by Talbot Mundy
“And they will pay you to go if you can make them believe you will not go otherwise,” Caswallon commented. But he said it in a low voice, as if afraid of his own words. Himself, he would never have dared to offer an affront to any druid, not even to a druid who he knew was false to the druidic teachings, for he was Celtic to the marrow of his bones, as meek in the presence of spiritual teachers as he was fierce in battle.
So Tros spoke cavalierly to the druids.
“I will not go,” he assured them, “unless you do your part. Rather I will launch my ship and raid Caesar’s ports as it suits me, using British harbors for a base. That will bring Caesar the sooner, so we can have it out with him and learn which way the gods decide the fate of Britain.”
The druids shuddered at the very name of Caesar, knowing well what fate he would impose on them. When spiritual vision wanes and temporal ambition takes the place of it, men flinch from being burned alive in baskets. Compromise creeps into their convictions.
“Pearls!” said Tros. “You have. Rome covets. I can not compel Rome, but I can buy Caesar’s enemies. I could buy all Rome except perhaps one man, if I had pearls enough.”
“Who told you we have pearls?” a druid asked.
“The same one who told me the world is round! I, I, myself! I know it!”
Long into a mystic night in May they argued, seated in the shed where Tros had stored his horrible explosive. Barrels of the stuff were all around them; barrels and great lead balls, as yet unfilled. Their white robes gleamed ghostly in the moonlight streaming through the open door, where Conops sat on guard against intruders. Tros looked like a great black bear among them, growling from the deepest shadow.
“What if we give you pearls? What proof have we how you will use them?”
“None!” he answered. “Read ye your own hearts. I have read mine for you.”
“If you fail?”
“Then blame the gods, not me! I, Tros, have spoken. I will add no word to it. With pearls—” he pulled off his black tarred cap and held it out toward them— “this full of pearls, I will go to Rome and try to put a stick in Caesar’s wheel. Without pearls I will stay here and let come what may.”
The night after that they brought pearls to him, a dozen huge ones in a small gold casket lined with fleece, and more than a thousand of mixed sizes in a woolen bag. He tossed the treasure into the bronze box that had once been Caesar’s money-chest and slammed the lid down, giving them no inkling that, except for those pearls, the chest was now almost empty.
“Let the gods say whether that is price enough,” he commented. “The gods know what and why you pay. The gods will judge what I do. Now I would advise you, speed the parting guest! Bid all men aid instead of hindering the launching of my ship!”
So, subtly the druids began to change the mental atmosphere until Tros actually suffered from embarrassment of riches in the form of unskilled labor and unsuitable supplies. Instead of boycotting, men brought him all the trash they did not need — the moldy grain, sick oxen to be killed and salted down, old horses for the same ungraceful fate, discouraged-looking slaves devoid of teeth or suffering from ague, who they said would make fine rowers; spoiled honey, hides half full of holes, moth-eaten woolen cloth, and all the odds and ends they had no use for, eagerly demanding money, and annoyed when Tros refused it.
There was nearly another riot. Tros was charged with cheating, by a noisy mob that refused to take its rubbish home again and called the judges of the land to witness he was liable for damages from rain and theft. Caswallon had to call out all his bodyguard, to use spear-butts and to charge into the crowd with chariots that had wooden staves set to the axle-hubs in place of the murderous scythes.
Then, two weeks before the date set for the launching, one last effort by the powers that impede men’s plans — blunt mutiny! Tros’s slaves, aware that nothing else could save them from a life at sea, deserted by night in a body, and before Tros could prevent, some Jack-of-anybody’s-business-but-his- own had fired the beacons and set bells a-ringing to alarm the countryside. That meant proscription. Every fugitive was outlawed from the moment the desertion became public news, a price by law on each deserter’s head, payable by the owner to whoever the captor might be; one-third of the fugitive’s market value if brought in alive, or, if dead, one-tenth of it.
