Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “How shall we reach Caesar?” Caswallon grumbled.

  But Tros was studying the woodstack, which, as he had guessed might be the case, was running low.

  It was heaped about midway between Caesar’s tent and the rear camp entrance, and had a ragged, untidy look from having been extravagantly requisitioned the preceding night.

  “We will stay here,” said Tros. “This place serves perfectly.” In a low voice he gave his orders to the two charcoal-burners, having learned long since in dealings with them that the only way to make them even wish to understand him was to moderate his voice. They nodded and went off in different directions, one toward the woods to the southward, the other toward the harbor where Caesar’s new fleet was building and twenty or thirty ships, unrigged as yet, lay anchored.

  Suddenly Tros gripped Caswallon’s forearm.

  “Hermes! That fellow Caesar is a swift one! Look!” He pointed to where a long, white road ran nearly due south over the horizon. “That tale of ours of thunderbolts and fifty thousand men and an invasion worked! He takes precautions, whether or not he believes the news!”

  The advance guard of a legion, mounted men with their helmets and covered shields swung over-shoulder, jogged over-hill, blurred by the haze, and there was infantry behind them. Men with ropes and pegs were already marking off at one end the lines for new ditches and ramparts, to enlarge the camp.

  “Luck?” said Tros. “We have it all! This arriving legion will want fuel. They’ll requisition most of Caesar’s small stack. Our charcoal-burners will find a ready market. They’ll be heaping faggots all day long to replenish Caesar’s pile while the new legion’s foragers pile up a heap of their own.”

  And so it happened. A fatigue party reduced the fuel stack by two-thirds its bulk, throwing it near the middle of the rectangle being marked out for the use of the arriving legion.

  But presently the light haze cleared away before a breath of wind, and Tros changed his mind about the luck being all his. He felt a cold chill creeping down his spine, that had nothing to do with the frosty air. He could see far out to seaward. His jaw jerked forward and his amber eyes glared like an angry cat’s.

  “Fool!” he muttered. “Idiot! I might have known the sea was my sphere and the dry land Caesar’s!”

  He pointed. Almost out of sight to westward, the ship from which the liburnian had carried Marius and Galba to their doom toiled against the tide along the coast.

  “They put in to drop Marius and Galba! They mean to land the women somewhere nearer Gwasgwyn! Zeus! Trust Caesar to pretend to have nothing to do with the business until he can find some way of covering his own tracks! Lud, Lud, Lud, Lud! What now?”

  “To our ship! Back to our ship!” Caswallon. urged instantly. “Up anchor. Give chase!”

  For about ten breaths Tros thought of that. Then:

  “No!” he said simply. “Can’t desert Eough and the charcoal-burners.”

  “Phaugh!” Caswallon snorted. “Those swine?”

  “They have our stinkballs.”

  “We have courage. Our wives are yonder!”

  “If we stay here, young Glendwyr will get word to us.”

  “Of what we already know! Let Glendwyr rot! Come on, Tros! Back to the ship!”

  “No!” said Tros.

  “Lud’s blood, man! Why not?”

  “Because the gods love men who do not change their plan at every setback. Because I can see Eough and his hundred bringing faggots from the woods. Also because if we should move our ship in the wrong direction, the Romans might suspect it is not Lomar’s tin ship after all; and they can move by land much faster than we could row against the tide. Here we lie unsuspected. Let us see what happens.”

  “Lie here like a frozen dog while Fflur, the mother of my sons—”

  Caswallon set his jaw and lapsed into angry silence, glancing at Tros from time to time as if he had begun to lose all confidence in his ally. But Tros watched Caesar’s camp and the legion, tramping down the long white road, singing, shields and helmets slung over their shoulders; wagons, war machines, camp followers and women trailing in the rear.

  After a while even Caswallon forgot impatience as he watched the marvel of a Roman legion making camp, the speed with which they dug the ditch and earthwork, the total absence of confusion, the unhurried ease with which the tents and wooden huts were raised in regular, straight lines.

  “If I could make my Britons work like that!”

