Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Bouquets for Caesar! Better than Rome’s electioneering ordure poured by women from the roofs! Something that would make an enemy trireme’s captain hurry to abandon ship!

  Thought of the surprise he had in store for Caesar started him singing in the teeth of the howling gale. The song was beaten back against his face; his own ears hardly heard it, but Sigurdsen did, behind him, and began a Viking chant that out-clamored the wind and made even Skell walk like a man.

  So they passed by the break in the fence that Conops and the Britons had repaired, passed thence to the long huts where the Britons lay on sheepskins on the floor, and Tros surveyed them, brandishing the lantern, making sure there was no more plotting for that night at any rate; thrust Skell into a watchhouse, where he could sleep alone and pity himself to his heart’s content; until at last they tramped into the Northmen’s quarters, where the table was set in place again and six men slept on it, the others snoring on the benches against the wall.

  Tros shook the snow off his bearskin, strode to the fire and kicked the dying embers into a blaze. By the light of that, he turned and looked straight into Sigurdsen’s eyes.

  “You little know what eats me,” he said, speaking slowly because Sigurdsen had hard work to understand Gaulish.

  “You lost your little kingdom. I never had one. This ship will be my first. I yearn for it as Caesar yearns to own all earth and sit in judgment with a golden crown on his bald head! I would not give that for a crown,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Sigurdsen,” he went on, staring harder than ever into the Northman’s blue-gray eyes, “what is the shape of the earth?”

  “Ask Odin. Ask the gods,” said Sigurdsen, drawing his huge bulk back a little. Tros’s expression made him half afraid. “There is a rim, over which the sea pours everlastingly, and beyond that there is no air, no light, nothing; but as to what shape it is, who knows?”

  “The earth is round!” said Tros. “Round like one of those leaden balls I made to fling at Caesar!”

  “Peace!” Sigurdsen exclaimed. He was scandalized. “A man should not make jests of such a matter.”

  “Round!” said Tros. “And I will sail around it!”

  “Now you are mad!” said Sigurdsen. “I have known men made mad by a blow on the skull.”

  “How mad was I when I told you we could build a longship with three banks of oars?” Tros answered. “How mad was I when I gave you your liberty? You, raw-beaten, trembling with hate, as ready to kill me as to eat my salt? How mad was I when I told you of the catapults, and of the burning stink? Mad, I suppose, because I will cover the ship with tin if I can get the stuff! How many times have I lied to you since you first knew me? The world is round.”

  “That is easy to say. But who knows it? How do you know?” Sigurdsen demanded.

  There was a half-glare in his eyes. The whites gleamed in the firelight.

  “How did I know how to figure the ship’s dimensions? It is part of the Mystery teaching. Earth, moon, sun, stars, all of them are round, and the earth revolves around the sun.”

  “You lie!” said Sigurdsen breathlessly.

  “If I lie,” Tros said, looking hard at him again, “and if you can prove it, I will give you the ship and all that she contains!”

  “Huh! Who can prove it?” Sigurdsen retorted.

  “You and I. We will set forth. We will sail around the world. If we should reach that rim you speak of, where the sea goes tumbling over and there is no more air, I will give you the ship and you may sail her home again. I will give you the ship unless I can prove that the world is round by sailing all the way around. We shall see.”

  “No,” said Sigurdsen, “we shall never see.”

  “How not?”

  If Sigurdsen had understood the glow in Tros’s amber eyes he would have been less careless how he delivered himself pledged and bound.

  “Because,” he answered, “the men will mutiny if they learn that we sail on such a madman’s quest as that! They will never consent to start.”

  “Which is why I speak to you and not to them,” said Tros. “This is my secret and yours, none other’s. If you keep it and if you play me fair, serving faithfully as my lieutenant, and if we two together find that the world is not round, she shall be your ship!”

  “She is as good as my ship now!” said Sigurdsen.

