Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Old, old as the hills is Verulam. There is the mint, and there my father lived. Lud’s blood! He had a good house, but I let the druids have it when Taliesan came from the west. They keep the mint, which makes the gold and silver safe enough,” Caswallon said as he drove at his usual speed, as fast as the gray stallions could lay hoof to ground, with Tros up beside him in the wicker-bodied chariot. “Verulam is a healthier place than Lunden. Better hunting, better pasture for the horses, no fogs from the river to give a man Lud’s ague, higher ground, better in every way. But no druid, no king! I was proud that I had my father’s house to give to Taliesan. He came and blessed my new house that I built in Lunden, saying it should not fall by fire or to a foeman in my day.”

  They did not go unattended. There was Orwic, at the head of four-and- twenty gentlemen-at-arms-the aristocratic caste, descendants of tribes who came from oversea three centuries before. Landholders, rich in their own right, who might not be denied the privilege of riding escort to the king, as well as of knowing nearly all his business. Behind them rode as many grooms and servants, most of whom were not so fair-haired or so light-complexioned, some of mixed blood.

  Caswallon did not talk much during the long drive through the forest. He frowned and muttered to himself, impatient when they halted at a mound- encircled roadhouse to change teams, refusing drink, eager to be off again.

  “Brother Tros, we shall need our wits,” he said at last. “Lord Druid Taliesan is a brother of gods, wiser than Merlin, and he loves me. But there are Caradoc, Gwanar, Gwenwynwyn, Madoc, of whom two are crafty men, and two are fools. It is what you and I will say that must solve this riddle by persuading Taliesan. I wish my tongue were readier and my heart less so.”

  “Keep an open mind. Play my hand and I will play yours,” Tros advised him.

  “Good! Stand you by me.”

  Thereafter not one word until they galloped down a lane between enormous oaks and came on to the rising open ground by Verulam, where the druids’ white hospice that was once Caswallon’s father’s house, gleamed in the setting sun above the turfed mound that surrounded it. The turf showed brown through rotting snow, and the roof was green and gray in patches where the lichen edged the shingles. It was an enormous house, built mainly of adze-hewn timber.

  There was a gathering of wool-robed druids, and the mighty Taliesan himself in the midst of them by the gate in the gap in the encircling mound, but no sign of any other kings, although the hour was late.

  “If we come first, good. And if we come last, better. Lud deliver us if we are neither first nor last,” Caswallon said, screwing up his eyes to scan the group of druids. “The first and last create a stir. Kings who are neither first nor last are nobodies.”

  There was a stir, at any rate, a fanfare of golden trumpets. The druids received their guests with song and with holly garlands, even hanging wreaths on the horses’ necks that pricked them and made them frantic. But that gave Caswallon a chance to display his horsemanship, which he enjoyed. He reined in the maddened stallions, tossed the reins to a groom who charged up in the nick of time, leaped to the ground and knelt for the old High Druid’s blessing. Tros knelt beside him. Then they entered by a wide gate through an embankment supported on the inside by a wall of heavy timber, up which ivy climbed, a century old, its main stems thicker than a man’s thigh.

  Behind the chanting druids Caswallon and Tros went arm-in-arm. They looked like two kings, not a king and his attendant, because Tros had donned his purple cloak for the occasion, bordered deep with gold embroidery. His deep- sea rolling stride was more majestic than Caswallon’s, who had lived too long on horseback to walk handsomely. But neither of them held a candle to the old Lord Druid at the head of the procession — not for dignity or grace or majesty or any other attribute.

  “Good! We are the last!” Caswallon whispered, and he kept the whole company waiting a good ten minutes longer while he and Tros washed themselves in a room to the left of the door.

  There were four kings standing in a row before the hearth in the great inner hall, and on the far side of the round table and two long ones was a crowd of their retainers, counselors, gentlemen-at-arms, bards, minstrels — crushing toes and shoving one another for the front rank.

