Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  He crowded half a century of fighting into Tros’s short life, described his father as a “king of kings” who died in battle against fifty thousand men, and ended with a prophecy that Tros would found a kingdom in which kings and queens should be his vassals, and “amber the stuff his cups are made of, platters of gold to eat from.”

  A hundred sons and grandsons, men of valor, should comb the earth in rivalry of manhood to deserve the privilege of wearing Tros’s sword when, “ripe in years and splendor,” he should go at last “to where the gods and all his ancestors make merry amid feasting in Valhalla!”

  Tros did not understand a word of it, but Helma told him as much as she could remember of it afterward, when they had all done roaring “Hail!” to him and the charioteers and stable-men crowded in the doorway — first with a notion that trouble was brewing and then, because Orwic appeared well pleased — adding their own shouts to the tumult.

  All the Northmen kissed Helma and did fealty to Tros, each touching the hilt of his long sword and murmuring hoarse words that sounded like an echo of a longship launching off the ways. There was a roll of thunder in it, and the names of Thor and Odin.

  Helma smiled through tears, a gleam of grandeur on her face. But she was serious when she repeated to Tros what Sigurdsen had sung, she walking hand-in-hand with him toward Caswallon’s hall, with the Northmen tramping in the rear supporting the wounded between them.

  It did not appear to occur to her that there might be any untruth in Tros’s pedigree as Sigurdsen unfolded it, or that there might be anything far-fetched in the account of Tros’s wanderings and battles at the far rim of the world. That he was not so old as Sigurdsen and could not possibly have done a hundredth part of all that Sigurdsen ascribed to him, meant nothing to her.

  She was proud of her new lord beyond the limit of expression, far beyond the commonplace dimensions of such tawdry facts as time and space. She walked beside him worshiping, her young, strong, virgin heart aglow with such emotion as no years can limit.

  “Lord Tros,” she said. Her voice thrilled. There was vision in her eyes. “My brother saw beyond the veil of things. The gods sang through his mouth. It is honor and joy to me beyond words that I will bear your sons.”

  Whereat Tros went searching in his mind for words such as he had never used to man or woman, marveling how lame a thing is language and how a tongue, not given to too much silence, can so hesitate between one sentence and another, falling between both into a stammering confusion.

  “Whether I be this or that, and a strong man or a weak one, I will do that which is in me, so that you be not sorry if my best may make you glad,” he said at last.

  And he took comfort from the speech, although it irked him to be picking and choosing, yet to find no proper words. And he did not think of his father at all, although he was conscious that he did not think of him — which would have puzzled him still more if he had pondered it.

  The sun went down and servants lighted the oil-fed wicks in long bronze sconces on the wall when they all came to Caswallon’s table and the noisy men-at-arms filed in — Caswallon’s relatives by blood or marriage, most of them — heaping their arms in the racks in the vestibule and quarreling among themselves for right of place at table.

  Some of them had wives who sat each beside her husband, because Fflur was at table, beside Caswallon’s great gilded throne-chair that had been pulled forward from under the balcony. Unmarried women served the food, receiving it from serfs at the kitchen door.

  Tros sat next to Fflur, with Helma on his right; beyond her, Sigurdsen, his wife and all the Northmen faced curiously amiable Britons, who seemed to think it a good joke to be eating and drinking on equal terms with men whom they had beaten in battle recently. Conops stood behind Tros, selecting the best dishes as they came and snatching them to set before his master.

  First came the mead in beakers that the women carried in both hands. Caswallon struck the table with his fist for silence, then, beaker in hand, stood up and made the shortest wedding-speech that Tros — and surely Britain — had ever heard:

  “Men of Lunden, we go presently to where the druids speed brave comrades, through the darkness men call death, into a life that lies beyond. And none knows what the morrow shall bring forth; so there are acts that should be done now, lest death first fall on us, like rain that shuts off a horizon. Hear ye all! This is my brother Tros. To him I give this woman Helma to be wife, and all these Northmen, who were mine by victory, to be his faithful men-at-arms and servants. Tros!”