So a hunt began, with all the countryside in arms and no hope there would not be bloodshed. Tros did not dare to remove his Northmen from the shipyard without first making some other provision for guarding it. So he mounted horseback, an expedient that with all his sailor’s heart he loathed, and rode full-gallop to Caswallon’s house on Lud’s Hill, falling, as the sun rose, in the mixen of the horseyard when the weary brute came to a halt too suddenly.
Caswallon was up betimes, for he had heard the clamor of the alarm bells, but he proved a sorry comforter, smiling behind his hand while half-a-dozen grooms removed the stable stuff from Tros’s cloak.
“You will get about half of your slaves back, probably — at so much each. I will instruct the judge. He shall assess you lightly. The dead ones won’t cost anything to speak of.”
It was Fflur who solved the difficulty. She came to the great front porch where the swallows were all nesting and the men and women already waited who had favors to ask of the king, winding up her long braids and calling to the grooms to bring her chariot.
“Fie!” she called out to Caswallon. “Laggard! Talking while the ricks burn! Lay a false scent quickly. Then clap your own pack on the right trail!”
“Fflur is always right!” Caswallon muttered. The words had grown into a formula from so much repetition, although he did not always recognize her rightness until after the event.
And then came Glendwyr, riding a mud-bespattered, foaming horse to death, vaulting as the beast fell, finishing the last three hundred yards on foot.
“Lord Tros, they have gone westward. They—”
He could not speak for gasping. But no need. Caswallon knew.
“Horns!” he exploded. “Trumpets! Fifty mounted men! The rally! All directions! Hurry the crowd downriver! Tell them Tros’s slaves are making in a body for the woods beyond the Medway!”
Never on earth were finer horsemen than the Britons. Give them leave to show off, and they had four legs beneath them faster than the partridges take wing from stubble fields. The silver horns and trumpets split the morning air as hoofs went thundering through the gate and, fanwise, fifty of Caswallon’s gentlemen-at-arms rode belly-to-the-earth to round up groups of searchers and view-hallow them eastward in the wrong direction.
“Runnimede!” Glendwyr panted.
Caswallon nodded. It was a far cry to the swamps by Runnimede where desperate men too frequently outwore the patience of the pursuers. He had already ordered out the chariots. To the summons of a golden bugle more than a hundred bow-and-arrow men turned out, making up the whole force of the standing army. Twenty more breaths, and already four white stallions pawed the air as the king’s own chariot came to a plunging halt in front of him. He jumped in, seizing the reins from the charioteer.
“I caught one,” said Glendwyr, recovering his breath at last. “He had returned to steal an ax. He nearly slew me with it.”
“Lives he?” Tros demanded.
“Aye, you will need him for the oar-work.”
Tros suppressed a smile. He foresaw that he had a good lieutenant in the making. However, too much praise turns willing heads.
“What then?”
“I tripped and tied him. Conops came, put a handful of salt in his mouth, showed him water. He soon told where the rest had gone.”
Fflur’s chariot was see-sawing behind two red Icenian mares that squealed for exercise, she reining them with one hand as she stood with a foot on the low seat balancing herself, and watched the five-and-twenty war-machines, whose stallions squealed and bit each other, rearing as their drivers formed them into five lines, four men to a chariot.
“Why do we wait?” Caswa
llon asked.
Tros jumped in. Glendwyr followed. Then Orwic came, driving uphill from the direction of Lud’s bridge, his handsome face alight with the fun of living at top speed, swinging his chariot on one wheel at the gallop and then backing until, hub by hub, he was in line with Fflur.
“What madness next?” he laughed. “All Lunden yelps on a stray dog’s scent! The roe runs yonder.”
He nodded over-shoulder, roughly westward, up the river.
“Ride!” Caswallon roared, and they were off, all eight-and-twenty chariots in action at the gesture of his arm, before the word could clip the air. He never finished it. It was a vowel cut in half. There was neither shout nor whip-crack, but two hundred hoofs struck earth together and the five lines wheeled into a single stream that poured through the gate behind its leaders, no collisions, no hubs striking, no sound except the bumping of bronze wheels, the squeak of straining basketwork, and the staccato thunder of the hoofs.
