Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Tros well knew that his crowning indiscretion had been to take Cleopatra into his confidence. He had been fooled by her love of ancient Egypt and by her understanding of the occult teachings of the Mystery of Philae. He had thought her a brilliant mystic in a world of ruthless greed — certainly the hope of Egypt, perhaps the hope of the world. He had discovered that ruthlessness and subtlety were as inseparable in Cleopatra’s consciousness as the two sides of a ray of moonlight.

  From the moment when he had told her of his projected voyage around the world he had been in her net, although it had taken him time to discover the fact. She understood his loyalties and his prodigious sense of gratitude — his will to repay favors and to reward the giver.

  So she had cat-and-moused him, picking his brains while he employed them in her interest. It was her agents in Punt and Arabia who had gathered for him information about almost legendary lands to eastward. She had put at his command the almost fathomless resources of the Library of Alexandria and the spider-web channels of information possessed by the priesthoods of Isis, Serapis, Ammon and Aphrodite. With amusement, and another emotion that she did not confess to herself, though it lurked in her eyes in her moodier moments and Tros detected it, she had shared his prodigious passion for geography. He had an outline map of Africa, compiled from conjecture and hearsay. He had a chart of the Red Sea coastline from Berenice to Punt, and a hearsay and guesswork chart of the ocean and islands between Punt and India, part of it inked in by the Queen’s own hand as the result of the examination of three Greek traders from Socotra, but they had been kept thirsty until willing to talk. Then one of them, with the sound of dripping water in his ears, had told too much — had boasted of a voyage he had made from Socotra eastward, to the land where slant-eyed men made silk from the magical vomit of captive worms, and a river as great as the Nile and as yellow as saffron poured into a sea whose fire made midnight luminous. So that Greek toiled now in the middle oar-bank, against the day when Tros might need him as interpreter and guide. Down on the lower oar-bank, was another, possibly useful pilot from an island far to westward of Africa, who spoke no language comprehensible to anyone but Tros himself and Conops, who had picked up scraps of Basque and could make occasional guesses at what the man meant.

  But those were only parts of Cleopatra’s ways — her baits, like her promise of fifty ships to accompany Tros around the world. Year after year Tros had laughed at himself as a male Penelope, forced for the sake of an ideal to unweave his own work. And now, as he gazed at the cloud-hung coast of Cyprus he knew he was no nearer to his goal, not though he should outwit Romans and Egyptians. He did not even know there were not traitors in the crew, although that was the least of his problems; if Tarquinius, or anyone else, had contrived to corrupt a few of them, he would know how to deal with that. He had the ever reliable Conops and he watched him now, with quiet amusement, training the ten new Jews to their appointed job.

  They lacked the heft and whirlwind blast of charging battleaxmen, but they made up for that with deftness, speed and a ferocious will to earn their freedom. Conops lined them on the poop, and again and again made them leap to the deck to repel imagined boarders, their swords held ready for a lunge when the smashing shields should have hurled an adversary backward on his heels, all point, no time-wasting with the edge of the blade. Then, almost before their feet had touched the deck:

  “Back to him! Back to your lord, you sons of Solomon! By Dionysus’s back teeth, are you corpses, or your owner’s bodyguard? You leave him exposed to arrow-fire? Up-shields to left and right of him, and leave him sword-room! You there, Jacob, what’s a shield for? To hide your modesty, or to fight with and protect your owner? Gladiator, you? You’d last a minute! Let me see that shield dance! Aphrodite Kallipygos! Are you holding up a mirror for a priest to prick his pimples at?

  “Now then: when they come at the quarter-deck you’re not the deck! You don’t wait for ’em! You’re death on the wing, in the air before they know you’ve started. You don’t need half-an-hour to kill your man and get back. You’re too slow forming wedge. The wings don’t fall back. The leader leaps forward, the rest hard after him, four to port and five to starboard. Hit ’em like a thunder-bolt!

  “Jeremiah, let’s try you in the centre this time. Now remember: you kick off the edge of the poop with your right foot, shields at half-arm and hilts well back. Smash, thrust, kill — and back quick! Odd numbers retire first, two paces, then even numbers two paces, odd numbers two paces — and you’re on the poop before a priest could say money! Now then — clear the poop! — Form wedge! — Have at ’em! That’s better! But for the love of your father Abraham, no wonder Pompey took Jerusalem! Why don’t you wait and kiss the enemy? Why not be polite and let him reach the poop ahead of you? Haven’t you ever seen a wave hit a beach and go curtseying back? Well then, try it again.”

  The hatches were on over the upper oar-banks, to make deck-room, and the whole ship’s company was at drill of one kind or another. Tarquinius, not so seasick now, sat on the deckhouse roof pretending to watch the drill. But Tros had observed what might be signals ashore. He watched Tarquinius, trying to imagine what treacheries were brewing in the man’s brain. It would be altogether too risky to arrive in the Bay of Salamis before daybreak, since there were dangerous shoals at the harbor mouth; so it would be quite possible for Tarquinius’s signals, if he should make any, to reach Salamis overland hours in advance of Tros’s arrival. How much truth had Tarquinius told? What did he know? How much was he merely guessing?

