by Talbot Mundy
“Skell, so was your story about smashing Caesar’s fleet impossible, since it was I who did that, and you were not there. You will say what I bid you to say, or I will march you now into the hall and name you liar before all the company.
“I see you understand what that would mean, Skell. Your sword against mine, in the fog, before a hundred witnesses. Choose then. I have offered you a chance to win a Roman galley and all the power that should go with owning such a ship, or a swifter chance to prove your manhood with your sword against mine this night.”
He did not give Skell long to think, but ordered Conops to open the front door wide, and there they stood, the three of them together with the firelight in their faces, Tros with a naked sword in his right hand, Conops with a naked knife and only Skell with his weapon sheathed.
A roar went up as a hundred voices asked the meaning of drawn weapons, and a bench upset as the feasters faced about. Caswallon rose from his great chair at the table end, and Skell had only time to draw three breaths before he had to answer, for Tros kept still and some one had to speak.
“It seems, in Samothrace men bind a wager by an oath made on a sword blade,” Skell said, with a catch in his throat.
Then, because he had gone too far to withdraw, he continued in a loud voice, laying his hand on Tros’s broad shoulder:
“This is Tros, who aided me in smashing Caesar’s ships. I did not recognize him until now, but he knew me on the instant. Tros will tell you of the wager we have made.”
But Tros was not to be caught so easily. When they had done drinking to him and shouting his name until the rafters rang with it, he stood — his toes beyond the threshold still, because he had not sheathed his sword — and, showing his strong teeth in a grin such as men do not learn the use of without earning the right to it, let loose a “Ho-ha-hah!” that shook his shoulders.
“Nay,” he answered. “For you all know Skell, so you shall have Skell’s word on what has passed between us.”
And he smote Skell such a slap between the shoulder-blades as made him take a quick step forward. Whereat Caswallon, bending his head to catch Fflur’s whisper, sat down and called on Skell to speak, and all the company roared to Tros to shut the door to keep the fog outside.
But Tros continued standing at the threshold, and did not sheathe his sword until Skell stood thoroughly committed by his own lips and had vowed before all that company that he would rescue Tros’s father, Perseus, Prince of Samothrace, from Caesar’s camp in Gaul or from wherever else Caesar might have sent him, or die in the attempt. Skell made the best of a bad bargain, boasting with his chin high and with an easy, reckless motion of the shoulders.
“And for my part,” Tros said then, “I will gladly give Caesar’s galley to a man so shrewd and brave as can accomplish that.”
He sheathed his sword then, and strode in, shutting the great door.
And from then until nearly dawn, while the company, growing more and more uproarious, wove Skell into a net of lies of his own spinning, Caswallon remained very sober, not summoning Tros to sit beside him lest Skell should appear slighted, and he did not care to have Skell sit at the table end.
Skell also remained sober, because the strong mead could not bite a brain that had so much embarrassment to think of. And Tros, who was the son of Initiate of Samothrace, never drank more than comforted the stomach without touching the brain at all, because “drink that dulls the senses,” say the Ancients, “is an insult to the Soul, and to refuse the hospitality of strangers is an insult to their kindness; wherefore, wisely observe temperance in all things.”
CHAPTER 18. The Phoenician Tin Trader
As the wind blows pollen, so are the bolder spirits blown forth by their own necessities and by their own desire and by their courage.
— from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan
AT DAWN, when the company was mostly drunk and Fflur had sent away the women — but she stayed, since none dared offer her indignity — Caswallon strode out to fill his lungs with air and to watch the watery sun rise over the swamps to eastward.
There was a bank of white mist where the Thames flowed, and the tops of oak trees loomed like phantoms through a cloud that blew before the morning breeze. Downstreet, above the smoky embers of abandoned bonfires, was the blackened shred of Caesar’s effigy still swinging from its chain, stretched from tree to tree. In lamplit darkness by the waterside was singing, where sailors from the foreign ships held revelry of their own. And here and there a house light made a pale halo in the fog.
