Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Cast up the reckoning,” he said. “Let us strike one woman off against the other, trusting neither. But a third remains. How often have you told me, ‘Fflur is always right!’ I say, take Fflur’s word for it, and look sharply to Glendwyr.”

  Caswallon stood still, mid-length of the hall.

  “It would suit me well to fight him,” he said. And he looked the part.

  “Then fight him now,” Tros answered. “Glendwyr thinks tonight’s obsequies will hold you occupied. Is he mad enough to spare you while your back is turned? To me it looks simple enough.”

  Caswallon came and stood in front of him, arms folded on his breast.

  “Simple?” he said. “How long have you known Britain? Twenty years now I have kinged it, and I — I don’t know my Britons yet!”

  “If I should stand in your shoes, I would teach them to know me!” Tros retorted. “Bah! It is as simple as a mutiny at sea. Pick out the ringleader and smash him. Thus, then Caesar’s woman. Fill her ears. Let her learn by listening when she thinks none watches her, that you and every man you trust will attend the obsequies tonight, leaving this town unguarded.

  “I will urge you, in her hearing, to guard the town well; you pooh-pooh it, laughing at me, and bid Orwic gather all your men for the procession. Then help her to escape or let Fflur dismiss her in a fury. Let Fflur give her a chariot and send her to the coast to make her own way back to Caesar.

  “Trust Fflur to put sufficient sting in it to make that plausible. The woman will go to Glendwyr; she will hurry to tell him Lunden is undefended. Good. You postpone the obsequies. You march! You catch Glendwyr unready in the nervous hour between preparation and the casting of the dice. You smite him in the night. Hang him! Hang Skell! Hang the Gaulish woman!

  “Pack the three into a box and send it with your compliments to Caesar. It will smell good by the time it reaches him. Then ride your bit of Britain with a rough hand, drilling, storing arrows, making ready. For Caesar will invade again, Caswallon, as surely as you and I and Orwic stand here.”

  “Clever. But you don’t know Britain,” Caswallon answered. “I am a king, but the druids say their Mysteries are more than kingdoms, even as a man’s life is but a spark in the night of eternity.

  “They have lighted the fires. They have informed the gods. They have found the right conjunction of the stars and set their altars accordingly. What the druids do, let no man interrupt.”

  “Lud rot the druids,” Orwic muttered.

  But he was of a generation younger, that was more impatient with eternity.

  “How many men has Glendwyr?” Tros asked.

  “Maybe a hundred! Nor will he have more unless he can score an advantage. If I have hard work raising a handful to fight Northmen, what hope has he of raising an army? They might flock to him if he should win a battle, but not otherwise.”

  “And how many have you?” Tros asked.

  “Maybe a hundred. I raised three hundred against the Northmen; but some were killed, some hurt and some have gone home. There will be a thousand in tonight’s procession, and as many women, but nine-tenths would run.

  “Britons are brave enough, but they say, ‘A king should king it!’ They leave their king to king it when the trouble starts. However, Glendwyr would never dare to interrupt the druids.”

  “Have you not watched Glendwyr? Have you no spies?” Tros asked.

  “Yes. But my men go home to the feasting when a fight is over, whether they win or lose! Glendwyr’s men are feasting, too, I will stake my kingdom on it.”

  “I have seen kingdoms staked, and lost ere now,” said Tros. Caswallon’s indifference puzzled him. He suspected the chief of knowing more than he pretended, and yet, the almost stupid, bored look might be genuine. Orwic looked as bored and careless as Caswallon did.

  Tros, both hands behind him, legs apart, considered how he might earn fair profit that should leave him free of obligation to the man who paid.

  “I have a bride, a longship and a crew of thirteen men. I need more men,” he remarked.

  “Lud love me, I can spare none,” said Caswallon.

  “You have three-and-twenty Northmen prisoners,” said Tros, “and they once belonged to my man Sigurdsen. They are no good to you for ransom. They are seamen. They can build ships. I can use them. If Glendwyr should attack Lunden while your back is turned—”

  Caswallon smiled, a little grimly, but said nothing.

