Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Put that down!” he ordered.

  The man in the midst had drawn bow, arrow to his ear.

  “Lay down your weapon! You fools! You know the penalty for slaves in arms!”

  He began to stride toward them, conscious of the sword against his left hip, but not moving his right hand toward it; in no hurry, and yet not slowly, aware that the light in the notch of the lane at his back made him a perfect target.

  The bowman hesitated. It was the man to his right beside him who struck the bow upward at the moment when he loosed the arrow. It whined in a parabola ten feet in air above Tros’s head.

  Tros kicked the bow out of his hand, then kicked him hard under the chin and sent him sprawling; seized a sharpened stick and thrashed him with it until the crimson bruises swelled from head to heel.

  Then when the writhing wretch had no more breath to sob with as he bit the muddied turf, Tros strode ten paces farther up the lane and turned to face the others.

  “I said, lay your weapons down! Lay them down! You are surrounded. You—” he pointed at the nearest man— “go and tell Glendwyr to come here!”

  The man threw down his knife and ran to carry out the order. Tros paused to give him time, then, when he heard him blurting out the news, blew a long blast on the bugle. It was answered instantly by shouts from Orwic and the crashing and plunging of a chariot in the undergrowth on the far side of the hollow. Orwic had divided forces, for his shouts were answered from a distance by the charioteer. There came a noise from beside the pool as if a hundred bee-hives had been overturned, then a cry from one throat —

  “Mercy!”

  Orwic answered it. Tros had a mental picture of him, standing in his peaked steel cap between two elm trees, laughing as he leaned to peer down at the frightened mob.

  “Throw down your weapons! Ho there, archers! Shoot if they refuse! Wait! Wait! They obey! Throw up your hands! All of you! Archers! Shoot any man who holds a weapon!”

  An arrow whined across the hollow and went plunk into a tree.

  “Mercy!”

  It was a hundred voices this time, followed by Orwic’s boyish laugh.

  Tros turned to face another problem. There were horsemen coming full pelt up the lane from the direction of the ford by Rhyd-y-Cadgerbydan. As Glendwyr reached his side he turned and strode along the lane to meet them, standing hands on hips exactly where the fellow with the bow had taken aim at him.

  “It was the bugle-note that saved me!” Glendwyr laughed. “They had a noose all tied to hang me by! Some bright one had suggested that if they should hang me they could blame me afterward for having tempted them to run away! They are beaten men, Lord Tros. There is neither fight nor run left in them.”

  “Aye, but there is fight in these!” Tros screwed up his eyes to scan the faces of a dozen horsemen who had drawn rein where the lane began to narrow, nearly a hundred yards away, and were discussing the situation. Several of them had dismounted and were examining their horses’ legs, scraping the muddy sweat off them with cupped hands. It was a minute or two before they realized who Tros was, because the shadow of the high bank fell across the lane. Then one man shouted to him:

  “Hah! Then we are in time, Lord Tros! We hunt your slaves. We rode far on a false scent, but your man Skell rode after us and clapped us on the right one. Skell ought to be rewarded. Caswallon, it seems, wants the slaves to escape! He is blocking the ford against all comers, but we swam the stream. The slaves can’t be far ahead. Have you a horse?”

  “I have the slaves and five-and-twenty chariots!” Tros answered. “I thank you for your courtesy, but I need no help.”

  The men began to ride up-lane toward him, each clutching his weapon in constrained, ill-omened silence. They had come well equipped for a man hunt — swords, spears, bows and arrows, rope. They halted again ten yards away, and Glendwyr picked up one of the long knives a slave had dropped. Tros recognized one of the horsemen, Rhys, a member of Caswallon’s council.

  “I standby,” Glendwyr remarked in a low voice.

  “Lord Tros,” said Rhys, and hesitated, not glancing to the right or left but, as it were, feeling for his men’s support. He was red-eyed from exertion — a big lean fellow with a mass of reddish hair, a long nose and high cheek-bones, on a horse whose legs trembled from weariness. “You shall pay me for this day’s effort! We were a-horse before dawn. We have ridden the noon out, all for your sake.”