  A simple solution would have been to imprison the Etruscan in an empty water-cask in the lower hold, and Tros loved simple solutions. But it would be too much like throwing away a key before discovering which lock it fitted The one almost absolute certainty was that Tarquinius was planning treachery and had not told all the truth, since such men never tell that, even under torture. Parts of the truth, yes. Odds and ends that were true yesterday, or might be true tomorrow, yes. But the truth at the back of his mind, his main information, and the hope or the plan he had based on it, never. There was no way to discover that but to leave him free and watch him.

  There had been time, Tros reflected, since the corn fleet went to sea from Alexandria, for Tarquinius to send a message to Cyprus and to receive an answer. He might have sent such a message overland, by runner, by way of Syria. Through Charmion or the Queen’s secretary he might very easily have learned of the Queen’s intention to send Tros to follow the corn fleet; he might have known that several days before Tros knew it. He might have known it even before the corn fleet went to sea.

  Such men usually have at least a dozen plans in mind. They dream dreams of what they would like to do, and of what they could do, given this or that turn of events; so not improbably Tarquinius had snatched at a thread that spider-webbed into a maze of previous intrigue. He was the kind of man who wrecks the designs of his betters, without ever having an honest design of his own; the kind who perceives a plot where none is, and who never believes the truth because he always thinks he sees some subtlety beneath it.

  Tros sent for him. He came along the swaying deck between two seamen and collapsed limply, pea-green, on a coil of rope.

  “I pity you,” said Tros. “My mercy strains patience. Could you eat a stew of onions and beans and pig-meat?”

  “Sulphury Cocytus! It makes me retch to smell it cooking.”

  “Very well, Shall I set you ashore?”

  “Great Jupiter! You haven’t that much kindness!” He looked incredulous, but a light had leaped into his eyes; they were flinty again, warmed by a colored hint of cunning. The avarice, that such men think is hope, had suddenly dismissed the lamentable complaints of his belly. His fingers gripped his knees. He sat upright. “For the feel of firm earth I would give more than you guess.”

  “Will you meet me in Salamis?”

  “Immo.”

  “On your oath? By what do you swear?” Tros asked him.

  “When I swear to the t
ruth, I swear by Lars Tarquinius.”

  “Swear then, by your sorry-looking, seasick god, that you won’t send word ahead of you by priest or pigeon — for I know there are homing pigeons in every temple hereabouts.”

  “Trust me! Should I find as much as a heap of stinking sacks in the nearest village, you may imagine me snoring on it all night long.”

  “And when you meet me in Salamis you will bring me all the news you can gather?”

  “Aye and gladly, for I like you.”

  Tros did not wish to be too well liked by Lars Tarquinius. He craved his treachery, not his good will. Above all, he wanted him ashore before it was too dark for a pigeon to fly, and before it would be too late to find a fast horse. So he interrupted Conops, and at a gesture the Jews went forward toward the cook-house, breathing through their noses. In another moment the bustle and noise of drill and sword-stick practise was interrupted by Conops’s whistle and shrill-lunged “boat away!” The boat crew, proud of seamanship as well as wary of rope-end and Conops’s knife-hilt, had the eight-oared boat overside before two men could haul out Tarquinius’s baggage. The protesting Tarquinius was swung overside in a noose, gangled above the waves and dumped into the stern seat with a thump that made his body-armor clank like a load of javelins. He vomited at last. But the idea of speed — that he must hurry because Tros was in a hurry — and had been jarred into his consciousness better than words could do it. He might not have believed mere forms of speech.

  Tros eyed the declining sun, wishing he knew more about the ways of pigeons. However, failing pigeons, he felt sure Tarquinius would find some means of making mischief before daylight.

  “Ahiram,” he said, after dark, when the ship was again under weigh, hugging the lee under oar and shortened sail, “since Caesar died the rulers of the world have all been guessing. Aye, and all their generals, and all their captains. None knows what may happen. But I know this:”

  He paused. Ahiram waited, in a sort of deep-sea silence that was part of his nature.

  “An honest man, at such a time, is as a cork on the sea. But a rogue is like a rat that burrows underground toward the weak point.”

  “Aye. But who can see him burrow?” said Ahiram.

  “Where he burrows, he bites,” Tros answered, and Ahiram turned that over slowly in his mind. Suddenly he asked: “You think he bites us?”

  “Are we weak?” Tros answered.

  “Lord Tros, I can read this storm is passing. And another, soon coming, I smell. But your mind I can’t read. Have you a plan?”

  “I smell its makings. I have only an intention, not yet a plan,” Tros answered.

