Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “At your hands I have suffered failure,” Tros went on. “It carks in me. I went for Caesar. I bring back dead and wounded men. Whose fault is that? Yours, you disobedient young devils! By the gods who grinned when you wasted arrows, it shall be my fault if I fail again! Now hear me! Not a man aboard this bireme shall see Lunden until we beat the Northmen first! Who questions that?”

  He paused dramatically, but there was no answer. He had stolen their thunder by threatening to do what they had first proposed, like yielding to a wrestler’s hold in order to upset him.

  “Less than a hundred arrows! Not one throwing-spear! A torn sail! Two- score swordsmen fit to stand up! You have nothing but me to depend on! Eat that! Any one question it?”

  “You can handle the ship,” said one of them. He seemed afraid to hear his own voice.

  “Can I?” Tros’s voice rang with irony. “Does any of you question that I will?”

  “Come! No ill-temper, Tros. Nobody doubts your seamanship,” another man piped up. “We have had proof enough of that.”

  “Not proof enough! Nay, by Lud of Lunden, not yet enough! Seamanship includes the art of choking mutiny! Who doubts that I command this ship and every Briton in her? Speak up! Who doubts it? I will abolish doubt!”

  “Caswallon gave you the command. That is all right,” said one of them. “Only lead us against the Northmen, that is all.”

  “Lead? I will drive you!” Tros retorted. “Stand out, the man who thinks I can’t. Come on and let’s settle the question. What? Haven’t I a rival? Down off my poop then! Down you go!”

  He strode after them, point-first, and they scrambled off the poop in laughter at their own defeat. So Tros saw fit to smile too, as they crowded in the waist to hear the rest of what he had to say.

  “Northmen,” he laughed, pecking at the planking with his swordpoint. “I will give you such a belly-full of Northmen as you never dreamed. To your benches now! Out oars!”

  And they obeyed. They had promised they would row when called on. They had disobeyed him more than once, and it was true that they had squandered ammunition contrary to orders — true that, unless he could think of some expedient, they would be helpless against the two or three hundred men the Northmen probably could muster.

  But they also obeyed because it dawned on them that Tros was sick at heart from having lost so many men without a victory to show for it, and that he was bent on snatching a revenge from destiny.

  Thirteen oars aside began to thump in unison, not adding much to the bireme’s speed, but adding a great deal to the unanimity; and presently Tros added twenty more, compelling the hired seamen to man the empty benches, taking the helm himself. The wind was falling; the sail flapped half of the time, but the tide served and with forty-six oars the headway was good enough.

  He did not want to move too fast. He had never fought Northmen, although Caswallon and Orwic had told him of their methods — how they usually landed from two ships on two sides of a village and fought their way toward each other, burning as they went, to create a panic.

  And he knew the British method of opposing them, by throwing fire into their ships if they could come alongside, and by cutting down trees in the forest for a rampart against them when they landed and advanced on foot.

  The hundred young men he had taken with him on his venture against Caesar constituted practically the whole of Caswallon’s available fighting force in any sudden emergency. Excepting Lunden, which was only a little place, there were no towns from which to draw levies at a moment’s notice; British settlements were scattered and Britons disinclined to obey their chief unless they saw good and sufficient reason for it, so it would take time to summon an army and Caswallon was probably in desperate straits.

  It was late in the year for Northman raids, but if these were the two ships that Tros had refused to fight in the channel on his way to attack Caesar they might be on one of their usual plundering expeditions; in which case they would be in force and with their line of retreat extremely alertly guarded. Thirty men would be next to useless as an independent force against them and the only hope would be to reach Caswallon somehow and support him.

  But it might be that the Northmen’s home harvests had failed and they were up to their old game of wintering in Britain, doing all the damage within reach in order to force an armistice and contributions of supplies. In that event they would not be considering retreat, their ships might be unguarded and it might be possible to come on them unawares.

  It seemed to Tros, and Orwic confirmed the opinion, that the smoke came from both sides of the river. The man at the masthead was equally sure of it, and those were his home waters; he knew every contour of the Thames.

