by Talbot Mundy
“Pass me that folded sheepskin,” he suggested, and made use of it as a cushion between his shoulders and the wall. “Damp, uncomfortable places, ships’ cabins,” he went on. “I am no mollycoddle, but I marvel at the hardihood of men who choose the sea for their vocation. Now Tros” — Caesar’s voice changed subtly; he was beginning to use consciously the full force of his personal magnetism— “I promised the last time we met — it was not far from here, I remember, to crucify you whenever I catch you. Put me not to that necessity. Surely there is no real need for me to have to catch you.”
“I could crucify you now,” Tros answered, “but I will not demean myself. You are too magnificent a rascal to be killed except in fair fight.”
“Tros, that is generously spoken. I admire nobility even in my enemies. Did I understand correctly that your wife has been killed by a Roman arrow?”
Tros nodded, chin on hand, elbow on knee, the hilt of his sword where he could reach it instantly.
“The news distresses me,” Caesar went on. “She would have been quite safe, however, had she not tried to escape. Accept my sympathy. And now, Tros, be sensible and listen. You and I are both men who can be magnanimous. We are not barbarians. We are above the little ordinary jealousies and trivial ill feelings. I am willing to confess that I admire you and your cleverness, also your courage. All true Romans admire courage. Let us come to an agreement. I need a truly bold sea captain. I also need the secret of whatever that compound was that blew my camp to pieces. Come now, I will make you admiral of the greatest Roman fleet that ever put to sea.”
Tros moved, leaned back against the mast and smiled.
“Yes,” he said, “you shall make me a Roman admiral! Mark this, Caesar, the Lord Caswallon has agreed with you, but I not yet. I pledge no loyalty to Rome, and none to you, but you shall write me that appointment of commander of your fleet and I will make shrewd use of it. Write it or die!”
He stood up, arms akimbo.
“Let me remind you that your friend Caswallon, as well as his wife Fflur—”
Tros interrupted:
“If I have to kill you, and I will if I must, I will presently land my crew and cut Caswallon and Fflur free when your man Livius brings them to the beach! Die if you wish! If not, you shall also write to Lomar the ship-master of Ictis a receipt for his cargo of tin, which I need. Ten tons of tin, to be paid for at the same rate as the last consignment, on presentation of that receipt to your agent in Caritia. I will remove the tin from Lomar’s ship on my way home.”
“A pirate, eh? A pirate at heart!” said Caesar. “You, who might have been a Roman admiral!”
“A Roman admiral I am, or you die!” Tros retorted. “The tin I take, we will call an admiral’s year’s pay! You shall write that, too, in the appointment. I know you, Caesar, and I know the road I take. I saw the mark you set just now below your signature, and I am not so dull-witted but I guessed its meaning. Men in your confidence, Caesar, have to think swiftly and be swiftly treacherous, eh? Your Livius will send a whispered message, won’t he? An ambush on the shore, or failing that, of your magnanimity, you allowed us two hours after the fog lifts, didn’t you? Then ships to surround us while we dawdle here at anchor relying on your promise. Hah!” Caesar appeared interested and amused.
“You are a fool, Tros,” he said after a moment’s pause, “but you are not quite such a fool as Caswallon. You have refused my friendship, but he consented to trade Caesar for a woman! You shall have your parchments, and my enmity. I yield him only my contempt.”
“For which he will care no more than I!” Tros answered.
And for an hour after that they sat in silence, Caesar closing his eyes and, if not sleeping, pretending to. At the end of an hour he coughed again and informed Tros that, in spite of the fog, he would prefer to wait on deck.
“These seizures of mine leave my throat congested. I breathe better in the open.”
Tros laughed and touched his sword-hilt. “You shall sit outside,” he answered. “But I see you have recovered altogether from the seizure. I remember how strongly you swim!”
He summoned four Northmen and made Caesar sit between them on an oar- bench, he with his sword drawn standing by. And so they were waiting in a fog that gave no hint of the approaching dawn, when Caswallon’s voice hailed them, asking the direction. Tros boomed back to him through hollowed hands and presently Caswallon stepped aboard with Fflur behind him, followed by all the captured slave-women and all except two of the escort who had been captured along with them. Caswallon thrust two sheets of parchment into Tros’s hand.
