by Talbot Mundy
Orwic himself would have challenged Tros a hundred times if the other ninety-nine had not been so continually challenging him that he had to stand by the commander to uphold his own lieutenancy.
Their theory was that they should stand around the deck in imitation Roman armor and look handsome until they came in sight of Gaul, when they would land by some unexplained stratagem by night and rape the lair of Caesar.
The twenty paid seamen who had brought the galley up the Thames with Tros, and perhaps a few more pressed for the occasion, were to do the work; and they were perfectly willing to help Tros lick those seamen into absolute obedience.
Tros stood on the poop with arms akimbo and laughed gaily at them, because if he had shown his real feelings there would have been no chance that he could handle them at all.
“Why not have me do all the work, and you all be the captains?” he suggested amiably.
He bulked big in a Roman’s armor that the blacksmiths had enlarged to fit him, and he wore his own long sword as well as a short Roman one, which made him look dangerous. An imitation Roman helmet — none of the captured ones was big enough — cocked at a bit of an angle suggested an indifference to consequences. The toga thrown back over his shoulder gave him dignity.
And there were always those leonine eyes, that a man could not see without knowing there was a volcano not exactly slumbering behind them, but under control until needed.
“You!”
He singled out the most opinionated of them all, a youth of twenty, whose wife had painted new blue pictures on his white skin, and whose moustache was like a fox’s, about ten reddish hairs on either side.
“Come up here on the poop and show me how to set that sail! Stand by, the rest of you, to take his orders!”
The coxcomb had the good sense to refuse, but that did not save him from being laughed at, and when the laugh had died and they had all done imitating what they thought were deep-sea orders — such as they had heard along the riverbank when the fisher-crews put out for herring in the North Sea — Tros dealt out information. He was growing very fluent in the Gaulish dialect they used.
“Ye know the feel of a horse’s backbone, when ye ride ten leagues without a saddle. Ye know soreness of the hams and how the spine can tremble like a stick with a weight of pain atop. Those are beginnings. I deal now in middle matters. And the end is not yet.
“Ye shall learn now what hard corns feel like on the hams; and how red hot the blisters grow on hands that have pulled on an oar a day or two. Ache? Ye have never ached as ye shall before this journey ends.
“Ye need now spines like oak trees, sinews like new ropes, belly muscles like a bear’s. Ye need guts such as go into a wild boar’s constitution, and a lot more courage than ye showed there on the beach when ye stood off Caesar’s men!
“I saw that fight. I watched it from this poop. I saw each turn of it, and perceived how Caesar won. That day, ye fought by fits and starts. Ye charged into the sea, and out again to let the rear ranks have a turn, resting yourselves behind the fighting line, to come at it again; whereas Caesar’s men stuck to it until they won the beach.
“And now ye are rigged like Romans, ye must do as Romans! There is no pausing between encounters with the wind and sea. The tides don’t cease because your hams smart with the salt in open blisters. Ye may cry, but the storm shrieks louder, and the only answer to the storm is work.
“Ye can get off your horses and walk home if your buttocks are on fire and your shoulders feel like a sack of wheat on a knitting needle. Not so at sea! Ye must sit and row until the oar-handle bucks back and lifts you by the chin, and the oar-end of the man behind you takes you in the shoulder- blades.
“With the ship rolling and the wind howling and the water squirting through the oar-port, ye must keep on rowing, while the blisters burn and your bones ache as if chariots had driven over them. This sea game is a calling that needs guts.
“So I will think no worse of any man who cries off now. I will cry good bed to him and good mead and a fireside. I need the daring men on this adventure, the bold spirits who would rather die than quit, the men who can endure pain and the cold and vomiting, and still row until I bid them cease. Ashore then now, every man who thinks himself unfit for this adventure!”
They howled at him to show them something he could do and they could not, mocking the sea and all its tantrums, as any young cockerel can who hasn’t tried it and who has a quart or two of curmi or some other potent liquor under his sword-belt. So he changed his strategy then and promised, by the great North Light that never failed a mariner, that he would leave behind whoever should disobey one order or shirk one trick of training before the start.
