Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “After such a night as this; I dare all hell!” Caswallon growled.

  CHAPTER 46. Eough Applies Alchemy

  Ye bring sacrifices and pray for a miracle to save you from the consequences of your greed and evil-doing. But ye call him an outlaw, a devil, a sorcerer, the enemy of Light, who taketh in humility what is and therewith doeth what ye lack the manhood to attempt.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  BEACONS, warning every man of fighting age to rally toward Lunden, blazed on hilltops, growing pale against the dawn as they neared the shipyard, where Caswallon set Tros down. He and Skell walked the last quarter-mile of the distance.

  “You are half a free man,” Tros remarked to him. “One more such service, and I will try to forget old treacheries. Nevertheless, you have not yet told the whole of it. I hate a man who goes half distances, brave one minute, afraid for his skin the next. You have until we reach the shipyard to discover to me whether you are my man, truly, or a mere scared, lower benchman, straining at the oar for better food and less whip. Mind you, I can smell a lie three leagues away!”

  Skell eyed him sidewise as Tros, pretending not to see, was perfectly aware.

  “Lord Tros,” he said awkwardly, his breath coming in startled puffs on the frosty air, “a slave who was born free must make the most of any chance to bargain for his freedom back again.”

  Tros spun on his heel and shoved him by the shoulders so that they faced each other.

  “You poor, miserable bastard, I will make no bargains!” he retorted. “Master and slave, druid and layman, king and subject, it is even so aboard ship. If a captain lets a crew drive bargains, then the crew is without a captain, slave without a master! Your duty is to me. My duty to use judgment. I will do mine. Do you yours or suffer for it!”

  Still Skell hesitated. Mightily he feared Tros. More than he had ever loved a human being, almost, that is, he felt affection for him. But he had too long trafficked in treachery, too highly valued his own volatile adroitness to surrender an advantage without stipulations.

  “You said half free?” he asked. “I served you well tonight. I nearly killed myself.”

  “Maybe better dead than half dead!” Tros retorted, laying a hand on his sword-hilt. “Mine to give, and mine to take away! You are no longer half free! Now speak. Say what you know.”

  Skell sighed and shrugged his shoulders. “There is not much satisfaction in serving a man who—”

  “There is satisfaction to me in being served well!” Tros interrupted, cutting him short. “There is none in being played with fast and loose! You have while I count ten.”

  Skell’s eyes betrayed that he did not know what would happen when the count of ten was finished. It was what he did not know that conquered him. Given a certainty, his mind would have started instantly devising schemes to take advantage of it. He had known Tros long enough to know he would not kill a man merely for disobedience, but he also knew he was a man of swift expedients.

  “I was afraid to tell you,” he stammered. “You have accused me before this of treachery. You might do it again. I asked Eough. He said to go ahead and tell you. So I made up my mind to bargain for my freedom.”

  Tros was silent, stern-lipped.

  “It was Galba” — Tros grinned savagely— “Galba in the shipyard, under the lee of the sawing shed, hinted there might be an incident, and opportunity thereafter for a man of tact to do himself some good. He said if a certain person should be missing, I would do well afterward to speak to you about it. He said I should tell you then that you can have the person back by coming to Gaul and making profitable terms with Caesar.”

  “Did he name the person who might disappear?” Tros demanded.

  “No.”

  “When did this conversation take place?”

  “In the afternoon two days before you left for Verulam. One day after it was known that you would go to Verulam.”

  “And you, you dog! You never thought of warning me?”

  They were not far from the shipyard. Tros drew a silver whistle from his breast and blew three peculiar, sharp blasts on it. There was instant noise and movement. The gate slammed. Conops came running, with two Northmen behind him, all three breathless, slipping and stumbling through the shallow snowdrifts.

  “Put Skell in irons!” said Tros. “Fetter him hand and leg. Short rations. Let him have no speech with any one.”

  They stared, for the news had gone through the shipyard that Skell was lucky to have been chosen midnight messenger. However, they seized him, asked no questions, hurried him away. Tros strode to the gate alone and stood there until Sigurdsen came, still pulling on his clothes.