  That might mean that the Northmen were divided, one ship’s crew plundering on either bank; which was likely enough, since it would be good strategy, obliging Caswallon to divide his own forces and making it more difficult for him to gather men into one manageable unit. The Britons were probably in scattered tens and dozens being beaten in detail for lack of one directing mind.

  “A man does what he can,” Tros reflected, glancing upward at the heavy fighting top that might be visible from a long way off up-river.

  He called the man down from the masthead, then turned to Orwic.

  “You and Conops take axes. Cut the shrouds on the port side. Then chop the mast down!”

  He called the hired seamen away from the oars, lowered and stowed the sail, set ten of them hauling on the starboard shrouds and gave the word to Orwic. Three dozen ax-strokes and the mast went over with a crash, increasing the damage to the bulwark done by Caesar’s grapnels. Swiftly they chopped away the starboard rigging and Tros sent the seamen below to their oars again.

  “And now,” said Orwic, “I obeyed you, and I don’t know why. Without a sail how can we attack two swift ships?”

  Tros was not fond of explanations; they are usually bad for discipline; but he conceded something to Orwic’s prompt obedience, which was a novelty to be encouraged.

  “We should have lost the wind around the next bend anyhow. I would have had to take men from the oars to man sheets and braces. The Northmen are faster; we couldn’t have run, sail or no sail. Gather all the arrows into one basket, set them by the starboard arrow-engine, and listen to me. I’ll kill you if you loose one flight before I give the word!”

  He did not dare to use the bull-hide drum to set time for the rowing, for the sound of drum carries farther over water than the thump of oars between the thole-pins; he had to rely on gestures and his voice.

  The bireme was in mid-tide, gliding up-river rapidly; the shore was narrowing in on either hand, with shoal-water projecting nearly into midstream at frequent intervals. The smoke of two burning villages, a dozen miles apart and one on either side of the river, was already diminishing from brown to gray and the nearest — not two miles up-river — appeared of the two to be the more burnt out. Tros began to whistle to himself.

  Between the bireme and the nearest smoke there was a belt of trees that crept down to the river’s edge on the starboard hand. The trees were lower nearer the water, but even so, now that the mast was gone, they formed an effective screen behind which he could approach without giving warning because the deep-water channel followed the bank closely.

  “Orwic,” he said quietly, “your Lud of Lunden is a good god, and the Northmen are on both sides of the river. Listen!”

  A horn-blast and then another rang through the woods on the starboard hand. They were answered by two more, from not faraway.

  “Are those British signals?”

  “No,” said Orwic.

  “The tide will serve us for an hour. How many arrows have we?”

  “Ninety.”

  “Save them!”

  Away in the distance, from across the river, came the faint sound of several horns blowing simultaneously.

  “Britons?” asked Tros.

  “Northmen.”

  Tros laughed.

  “Casw
allon has them checked, I take it. They are summoning their friends.”

  He sent Conops to stand below the poop and signal to the oarsmen to dip slowly, quietly. He only needed steerage-way; the tide was carrying the bireme fast enough, perhaps too fast. There was nothing but guess-work until they should pass that belt of trees.

  The shoal mud formed an island nearly in mid-river, half submerged, and between that and the land the tide poured in a surging brown stream. There was no room to maneuver, hardly room to have swung a longship with the aid of anchors. A little higher up, beyond the belt of trees, the mud bank vanished under water, and there was room enough there for a dozen ships to swing; deep enough water almost from bank to bank the full width of the river. Tros tried to form a mental picture of the riverbank at that point, but he had seen it only once before as he passed it on the outward journey.

  “Is there a creek beyond those trees?” he asked Orwic.

  Orwic asked the man who had been at the masthead.

  “Yes, a narrow creek. Fairly deep water.”

  Another horn-blast echoed through the trees. It seemed to come from close to the riverbank and was answered instantly. Like the echo to that, from away up-river came a chorus of six horns blown in unison. There began loud shouting from somewhere just beyond the trees and, presently, the unmistakable thump and rattle of oars being laid in rowlocks. A moment later Tros’s ear caught the steady, short stroke of deep-sea rowing, such as men use where the waves are steep and close together.

