Caswallon, striking an attitude.
The ancient addressed as Gobhan grinned at last — if it was a grin that quaked among the wrinkles. He muttered something, shrugged his bony shoulders, turned, and led the way into the house. Caswallon strode in after him and Tros followed; Conops would have followed Tros through a furnace door, whatever his private feelings; but the escort withdrew toward the chariot, expressing strange emotions.
“Wizard!” was a word that one man used; and another one said something about “dirty magic and abominations.”
The interior of the house — it had only one room — was almost as remarkable as its owner. There were two truckle-beds at one end, with a table between them and two stools, but the whole of the rest of the interior was given up to furnaces and clay retorts, instruments for measuring, benches piled with jars, mortars, ladles and a work-bench down the middle of the room on which were appliances whose object Tros could not guess. The room was not exactly in confusion, but there was hardly standing room for the three who did not belong there.
Over in a corner a blind man clothed in skins plied an enormous bellows steadily, as if he did it in his sleep. There was the roar of a charcoal furnace and the stench of heated metal, but no sign of anything being made, although there were an anvil and great tongs and hammers near the door.
The owner of the place made no remark but simply waited in front of Caswallon, holding his apron to keep his hands from shaking and constantly moving his toothless gums. He seemed neither afraid, nor yet pleased to see his visitors.
“So now you see Gobhan,” said Caswallon. “Look at him! My people wanted to roast him alive in his own furnace for wizardry; but I said no to it, for one reason and another. It cost me quite a quarrel with the younger druids, who proclaimed him an outlaw from their Mysteries, which I daresay is more or less true. And there is trouble now and then because the Northmen come to him, and he will not see the difference between a Briton and a foreigner, but teaches anything he knows to any one who asks him.
“If the druids know more than he
does, I will say this: They conceal it! I never could have saved him, if I hadn’t thought of using him to trap a longship full of Northmen, who sailed up the Thames to plunder Lunden.
“I sent a man to fall into their hands and tell them about Gobhan; so they turned aside to steal him, meaning to take him to their own country to teach the trick of metal to their shipwrights. And I caught them there, yonder where the creek flows through the rushes.
“We drew a chain across the creek behind them, and they burned their own ship rather than let us capture it, cattle and all; the forehold of the ship was full of bulls. It took three to kill the last man; never were such fighters! I would have saved him; I would have given him a wife and let him live in Lunden; but I could not reach his side before they ran a spear under his armpit and drowned him. He was fighting waist-deep when he fell.
“Northmen are thieves, and they come a-roving summer or winter, whenever they’re least expected; but the fault I find with them is wearing armor, which is not the way a man should fight. We Britons fight nearly naked, not esteeming cowardice.”
“You have brought me a long way to see Gobhan!” Tros interrupted drily.
“Aye, I was coming to that. You spoke of Caesar’s fleet, you remember. Now Gobhan owes his life to me. If you can understand that noise he makes between his gums, he shall tell you things that Caesar does not know. Gobhan knows the Book of Domnu.”
“Does he understand the tides?” asked Tros, nudging Conops. In Samothrace, where he came from, they knew more of “Domnu” and the inner meanings of the word than any druid did.
“Tides, full moons and the weather — he knows it all,” said Caswallon. “Make shift to understand his yammerings, and I will send him south for you in one of the longships. He shall lie in wait at Hythe.”
“There are strange tides around this island,” said Tros, observing Gobhan closely.
“Aye,” said Caswallon. “Our tides puzzle the Northmen badly. And the worst of it is, that this old wizard teaches them as readily as he teaches us, when they can find him! He has no discretion. I have often wondered why I did not let my people burn him.”
“Let me talk with him,” said Tros, beckoning the old man. Together they went and sat on logs up-ended near the furnace, where Tros could draw patterns with his finger in the charcoal-dust on the floor. Caswallon stood and watched them, with his legs astride and hands behind his back.
The only light in that corner came from the door and in a red glow from the charcoal furnace that the bellows-man was tending. Tros’s eyes glowed like a lion’s, but most of his bulk was lost in shadow, as his fingers roughly traced an outline of the shore of Kent and the coast of Gaul with the narrow sea between.
The old man wiped it out and drew a better one, and for a long while Tros studied that, until at last he laid a finger on the spot where he supposed the quicksands lay. At that Gobhan nodded, and looked strangely pleased. The ague left him. He began to grow excited.
Mumble-mumble — Tros could hardly understand a word of it, until Gobhan prodded the blind old bellows-man with a long stick. Then the purring roar of the furnace ceased, and the blind man sat beside them to interpret the toothless noises into more or less intelligible speech.
The blind man seemed to know as much as Gobhan did about the tides and winds and weather; as the two of them became aware of Tros’s inborn understanding of the sea, they vied in their enthusiasm to explain to him, clutching him, striking each other’s wrists, interrupting each other, croaking and squeaking like a pair of rusty-throated parrots, answering his questions both at once and abusing each other when he failed to understand exactly — Caswallon smiling all the while as if he watched a dog-fight.
