by Talbot Mundy
Tros whistled softly to himself, pacing the cabin floor, his hands behind him. Suddenly he turned on her.
“You didn’t come here just for Horatius Verres’ sake! You didn’t cross that marshland in the dark for the fun of a swim to a pirate’s ship! You called me a pirate just now. You had Verres’ word for that. Whose else?”
“Caesar wrote to Balbus to be on the watch for you. I saw the letter. It came by the overland mail three weeks ago.”
“You a slave, and you risk yourself on a pirate’s ship?”
“Well, I thought I would make friends with you.”
“Why?”
“Because if Pkauchios gets into difficulties, I might be able to escape to somewhere. Almost anywhere would do.”
Tros, pacing the floor again, turned that over in his mind, reflecting that if she was willing to risk herself in what she supposed were a pirate’s hands, she must be in serious danger of the Roman tortures. Pkauchios, her master, must be well into the toils. However, he was not quite sure yet that she was telling the truth.
“You say Balbus loves you and would torture you?” he asked. “He is the governor, isn’t he? He can overrule the court. He would find some excuse—”
“Bah!” she interrupted. “Balbus would enjoy it! You should see him at the circus. He isn’t satisfied unless a dozen horses break their legs under the chariot wheels. See him at the spectacles. He likes the agony prolonged. A month ago he had a woman scourged and then worried by dogs, but he gave her a stick to defend herself and it took the brutes an hour to kill her. Balbus pretends he does it for the people’s sake, but he makes them sick. It is he who likes it!”
Tros grinned pleasantly. The girl was trembling, trying to conceal it. He perceived he might make use of her, but fear, and the more of it the better, though a safe spur, would not provide against her treachery. He must supply hope, practical and definite. However, first another question, to make sure he was not wasting time and wit:
“So, after all, you have no real influence with Balbus?”
“That I have! I say, he loves me! I whisper, and he favors this or that one. But he would get just as much pleasure out of seeing me tortured as he does out of hiring me from Pkauchios to dance before his guests. He would say to the world, ‘See how just I am. Behold my impartiality. I torture even Chloe, qui saltavit, placuit. Then he would enjoy my writhings! He would enjoy them all the more because he loves me.”
Tros stood staring at her, arms akimbo.
“Do you think, at a word from you, Balbus would admit me into Gades?” he asked.
“That would come better from Pkauchios. Pkauchios can go to him any hour and say he has read portents in the stars,” she answered.
“Can you manage Pkauchios?”
She frowned, then nodded.
“Yes. But he is dangerous. He will try to put you to his own use.” Suddenly she laughed. “Let Pkauchios go to Balbus and prophesy that Tros the Samothracian will enter the harbor at dawn in his great red ship. It is red, isn’t it? So Caesar’s letter said.”
“Vermilion, with purple sails!” Tros answered proudly.
“And let Pkauchios say to Balbus that Tros of Samothrace is destined to render him a very great service. At dawn, the first prophecy will come true. So Balbus will believe the second and will receive you eagerly.”
Tros nodded. He well knew the Romans’ superstitious reverence for signs and omens. But he also knew the notorious treachery of the dancing girls of Gades.
“Do you care for pearls?” he asked her.
She gasped as he took a big one from the pocket in his belt and placed it on the palm of her extended hand.
“You shall have enough of those,” he said, “to make a necklace.”
“But a slave mayn’t wear them.”
“You shall buy your freedom from your master.”
“But Simon can’t give me my money!”
“If all plans fail, you shall escape with me on my ship — you and Horatius Verres.”
“If?” she said, watching him, weighing the pearl in the palm of her hand.
“If you give to me in full, meanwhile, your influence in Gades! If you work for me ten times as faithfully as you have ever served your master! If you fail me in nothing, and lend me all your wit and all your knowledge.”
“A bargain!” she exclaimed and held the pearl between her lips a moment. Then, suddenly, “Show me the rest of them! How many pearls?”
“You shall have them at the right time. Their number will depend on you.” Tros stepped to the door. He heard the oar-thumps of the longboat. “How will you go back?”
