Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  So when they bore down by the great grim headland near where the galley had pitched at anchor while Tros was in Britain, Conops cried out suddenly and pointed to where the moon shone for a moment between black waves.

  Tros roared out to the crew and wore the ship around, at a risk of swamping, dousing the sail then and letting her high poop serve the purpose of a sail to keep her head to the waves.

  Then Conops tied an oil-soaked bundle of corn sacks to the ship’s bow, and in the smooth, slick wake of that he launched a small boat, forcing four of the crew to help him by pretending he had orders straight from Caius Volusenus.

  But the Roman commander was in no condition to give orders. Dimly, in between the throes of vomiting, he understood that they had reached the place where the anchor had been buoyed; it certainly never occurred to him that, even if the dancing spar should have been seen, the ship had drifted from it downwind long since, and that no small boat could hope to work to windward.

  He groaned and wished whoever came to question him across the Styx.

  Had he given orders, it is likely they had come too late; for Tros held the boat while Conops jumped in — then followed in the darkness, pushing off before a man could interfere, and the last they saw of Caius Volusenus was his pale face over the ship’s sternwhether vomiting, or watching to see them drown, they never knew.

  They had no sail. Their oars were short, and the boat was made for harbor work — an unsafe, rickety, flat-bottomed thing that steered like a dinner dish.

  “To the shore!” yelled Tros, pulling stroke, “and when she upsets, cling to your oar and swim for it.”

  But when a man and a loyal mate give thought to nothing except speed and are perfectly willing to upset if that is written in their destiny, they upset not so easily. It is the men who hesitate and calculate who lose out on a dark night in a stormy sea. Strength, and a vision of what is beyond, work wonders.

  So it happened that the breakers pounding on the shingle beach that guards the marshes to the east of Hythe threw up a boat and two men clinging to it, who stood still, shivering in the wind awhile and watched by the light of the moon a ship a mile away that rolled her beam ends under while her crew struggled to make sail and run before the storm.

  “May they drown,” remarked Conops bitterly, perhaps because his teeth were chattering.

  “They will not,” said Tros, half closing his eyes as he peered into the wind. “There is no real weight to this. It is a foretaste. It will die before daylight. Old Gobhan was right after all — I was a fool to doubt him. The equinox will come after the full moon. Caesar’s men will ride this out successfully and think they can repeat it when the full gales come. Now — best foot forward and be warm.”

  Tros wrung the salt water from his cloak and led the way, keeping to the beach where the going was difficult, but the direction sure, swinging his sword as he went along, until he found dry sand into which to plunge the blade.

  There was no sound to break the solitude except the pounding of waves on shingles; no light except the wan moon breaking through the clouds; no sight of Caius Volusenus’ ship. They could no longer see the lights of Caesar’s camp behind them, but on the hills to the right the Britons had huge fires burning, that made the wind-swept beach seem all the lonelier.

  Hungry and utterly tired, they reached the swamp beside Hythe harbor three hours before dawn, and chanced on one of the narrow tracks that wound among the reeds, between which, once, they caught a glimpse of four shadowy ships at anchor, one much smaller than the other three.

  But though they hailed, crying, “Gobhan! Oh, Gobhan!” there was no answer; their voices echoed over empty wastes of water, and the track they were following came to an end at a place where a boat had been hidden in the rushes. But the boat was gone.

  “Shall we swim for it?” asked Conops.

  Tros had had enough of swimming for one night. He roared again for Gobhan and, disgusted with failure, turned to retrace his steps and find another track, jerking his heels out of the soggy mud and stumbling, until suddenly he heard a voice among the reeds ten yards away, and crouched, sword forward. Then he heard three Britons talking, and one voice he thought he recognized.

  “I am Tros,” he shouted, louder than he knew. A laugh he could have picked out of a hundred answered him:

  “Why not call for me? As well cry out for the Sea-God as for Gobhan.”

