Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Never once!” Tros answered, but his face was bruised and flushed where Sigurdsen had hit him, and Caswallon laughed again. Marius, the Roman, strode in, helmet and armor clanking. His was the yard-long military stride that lent dignity to any kind of turmoil. A crowd of Caswallon’s young British aristocrats, heavily clothed in furs, surged through the doorway behind him.

  “Why didn’t you send for help sooner?” Caswallon asked. “I would have come.”

  “I needed none,” Tros answered. “There was a question as to who is captain here. I have answered it.”

  “Tros,” said the Roman quietly, “you should be a Roman. You are a man after our Caesar’s heart.”

  Then Skell came, frozen blood on his face and his hands tied, kicked along by Conops.

  “Nay, master, I didn’t knife him. You said ‘alive,’ so I used only the hilt. I found him coming forth from the Lord Caswallon’s house.”

  “Loose him,” Tros commanded, and Conops cut the thong.

  “I would crucify that man,” said Marius. “He came to have word with me.”

  “What did he say?” Tros asked.

  “That for a price he can persuade your men to force you to join Caesar. Treasonable talk. It is not our Roman custom to encourage it. It is cold. If you crucify him he will be dead by morning.”

  Tros looked steadily at the Roman, drawing ten long breaths before he spoke again. Skell did not try to speak.

  “No,” Tros said at last. “Tonight I will kill no man.”

  “You and your amber eyes. You look like a lion,” said the Roman. “Are you afraid to kill?”

  Tros stroked his beard. The room grew full of silence, Caswallon leaning on a spear and smiling, standing with his cloak undone and firelight gleaming on the golden buckles of his tunic.

  “You are Caswallon’s guest. How can I kill you?” Tros answered at last, looking straight into Marius’ eyes. “If I should kill Skell, how should I learn what you have said to him? I look like a lion? You and I, Marius, have both seen lions, not only in the circuses of Rome. Skell is a jackal. Are you Caesar’s jackal?”

  “I am a centurion,” said Marius.

  “Helma,” Tros answered, speaking very slowly, “is my wife. Skell is my jackal. They are neither of them at your disposition, nor at Caesar’s.”

  Marius blinked but did not flinch perceptibly, although one or two Britons behind him laughed.

  Caswallon fastened up his fur cloak and gave his spear to a retainer, pulling a fur hood over his head.

  “Let us go,” he said abruptly. “Come, Marius. Tros, you will need to mend your fence. We broke it.”

  Marius, following Caswallon to the door, came face to face with Helma. She was bringing Tros’s bearskin overcoat. Her young eyes met the Roman’s angrily. She almost spat at him. Tros laughed. In the doorway the back of Caswallon’s great shoulders shook suggestively. It looked as if his hand might be over his mouth, but he made no sound.

  CHAPTER 40. “What shape is the Earth?”

  Whatever ye see or hear or know was aeons old before ye heard of it. If it is new to your ears and eyes; if ye have never smelt or felt it; if it tastes not like mothers’ milk and ye never bought or sold it in the fair, is that why ye think ye are fit to pass judgment and to mock those who open their minds?

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  SOME kind of mental alchemy was brewing in the murk that night. The wind shrieked of it and the shadows seemed to be the womb of tragedy. Tros turned a dozen Britons out into the dark to mend the fence Caswallon’s men had broken, Conops spurring them to haste with his knife-hilt and much blasphemy mixed of Greek, Gaulish, Norse and any other language that came to mind.

  Skell he kept with him because he wanted Skell alive, and he had small doubt that Britons or Northmen would kill him if he left him hutted up with either. Skell had betrayed Northmen, Britons and Tros alike; he should betray Marius, too, presently. Sigurdsen stayed with Tros uninvited, snorting disgust at the weather that only they really feel who were born amid gales and crave the sunshine. But Sigurdsen’s motive needed no explaining; he wished to cement new confidence, having lost that of his own countrymen. His day was done unless Tros should continue to lend him countenance.

