by Talbot Mundy
“Gwenhwyfar,” he said presently, “we were friends once — you, I and Britomaris. I ate your bread when I first set foot in Britain. Shame irks me that I need to see your ruin. If I can save your Britomaris, will you play him fair and be his wife and bide the laws of Britain — if I pluck him out of Rhys’s net?”
She began to sob, her face between her hands, her body shaking in convulsive shudders. Tros’s eyes smiled, but he was sorry for her. Surely he was sorry.
“Speak. Shall I save him?”
She could not speak. He hardly knew whether in truth she nodded or whether the sobs still shook her. He repeated the question.
“Yes! Save him, if you will. Oh, Tros—”
She turned with the swift motion of a snake and sat up suddenly to stare at him.
“If I had wrecked your ship and taken you alive last night, there would have been no more talk of Britomaris! It would have been you and I, or death for both of us!”
“As it is, we will save Britomaris,” Tros commented, resuming his stride from wall to wall. He did not choose that she should see his face that minute and each time he reached the wall he turned away from her. “Where can I reach him?” he asked off-handedly.
“Dertemue,” she answered, and caught her breath. She realized as well as he did that she had betrayed the secret of where Caesar’s men would land. “Tros!” she said. “Tros! There is a devil in you!”
There was self-mastery at any rate. His face betrayed no triumph, though now he need not trust to Skell! If Skell had accepted a bribe to lead him in the wrong direction, he could nevertheless find Caesar’s men. Nothing to do but sail to Dertemue and await their coming!
“Tros,” she said. She had detected something like a gleam behind the amber eyes. “You will betray me? You will betray Britomaris?”
He made one of those strong, slow, confidence-imposing gestures that revealed his character more certainly than words.
“Never,” he answered.
Another thought occurred to him, a blind guess snatched at random as the panorama of the past week’s happenings passed swiftly across his mind.
“If you had wrecked me, would you have sent word to Caesar?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Rhys would have demanded your head to send to Caesar. Lud! But what would Rhys have been to me if I had won you! I would have told Rhys you were drowned. I would have given him your cloak, full of arrow holes, to send to Caesar, bloodied up from other men’s wounds. Rhys has a man in Pevensey who waits, all ready to sail to Caritia with your head in a basket.”
“You would have sent the cloak instead?”
She nodded.
“Aye. I love you!”
“I have an old cloak,” said Tros. “Can you write?”
Gwenhwyfar laughed. The blood began returning to her pale lips and her eyes grew brighter.
“Aye, Tros, I learned that from the druids.”
“Can Rhys write? No? Then I will sign his name! Gwenhwyfar, write to Caesar! We will pin that letter to my old cloak, bloodied up and pierced with arrow holes.”
She lay back, overcome again by nausea, but she smiled at him, nevertheless.
“Tros,” she said, “Tros, you could have been a king!”
He left her and bolted the door, stationing a Northman to keep watch through one of the arrow ports. Her moods were as sudden as the seas before a veering wind. She would hate him again presently.
He took the helm awhile for the sake of the feel of the ship’s response to it, and two or three times he changed the course to give the Northmen practice in trimming the sails. Then, giving charge to Sigurdsen, he went to the hatch and looked down at the rowers, sprawling, vomiting between the benches; went forward to the galley where the cooks were in a like predicament; laughed and returned to his own stateroom underneath the poop, where for a while he studied his water clocks, three bowls with holes in them, that floated in leaden tanks and, slowly filling, sank, the first in four hours, the second in twelve hours and the third in twenty-four.
Presently he pulled out his third best cloak from a locker underneath the carved oak bunk and, with a wry face, because he hated to see good purple cloth destroyed — he had intended that cloak should be Conops’ great reward after he himself had worn it a few more times — he tossed it into a corner. Then, cutting off a section from a roll of parchment, thoughtfully he wrote a letter, pausing before each word because, though he had great facility with Greek and Latin, he had trouble with the spelling of Gaulish words.
