by Talbot Mundy
A quarter of a mile downstream he dropped two anchors, he and Conops standing guard over the cables lest the indignant Britons should cut them and try to row across to the other side. Only Orwic, and he nervously, stood by him; the remainder, wounded included, threatened and cursed him for a flinching coward; but as they could not swim, they could not leave him.
Tros watched the far bank, trying to imagine what he himself would do if he were a Northman hemmed in by determined enemies and cut off from his ship. Those Northmen doubtless had a leader wise in war, chosen to lead raids because of previous successes.
He did not believe they would have landed without exploring all the riverbank; it was at least an even chance that the two who had swum for shore had reached their friends to warn them the ship was gone.
Orwic bit his fingernails, torn three ways between loyalty to Tros, anxiety for his friends ashore and eagerness to lead his own men into the thick of the fighting.
“By Lud, we will be too late!” he grumbled. “Too late! Too late! Tros—”
“If Caswallon can keep them away from the river, there’s no need for us,” Tros answered. “If they reach the river, they’ll find boats and try to recapture their ship.”
“But there aren’t any boats!” Orwic objected.
“Then again, no need for us. But I will wager there are boats, among the reeds, and the Northmen know it.”
“Then let’s hunt for boats and burn them!”
Tros laughed.
“Set this crowd of ours ashore, and who’ll keep them out of the fighting!”
The Britons, and some of the wounded with them, had nearly all jumped into the longship and were holding a sort of parliament, even the hired seamen taking part. An iron bolt hurled at Tros just missed him where he stood in the bireme’s bow, and some one shouted:
“Cross the river, or we’ll burn both ships!”
They had found the Northmen’s fire-pot and meant business; there was smoke where half-a-dozen of them stooped over a box full of kindling, blowing on it.
“By Pluto’s teeth! You’ll burn my prize of war?”
He would rather see a city burned than lose that sweet-lined ship. He leaped on the longship’s bow, roared like a bull and charged at them, scattering them right and left, kicking fire-pot and kindling overboard before they could draw their weapons; and by that time he had his back against the mast, the hilt of his long sword on a level with his chin, its point just sufficiently in motion to confirm the resolution in its owner’s eye.
They were not afraid of him exactly. There was none, at that crisis, who would not have dared to try conclusions. They had all fought Romans on the Kentish coast, had beaten Caesar’s men at Seine-mouth, had been trained, since they were old enough to hold a weapon, against the wolf, the Northmen and the neighboring British tribes.
Cowardice was their pet abomination. But he had them puzzled. They were Celts, hereditary gentlemen, much given to reflection and to arguing all sides of everything, deeply versed in chivalry and legend, and despising the notion of attacking one man in overwhelming numbers. Against any one except Northmen they preferred argument to violence. They admired him for his daring to defy them all.
Four of them kept him backed against the mast; six others engaged Conops in the longship’s bow, while two more hacked the cables through and set both ships adrift again.
But they drifted toward the wrong shore naturally, since the tide set that way. Within a hundred yards they were aground on clinging mud, and in a moment after that there were only wounded left to reckon with; the remainder, hired seamen and all, had plunged overside and were struggling shoulder-deep to reach the swampy bank and hunt for boats, rafts, anything in which to cross the river.
Orwic hesitated. Tros took pity on him and a shrewd thought for himself.
“Friend o’ mine, I give you leave to go,” he said, laughing, and Orwic jumped overside without touching the bulwark.
“And so by law, if there is any law, the longship’s mine,” Tros chuckled.
Some of the Britons began to swim across the river, using logs to help them breast the third of a mile of strong stream. Four men found a raft near the edge of the swamp and wasted several minutes arguing with seven wounded men who tried to take it from them, until Orwic arrived and seized command; he put the wounded on the raft and made the others help him swim the crazy thing.
Several men found horses — Britons could be trusted to smell a horse if there was one within five miles — and within fifteen minutes of the ships’ touching the mud the last horse took the water with its long mane held by two men and a third — he had only one arm — clinging to its tail.
Battle raged unseen on the far bank, to the tune of horn-blasts and the crash of falling trees. Chariot and horseback fighting — the Britons’ favorite method — had developed a type of defensive tactics to correspond; they were experts at felling trees in the path of an advancing or retreating enemy, ringing him around if possible, blocking the narrow forest paths and reinforcing the dense, tangled undergrowth with massive tree- trunks.
It was easy to read the wavering fortune of the battle by observing trees that fell, in different directions, three, four at a time.
Once it seemed as if the Northmen were surrounded, then as if they were making good their retreat toward where they had left their longship. But that might have been a feint; the shouting and crashing changed direction; there followed a din of horn-blasts as the Britons re-formed ranks and rushed to block a new line of retreat.
Once three Northmen, iron helmeted and armed with battle-axes, showed themselves on a bare hillock near by the ruins of a burned hut on the riverbank, but they were cut down instantly by a score of Britons who rushed out of the forest.
Once Tros thought he saw Caswallon, mounted, galloping along the river’s edge to turn the Northmen’s flank.