  Caswallon broke through the reeds, seized Tros by the hand and dragged him on to firmer ground, where two other Britons, one of them wounded, leaned on spears.

  “Gobhan died, say I. The sailors say the Sea-God called him. If you should tell me that the sailors threw him overboard, I would think three times before giving you the lie,” said Caswallon. “I knew you would come, Tros. My chariot is yonder. I heard you shouting.”

  He led the way with long, sure-footed strides to where his chariot waited with at least a dozen mounted men who wore wolf-skin cloaks over their nearly naked bodies.

  “I left Fflur with the army, because she can hold them as none else can,” he explained. “What do you think now of us Britons? Did we fight well?”

  “Not so well as Caesar,” Tros answered. Caswallon laughed, a shade grimly.

  “Two thirds of my men were late. They are not here yet,” he added. “If Caesar’s cavalry should come—”

  But it was Tros’s turn to laugh. He knew the cavalry would not come.

  “My father is the pilot for the cavalry,” he answered. “He is a wiser man than I — a better sailor. If he has not wrecked them on the quicksands—”

  “Yonder with my three ships is a little one from Gaul,” said Caswallon. “The Gaul brings word that Caesar’s cavalry have put back into port.”

  “They will never reach Britain, if my father lives,” said Tros; to which Caswallon answered two words:

  “Gobhan died.”

  He seemed to think that was an evil omen.

  There was no more talk until they reached a long, low building just outside the town of Hythe, where women were serving mead and meat by torchlight to a score of men who had evidently not been near the fighting.

  Caswallon was in a grim mood, with an overlying smile that rather heightened than concealed it, hardly nodding when the new men greeted him, refusing mead, refusing to be seated, saying nothing until silence fell.

  But Tros ate and drank; the chieftainship was none of his affair.

  “We are beaten,” said Caswallon at last, “and for lack of a thousand men to answer their chief’s summons. Caesar has landed and has already fortified his camp. It is your fault — yours and the others’ who have not come. I am ashamed.”

  There was murmuring, particularly in the darker corners where the torchlight hardly reached.

  “We defend Hythe. Caesar fears us, or he would have brought his fleet to Hythe,” a man remarked. “He does not fear you, because he knows you are a weak chief. Was he wrong? Has he not defeated you?”

  Caswallon made a gesture of contempt, then folded both arms on his breast — and it was naked, as he had exposed it to the enemy.

  “Hold Hythe then,” he answered. “Ye are not worth coaxing. The men who fought today are my friends, and I know them. Ye are not my friends, and I will never know you. But I bid you hold Hythe for your own sakes.

  “For if Caesar learns of the harbor and brings his fleet in here, he will stay all winter; and then, forever ye are Caesar’s slaves. But it may be, ye would sooner be the slaves of Caesar than free men under Caswallon.”

  They murmured again, but he dismissed them with a splendid gesture.

  “Get ye gone into the darkness, where your souls live!” he commanded.

  But a dozen stayed and swore to follow him, and when he had repudiated them a time or two he accepted their promises, although without much cordiality.

  “They who fought today, have fought. I know them. Ye who have not fought, have to prove yourselves.”

  And presently, one by one, the others who ha
d gone out at his bidding into darkness began to slink back, until the room was full again. The women brought in mead, and Caswallon consented to drink when they begged him two or three times, but he only tasted and then set the stuff aside.

  “And now, Lord Tros — my brother Tros,” he said, smiling gratefully at last, “so your father is safe? I am not in debt to you for that life yet?”

  “I am a free man and you owe me nothing,” Tros answered. “My father is a free man, and his life is his, to give or to withhold until his time comes. And I told you that I drive no bargains, for I never knew the bargain that was fair to both sides; so I give or I withhold, I accept or I reject, as I see right, and let Them judge my acts whose business that is.

  “But I warn you: If I live, and if my father lives and is a prisoner in Gaul, I will invite you to help me rescue him. As to what your answer will be, that is your affair.”