  The round table was on a dais that occupied about a quarter of the floor space at the farther end. From the dais to the door the two long tables were set parallel, spread with linen cloth and silver and pewter dishes. But the round table was spread with a finer cloth, bearing designs dyed in three colors. Its plates were of gold, the cups of colored glass, gold-edged.

  The huge hall was entirely lined with dark oak, and there was a high gallery around three sides, over which whispering druids leaned. They burst into welcoming song as Caswallon entered, and the four kings by the hearth stiffened themselves to show their breeding in four different ways — surly, supercilious, suspicious, condescending.

  However, Caswallon out-kinged them. He stood, his followers in a formidable crowd behind, and let the old High Druid introduce him, as if he had never before seen one of those kings, was rather curious to know them and quite willing to be kissed on both cheeks, provided, by standing on tiptoe, they could reach that far.

  “The Lord Caswallon! The Lord Tros!” said an announcer by the door. It might have been one of Caswallon’s followers. Young Orwic was quite capable of that.

  “The Lord Caswallon! The Lord Tros!” the old Lord Druid repeated. And the four kings had to leave the hearth to come and kiss Caswallon, since he would not go to them.

  They were neither shabby men nor insignificant. They stood like kings and were more richly costumed than Caswallon. Gwenwynwyn, king of the Ordovici, he of the bottle nose, was dressed in cloth of gold with gold and amber ornaments. The others wore dyed woolen stuff and cloaks of imported Gaulish broadcloth trimmed with fur. They all wore gold chains and the royal golden girdle at their waists, but Caswallon and Tros, almost without an ornament between them, except Tros’s jeweled sword-hilt and the gold forehead band, out-braved them, nevertheless.

  There was that about Caswallon in his plain, dyed wool and beautifully made cloak of figured deerskin, edged with gold and blue, that no amount of ornament could offset. He looked open-countenanced and honest. His emotions were there for the world to see depicted on his face, and they were manly. When he laughed it meant he was amused. If he frowned he was angry. When he looked at the old Lord Druid he was half afraid and half affectionate. When four kings kissed him he was perfectly aware they did it with suppressed hate, and his face showed tolerant understanding of their jealousy.

  He pulled Tros forward by the arm and made them kiss Tros, too. There was no way for them to refuse without open violence to the laws of British courtesy. Then he had them greet and give the curt, perfunctory embrace to every one of his escort, taking each one by the arm in turn to name him.

  “So that is good. Tonight, at least, there will be no stabbing in the back,” he laughed. Before they realized what he was doing he had taken precedence and was following the old Lord Druid to the dais and the round table where five other druids already waited. So because he drew Tros with him arm-in-arm, he and Tros had seats on either hand of the old prelate with druids on either side of them again. The other kings had no choice but to take the remaining seats, some with their backs to the two long tables. Druid and king alternated all around the table, none challenging Tros’s right to royal honors, although Gwenwynwyn of the Ordovici scowled at him and took offense when he laid his jewel-hilted sword beneath his chair.

  “You — you should have left that outside,” he objected.

  “Not with you near!” Tros retorted. They two were foes by instinct, without given cause or reason, which is the deadliest kind of enmity, the easiest to fan into a blaze, the least responsive to the efforts of any peace-maker.

  When the followers of all five kings had elbowed and quarreled enough and had all found places at last at the two long tables, with monk-robed druids behind
them to act the hospitable part of servingmen, there was a note struck on a golden gong, which set the key for a hymn to Mother Nature, of which every man in Britain knew the words from end to end. The old Lord Druid led the singing, but grew silent after the first few measures. The choir in the gallery wove harmonies under the carved ceiling beams. The gentlemen-at-arms and serving druids thundered the refrain. Then silence, and a blessing from the old Lord Druid in a voice that sounded like the rolling of the wheels of golden destiny.

  Druids lit the sconces then, as if that were ritual. There was a creaking of the benches as men took their seats, and silence, broken only by such noises as a man must make if he chews meat with an open mouth and breathes through his nose because his mouth is full; that, the clatter of plates and the opening and closing of two doors, through which the druids brought endless quantities of things to eat. All hungry. All on their best behavior.