  The three, Tros leading, Skell in the midst, leaned into the wind and fought their way against it to where the great ship’s ribs loomed stark against the night, wind howling through them and through the scaffolding. Once in a while, when a squall from between the buildings on their right hand blew a lane down the driving snow, they could see the great crane like a gallows over all. Then darkness, and they stumbled over sawed logs, planks hidden under snow, ropes, baulks of timber, all the litter of a shipyard, all the evidence of haste by men unused to systematic building.

  They stood under the ways, beneath the prow at last, where the scaffolding was boarded up below and formed a shelter against the wind. The snow had filled the chinks, so it was warm there and Skell ceased shivering. Sigurdsen found a lantern and lighted it from one of the fire-pots stowed in a locker. Tros took it from him and walked forward underneath the ship until, two- thirds of her length toward the stern, there began to be hardly standing room under the keel. Then he laughed at something and held the lantern so that Sigurdsen could see what he did.

  Shavings and small bits of dry wood had been piled into a heap that reached nearly to the keel. Snow had blown against it before the wind changed and the stuff was damp. Tros kicked away the snow. Shavings and sawdust actually smoked down near the bottom, and he stamped it out, kicking the snow back into the heap and mixing both together.

  “While you plotted to rule me!” he said, holding the light close to Sigurdsen’s face.

  But Sigurdsen had had punishment enough. His face was bruised and his eyes were a beaten man’s. Tros turned the light on Skell. “Who did this?” he demanded.

  Skell’s red-rimmed eyes grew ghastly in the dark. He licked his lips. He tried to dodge the lantern-light, but Tros kept it close to his face.

  “I — I did it!” he said at last.

  “One little word there was between you and your death! If you had lied, that was the end of you,” Tros answered. “How much did the Roman pay you?”

  Again Skell trembled on the verge of lying. But the lantern betrayed every line of his face. Tros peered into his eyes. The thought of death was comfortless down there in the gusty darkness with the cold river sucking among reeds fifty or sixty feet away.

  “He promised me freedom.”

  “And what?”

  “And two thousand sesterces.”

  “If what?”

  “If the ship burned.”

  “Two thousand sesterces to burn a ship? Just to pile a heap of tinder under her? And he a Roman. Hah! What more did he demand for that price?”

  “Lord Tros, I dare not say. Ask Marius.”

  “I remember now, I swore I will not kill a man tonight.”

  Skell grinned at that. He was half mad with terror; the bloodshot whites of his eyes rolled like a steer’s in the shambles.

  “But I will nail you by the ears to one of these posts,” said Tros, “and when morning comes—”

  “Lord Tros, if I tell, will you—”

  “Nay, I make no bargains!” Tros retorted. “Dog! Swine of a bastard British-Northman! Look!” He slapped the planking of the great ship overhead. “Ten years I have dreamed of this. I have fought the seas, year in and year out. Storms and worse weather than tonight’s. Ships, boats, crews to break a man’s heart, all to learn enough to build this beauty. I fought Caesar for the gold to buy her timbers. I fought pirates and rebels to get men to do the work. I even spared your life, you dog, so hungered I for men to build my heart’s desire. And now she is half-built — three months’ labor of two hundred men and Sigurdsen — and me, burning oil by night to draw the plans, first on the task at dawn and last to leave it. Dog! You dare to try to burn my ship, and then to bargain with me? Seize him, Sigurdsen! Bring nails!
He shall freeze here until morning!”

  “Nay, nay!” Skell dropped on his knees, mumbling with dry lips, licking them, then slobbering his fox-hued beard. “I will tell! Lord Tros, no cruelty! I did not know how great a man you are! No friends. Freedom, property all gone. What could I do but listen to that Roman? A man must hope! A man must help himself!”

  “Even a slave can be a man,” Tros answered. “What did Marius demand of you?”

  Skell hesitated yet, but Sigurdsen came striding through the dark with cord and two bronze nails.

  “Helma!” he said, gulping, almost swallowing the word. “How?” Tros knew the Roman was not fool enough to think he could seduce Helma or persuade her to betray himself.

  “I was to burn the ship. The Britons were to kill you. The Northmen would be free and masterless. Their own longship that you captured is still seaworthy. Marius was to offer them a price to man that and take him back to Gaul, taking Helma with them.”

  “For Caesar?”

  “So said Marius. Caesar has never seen a daughter of the Vikings.”