“No need for Northmen to burn Lunden,” Caswallon said, yawning and stretching himself. “One of these drunken nights we will do it for them, and that were worse than a defeat. Oh, Lunden is a good town.”
Tros, kneeling to wet his hands and face in the dew on the grass before the gate, looked up and laughed at him.
“If Caesar had known of Lunden, he would be here now,” he answered. “In war he is unconquerable if he knows of a point to drive at. Now the boasting is over, how did he really leave Britain?”
“Oh, he used the metal of some broken ships to repair the others, and a few more small ships came from Gaul. And while we made ready to storm his camp he slipped away at midnight, leaving the campfires burning.”
“He would not have gone,” said Tros, “if he had known of Lunden. I know Caesar. He will write to Rome of a victory, but defeat will rankle in him. It will eat his heart. I will wager you, this minute he is laying plans to try again, and his spies are on the way. The spies will tell him you eat off golden dishes, and that your wife — Caesar would rather steal a king’s wife and enjoy her shame than play at any other sport the world holds.”
“You are as black-haired as a raven, and you croak like one,” Caswallon answered.
“I am your friend.”
Tros stood up, his beard all wet with dew. Caswallon looked him in the eyes and nodded, then wetted his hands at a yew tree and laved his face in the dew until his long moustache dropped in untidy strands below his chin.
Fflur came then, all new-dressed and smiling, wearing amber jewelry, and twisted the moustache until it hung respectably, then kissed him and called him some absurd name in an undertone.
Two girls and Orwic were in attendance on her, but Orwic was so drunk he could hardly walk straight although he used a spear to lean on, and the girls were pushing him surreptitiously, giggling at his attempts to appear dignified. The only remark Orwic made was that druids were more trouble than they were worth.
“If they drank more and preached less, a gentleman could have more patience with them,” he concluded.
Caswallon, with an arm around Fflur, led the way toward a grove of yews within a wooden paling. In a clearing in the midst six druids stood before an unhewn rock, whose highest point faced the rising sun. A druid knelt, peering along the rock and down a vista between the yews, toward where the sun’s rim was beginning to appear above the mist.
There were rock seats spaced at intervals around the clearing, with a bank of grass-grown earth behind for less important folk. Caswallon sat on the seat that faced the altar and the others took places on either hand, the women to the left.
“The sun has been up for an hour,” said Orwic, hiccoughing. “It’s all nonsense waiting for it to touch the top of that old rock. Who cares anyhow?”
But he bowed his head when the kneeling druid raised both hands and those who were standing chanted the orison, each in turn advancing as he sang to lay flowers, corn, honey, earth and water on the altar stone. Then the old High Druid turned with his back to the sun, the others facing him, and blessed them sonorously. That was all.
“Doubtless you do these things better in Samothrace,” Caswallon remarked as they filed out.
He seemed in a mood to find fault with anything at all.
“I know nothing better than the best a man can do,” Tros answered, “and no hour better than the dawn.”
Fflur smiled at that and stroked Caswallon’s hand that was on
her shoulder, but he turned and faced Tros as they reached the gate in the paling:
“I like that you accepted Fflur’s word that the galley and the gold are yours. That you promised the galley to Skell, I do not like,” he said abruptly.
“Is it yet Skell’s? Has he earned it?” Tros replied.
“Skell never did earn the cost of a horse’s bellyful, but he has made me more trouble than I can count,” Caswallon said grimly. “You have set the mischief working in his mind. You have forced him to be up and doing. It had entered my thought to kill him for his lies about Caesar’s ships; now I can not kill him, because you have given him the right to make good his pledge before any other man may call him to account. That is our law.”
“It is a good law,” Tros replied.
“Now Skell will go to Caesar. And I must let him go, or else discredit you, who have been my friend.”
Tros grinned craftily. “The man who claims he wrecked all Caesar’s ships will go to Caesar.”
Caswallon shook his head. Fflur glanced from one man to the other, and Orwic poked with his spear at the tip of Tros’s sword. “You should have gutted Skell last night with that thing,” he remarked.