  “Now!” he shouted. “Give way!”

  There was nothing for it now but speed. If he had the Northmen trapped they were at his mercy; if he had guessed wrong, then the bireme was at theirs. He beat the bull-hide drum and bellowed to his rowers:

  “One! Two! One! Two! One! Two!”

  Shouts responded from around the tree-clad corner of the bank, shouts and a mighty splashing as a helmsman tried to swing a long ship in a hurry out of the creek-mouth bow-first to the tide, backing the port oars.

  “Row, you Britons! Row!” Tros thundered, taking the helm from Conops.

  He could hear the water boiling off the bireme’s ram. In his mind’s eye he could see the Northmen’s whole predicament, with no room to maneuver and a strong tide hitting them beam-on as they left the creek-mouth. He could hear their captain bellowing, heard the oar-beat change and knew the longship was attempting, too late, to turn upstream and run from the unseen enemy.

  And it turned out better than he hoped. As the bireme’s bow raced past the belt of trees the longship lay with her nose toward the midstream mud-bank, starboard oars ahead and port oars backing frantically, blue mud boiling all around her and panic on deck as a dozen men struggled to hoist the sail to help her swing. She was less than a hundred yards away. Tros could have sunk her, with that tide under him, without troubling the oars at all.

  He beaked her stark amidships. As the Northmen loosed one wild volley of arrows, the iron-shod ram crashed in under the bilge and rolled her over, ripping out fifty feet of planking from her side. The shock of the collision threw the rowers from the benches, and the bireme swung on the tide with her stern-post not a dozen feet away from the edge of the midstream shoal, then drifted upstream with wreckage trailing from her bow and the wounded crying that she leaked in every seam.

  Tros sent Conops below to discover what the damage really amounted to and watched the Northmen. Their longship had gone under sidewise, so that not even her mast was visible. Most of her men were drowning; some had struggled to the mud-bank, where the yielding mud sucked them under. Others, trying to make the creek-mouth, were being carried upstream by the tide; not many were swimming strongly enough to have any prospect of reaching shore. And as if they had been hiding in fox-holes, Britons began appearing from between the trees gathering in excited groups to cut down the survivors.

  “The collision opened up her seams. I doubt she’ll float as far as Lunden,” Conops announced.

  “How much water has she made yet?”

  “Half a cubit, master.”

  “Orwic, take some of the wounded and man the water-hoist!”

  So they rigged the trough amidships, and the beam with a bucket at either end that was the Roman ship designers’ concept of a pump. Tros swung the bireme’s head upstream and began to consider that other smudge of brown smoke, half-a-dozen or more miles away.

  “Now, if Lud of Lunden really is a good god,” he remarked to Orwic, “we will catch another longship on our ugly snout without wasting a single arrow!”

  “We might pray to Lud,” Orwic suggested.

  “No,” said Tros. “The gods despise a man who prays. They help men who make use of opportunity. Get below there!”

  The oarsmen were all leaning overside to watch the Northmen being cut down by Britons as they struggled through the muddy shallows close by the riverbank.

  “Man the benches! Out oars! I’ll show you a fight to suit you between here and Lunden Town!”

  CHAPTER 29. Battle!

  Spirit of Earth and Sky and Sea, forbid that I should feel no pity for the blind and deaf! Toward ignorance may my patience be as gentle as the dew on thirsty earth-aye, and as time that permitteth newness. But ye are not blind; ye can see your desires. Ye are not deaf; ye can hear the tempter. Ye are not ignorant; times beyond number I have given freely all the wisdom I have learned, and then have sought more that I might share it with you. What then shall I say to wantons who rebel in the name of liberty against their captains in an hour of peril, that they may enslave themselves to lusts that chain their souls to worse indignities, and force them to worse treacheries than any tyrant? What can a tyrant do but slay? And what is death but freedom? If ye seek freedom to betray and to debauch your manhood, lo, ye have it. And then what? Death shall set you free indeed from the reins of Wisdom. But when ye return to the earth for future lives shall Wisdom be yours for the asking? Or shall ye begin again at your beginnings and earn in sorrow little by little again the Wisdom that was yours but ye would not use?