Fflur, one white hand on Tros’ shoulder — she had no words for him; they choked her when she tried — stared at Caesar as if he were some monster she had never expected to behold outside her dreams. Caesar stared at her and at Caswallon. He was puzzled. Caswallon, looming like a giant in the white fog, laughed at him.
“I heard your fellow Livius giving whispered orders to a slave. So when we reached the shore I smote friend Livius. He isn’t dead, but I wager he needs the doctor! He cried out. Did you hear him? Ten fools of your Tenth Legion who escorted us, ran to his rescue, so I put as many as I could into the boat and we came away. The Northmen row well. We were too quick for your frozen Tenth. You must thaw them, Caesar, before they will be any good against us Britons!”
Caesar’s face betrayed no hint of the anxiety that must have gripped him. He smiled.
“Unhappy Livius!” he exclaimed. “Forever over-zealous! I suppose he was taking precautions to ensure secrecy for my sake. So his whispering alarmed you. Well, well, let us hope he is not too badly hurt.” He made a gesture toward the parchments in Tros’s hand. “Shall we conclude our business? I am anxious to return to shore before news of my absence—”
Caswallon’s loud laugh interrupted him.
“Ave, Caesar!” he remarked, using all the Latin he knew. “I think you must be the greatest rogue the world has ever seen! You commit foul treachery on me, and then dare to count on my promise to let you go, even though I now have Fflur! Lud’s blood and backbone! Well, my promise holds. I made it. You shall go free.”
“I admire your sense of honor. It becomes you,” Caesar answered, bowing.
“Write!” commanded Tros, and gestured toward the cabin where the table was.
So Caesar wrote what Tros dictated, while Fflur, her arms around Caswallon, begged him not to return to shore for the two remaining Britons.
“Let the Northmen take Caesar and bring them in exchange for him. There will be treachery yet!”
“Not I! This Caesar is my guest!” Caswallon laughed. “But if he tries to trick me, I will kill him! If the Northmen should go ashore again without me, Caesar would simply add them to the two of my men Livius has, and we should have the whole work to do over again.”
Caesar came out of the cabin and bowed to them all with condescending dignity, his lips curled with a trace of sarcasm. He hardly glanced at Fflur, but he met Tros’s eyes and nodded.
“So we are enemies,” he said. “It is a pity.”
Then he looked straight at Caswallon, as if he were judging a slave in the market.
“You seem to me a good barbarian but an unwise chief,” he remarked. “I will come one of these days and see how barbarous and unwise you really are. And now, are we ready? It is very comfortless and cold here.”
Caswallon and four Northmen made another journey to the shore, this time with Caesar in the boat’s stern, while Tros and Fflur leaned overside, listening anxiously for noises in the fog. After an interminable interval they heard Caswallon’s shout and Fflur gripped Tros’s arm. But the chief was on his way, returning with the two remaining Britons..
“All’s well!” he called.
“All’s well?” Tros tucked the parchments into his tunic. “Is it? I know Caesar! Sigurdsen! Up anchor! Out oars! All haste to sea before Caesar’s ships put out of Seine-mouth and surround us!”
CHAPTER 52. “I Build a Ship!”
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nbsp; Whence I came, I know. Whither I go, I know not. I came forth from the womb of Experience. What I know, that I am. What I know not, is the limitless measure of what I may become. Life grows, and I see it. And so I grow, because I know it. I will strike such a blow on the anvil of life as shall use to the utmost all I am. Thus, though I know not whither I go nor what I shall be, I shall go to no home of idleness. I shall be no gray ghost lamenting what I might have done, but did not.
— from The Log of Tros of Samothrace
THERE were ambassadors from half-a-dozen kings around the fireplace in the great hall in Caswallon’s house, and they were dressed in all their finery of jeweled woolen cloth, with golden chains around their necks. Behind them, backs against the long wall, their retainers sat, arms folded — a pattern in half-relief against the shadow that reached to right and left of the door into the gloom of the far-away corners.