  “ — they would naturally help Glendwyr if he turned them loose. But I have Sigurdsen, their former chief. And I have Helma, whom they love. If I should promise them their freedom under me, they would fight at my bidding. Will you give them to me, if I guard you tonight while your back is turned?”

  Caswallon stared hard. “Will you not attend your father’s obsequies?” he asked.

  “That I would dearly love to do,” said Tros, “but you are my friend. I think you are in danger. I would rather strike a hard blow for a living man than shed tears following a dead one to the grave. Give me the Northmen.”

  “What will you do with them?” Caswallon asked.

  “I will guard your back tonight.”

  “You mean, you will dare to hold Lunden Town for me with six-and-thirty men?” Caswallon asked.

  He hid his mouth behind his hand as he watched Tros’s eyes, and once, for about a second, he glanced at Orwic.

  “Aye,” Tros answered. “I am no fair-weather friend. As for my father, if he could come from the dead, he would bid me attend to the task of the living and leave comfortably dead men to the druids.”

  “You are mad, Tros!” said Caswallon. “But I like you, though I did doubt you a while back. You are a fool; Northmen are poor laborers on land. I will give you instead as much land as you can stride the length of on your own feet from dawn to sunset. With Caesar’s gold you can buy mares and cattle. I will give you the gray stallion I bought a month ago from the Iceni. Helma to wife and a holding in Britain, what more do you want?”

  “Freedom! A ship and the sea!” Tros answered. “Nay, no bondage to the dirt. Will you give me the Northmen?”

  “They are yours.” Caswallon nodded. “But you are more mad than a hare in the furrows in spring!”

  Nevertheless, he nodded at Orwic as if Tros’s bargain suited him, and Orwic smiled behind a hand that stroked his long moustache.

  CHAPTER 36. Rash? Wise? Desperate? Or All Three?

  Trust both friend and enemy — your friend to do his utmost for you and your enemy to do his worst against you; nevertheless, not forgetting that friend and enemy may be one and the same. In no way better than that can ye learn to trust and to mistrust yourselves with unerring judgment.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  THERE was a deal of talk still, interrupted by men who came in to ask about the night’s procession, and by the servants who set up the long table in the hall, putting benches in place and silver plates for folk of high degree, wooden ones for ordinary mortals. Britons never moved, whether for war or peace, until they had gorged enormously.

  “A poor enough wedding feast,” Caswallon said. “I would rather you waited, Tros, until—”

  Tros interrupted him with one of his deep-sea laughs that rose from somewhere near his middle where the sword hung:

  “Until Glendwyr runs me through, and you give Helma to a man who loves horses and pigs? Nay, Caswallon, you shall marry us this day. Then if I die, Helma will be dowered with money and ship, so she may choose, and not be chosen.”

  He swaggered with his deep-sea captain’s gait toward the long room at the rear where all his Northmen lay glooming, their eyes on Caesar’s woman, who sat between Sigurdsen’s wife and the widow.

  Sigurdsen rose to his feet as Tros entered; he looked as if recovering from too much mead; his eyes were red; his knees shook; a northern gloom possessed him such as grays a winter’s sea; but he met Tros’s eyes as faith to faith, without emotion.

  He would have spoken, but Tros checked him with on
e of those gestures of confidence that convey more than a hundred words. Sigurdsen sat down again among his men, his back toward a leather-curtained wall.

  Tros smiled at Caesar’s woman. She smiled back, remaining seated. She did not glance at Helma, who had followed Tros into the room, but she let Tros see that she understood Helma had told of the palm-reading and the trance. Her liquid eyes were more intelligent than lovely — too alert, too knowing.

  Tros out-acted her. Over his bold face there swept such visible emotions as a man might feel who found himself mistaken, who had doubted, to discover that his doubt was wrong, who envied brains more subtle than his own, who held the upper hand, yet felt a diffidence in using it, because he must seek favors of his victim.

  There was a vague regret depicted, and a little laughter at the ebb and flow of destiny; a gift of guile that could admire guile, the expression of a clever gambler, losing, who will pay the bet.

  “If you stay, Fflur will tear you to pieces!” he said, grinning, stroking his chin, letting the black beard straggle through his fingers.

