by Talbot Mundy
“As for that, I have ever trusted you. Let us go. We will talk on the way,” Caswallon answered.
But that was Britain. They could not take Roman leave as Marius had done. There were farewells, ceremonious and long-drawn blessings from the druids, and a midnight invocation to the gods who had summoned the great Taliesan at last to impoverish men’s counsels and enrich their own.
“Him whom we revered, treat ye, O Powers of the light that burns in darkness, with all honor and all gentleness. As he poured wisdom on us, pour ye your love on him.”
Then away under the frosty stars, Caswallon driving faster than his gentlemen-at-arms could ride and Tros beside him huddled against the wind that nipped face, feet and hands, Caswallon tossing down to Tros disjointed scraps of conversation.
“None to replace Fflur, and Caesar knows it!”
Then presently:
“None to replace Taliesan. The gods know that!”
Silence, and after a while:
“Taliesan could have solved it. Hi-yeh! Hup! Lud love ’em, but the druids keep fat horses! We’d have done better with my own tired team.”
Silence again, the trees like phantoms flitting by, steel stars overhead, no clouds, but a wind that cut like a whiplash. Then:
“I would have listened to Taliesan. If he had answered one word. But he didn’t, and now Caesar’s answer comes. War! So be it.”
He made harsh noises with his teeth that sent the horses headlong, faster than ever. The din of the escort galloping behind grew more remote. Tros beat his fingers on the wooden rail that topped the basketwork. Presently Caswallon again:
“These horses are like snails! And Fflur in the hands of Marius! Will he dare insult her? Will he dare—”
Noises in his teeth; then whip and a furious charge at a watercourse where the cat’s ice crackled at the stream’s edge and the water raced among the singing stones. A bump that made Tros’s spine tingle and his teeth snap, a shout, ice-cold spray that froze on the face and on the chariot side, a swift succession of swaying jerks, and they were up the far bank, Caswallon easing the team to a canter to let them recover wind. Then:
“No chance of learning anything this side of Lunden unless they sent a messenger to meet us. Left or right, nobody’d know anything.”
“Yes,” said Tros.
“Who?”
“Eough.”
“The sorcerer? Lud save us, Tros! From Taliesan’s death chamber to the charcoal-burner’s wizard? What next?”
“Any lee in a gale!” Tros answered. “Eough can help us. I sent him a full firkin of new cod’s oil less than three days gone. Turn out when you come to the track that leads to Eough’s place.”
“We passed it long ago.”
“No lies to me, Caswallon! You and I are too good friends, and you too much the man for that game! Turn out on the road to Eough’s. I’ll swallow the blame for sorcery, which frets me not at all. Good Taliesan is gone. We must make the best of evil Eough.”
“A mad night! Lud’s blood, a mad night!” Caswallon muttered. But when they reached the mound-encircled roadhouse where the teams were changed he sent all of his escort except Orwic ahead of him along the road to Lunden, giving no excuse except that they should gather news and have it ready for him against his coming. Tros pulled Skell down from behind a Briton’s saddle and ordered him into the chariot.
“Skell knows more than he has told,” he muttered, stamping his feet to warm them.
“Lud’s liver! What would my men say if they knew I rode to Eough’s on such a night!” Caswallon remarked, examining the fresh team, tightening a bridle. “Orwic, druid’s curses on you if you tell what you shall see tonight!”
But Orwic laughed. His youngsters’ generation lacked a good deal of its elders’ piety.
“I am all for seeing sights,” he answered, mounting a ramping stallion that swerved away from him. But he was in the saddle quicker than the squealing brute could move. “Lead on. This is cold work, waiting.”
For about three-quarters of an hour they followed in the escort’s track, then suddenly Caswallon swung the team around a clump of oaks and drove full gallop into the gloom of a sighing forest. No stars now. There was hardly a glimpse of sky between the swaying treetops. Only a gloom that even Tros’s eyes hardly penetrated — black, solid night on either hand, that breathed of dry leaves. Ahead, a winding trail that took the whole of Caswallon’s woodcraft and all his horsemanship to follow. He drove headlong, leaning forward, crying to the horses.
