by Talbot Mundy
So he let them sleep wherever they lay down to it, and the seamen stood watch and watch that night, but later, when the storm came, Tros had a score of proud men he could call on, half of them in either watch, not expert, but enthusiastic. Thus he was able to rest ten tired-out real seamen at a time.
And that worked wonders. For the aristocracy discovered they were not so far behind the seamen after all, stronger than they when their muscle counted, lacking only knowledge of what to do, and how to do it with the least exertion.
That led to rivalry, even to blows, until Orwic, green-cheeked, swaying and self-conscious, crawled down from the fighting top at last, compelled himself to eat, and took charge of his friends.
Then Tros rearranged the watches, keeping gentlemen and seamen to themselves, and matched one against the other. By the afternoon of the first day out the men who had lain groaning in the scuppers began appearing one by one on deck, and some of them added themselves to Orwic’s watch, getting in one another’s way, but learning rapidly.
So all went increasingly well until Tros hove the ship to in fine weather, the second day out from Lunden, with the Kentish cliffs in sight on one hand and the cliffs of Gaul just visible through a haze to southward.
Being hove to was another kind of motion. There were prompt defections from the ranks of Orwic’s men. But Tros was more concerned about the blue haze masking the cliffs of Gaul and a change of weather in the northwest where a bank of gray cold-looking clouds looked full of wind.
Watching that cloudbank and the line of white across the sea beneath it, his eye detected two specks that he liked still less, for they followed a third, which was certainly the three-reefed mainsail of Hiram-bin-Ahab’s ship. He knew that Phoenician curved spar as he knew the cliffs of Samothrace, and, though he had only seen the spar and lug-sail of a Northman once, he did not need Orwic’s voice from the fighting top to warn him that Hiram-bin-Ahab was running from a pair of North Sea pirates.
The Britons began roaring for a battle on the deep, and even the seasick oarsmen crawled on deck, recovering their strength from sheer excitement, some of them demanding food, that they might gain strength for the fighting. But Tros stood scratching at his beard, perplexed.
The gods — and he was a whole-souled pantheist, who saw the hand of one god or another in every splash of spray and change of circumstances — were staging a conundrum for him that demanded wit.
He felt reasonably sure he could beat those Northmen off, for he knew his Britons and the dreadful havoc he could wreak with six great arrow-engines. Too, if he could trust his oarsmen, by a deft maneuver he might wreck one Northman, catching her in a following sea — it was boiling white now under the racing clouds, and the following sea would swamp her as her slim bows crumpled on the galley’s oak-and-iron ram. That would leave but one Northman to deal with, and six arrow-engines for the work: one slim-waisted longship, that had run too long before the rising sea to dare to turn about.
He smiled at the nerve of the old Phoenician, who had dared to reef down snugly even though the Northmen gained on him and he had no fighting crew. He supposed old Hiram-bin-Ahab had counted on the sight of a Roman bireme to send the pirates scurrying for shelter, calculating speed and distance with the accuracy that a man learns in fifty years at sea.
But what if the Northmen did not know the bireme’s possibilities? Had Rome ever sent a ship up their way? They might mistake her for some freakish foreign thing hove to and helpless, as she surely would be presently, unless he should go about in time. The storm would burst on him as the galley lay a- rolling with her yard braced nearly fore and aft.
Tros felt at the helm, watching all three ships, and there was hardly a mile between them, or more than three miles between them and himself. The Northmen seemed not far behind the old Phoenician in seamanship.
If he should fail to put the galley about before the thundering northwester hurled high seas on him — and it would be too late then — they would simply storm along past him and pursue the old Phoenician until they could close with him at their own discretion, perhaps in the lee of Vectis or wherever the wind and sea should offer opportunity.
But if he should go about in time, ahead of that tumbling sea, and run, he was afraid the Northmen might think he ran from them, and that involved a second problem: that his own Britons might believe the same thing and be mutinous.