“I will swim.”
He shook his head. “I will send you ashore. Say nothing to the men. But how will you reach the city? There will be no Horatius Verres this time to fight the dogs off and protect you.”
“I told you I am a slave who owns slaves. I have two men waiting for me on the beach.”
Tros heard the deck-watch challenge and Sigurdsen’s answering howl from close at hand.
“There is time yet,” he said, glancing at the water clock. “Hide there.” He pointed to the dark corner where Horatius Verres sat. “If this is Simon coming, don’t let him see you. Slip out when he enters the cabin and I will order my boatmen to row you to the beach.”
Then he peered at Verres. He could hardly see his outline in the shadow under the row of clothing.
“You,” he said, “stay where you are, and don’t let me hear a sound from you!”
CHAPTER 72. Herod Ben Mordecai
They think they know a thing because they have a familiar word for it. If I say avarice, they think of a craving to have. But do they know the subtle treachery of avarice? It is incapable of honor. But who knows it? Not the avaricious! Am I over-sudden? Should I threaten? A threat is the snarl of cowardice. A fair warning is no threat, but is treachery entitled to a warning? A fair warning is an appeal to wisdom, as when the clouds warn mariners to furl their sails. Threats are the lies of a coward masking treachery. I smite hard where the threat squeaks. Let the blow be a warning to liars to mend their manners.
— from The Log of Tros of Samothrace
TROS went to the deck and peered over the bulwark into darkness. There was a half-moon now, but the ship’s shadow covered the long-boat and he could only vaguely see the shapes of four men sitting in the stern, one of whom was hugely fat, unquestionably Simon. Sigurdsen climbed to the deck and grumbled, using Norse oaths: “Helpless! Weighs like six men! Have to hoist him!”
“Orwic? Conops?”
“Haven’t seen them. Fat man rode horseback to the beach. Asked for you. Others are his servants.”
Sigurdsen ordered a rope rove through a block on the after yardarm and a bight put in the end of it. Tros leaned overside. “Simon!” he called. “Simon ben Tobias?”
A hoarse voice answered. Question and answer followed in a mixture of three languages, but Tros could hardly hear what Simon said.
“Ho there!” he exploded. “Put a parceling on that rope? Will you cut good Simon’s rump in halves? Now steady. That’s a nobleman of Gades, not a sack of corn!”
They walked the grunting weight up to the bulwark rail and swung him inboard, where Tros received him in strong arms.
“Simon, salaam! Salaam aleikum. Marhaba fik!”
“Peace? Blessing? There is none in Gades!” Simon answered, wheezing with fatness and asthma. “Curses on this night air. There is death in it! Tros, Tros, I can not pay the debt I owe you!”
Tros hurried him into the cabin, a slave, who had clambered up the ship’s side, fussily arranging shawls around the old Jew’s shoulders. A second slave helped a lean man up over the bulwark, who followed in uninvited.
“Door — door — shut the door!” Simon gasped in Greek, the language he had grown more used to than his native tongue.
The two slaves slammed it and remained outside. Tros helped Simon into a chair beside the table and then turned to face the second man, an old
Jew in a cloak and a dirty cloth cap, beneath which long black ringlets curled beside his eyes.
“Who is this?”
Simon, coughing apologetically, answered— “Herod ben Mordecai.”
It might have been the cough, but it appeared to Tros he did not like the name.
“A friend?”
Simon did not answer — only coughed again, his tongue between his teeth.
Herod ben Mordecai smiled, his lower lip protruding as he thrust his head and shoulders forward to peer into Tros’s face.
“Let us hope we are three friends!” he said significantly. “Shall I sit on that chair or on this one?”
He began to peer about the cabin, his bright eyes appraising everything. Tros sat down on his own oak chair with his back to the stern of the ship and Simon on his right. Herod ben Mordecai helped himself to the third chair, facing Simon, with his back toward the corner in which Chloe and Horatius Verres crouched in hiding.
“Where are the Lord Orwic and the man I sent with him?” Tros asked, looking straight at Simon.