  He raised his beaker and drank deep, up-ending it in proof there were no dregs. And when that swift ceremony was complete they all drank, except Tros and Helma, then cheered until the great hall crashed with sound. Fflur, rising, gave a golden flagon into Tros’s hands, from which he and Helma drank in turn, Tros finishing the mead with one huge draft that left him gasping when he set the flagon bottom-up. Then he spoke, and was briefer than Caswallon:

  “Lord Caswallon, you have named me brother. I abide that name. At your hands I accept this woman. She is my wife. I accept these men. They shall obey me; and, whatever destiny may bring, they shall at least say they have followed one who stood beside his friends in need and kept faith whatsoever came of it!”

  Then Tros took the broad gold band from his forehead, and by sheer strength broke it, signifying that a chapter of his life was ended.

  He began the next by binding the broad gold around his bride’s right arm, she staring at the symbols carved on it and wondering what gods they charged with her protection.

  But there were some who murmured it was witchcraft; and a married woman cried aloud that the breaking of the golden circle was an omen of ill luck.

  Thereafter Tros had hard work to prevent his Northmen from drinking themselves useless, since the mead flowed without limit and as host Caswallon was too proud to check them.

  But Tros imposed restraint by promising the widow-woman to the soberest, whereat Conops, in a panic, began drinking behind Tros’s back.

  And when the hurried feast was nearly at an end there came a bareback galloper, mud-bespattered, sweating, who burst into the hall and ran to Caswallon’s chair, thrusting his head and shoulders between the chief and Fflur. He whispered, but Tros heard him:

  “Lord! Make ready to hold Lunden! Glendwyr and two hundred men are marching! They are at the king’s stone by the Thames! They mean to make Glendwyr chief while you stand on a hillside communing with dead men’s souls! All Lunden empty! Not a light! No guard at Lud’s Gate! They have all gone to the druids’ circle!”

  “Aye. Why not?” Caswallon answered. But he glanced at Tros.

  “Lord! Stay and fight Glendwyr! He will burn your house!” “Not he!” Caswallon laughed. “Lud rot him, he would like too well to live in it. Two hundred men, you say? Did you count them?”

  “Nay, I rode. But I heard two hundred.” Caswallon laughed again.

  “Maybe he rides like us to the burying.” But he glanced at Tros.

  “Lord Caswallon, I have warned you. I have done my part”

  “Nay, not yet the whole of it,” Caswallon answered.

  And he looked a third time straight into Tros’s eyes, while he wiped his moustache with a freckled, blue-veined hand.

  “Take a fresh horse. Ride and find Glendwyr. Bid him meet me at the hillside where the druids wait. Say — there — when the souls of the dead have traveled their appointed path and all the fires die, he and I will meet alone. It will be dawn before the fires die. Say I will fight him for my house and Lunden when dawn rises over the druids’ hill.”

  “He will not believe me.”

  “Show him this,” Caswallon answered; and he pulled a great gold bracelet off his wrist.

  But Fflur shook her head and sighed, as if words failed her.

  The man would have gone at once to ride his errand, but Tros, who had been whispering to Fflur, leaned behind her and caught the fellow’s arm.

  “Let him wait. Let him see
us all go,” he whispered, wrenching at the man’s arm so that he swore aloud and struggled, not hearing what was said. “Let him first see me and my men march out with the rest.”

  Caswallon nodded.

  “Wait,” he ordered. “Ride when I tell you.”

  So the man went and sat by the fireside, drinking mead and rubbing a wrist that Tros had come near breaking.

  “Caswallon, will you hear me?” Fflur asked.

  “Nay, for you are always right,” he laughed, “and I know what you will say, Fflur: That the druids rule Britain, which is true enough. But you will tell me I should ride it rough over the druids, which I dare not, right though it may be you are. A druid’s neck may break like any other man’s, and I could butcher a herd of them, maybe, like winter’s beef, but can I convince Britons I am right to do it?