Once when he pulled up sharp at a fallen tree before he plied the whip and jumped it, Orwic, thundering behind, reined in the red stallion with forefeet over Tros’s head. Once they plunged into an icy marsh, and Orwic’s stallion had to be hitched to help the struggling team toward a bed of rushes, whence they staggered back to firm ground. And once both horses fell in a frantic heap on the ice at the edge of a watercourse. The twisted harness had to be untangled in the dark, both horses kicking blindly and Caswallon laughing nervously as he hove them to their feet by main force.
“Not so bad,” he commented. “I had expected worse than this!” Then on again, full pelt beside the brook where pollard willows looked like goblins in the wan gloom and the rabbit holes, between the patches of refrozen snow, were a maze of unseen danger underfoot.
Both chariot horses limped when Caswallon reined at last before a thatched mud hovel and Orwic, leaning from the saddle, thundered with his spear butt on the oaken door. Caswallon got down, feeling the horses’ forelegs, and there was a long wait, no sound from within the hut, until Orwic wheeled his stallion away and, retreating twenty or thirty yards made ready to charge and smash the door to splinters. It was then that a voice from an oak tree called to them.
“What damage have I done you? Why break my house?”
It was a voice as clear and ringing as a young man’s, with a note of anger in it and no reverence. Orwic rode under the tree and poked among the branches with his spear-point.
“Come down, and tell us where to find Eough!” he shouted.
“I can tell you that without coming down, and you can’t reach me with the spear!” the voice retorted. “Caswallon, the king, Tros the ship-builder, and Orwic, the coxcomb! Come from seeing the Great Druid die! Blind as bats in daylight, all of you! I know! I watched the heavens from a treetop.”
“Come down!” commanded Orwic.
“Get an ax. Cut down the tree!” Caswallon ordered, blanketing the horses. That would have been real generalship, except for one or two facts. The tree, for instance, was eight or nine feet thick, and there was no ax.
“Come down, Eough, or I will send Skell up after you!” said Tros.
“I am not afraid of Skell, who is afraid of me!” the voice retorted.
“Oh, very well,” said Tros, and began to pull his cloak off. “I’ll come!”
“I can jump like a squirrel from tree to tree. What do you want? Have you brought some fish oil? Charcoal for fish, dung for oil, nothing for nothing! Caswallon is a king. People who trust kings deserve to be tricked!”
“My promise.”
“Promise of Tros the ship-builder? Fish-Oil Tros. Smoked-Herring Tros. Cod’s-Liver Tros. Horse-Dung Tros. Very well, I’m coming.”
He came with so little noise and on the far side of the tree that he was on the ground before they were aware of it, a dwarf in a jelly-bag cap and leather jerkin, with a beard to his middle and long hair over his shoulders; in all respects a giant in miniature — heavy, strong, athletically shaped, walking toward them as if he owned the forest. The horses shied, but not at him. When he whistled, a wolf came and fawned against his legs.
He made no remark, but went to the back of the hut and entered through a window. Presently, from within, he opened the door and stood there with a newly lighted fire blazing on the hearth behind him. Smoke filled the room, not finding its way out yet through the square hole in the thatch. With smoke and fire behind him, he looked like a gnome from the infernal regions
. Caswallon made motions with his right hand and muttered invocations to the Lords of Light.
“Kings who enter here must bow their heads!” said Eough. He laughed, and slapped the arch of the low door. “High enough for me! You big proud fellows stoop, stoop all of ye! Skell, the squealer, Skell, the slave, Skell, the pirate’s bastard! Leave Skell to watch the horses. Lame horses, I must mend their legs. Come on in. What are you waiting for? Caswallon, Caswallon, the king is afraid! So would I be afraid if I hadn’t the given word of Fish-Oil Tros. Come in.”
He turned his back on them, and they entered one by one into a dingy cabin, marvelously clean but heaped with odds and ends. Bags, hanging from the roof-beams, bulged with mysterious contents and had to be dodged, although Eough’s head missed them comfortably. He set three stools before the fire, signed to his visitors to sit down and himself stood with his back to the wall in the one place where the smoke did not curl in stinging clouds.