But Fflur was pleased that there had been no murder done. There was seldom a drunken feast without bloodshed afterwards, and she had the name of being too tight with the purse-strings, because she opposed feasting whenever she could make her voice heard.
She suggested it was time to sleep and led her grumbling lord and master by the hand, making the girls laugh by the way she tugged at him as if he were a stubborn horse being led to the chariot pole.
They entered the hall — it reeked of mead and wood smoke and the after-stench of food — where most of the men were snoring on the floor, or on benches against the wall, and the dogs were cracking bones under the table.
Caswallon strode off to his own room, but Fflur went first with Tros to the guest chamber and stood by while he threw out two Iceni who had made themselves free of the bed. Then she kissed him and said:
“Tros, you did well, because you must certainly set your father free by some means. And Caesar will try again, so you did doubly well, for you are more dangerous to him and a stronger friend to us as long as Caesar does not know you broke his ships. But he will know it, if Skell should reach him; I suppose you understand that and are counting on Skell’s treachery. Sleep well, and at noon Caswallon will have changed his mind.”
But Tros did not sleep for a long time. First he sent Conops to find Skell and watch him.
“If Skell goes, I wish to know where he goes, and what reason he gives. Let him not see you are watching him, but make talk with the maids and serving-men and grooms,” he commanded.
Then, very shortly after that, there came the old Phoenician trader, still wrapped in his camel-hair, greeting Tros, between bouts of coughing, with courteous eastern phrases, sitting cross-legged on the bed when Tros invited him, and naming himself Hiram-bin-Ahab.
He had gold rings, chased with strange designs, on all his fingers, and a gold band on his forehead very much like the one that Tros wore. They exchanged peculiar signs, and then strange passwords in a said-to-be-forgotten tongue that sounded like challenge and answer or some sort of magic ritual.
After which they shook hands, taking a long time about it, looking straight into each other’s eyes. Thereafter they conversed in Greek.
“My son, I am sure now you are not mad,” said the Phoenician. “Why did you act like a madman? The Britons keep their secrets well, but even I know Skell lied and that it was you who wrecked Caesar’s fleet. The very maids who wait on table know it. Why did you let Skell take the credit to himself?”
“I take what the gods send my way,” Tros answered. “Skell is a mean fish, but I have him in my net.”
“Son, you are a stranger in a strange land. I foresmell difficulties. Skell is an older man than you, and I am older than the two of you together. I warn you, such men as he is are the same the wide world over. Skell—”
“ — will run to Caesar,” Tros interrupted. “What else can he do? He fears to fight me. The good gods know it is not in him to keep faith. He has no more thought of rescuing my father than of loving me. Yet he can not lie idle here with that wager on his hands or the Britons will mock him, and he will have no rights whatever — and no peace.
“He must pretend to keep faith. And how can he do that unless he leaves Britain for Gaul? I wish I knew a captain who was sailing for Caritia presently, and who would take Skell with him.”
“Son,” said the old man, screwing up his face and rubbing the end of his nose with a lean forefinger, “I would not go near Caesar for all Caesar’s gold — keh-keh-keh-khaah, these fogs! — because Caesar would take my cargo of tin and would give me for it an order on Rome for money — phaagh!”
“Did you obtain tin here in Lunden?” Tros asked him.
“Nay, at Ictis, where they make it into ingots like sheeps’ knuckles. I traded my Tyrian dye and my silken stuff for tin and did well, for the Britons are a reasonable people when they want a thing badly enough.
“Then I came here to hide, because I heard of Roman galleys off the coast of Gaul. You know, if those overbearing rogues catch sight of you they send their liburnians in chase and ask for all sorts of documents until they chance on one you haven’t. After which, if they want your cargo, they just take it. It is all very legal, I don’t doubt. They say the Romans are great law-makers.”
“And you count on the Roman ships being laid up for the winter now?”