  “Sigurdsen, launch the longship! Don’t tell me she’s frozen on the mud, I know it! Work her loose! Boil water, soften the mud with hot fish oil, anything. Have her ready for sea tonight! Steady now! Mark this — if you as much as whisper that it can’t be done I’ll find me a new lieutenant! Put stores aboard for a hundred men for one week. Set fifty Britons at once to spreading pitch on her from stem to stern.

  “Fill one of the water butts with charcoal. Put aboard twice as much rope as you think we’ll need. Take one of the bronze anchors from the new ship and secure it close to the mast where we can use the halyards to get it overboard. Bows and arrows, swords for forty men, shields, axes. Leave the rest to me. Report to me when the ship’s afloat.”

  Tros went in search of the slave-girl who had brought the news. She had heard his whistle and was already cooking breakfast for him, weeping beside the hearth, tears dripping in the sizzling bacon.

  “You are free!” Tros informed her by way of greeting. “I will give you the document. Now, now! No slavering! Get up! Put the food on the table and talk while I eat. Stop crying or I won’t hire you.”

  The night’s ride had sharpened his appetite. He ate enormously, listening with grunted comments and curt questions to the woman’s half hysterical account.

  “By the River Wey we waited while they watered the horses. The Lord Galba was amusing the company on the riverbank, singing a song about his own country. But the Lord Marius sat horseback on a high mound, and I saw him take his helmet off and wave it. Then men who looked like Gauls — but some of them shouted in the Roman tongue — came running out of ambush and cut off those of the escort who had not yet crossed the river.

  “The Lady Fflur jumped into a chariot, but two men seized the horses’ heads, although she beat them with a whip. There was fighting and men slain. The Lady Helma cried to me to hide and then run for help. I jumped into the water where there was ice among the rushes. I couldn’t see much. I was half frozen and afraid to move. Two men came and searched for me, talking Roman to each other, but they could not wait long, and presently I saw them ride away eastward, following the others.

  “Then I ran until I found a farmhouse where the man said I was a runaway slave and wished to hold me for the reward. But I persuaded him, and he took two horses, setting me on one. So we rode to Lunden, crying alarm to the few whom we met on the way. But they laughed at us, and we had no time to stop and explain. I came straight to Sigurdsen and he sent Skell.”

  “Well, you are free,” said Tros, “and I will hire you for a wage to be the Lady Helma’s servant, so that you may earn yourself a dowry and become an honest woman.”

  He strode out into the shipyard, where all was already bustle and confusion. Shouts and an oily stench from where the longship lay, announced that Sigurdsen had gone to work. There was a crackling of wood under the cauldrons where the Britons were heating pitch, and some of the Northmen were rigging tackles by the waterside and passing ropes to a mooring in mid-river to help launch the longship as soon as the mud was thawed.

  Tros visited the biggest store-shed, calling to Conops to come and unlock it, then summoning a dozen Britons to follow him inside. He made them fill one barrel full of the yellowish crystals he had dug from beneath Caswallon’s stable. That and twenty of the round lead balls he had made
for ammunition for the catapults, he ordered rolled outside into the yard.

  “The druids,” he said to Conops, “are full of wisdom in the ways of peace. But for making war against Caesar, with only one ship and a hundred men, sorcery seems better. When Eough comes, let me know.”

  He was still greatly puzzled about Eough; half feared the dwarf would not come after all, although hitherto he had always kept his promises and had even made the charcoal-burners keep theirs. He wondered why Eough should wish to go to Gaul and take a hundred charcoal-burners with him, women too. It was a mystery, he decided, and it was a part of his philosophy that the mysterious evolves into the beneficial.

  He could crowd two hundred into the longship in addition to his Northmen to man the oars and the yards and the braces, although it would be tight quarters. He suspected a hundred woodsmen, used to outlawry and self- concealment, would be better against Caesar than a thousand of Gwanar’s men, provided only he could manage them, which he might do with Eough’s help. Whereas, not Gwanar himself, still less Caswallon, would be likely to keep control of a thousand Iceni and perhaps as many Trinobantes, even supposing it were possible to land them on the coast of Gaul.