Then, though he had improved her, the galley still steered like a house when a following sea lumped under her high stern. There was the risk, amounting almost to a certainty, that a high sea under that stern would break away the wicker false end he had erected at such pains to increase the ship’s apparent size.
However, he went about, and squared away under a three-reefed mainsail before the storm struck him, boiling along beam to beam with Hiram-bin-Ahab three-quarters of a mile to starboard and one of the Northmen half a mile astern. The other lurched and pitched off the Phoenician’s quarter like a lean wolf keeping a stag in view.
Then Tros began to curse the day when Romans ever left dry land and built themselves floating islands that they fondly thought were ships. Hiram-bin- Ahab’s sweet-lined little merchant-ship, with her great eye painted in the bow, deep-laden though she was, sailed faster than he could follow without spreading more sail than he dared.
The Northmen raced along like hungry fish, their beautifully molded bows preventing them from plunging. It was going to be a hopeless stern chase, with all the ever-widening channel in which to scatter, and small hope of coming to the Phoenician’s aid in time.
Tros made up his mind swiftly when he realized that, for the waves were thundering under his stern and loosening the wicker dummy work with every plunge. Already the cloth covering was washed away and there was nothing to be gained by maneuvering to save what seemed already doomed.
He changed his helm and ordered two reefs shaken out, turning the reeling galley’s broadside almost square to the waves, and bore down on the nearest Northman.
It was then that he cursed himself for letting Conops go to the Phoenician. There was no one he could trust to rush below and make sure of the closing of the oar-ports; no one to stand below the poop and enforce his orders on the instant that he roared them; no one to see that the arrow baskets did not lurch overside while the Britons wrestled with one another for the right to serve the engines; no one to see that the gut was sheltered from the spray.
Some fool loosed the dolphin from its lashings and the great iron horror began swinging from the yardarm like Fate’s pendulum, threatening to chafe its halyard and go crashing through the deck, striking the shrouds when the ship lurched, swinging the yard and spilling wind out of the sail.
Nor had he a seaman fit to send aloft to throw a rope around the thing and make it fast. He had to let the helm go then. He gave it to Orwic, jumped to the main deck and up on to the citadel. Thence he sprang into the shrouds with drawn sword, slashing at the halyard as it swung, and the dolphin grazed the ship’s side as it plunged through the crest of a wave, forever harmless.
Orwic, laughing happily when Tros took the helm again, cuffed another Briton away from one of the poop arrow-engines. He had feared he might miss something by having to stand there hauling at a steering oar, and in another minute he would have let the helm go anyhow.
The heads of the Northmen showed plainly now between the shields erected all along the longship’s bulwark. Orwic began laying arrows in the grooves, while half a dozen young enthusiasts got in one another’s way to turn the crank and strain the bows taut.
But it was the bow engines that fired first, ignoring the galley’s roll and shoulder plunge, that were increased by the weight of the fighting top, where no man could have clung and kept his senses.
One volley of arrows plunked into the sea like a flight of hurrying fish, three waves away. The other went rocketing so high over the Northmen’s mast that the pirates did not even guess of its existence.
What the Northmen did see was a row of tousled h
eads along the galley’s bulwark, and a galley plunging down on them under a weight of sail that looked like carrying the mast away and bore her down until the keel showed in the trough between two waves.
They could see the boiling ram, and they were smart of helm enough to miss that easily. But they could not see much, in the way of men or weapons, that alarmed them, until Orwic, steadying himself with a foot against the poop rail, loosed his trial shot exactly at the moment when the galley’s stern paused swaying on a wave. It was the sway that did the spreading. It was luck, or Lud of Lunden, maybe, that sent twelve arrows screaming straight into the gaps between the Northmen’s shields.
The Northmen did not wait for any more of that.
Their helm went over instantly. A big man, whose long, fair hair streamed out from under a peaked helmet, shook his fist as the crew hauled on the braces and the longship changed her course toward the coast of Britain.
