Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  So they loosed Skell, and the Northmen took charge of him with low- breathed insults, despising him as neither Norse nor Briton, but a traitor to both races, speaking both tongues. Tros, arms behind him, stared at the Gaulish woman, who was kneeling in the mud.

  “Mine?” he wondered. “Mine? By Pluto, what should a seaman do with you?”

  And Caswallon chuckled, waiting. The woman tried to smile, but fear froze her again when Helma stood beside Tros, taking his hand to remind him of her rights.

  “I shall need no wench to wait on me!” said Helma.

  “You shall go to Caesar,” Tros said finally. “You shall take my message to him.

  “You shall say: ‘Whatever Tros needs that Caesar has, Tros will take without Caesar’s leave or favor!’

  “Bid him send me no more slave-women, but guard himself against a blow that comes! And lest you lie about that message, woman, I will chisel it on bronze and rivet that to a chain around your neck.”

  “So! Then this business is over,” said Caswallon. “The druids wait. Send your Northmen back to Lunden with your prisoners, Tros. We must make haste.”

  He signed to the Northmen to take the prisoners away, and offered Tros and Helma places in the chariot beside him, then shouted to the team and drove like a madman through the mist.

  He said not another word until the horses leaped a stream and the bronze wheels struck deep into the far bank; then, when they breasted a mist-wreathed hill beneath dripping branches and he had glanced over-shoulder to make sure Fflur followed, and Orwic, and a score of mounted men behind their chariots, he tossed speech to Tros in fragments:

  “Too many druids, not enough king. If druids keep me waiting, men say ‘Hah! even Caswallon must cool his heels!’ But if I keep them waiting, they say ‘Caswallon is irreligious!’ Nevertheless, unless I king it carefully there will be neither king nor druids! And the druids know that. They must wait for me. And I think that dawn is a better time for funerals than midnight, because at dawn men hope, whereas at night they are afraid.

  “So, Brother Tros, you shall attend your father’s funeral after all, and all my people shall believe you are my friend. I will bid the druids thank you that Lunden wasn’t plundered while they prayed! On ye horses! Ho, there! Hi! Hi-yi! Which is the hardest, brother Tros, to king it or to captain a ship at sea?”

  “That I know not,” Tros answered. “But I will build my ship by your leave. I know not which is harder, to build ship or kingdom. Only I know which task I choose.”

  “Hew your timber, lay your keel and build. You have Caesar’s gold,” said Caswallon.

  “Aye, and I know Caesar. He has sharp eyes — long ears. His spies—”

  “Leave spies to me to deal with.”

  Tros fell silent, thinking of oak and iron nails and cordage — of tools, food, housing and a thousand other necessities. He would get them all. He would build. But the getting and building, he knew, would soon reach Caesar’s ears.

  CHAPTER 38. Winter, Near Lunden Town

  A guest, no matter who nor whence, is sacred, be he friend or enemy. I tell you an eternal Law, which if ye break by thought or word or deed shall shut you away from safety in the day of peril. When ye open the door to admit the stranger, open the heart also and turn out guile and malice, lest your guest, if he discover them within you, mock your hospitality and call it by its right name, Cunning. Ye say, what though if a guest have guile and malice? I say, let him. I am old, but not in my day, nor in my father’s day before me, has treachery been known to bring forth comfort for him who hath it in his heart.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  THE CLEARING in the forest rang with the noise of adze-blow and hammer on anvil. An eight-yoke bull-team swayed and floundered at a felled oak, hauling it amid a riot of shouts and whip-cracks toward the sawing scaffold, where a Northman overseer bellowed with rage at Britons’ notions of a straight cut. Tros, looking older, because he was calm with the intensity of patient anger forced by will to subserve energy, sat in his usual place on a log in mid-clearing. He had a lump of charcoal in his fist, and a board beside him. He was too well aware of the Britons’ rules of hospitality to be less than courteous to a Roman envoy introduced by Caswallon. But he kept interrupting the conversation to draw joints and fastenings, and to write measurements on the board, using the British inch and a system of circles and dots to mark numbers of inches. He allowed no sign to escape him that the Roman’s conversation was an irritating interruption, or that he suspected the Roman of any hidden design.