  “I am your slave,” she answered.

  She laid chin on hands, both elbows on her knees, to watch his face.

  He nodded.

  “Careless kings are weak friends,” he said darkly. “Caswallon cares nothing about you. Fflur will not endure you. You may go. I will send you to Glendwyr’s place. Tell Glendwyr I would have come with you, but I attend my father’s obsequies. Say, if he takes Lunden before dawn, I will befriend him with six-and-thirty Northmen.”

  “Noble Tros,” she answered, “I will tell Glendwyr how many men guard Lunden, if you inform me.”

  “None,” said Tros, almost whispering.

  She stared. He nodded, one arm across his chest, resting the other elbow on it, chin on hand.

  “Tell Glendwyr I arranged that. I pay for service rendered, handsomely. You understand me?”

  “Noble Tros, I am your slave! You shall be king of Britain and Caesar’s friend, if you will trust me!”

  “I judge words by performances,” Tros answered. “Come!”

  He led her to the stable-yard, where Orwic had a chariot yoked and waiting.

  “How far to Glendwyr’s place?” he asked her, as if that were an afterthought.

  “Four or five hours,” she answered. “But Glendwyr waits only three hours’ ride away or it may be less. I know the place. His charioteer, who brought me, showed me where the road turns off by a stream in the forest.”

  “Go fast,” said Tros. “Bid Glendwyr hasten. Say, if he fails this night, I will never again trust him. And you likewise! Fail me, and you will find Caesar a more forgiving man than I! Serve me, and I am more generous than Caesar!”

  Orwic opened a side gate, standing behind it, so that she did not catch sight of him, although her appraising eyes swept every corner of the yard, and Tros was sure she knew the count of chariots that stood pole-upward, the number of restless horses in the long sheds, and how many serfs played knuckle-bones under the eaves.

  Those eyes of hers missed nothing, except that Tros laughed when her chariot went plunging through the gate, and that it was Orwic, Caswallon’s nephew and his right-hand man, who slammed the gate shut behind her.

  “A mare’s nest,” said Orwic, rather melancholy. “There will be no eggs in it. I know Glendwyr; bold when it pays to lie low, coward at smiting time. If he had come to fight the Northmen, yes, he might have won a following against Caswallon afterward.

  “But he lay low then, and he will lie low now, until Caswallon has an army at his back. Then the fool will have at us — Lud help him! He shall lie low then for all time!”

  Tros’s amber eyes glanced at the sky.

  “Northeast wind backing to the north,” he answered; but what he meant by that he did not say, any more than he knew what Orwic’s air of information in reserve might mean.

  He returned to where Helma waited whispering to Sigurdsen. The Northman looked at Tros with new appraisal in his eyes, and actually smiled at last.

  “Can he fight?” Tros asked. “Is he fit for an adventure?” Sigurdsen nodded and talked back to Helma in a singsong growl that sounded like the sea on jasper beaches, but Tros did not wait for all that outburst to be interpreted; when Helma turned to speak he took her by the shoulders and, in short, hurried phrases told her of the plan in mind.

  So she told Sigurdsen, and he, laughing, told the others, bidding one of them help him strip off all the bandages that impeded his arms and his huge shoulder muscles.

  Tros led the way then toward the yard, but Conops met him in the door, gesturing secrecy, mysterious as if he came from snooping in a graveyard.

  “Master! One word!”

  “Aye! And I will count the word. Be swift.”

  Conops drew him back into the room and whispered:

  “Master! Women are no good! I know. I never dallied with a woman but she robbed me. That one you have sent away would sell her lover to a press-gang for the price of a drop of scent. This one, this yellow-haired young one will scold you, day in, day out! When she is older she will be like Fflur, who scolds Caswallon until he daren’t even drink without her leave, and drinks because she worries him! Master, don’t marry her! Don’t! Don’t! And your father not yet in his grave!”

  Tros took him by the neck, laughed, shook him until his teeth clattered like castanets.

  “Stand by!” he said. “Stand by! You hear me? Stand by for dirty weather, if you smell the wind! If she should scold me, I will take it out on your hide, little man, you little one-eyed, split-lipped, red-haired, freckled, dissolute, ugly, faithful friend o’ mine! Belay advice!