  “Hey-yey-yey! Rome breeds centurions,” said Tros. “That Marius should have been a Greek, not a Roman. But what a loyal dog to Caesar! What a fetch-and-carry, faithful, crafty scout of an ambassador! Lud’s blood and backbone! Skell! If you had half the grit of Marius and half young Glendwyr’s spirit, I might fear you. Better for you, perhaps, that you are no more than a jackal!”

  He turned away a moment pacing to and fro under the ship’s keel, with his hands behind him, kicking at his sword-point as he turned. “Marius called me a lion,” he muttered to himself. “Why does a lion let jackals follow him? Why not kill them?”

  But he knew why he did not intend to kill Skell. He was grateful to him. Skell had been useful, bringing disaffection to a head, providing opportunity to nip in the bud what might have grown into a serious sedition. Skell’s value was gone for the moment, but men have short memories, whereas a jackal’s character persists. He might need Skell again.

  “Zeus pity you!” he said, taking the lantern from Sigurdsen and holding it close to Skell’s face.

  There came a blast of freezing wind that made Skell shrug himself against the oaken post on which the ship’s buttock rested.

  “I suppose you are here on earth like the rest of us to try to learn to be a man. But how many lives will the learning take you? Miserable bastard! I will not rob you of experience. You may yelp and gnaw bones and jackal it in my wake for a while yet. Until I mark a change in you, be Sigurdsen’s fetch-and-carry man. Work him hard, Sigurdsen. Follow.”

  He led the way, swinging the lantern, and inspected all the lumber piles to make sure there were no more fires laid, kicking away the snowdrifts, making Skell move heavy timbers so that he might peer among the crevices. Then into the drafty sheds, stirring among the shavings and adze splinters. Then into the locked storehouse, where the finished fittings lay in orderly confusion. Ropes — there seemed enough to make a net to hold the world in — ash oars, stout and long enough to mast a fishing boat; pegs of larchroot of a dozen sizes and by the thousand, for fastening ship’s planking; bronze rivets thicker than a man’s wrist; working parts, chain and pulleys, for the four great catapults; yew beams and woven horsehair strings for the twelve-flight arrow-engines, arrows by the thousand, iron-barbed, of beech and goosequill, roped in bundles; paint, pitch, box-wood blocks, bronze anchors of a new design, with wooden stocks at right angles to the flukes — wealth! It represented more than wealth to Tros. It was the expression of his genius. It was the key to independence and the unknown.

  Sigurdsen eyed it all miserably, valuing the weight of bronze and reckoning the labor that had cost so much in food, housing, clothing, toil of supervision. Had he owned Caesar’s treasure chest, he would have thought twice, ten times before he risked its contents on a venture on the high seas. To him, a ship was only a protection against famine, a defense against invasion, an expense, a last resource, to be built with skill and patience but reserved until a man must battle with the seas.

  He was a sailor because he was a sea-king’s son, because he had had to be, because the bitter seas around his northern home had been the only road to anywhere when crops failed and the long, dark winters threatened hunger. Sigurdsen would have bought land and would have built a mansion on it, if he had had Tros’s money.

  Whereas if Tros had had all Caswallon’s wealth and all the money coined in the mint at Verulam, he would have built three ships instead of one. And the one ship that he could build, with the help of the money he had looted along with Caesar’s bireme, was to be the finest that had ever sailed the seas.

  He had torn Caesar’s own bireme’s planks and beams apart for the bronze in her and to learn how Roman shipwrights built for strength; and he had improved on all their joints, proportions, fastenings. For beauty of design, seaworthiness and speed, he had turned to the Northmen’s longship, captured in the Thames, copying her under-water lines, the easy entry and the almost fish-like quality of the stern, that could never be pooped, however fierce a following sea. Above all he had copied her lightness, sacrificing no strength, stiffening the chine to enable his ship to carry an enormous spread of sail, and providing three masts, in which respect again he was a daring innovator.

  As for rig, he had copied the lateen spar, loved of the Phoenicians, with tackles of his own invention that should make it easier to tack swiftly. All his cordage and his sail-cloth was of linen. British women were working by the whale-oil lamps that minute, weaving against time to earn the unheard-of prices that he paid. Three sets of sails, and covers in which to stow them!