He was apple-cheeked, and the cheeks were bright red, as red as his cap, from exercise in the frosty night. Crowsfeet at the corners of his eyes betrayed age, but he looked otherwise not older than Caswallon, until he showed his hands, that were an old man’s, knotted with protruding knuckle-bones. His bare legs, strong as oak boughs and as brown as oak tan, had not a hair on them.
“Now,” he said, “Taliesan is dead, and so you come to me. I could have told you Taliesan would die. His time had come. I was up in the treetop watching the conjunction of the stars. Kings and fools don’t understand such simple mysteries.”
“What else did the stars tell you?” Tros asked, pointing at him with his long, sheathed sword.
“Put that thing down!” He whistled the wolf and it came liplifted, snarling. “You didn’t come to ask me about stars or about Taliesan, who was a good friend of mine, although you, you fools, call me a sorcerer. If it hadn’t been for Taliesan your pack of hunting, drinking, swaggering madmen would have tried to kill me long ago, but Taliesan knew the charcoal-burners must have a wise man to guide them. Who will protect me now Taliesan has gone? You?” he asked, pointing a crooked finger at Caswallon.
“Come to the point!” said Orwic, grinning, touching the dwarf’s breast with the point of the long spear. “Tros thinks you can tell him something. Tell it!”
“You will protect me?”
“I have given you dried fish and fish oil, lots of it,” said Tros. “I want sulphur tonight.”
“You shall have it.”
“It was you who told me, a month ago, which way two of my runaway slaves had gone. Tell me now where the Lady Fflur is, and my wife Helma.”
“The Romans have them. Any fool could know that.”
“Where?”
But Eough shook his head. “I don’t trust kings.”
Tros looked at Caswallon, who screwed up his face in unconcealed disgust. He was an easy-going king, but had his prejudices.
“He should have been roasted long ago,” he remarked, and then spat in the fire.
“Nothing for nothing,” Tros answered. “Give him your protection.”
Caswallon laid his face between his hands, sighed and looked up again.
“I gave Marius protection,” he said gloomily. “We waste time. What can Eough say? Oh well, what does it matter? One rascal more or less, Lud’s mud! This is a mad night! Speak,” he said, frowning at the dwarf. “I protect you in coming and going, in house and holding, so you break no common law.”
“I witness!” Tros exclaimed.
“I witness!” echoed Orwic. Orwic grinned, he was enjoying it. The expression of Eough’s face hardly changed, although his eyes seemed to hint at laughter.
“Sorcery is against your common law, and you call me a sorcerer,” he answered. “If I tell you what I know, you will have me burned, so I will tell you what the charcoal-burners told me. That is not sorcery, is it? Are they sorcerers?”
“Speak!” Caswallon exploded irritably. “I protect you if you speak, not otherwise. Have you the spear ready, Orwic?”
Before Orwic could answer or move, the dwarf had sprung for the small, square window and had vanished through it.
“I don’t trust kings! I will tell Tros what I know. Let him come out here,” he called from outer darkness.
So Tros gathered the cloak around him and strode out into the night, stumbling over tree roots, feeling his way clumsily, his eyes bewildered by the darkness after firelight. The dwarf took him by the hand and pulled him in great haste, warning him when to duck the branches, until they reached a rock and a tangle of brambles that protruded through frozen snow.
Down under the rock they went into a cavern that reeked of fish, and there they sat on empty barrels when Eough had lighted and trimmed a lamp wick, Tros cursing the cold and the stench, while his eyes tried to pierce the shadows in search of the sulphur his heart desired.
“Now,” he said, when the dwarf climbed a barrel and faced him, “call it sorcery or call it charcoal-burners’ gossip, but tell me what you know about the Lady Fflur and my wife.”
“Why not call it truth?” the dwarf suggested. “Don’t you propose to believe me?”
“Truth then. Go ahead, but tell it.”