The motion of the ship, as he sat with elbows spread on the oaken table and his legs stretched out in front of him, made it a simple matter to disguise his handwriting. The scrawl looked as if some one half-illiterate but with a good command of spoken Gaulish had done it by flickering torchlight.
“To Caesar, the Roman, in Gaul, greeting from the Lord Rhys of Maulden in the Isle of Britain, and from the Lady Gwenhwyfar, wife of the Lord Britomaris:
“This according to our promise. The great ship built by Tros, the Samothracian, was wrecked on the bank of the Thames by our contriving. There was a great battle by night and many arrows struck Tros. He, fighting furiously, weakened, and his knees gave under him so that he fell headlong and was swallowed by the water, being seen no more. Tide bore his cloak to shore and it was found at daybreak.
“Therefore, there is no more the great ship to fear nor any danger to the Spaniards whom the Lord Rhys will await at Dertemue.
“We await the proof of Caesar’s word. It was three talents for the head, but it was no more seen and we have sent the cloak as surety our work is well done.
“Now send three talents by a trusted hand to Pevensey, whereafter all shall be continued as agreed between us.”
Tros, after reading the letter a dozen times, signed it, “Rhys of Maulden,” and left a space below that for Gwenhwyfar’s signature. Then he took the cloak on deck and ordered Orwic to shoot arrows through it until it looked as if it had been through half a dozen battles.
Seasick men were butchering some equally seasick sheep for dinner on the forward deck. Tros drenched the torn cloak in the sheeps’ blood, let the blood dry, then towed the cloak overside at the end of a line, with a bronze-tipped arrow caught by the barbs in the lining.
“Caesar,” he said to Orwic, “is a shrewd, lean fox, not easily deceived, but he will recognize the cloak by the gold braid around it, concerning the meaning of which he questioned me when I was his prisoner in Gaul. Now if Skell should have betrayed me and should be offering to lead me into Caesar’s trap, Caesar may think I was slain since Skell left Britain, in which case he may send Skell to Pevensey with a message that the Spaniards are on their way. So we will go to Pevensey with all haste, but we will not wait there long.
“And it may be that Caesar will see through this trick. That nose of his can smell a rat through solid masonry. And it may be that Gwenhwyfar will yet betray me. But a wise man, Orwic, uses all expedients and overlooks no opportunity that the gods have thrust into his hands.”
CHAPTER 62. Discipline
Show me successful mutiny, and I will show you a commander who believed his men were as humorless and stupid as himself.
— from The Log of Tros of Samothrace
TROS had trouble with his top-masts. They were too tall. When he ordered topsails set that afternoon to take advantage of a steady breeze, there was too much leverage aloft for the ship’s beam and depth. She steered unhandily, needing two strong men on the steering oar. And when the breeze freshened two top-masts snapped before the Northmen could get sail off or the men at the helm could bring the ship around into the wind.
So Sigurdsen said, “I told you so,” which made Tros lose his temper, and there was other trouble besides. For instance, Orwic lost his head completely. The slaves below deck heard the sharp reports of breaking spars and, seasick though they were, began to storm up the hatch in panic that was increased by the changed ship’s motion as the men at the helm hove her to. Orwic leaped to the
hatch and defended it, drawing his sword, instead of letting the slaves surge through and find out for themselves that nothing serious had happened.
It would have been easy enough, on deck, to have laughed them out of their alarm and that lesson might have done good. But Orwic wounded three men seriously, driving the rest below and clapping on the hatch cover. The slaves made up their minds they were being herded to their death, and there was a riot among the oar benches that called for all Tros’s mastery. They began to throw the oars out through the ports, there being not much other mischief they could do, until one bright genius suggested they could break the deck loose from the beams and force an opening to freedom.
So the oars that were not yet thrown out through the ports were turned into battering rams, and a pounding began on the deck that shook the whole ship. Whip was no use. Conops and the Northmen oar captains hurled themselves into the confusion, flailing right and left, but oar ends made good weapons, and they were driven backward to the ladder where Tros opened the hatch in the nick of time and rescued them, bruised and bleeding.