  “I am your friend and your father’s friend,” said Caswallon. “I have spoken before witnesses.”

  There was a pause, a long, deep breathing silence, until Caswallon glanced around the room, and said:

  “I would be alone with Lord Tros.”

  They filed out into darkness one by one; but Conops stayed, and Caswallon nodded to him.

  “What said Gobhan of the tides?” he asked, and sat down on a roughly carved chair, leaning his head against the back of it. He seemed tired out. “I can wear out Caesar and his little army. But if more ships come, and cavalry, and more supplies—”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “The full moon, and the high tide, and the equinox,” said Tros grimly. “Three more days, and then the storm will burst. For my part, I would rather that the gods should kill men than that I should be the butcher. How many were slain today?”

  “Of my side? Three hundred and nine. And of Caesar’s?”

  “More than four hundred,” said Tros. “That is death enough for the sake of one man’s glory and a helmet full of pearls. Are you a crafty liar? Can you lie to Caesar and delay him while I loose his ships for the storm to play with?”

  “How shall I convince him?” asked Caswallon.

  “Give him Commius. Promise to give other hostages and to pay him tribute. Promise him pearls.”

  Caswallon nodded.

  “Aye — he is welcome to Commius the Gaul.”

  “A lie well told is worth a thousand men,” said Tros. “Truth is good, and pride is good. But Caesar measures truth by bucketsful, and he is prouder, with a meaner pride, than you or I could be if we should live forever. Therefore, swallow pride and lie to him.”

  “That is what Fflur advised,” said Caswallon. “She has vision. Her advice is good.”

  “And the longships?”

  “Will the crews obey me?” asked Tros. “If they slew Gobhan, what will they do to me?”

  “You are a man after their own heart. Gobhan was a wizard and they feared him,” said Caswallon. “They will stand by you, for I have promised each man coin enough to buy mead for a year.”

  Tros thought a minute.

  “Hide two ships among the reeds,” he answered then, “and put all three crews on the third ship. Select the worst ship for me, for you will lose it. See that the men have knives or axes. Then leave me here; fetch Commius the Gaul, and send him to Caesar with a man you trust, to offer hostages and tributes.

  “But don’t trust yourself within Caesar’s reach, because he is a craftier liar than ever you can hope to be. He will speak you fair, but he will hold you prisoner if you approach him near enough; and he will march you in his triumph through the Roman streets, if he has to lose a thousand of his men in order to accomplish it.

  “Thereafter they will cut your head off in a stinking dungeon and toss your carcass to the city dogs and crows — they keep a dung-hill for the purpose.”

  They talked for an hour after that, and then went and routed out the ships’ crews, who had come ashore to drink in Hythe. Half drunk already, wholly mutinous, they challenged Tros, telling him they had no use for autumn storms and still less use for lee shores where Roman fleets were anchored. They had seen enough of Caesar on their way down.

  But Tros smote a captain with his fist and flung the mate crashing through a shutter. Thereafter, disdaining to draw his sword on fishermen, he seized a wooden bench and cracked a skull or two with that, until the bench broke and the Britons began to admire him.

  Caswallon looked on grimly, offering no aid.

  “For if I help you, Tros, they will say I helped you. It is better that they learn to fear you on your own account,” he remarked. They also learned a quite peculiar respect for Conops. He knew all the tricks the longshore press-gangs used in the Levant for crimping sailors. He could use the handle of his knife more deftly than those Britons used a blade, and it was hardly dawn when all three crews decided they had met their masters, piled, swearing but completely satisfied, into small boats and rowed themselves to one ship, ready to continue to obey their new commander.