Tros’s cockerels sent flight after flight of arrows after her, and one chance volley of a dozen plunked through the crimson sail, but most of them went wide by half a dozen ship’s lengths, and there was no hope of pursuit.
But the other Northman, who had been edging his way gradually closer to Hiram-bin-Ahab’s flank, turned tail too, because Northmen were easily scared when they did not understand just what was happening, and both longships shook down a reef in a hurry to reach shelter under the cliffs of Kent. So Tros, too, changed his helm, to follow the Phoenician, hoping the Northmen would suppose he had chased them from their quarry in order to capture it himself.
But the instant he changed his course he had to deal with mutiny. The Britons, Orwic leading, swore they would not sail another yard with him unless he should follow the Northmen and force them to give battle.
They called him coward, traitor, a purse-loving Samothracian. They struck the helm away from him and tried to sail the galley for themselves, laying her over until even Tros cried out in terror and half of the water casks broke adrift below, thundering and crashing as if the ship were falling apart.
But the sail did not split, because Tros had jumped to the deck and let the sheets go. So when they all discovered they were helpless — and that was only after they had tried to row with heavy water squirting through the oar-ports and a dozen or more knocked senseless as the oar-ends caught them in the jaw — they let Tros take the helm again, threatening to hang him where the dolphin used to swing unless he should pursue the Northmen.
“Then hang me and have done with it!” Tros answered.
He laughed at them. At which they also laughed, because they understood that he had them at his mercy just then. What should happen later was another matter!
The sail thundered and snapped in the wind and none had a notion how to get it sheeted down again, while the galley rolled and every third or fourth wave swept her from stem to stern.
It was more than Tros knew how to do, although he did have twenty men who could go aloft and lay their bellies on the spar, once he could get that braced and steady, but in some way he had to save that sail. So he sent the twenty men aloft to tie a stout line to its corner and then to cut it loose to blow downwind. When it had flopped into the sea he towed it, to help keep his stern to the waves, wondering what Conops might be thinking, for he knew Conops had missed none of that performance. Conops would be watching with one eye as good as half a dozen from the old Phoenician’s poop.
The Britons grew seasick again, the excitement having died. There were some who said the expedition was a failure; they demanded that Tros should put back to Lunden as soon as the storm might permit.
“Where the women will laugh at you, and I will bid them laugh, whether you hang me for it or not,” Tros answered.
He had only one dread now. The galley would survive the storm, but Hiram- bin-Ahab might run out of his bargain. The Phoenician’s ship was out of sight, hidden by spume and rain that made a howling twilight of high noon.
A sudden shift of wind made even the direction doubtful, since without a glimpse of sun or coastline, tide across the current and the wind kicking both into a three-way mess of wallowing confusion, there was nothing to set a course by. At dawn old Hiram-bin-Ahab might be a hundred miles ahead.
Tros laughed at himself bitterly. His whole ingenious plan had gone downwind, and, what was nearly as bad, he had lost his good man Conops. He would not have willingly exchanged him for all the Britons, Orwic included. He knew Conops could take care of himself; but he laughed again, and not so bitterly, to think of Skell’s predicament, without friends in some foreign port, and with plenty of press gangs on the prowl for a likely oarsman.
There was no one to consult with. Orwic was indignant because he had refused to chase the Northmen.
“Who will be burning Hythe or Pevensey tomorrow as surely as we’ve lost the way!” he yelled against the wind when Tros said something flattering about his marksmanship with the arrow-engine.
Nothing after that to do but pace the poop and watch the sea. Orwic went below. Even the seaman, who relieved Tros at the helm so that he might sleep in snatches, was impudent and made a suggestive motion of finger to throat, prophetic of what might happen when Orwic had done talking to the crew.
However, they were still afloat and likely to survive the storm. The wickerwork structures built at bow and stern were almost undamaged. The pitched cloth covering was gone, but the marvelously twisted basketwork had offered no resistance to the waves, which washed through the interstices, even breaking their force without being torn loose, and keeping many a wave from bursting on the deck.