Sun and moon — there was interminable talk about them. Gobhan suddenly wiped out the channel map and drew a diagram of sun and moon and earth, with circles to describe their courses.
But the blind man did not need the diagram to argue from; he used his two fists for earth and moon, and Gobhan’s head to represent the sun, gesticulating with his foot to show the action of the tides as their positions changed.
Once in his excitement he would have burned himself by getting too close to the furnace, but Gobhan hurled him away, and the argument resumed with both men kneeling as if they were throwing dice, and Tros’s heavy face, chin on hand, two feet from theirs as he leaned forward, studying first one and then the other, then the diagrams that Gobhan traced and the blind man kept on wiping out because he could not see, and did not need them.
At last Gobhan struck the blind man into silence and sat still with his eyes shut, counting days and hours, checking them off on his fingers; and by that time it was the blind man who appeared to have the ague, for he was sweating and trembling with irrepressible excitement. Gobhan on the other hand had grown as calm as if he were saying prayers.
“Mumble-mumble.”
“Eight days,” interpreted the blind man. Gobhan nodded.
Tros rose, facing Caswallon.
“What present shall I make?” he asked.
“None,” said Caswallon. “If you give them money they will have no further use for you. And as for their needs, they eat at my cost. Have you learned what you came for?”
“Aye, and more,” said Tros.
“I will send them both to Hythe to await you there, in the harbor with the three ships,” said Caswallon.
And then Conops entered; he had slunk out to explore the marsh, and came back with slime up to his knees, resheathing the long knife in the red sash at his waist.
“Master, I have seen the ships. They are no good,” he remarked in Greek. “They are too long for their beam, too high at bow and stern to steer in a breeze; and they would swallow a quartering sea and lie down under it as a Briton swallows mead, or my name isn’t Conops!”
“That is their affair,” said Tros.
“They are leaky,” Conops insisted. “Their seams are as open as the gratings on a prison window. I vow I could stick my fingers in! I would as soon put to sea in an orange-basket. Some of the cordage is made of wool, and some of leather! Some of it is good flax, but you never saw such patchwork!”
The blind man returned to his bellows. Gobhan peered into a clay crucible that was set in the charcoal furnace, shaking again with ague and not pleased, because the crucible had cooled. Both of them appeared to have forgotten Tros, and they took no notice whatever of Caswallon who beckoned to Tros to come out and see the three longships.
They lay berthed in the mud up a creek well concealed from the river by a bank of rushes. There were branches fastened to their masts to render them invisible against the trees. They were very small, but not ill-built, and they were much more seaworthy than Conops made them out to be.
The woolen cordage Conops had described turned out to be the lashings that held in place the tent-cloth with which they were covered, but it was true they were moored with horse-hide warps made fast to the nearest trees. Nor were they very leaky; they were well tarred, and a day’s work on their seams by half a dozen men would make them fit for sea.
“Where are the crews?” asked Tros.
“Doubtless carousing!” said Caswallon. “It needs a month to sober them when they have beaten off a North Sea rover. Three weeks gone, the three of them together sunk a longship down at Thames mouth, and I paid them well for it.”
“There is need for haste,” said Tros.
“There shall be haste! I will promise them another big reward. And there will be Gobhan with them, whom they fear a great deal more than they fear me — for they who follow the sea are bigger fools than they who live on land!
“I will say that if they fail to reach Hythe and if they fail to obey you, Gobhan shall turn them all into fish. They will believe that, and they are too familiar with fish to wish to grow scales and fins! The rest is for you to contrive.”
“Very well,” said Tros. “Understand me: I do not know what the gods will have to say about all this. The gods prevent many things that men desi
gn; but I think the gods are not in league with Caesar. Unless Caesar’s cold heart changes, I am likely to be pilot when he sets sail for the coasts of Britain.
“I will lead him to the high cliffs that are nearest to the coast of Gaul, and if it may be, I will wreck him on the quicksands in midchannel. I will surely do that if I understand the tides aright and if the wind should favor.
“In that case, you and I will never meet again, because, of all the certainties the surest is, that if I set Caesar on the quicksands he will slay me. And we may miss the quicksands; or Caesar’s men may see the water boiling over them and steer clear.
“So watch for his fleet, and be ready with an army to oppose his landing. And if he succeeds in landing, count on me nevertheless, provided you are sure that Gobhan and these three ships are safe in Hythe, and that the crews will obey me when I come.”
“Tros!” said Caswallon, and seized him by the right hand. Their eyes met for the space of seven breaths.
Then the Chief spoke again:
“You are a man. But I do not know yet why you do this.”
“I have not yet done it!” Tros answered.
“Nevertheless, in my heart I know you will attempt it. Why? What am I to you? And what is Britain to you?”
“What is fire to water?” Tros answered. “One stream serves as well as the next when it comes to checking forest fires. If you were invading Caesar’s rightful heritage, then I would side with him against you! I am a free man, Caswallon. A free man mocks himself, who sits in idleness while Caesars burn up freedom!”
“I see you are not a man to whom I may offer a reward,” said Caswallon, gripping his hand again. “But I am your friend, Tros; Fflur is also your friend.”