“Stink! Throw the stink into them!” urged Conops. But Tros wanted oarsmen, not corpses.
“Open all hatches!” he thundered. “Sigurdsen! Below there with a dozen men, and drive the fools on deck!”
The Northmen plunged into the opening with capstan bars. The thundering ceased on the deck planking and the Britons began pouring out on deck, where they stormed the two boats, unlashing them from the rings that held them down on the oaken chocks, starting to drag them toward the davits.
Tros, swallowing impatience, stood and showed them how to launch the boats, which, crowded full, were large enough to hold between them about forty men. They got in one another’s way — as mad as steers, too mad to know whose voice advised. Tros signaled to the Northmen, who came up red-faced through the forward hatch; they charged down deck and broke the crowd up into two detachments, leaving a dozen or two frantically laboring at the boats. Once on the run the Northmen kept the Britons moving, driving them around the deck and herding them up forward. The remainder lowered both boats and swarmed into them, hand-over-hand down the falls. They had no oars. They had forgotten that. Tros ordered the falls hauled up and two short oars thrown down to each boat.
“Now stay adrift!” he roared. They had neither food nor water, and began to realize it. “Not a slave returns until you have picked up all the oars you fools threw overboard!”
They were out of sight of shore. Above them the great ship tossed, two top-masts swinging by the stays, the loose sails thundering, the serpent’s tongue flashing to right and left. But at last a man in the stern of the rowboat cried:
“Brothers! See the color of the water! That way lies the river! Row for it! We will pick up long oars as we go!”
“Man the port stern catapult!” Tros thundered. His voice roared clear above the thunder of the sails.
Four Northmen ran and cranked the weight aloft, and every slave in both the boats had seen what the catapults could do.
“Go and find those oars! Look lively now!”
Two short oars to a boat, they began to paddle timidly, afraid of the short waves that pitched and rolled them, more afraid of Tros and his artillery. Tros sent a Northman up to the masthead to shout directions to them, then went forward.
“Get aloft and bring those top-masts down on deck,” he ordered. “Leave these fools to me!”
The Northmen swarmed aloft, and Tros stood looking at the Britons herded on the bow and on the deck below the bow. A few had armed themselves with odds and ends — belaying pins, capstan bars, wood from the cookhouse fuel box. They looked ugly enough, but the panic had left them. Some were still miserably seasick; three were wounded; nearly all had bruises, because the Northmen had used capstan bars to keep them moving. Orwic, and with him Glendwyr, came and stood behind Tros.
“Are ye ashamed?” Tros asked. He stood there hands on hips, his back against the foremast, looking like a man who knew his own mind perfectly, whereas he was not at all sure how to handle them. “Six of you, carry those three wounded fools aft!” he commanded.
They obeyed. A dozen made haste to obey, all too glad of a chance to get out of the storm that was coming. Tros had to herd back six of them.
“They’re beaten!” Orwic whispered. “Better thrash them one by one!”
“Is that the way you school a horse?” Tros snorted, turning on him, showing fifty times more anger than he felt. Once more the gods had given him the proper cue! “Fool!” he thundered. “These are scarelings. Shall I make them more afraid? Learn to keep that sword in the sheath until it’s needed!”
Orwic chewed at his moustache and tried to look like a gentleman who had not received rebuke.
“Below there! To your benches! Mark this — any more such foolishness and I’ll chain you to the seats!”
At a jerk of his thumb the nearest men filed past him to the hatch. The others followed them like sheep, dropping their belaying pins and capstan bars quickly before he should see them. Tros stood conning them, his face a strong enigma. He was making sure that none had been too badly damaged by the Northmen’s blows, but he did not let them guess what thought was in his mind. When the last of them had vanished through the hatch he turned to Glendwyr.
“Go below with them,” he ordered. “Talk to them. Get them good-humored again. Let them knew they are fortunate not to be slaves of a weak and revengeful master. Give them tallow for their bruises. Tell them that any other man than I would hang each tenth fool from the yardarm as example to the rest. Be mother and uncle to them for a while. Then, when they’ve come to their senses promise them to try to coax me to let them have mead for their supper. Go!”