  “But if you fail me in one particular, if you refuse me one obedience, or if you hang back, or if you seek to turn homeward before we see that rim of the world that you say is there, or if we prove that the world is round by sailing all around it, then she is still my ship and you are still my man,” said Tros. “Shake hands on it.”

  Whereat, having bound Sigurdsen by oath and by cupidity, so that he had no more doubt of him at all, Tros left him staring at the embers and returned to where Helma sat before the fire stirring warm mead against his coming.

  CHAPTER 41. “The world is round!”

  Ye accuse me of keeping secret knowledge that I should share among you, as if a she-bear should show you her cubs or a thrush should tell you where her eggs are nested. There is nothing, nay, no knowledge hidden saving only from him who seeketh the wherewithal to fatten ignorance.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  HELMA sponged the blood out of Tros’s hair, where Sigurdsen’s fists had rained blows on him, and sat down to her knitting. There was no light but the blazing hearth, and from that the howling wind blew intermittent gusts of smoke into the room, but it was no darker or draftier than her former home beside the Baltic had been, and she was proud of Tros, which bred contentment.

  She had settled down to wifehood better than he had to the husband’s part. He was a disturbing man to live with, approving all the outer forms of luxury, evidenced by painted walls, dyed hangings, goose-breast feather bed and the best of everything to eat and drink, but bursting in to swallow a meal in haste and charging out again to stride among the ship-builders and watch each peg and rivet driven home. When the bronze was to be poured he stayed out all night long.

  “You love that ship much better than you love me,” she had said a dozen times.

  He usually laughed and answered that he did not doubt it.

  “Shall you change a man in three months?” he would ask her. “That ship is of my own imagining. I dreamed her. Lo, I build her. You came from the gods. I never sought you. I accepted you, because it seemed to me the gods intended that, and you are a good woman, brave and beautiful.”

  Whereafter, in the rare quiet moments that they had together, he would lapse into a brown study, staring at the fire, brows knitted, studying some problem of construction or contriving new ingenious ways of saving time.

  But tonight he was in a new mood, at any rate in her experience. He looked at her instead of at the fire. It seemed almost for the first time to occur to him that her hair was like spun gold, her eyes the color of lake water in the spring, her figure, neck, hands, feet, like those of a Diana that adorned a fane in Ephesus. He even remarked on it.

  “No wonder Marius bribed Skell!”

  She looked up sharply from her knitting.

  “He tried to bribe me.” She nodded, watching Tros’s eyes.

  “Which? Skell or Marius?”

  “Marius.”

  Tros whistled three or four bars of a song that had its vogue along the Alexandrian waterfront, a song about the Ptolemies and women. But Helma did not know it was impolite, she rather liked the air, and she never could help smiling when Tros whistled. He did it through the gap between his square front teeth, and it made all the muscles of his face move comically.

  “He sent his slave,” said Helma, “that Greek Bagoas who shaves him and makes his bed. That was yesterday.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you are you, and I do not wish to change you, but myself, so that I may resemble you and we may understand each other. You are still, and you watch when an enemy begins to uncover his plan, until the time comes to surprise the enemy.
And then you smite. So I was still. I saw that you knew part of what was going on, and I did not wish to confuse you. But I made my brother, Sigurdsen, betray what was in his mind, and so brought that part to a head. None questions now who is captain. Now since that is settled, I will tell you about Marius.”

  Tros stroked his beard. He began to study his young wife all over again from the beginning. Brave he had known her to be, and beautiful, and not at all given to contradicting him, which was more convenient for her than possibly she guessed! But this was a new phase of her.

  “Speak in your own good time,” he said.

  And that was not the way that most men treated women. One demanded to know every detail of their conversation with any other man, pretending as a rule to disbelieve every word of it, or else one ran away because they talked too much.

  “Marius sent Bagoas,” Helma went on, “and Bagoas promised that if I will persuade you to join Caesar and become a Roman citizen, Caesar will see to it that I visit Rome under his protection. He said, I will become a great lady in Rome, because all Rome will admire my fair hair and my complexion.”