Simon’s face, majestic, heavy-browed and framed in a patriarchal beard, but sallow now from ill-health, wrinkled into a worried frown. Old before his time and physically weak from being too much waited on, he looked too strong- willed to yield to death and yet unable to enjoy the life he clung to. His clothes were wholly oriental, of embroidered camel hair, and there were far too many of them, making him look even fatter than he was. An eastern head-dress, bound on with a jeweled forehead band, concealed his baldness and increased his dignity; and he wore heavily jeweled rings on three of the fingers of each of his fat hands. He had kicked off his sandals when he entered and his fat feet, stockinged in white wool, were tucked up under him and hidden by the bulge of his prodigious stomach.
“I haven’t seen them!” he said hoarsely.
“Then how did you get my letter?” Tros asked.
“Herod ben Mordecai brought it.”
Tros stared at Herod. The old Jew’s brilliant eyes met his without a quiver.
“How did you obtain my letter?” he demanded.
“My friend,” Herod answered in an unexpectedly firm, businesslike voice, “you are lucky it fell into my hands. I took it straight to Simon, who keeps his house like a castle. There are not so many who could get to Simon at such an hour and, believe me or not, there are fewer who would not have gone straight to the Romans with the news that Tros of Samothrace is so near Gades!”
“I asked you, how did you get the letter?” Tros insisted.
“I heard you. I didn’t answer,” said the Jew.
“Very well,” said Tros, “you are my prisoner!”
He made no move. He simply kicked his scabbard to throw the sword-hilt forward, and sat still. The Jew looked keenly at him, thrusting out his lower lip again, and for a minute there was silence, only disturbed by Simon’s heavy breathing. Then Herod leaned across the table toward Tros, thrusting forward one hand, fingers twitching.
“You should make a friend of me,” he said excitedly, “for Simon’s sake. Let Simon tell it.”
Herod resettled himself, twitching at his curled black beard and showing yellow teeth. Simon sighed heavily.
“Tros!” he gasped suddenly. “Herod knows too much!”
“What a prisoner knows won’t sink the ship!” Tros answered. Herod leaned forward again, elbows on the table, lower lip protruding, eyes as hard and glittering as jet.
“But it will ruin Simon,” he retorted in a level voice.
Simon blurted out the facts, a list of them, while Herod tapped a finger on the table as if keeping check.
“I am in debt. Caius Julius Caesar owes me three million sesterces, and won’t pay. Balbus owes me a million, and I daren’t ask him for it. If a word gets out in Gades against my credit, there will be a run on me. I lent my warehouse to conspirators for—”
Tros whistled softly.
“Which faction now?” he asked.
“Oi-yoi! Gades is full of factions!” Herod remarked, rubbing his hands as if washing them. He seemed amused.
“ — for the storage of weapons,” Simon went on. “They paid well. I needed — I need money. I didn’t know those bales of merchandise were weapons until Herod spied on me and came and told me. Now, if Balbus learns of it, he will jump at the chance to seize my goods. He will tear up his own promises to pay. Caesar’s too for the sake of Caesar’s favor — and crucify me!”
“On a great-big-tree!” said Herod, laying both hands on his knees and smiling cruelly. “You would better tell Simon why you sent for him and make your proposal, whatever it is, and let us all three consider it. I am a man of business. Offer me business or my young men will be at Balbus’ door at dawn. Before he has bathed himself he will have sent his guards to Simon’s warehouse, where they will find the weapons in bales and bags and barrels. Then a thousand slaves that Simon owns and his great house full of curios and his daughters’ children — how many, Simon? How many daughters’ children? — will all be sold. And Simon, well — he may escape on this ship. I don’t know. But the two who went ashore tonight will remain in Gades, where they will suffer such tortures as only Balbus can imagine — rack, fire, spikes under the nails—”
“Tros!” Simon exclaimed wheezily, his nervousness increasing the effect of asthma. “We are old friends! You will not—”
“None knows what I won’t do!” Tros interrupted, thumping his great fist down on the table. “My young friend Orwic and my servant Conops went ashore. If a hair of a head of either one is injured, this man” — he scowled and showed his teeth at Herod— “dies!”