“Ye have stood up to the big bear and the lean wolf and the gray boar. But I will make you fit to face the sea! May the gods, who laugh, forgive me!” he added in an undertone to the old Phoenician. “Can a man turn Britons into mariners?”
Caswallon kept away.
“They will appeal to me and I might have to side with them,” he said when Tros invited him to come and watch proceedings.
But he took care to learn how Tros had handled them and laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks.
For one of the things that Tros did was to moor the galley by the stern to the oak pile in mid-river, and to set those free and fearless horsemen rowing against that, with the paid seamen placed at intervals along the benches to set the pace and show them an example. And that, as Orwic swore, was no amusement for a British gentleman.
For a while they made sport of it, trying to break the warp or else the oaken pile, but all they succeeded in doing was to stir up Thames mud until the stink offended them, and to crack one another in the back with oar-ends until hot words led to fighting, and Tros had to get down among them with a mop to swab their indignant faces and get them all laughing again.
Conops’ services were lost then, when most needed. He was used to teaching men to row. He could have run along the plank beside the benches, singling out this man and that, showing exactly how to hold an oar and how to throw the head back when the blade struck water.
But word came up-river, brought by Hiram-bin-Ahab’s second mate in a small boat, that Skell was growing restless and threatening to leave the Phoenician’s ship unless something happened before nightfall. So Conops had to be sent back with him to manage Skell. Tros’s parting words were careful.
“Understand me — he mustn’t be tied. He mustn’t think he is a prisoner, or he may see through the whole trick. Also, I want him alive and fit for treachery in Gaul. So, first, try lying to him. Say Hiram-bin-Ahab will come tomorrow, then the next day, and so on. When that fails, pick a quarrel with him.
“He will call you a liar, no doubt. Be offended by that and lay him out with a belaying pin or with your knife-hilt. But mind, no overdoing it. A sore head may stir the venom in him, which I need. But a knife wound might let the impudence out, and he will need all his impudence this journey.”
Conops winked his only eye, bowed with a movement like a curtsey until his weather-stained blue kirtle nearly touched the deck, holding his right hand up, palm outward, and departed overside. He would have gone to Gaul, to try and kidnap Caesar single-handed, if Tros had ordered it.
Thereafter, Tros was in a quandary, because the girls came down to the riverbank and crowded into boats, to laugh at the oarsmen’s antics and at the oar blades straddling this and that way like the legs of a drunken centipede.
They screamed idiotically when the galley lurched toward them, and asked, when it lurched away again, whether Tros had his crew chained by the foot, the way the Northmen chained slaves to the benches.
When Orwic leaned over the side to order them away in his haughtiest manner, they called him “sailor-man Orwic” and asked how much a basket were the fish.
So the first day’s practice at the oars broke up in rowdy repartee and ended by the girls all being chased home, screaming, Orwic vowing that women were the curse of the human r
ace.
“That’s one thing I concede the druids,” he said scornfully. “They are born of women, like the rest of us, but they know enough to keep away from them when they once take vows. What puzzles me is, why a man can’t do that without pulling a long face and singing hymns at sunrise. I was through with women long ago. They spoil everything.”
But Tros went straight to a woman, Fflur, by her fireside, where she knitted the first trousers of her youngest son and listened to the calf-love story of her eldest, who had seen a girl who suited him “by Verulam, where Merlin son of Merlin keeps the mill. Aye, Mother, Merlin’s daughter.”
When she had said her say concerning Merlin’s daughter — and there was much she said that was pointed, but without a barb, and much more that was understood she might have said, had it not been better that Caswallon should say that for her — she listened to Tros, seeming to listen with those gray eyes rather than with her ears, which were hidden under the gray-shot golden hair.
And that night Fflur gave a party to the women, at which no men were present, although the men made bonfires all around the house and caterwauled and burned a witch in effigy, pretending they thought the women were conspiring to sell Lunden to the Romans and submit themselves to Roman husbands. They even made a Roman out of a pig’s bladder and some meal bags, and pushed it through the window on a stick.