Firelight shook the shadows among the ceiling beams and fitfully illuminated shields and weapons, colored designs on the wall-cloth, faces, shapes of a dozen dogs asleep. Oil sconces by an inner door at one end of the hall and two more on the wall that faced it, made halos of light in the smoke from the hearth. A minstrel with a small harp plucked at the strings reflectively, as if searching for music to appeal to many minds in disagreement.
From the vestibule, through the thickness of an oaken door, came thumps of spear-butts and the laughter of men-at-arms, but within the great hall there was hardly any conversation. A man’s voice broke too noticeably on the silence for even a king’s ambassador to care to voice more than platitudes.
But in a smaller room, by another fireside, there was conference that those ambassadors would have given ears to hear. Tros sat, fist on table, clutching a roll of parchment. Beside him was Sigurdsen.
Fflur faced them, hair in long braids to her waist, her gray eyes watching Tros as if he were the arbiter of destiny. And beside her, Caswallon tugged at his fair moustache, his white skin whiter for the pale-blue figures drawn with fading woad on neck and forearms.
Conops sat on the floor, cross-legged, poking at the fire. Orwic lolled at the end of the table, his interest disguised under an air of cultivated boredom.
The room was so hung with colored draperies as almost to resemble an enormous tent. The door was double-curtained, leather behind embroidered cloth. No sound of what they said could reach the great hall, though they had argued noisily.
“The breadth and length of it is this,” Caswallon said at the end of three hours’ hot debate, gripping the edge of the table with a great white hand. “These lousy cousin kings have stirred up the druids against me. Some accused me of ambition to be the king of all Britain; others, of cooking an unnecessary war against the Romans. Two of the fools accuse me of befriending Caesar! Mother of my sons, don’t interrupt me!
“Only the gods know what will happen to us now Taliesan is dead. He had wisdom. Ere the breath had left his lips we learned that Rome’s ambassadors had snatched my wife while my back was turned. Peace, Fflur! I speak. I say, don’t interrupt me!
“They slew Helma, wife of my good friend Tros. And here sits Fflur beside me. I have Tros to thank for it.”
“Tros and the luck o’ Lud!” said Orwic.
“Tros and the gods and the sorcerer Eough,” said Fflur, “but I think my Lord Caswallon did his share.”
“Mother of my sons, I would have died for you nine times over like a cat away from home, and have found a tenth life in which to regret you, had I failed! But listen to me! Caesar had no liking to be taken prisoner, though he thought it a great stroke of strategy to sneak my wife away. He feels his dignity is injured. He swore vengeance, pledging himself to invade us with an army and to burn my house. It is war. There is no gainsaying it. Caesar will come.”
“Not if I have my way, he won’t,” said Orwic, yawning. “If half what Tros tells us about the man is true, we need only to send him a woman. She can put poison in his drink or run a bodkin through his heart or—”
Fflur interrupted in a voice as vibrant as her father’s, who was Mygnach the Dwarf. And they said of him that he could ring bells merely by speaking at them.
“If I thought you meant that, Orwic, I would forbid you the house!”
“Nay, nay, I can’t spare Orwic,” said Caswallon. “Let him talk as he pleases, so be he plays the man in action. Caesar will come with an army—”
“Not before summer,” Tros put in. “He will need time to prepare his army and to pin the Gauls down tight before he leaves them in his rear.”
“Worse and worse!” remarked Caswallon. “If he came before the indignation dies, my men would fight. I might even persuade these craven cousin kings to lend me ten or fifteen thousand men. But already the kings send word by their envoys that this quarrel with Caesar is of my making, so I must pay for their help if I need it. And if Caesar waits a few months, my men will be saying the same thing. Lud! Lud! Lud’s blood!” he exclaimed. “This kinging it is a man’s task, but there is small reward in it!”
“We talk, we talk,” groaned Orwic. “What are we going to do?”
“I build a ship!” said Tros, and struck the table with his parchment.
Fflur nodded, her eyes on Tros as if she could see the thought behind his massive forehead. The amber of her ornaments was not more yellow than his eyes. The gray of her eyes suggested no more strength of will than did the line of his jaw, neck, mouth and shoulders. She was Athena to his Poseidon, she quietly wise, he capable of tempests before which cliffs would shatter.
“In the ship, Tros, you will sail away. And then what?” she asked.