“Surely,” he answered. “You know the Romans are no sailors. I have stepped a new mast. My men have made and rove new cordage. The British women have sewed me a sail out of linen that I think will stand the storms off the west coast of Hispania. It is a small sail, very stout, with good, wide strapping on all the seams and with a stout cord all around the edge of it. My crew have scoured the hull and payed the seams.
“We have food aboard, good dry venison and apples. Those are very good against the scurvy, Tros, and they keep better than our Mediterranean fruit. Water for four months in new oaken casks that have been well soaked to kill the bitter taste. I have raised the freeboard more than half a cubit from bow to stern, using oaken planks.”
“Better a big sea on an open deck than a lesser one caught between bulwarks where it can’t escape,” Tros cautioned him.
“Ah! But I have hinged the planking from above, and the waves can pour off as the ship rolls. You had better come with me, Tros,” he said, red-eyed from another bout of coughing. “I have lost three of my men in a drunken brawl by the riverside. I bought three Britons to replace them, but — I will pay you, I will pay you a percentage if you come. I grow old, too old for storming the Gates of Hercules in winter. This is my last journey. Come with me to Alexandria, you and that one-eyed fellow, Conops, and when I have sold my tin to Esias the Jew, the ship is yours, Tros.”
Tros shook his head, grinning kindly.
“I must go to Caritia,” he answered. “My father was the pilot who had charge of Caesar’s cavalry. The cavalry never reached Britain. Caius Julius Caesar will blame my father for that, and justly. My father Perseus is a Prince of Samothrace; he will not lend himself to such purposes as Caesar’s.
“I don’t doubt he led the cavalry astray, even as I tried to wreck all the rest of the fleet in the quicksands — I being no Initiate and therefore not wholly averse to drowning a few thousand Romans.”
“Your father must be dead long since,” said the Phoenician. “Caesar will have had him beaten to death.”
“I think not,” Tros answered. “My father is wise in the Mysteries. He would know how to speak with Caesar. Caesar might torture him; I have seen him torture others, with fire and ropes and wedges and all manner of cruelty; it was Caesar who ordered Conops’ eye put out in return for a saucy answer. But Caesar is not such fool as to kill whom he hopes to use. I expect to find my father living.”
“He were better dea
d.”
The Phoenician coughed until every sinew of his frame was wrenched and he lay back gasping.
“So you and I might think, Hiram-bin-Ahab. But such men as my father, by the oath of their Initiation, must live as long as life can be spun out, enduring all things. That is a charge imposed on them when they are chosen for the Inner Secrets.”
“God spare me from such initiation,” said Hiram, coughing again with his face among the shawls. “Kuff-kuff — this one last voyage and — heyh-yeyh — then I am ready if my time has come.”
Tros sat thinking, cudgeling his brain.
“It is early yet for the Roman ships to be laid up for the winter,” he said after a while.
“But I will die if I stay here. I must go, I must go,” said the Phoenician, breathing through his nose.
“Then you need a safe-conduct that Romans will recognize,” said Tros, slapping his thigh, for a bold idea had dawned on him. “The liburnians might put to sea in any moderate gale and overhaul you. What if I escort you with a Roman bireme all the way to the farthest western limit of the coast of Gaul? If I promise to do that, will you give Skell a passage to Caritia first?”
The Phoenician propped himself against the wall and stared through red- rimmed eyes. The shutter was closed tight, but a dim light filtered past the edges of the leather curtain that hung in the doorway and they could see each other’s faces well enough.
“Your eyes are the color of gold, and you do not look mad,” said the old man.
“Nay,” Tros answered. “And I will pass you by the Romans as far as the corner of Gaul, if you will first pass Skell into Caritia.”
Hiram-bin-Ahab turned that over in his mind. His cargo of tin was as good as lost if the Romans should learn of it. They claimed a monopoly of all commerce in tin, because of their own tin mines in Spain and their own need of tin for making bronze for military purposes.
Even if he should succeed in passing the Gates of Hercules undetected, he would still risk being caught in the Mediterranean, in which case he would be made to hand over his tin against Roman promises to pay, promises which he would have to discount with the Roman money lenders if he ever hoped to cash them.