by Talbot Mundy
“Lord Druid, I have done with threats. I speak of what is. Let the outcome rest with thee. Rule thou my brother kings. Tomorrow I will answer Marius, the Roman, and he shall say to Caesar one of two things. Either he shall say, ‘Come, Caswallon welcomes you!’ or he shall say ‘Caswallon and his brother kings have raised ten thousand men and will resist invasion!’ That is my last word. I speak with reverence.”
He sat down. Tros nodded. But a great sigh came from the white-haired Taliesan. Then a stillness fell, in which the cracking of the burning logs was like the snapping of loud whips. Red firelight fell on a dozen spell-bound faces, bearded and unbearded alternating. The old Lord Druid’s white hands gripped the throne-arms. It was his turn next to speak. He and none other could control those kings. In his hands lay the issue, peace or war.
They waited, hardly breathing. The firelight flickered. A big log cracked, and fell among the crimson coals, tossing a burst of sparks.
“He sleeps,” said a druid, leaning forward, holding up a finger. But the old Lord Druid stirred. Three times his lips moved, but no sound came. Three times he grew rigid and relaxed, all eyes observing. Then his head fell forward on his breast and both hands slipped on to his lap.
“He is weary. He sleeps,” said the druid again, but five kings stared with frozen faces and none else said a word.
Tros moved from his place on tiptoe, passing through the shadows behind the chairs, and leaned over the throne-back from behind. None breathed. There was no sound other than the cracking sparks. Then Tros’s awed voice broke hoarsely on the stillness:
“He is dead!”
CHAPTER 45. Eough, the Sorcerer
So ye accuse me? Ye say I stand between Eternity and treason. A sorcerer lives, ye say, and the responsibility is mine. Mine be it. When was it that ye gave comfort to the people who are not as ye are? But ye bid me to slay their comforter. Him ye call a sorcerer, and me ye call a druid. They, though; call him their prophet, and of me they speak fearfully, in doubt and mistrust of the grandeur in which ye clothe my office. In that their sorcerer brought them comfort that ye would not, and I could not give them, he is greater than I and more noble than you. Ye who bid me to slay him because he betrays the Ancient Wisdom, have ye taught them any wisdom? When did Wisdom ever rob the wretched of their hope and faith, in order that intolerance might smell more rotten in the nostrils of Eternal Mercy?
— from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan
A DRUID, face whiter than his robe, took Tros’s sleeve, drew him into shadow behind the semicircle of chairs and faced him, his hand on Tros’s forearm trembling.
“Dead!” he said. “Do you know what that means?”
“It means war,” Tros answered in a growling undertone. “Gone! The last of the Great Druids! None to replace Taliesan! Go you” — he took Tros feverishly by the shoulder— “go you to the dining-hall. Keep silence. See that the kings’ followers suspect nothing until we decide what shall be told, and when and how.”
“Another could do that better than I,” Tros objected. “The Lord Caswallon—”
The druid gestured with his head toward the firelight where five kings knelt. That, plainly, was a family affair. Decency forbade intrusion. Tros tiptoed to his chair, picked up his sword, buckled it with a shake of the hips and shoulders. Then, not glancing once behind him, he tiptoed to the door, unlocked it and passed out into darkness.
There was a passage twenty feet long, with a door at the farther end. He had time and opportunity to gather all his wits.
So when he emerged on to the dais in the dining-hall he had managed to assume that carriage of the loins and shoulders of a man who has accomplished, who awaits but the announcement of success. It was a true stage entrance that he made, into the fire and sconce-light. Babbling of tongues ceased. All eyes turned toward him. A minstrel, strumming wandering airs, muted a chord with the flat of his hand.
“Noblemen,” said Tros, and his voice was confident, “I beg leave to enjoy your company. The chief druids and your kings confer about an offer I have made them.”
His words fell flat. He knew why. He had come forth from the conference unattended, which was such an unheard-of thing in that land of ceremonious hospitality that it conveyed an impression of something being wrong. Before any one could question him, he had forestalled the question, head to one side, grinning:
“Your kings would let none leave the room with me, lest I persuade him while their backs are turned! Shall I try my eloquence meanwhile on your good company? Or have you better entertainment?”