Caswallon drove like wind, Fflur keeping pace with him and Orwic not a dozen yards behind. Before a mile had ribboned under wheel, the leaders were beyond hail and the five-and-twenty let the intervening distance grow, conserving their own horses’ strength. Not long, and there was no procession visible, only when Tros listened, he could hear the thump and splash when they who followed plunged into a ford, and now and then he caught a glimpse of them hard-galloping across a crest of rising ground.
So, for an hour, they drove at full pelt within a furlong of the swamps beside the river, crossing long arms of the forest, skirting the fenced meadows until they reached a hill from whose summit they could see the Thames curved like a silver snake below them. There Caswallon drew rein and let the foaming stallions breathe awhile, his eyes and Fflur’s intent on the sunlit view.
Smoke came from fifty homesteads. There were cattle browsing in a hundred fields. Peace lay along the valley like the smile of the Earth Goddess.
“When I tax them for their own protection, they rebel!” Caswallon remarked drily, his eyes still searching out the details of the landscape.
He was a huntsman born, but Fflur’s eyes just as soon as his detected an alertness in the movement of a herd of fallow-deer that grazed, five miles away, on the short, sweet grass between a copse-edge and the high fence of a homestead. Orwic was the first to speak:
“Men moving — not toward them, but up-wind and rather quietly. There’s a road over there beyond the river. It runs between high banks topped with brambles. That’s where your runaways are, Tros! They’ll be dog-tired and all in a herd — hot-foot — keeping together, lest stragglers get in trouble with the farmers. Where did they cross the river, though?”
Caswallon pointed. Down a vista between tree-tops they could see an abandoned ferry-scow that lay against the far bank of the river, half in water.
“The tide’s flowing,” Tros remarked.
“And in an hour,” said Fflur, “there will be a hundred feet of soft mud there. No good for chariot wheels!”
Caswallon laughed, the quick, short bark he always gave when he could see solutions.
“The fools expect pursuit. There was a second ferry-scow. They’ve sunk it. I wager they’ve scuttled the one we can see. If we should cross the river here — it might be done, we could swim the horses — they would scatter. It would take a month of hunting to get half of them. The thing they don’t expect, is to be headed off. There’s a ford at Rhyd-y-Cadgerbydan.”
“If you get ahead of them and hunt them back toward Lunden, they’ll be killed to a man,” Fflur objected. “Our Lundeners will be in no good humor after having wasted half a morning on a wrong scent.”
“Mother of my sons, I laugh!” Caswallon answered. “They have been afoot since two hours before dawn. How much farther do you think the fools can run? True, Tros has overfed them, but a man’s strength has a limit. When they find us in the way, they will lose all heart and lie down. We will drive them home between the chariots, slowly, like pigs to market!”
Chariot after chariot came galloping and drew rein on the hilltop, breathing the horses, until all five-and-twenty were in line again and all the bow-and-arrow men had gathered beside Caswallon’s wheels to receive his orders, leather cases over their shoulders with the arrow ends protruding where they could pluck them with the right hand easily and fast.
Tros felt as resentful as a fisherman whose seine-net has been torn through his own carelessness. No talking could improve the situation. Advice from him would be impertinence. It was he, not they, who had lost two hundred slaves. They, not he, who must retrieve them for him. It was more than probable that, being in a band and desperate, the runaways had done more mischief than the sinking of one scow. More likely than not, they had murdered lonely farmers and anybody else who might happen to have seen them, their one hope of escape depending chiefly on a long start. They would have done everything possible to prevent the true direction of their flight from being known.
And law was law. The law of Britain as concerned slaves varied very little from that of other countries. For whatever a slave, fugitive or not, might do his owner was responsible. Which was fair enough, considering that an owner was allowed to punish his own slaves as he saw fit, and though he might not kill them he might turn them over to the public executioner, his own unchallengeable accusation being tantamount to sentence by a court of law.