  “Out oars, you knife-nasty, wharf-running, loyal old dirty-weather sea- dog! Stow that tongue and stand by me as I endure you, dockrat, drunkard, shame of the Levant, impertinent, devoted trusty that you are! No back-talk, or I’ll break your head! I’ll buy a wife for you, and make you keep her! Now, are you satisfied?”

  Tros banged his head against the wall by way of clinching argument and strode at the head of his Northmen to the stable-yard, they tramping in his wake like henchmen who had served him since the day they carried arms, with Conops fussing along behind them ragging Sigurdsen because he did not keep step.

  But Sigurdsen was too proud to fall into the rhythm of the tramp, and rather too long-legged; also, he was not at all disposed to do what Conops told him, or even to take notice of him, or to admit that he understood.

  When they reached the great barn where Caswallon’s Northmen were confined, Orwic was waiting and unlocked the complicated wooden contrivance that held the beam in place across the double door. There was no armed guard; the prisoners knew they were safer there than if at liberty until the rage against them should die and Britons resume their usual easy-going tolerance of friend and former foe alike. They were lying in straw, their wounded wrapped in clean white linen.

  Those who could rise were on their feet the moment Sigurdsen stood bulked against the light; there were only two who lay still, although a dozen of them had to struggle from the straw, being stiff from painful wounds.

  But there was none hurt beyond fairly swift recovery, or he would have been “finished” where he lay on the battlefield as unfit for slavery, half- slavery of service to a British chief, or ransom.

  Tros, with Helma next to him, stood at one side of the long barn where the failing sunlight pouring through the door shone on their faces. Sigurdsen, his Northmen at his back, stood facing Tros; and there began such rhetoric as Tros had never heard.

  For Sigurdsen’s fever had left him and left his brain clear. A beaten chief, hopeless of ransom, Tros had given him far better terms than even over-generous Caswallon would have dared to give.

  The Britons would have put him to hard labor for a year or two, a dismal execution overhanging him if he should fail to please; thereafter, little by little, they might have let him rise from serfdom to a holding of his own, half-subject to one of the numerous minor chiefs. But Tros had
offered him a free man’s post of honor, second-in-command to Tros himself, and great adventure on the unknown seas.

  So Sigurdsen waxed eloquent. The rhythm of the northern sagas rang among the barn-beams as his throat rolled out in Norse a challenge to defeated men to rally to a new prince, Tros of Samothrace, sea-captain without equal, loved of Thor and Odin, brave and cunning, Tros who stood before them, Tros who had claimed the fair-haired Helma, daughter of a hundred kings, to be his bride!

  There seemed no stopping him now that he had broken his long silence. He recited Helma’s pedigree, commencing in the dim gray dawn of time with mythical half-deities and battles between gods and men. He made the roof-beams ring to the names of heroes and fair-haired heroines whose record seemed to consist exclusively of battlefield betrothals, glittering wedding feasts and death on fields of honor.

  He chanted of a golden age when his ancestors were kings, it seemed, of half a universe, with wise men to support them and defeat the magic of the witches and trolls who counseled enemies, whose only purpose in existence was, apparently, to act as nine-pins for heroes to knock down.

  And presently he sang of Tros. His measured, rhythmic prose grew into singsong as imagination seized him, until almost one could hear the harp- strings picking out the tune. He had no facts to hamper him, except the all- important one that Tros had conquered him in single fight and, recognizing a descendant from the gods, had pledged with him faith forever on an oaken poop, “a sea-swept poop, a poop of a proud ship, mistress of the gales, a strong ship, a longship, a ship that Tros, a mighty man in battle, saw and seized — he, single-handed, slaying fifty men!”

  He made a pedigree for Tros. He chanted of his black beard and his amber eyes, that were the gift of Odin treasured through endless centuries by high- born women who were born into the world to mate with offspring of a hundred gods. He sang of seas that roared in cataracts across the far rim of the world, where Tros had met strange fleets and smitten them to ruin, “and the bare bones of the foemen strew the beaches; and the rotting timbers of the wrecks lie broken on the sand!”