Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “If the druids had more sense and less sanctity,” said Orwic, “they might visit some real smallpox on the Romans. Why can’t they do an honest day’s work against Britain’s enemies, instead of pulling long faces at the sunrise? I believe in results. By Lud’s ill-smelling mud,” he went on impiously, “I’d sooner sail with Tros, vomit or not, than be blessed by all the druids between here and Mona.”

  “Don’t blaspheme the druids,” Tros retorted. “As for me, I would rather have their blessing than all Caesar’s gold.”

  “Well, you have both, you have both!” said Orwic pleasantly. “The druids like you, and the gold rings genuine. What have you to worry about?”

  “This,” Tros answered: “that a number of you young horse-performers” — Caswallon and Orwic laughed delightedly at that— “must be on that galley and obedient to me. That is worry enough. Everything aboard a ship is just so, with one man giving orders and the rest obeying, or the ship sinks.”

  “What of it?” Orwic asked.

  Caswallon held a finger up again for silence. Fflur’s eyes were looking dreamy. A great gust of wind blew down the chimney, sending a cloud of smoke into the room. The wind howled, and a log fell suddenly sending up an explosion of sparks. Fflur’s voice, when she spoke at last, was far-away and colorless, pitched in a middle monotone.

  “Whatever you do, or whatever you do not, Caesar will come again, but not yet. He will cross the Thames; but I see Lunden standing after Caesar has gone, taking many with him — prisoners, hostages, slaves, women.

  “Do what you will, you can not prevent Caesar from coming. Do what he will, he can not win Britain, although Gaul is his, and so are the lands of the Belgae. Tros shall injure him, but not much, and again a little, and that time more severely, only to befriend him in the end.

  “Tros shall do Caesar a service that neither he nor Caesar will value at the moment; but it will place the world at Caesar’s feet, and kill him before he can grasp it. Tros and a woman, whom he shall serve to her own undoing.”

  She ceased, coughing in the sharp smoke, and Caswallon sent a serf outside to climb on the roof and fix a slab of wood against the chimney top. When that was done, he drank heavily of mead with apples in it, and, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, pronounced judgment.

  “I never knew Fflur wrong when she is in that mood. So I think it is a good thing to launch this venture against Caesar, because Tros, she says, shall injure him. What of the Phoenician? Is he willing?”

  Tros admitted with a gruff laugh that the Phoenician had not yet given his consent.

  “But I have gone the right way to persuade him. I have promised him my help to get past the Romans on his way home, whether he helps me or not. He will do more in that way, than if I bargained with him.”

  At which Caswallon roared with laughter.

  “Try that trick on the Iceni!” he shouted. “Eh, Orwic? Let him try to buy a horse or two on such terms. Lud! Oh, Lud of Lunden Town! Hey there! Send for the Phoenician.”

  He threw a lump of wood at one of the sleepers on the benches and sent him to bring Hiram-bin-Ahab “shawls and all.”

  “Bring him in a basket if he won’t walk.”

  Tros urged that the Phoenician was a brave old sailor who should be treated with the courtesy due to a blood relation. But that was because he and Hiram-bin-Ahab were members of the same secret fraternity, although of different chapters of it.

  “I know these blood relations,” said Caswallon. “Aye, he is a very bloody one. Eh, Fflur? Eh, Orwic? He underpaid us for the tin and overcharged us for the dyes. He has lived at our expense, and his crew have robbed our townsmen, mending boats that the lazy rascals should have mended for themselves, demanding twice what the work is worth, and saving money for their master, who pays them nothing while they are in port. Drunken, knife-throwing thieves! What’s worse, there will be a lot of little half-Phoenician bastards for us to try and make good Britons of!”

  However, he was courteous when the old Phoenician came, coughing and shivering in his camel-hair shawls. He had a great chair set for him before the fire and woke up the dogs to make room for him, offering him warm mead, saying that Fflur knew how to cure all kinds of coughs.

  “Only she will purge you worse than druids do,” he added reminiscently. “The last time she cured me of a headache I had belly burning for a week.”