Then he turned on Orwic and read riot law, first principles for making panic-stricken scarelings into men:
“Stab, hang, beat. They learn you are afraid of them! You hothead with your ready sword and dagger! Any fool can stab! That’s first instinct. Do you dam the river flood, or do you clear a course for it? Do you stand in the way of a bolted horse? Or do you run alongside of him and get the rein and pull him around in circles until he tires of it? Lud’s anguish! I have seen you break a team of horses and not use the whip once. Remember this — a man has more brains than a horse. Out-think him, if you hope to keep control! And take good care that when he thinks, he’ll have an unexpected clemency to think about, but never a glimpse of weakness. Justice first, strength always! There is neither strength nor justice in a sword stab at a poor fool afraid for his life.”
“I regret what I did,” Orwic answered, saluting him.
“Go and bury regret and don’t do it again!” Tros retorted and turned away from him to watch the Northmen passing down the top-masts to the deck. Not for another five-and-twenty men would he have let Orwic see how satisfied he was. He knew he had accomplished more to discipline his crew than a whole month’s uneventful voyage could have brought about. The twenty who were quartering the sea for lost oars would have a long look at the great ship on the water and would return with their minds full of it, to talk about it to the others, beginning to think of the ship with pride instead of as a prison.
But better than that was discovery how well the ship behaved when hove to. He had left the youngest of the Northmen at the helm, a youth not likely to have used much head work if the ship had fallen off the wind and filled away. But all the time that riot lasted and the Northmen labored up aloft to clear away the broken top-masts, the great serpent’s head had curtseyed to the wind, swinging a little this way and then that, but never enough to fill the sails or make the helmsman work. She was a good dry ship, too. Not a gallon of solid water had come overside, although the waves were chopping up before a brisk wind crosswise of the tide. She was a steady ship and weatherly. He judged she had worked to windward just about enough to offset drift.
So when Sigurdsen came down on deck along with the main topmast, grumbling, with a great deal more about his “told you so” and, stopping to secure
the broken spar to the bulwark stanchions, talked back at Tros between his legs, his gloom proved uncontagious.
“Too much newness! Too much untried crazy stuff!” said Sigurdsen. “You should have listened to me. We laughed at a man on the Baltic who tried new rigs, and we called his wife widow before ever he put to sea. You will lose this ship yet!”
“Aye! Over the edge of the world!” Tros answered, laughing. “A square world and a Baltic lugger! Rig new top-masts, shorter by two cubits and stayed aft as well as forward.”
“This having three masts is madness!” Sigurdsen went on.
But Tros, with the course in mind, knew fairly well how fast the ship had sailed and, well contented that the damage was no greater, squared his shoulders and went aft to bandage up the wounds of the oarsmen whom Orwic had stabbed. That was a messy business that his heart did not delight in, but the druids had given him pungent stuff that smelt like tar for treating wounds and he attended to the bandaging himself because he could not afford to lose three oarsmen.
That done, he watched the boats come back with the recovered oars, observing that the crews had learned one lesson. They no longer feared the motion of the waves nor troubled when a wave-top lipped over the bow and drenched them. Three or four were bailing leisurely, and some were singing. They reported they had picked up all the oars, and came aboard hand-over-hand up a rope with their feet against the ship’s side, almost with the air of sailors, but not quite.
“Salute the poop, you dogs!” Tros roared. “You grinning wharf rats! Do you think my ship is a longshore stews that you can swagger into and pay down your money for a drink?”
He made them stand there and salute him ten times running, just to train their memories. Then twice he made them lower away the boats again and haul them up evenly, snatching at the halyards on the run and swinging in the davits handsomely. They went below all grinning at their new-found sea legs, but Tros stopped the man who had cried from the stern of the boat to the others about the color of the water and direction of the land. He gave him a red cord to hang around his neck.