“What if I don’t know where they are?” said Herod, shrugging his shoulders impudently.
“So much the worse for you!”
“You heard me. Balbus will ruin Simon!” Herod insisted, thrusting out his lower lip again.
“We will cross the bridge of Simon when we reach it,” Tros said grimly.
Herod showed anxiety at last. His eyes admitted he had overstepped his reach, grew shifty, glanced from one man to the other, rested at last on Tros’s angry face.
“You’re a fine friend, to talk of letting your friend Simon be sold up and crucified just for the sake of a Gaul and a Greek slave! Mind you, I can’t stop it, not unless I go ashore. My young men know I went to Simon’s house. They don’t trust him — nah, nah! They don’t trust him. They know what to do! Any of Simon’s slaves might murder me, mightn’t they? Any time. Dead men can’t talk. So you see, if I don’t return pretty soon from Simon’s house, my young men will go straight to Balbus. I tell you, I can’t stop it unless—”
“I’ll drown you unless my men return!” Tros interrupted. “You may send a messenger ashore—”
“I’ll go!” said Chloe’s voice, and even Tros was startled. Simon nearly screamed.
She stepped out from the dark and Simon stared uncomfortably at her, looked like a man caught naked in the bath for all that he wore so many clothes and she so few. Herod ben Mordecai recovered from surprise and found speech first. He became all oily smiles, a mass of them, his very body writhed itself into a smile, and his lower lip grew pendulous like an elephant’s.
“Ah, pretty Chloe! Clever Chloe! Who’d have thought of finding Chloe on the ship of Tros of Samothrace! Chloe and I are old friends, aren’t we! Often I hired Chloe before she got so famous and so expensive. Many a stroke of business Chloe had a hand in, eh, Chloe? Yeh-yeh. Chloe could tell who taught her how to turn a pretty profit now and then, eh, Chloe? Friendship, eh!”
He chuckled, as if remembering old mischief she and he had shared in, dug her in the ribs with his long forefinger, caught the edge of her damp chlamys, trying to pull her closer to him. She broke away, approached Simon from behind and stroked his forehead with her cool hands.
“Poor Simon!” she said merrily. “And he owes me two hundred thousand sesterces! Am I to lose it, Simon? And you so old! You’ll never have time to grow rich again before you die, unless we he
lp you! How shall we do it?”
Tros seemed to know. He reached for pen and ink and set them down in front of Herod. Then he clipped a scrap of parchment from a roll.
“Write!” he commanded. “To the people you refer to as your young men. Bid them release to Chloe, the slave of Pkauchios, my two men from whom you took that letter. Add that secret business will detain you. They are not to be troubled on your account. They are not to go to Balbus.”
Herod ben Mordecai shrugged up his shoulders almost to his ears, then shook his head.
“I won’t!” he said. “Sometimes letters get into the wrong hands. And besides, I can’t — I can’t write.”
Chloe chuckled. Tros reached into a locker behind his chair, chose a long knife, stuck it point first in the table, bent it back toward him and released it suddenly.
“You have until that stops quivering!” he remarked.
Herod began to write with great facility, using Aramaic characters. He covered both sides of the scrap of parchment and then signed his name. Tros scrutinized the writing carefully, then handed it to Simon for a second censorship before entrusting it to Chloe.
“There, you see, there. I have done exactly what you say,” said Herod. “I was only bargaining. We all have our own way of bargaining. You had the better of it. Now let’s be friendly. I wouldn’t have hurt Simon for—”
He wilted into silence under Tros’s stare. He looked puzzled — seemed to wonder what mistake he might have made in judging character. Tros turned to Chloe.
“Understand me now, my two friends first! Go bring them here.”
“Too late!” said Chloe. “I will have to hide them. Remember, I must go to Pkauchios and send him hurrying to Balbus with a reading of the stars!”
Tros nodded, chose a pearl out of the pocket in his belt, held it for a moment between thumb and finger in the lantern light, and tucked it away again. None but he and Chloe was aware of that sideplay.