  “And you said?”

  “I answered, I do not negotiate with slaves. I said, let Caesar speak to the Lord Tros in person.”

  “Good!” Tros clapped his thigh, then laid his head against the chair- back, laughing silently. “This is a fine cycle of intrigue!” he said after a minute or two. “First, Marius invites me to become a Roman and receive the command of Caesar’s fleet, undoubtedly, although he did not say so, in order that I may lead the fleet up the Thames and rape the stronghold of my friend Caswallon.

  “Next, through Skell’s agency, Marius persuades my Northmen to try to compel me to become a Roman. Yet at the same time, and through the same Skell’s agency, he tried to persuade my Britons to rebel against me on the very ground that I propose to sell them to the Romans. In the self-same hour he bribes Skell to burn my ship, and to take you and my Northmen to Caesar, leaving me dead, murdered by my Britons. Later, all plans having miscarried, he proposes to have Skell crucified in a storm, so that he may freeze to death before he can reveal the plot. What do you make of it all?”

  He sat back again, watching Helma’s face across the zone of firelight. She counted stitches on her knitting needle before she answered.

  “I make of it that Caesar knows you are a man of valor, a stout friend or a bold enemy,” she said at last. “He will either have you on his side or else destroy you. From what you have told me of Caesar, I think he would keep faith with you if you should yield to him. And I think, that if you refuse to yield to him he will never rest until he has found some way of killing you.”

  Tros nodded

  “And what do you advise?” he asked.

  “Be yourself, Lord Tros. It seems to me you have no ambition such as Caesar’s, and if you should yield to him you would have to be another Marius. Caesar would use your valor and strength and cunning. He would reward you. You would grow richer than ever Marius will. But Caesar would become your god and you his servant, furthering his aim. You have told me his aim is to bring the whole world under the Roman yoke, he ruling Rome. I am sure that you could help him better than any lieutenant he has yet had. But I would rather drown with you in freedom than wear gold and pearls on the steps of Caesar’s throne. Nevertheless, I will do as you say.”

  Tros nodded, reappraising her. In the few months since she fell captive to his sword he had had no time to probe into her inner consciousness and learn of what stuff she was made. But it seemed she had studied him, and she astonished him.

  “Speaking of the world,” he said, “what shape is it?”

  She looked up from her knitting suddenly, surprised, her blue eyes meeting his, first, as if she suspected him of trying to make fun of her, then, aware that he was in earnest.

  “I would like to know,” she answered.

  “Zeus!”

  He grinned as if she had given him new ship’s stores or a new idea for building against time. He looked as pleased with her as if she were a coil of seven-ply linen rope, or a bolt of linen sail-cloth, or a ton of well-kilned willow charcoal.

  “You shall know! Helma, you shall see!”

  She laid the knitting on her lap and watched him, awaiting more speech, never questioning him when he was in that mood, never interrupting thought when it glowed behind his amber eyes. But at last she understood that he was studying her, not thinking of the world’s shape.

  “If I may see what you see,” she said.

  But he brushed that aside with a gesture as mere harping on the obvious. Of course she should see. She was his wife. She should sail the high seas with him.

  “I wonder I never thought of that before,” he exclaimed, looking at her so hard, so appraisingly that she looked down at her hands and at her dyed woolen dress to see what the matter might be.

  “Were you thinking of leaving me behind?” she asked. But he brushed that aside, too, as not worthy of discussion.

  “Nay! But I had not thought how you shall go before me! Helma, one thing I have mulled over in vain until this minute, how shall the ship’s bow be finished! A serpent there shall be, since that betokens wisdom. I have the serpent made, of coiling larchroot more than a man’s thigh thick and the head carved from a great lump of yew, mouth open, all set with whale’s teeth found on the seashore. It lies in the storehouse now, awaiting nothing but the paint and gold leaf. There is a great forked tongue of bronze, fixed on a hinge, so it will flicker like a moving serpent’s when the ship moves.”