  “Little man,” he said to Conops, “I shall need you ten times over. Yet you shall stay here and guard my half-built ship. Ten of those hot stinkballs go with me. Ten are for you to keep. When Eough comes with the sulphur we will mix the charge for them. Roll me out a barrel of that resin. Set it near the other barrel, so. Eough shall appoint you lord high second sorcerer. I give you command over the shipyard, to guard it in my absence. He gives you command over the dark powers of the underworld, in proof of which, when the longship sails, you shall let off one hot stinkball, taking care to keep up-wind of it.

  “After that, I think, those Britons I must leave behind will be afraid to disobey you. And there won’t come too many visitors to steal the fittings. I will leave you enough money to buy food with, but buy only a little at a time. Buy hand-to-mouth, and let the slaves know you are doing that. So you can refuse to buy at all and they can all go hungry if you have any trouble with them. Glendwyr I will take with me. That hot-blood might kill you otherwise.”

  Conops grinned sourly. “What have I done that you should leave me?” he demanded.

  “You have done well,” Tros retorted. “The reward of doing well is a more severe task, always. Attend to this one properly, and I may send you to Caesar next, lone-handed, to cut his ears off!”

  “Master, master! Let that woman Helma go her way!” Conops urged, his one eye gleaming jealously. “You and I are not made for marrying. Let Caesar have her. No luck, so long as we are tied to a woman’s skirt! One trouble on the last one’s heels. Follow my way and have a new woman in every port you come to, like a ship tied to a mooring, that can let go when her captain pleases.”

  He stopped because Tros was grinning at him, more than because Tros’s fist was raised. But he ducked the fist, nevertheless.

  “If you had two eyes, my little man, I’d knock one out for you!” said Tros.

  But though he stooped to pick up a lump of wood and made believe to throw it, Conops stayed within range.

  “Master, I’m right and you know it! Look at this now! A wonder ship but half built, and a woman.”

  Tros hove the lump of wood, purposely missed him by an inch or two, laughed and walked away toward where Sigurdsen was brewing agonizing stenches, scalding the legs of men who did not get out of the way in time and nigh breaking the backs of others who hauled on anchored tackles at the word of command. Tros watched, observed that the pitch was very nearly spread on the ship’s undersides from mud to waterline — for that job went swiftly with fifty men — and ordered a sheerlegs carried up, three tree-trunks set up tripod fashion with a great bronze block hung from the summit.

  “You’ll break her back,” warned Sigurdsen. But Tros preferred the risk of that to more delay.

  They passed the tackle to a capstan fifty feet away. Twenty men on the capstan put strain on a sling under the ship’s bow, easing the ship’s weight off the thawed ooze and, at a blow of the whistle, all tackles worked together. The ship did not budge, although dry timbers creaked and a tackle broke with a noise like one of Tros’s new catapults. Sigurdsen assumed a told-you-so expression. But Tros doubled the crew on the sheerlegs, tried again and, at the next attempt, the longship slid into the river.

  “Now she will leak like a sieve!” said Sigurdsen. “There’s no pitch on her bottom.”

  “Pitch her inside then! Slap it on thick and throw sawdust on it. We sail tonight.”

  There were a thousand things to see to, not least the new half-finished ship that must be covered and protected in all ways possible. Tros went up to examine the new deck that Sigurdsen had started laying in his absence, and presently gave an order that nearly broke his heart. He made them bring the newly finished linen sails out of the sail-shed and spread them tent-fashion over the ship’s gaping waist, with loose boards under them.

  “They’ll be ruined,” he muttered, “ruined!”

  But it had to be.

  And then Caswallon, fresh from a council meeting, wanting to be comforted.

  “Lud rot them! They will offer gold for Fflur. They bid me send a messenger to Caesar and demand what price he asks, and to tell you to do the same for Helma. My Lundeners will pay Fflur’s ransom but not your wife’s. Pursuit? Aye, three thousand men turned out, and they’ve hung a dozen of my shepherds for not reporting that Romans were lurking near Merrow. About a hundred men reached Thanet in time to see the Roman’s ship put to sea in a gale. What shall I do, Tros? Lud o’ Lunden, what a helpless cockerel a king is, if his men won’t fight! Will you take my message to Caesar for me?”