They had been growing rather bored with their own expedients for keeping out of mischief. The druids appeared to have received strict orders to keep them sober, so the mead, good though it was, came slowly up the cellar stairs in parsimonious installments.
Some of them were playing games with knucklebones across the table. Others had been half asleep when Tros came in. All roared to him for a story. Druids, calm-eyed and incurious, as much at a loss as priests in general are to entertain men who would rather be elsewhere or else drinking themselves quarrelsome, added their voice to the chorus. Tros spread his legs, and began without more ado:
“I wager you have never heard of Troy.”
And he began to tell them that tale, alchemy of will recoining Greek hexameters into the prose of Gaul while he stood there and kept tragedy at bay. He concentrated all his intellect, his whole genius. And he began by picturing the fair-haired Helen for them as a British woman, whom each man present might have known and loved.
No question that he held them. From the moment that he spoke of Helen, blue-eyed, with the spun-gold tresses and the smile like rosy morning on a white-capped sea, he had them by the heart-strings and imaginations. All he needed then was music, and a minstrel came unasked to sit on the floor of the dais, eyes fixed on Tros’s lips, and pluck suggestive harp-strings that began to change the prose into a chant until Tros was singing, almost before he was aware of it.
But he had not sung further than the rape of Helen — she had not reached Troy — when a horn blown down the night wind, outside the building and beyond the gate, brought every man in the room upstanding. There came a clamor on the great gate bell. Men’s voices raised in anger, fear, haste, panic or some such emotion. The rattle of bronze and squeak of an opening gate. Then cantering horse hoofs and a thunder on the hospice door.
None spoke. Men looked to their arms that stood in rows against the long wall opposite the hearth where a druid stood on guard, his hand raised. None beneath the rank of king might wear his sword in that place, and none dared disobey the druid. Four druids hurried to the door; the rest dispersed themselves about the room, ready to check too headlong curiosity.
The thundering ceased, and on a blast of wintry air that sent the smoke billowing from the hearth, five Britons burst into the room at the heels of a man who was neither Briton nor yet Northman, but half of both. They shouted for the Lord Caswallon, but he cried, “Tros! The Lord Tros!” with a parched throat, and there was frozen slobber on his beard. He staggered, lurched into the room, blinded by the firelight. Tros leaped from the dais and in six strides had him by the shoulders.
“Now then, Skell, what is it?”
Skell could not speak. Tros shook him, but the words cracked in his throat. It was the five who followed Skell, who broke the news:
“The Lady Fflur — raped — gone, the Romans have her!”
Turmoil! Such a roar as goes up when the battle ranks engage. Tros seized a half-filled mug of mead and thrust the rim of it between Skell’s teeth, bending his head back by the hair, holding his shoulders in the hollow of his left arm. Skell swallowed half-a-dozen gulps, spat, broke his own news:
“Helma! The Lady Helma! Gone! The Romans have her!” Suddenly his own fear for himself came uppermost. “Lord Tros, not my doing! No, no! Not I! Skell was faithful!”
He vomited the mead on to the floor. Tros gave him more of it.
“Now speak,” he said, “for this
time I believe you.”
There was too much stark fear in the eyes of Skell for anything but naked tragedy to lie behind it. Never a man in that emotion thought of coining lies. Truth he might not tell, but it would be the truth as he conceived it.
“Speak!” Tros said again, and shook him, but Skell was losing consciousness. His eyes were glazing with the film that comes of uttermost exhaustion. Hands pawed feebly at the air, knees doubled under him, and what few words he murmured died in the babel of hoarse British shouting before they reached Tros’s ear.
And then Caswallon appeared, pale as a ghost from a tomb, the woad-blue patterns on his neck and forearms standing out like fretwork, back to the door to keep the other kings from bursting through, his eyes ablaze with horror.
“Hold!” he thundered in his line o’ battle voice that crashed among the ceiling beams.
And there was silence for the space of ten breaths. Then the hoarse voice of one of the five messengers:
“The Lady Fflur, gone, seized on her way to Merrow — Romans!”