So there would be a bill to pay, none knew how big. For every murder done there would be a dozen or more of the runaways tortured, to discover the real culprits, who would be put to death. And tortured men make poor beginners at the deep-sea oar-work that Tros had in view.
Not least toward the making of the loss disastrous was the point of view of bow-and-arrow men, turned out at a moment’s notice and brought full pelt in pursuit. Such men were hardly likely not to want to flesh an arrow once or twice before accepting slaves’ surrender. It appeared to Tros he would be lucky if he only lost a hundred of the fugitives killed, maimed and missing. And he would probably have to reward Caswallon’s men at something less than one-third of the market price of each survivor, since not even the king’s friendship could offset the law of Britain.
However, Fflur surprised him. Her gray eyes observed the glowering disgust in his.
“Lord Tros,” she laughed, “you came hot-foot to Gaul to rescue me from Caesar. Watch now how I repay.”
She paused a moment, signing to her husband and to Orwic to be still, then studying the faces of the bowmen. Hot they were, and hard-eyed, leashed hounds, eager to be loosed against the quarry.
“Does any of you love me?” she inquired, and for a moment after that they stared at her, grinning. Then there was a murmur of her name, a rising buzz of protest.
She knew, without their saying it, they loved her. All did. Why the question? Two or three men strung their bows — expression of their willingness to fight for her, and die if need be.
“Try us!” said a big man standing close beside her chariot wheel. “How many shall we slay?”
“You, you at least might have known better!” she answered. “When the town judge sentenced you to lose a hand for stealing, was it I who had charged you? Or do I remember rightly that I paid the fine, and over and above that, too, the restitution money? Was it I or some one else who begged a place for you in the Lord Caswallon’s following? Do you think the maiming of a poor wretch pleases me?”
The man grinned at her sheepishly, leaning his weight on his bow, unstringing it.
“Is there one man here for whom I have not done favors?” Fflur asked, raising her voice. “Wounds, brawling and dismissals, wives in child-birth nursed, debts, and the prospect of slavery for debt.”
Murmuring again — another protest of a deep, remembered gratitude from men who were none the less puzzled by her choosing that time and that place for an appeal to their affection.
But Caswallon got down from the chariot to feel his horses’ forelegs, satisfied that Fflur could do with men-at-arms what he, their battle-leader, could not
.
Orwic looked stolidly bored. The climate, and it may be, breeding, had produced in him a distaste for scenes in public that even remotely touched the sentimental. He was for action, first, last, all the time, nor too much talk about it afterward unless by way of humorous, half cynical review.
“Lud’s blood!” he grumbled. “What now?”
“The Lord Tros helped to rescue me from Gaul,” Fflur went on, using the middle notes of the voice that resembled her father, Mygnach’s. They did say Mygnach had such magic in him that the birds sat still in the trees to listen when he chanted his orison to the sun. “The Lord Tros goes to Rome to risk his life and all he has that we in Britain may be saved from Caesar. I would like to treat the Lord Tros gratefully. I think a gift from you, for my sake, if you will, of all those slaves of his, recaptured and unharmed, without the customary price on them, would be an offering the gods would call a manly gift. What say you?”
There was not much that they could say. Some grinned, half shamefacedly, like boys in good time lectured against poaching, that they had intended, and regretfully refrained from. Many of them nodded, trying to look statesmanly sagacious. All of them watched Tros, expecting he would speak. But Tros sat silent in the chariot, not pleased that he must be recipient of favors. Only he knew how immensely he preferred that others should receive his largesse, rather than he theirs. But also, only he knew that the money he had won from Caesar half-a-year ago had dwindled almost to the last coin, lavished on the ship, and now he had nothing but the druids’ pearls out of which to pay fines and ransoms. He was nearer to disaster than Fflur guessed, and carkingly self-critical.
Tros had the trick of silence, though, as Orwic had asserted, he could blow like a northeaster when he chose with gusts of words that carried all before him. Orwic, like the others, looked at him to speak now and, since Tros continued staring straight in front of him, tried urging.
“Tros, what say you?”