  “She’s better than the druids, though,” said Orwic. “Druids put you on rations of dry bread and carrots, and make you drink water like a horse. When you’re properly famished they preach about your latter end and being born again into another body, until you feel like burning all the undesirables, so that it won’t be into one of their bodies anyhow. I’d rather be purged by Fflur than preached at by a druid.”

  “None can cure me,” Hiram-bin-Ahab answered, coughing. “This is my last journey.”

  “Hah!” remarked Caswallon. “Then make it one to be remembered. On a man’s last journey he should play a man’s part.”

  The old Phoenician glanced from face to face, his fingers twitching nervously.

  “You will reach home,” Fflur assured him.

  Hiram-bin-Ahab coughed, perhaps to hide a grin, or so at least thought Tros.

  “If I knew surely I would reach home, I would put into no port on the way,” he answered.

  “Fflur is always right,” Caswallon retorted, almost angrily. “So it is certain you will reach home. Therefore you can afford to do your friends a service on the way.”

  “I have done you many services,” said the Phoenician. “I taught your women how to use the dye so that it would not wash out. I taught your sailors how to make boats water-tight; how to make a proper rope by twisting seven sets of linen strands; how to bind the edges of a sail, and how to cut the sail so that it will catch more wind. What more do you want of me?”

  “No more than you shall do,” Caswallon answered, laying a great blue-and- white fist on his knee and leaning forward. “You wish to go before the winter storms. But unless you will do what I propose, you shall not sail until spring comes.”

  The Phoenician coughed, perhaps to hide embarrassment, but it racked his frame for all that.

  “What could you profit by keeping me here all winter?” he asked.

  “I am thinking of you,” Caswallon answered. “If you will do what I wish, I will send an escort with you, a great bireme, as far as the end of the coast of Gaul to protect you against Romans and Northmen and pirates. But if not, then I could not spare the escort. And I should be a mean host to let you go away alone before the spring in that case. There might be fewer pirates in the spring, and fewer storms and possibly no Romans. Name a price if you will; but you shall do what I demand.”

  “There is nothing I could ask,” said the Phoenician, “except, perhaps, a pair of pretty slave girls for the court of Ptolemy.”

  But he knew Caswallon would not grant that favor, because he had tried before and Fflur had vetoed it.

  “I have sold you three rowers,” said Caswallon. “I will give you back the price of them, if that will satisfy you.”

  Hiram-bin-Ahab coughed again and spat into the fire. The expression of his face might have been due to physical agony, but Tros thought not.

  “I am a trader,” he said at last, and his words were arresting because he spoke slowly in a foreign accent, with harsh gutturals and none of the soft, swift, liquid sounds the Britons used.

  “I fill a ship. I buy men or I hire them, and I drive them to the world’s end. Some die; some live; all suffer. I trade and I fill my ship again and go home, I suffering more than any, because it is my ship, my risk. You understand me?

  “Sickness, mutiny, Romans, pirates, rocks, tides, quicksands, storms, all these and more I struggle with, day and night, month after month. Ever I swear each journey is the last. Ever I set forth again, because two spirits in me urge. One beckons and the other drives.

  “Trade I must, because I am a trader and I itch for trade. Adventure I must have,
because I am an adventurer; it is in my blood, my bones, my dreams. It frets me when I count the profits of a journey and men say to me, ‘Hiram-bin-Ahab, you are rich at last. Go not again. Remember the pot that went too often to the well.’

  “And yet I go again, because I love adventure and I love trade, being wedded to them as to two wives, each of whom is jealous of the other and I striving to serve both equally, giving each her turn, yet living, as it were, in one house with the two.”

  The howling wind blew away the board from the chimney top, sending it clattering along the roof. A great cloud of smoke filled the room and the old Phoenician coughed until it seemed as if his lungs would burst under the strain.