  “Wonderful,” said Helma, disappointed.

  “Aye! It will make the Romans pray! But I have thought of a greater thing. Below where the serpent is to oversee the course, between the ship’s bow and the waterline, a place lacks ornament. I had thought of adding three coils to the serpent, so that it might appear to rise out of the sea from under the ship’s keel, but it is better to give it two tails coiling on either side the full length of the sheer strakes, joining into one tail at the stern. And now I know what I will do with the ship’s stem beneath the serpent’s neck. I will set your image there, blue eyes and golden hair and all! Cuchulain the Briton shall carve it out of heart of yew, and I will give him his freedom for reward if he carves it true and lifelike.”

  Helma smiled. That was the greatest tribute Tros had paid to her, perhaps the greatest that he could pay. But Tros laughed, long and silently.

  “Why do you laugh?” she asked him.

  “To think what my stern old father would have said, to see a figure of a woman on my ship’s bow! He would have spoken of the Roman Venus Genetrix, from whom Caesar claims descent, and of the wharfs of Alexandria, and Ostia, and Massilia. However, my father is dead, I live. Helma, can you keep a secret, a tremendous secret, greater than all Caesar’s schemes?”

  She nodded.

  “The world is round!”

  She nodded. She believed whatever Tros said. She would have believed it square, had he said so.

  CHAPTER 42. Galba, the Sicilian

  It is through the open gate of each man’s treachery and idleness, that each man’s enemy comes in.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  THE FENCE Tros had built around his shipyard was intended less to keep his own men in than to keep intruders out. There was no risk of his Northmen straying far; they had too recently been enemies of the Britons; they would have been unsafe almost anywhere on the countryside, and though they had received their nominal freedom at Tros’s hands, they had neither goods nor money and would have found it next to impossible to make a living. Whereas Tros fed them royally, and they liked the work of ship-building.

  His Britons, on the other hand, were slaves and, as such, outlaws if they should dare to run away. Every slave-owner and every serf above the rank of slave, nominally free but not allowed to leave the land he tilled, would be in arms against them. Their only chance, if they should desert Tros, would be to do so in a body and take to the woods, driving
off cattle and plundering lonely homesteads.

  Delay, obstruction, interference came chiefly from without, and from two sources. First, those rebels had had women who depended on them, some unfit for service, some too young. Those clamored at the gate for food and shelter, and Tros fed them for a while, though he could ill afford it. Some he set to work at weaving and at making sails; others went to the ropewalk, where the linen cordage was twisted and tested. Some merely wailed and devoured good sustenance. They were all a nuisance. They all knew their men-folks’ liberty was forfeited and that they must be left behind when the ship was launched and sailed away at last. To all intents and purposes their men were dead, as they would have been dead in fact — hung, burned alive, beheaded — had Tros not accepted them as Caswallon’s gift.

  A few at a time, the marriageable ones were absorbed into British families. A few of the older women died, mainly of misery, and some of the younger ones were taken by the druids to be kept as virgins in the sacred sisterhood. In the end the druids took all but a few and parceled them out around the countryside, obliging men of means to accept them as serving-women, whether useful or not. It was the few who remained after that who gave Tros the most trouble, nine women, their own fathers toiling at the heavy labor in the yard, upsetting discipline by siren-smiling at the Northmen overseers, who were human and young and not eager to be stayed by good advice.

  Legally Tros might have sold those women. They were his. Daughters of traitors, captives of Caswallon’s spear, they became, foot, hand and hide, the property of the king, who had waived possession in Tros’s favor, although Caswallon himself took over their homes and goods. But there was something in Tros’s obstinate nature that objected to that very commonplace proceeding. He did not even like the thought of selling men. He had bought men in days gone by to man oars in his father’s ship, but had never sold them; he had never bought or sold a woman, and he did not propose to begin.