  “Not on my invitation,” Tros retorted, keeping his right hand well away from the projecting sword-hilt. “Glendwyr, get behind me!” he whispered. “Keep your weapon out of sight!”

  “Lord Tros, that is a lie! Your man Skell came and clapped us on the scent.”

  “Not with my authority,” said Tros.

  “He is your slave, isn’t he? For what he does, you answer. It is not our fault if he is ill-trained. You say, you have caught your slaves. Where are they?”

  “Safe,” said Tros.

  “Well, I am a reasonable man.”

  The red-haired, thin-nosed nobleman glanced right and left at last, took stock of his companions, and went on:

  “Pay me half the proper ransom-money and I will cry quits!”

  Tros laughed. He always did laugh when the odds were all against him and demands were made to which he was determined not to yield. Sometimes that volcanic, dry bark bursting from his chest disarmed an adversary’s will. Not always.

  “Easy to laugh!” said the other, growing truculent. “I doubt that story of the five-and-twenty chariots! See—” he drew the other man’s attention— “here are the wheel marks of a score or so proceeding this way, and but one returning. If anybody asked me, I would say those are Caswallon’s chariots, and we know where he is.” He turned to the others. “This looks like a scurvy trick to me. He and his friend Caswallon and Mygnach’s daughter Fflur proposed to cheat us of our dues! However, he tries to cheat the wrong man. We will flush that covert and enjoy some profitable hunting after our long ride!”

  Rhys jerked the spear free from its sling behind his shoulder and made two or three practice passes with it, with its point in Tros’s direction. But Tros still kept his hand away from the projecting sword-hilt. He did not dare to blow the bugle yet, because Orwic might interpret that into a signal to use violence on the slaves. Nor did he propose, if it could be helped, to fight a member of the council. He had a perfect right to protect himself and his human property if he could do it, but the slaves had been proscribed by general alarm as runaways, and the obviously profitable thing for Rhys to do was to chase the slaves into the open, where he could round them up and claim redemption money. Rhys turned to his companions.

  “Better make haste,” he remarked. “There will be others presently. Why share the profit? You four keep his lordship occupied! The rest of us will ride in!”

  Tros drew his sword at last, a thing he never did unless he meant to use it. And he said nothing, which was another of his characteristics in extremity. His silence, more than any speech he might have made, gave the opponents pause. Rhys laughed unpleasantly.

  “Hold him here, four of you. The rest of you follow me!”

  He began to wheel his trembling horse, and Tros made up his mind to retreat to the pool, where the slaves would be all around him, so that afterward he would be able to assert they were under control and, if he should slay any one, he would be able to claim he did so in defense of them. But as he took one short step backward he heard a yell behind him. Thunder of hoofs and wheels came, not along the lane but down the bank-side like an avalanche. He and Glendwyr sprang to the opposite bank in the nick of time. Orwic, one foot on the chariot-front, the reins in both hands, made his frantic team leap as they were six feet from the bottom, preserving them from a fall beneath the chariot by a trick of horsemanship so near to magic as to make Tros gasp, wheeled them down the middle of the lane before they could lose impetus, and charged headlong at the twelve who blocked the way.

  Down they went, horse and rider, in a shoutin
g, blasphemous confusion. Orwic, avalanching through the midst and struggling for fifty yards or more to rein in the frantic team. Before he could turn, some of the riders were on their feet, clustering together, looking the wrong way, expecting another chariot. Three horses were too badly injured to get up, others had bolted. Before the riders had time to collect their wits and scatter Orwic was coming again headlong. A horse’s shoulder knocked the Lord Rhys stunned against the bank; the others, leaping right and left, avoided wheels by inches.

  “Run!” laughed Orwic. “Run before I signal!”

  He leaned out of the chariot, beckoning to Tros to pass the bugle to him, held it to his lips and filled his lungs. But they did not wait to find out whether a bugle signal would bring reinforcements; they took the threat for granted, cried, “Hold! Enough!” and ran to catch their horses.

  “Home! Home with you!” Orwic shouted. “Get you home before I name you and lay charges!”