  “Three months’ work yet,” he grumbled, knowing in his heart that he would work a miracle if the last spike should be driven and the last rope bent before midsummer; but to attain the possible a man must strive for the impossible. He knew Caesar would be building ships in Gaul all winter long, and he proposed to take to the sea ahead of him.

  He knew that Caesar was meditating a second attempt to invade Britain, although the Britons themselves, Caswallon alone possibly excepted, did not believe it. They were deceived by Caesar’s overtures for peace, and by the spies, for the most part Gauls, who threaded the country in the guise of merchants. The one thing that Tros dreaded more than all else was that Caesar’s attempt might be made in spring, before his own ship was finished, perhaps even before he could get her launched.

  If he could get her into the water before Caesar came, it might be fairly easy to conceal the mastless hull in some creek higher up the Thames, although it would be more than two hundred feet long and not easy to maneuver in the narrower reaches of the river. He did not believe that even a Roman general would be so unwise, so unseamanly, as to risk his fleet a second time on an open beach, where the first storm was sure to destroy it. Caesar’s next invasion, he felt sure, would be up the Thames estuary aimed straight at Lunden Town and Verulam.

  So he had made his Northmen and his Britons toil from dawn until dark. He had hired minstrels to sing and play music to them. He had hired hunters to keep then well supplied with venison, boar meat, geese and ducks, which was cheaper, after all, than buying sheep and oxen from the land-owners, who put up the price of everything their foresight told them he might need. He had even hired three fishing boats and sent that fleet to sea in winter to bring cod, sole and herring; there was a stench in the biting wind from the smoke-house nearby, and from the vats of fish-oil that he had rendered down from surplus herrings. Only a man who builds a big ship knows what quantities of oil are needed.

  Sheltering the lantern now under his bearskin cloak against the wind, he led toward the forges and the foundry, grinding his teeth as he thought of the trouble he had had with British blacksmiths, masters of their craft, past masters of obstruction and extortion, believing themselves keepers of the metal mystery. There were things that Tros knew about metals that they did not know, as for instance, how to melt a modicum of iron in with the bronze to strengthen it, thus helping to
reduce weight. He had had to fight them to a standstill before they would admit him into the foundry shed; he had had to threaten to throw them into the molten mixture before they would consent to change the proportions of tin and copper. And then, that battle won, he had had to watch them lest they put in lead instead of iron to spite him.

  But the worst had been the charcoal burners. They, too, were a guild and, like the blacksmiths, they were the descendants of swarthy tribes who lorded it in Britain long before the Trinobantes and Iceni came from some forgotten mainland. Conquered and, in a sense, submerged, they had retained their freedom, scorned by the aristocratic Britons, living in their own forest villages of mud and boughs, refusing even to trade charcoal unless they were more than usually hungry.

  Yet Tros had needed and continued to need charcoal of the best, almost as much as he needed heart of oak and metal. He had tried raiding their chickens and pigs to reduce them to reason; had tried overpayment, bonuses for quality, and floggings for broken promises, but had failed until at last he found their hermit-priest, half druid, half sorcerer, and by bribing him with smoked cod’s roe and herring oil had ensured deliveries of the best stuff, kilned, of willow, not oak sticks, burned in heaps beneath a cover of wet turf.

  Memory of what that had led to, of the cod-roe and fish-oil friendship made with old Eough, the sorcerer, restored Tros to comparative good humor. It was Eough who had shown him the cave beneath Caswallon’s stables, into which the dung of generations of horses had been shoveled; Eough who had dug down to the bottom of it where the yellowish crystals lay inches deep; Eough who had shown him how to mix those crystals with powdered sulphur, charcoal, resin and oak sawdust, until he had a fiendish concoction that would burn like the fires of the Jews’ Gehenna, with a stench that no human being could endure.

  It was Eough who knew where sulphur could be found in quantity, though it was rare and valuable stuff in Britain, and had promised to provide it in return for its weight in salted cod and herring oil. He had the lead balls all ready for the mixture — lacked only the sulphur now — and four prodigious catapults of his own invention that would hurl those balls with accuracy nearly half a mile.