  “How long would they be about raising a new king to rule in place of me? The druids would choose that king and be stronger than ever. The druids summoned you, me and all Lunden to the burying tonight. Obey them?

  “Nay! I am the king! But I go, nevertheless, and so do you go, and all my men, and all Lunden Town, because a king’s throne has four legs, of which the first is a druid; and the second is ceremony; and the third is mystery; and the fourth is common sense. But the druids did not summon Tros, nor any of his men.”

  He looked hard at Tros again.

  “They left that courtesy to me to undertake, and it may be I forgot to mention it!”

  He did not wait for Fflur to answer. He rose, gesturing toward the door, through which the sound of stamping stallions came and the crunch of bronze wheels on the gravel drive.

  “Now, Tros,” he said, “I would not leave you here unless I knew this Glendwyr business is a little matter. And I know, too, that you need a hook on which to hang your coat, as it were, if you are to winter here in Britain. I need a good excuse to lend you house and countenance in spite of jealousy and tales against you.

  “So — Glendwyr is no great danger but he will serve your end. If he has fifty men, that is more than I think; and the half of those will run when the first one yells as a spear-point pricks him at Lud’s Gate! Glendwyr counts on Lunden turning against me, if he can steal my house. Take care then that he never enters it! For my part, I will let the men of Lunden know you saved their town for them tonight when their backs were turned!”

  Tros answered him never a word.

  “Is he a rash fool, or so wise he can laugh at rash fools, or a desperate king with druids on his neck, or all three things at once?” he wondered.

  But Caswallon marched out looking like a man who understood all the rules of the game of “kinging it.”

  CHAPTER 37. The Battle at Lud’s Gate

  I have spoken unto weariness. Yet now this! Listen, ye who heard, yet heard not. It is manlier to slay and to be slain then to escape by cowardice from dangers that a little Wisdom could have taught you to avoid. Aye, to the shambles with you! To the houghing! Return not for pity to me if ye run from the terror that ye have brought upon yourselves. A coward is a mocker of his own Soul.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  TROS gathered his Northmen, the wounded and all, for they could eat and drink and walk, whatever else might ail them, and, with Helma at his side, brought up the rear of the procession behind fifty chariots that swayed in the crimson glare of torches held by men on foot.

  Far away to the northwestward, beyond the forest and the marsh, there was a crimson glow against the sky, where druids’ fires burned; and all the distance in between was dotted with the irregular glow of torches where the folk of Lunden and the neighboring villages formed one continuous stream.

  “Zeus! Those druids have the Britons by neck and nose!” Tros muttered. “Would my father have asked burial at the risk of a man’s throne? Not he! He would have ordered them to throw his body on a dung-heap, and defend themselves. If he is not too busy in another world, he will forgive me for not attending his funeral.”

  The long procession filed through the circle of solemn yew-trees, where the altar was on which a daily sunrise sacrifice was laid; and there Tros halted, gathering his men around him, bidding Helma explain his plan to Sigurdsen:

  “Now we march back. One has ridden to warn Caswallon’s enemies that his house is empty and the town unguarded. He saw us all march away, and though that man is Caswallon’s friend, the information will leak out of him like the smell of strong wine through a bottle-neck. There is none in Lunden, save the fire-guard, a few old women and, it may be, a handful of drunken fishermen down by the riverside.”

  “Who is the fire-guard?” Sigurdsen asked; for he knew next to nothing of Britons, except that they were not fit to be reckoned with at sea, although great fighters on horseback and on foot in their forests.

  “They,” said Tros, “are about a score of old men, who sleep by day and are supposed to patrol by night. This night, instead of snoring in the watchhouse, they shall serve a purpose. Conops! Go find the fire-guard. Wake them. Keep them awake. See that each cripple of them arms himself with two good torches. Hide them within Caswallon’s wall, with a small fire handy at which to light the torches swiftly when I blow three blasts somewhere near the town gate.

  “When I do that, make all the noise possible and run downhill toward the gate, as if at least fifty of you were coming to my aid. If the running kills them they will die in a good cause, so spare none. No talk now! Go about your business! Hurry!”