  “The Greeks,” he said at last, “have a word for it.” Greek was his native tongue, but he liked to speak of Greeks as foreigners. That, of course, meant nothing to Caswallon, who was watching a groom take hot pitch from a Northman’s cauldron and apply it to a cut on a horse’s foreleg. But the Roman’s eyes smiled.

  “The Greeks call it nous,” Tros continued. “It means more than knowledge.”

  His amber eyes thoughtfully studied the Roman who sat, with loosely buckled breast-plate and his helmet on his knees, on the butt end of an oak log facing him; but he spoke at Caswallon, as the Roman understood. It was gray twilight, snow about to fall. Appearances were deceptive in that half-light. Tros looked the oldest, the, Roman youngest because the gray over his temples did not show and he was clean-shaven. But the fact was the other way. Marcus Marius was fifty; Tros, black-bearded, hardly more than half his age.

  “We Romans call it virtue, which is courage. The Greeks are like women, good at words,” said Marius. “I have fought Greeks from the Piraeus all the way north into Macedonia. I sailed with Pompey the Great against the pirates, of whom more than half were Greeks. We beat them easily, talking less, but hitting harder.”

  “Fight me. See if your virtue is greater than mine,” Tros suggested, his white teeth showing in a grin of great good humor.

  “No,” said Marius. “I may have to fight you some day. This time let us talk and see which has the better of it. If you have what the Greeks call nous, which is something they talk about but haven’t, you will understand me easily enough.”

  “Talk on,” said Tros.

  Caswallon sighed. He had heard too much talk — as, for instance, from Fflur, the mother of his sons. He began to stride up and down within earshot, six paces this way and six the other with his hands behind him, while his blanketed chariot-horses stamped impatiently, a wolf-skin-clad groom squatting under their noses, twenty yards away.

  Firelight shone between the tree-trunks near by. The woods were full of the echoing din of hammer blows, the snore of rip-saws and occasional shouting in a tongue the Roman did not understand. He had to speak loud and in Gaulish because Tros had refused to have any conversation with him without witnesses, and Caswallon knew no Latin.

  “I will speak first of Caesar,” said Marius, and again Tros grinned, but Caswallon began to knead his fingers nervously behind his back.

  “Why?” said Tros. “I know Caesar already. So does the Lord Caswallon.”

  “I have heard others make that same boast,” Marius answered. “Yet I, who am older than Caesar, who have served under him in Gaul and in Hispania, who have been in his household in Rome, who have traveled with him to Bythinia and back, who have lived with him in exile and have shared dry bread with him on many a campaign, am not so sure I know him. Two or three times you have had the best of him. I have heard it was you who wrecked his fleet when we invaded Britain and you who all but captured him at Seine-mouth. But were you never stung by a wasp?”

  Marius picked up a stick and struck the log on which he sat, to illustrate a wasp’s fate, then continued:

  “Caesar was captured by pirates once. That was long ago, near Pharmacusa, when he was hardly more than a boy. I was with him. They were a blood-thirsty pack of swine, and they demanded twenty talents’ ransom. ‘Not enough,’ said he. And while we who were with him feared for our lives and his, he laughed at those pirates for fools who did not know Caesar’s value. ‘I w
ill give you fifty talents’ ransom,’ said he, ‘and that price will be nevertheless, too little.’

  “Thereafter, while all of his party but the two of us and one slave, who remained in the pirates’ camp with him, went to raise the ransom money, Caesar ruled those pirates as if they were his prisoners, not he theirs. He took part in their games, he made love to their women and he made them listen to his own writings that he read aloud, they wondering and he assuring them they were fools who could not appreciate a priceless privilege. When he wished to sleep he ordered them to keep silence, which they did, treading on tiptoe and striking whoever disturbed him. When the ransom money came at last — fifty talents! Think of that! — he paid it, promising he would come back soon and crucify them all.