  Then he stepped out of the chariot and took the stunned man by the hair, discovered he was conscious, shook him, dragged him to his feet, shook him again and kicked him down the lane toward his friends.

  “Better let me forget who you are!” he called after him and turning to examine the injured horses, drew his sword across their throats.

  “You may have to pay for three horses, brother Tros,” he remarked, wiping his sword as he strolled back. “That would be an act of generosity that should draw Rhys’s teeth. And I wager he won’t talk! But if you had killed Rhys or his men, Lud love you! Not even Fflur could have saved you from indemnities that would have cost you half the tin from off your ship.”

  Tros stepped into the chariot and they drove slowly to the pool to count the slaves. There were only four men missing, of whom one, they said, was drowned when they crossed the river, and three, losing heart, had returned to the shipyard.

  “I will sell those three!” said Tros. “They are not slaves, they are animals. Nay, I will not even sell them, I will give them in exchange for those three horses that were overthrown just now and injured! Glendwyr, take some men and skin me those three horses. Cut the meat up, have it cooked, and feed these rascals or I’ll never get them home!”

  He asked no further questions, made no inquiries as to who the ringleaders might be, threatened no punishments, intended none. He and Orwic strolled together, arm-in-arm, beside the pool, Tros praising Orwic’s horsemanship and Orwic trying to talk of anything else under the sun because the subject of his own achievements bored him.

  “I suppose,” said Orwic, “you will have to have these poor fools flogged?”

  “Not I!” Tros answered with his great full-chested laugh. “I no more flog a man who has his belly full of grief than you flog a foundered horse. I am rather pleased with them. See how they stuck together! And only three faint- hearted ones among the lot! Those three discovered and all ready to be weeded out before I set sail! Hah! I begin to believe I shall have a fair crew after all.”

  “But have you enough yet?”

  “No, not by a hundred men. And I have one who will make more trouble for me than the hundred that I lack! Yet I can not get rid of Skell, for I have promised him a chance to prove himself. Hey! What a fool a man is with his promises! Look you. Skell is nine days out of prison, where I put him for treason as black as the inside of a tar pot. He inclines now toward honesty, being one of those teetering bastards built like an Antioch scale, with manliness at one end of the balance-arm and false weights at the other. Intending me a good turn, he claps the men of Lunden on the trail of these runaways and all but costs me a fortune. And that’s nothing to what he’s likely to do when fortune finds him opportunity in some foreign port! What shall I do with the fool? Lord Zeus, what shall I do with him!”

  “Send him to Caesar!” said Orwic. “He might serve as well as a woman to break Caesar’s wheels.”

  To his surprise, Tros took the suggestion seriously, pacing up and down, both hands behind him now, turning over in his mind the pros and cons of it. He was still meditating, frowning when Caswallon came with a fresh team he had appropriated somewhere, laughing, confident, Tros’s problems out of mind because of a brand new solution for his own.

  “Tros, brother Tros!” he shouted. “I have Caesar by the horns!” Drawing rein, he leaned out of the chariot and took Tros by the shoulder. “Let him come!” he said, with one of his confident nods. “That ford by Rhyd-y- Cadgerbydan shall be the battle-ground, for I have seen now how to hold it. I will drive stakes in the river bed. Then we will tempt Caesar inland, away from the coast and reinforcements, harrying his legions all the way with horse and chariot, opposing him enough in front to keep him occupied and out of reach of Lunden until we check him at the ford by Rhyd-y-Cadgerbydan with half his legionaries drowning and our own men charging downhill from his rear to cut off his retreat. Let him come! We have Caesar beaten!”

  CHAPTER 56. A Bargain with the Druids

  Such wisdom as I have, I think enables me to recognize a higher wisdom when I meet it. Him who hath it, I obey, of my own will, in the knowledge that a higher wisdom will demand no more than a lesser can properly do. But when I find clowns in the garb of wise men, masking avarice within the folds of solemn ignorance, by Zeus such hypocrites must buy whatever good for themselves they hope to get from me. For a high price paid in advance I sell to such impostors; and I sell them nothing I would not have given freely had they asked with the decent dignity of honorable men in need. Such men should be made to buy the sunshine.