  “Then you would conquer all Britain! What good would it do you and the other tribes?” Tros answered. “Rome is a disease. She has no virtue except discipline.”

  Eough and his charcoal-burners made three trips from the forest, stacking their faggots hardly fifty yards away from Caesar’s tent, before the legion’s foragers began to march away in parties to attend to that work themselves. Apparently the charcoal-burners were paid off. They returned to the forest but made no reappearance on the scene. The Roman foragers cut trees down, split the wood and stacked it around and about the charcoal-burners’ pile, hauling some in wagons, some piled high on mules. By noon the heap was almost mountainous, and the last loads were delivered direct to the soldiers for the night’s use, the wagons going the round of the rampart and cross-wise up and down the camp, dumping separate heaps at every intersection.

  Then, a little after high noon, Caesar himself in his scarlet cloak emerged from the great tent to be fawned on by his generals and parade the camp awhile, pausing at intervals — a figure of dignified gesture — the crowd around him backing away as he swept with his right arm in the direction of whatever he discussed. Once he pointed straight at where Tros and Caswallon were concealed and for three minutes they lay with bated breath, forgetting how impossible it was that he should see them or know they were there.

  Caesar returned to his tent, and not long after that came Eough, boy- voiced, a trifle querulous, guided by that charcoal-burner who had gone in search of him. The Romans had not paid his men. The quartermaster had told them to return tomorrow for the handful of copper money due them. Eough was as disturbed about that as if it were Tros who had broken a promise to himself.

  “That Roman intends to swindle my people,” he complained. Tros laughed and called him Xenophon, a jest that only aroused Eough’s ire because he had no notion what it meant. He demanded the women and children.

  “I have done my work. The stinkballs are under the woodpile with a fuse set into each, and each about a man’s length distant from the other.”

  The dwarf stood arms akimbo, stomach out, pouting his lips, his bare toes clenching at the hard ground.

  “Shall I curse you?” he suggested.

  “Go and curse Caesar!” Tros advised him. “Some one has to fire that woodpile between now and midnight. None but you can get into the camp and stay there after dark. They turn out all strangers at sunset. But, as I told you last night, Romans are mad about omens; Caesar as mad as the rest.

  “If you present yourself at the camp gate they will take you straight to Caesar as a curiosity. If you tell Caesar you can read the stars, he will order you to cast his horoscope. Tell him you must watch the stars alone, uninterfered with, and go and sit near the woodpile. But don’t set fire to it until just after they have changed the watch, midway between sunset and midnight.”

  “I don’t want to be sold and sent to Rome,” the dwarf retorted. “I don’t want to be crucified for burning wood-piles. I know Caesar’s horoscope already. He will die by the knife when his time comes. You can’t kill him.”

  But Tros knew Eough’s weakness, which, like any other man’s, lay underneath his pride.

  “You could obtain a big reward by going straight to Caesar and betraying us,” he suggested.

  “Dung-Heap Tros! Fish-Oil Tros! When did you and I break promises?”

  “Then go to Caesar. Do as I bid you. Remember all I told you last night. I will set the women and children ashore before daylight if the woodpile burns.”

  Eough stuck ou
t a tongue at him.

  “I go,” he said. “I do it. But I know your horoscope, too. Like Caesar, when your time comes, you will die with iron in your belly.”

  Eough turned on his heel and walked away, making discontented noises with his teeth and tongue. Caswallon rose to his knees, loosening his sword from the scabbard.

  “I go to kill that dwarf,” he explained when Tros tried to restrain him. “He will sell us to Caesar as surely as we lie here. Better please the gods by killing him now. You or I can creep into the camp and fire the woodpile.”

  “Kill me instead, if I shall judge wrongly,” Tros answered. “That dwarf thinks more of his charcoal-burners than of you or me or Caesar or all the money Caesar could pay him. And more than that again, he values his own promise! He will do exactly what I have told him to. But if we should play him false thereafter, and not set those women and children ashore, I would not give a denarius for either of our lives. Eough is a keeper of bargains.”