Tros fell asleep considering that contraption, dreaming of the sweet ship he would some day build — he had her half-designed already in his head — and calculating on a basketwork construction all around her above the waterline, perhaps covered with well-pitched sail-cloth, wondering whether that might not serve better than the metal plates he had always had in mind. He could see the possibilities.
He set himself to try to dream of something better than the sailcloth for a covering, and dreamed, instead, of deep-sea monsters that came overside and threatened him with death.
When he awoke, both his own long sword and the shorter Roman one were gone. He was not tied, but Orwic and a dozen other Britons were on the poop, eyeing him with guarded curiosity. They were leaning against the poop rail, an obvious committee of mutineers.
It lacked an hour of sundown, and the storm had died, but a tremendous swell was running. The sun was an angry red ball above a welter of gray water, and the coast of Gaul was like a pencil line behind a curtain of haze on the left hand. The twenty seamen were all clustered in the bow, as panicky as sheep that smell wolf.
“We propose to go home,” Orwic announced drily, definitely.
“Very well,” Tros answered, standing up, arms akimbo, facing them. “Set me ashore on the coast of Gaul.”
But Orwic laughed.
“You take us home,” he answered.
Tros studied the drift awhile, for there was hardly any wind, although the waves were running too high for that crew of horsemen to manage the oars. It was difficult to judge direction in the gray haze, but at the end of a minute he was nearly sure he could hear surf pounding on a beach.
“Let us see whither we go,” he answered, facing them again.
“Home!” repeated Orwic, gesturing rather vaguely to the northward.
But Tros realized that Orwic was ashamed beneath that air of well-bred calm, and that, though he spoke for the committee, he was not its instigator. He had seen a many deep-sea mutinies. He made a gesture to his sword-belt, saying nothing. Orwic actually blushed, which made him look ridiculous, with his hair all blown and tousled and a two days’ growth of yellow beard.
“Give me my sword and I will fight the lot of you,” said Tros, turning his back again.
He put both hands behind him, listening. He was sure now he could hear surf pounding on a beach, equally sure that it didn’t much matter what happened unless he could control t
he crew. The mutineers consulted in whispers, which is no way to conduct a mutiny. Out of the corner of his eye Tros could see all the rest of the men clustered around the citadel, most of them chin on knee, squatting on the deck, watching the outcome. And that is not the spirit in which mutinies succeed. It was too bad to have to make a fool of Orwic, but even nephews of Caswallon’s have to learn.
Tros leaned overside and noticed that the basketwork was still in place. He was careful to display his interest in that, watching the suck and movement of it as the galley rolled and the sea swirled in and out through the interstices, as if the mutiny were unimportant.
“We will give you your sword if you will agree to take us home,” said Orwic.
“No!” Tros answered, facing them again. “If I have my sword I will be captain, and you will obey me. Without my sword I am not captain.”
“Then you must obey us,” said Orwic.
“No,” Tros answered. “I gave no undertaking to obey you.”
“But you shall!” said Orwic.
Tros laughed, for he saw the boy was desperate — between the devil and the deep sea — obliged either to take command of a ship he could not handle or to yield and lose prestige with his own people. There was only one thing that a man of Orwic’s breeding could do in that predicament.
“You shall give the undertaking now,” he said grimly. But he could not challenge an unarmed man to fight. “Give Tros his sword!” he added, snapping out the four words to a man beside him.
He was pale now, almost gray-white. He could fight on horseback, but he had never tackled a trained swordsman on a swaying deck, and it was growing dark. The sun’s red rim was disappearing in a smear of angry haze.
They brought Tros’s sword out of the cabin, and Orwic gave it to him, stepping back at once and stripping his own breast bare. For it was against a Briton’s code of honor to fight hand to hand unless the opponent could see the naked skin over throat and heart.