But what happened at that party did not leak out, because Fflur knew how secrets are told in such a way that women keep them. The girls had a great air of importance when they let the men lead them home at last, but no amount of cajoling or teasing made them talk.
And next day, when most of his hundred — as Tros had expected they would — refused downrightly to return to rowing and be made ridiculous, the girls joined hands and danced around them, mocking them, singing a new song Fflur had set to an old tune. It was about the men of Lunden, who were such babies that they could only ride horseback and were afraid to hurt their lily-white hands by pulling at ash oars.
So the hundred went back to the rowing, because the girls declared they wouldn’t kiss a man who hadn’t blisters on his hands and couldn’t make an ash oar keep time as it smote the water. In fact, there were more than a hundred who offered themselves in place of the mutineers, and several heads were broken as the original hundred defended their claim to be the first gentlemen rowers in all Britain, a kind of brand-new aristocracy with first claim on the admiration of the women.
Orwic had two girls in attendance on him when he sauntered back to duty. He contrived to look bored, but the appearance was unconvincing.
CHAPTER 22. Mutiny and Mal de Mer
Ye speak to me with deference, and in my presence ye behave with reverence for the Wisdom that I worship. But why do ye not slay me? I will tell you. Ye fear those underlings, for whom I insist on such small justice as your law permits. And they fear you. But I fear neither them, nor you, nor death.
— from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan
THEN CAME, after a series of gales, one of those clear October nights when Britain is hushed, as if she heard the winter coming and were waiting in her bridal robes. The very animals were still. The river sucked by the wharf-piles with a hint of bell notes in the splash, and the stars shone as if wet with dew.
That was the night Tros started. He had sent Hiram-bin-Ahab downriver in the afternoon, the rowboat keeping close inshore to avoid the incoming tide. There were no farewell feasts or mead drinkings, because the old man protested he could not sit through another such ordeal.
Caswallon permitted him to vanish like a specter of the past, wrapped in his camel-hair shawls and seated in the stern of Fflur’s swan-carved barge.
But twenty of the young girls kissed him first, lest Britain be disgraced, and hung three garlands around his neck, filling the boat so full of flowers that the rowers had hard work to take their seats.
And Tros would have no feasting because he wanted his crew sober. If they had sat down in Caswallon’s hall to meat and mead there would have been no hope of getting them on board before morning.
But he could not keep Fflur and Caswallon off the ship, and although Caswallon, at Tros’s request, gave out that the galley would leave on the following day, all Lunden was there, nevertheless, two hours after sunset, when the tide changed, and the girls so flocked around the ship in punts and rowboats that when Tros ordered the warp cast off and struck the first beat on the bull-hide drum to time the oarsmen, there were upsets, screams, girls in the river, and it needed Tros’s voice, roaring louder than the drum, to keep the oars at work.
Even so, as the tide took hold of the galley, she almost buried her beak in the mud below the pool.
But Caswallon had brought along three druids to forfend ill luck. There was mistletoe at the masthead. The moon was just exactly right, a crescent with the points so oriented as to gather fortune from the sky and pour it on the undertaking.
So nobody was drowned, as Orwic, leaning out from the fighting top at the masthead, where he was supposed to be conning the course, reported.
Orwic said he knew those reaches of the Thames. So Tros had sent him up there, chiefly to flatter him, but he sent a seaman up there too, and Caswallon made Orwic his admiral afterwards, he was so impressed by the way the ship was piloted in darkness.
They rowed downstream to drumbeat, towing Caswallon’s barge, filling the night with throbbing until the ducks awoke and stuttered into deeper reed beds, until the singing of the girls by Lunden Pool grew faint and died away in a murmur, until mud appeared, as the tide receded, and Tros held the galley in mid-river, not trusting even Orwic’s skilled assistant to know short cuts in the gloom.