  Mightily dissatisfied, Caswallon let Eough go, but a dozen times he changed his mind and wanted to send the Northmen after him to kill him before he could reach the camp. It was only because the Northmen refused point-blank that he at last subsided, growling to himself.

  “It is not good to kill dwarfs,” Sigurdsen explained. “That man is a cousin to the Zwergs and Trolls. He has the mind of seven men in the body of the seventh of one. Seven curses lie on whoever kills him.”

  Whether Sigurdsen made that up merely to support Tros or whether he believed it, he impressed Caswallon, who lay quiet until nearly sunset, watching the camp activities through mist that gradually settled into fog as night drew near. The fog rather worried Tros. Eough’s story of sitting alone to watch the stars would hardly be likely to pass muster.

  And then at sunset Glendwyr came, guided by the other charcoal burner who had found him wandering along the seashore, looking for Tros where the boats were upturned on the beach. Glendwyr was brief.

  “They were landed in the ship’s boat on the far side of the river, and the ship has vanished westward. The Lady Fflur sends loving greetings to the Lord Caswallon. The Lady Helma has escaped.”

  “Zeus!” Tros sprang to his feet. “Where is she?”

  “Come,” was all Glendwyr said, and jerked his head in the direction of the sea.

  They left Sigurdsen and his fellow Northmen lying there to watch Caesar’s camp, and followed Glendwyr through the thickening fog. He would have gone at a jog-trot, but Caswallon seized his arm, ignoring risk, questioning him loudly.

  “What else said my wife? How was she? Have they treated her with courtesy? Where is she now?”

  It was only when he tried to talk that it appeared how exhausted Glendwyr was. He was eager to finish his task before he dropped.

  “In the larger camp beyond the river. Yes, she is well,” he gasped.

  It was Tros who detected blood, for Tros was following. There was an open wound on the back of Glendwyr’s right thigh. He overtook him and felt it.

  “Javelin,” said Glendwyr. “Glancing blow. Not deep.”

  Tros swore under his breath as Glendwyr broke into a trot. Now the whole plan had gone skyward! It was brave of Helma to escape, but Pluto! They would inform Caesar, there would be hue and cry, two thousand men would search like trained hounds, they would put out in boats and search the longship.

  “We are done for now!” he muttered.

  Down by the shore between three water-rounded rocks, not a hundred paces from the place where they had left the boats, lay Helma. Tros knelt and took her in his arms, but for a long time she could not speak to him, until the warmth of his body brought response at last, he lending her, as it were, a reflection of his own vitality. She was wet to the skin, but the back of her deerskin dress was drenched with blood and he could feel the broken-off end of an arrow protruding below her shoulder-blade.

  Caswallon stood by, saying nothing, only he drew his sword and felt the edge of it with his left thumb. Glendwyr sat down with his back against a rock.

  “Helma! Helma!” Tros kept repeating.

  She spoke at last. He held his ear to her lips but there was no need. The spirit in her burned high like the last flame of an exhausted lamp and her voice had strength in it.

  “Lord Tros, I grieve I may not bear your sons. Set Glendwyr free.”

  “Glendwyr!” said Tros, very loud, sparing one glance for him. “You are free!”

  “He found us. We were in a hut outside the camp. But now they have taken Fflur inside. He whispered. Then — in the fog — I crept out to talk with him. Too many sentries. Farther away. Fog. And then — I thought of you — if I am killed, no need to fight for me — if I reach you, my proper place — father of my son, Lord Tros. But never now. We ran — and we ran. Glendwyr knew the way. Boat down by the river, but only a pole — no oars. Sentries running after us, and it took time to launch the boat. Arrow — and I lay in the boat. Glendwyr was hurt — something knocked him overboard and he lost the pole. He swam, guiding the boat. And then — when he called to me to help him in — I couldn’t. Fog. Tide. We struck a sandbank. He lifted me out. I lay on the water. He dragged me. After that, I don’t know, but I suppose he carried me to this place. O Tros, I grieve — press me closer, so. It is warm — I grieve your son might not be born before I die.”