“Weeks, weeks, weeks, weeks, weeks — five weeks. Three Romans. Two- and-twenty men from Murchan, king of Gwasgwyn. A small ship at the south end of the Isle of Thanet. Gauls and Romans all dressed alike, Romans pretending to be Gauls. Can’t fool me, though. Can’t fool the charcoal-burners. Two-score Gauls and Romans waiting in the ship. Watch changed every hour or two. Five-and-twenty, getting very hungry, lurking on the downs by Merrow Pool, stealing sheep. Much trouble with the sheep-dogs. Frightening the shepherds off with sheets tied to a pole. Marius the Roman’s barber staying at the gatehouse by Lud’s Bridge; one Gaul brings him messages; he tells Marius when he shaves him in the morning. The king’s wife, your wife, eight slave-women, two other women, Marius, Galba, charioteers and ten-man escort — all off to the king’s farm near by Merrow. Simple enough. Ship waiting, not too far. Charioteers dead. Four escort dead. Others tied, taken along. All worth money over there in Gaul.”
“Has the ship gone?” Tros demanded.
“Wind’s good,” Eough suggested, and Tros swore savagely. The wind had backed to the northeast two or three hours ago. It would be blowing a three- reef gale by morning.
“Why didn’t you tell me all this before?” Tros asked him. “Why should I?” Eough retorted, and Tros nodded grimly.
There had been no reason why an outlawed man should run with information to a king who only tolerated him because the druids had suggested tolerance. There was no real reason why he himself should expect favors from the dwarf. Yet they had struck up friendship on a fish-oil bargain basis, and he had learned to value the dwarf’s judgment as well as his knowledge of alchemy and an almost superhuman skill in sifting news.
“You and I have been good friends,” he said, watching the dwarf’s eyes by the light of the flickering wick.
“Nothing for nothing!” the dwarf retorted, quoting him against himself.
He was reading Tros’s eyes quite as sharply as Tros could read his.
“Certainly,” said Tros, “but there are some things a man can’t pay for in one life.”
“Oh, you know that?” said the dwarf. “Where did you learn wisdom?”
“I am on my way to Gaul to recover my wife and the Lady Fflur from Caesar’s hands,” said Tros. “Will you come with me and bring about fifty charcoal-burners?”
“Oh!” the dwarf exploded. “Oh! Who ever heard the like of that!”
He rolled sidewise off the barrel in a paroxysm of almost inaudible laughter.
Suddenly he rested his chin on the barrel and peered into Tros’s eyes.
“Charcoal-burners! Me! What impudence! Who ever heard the like of it! Why yes, we’ll come!”
“I will pay you.”
“Na-na-nah! No bargains!” said the dwarf, pointing his crooked finger at Tros’s face. “You go for what you wa
nt. I go for what I want. You find the ship and the food. I find the charcoal-burners.”
Tros began to hesitate. The dwarf’s consent was too quick not to imply trickery. His unwillingness to stipulate for payment, too, was so unlike his usual method as to arouse suspicion that he had some method in mind of paying himself handsomely. But outside Caswallon and Orwic were filling the night with howls and shouts to Tros to hurry.
“Can I bring a hundred men and all their women?” the dwarf asked.
“Bring as many as I can crowd into the longship, not one more,” Tros answered. “Bring them to the shipyard now. No waiting. I won’t wait one tide for them. And bring sulphur, all you have.”
“Tros! Tros! Tro-o-os! Where are you, Tros!”
Tros found his way out of the cave, but the dwarf lingered. The wolf came and clicked jaws a yard behind Tros’s heels as he followed the sound of the voices. Caswallon and Orwic had wandered away from the cabin in search of him. They crashed among brambles and snow-covered roots, cursing Eough and sorcery and all that forest.
When Tros found them the three together found their way back to the chariot more by the sound of Skell’s voice than by eyesight. Eough — speaking in grunts to Skell — was on his knees in front of the horses, rubbing something on their legs that stank like rotten fish but, judging from the way they held their ears, appeared already to have eased them. It might have been sulphur and fish oil and something else, a smell Tros did not recognize.
“A mad night and a mad waste of time!” Caswallon snorted.
For a minute Tros did not answer. He was figuring in terms of ebb and flow.
“Two tides and we are on our way to Gaul, that is, if you dare!” he said at last.