  “No,” said Tros, stroking his beard thoughtfully as he leaned back against an oaken prop that supported the great ship’s hull. “But if you can send a messenger to Gaul, who will start a rumor that you will sail a week or two from now to have at Caesar with ten or fifteen thousand men, do that by all means.”

  Caswallon laid a blue-veined white hand on his shoulder.

  “Brother Tros, we must pay Caesar’s price. My council say they will not feed Gwanar’s men, nor do they want Iceni quartering themselves in our towns. They offer gold for Fflur’s ransom, and beyond that nothing. They loved Taliesan. They are thinking only of his funeral.”

  “How much do they love you?” Tros inquired.

  Caswallon hesitated now to answer that. Tros continued his line of thought:

  “If you should be a prisoner in Gaul or should be slain in Gaul, how deeply would it stir them?”

  “I don’t know,” Caswallon answered. “But I think that in the spring they might send an expedition.”

  Tros laughed. “Buy back your wife from Caesar with your subjects’ money? If Caesar would sell, which I doubt, though he loves gold. Sail with me, man! I sail tonight. Either I win back Fflur and Helma or I die.”

  Caswallon’s eyes gleamed.

  “My son is too young to act as regent,” he said, “but my cousin Orwic—”

  “Tonight’s tide!” Tros said with deliberate emphasis. “Get that messenger to Gaul if you can do it. Have him say that every fishing ship in Britain is being prepared to go to sea.”

  Caswallon drove away for further wrangling with his council, promising, if nothing else, to send that messenger. Tros went on working like Force incarnate to make the shipyard safe, and to provide sufficient plain, hard labor to keep his Britons out of mischief during his absence. He did not much care whether Caswallon should elect to come with him or not.

  It was nearly nightfall when at last Eough came. It was a strange procession that he led. Two hundred men and women, fifty children, clothed in skins, all carrying wicker baskets in which their miserably insufficient household goods were packed, trailed behind Eough like a flexible long monster snaking through the shadows. Those in front carried bags of sulphur in addition to their baskets. All, even the women and children, had r
ough knives. They reeked of fish oil, as if they had used up all Eough’s treasure on their skins before they came away. Eough’s wolf ran in and out among their legs like a shuttle weaving an interminable pattern.

  Tros observed them from the poop of his half-finished ship, wondering more than ever what their willingness to go to Gaul in winter-time might mean. He had promised them no reward, had offered no inducement beyond that one proposal made to Eough. There was something more than melancholy; there was a determined, almost a religious air to their procession. They resembled ants that he had seen in warmer climes, migrating from abandoned nests.

  Conops, staring distrustfully, admitted them through the gate, but though he gave them no direction, they seemed to know exactly what to do. They filed toward the middle of the yard where they squatted densely around Eough who stood in the rough circle in their midst. He began talking to them, but his words were intended for them and none else; his head and hand moved in gestures of emphatic speech, but not even the sound of his voice reached Tros.

  They made no answering murmur to the dwarf’s remarks, but sat quite still and listened.

  Tros sent them dried fish, carrots and cracked wheat. They devoured the food, not eagerly, not even with a display of interest, continuing to listen to Eough’s speech. As gloaming deepened they began to resemble ghosts attending a voiceless oracle.

  “They make me think of rats that leave a ship,” Tros muttered. The thought made him shudder. Was he himself a rat, deserting his own half-finished wonder-ship? Was Caswallon a rat deserting Britain? Was Britain doomed?

  Presently he called Eough over to where the barrels stood, bidding him bring sulphur.

  “Mix!” he commanded.

  Eough pounded the sulphur and charcoal separately, then mixed a quantity of each with powdered resin and oak sawdust, adding the yellow crystals afterwards. Tros took about a spoonful of the mixture and ignited it in a far corner of the yard. It spluttered as it burned. The stench nearly choked him and the heat, from even that small quantity, was almost incredible. When he returned he found Eough wetting down the sawdust.