  CHAPTER 14. “If Caesar could only know”

  Ye call yourselves the heirs of this or that one who begat you. I say, ye are heirs of Eternity. What does it matter who saw your triumph? Whose praise seek ye? And whose hatred stirs your pride? Eternity is Life. Life knows. And as ye do, it shall be done unto you. No matter what your generosity, I tell you malice is a mean man’s comfort and begets its own humiliation.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  THAT SHIP, with sixty men aboard, was something worse than Tros had ever known in all his sea experience. It would have been bad enough, if he could have put to sea at once, with hard labor at the oars to keep the three crews busy; but a three-day wait, with all provisions short and Hythe in sight, full of mead and women, and no news — but a mystery — and fires along the hills at night was invitation to the Britons to display the whole of their inborn and accumulated zeal for doing just the opposite of what they should.

  They knew a thousand reasons why they ought to go ashore; not one for staying where they were. They wanted to revisit the two other ships and make sure all was well with them in the mud berths where they lay concealed.

  They demanded money, mead, more food and better; they insisted on new cordage; they proposed to go a-fishing; they fought with one another, with the new knives Caswallon had provided; they refused to make repairs, and pointed out whatever needed doing as a good enough excuse for going ashore forever.

  They listened to Tros’s promises with leering grins that told of disbelief; and when he scuttled the small boats, to keep them aboard ship, eleven of them swam ashore and yelled from a place of safety amid the reeds to all the others to swim and join them.

  That same night the eleven swam back again, reporting that the men of Hythe were a scurvy gang, and the women worse; they proposed to storm the town and burn it in revenge for having been refused free food and drink, and they promised Tros full obedience thereafter, if he would only lead them to the night assault.

  And Tros suffered another anxiety, even greater than they could provide. The weather held calm and gray, with varying light winds that might have tempted Caesar’s ships to look for safer anchorage — or might have tempted the cavalry to sail again from Gaul.

  He had no means of knowing whether the cavalry had come at last, nor where his father might be; and all that held him from setting sail for Gaul to find his father, was the knowledge that his father would despise him for having left a promise unkept and a duty unattempted.

  Thirty times in three days his determination nearly failed him, only to return because he had to show himself a man to Conops, and a master on his own poop to the Britons.

  But at last the night of full moon, and an offshore wind that blew the reeds flat. That afternoon there was a tide so low that a man could have walked knee-deep across the harbor mouth. The gulls flocked close inshore, and by evening the sky was black with racing clouds.

  By night, when the raging wind kicked up steep waves against the t
ide, the crew swore to a man that they would never put to sea in that storm even if Tros should carry out his threat to burn the ship beneath them by way of penalty.

  Yet he had his way, and even he could hardly have told afterwards how he contrived it. It was Conops who slipped the cable, so that the ship drifted toward the harbor mouth.

  Tros steered her for the boiling bar, guessing by the milk-white foam that gleamed against the darkness and the thunder of the waves; and when the ship pitched and rolled, beam-on, the crew took to the oars to save themselves.

  Once clear of the bar, in darkness and a howling sea, there was nothing left for them but to hoist a three-reefed sail and pray to all the gods they had ever heard of.

  There was no risk of Caesar’s men seeing them too soon, nor any other problem than to keep the ship afloat and close inshore. If the wind should blow them offshore, there would be no hope of beating back; and the oars were useless, with the waves boiling black and hungry and irregular.

  The one hope was to hug the beach until they should work under the lee of the high cliffs, where Caesar’s fleet had more or less protection as long as the wind held in the north-northwest; and to that end Tros took all the chances, judging his distance from shore by the roar of the surf on the beach — for he could not see a ship’s length overside.

  Once he sailed so close inshore and the crew were so afraid, that six men rushed him at the helm, meaning to beach the ship and jump for it; but Conops fought them off, and Tros held his course — in good deep water within thirty feet of shore.

  And presently the crew began to wonder at him and to think him an immortal. When the moon broke through the racing clouds he looked enormous at the helm, with his cloak and his black hair streaming in the wind, one leg against the bulwark and his full weight strained against the long oar.

  Then the rain came, and the lightning gleamed on the gold band on his forehead. And when he laughed they knew he was a god and he knew something else — that Caesar’s fleet was at his mercy.