There was thumping on the door behind Caswallon, but his hand was on the bronze latch and there were no four kings in Britain who could break his finger hold.
“Tros!” he said.
“Aye,” Tros answered, “they have Helma too.”
The blood crept back into Caswallon’s face until the veins of his neck swelled and his cheeks flushed.
“Britons!” he said. “The great Taliesan is dead. He died with the word Romans on his lips!”
He let the latch go, striding forward to the dais edge, and four kings came in a hurry through the door behind him, each as phantom-pale as he had been. They were in time to listen, that was all. Caswallon had the ears of that assembly.
“Sons of Britain!” he began. “Will you endure that Romans send ambassadors to me to blandish us with words and seize my wife, a king’s wife, while my back is turned in conference with holy druids?”
There began a clatter of swords and swordbelts as the druid by the wall gave every applicant his weapon. Small risk of a quarrel now between the five kings’ followers, and a chance, a hope at any rate, that they would cut their visit short on receipt of that emphatic hint. The laws of hospitality were adamant. Not even druids could have asked them to depart.
“Britons!” Caswallon thundered. “What would you think of a king who should submit to this indignity! This outrage! Rot me the king who would endure the hundredth part of it! I lead against the Romans! Who comes?”
They roared and, breaking the druidic rule, drew swords, stamping their right feet until the floor shook and the ceiling beams were thunderous with tumult.
“Britons!” yelled Caswallon. “The Lord Taliesan, the son of Dragons, brother of the gods, is dead!”
Silence again, save only the murmur of awe-struck druids passing somebody’s commands in undertones. Caswallon dropped his voice to a sepulchral note.
“These four, my brother kings, will bear me witness that the great Lord Druid died in conference, his whole attention strained to keeping peace with Rome! The gods have summoned him. He died, the word unspoken. There is none now to advise us how the gods would rede this riddle. There never was in our day one but that grand Lord Druid, whom we loved, who could have told us how to tolerate this outrage without losing manhood. Are we men?”
He paused.
“I will speak no word of vengeance in this holy place, this house where my father lived, where I was born, that I gave to the great Lord Druid. But I speak of manhood, that he praised this night to all of you. The word he left unspoken, speak ye! The riddle that he died before he answered, answer ye! Is it peace or war with Rome?”
They drew their swords again. Eyes met. There was a long breath and a thunderous answer:
“War!”
“War be it!” said Caswallon, turning to the four kings who had had no say at all in that decision. He offered to embrace them, and the first two kissed him with good grace. Gwenwynwyn of the Ordovici, third in line, however, stepped back and his silky voice sweetened the silence.
“A minute. Whose wife is missing? My wife keeps her household modestly where I left her in Glamorgan.”
Caswallon checked him with a gesture that looked like a blow controlled in time.
“No arguments!” he said. “Gwenwynwyn, lord of the Ordovici, you and your followers may go home!”
“Indeed, and we do!” Gwenwynwyn answered. “My brother kings bear witness that the great Lord Druid spoke of peace. He died, having spoken of nothing else than peace. He did not speak of hunting other men’s stray wives.”
Gwanar, king of the Iceni, stepped between the two and threw an arm around Caswallon’s shoulder.
“The Lady Fflur is worth a thousand men and fifteen hundred horses!” he said boldly. “So they shall go with you to Gaul if need be.”
“That is a new way to sell horses,” Gwenwynwyn said in an aside that could be heard throughout the room.
“Horses?” Tros exploded. He had left Skell in the hands of the druids who knelt on the floor beside him, administering some kind of drug. Caswallon’s messengers were talking to excited groups.
“Who has ships? My man Skell says the Lady Fflur, my wife and seven slave- women, along with eight or ten of their escort, were seized on their way to Merrow by a party of Romans dressed like Gauls. Marius and Galba—”
“Who went in pursuit?” Caswallon interrupted.
“Skell says half the countryside.”
Caswallon barked for his own five messengers. They left the groups and came to stand in line before him.
“Sieves!” he said, scowling “Tosspots! Bottomless buckets of gossip!”