  Caswallon scolded the serf and sent him to fix the board in place again, threatening to make him stand and hold it there all night unless he should fasten it properly. Then when the smoke had thinned a little and they had thrown fresh oak knots on the fire, Hiram-bin-Ahab cleared his throat with warm mead and, biting an apple, went on talking:

  “Trade and adventure, two jealous wives, helping, hindering each other. Hey-hey! I have been a good husband to both of them — keh-keh-keh — and I am old. A too good husband ages sooner than a bad one.

  “Trade and adventure — the same and not the same. For when I trade” — he thrust his hands forward, palms upward, and moved the fingers in a “hither! come ye hither!” gesture— “I look to profit. That wife is a thrifty one, you understand me? Eh? Keh-keh-keh-ka-a-gh — these fogs! These fogs!

  “And when I go adventuring — eh-h-h, but I have seen strange sights in my day: mountains of ice in the sea, and whales around them, and the big fish warring with the whales until the sea was blood-red; land where you could see the sun at midnight, where fir trees taller than British elms came to the sea’s edge and the men wore bearskin and ate fish; black stone that burns—”

  “We have that,” said Caswallon. “Our fishermen bring it from the country north of the Iceni. We have burned it on this hearth.”

  “Have you seen fish fly?” asked the Phoenician.

  “No,” said Caswallon, “but I have listened to a lot of lies in my day.”

  “Oh, well. When I go adventuring, it is for love of the adventure. That wife is a mistress, teases, coaxes, is extravagant” — he threw his hands outward, and smiled as if he were pouring a fortune into a woman’s lap, a lovely, lucky woman to be wooed by that tough old master of experience — but I never forget that I have two wives.

  “I have carried the stone that burns, all the way from an island where it snows at midsummer and the sun shines at midnight to Alexandria, where I sold it to King Ptolemy the Piper for its weight in corn, which I took to Ostia in four ships and sold to the Romans for silver. Hey-yey!

  “And Ptolemy burned the black stone all in one night, when he was drunk, to entertain a Roman money-lender; made a circle of it in the execution place and burned I don’t know how many convicted criminals, throwing in more and more until the fire was finished. But he would have killed them anyhow, so that is not on my head. Let Ptolemy answer for that.

  “Of all the men who set sail with me on my first voyage — I was younger than Tros then; that is fifty years ago — not one man lives but I. Storms, sickness, strife: I have enough to answer for.”

  “You haven’t answered me,” said Caswallon firmly. “Tros spoke to you of what I require. Will you do it, or no?”

  Hiram-bin-Ahab took a drink of mead. Then he looked at Fflur a long time. Then he met Caswallon’s eyes.

  “If it is for Tros and his father Perseus, I will do it gladly and for nothing,” he said, drawing up his legs and folding them under him, as if he were sitting on his own poop. “But if it is for you, you pay.”

  Fflur nodded. She understood him perfectly, but Caswallon looked piqued and Orwic swore under his breath.

  “Have I not been your good host?” Caswallon asked.

  “Aye, and I have been your good guest. As to that there is no account awaiting settlement. But Tros, who might have made a bargain, and a hard one — for I will need that permit he can sign with Caesar’s seal — Tros chose to make none, but promised, as a young man to an old one—”

  Caswallon stood up suddenly. He was a giant, and he looked like the god of battles when he tossed his head to throw back the long, fair hair.

  “By the Blood of Lud!” he thundered, “I am not behind Tros in this my kingdom! Take what you will! Help yourself to anything your old eyes covet, and go free. For I think as you say, this is to be your last journey. I ask nothing of you.”

  “Then I must do the best I can,” said the Phoenician, sipping at the mead again and glancing at Tros slyly. “Hey-yey! When a man has two wives, it is not always the thrifty one whose counsel guides him.”

  Later, when the men-at-arms were very fast asleep, Caswallon went and fetched a druid, who had lived in Gaul and learned great skill with the pen. Then they brought out Caesar’s chest, and after much confabulation between Tros and Hiram-bin-Ahab the druid copied Roman documents on parchment, making changes at Tros’ dictation, and forging Caesar’s signature so perfectly that not even Fflur’s keen eyes could tell the difference when she compared copy and original.