  “He was very young and they laughed, even as just now you laughed when I mentioned Caesar’s name. They knew he had no authority. He was an exile. He had no army, no fleet, not many friends. They did not even trouble themselves to move away from Pharmacusa, but sent two of the talents for precaution’s sake as a present to Junius who, in those days, was governor of Asia and in a too great hurry to grow rich. But Caesar, I with him, went to Miletus, whence the ransom had come. He had a few friends in Miletus. There he assumed authority, and there was none who saw fit to challenge it although, as I say, he was a young man and without much influence. He manned some ships that lay there, impressing freemen in the name of Sylla, who was all-powerful in Rome in those days and had proscribed him. He descended on those pirates as the dawn steals on the night, and caught them all, with all except two talents of the fifty he had paid them. He kept the money, but he threw the pirates into jail in Pergamus.

  “Then he went to see Junius, I with him again, but Junius had already received two talents from the pirates and his appetite was keen for more, so he said he would consider at his leisure what punishment should be imposed. He was a mean Etruscan with a long nose and the kind of sneer that has cost many a man his fortune. Caesar can sneer, but never that way. Junius asked by what authority Caesar had taken ships and men from Miletus, and in whose name.

  “So Caesar took very courteous leave of him, answering that he would keep a promise while Junius considered at his leisure what his duty might be. And he returned to Pergamus, where he crucified every one of the pirates. He always keeps promises. But because they had been civil to him while he was their prisoner he showed them mercy by ordering their throats cut before they were tied to the trees. Thereafter he wrote to Rome and made use of a talent or two for the hastening of the end of Junius’ career. All fail, who oppose Caesar. He would have been Junius’ friend, had Junius supported him.”

  “You suggest I am a Junius?” asked Tros. The thought seemed to amuse him.

  “No. But you might be a greater than Junius. You are a pirate. Caesar would have befriended those pirates had they sought his friendship and promised to desist from piracy, even as Pompey the Great befriended all the pirates who surrendered to him in his war against them. Caesar and Pompey are great ones and great friends at present, Pompey lending men to Caesar for his work in Gaul, each meanwhile courting the wealth of Crassus, who fears them both. But men are saying the world is hardly big enough to hold all three, Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. The time comes soon when each of the three will be seeking every friend he can depend on and the world will split in three, if my judgment amounts to anything.”

  “What if I am Pompey’s friend?” Tros asked. “You call me pirate. I have Pompey the Roman’s written leave to sail where I please. Caesar gainsaid that. He burned my father’s ship. He beat the crew to death. My father died from torture.”

  “You were none of you Roman citizens,” the Roman interrupted. “Rome puts no such indignity on Romans.”

  He held his chin high while he said that, and the firelight through the trees shone on a proud face. Rome was his religion.

  “Better be Caesar’s friend and become a Roman citizen. I tell you, Caesar can procure that honor for you.”

  “Pompey could have done the same,” Tros answered. “I refused it. I am a lord of Samothrace.”

  “Bah!” said the Roman. “What is Samothrace? An island, a spot of an island in a rocky sea. The pirates plundered it. No army, no revenue, nothing.”

  “Nothing that you can understand. Nothing there for Caesar,” Tros retorted. “Never was a foreign ruler there, and never will be!”

  “No harbor, no houses, no commerce, not even a tree!” said the Roman, his eyes wandering among the giant oaks around him.

  They were martial, appraising eyes. He appeared to be mentally figuring in terms of baulks of timber that would serve to build redoubts or batter down an enemy’s.

  From out of the trees into the clearing came a score of fair-haired Britons armed with spears and handsomely clad in furs against the wintry wind that made the Roman shiver now and then. The furs had jeweled clasps. Several carried dead wolves on their shoulders and two had a boar hung between them on a spear. They greeted Caswallon noisily, but he took scant notice of them. Then a horn blew and there began a great commotion in the gloom a hundred yards away behind Tros’s back. The hammering and the sawing ceased, but there was a noise of footsteps and laughter and, by the thump, it might be of tools and odds and ends being stowed in boxes for the night.

  “It is cold here,” said the Roman, pointedly.