“Sigurdsen knows,” he answered, “and Conops knows. Now I will tell you and I think you will not laugh, although my friend Caswallon will believe me mad and Orwic will mock me at risk of being sat on hot coals on the hearth! The world is round, and I will sail around it!”
Again Fflur nodded.
“You know too much, Tros,” she said quietly. “And still too little for your own good.”
“Tros knows enough to stand like a true man by his friends,” said Orwic. “Mad? I like that kind of madman. The world has my permission to be square if it so pleases, and Tros, if he wishes, may call it a triangle. Nonetheless, I sail with him on his adventure.”
“Not you!” Tros retorted. “I need men who are obedient!”
“Kill me in single combat, or prepare my quarters in the ship,” said Orwic blandly.
Caswallon’s face fell, for he loved Tros like a brother. More than that, he counted on his knowledge of the Romans and his passion to wreck Caesar’s schemes of conquest. But he knew Tros too well to try to set obstructions in his way, and he knew there was no holding Orwic.
“How soon will the ship be finished?” he asked, trying to mask his disappointment.
“Soon, and for many reasons. A ship’s genius is motion,” Tros replied. “She will rot if she sits still too long — on land or water. My genius, too, consists in action. I am no use at this waiting game. I lose my temper if a dozen popinjays of kinglets strut and claw like poultry clucking for grain that is still in the sack. I would knock those envoys’ heads together and send their masters a challenge to provide regiments against Caesar or against me, whichever suits their temper best! That might not be the best course. You can manage your poultry-yard better without me. Nevertheless, you are my friend. I will serve you first and take what comes of it. But I must serve you in my own way, and I must have more men.”
Again he rapped the parchment on the table. He seemed to wish to call attention to it, but the sight of it suggested no solution of the problem to Caswallon’s worried brain.
“You forget I am an admiral of Caesar’s fleet!”
Caswallon stared and Orwic laughed. Sigurdsen grumbled below his breath, being superstitious about writings in a language he could not read. Fflur leaned back, drumming jeweled fingers on the table.
“Much good a writing will do! There is no seal on it,” said Orwic. “Caesar will have sent
long ago to all the ports to warn them that the parchment is a forgery and—”
There was a small wooden box on the table. Tros struck it with the roll of parchment.
“Perhaps — and let us hope — that Caesar forgets, as you forgot, that when I took his bireme, there was not only his treasure in the well below the cabin, but his seal and a great stack of his private documents. There lies the seal.” He struck the box again. “A fool maybe I am, but no such fool as Caesar thinks. He smiled when we had him prisoner. He thought he could bribe me, and he knew we would never kill him, for fear his own men would retaliate and kill Fflur. He offered to make me admiral of his fleet if I would desert Caswallon. And he smiled again when I made him write me the appointment.
“Caesar was fool enough to think me fool enough to believe that appointment valid without the seal. But I have the seal! He thought me fool enough to believe that he will not close all the ports of Gaul against me and set a big price on my head. He forgot, or else he never knew, that I have his private correspondence, that I know who his friends are in Rome, and who are his enemies. The thought never entered the calculating brain of Caesar, that I will go to Rome and there, it may be, break the wheels of his ambition!”
“Rome?” Fflur muttered. “Rome!” She seemed to be seeing visions.
“If he has any brains at all, he will have written to Rome,” said Orwic.
“Not about me! Not Caesar! I know him. He will count on catching me up to some trick on the coast of Gaul, or possibly in Hispania, at any rate this side of the Gates of Hercules. In the first place, Caesar’s popularity depends on his personal renown. Were it known he was taken prisoner and forced to exchange himself for a British chief’s wife, whom he had stolen against all the laws of embassy, there is a man named Cato in Rome who would leap at the opportunity to denounce him before the Senate. Moreover, by appointing me an admiral Caesar usurped the Senate’s privilege. He is on the horns of a dilemma. If he will keep the story secret of his having stolen a king’s wife by dishonorable trickery and of having returned her in exchange for himself and an appointment that he had no right to make, he must keep silence and watch for me as cats watch mouse-holes. He knows I build a ship, but he does not know how big a ship or how sea-worthy, because Caswallon slew his spies. It will never enter Caesar’s head that I will go swiftly to Rome.”