And at last they saw a dim light in the marshes, which was Hiram-bin- Ahab’s riding light, and there Fflur, Caswallon and the druids were put overside to wait for the tide to change again and bear them back, upstream, to Lunden Town.
But first Caswallon made a speech to the gentlemen adventurers who leaned on the white-ash oars to listen, each man with an imitation Roman helmet, sword and armor under his rowing bench. “Sons of good British mothers! Let none return to Britain less a man than he set forth! Into Tros’s hands I have given you, charging him that he shall lead you nobly. Do ye obey him. Trust him. I hold him answerable. If he brings you back with honor, I will honor him; and I think he will lead you craftily to great deeds, the which I would that I might share in.
“But I am the king, whose foot should not leave Britain, save in extremity. Smite, each of you, a blow for me! For lo! I am a king who strikes at Caesar with a hundred sword hands, with the cunning of a hundred brains. So be ye valiant!”
They did not cheer, lest Skell should hear them on the old Phoenician’s ship. Caswallon, Fflur and the druids went overside into the lapping darkness and were rowed into the reeds to await the coming tide.
Then Tros called to Orwic to light a masthead flare, and when that had burned for the space of a hundred heart-beats the pitch-dipped branch was cast into the river like a plunging meteor and Tros set the drumbeat going, low, slow, regular, muting the drum with his knee, lest Skell should catch the rhythm and add two and two together later on.
Then, when they had cleared the mouth of Medway and at dawn the river broadened out of view on either hand, he set the drum to thundering and made the oarsmen grunt and sweat until they felt the long swell under them and, as the tide was near the slack, an off-shore breeze awoke.
“This Lud of Lunden is a god with brains,” Tros shouted then. “Tide he gives us, and then a wind exactly in the quarter whence we need it!”
He laughed when the hirelings manned the halyards and the wind filled the bellying sail, for he had those young cockerels at his mercy now. Soon he could hear Orwic’s groan and vomit from the fighting top, for the tide had turned against the wind.
There was a lively motion in the dark, uplifting rollers and a drift of white scud splashing through the oar-ports. Now was not much need to bid the rowing cease; good half the oars were idle b
efore the order came.
And as Tros leaned on the helm to make the utmost of the wind to gain an offing before he should turn, with tide abeam, southward along the coast of Kent, he chuckled — first at the silence in the ship’s waist, then at the noise of resurrected mead and venison that gurgled overside or in between the benches, anywhere at all!
The twenty sea-wise hirelings, who had fought him all the way from Gaul to Lunden not so long ago, gave him no trouble at all on this adventure, since he had them too, at disadvantage.
As surely as they were none too many to man the sheets and braces, they were all too few to offer disobedience, with a hundred of Caswallon’s blooded cockerels, seasick though those were, at hand to put them in their place. The scorn was mutual and thorough.
The more sick the aristocracy became, the less they admired such human cattle as could thrive in a box on a heaving sea and, by the same compelling instinct, the less pleased it made them to be patronized.
One seaman, who dared to grin between decks when sent below to wedge a shifting water cask in place, was almost killed, which set Tros thinking.
He put a seaman at the helm and went below, discovering more than twenty oarsmen who were only sick enough to feel ill-tempered, chilly and ashamed. He gathered them in the ship’s waist, abaft the citadel.
“Choose,” he ordered gruffly. “Take mops and clean up all that mess of vomiting, or stand a watch on deck and let the seamen swab.”
They chose the deck, and Tros, in no hurry at all, since he must let the Phoenician overtake him after the next tide, spilled the wind out of the sail repeatedly until they learned the use of brace and sheet. There being no such cure for seasickness as work aboard a plunging ship, he quartered the sea in every possible direction to keep them busy at the ropes and to accustom them to every kind of belly-empty motion, until they grew new sea legs under them and were aware of appetite.
When they had eaten of the sacked dry venison and bread, such sleepiness came over them as only sea produces, sleepiness of bone and brain and muscle, eyes, skin, all the senses, until an oak deck felt like a feather bed and any kind of wind-break was a haven of dreamless bliss.