It was easy now to distinguish Norse from British horn-blasts; the Northmen’s note was flat, blown on an ox-horn; the Britons used copper and even silver instruments that rang through the woods with an exciting peal. Shouting and horn-blasts signified that the Northmen had fought clear of the felled-tree barriers, were retiring in considerable number almost parallel with the riverbank, their right flank possibly two hundred yards away from it, with an apparently impenetrable thicket in between them and the river.
By the sound they were circling that thicket on the far side of it. The Britons were striving to crowd them against it. Except for a few feet of stump-dotted marsh it reached almost to the water’s edge — an obstacle to Briton and Northman alike; but once or twice Tros could see Britons creeping into it to take the Northmen in flank or from the rear, armed with spears with which to thrust at the Northmen’s backs from behind the cover of the undergrowth.
Once, about two score Britons tried to make their way between the river and the trees, jumping from clump to clump of turf and rotting roots, but the strip of marsh came to an end in knee-deep mud in which they floundered until they gave up the attempt and struggled back again to hack a path through the undergrowth toward the enemy’s flank.
Ten minutes after that, the Northmen’s strategy revealed itself. They fought their way around the thicket to a creek that Tros could not see because of intervening trees. The news that they had reached it was announced by a frantic chorus of British bugle-notes.
Another thirty or forty Britons charged along the riverbank and tried to force their way to the creek-mouth, but were prevented by the mud that grew deeper the farther they went, until some of them floundered to the breast in it and had to be hauled out by their friends.
And presently, from behind the trees that shut off Tros’s view of the creek-mouth, three small boats emerged crowded with Northmen, towing others who clung to the boats’ gunwales helping to shove the boats along until the water grew too deep.
The Northmen’s shields were a solid phalanx, behind which they crouched in the boats, protecting the paddlers against British arrows. Some of the m
en in the water swam with shields over their heads, but some were already drowning. Tros counted nearly sixty men, and there were more behind them, too late for the boats or crowded out, dodging missiles as they swam.
Their leader stood in the first boat, a big man with long moustaches drooping to his chin and a bushy, clipped, red beard; young, hardly thirty by the look of him, but a giant in stature, with a head that drooped a little forward as if he were a habitual deep-thinker, or else wounded or very weary.
He was nearly a full head taller than the tallest of his men, two of whom stood beside him. Their eyes were on the Britons ashore, but his were on the longship. He stood recklessly, ignoring arrows, hardly troubling to raise the painted shield on his left arm. As the boats drew nearer Tros saw three women crouching among the men.
“If that chief loves a ship as I do, he will fight,” Tros said to Conops. “Swiftly, bid our wounded show their heads above the bulwark.”
The longship had had the inside berth when both ships took the mud, but the tide had carried their sterns around, pivoting them on the bireme’s ram, which presently stuck fast, so that now both sterns were out into the stream, with the longship free except for the ropes that held her to the bireme’s side.
Smashed oars, jammed between them, kept the ships’ sides from grinding, and the water making in the bireme’s hold brought her down by the stern, so that she lay now for two-thirds of her length on soft mud, immovable until they should pump the water out and the tide should turn again and lift her.
Tros climbed up to the bireme’s poop, leaving Conops on the longship’s bow, and carefully chose twelve arrows from the basket, laying them in the arrow-engine’s grooves and cranking the clumsy mechanism that drew the bow taut. Then he studied the wounded; there was not one man among them fit for fighting; whoever could carry his weight had gone with Orwic to the battle in the woods.
“Men of Lunden,” Tros said, for he knew they liked that better than if he had called them Britons, “we will burn both ships under us rather than let the Northmen have them! But I think those Northmen have a bellyful. Let your heads appear and reappear, as if there were a host of you crouching below the bulwark.”
Many of them lacked strength to keep their chins above the bulwark for more than a few seconds at a time. They raised their heads, let go, and struggled up again to watch. The approaching boats came very slowly, for lack of enough paddles and because of the overload and the strength of the tide in midstream.
On the far shore the Britons were using horses to drag felled trees into the water, laboring shoulder deep to lash a raft, together on which enough of them might cross to dare to give the Northmen battle.
But that was a work that required time; the Northmen had burned all the buildings within reach, so there were no doors or hewn timber available.
The Northmen appeared to have no information about arrow-engines, but they seemed to expect ordinary arrow-fire. As they won their way across stream in slow procession, more than fifty yards apart, and the distance between them increasing, they kept their boats’ heads pointed toward the ships’ sterns to reduce the breadth of the target, and the men in the bows raised a sloping barricade of locked shields; but they were wooden shields. Tros’s engine could have shot a flight of arrows through them as easily as an ordinary arrow goes through leather jerkins.
The Northman chief chose to lighten his boat. He growled an order and six men leaped into the water, leaving only twelve and three women. The six, along with those who had swum alongside all the way, turned back and made for the second boat, which was already overcrowded.
Leaning his weight against the table on which the arrow-engine turned, Tros let the leading boat approach within two ships’ lengths before he tried conclusions.
“Who comes here to yield himself?” he shouted then in the Gaulish tongue, for he knew neither Norse nor any of the dialects of northern Britain, which a Northman might possibly have understood.