  He buckled up the bronze armor to his throat, but there was not much warmth in that. Wind sighed through the trees, and the great fires, glowing crimson hardly a hundred yards away, looked cheerful and inviting.

  Caswallon came and stood, legs apart, his back half-turned toward the Roman. He said nothing, but he met Tros’s eyes and jerked his head in the direction of the firelight with an uplift of the eyebrows and a questioning smile. Tros answered the unspoken thought:

  “What can one more spy do? Caesar knows already.”

  He arose and led the way into the trees, Caswallon following the Roman, who strode at ease, not minding that a king should walk behind him. His armor clanked and his footfall on the frozen earth was even heavier than Tros’s, but Caswallon, clothed in dyed, embroidered leather moved as silently as a shadow except that his leather-stockinged feet rustled among dry leaves. Tros rolled in his gait as if a heaving deck were under him.

  The path they followed led to a new-made picket fence a man’s height from the ground, interwoven with willow-withes through which the firelight shone. There was a wide gateway barricaded with oak beams and deeply scored with wheel-ruts, with a log and mud guardhouse beside it, in the door of which stood Conops, who doffed his red cap civilly and let the bars down, but showed one yellow eye-tooth at the Roman.

  “I have seen you before,” said Marius, acknowledging what he chose to consider a salute.

  Conops touched the lid over his sightless eye.

  “Ah!” said Marius. “I remember. You forgot your manners. Caesar punished you. Well, if you have learned the lesson you will be a greater comfort to your master and less dangerous to yourself.”

  He passed on because Tros beckoned, and Caswallon crowded at his heels. Conops raised the bars again, his tooth still showing through the slit in his upper lip. Before them a low, thatched building, lighted from within, loomed shadowy in the bonfire light, and beyond that the roofs of other, longer buildings set in rows, noisy with voices and song. In the gloom to the right by the gurgling river’s edge arose the ribs of three ships, two of them of good size, one tremendous, looking like the black bones of a deep-sea monster beached and picked clean by the birds. The scaffolding erected around all three resembled giant rushes, through which the wind moaned lonesomely.

  Tros led the way toward the nearest house, and the door opened before they reached it, Helma, golden-haired and smiling, standing framed in the glow from the hearth.

  “My wife,” said Tros, and introduced the Roman, who bowed, inspecting her curiously. She answered stare for stare, having heard no good word of the Romans, from Tros at any rate. Her blue eyes challenged h
is indignantly, until Caswallon laughed, bending his head to get through the door, which was high enough for Tros or any ordinary man.

  “She is Norse,” he warned. “The Norse are fighters, and the women are the mothers of the men. Look out for her!”

  A British slave-girl knelt beside the hearth, turning and basting a huge spitted roast. There was a smell of well-done meat and warming mead that made the Roman smack his lips and set Caswallon whistling, but Tros led the way through a door at the far end, shouting for light, which the slave-girl brought. He lighted three lanterns from the first one, and then kicked the door shut behind Caswallon, who stood looking bored as if he had seen this sight too many times. But the Roman’s dark eyes stared appraisingly.

  The room was a museum of new wonders. On a table twice a man’s length, in the midst, was the model of a ship such as no Roman nor any other living man had seen. She had three masts, three banks of oars and lines so lovely that even the Roman gasped at them. The sails were purple, as were the oar-blades; the top-sides were vermilion; the bottom gleamed like polished silver. She was nearly the same shape end for end, except for a flare from bow to waterline. She was all decked over, and along each side of her were painted shields, each bearing a golden dragon on a purple ground. Near where the break came at the bow and poop were four sets of double uprights, each with a wheel at the top between them. They resembled cranes, but their purpose was explained by models set against the end wall of the room.

  “Catapults!” said the Roman, his eyes ablaze with interest. He was an expert in artillery.

  “Aye, but better than any Caesar has!”

  Tros was prouder of that model than a mother of her child. It represented ten years’ thinking, all his hopes, and three months’ whittling with a knife. The Roman wanted to examine the working model of the catapult, but Tros prevented him.