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  IT WAS a desperate, dinning fight that raged to the south of the river and a few miles south of Lunden. The tide slackened and began to change; the bireme made slow progress; it was a long time before Tros made out the mast of another longship between the trees ahead of him. But long before that he could hear and see trees falling, as the Britons felled them in the Northmen’s path. Orwic kept up a running comment:

  “That’s a good joke. They have burned Borsten’s village; his father was a Northman! They’ll have thought to scare Caswallon and force terms from him. Threats only make him fight. Did you see that tree fall? That’s by Borsten’s Brook. Caswallon has whipped a force together in the nick of time. He has them cut off from the river. There! another tree. They’re ringing them around! Land us yonder, Tros; I know a short cut to where Caswallon stands praying to the gods for thirty extra men!”

  “No,” Tros answered, with a jaw-snap that conveyed conviction. Tros’s eyes were on that longship. He lusted to possess it. It lay bow out of water on the mud, with a kedge in midstream with which to haul off in a hurry in case of need. In all his wanderings he had never seen a ship with such sweet lines; she was almost the ship of his dreams — not big enough, but there were only three men guarding her and she would do for a beginning! One of the three men blew a horn-blast as he sighted the dismasted bireme. Tros’s laugh was like an answering trumpet-call; he knew that ship was his if only he could manage his excited Britons.

  It was easy enough to read what had happened: A raiding party of Northmen caught ashore by the Britons and cut off from their ship; the men left to guard the ship summoned by horn to the rescue, only to find themselves in the same trap.

  “The Britons will burn that ship, Lud rot them, unless I prevent,” Tros muttered.

  But he was hard put to it to keep his own Britons rowing; they wanted to ram the riverbank and leap ashore to help block the Northmen’s retreat. Half of them a
t a time, and sometimes all of them, left the oars to lean over the bulwark and instruct Tros how to steer for the bank; it was only when they saw the bireme drifting backward down the river that they returned to the oars reluctantly.

  There began to be downright mutiny again; one man threw a lump of wood that missed Tros by a hair’s breadth; the wounded crawled on deck and cursed him for a coward alien. He thundered on the drum for silence, gesturing to Conops at the helm to hold the bireme in mid-river.

  “You young fools!” he roared. “If you take their ship away, what have they left to retreat to?”

  But they did not see the point. They wanted to rush to Caswallon’s aid and share in the glory of cutting down the hereditary enemy. Three jumped overboard and swam for it.

  “Back to your arrow-engine, Orwic! Shoot the next man who leaves his bench! Row or Lud rot you! One! Two! One! Two! Easy, starboard. Port ahead. Now, altogether, back her!”

  He swung the bireme’s stern toward the longship’s kedge-warp, and sent Conops overside to bend another warp to it, making that fast to the bireme’s stern. Then — downstream now — he bullied them all to rowing until the kedge came up and the bireme swayed like a pendulum in midstream, mud boiling all around her.

  “Watch those three Northmen, Orwic! Shoot if they try to cast off!”

  The longship heeled. Her bow began to swing round on the mud. Two of the three who guarded her ran to cut the kedge-warp with their swords.

  “Shoot!” Orwic loosed twelve arrows in one flight and one man fell; the other hid himself below the bulwarks; the third sprang to the longship’s stern and hacked the warp through with a battle-ax, but too late; the ship slid off the mud and glided into midstream.

  The bireme shot ahead when the warp parted; it was a minute before backed oars could take the way off her; then, port oars forward, starboard oars astern, Tros swung her in a circle in midstream.

  Two minutes after that they broke three oars as the bireme bumped the longship and a dozen Britons led by Orwic jumped aboard. The two Northmen took to the river like water-rats; four Britons plunged after them; Tros lashed the ships together, beam to beam and let them drift downriver with the tide, which set toward the south bank, away from the fighting.