  At last, with a great laugh of contentment, Tros affixed Caesar’s seal, and went out with his arm around the shivering Phoenician, to greet the golden dawn.

  CHAPTER 21. In Which the Women Lend a Hand

  Ye think obedience is indignity; and so it is, if ye obey your baser selves, or if ye serve another’s avarice. But will ye all be kings and captains? It is neither freedom nor love of freedom that makes you disobedient, but envy, and fear lest a leader should prove what muddleheads ye are.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  THE BRITONS called it fun, until the third, or maybe the fourth day, when even Orwic tired of it. The women had enough to do to copy Roman costumes, and all the blacksmiths on the countryside were set to making Roman shields and swords in imitation of those captured on the Kentish beach.

  The helmets were the greatest difficulty, until they found a way of imitating them with basketwork, at which Britons were experts. They stretched skin over that and painted it, making plumes of horse-hair.

  Conops had a hard time keeping the Britons from making their own improvements. They wanted to make the plumes three times the size and to lengthen the swords, and to paint the shields blue because that was the color that always brought them luck.

  Tros saw to the galley, which needed such an overhaul as was next to impossible to make in haste in that undisciplined community. They had a Celtic kind of individuality, that fused them into one mercurial mass in opposition to authority, but made them units in deciding what to do and when to do it. When all other excuses for not working had been tried, they discovered that the day was sacred to some god or other and decamped to the woods to listen to a sermon from the druids.

  So the druids had to be won over, and Tros did that by letting them into the secret that he hoped to capture Caesar, enemy of their religion. Their forest dwellings were a-hum with fugitives from Gaul, who had brought details of the tortures Caesar used in his efforts to learn druidic secrets.

  So the druids came down in procession from forest to waterside and blessed the bireme, with dew and earth and mistletoe, proclaiming the ship sacred and whoever should lend a hand to recondition her, or whoever should sail in her under Tros’s command, thrice blessed.

  “You’ll find we’ll have to fight for what we want though,” Orwic commented.

  The galley had been built in Gaul, from a Roman model but by unaccustomed shipwrights, and in haste, because Caesar did everything in half the time that other people liked to squander. So, to a practiced eye, she would have been an obvious fraud if she had appeared off Caritia pretending to have come from a Roman port through the Gates of Hercules.

  She was too small, too clumsily built, and undersparred. It called for a very great deal of crafty reconstruction to make up for the lack of
size, and, even so, pitch and linen-covered wickerwork had to masquerade in many instances as heavy timber, not that timber was lacking, but time. And the Britons were nimble with their favorite wishes.

  Tros built a whole new bow and stern of wickerwork on light oak frames, and covered that with painted cloth to make the ship look larger, praying to all the gods he had ever heard of, and they were many, not to send even such a half-gale as should break it all away.

  In all that, he was ably helped by Hiram-bin-Ahab, who had sent his own tight ship downriver, with Skell on board, to lie up in a creek and wait for him. Thus they lost the services of the Phoenician’s crew, but prevented Skell from seeing the galley or learning of what was taking place.

  They mended the great arrow-engines and crammed the baskets full of new- made arrows nearly a yard long, Tros stowing those below deck to keep the Britons from firing them at marks across the river — they claiming they must have practice; he swearing he would have ammunition. They filled the water casks. That was a prodigious business, because the Britons swore that any sort of water was a miserable substitute for mead; but Tros made them clean the casks with charcoal and then haul water from a dozen miles away, having seen too many crews die of the stuff they put into ships from longshore wells. And by that time the Britons voted him a despot, although, and perhaps because, he had only used up ten days for the entire business.

  But it was not until the ship was ready and the crew had to be broken in that his real trouble began.

  Fflur, Caswallon and Orwic had chosen a hundred of the brassiest young coxcombs Britain could produce. Most of them had ridden into the waves in the teeth of Caesar’s legions and had slain their Romans, hand-to-hand, but were chosen chiefly for their horsemanship. That was not so foolish as at first appeared, because the men with the highest courage and the strongest sense of manhood took the trouble to excel at that. But they were coxcombs.