That leading boat was at his mercy; it was a frail thing, nearly awash with the weight of men; but he could see those fair-haired women crouching among the men’s legs, and though he would have taken oath before a pantheon of gods that his own heart was invulnerable — that whether a foe was male or female was all one to him — he held his finger on the trigger yet a while.
The Northmen seemed to hesitate. They let their boat turn sidewise, head upstream, exposing its whole flank to Tros. The chieftain in the midst uphove a great two-headed ax and gestured at the bireme’s stern, shouting strange words in a voice that resembled waves echoing in caverns.
It appeared he was defying Tros to single, combat, a disturbing possibility that Tros had overlooked. He was under no compulsion to accept a challenge, but he knew what the Britons — and their women in particular — would say of any man who should refuse one. It was part of the tactics of war so to fight as to provide an enemy no opportunity to issue such a challenge until the outcome of single combat could not affect the issue either way.
However, Tros was not sure he had understood yet; and there were no women in the third boat, which was laboring in midstream, losing headway against the tide. They were rowing with a pole and broken branches. He loosed the flight of arrows at it, plunking the whole dozen square amidships.
The wounded Britons yelled delight. The arrows pierced the shields and struck men down, who fell against the farther gunwale and upset the crowded boat. The others, jumping to save themselves, capsized it, and it drifted downstream, bottom upward.
The second boat backed out of range, avoiding the men in the water because there was no room for them. It was nearly awash already without the added burden of strong hands on the gunwale and heavy men seeking to clamber overside; its crew of discouraged Northmen elected presently to drift downstream, hoping perhaps to make connection with the crew of the other longship lower down.
So there was only one boat left to deal with for the moment, one boat, eleven men, and that great, grim Northman captain, with the women crouching at his knees. The Northman’s eyes were on the longship; he was close enough for Tros to see them and to recognize despair, the mother of forlorn hope.
No ruler loves a kingdom as the true sea-captain loves a ship he has built and navigated through the rock-staked seas. Tros knew that blue-eyed yearning; he could ever feel it in his own bones when he planned the queen of all ships he would some day build and sail into the unknown.
He laid another dozen arrows in the grooves and cranked the engine; but the Northman, who could see him plainly, stayed within range, flourishing his ax as if he courted death, bellowing his bullmouthed phrases that to Tros conveyed less meaning than his gestures.
They were a challenge repeated again and again. There was no humility about that man; in his defeat he was as splendid as in victory, demanding a right that no brave man might keep from him. One of the wounded Britons called to Tros, interpreting his words:
“He bids you fight him for the longship. Beat him, says he, and he surrenders to you — he and his men and his women. If he beats you, he takes the longship and you must help him sail it home. But if each should kill the other, then his men- and women-folk are at Caswallon’s mercy! Those are his terms. You must fight him, Tros!”
But it irked Tros to be told he must do anything. He could have shot that Northman down, and though the wounded Britons would have mocked him for a coward, he was strong-willed; he could face their scorn if he saw fit.
His eyes were on the farther riverbank, where now a hundred of Caswallon’s men were working like beavers to build the raft, and he was calculating just how long they would require to finish it and pole it across the river. He decided they would never be able to move such a clumsy platform fast enough through the water to overtake the Northmen, although if the bireme and the longship were attacked they might arrive in time to save both, and if they were successful they would claim the longship as their lawful plunder.
It was therefore up to him, Tros, to decide, and to do it sw
iftly. He doubted Caswallon, remembered that Gaulish fishing boat dismasted in the channel storm, recalled to mind the likelihood that Caesar’s men had undermined him in Caswallon’s favor by some ingenious means. Even if Tros should fight for the longship and defeat the Northman, Caswallon might claim as his own property all shipping captured in the Thames.
Caesar’s treasure-chest, left with Caswallon for safe keeping, would be a strong temptation to Caswallon’s intimates, if not to the chief himself to force a quarrel, and the longship, if Tros should claim it for his own, might prove an excellent excuse. It was a sharp predicament.
But the Northman kept on challenging, and the wounded Britons urged. And suddenly a blue-eyed girl stood up beside the Northman, with fair hair falling in long plaits nearly to her knees.
She set one foot on the gunwale and mocked Tros in the Gaulish language, calling him a coward among other names. The words were ill-pronounced, but her voice throbbed with such scorn as Tros had never listened to — he who had heard harbor-women scold their lovers on the wharfs of Antioch and Alexandria!
The words — he knew their worth and could ignore them — might have left him careless, but the voice and her manner brought the hot blood to his cheeks. He had never seen a woman like her, had never before felt such strange emotions as her anger stirred in him. She looked not older than nineteen.
Tros threw his hand up in a gesture of command. Briton and Northman alike paused breathless at his signal.
“Tell me your name!” he demanded.
He had right to know that; a man did not engage in single combat with inferiors by birth.
“I am Olaf Sigurdsen of Malmö.”
“I am Tros, the son of Perseus Prince of Samothrace,” Tros answered, laughing to himself.
His father would have been finely scandalized at the proceedings.