He forgot that he had given them no opportunity to tell their tale to him direct. Now they confirmed what Tros said, adding:
“Pursuit started late. One of the slave-women gave the Romans the slip and made her way to a farmhouse. A man put her on horseback, and they killed both horses under them. He rode to Lunden, she to the shipyard. Sigurdsen found a horse for Skell and sent him hotfoot, because of all in the shipyard only Skell knew the way to Verulam. We overhauled Skell not a mile from here.”
“One more such service, and I set Skell free!” Tros muttered.
“Lord Caswallon, come and look at the horses if you think we wasted time,” urged one of the messengers.
“Horses? Ships!” Tros exploded again. “That honest Marius had this planned from the beginning! I will wager all my shipyard to a broken wheel that the Romans had a fast ship waiting in the port of Hythe. The Northmen burned Hythe. There would be no Britons there. They can’t rebuild the place before spring.”
“No,” said a messenger. “The slave-girl told us they were headed eastward, toward Thanet, maybe.”
“Quick, then!” Tros was thinking instantly in terms of wind and tides. “To the south coast with a hundred men! Take ships and head them off. Get between them and Gaul!”
“No ships,” Caswallon answered with a gloomy shoulder shrug.
“All hauled out for the winter, cordage laid away. My Lunden men may overtake them before they reach Thanet,” he added, trying to speak hopefully.
“Not they!” Tros answered. “The Romans are good on land; they lay all plans carefully. It is only at sea they are duffers. It might take them a week to reach Gaul from Thanet unless the wind backs to the northeast.”
“Which it will,” Caswallon said.
“Which it will,” said Gwanar, king of the Iceni.
Tros knew they spoke the truth. The marvel was that a Roman ship should have reached Thanet in winter time in the teeth of the prevailing northeast gales. Yet there could be no other possible solution of the riddle. Neither Marius nor Galba would have taken flight unless a ship were waiting to carry them back to Gaul. It would have been absolute madness to carry off Fflur and Helma unless they could convey them out of reach. Fflur’s and Helma’s value would be as hostages in Caesar’s camp.
“We waste time,” Caswallon
said. “Who comes? Gwanar” — he turned and looked into the eyes of him of the Iceni— “will you send me a thousand men?”
Gwanar nodded.
“You must feed them,” he answered.
Tros, hands behind him, grinding his teeth savagely, strode up and down the dais. Ship not yet half-built, young wife in Caesar’s hands, friendship to Caswallon pledged, the bireme he had won from Caesar three parts broken up, all useless, and no British ships available or even seaworthy, supposing they could be fitted out within a week or a month or three months. A fine predicament.
“Fool that I was to take a woman to myself!” he muttered, knowing, nonetheless, that he loved Helma and would bring her back from Gaul or perish trying. He recalled his father’s words:
“A woman is experience, a man’s friend insofar that she provides experience. Nevertheless, my son, experience is warfare between soul and circumstance. The less a man is tangled up with circumstance, the more he is his own master and free to enlarge horizons.”
Tros knew he was not his own master that hour and it fretted him more than did the thought of being tricked by Caesar’s jackals, Marius and Galba. He felt like a man in chains. Had only Fflur been carried off, he could have abandoned his own plans cheerfully and have thrown his whole strength and resources into an effort to help Caswallon. That would have been sacrifice for friendship’s sake, a satisfying, splendid course, whatever came of it. But now he must abandon all plans and unite his efforts to Caswallon’s for his own sake, for his own pride.
The love he had begun to feel for Helma he recognized as something he might not repudiate and might not subordinate to other considerations. So long as she was faithful to himself, he had to set her first in his appalling host of obligations.
Suddenly he turned and took Caswallon by the shoulder. “Friend o’ mine,” he said, “will you guard my back if I pluck these chestnuts from the fire for both of us? Lud rot these other kings! They stink of jealousy! Gather your thousand men, ten thousand, any number. But guard my shipyard while I out-speed Caesar! Should I fail, you will have the men to follow up with; though the gods alone know how you will ever carry them to Gaul! Speed is the first consideration, speed the second, speed the last! Will you trust me?”