  She died in his arms as he knelt there, he saying to her what he had not known was in him to be said. When she had breathed her last he looked for Glendwyr, to repeat to him that he was free.

  But Caswallon was talking to Glendwyr, binding a strip from his own good linen shirt on Glendwyr’s thigh, talking, acting as toward an equal:

  “Luck o’ Lud o’ Lunden? I begin to doubt it! Lud lives in the Thames. He doesn’t care for us in Gaul! I had a good ally in Tros as long as his own wife was a prisoner, but—”

  Tros cut that conversation short.

  “Luck or none,” he interrupted, “will you help me launch a boat?”

  Through the fog, and in spite of the fog, Caswallon’s face loomed savagely resigned.

  “I will,” he said, snapping his jaws tight.

  “I will lay my wife aboard the ship,” said Tros, “and leave Glendwyr there because of his wounds. Then we will return for your wife and attend to it that Caesar pays the bill.”

  Caswallon sighed, grinned and gripped Tros’s shoulder: “Brother Tros,” he said. “I grieve, I did you wrong. I should have known you would see this through. It was Lud’s own luck when you and I made friends!”

  CHAPTER 50. The Gods! The Gods!

  Why praise the gods? Why blame or thank them? Do your duty and the gods will do theirs.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  IN FOG so dense that they could hardly find the shore, so dense that when they did reach shore they lost themselves a dozen times, Tros and Caswallon found their way at last to where Sigurdsen and the Northmen waited. Sigurdsen reported that a search for Helma had begun. Roman soldiers, quartering the fog, calling to one another to keep touch, had almost stumbled on them.

  “Helma is dead,” Tros told him, expecting the news would arouse the shivering Northmen’s fighting spirit. But Sigurdsen merely gloomed about it, and the other Northmen took his view.

  “I said we would have no luck after we chopped down those figureheads. We will all be dead men presently,” said Sigurdsen, fingering his ax.

  Tros solved that problem Spartan army-fashion, as Leonidas once did the while his frozen handful waited for the Persians in the high gap by Thermopylae. He set them all to playing leap-frog, until the blood ran warmer in their veins and the solitary charcoal-burner who had guided Glendwyr bolted because they looked like jumping goblins in the fog.

  At last when all were breathless, and Caswallon had wrestled Sigurdsen until the giant lost his temper from having so much the worst of it, Tros raised both arms, adjuring gods whom neither Northmen nor Caswallon knew by name:

  “Ye Guides! Ye Powers! Ye, whose thoughts enfold us! Ye,
whom Father Zeus breathed forth! Uphold us!”

  Forward then, blood tingling, to where the watchfires burned around the four-square rampart, blurred by the fog until they seemed a wall of crimson, decorated with the sentries’ silhouettes. By the main gate there was a beacon brighter than the rest, whose flame danced on the guardhouse wall and on the figures of at least a dozen sentries.

  The gate at the rear was almost equally well lighted, but those at the two sides, narrower and less used, had been blocked at sunset with spiked logs set firmly on wooden supports, and were guarded by only two sentries apiece. However those sentries were wide awake, and there were others nearby, pacing the rampart and tending the watchfires. Hardly a cat could have crept into the camp unseen.

  And the Romans took additional precaution, owing to the fog. A patrol of fifty men under a centurion, was marching at a distance of a hundred paces from the rampart around and around the camp at arbitrary intervals. Twice, while Tros and his party lay and wondered what Eough might be doing, the patrol passed so close that they could hear the soldiers’ breathing.

  One thing was certain, Eough could not make any excuse about the stars; they were invisible. He would need all his ingenuity to invent a reason for approaching the woodstack, to say nothing of remaining near it unobserved. As the hours wore on Tros began to despair of the plan’s success.

  The Northmen had grown cold again. Their teeth were chattering. Caswallon was growing restless. Tros, depressed to the depths of his being over Helma’s death, began to feel that, even though Eough should not fail them; the prospect of success had vanished for the simple reason that his party had no spirit left. They were in no mood to take advantage of surprise.