  At the round table the silence was almost agonizing, each royal guest staring at Caswallon and Tros between mouthfuls, doing his best to stare them out of countenance and getting better than he gave, until the Lord Druid spoke at last and loosed their tongues. There was none, unless possibly Tros — he lacked the Celtic sense of reverence — who would have dared to speak until the prelate had spoken first.

  The old man merely asked Caswallon how the roads were on the way to Lunden. But, that being Britain, the dam was down then and there began at once a crossfire conversation about horses, hunting, fishing, scarcity of wild geese and the quality of last year’s oat crop. Babbling noise from the lower room told that the gentlemen-at-arms were also talking horse. Minute after minute the whole atmosphere grew friendlier.

  Caswallon told a story about a favorite mare of his that bore two foals, both skew-bald, and how the three together drew his chariot until the Romans came and they were drowned in the surf “all three fighting with their teeth against Caesar’s legions.”

  Gwanar, king of the Iceni, capped that with a story of a stallion that carried a fat man from sea to sea, the breadth of Britain, without rest or food. Not to be out-boasted by those two, Gwenwynwyn of the Ordovici told of a giant among his people who could lift a grown horse on his shoulders and carry the struggling beast from one town to the next.

  Thereafter Tros told of sights he had seen by land and sea, and that was entertainment to which even the Lord Druid listened eagerly. He spoke of the Pharos lighthouse, visible on a dark night from seventy miles away at sea, whose giant lenses were of glass, made in Arabia, whose flame was from a rare oil found in the earth beyond the eastern Euxine shore, whose marble tower contained an engine worked by steam that hoisted the fuel and supplies out of boats in the sea below.

  Then he told of the fane of Diana at Ephesus “all overlaid with silver,” and of the temple at Jerusalem “of cedar and gold and stones ten cubits long,” where, on feast days, it took from dawn to dark to slay the sacrifice, so many hecatombs of beasts were brought. And he spoke of King Ptolemy’s palace on the Lochias at Alexandria “all hung with silk from somewhere east of the rising sun.” He spoke of the wealth of Egypt, of the corn-ships that sailed in fleets bearing grain by the million bushels.

  And presently the Gaulish wine began to flow, the druids only sipping theirs, but the five kings drinking deep. The gentlemen-at-arms were served with mead, and not too much of it. Drunk or sober they would not dare to offend the druids, but with too much mead in him, a man might forget wherein offense consists. Tros added water to his wine and noticed that the old High Druid did the same.

  In course of time, when the edge of a winter’s appetite was dulled, the minstrels tuned their harps, each king’s musician striving to excel with songs about ancient heroes. But as soon as each song was finished the druid’s choir in the gallery sang sacred harmonies that took the fight out of the gentlemen-at-arms, restoring them to more or less subdued exhilaration.

  Then, when enough wine had been drunk at the round table, the old Lord Druid made a signal and an attendant in the gallery struck the golden gong. He arose in the silence that followed, blessed them with murmuring lips and ancient ritual of movement, then stood for a moment with eyes gazing, as it were, through walls into another world. White beard falling to his waist, white hair on his upright shoulders, he looked like Time himself.

  “My sons,” he began at last, “O Lord Caswallon of the Trinobantes, Lord Tros of Samothrace, Lord Gwanar of the Iceni, Lord Madoc of the Coranians, Lord Caradoc of the Silures, Lord Gwenwynwyn of the Ordovici, noblemen of the escorts, priests of the Ancient Mystery, we welcome you in the name of Fire, Air, Earth and Water.”

  His voice was a singer’s, trained to stir the audience and play on their aroused emotion as plucked harp-strings play on ears awakened by the drum.