  — from The Log of Tros of Samothrace

  TROUBLES increased as the day drew near that Tros had set long in advance for the launching. He had hoped, by making that a popular spectacle, to win the public to his side and, perhaps, to recruit a score or two of freemen for his crew by exciting admiration, curiosity and those other emotions that stir men to act on the spur of a moment.

  Nothing had he left undone to make the event spectacular, even as he had overlooked no element of danger that could be foreseen. The ways, down which the ship must slide, had been reinforced and, in places, even shored with masonry. He had anchors buried deep on shore and prodigiously heavy flaxen cables to prevent the ship, when launched, from gliding too far across the river.

  To make sure the ship would start when he gave the signal, he had set a turn-screw in position, by which he could raise the huge balks of timber on which the bow end rested, thus increasing the slant to overcome inertia. And he had greased the ways so thickly with good hog fat that even his friend Caswallon complained of the extravagance.

  The ship rested in a cradle made of elm, so there was no risk that friction would strip off the tin from her undersides. Sigurdsen had spent a whole day taking soundings in the river bed to make sure there were no submerged wrecks or obstructions in the stream. At all strategic points within the yard Tros had secretly placed quantities of his appalling chemical, with instructions to Conops to fire it if the crowd of spectators should unexpectedly turn riotous.

  But more than any physical precaution that he took, acceptance by the druids of his invitation to be present and to bless the ship was Tros’s chief guarantee of a successful launching. He would have preferred to leave the druids out of it. Having extorted pearls from them, he was conscious of their resentment, and he preferred the ill-will of men less practiced than the druids in the art of making thought produce results. He had too much experience of priests in Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem and elsewhere not to know that the preliminary steps of decadence destroy all vision and the power to do good, but do not for a while destroy the energy itself or its accumulated impetus. He would have been almost as pleased with the druids’ curse, just then, as with their blessing.

  But an undiscoverable enemy set rumor stirring. It was whispered, then repeated in the market-place, that Tros intended to perform a human sacrifice before the launching, in order that the ship might have a soul and be superior to other ships. From mouth to mouth the tale waxed circumstantial. He would bind a living slave ac
ross the ways and let the ship slide over him, drowning the victim’s screams with a fanfare of trumpets and salvo of war drums. Representations were made to the king and council that the superstitious cruelty should be prevented.

  The council in full session sent for Tros, who, arms akimbo, laughing angrily, repudiated any suggestion of sacrifice of any sort whatever.

  “Lord Caswallon — noblemen!” he snorted in disgust. “I hold myself inferior in all things to the meanest of the gods, and I would shudder at the thought of cruelty to win my favor! What then is it likely that the gods would think? I would forever count myself an exile from the company of all that host of spiritual beings who surround us and employ our manhood, whose very breath is inspiration to the brave. If I should tolerate a human sacrifice, if I should perpetrate it, I would say, ‘My soul has left me. Henceforth I am no man, a thing!”’

  But one member of the council was the Lord Rhys, who smarted from a previous attempt to pull Tros’s purse-strings. Rich from impeaching law- breakers and buying up their property when they must sell to pay the heavy fines imposed, he was not to be decoyed by spiritual herrings drawn across a chance to profit by another man’s predicament. He already had one issue against Tros. The hope he might be bribed lurked in his cold eyes as he leaned forward and, without rising, pointed an accusing forefinger, used it to knock off a drop from the end of his nose, and then pointed again.

  “The Lord Tros speaks with much assurance about gods, of whom he affects to know a great deal. But we all know that human sacrifice has been made before now at the launching of ships, by men who think more of their own superstitions than of the law and the opinions of decent people. Such men invariably hide their evil practices and deny them after the event. It happens I have seen the ship, which is a monster and not like any ship previously built. Not only is it plated underneath with precious metal of a value greater than a whole year’s taxes from my district, but there is a golden serpent having two tails, one of which coils the full length of the ship on either side until they reach the stern, where they are joined together and project into the air. We all know that the use of snakes by anybody but the druids is a blasphemy, and I have this to add—”