  “How much of a fight is this to be?” asked Sigurdsen. “A third of us are stiff with wounds.”

  He flexed his own great muscles, but it hurt him.

  “Neither more nor less than any fight,” Tros answered. “Tell him, Helma, that a man does what he can do, and neither gods nor men should ask more or expect less!”

  He saw that nothing could be gained by telling Sigurdsen how great the danger was. The Northmen had too recently been beaten to thrill at any thought of a forlorn hope. He must make them think their task was easy; so he led off, whistling to himself.

  And first he returned to Caswallon’s house to rifle the great racks of arms that lined a storeroom near the hall. There was no guard, no lock. He laughed as he served out bows and arrows, laughed again, as he thought of that gold he had won from Caesar.

  Fflur was supposed to be guarding it. It was probably under her bed! He wondered where Caswallon’s own treasure lay, all the golden money coined in the mint at Verulam.

  “Honesty, unless all other men are honest, is no better than Achilles’ heel,” he reflected. “Britons are madmen. Caswallon is the maddest of them all!”

  He marched his men out through Caswallon’s gate slowly, because some limped and had to lean on others, and downhill between the neat, fenced houses, leaving Sigurdsen’s wife and the widow-woman with orders to attach themselves to Conops’ torch brigade. But Helma he kept with him, since he had no other means of instructing his men.

  They marched into a creeping gray mist ascending from the river, that made trees and houses loom like ghost-things from another world.

  Except that once or twice a tied hound bayed at them and cows lowed in the barns as they went by, there was no sign of life until they reached Lud’s Gate with the wooden bridge beyond it.

  There was a guardhouse built of mud and timber either side the gate, but no lights and only one man fast asleep on a bench within an open guardhouse door. When Tros wakened him he said he was there to entertain belated strangers, and he pulled out a bag of roasted wheat, supposing that Tros and his men wished food and lodging for the night.

  He was a very old man, trembling with the river ague, but Tros pressed him into service since he admitted that he knew every nook and corner of the sparsely wooded land that lay beyond the bridge.

  Tros decided not to close the town gate. It was ajar when he arrived, because the old man was too thoughtful of his ague to wish to struggle with it if a stranger should seek admittance. Tros flung it wide and lighted the bronze lam
ps in both guardhouse windows, so that any one coming would know there was no obstruction and might elect to ride full pelt across the bridge.

  The wall reached either way into obscurity. It was a thing of mud and lumber, useless against battery, but too high for an enemy to waste time climbing if he should see a gap that he might gallop through. Beyond, were occasional clumps of trees that loomed through the drifting mist, a low gurgle from the swamps at the river edge, and silence.

  “Now,” said Tros to Helma, “you shall be a widow on your bridal night, or else shall wife it with a man who stands firm in one king’s favor! It seems to me the Britons are all fools, not alone Caswallon. So I think this man who comes to seize Caswallon’s throne is no whit wiser than the rest. If I am wrong, then you are as good as married to a dead man! But we shall see.”

  He took Helma and the old guardhouse man across the bridge with him, ignored a clump of trees and undergrowth — since any fool might look for an ambush there — and, after ten minutes’ stumbling over tufted ridge and muddy hollow, chose a short stretch of open country where the road crossed what apparently was level ground.

  But he noticed it was not actually level; mist and darkness were deceptive. Fifty feet away to one side the smooth, grazed turf was half a man’s height higher than the road, and from that point it fell away again into a mist-filled hollow. He could have hidden a hundred men there.

  He glanced at the town gate, wide, inviting. Lamplight shone across the opening, blurred by fog, and he whistled contentedly as he realized what a glare Conops’ torches would make, seen from that viewpoint through the lighter mist uphill. But there was something lacking yet.

  “If they come they will come in a hurry. They will charge the open gate. They will get by before we can check them.”

  He observed again. On his left hand, almost exactly midway between his chosen ambush and the town gate, was the clump of trees and undergrowth that looked like such a perfect lurking place.