  “This life,” he said after a moment’s pause, “this little life we live, that flickers, burns into a man and flickers out again, is but one grain of sand upon a seashore, one drop in all the ocean of Eternity, one link amid the endless chains of lives we live, living and dying, living and dying, as the tides flow, as the day succeeds the night and seasons follow seasons in the cycles of the law. O ye, who measure life by hours and years, I bid you heed Eternity.”

  Thereafter, following a long, dramatic pause, he spoke of manhood and its debt to Mother Nature; he praised bravery and courtesy and all the qualities of mind and body that the Britons held in high esteem, until their eyes burned at the thought of heroes who had died defending homes against the raider, and a stir, like the breath of a breeze among trees, went through the audience.

  Then, subtly, as he wove his words into a skein of golden music, thrilling them with pride in their high birth, and their descent from gods who walked on earth with men, he began to sound a warning note, at first a mere suggestion, then a hint.

  “Last night I saw a falling star. Take heed lest ye fall.”

  That note set the key to his conclusion. He denounced all strife, but first and foremost all internal strife. He told them that the fate of Gaul, downtrodden under Caesar’s heel, was due to the Gauls’ unrighteousness, their quarreling among themselves, their deafness to druidic warnings and their listening to unwise agitators who had counseled them to take the sword instead of communing with the gods “who know men’s destiny and are nearer than a man’s breath, closer to him than his thinking.”

  He wetted his lips at a cup of amethyst and dried them on a linen towel passed to him by an attendant, then continued:

  “Take not too much upon yourselves, nor trust too little in the gods who upreared Britain from the sea. The Gauls have fallen. They have made their druids suffer for their sins. Take heed lest ye do likewise.”

  Then he blessed them sonorously, kings and all their followers standing with heads bowed. The druids in the gallery chanted a response; and then he led the way in silence, followed by five kings, by Tros and by the five druids who had sat at table with them, through a door on the right of the dais into another room to hold the conference.

  CHAPTER 44. Caswallon’s Ultimatum

  As the wind bloweth, I go now, and ye know not whither. With a warm breath I have blown upon your seedlings. I have blessed you as the warm rain. Aye, and from the northeast, icy and stern was the blast of my indignation against the weeds of treachery — against the waste of your unclean furrows and the falsehood of the broken barns, wherein the mice ate the seed I gave without stint. Now look ye to the harvest, for I go, and neither tears nor bell nor burning sacrifice shall summon me again to teach anew what I have taught so often that your ears are weary and ye are fat from hearing but not doing.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  IT WAS a large room, hung with embroidered woolen draperies, containing a fireplace nearly as large as the one in the hall they had left. Twelve high-backed chairs, gilded and carved, like thrones, were set in a wide semicircle facing the hearth. A druid signified to each guest which his chair should be, and then the Lord Druid sat on the one in the midst that was raised on a stand
six inches higher than the others.

  Tros, with a druid beyond him, had a chair near the hearth. Caswallon faced him in the end chair on the right. Kings and druids alternated, with Gwenwynwyn of the Ordovici, dark-faced, bottle-nosed and sly, on the old Lord Druid’s right.

  For a while they sat and warmed themselves in silence, all apparent good- will and well-fed contentment, except that Gwenwynwyn’s smile foreboded trouble, and the shorter, dark-haired king of the Silures, Caradoc, watched him nervously, as if he were pledged to a certain course and dreaded it.

  At last the old Lord Druid broke the silence, elbow on the chair-arm, cheek on hand, his voice as gentle as if he spoke to respectful children:

  “My sons, I will speak of something that is simple, yet too easily forgotten. There were Britons in Britain before your forebears came. Ye call yourselves Britons without knowing why or what the word means. Some of your forebears came here from the eastward, crossing the sea in big flat-bottomed boats, because they were driven forth by men who had no liking for their strange gods. Here they found a swarthier, gentler people. Some they conquered, and with some they made treaties, living in armed suspicion side by side with them.

  “Now this is a mystery. Ye all say ye are Britons, except the Lord Tros, whose father was a Greek, and yet whose mother was as much a Briton as the rest of you.”