  “So? Then I smell trouble,” said Ahiram. “As for me, I would have skinned that Etruscan. He has told some of the men that Queen Arsinoe pays double wages.”

  Tros nodded. He was beginning to see his way clear. All that night long there were beacons ashore, like rubies on the ledges of the hills.

  CHAPTER V. “Lord Captain Tros!”

  It never was my view, that women are the worse for audacity. To be mothers of sons worth weaning, they should have the manly virtues in addition to the qualities that charm and tempt.

  — From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace

  Dawn glimmered through a cloud bank on the splendid temple of Aphrodite, beyond the wooded plain, high on the hill above Salamis. It shone as white as a hound’s tooth, an enormous mass of buildings within a high wall. For a while after that the astonishing foam along the shoreline merged into land and sea and sky, creating a polychrome haze in which the crew believed they saw Undines and sea-horses — monstrous, mysterious beings that obey the gods but make trouble for me. Out of that presently loomed the walls of Salamis, seventeen feet thick, and beneath those the masts of a hundred ships.

  The River Bocarus, half hidden by myrtle and oleander, was a shadow shaped like a man’s leg running, to the left of the city. Foam boiled over shoals at the harbor-mouth. The serpent on the bow of Tros’s trireme flashed its golden tongue straight at the city as the ship rose and fell on the waves at the bar that came tumbling from three directions. Eastward, astern, toward the coast of Phoenicia, there were mountainous seas, although the wind had died, but within the wide harbor it was as calm as a mill pond. There, their masts hardly moving against the city wall, the Egyptian corn fleet rode at anchor. Two small Roman biremes lay between them and the seaward channel.

  “So we have them,” said Ahiram.

  “If we have brains, and a little luck, and some guts in our bellies,” Tros answered. He was watching the broken rhythm of the waves and the skirling seabirds, studying the channel, which had shoaled badly of recent years. He decided he needed more sea-room. He had in mind the corvi on those biremes — long gangplanks with a spike at the end. Let Romans drop those on a ship’s deck and a sea-fight would become a land-fight such as suited Roman genius. So the cymbals clashed and the ship went forward under oars at quarter speed another cable’s length toward the city where the harbor widened out and there was room to turn.

  There was nothing that was not ready for instant action. The crew had been fed in the dark. The gray flax battle-sails were brailed up to the three big yards, ready to be sheeted down in an instant; even if there were no wind they were a protection against arrow fire. There were men at the sheets and braces, casual-looking, careful to appear seamanly unexcited, but every living man of them watching Tros with the side of his eye. All the paulins were off; the master-archers were lovingly wiping imagined damp off the cords of the arrow-engines. The arrow baskets were in place. The enormous weights that provided power for the catapults had been cranked to the top of the stanchions, down between which they would fall on the propelling levers, and thence on to wicker-work cushions below, at the touch of the decurion’s trigger.

  Those catapults were the deadliest war-engines afloat. Their lead missiles were loaded with stuff that was worse than Greek fire, and their range was twice that of any Roman weapon, though they were difficult to aim on a tumbling sea and their layers gave themselves the airs of master artists. There were a decurion and ten men to each catapult, to crank the weights, roll the leaden balls into place, pour in water and plug them, and to manhandle the revolving platforms. Those were picked men, who gave themselves more airs than Tros himself, even though they feared the fire-balls and believed Tros was in league with the powers of darkness. If he were not a black-magician, how should sea-water, poured into evil-smelling stuff of which one ingredient was known to be yellowish crystals scraped from beneath old heaps of cattle dung, make the missiles take fire and explode with frightful heat and suffocating stench? They were assistant-magicians, of superior intelligence and entrails, whose special god was Pluto. Nevertheless, they appealed for special speed to Hermes when they aimed the catapults before loading, and then served them like lightning, lest the balls should burst inboard or in air before they struck their target. They were proud servants of a special mystery, armed, nevertheless, with shields and javelins for repelling boarders.

  There was commotion on the decks of the Roman biremes. They began to clear in haste for action throwing dunnage and small boats overboard. Their oars appeared and they rowed up close to their anchors, but they did not weigh yet, and the corn fleet seemed asleep. Tros let his trireme swing until her beam was toward the city, so that he could turn whichever way he pleased and keep the Romans guessing.

  A man at Tros’s mainmast-top hailed the quarter-deck, gesturing. From northward, around the corner, with a man standing in the bow to con the course, and pitching like a porpoise at play, came Tros’s long-boat rowed by eight Gauls with Conops in the stern making signals, unintelligible except that they were urgent. Tros, after one glance seaward continued to watch the harbor front.

  “You expect Tarquinius?” asked Ahiram, between Tros and the helmsman.

  “No,” he answered, fairly confident that he had out-guessed that specialist in treachery. “I expect proof of his night’s work. With his feet on dry lan
d, vinegary malice should have strengthened his stomach. His is a fox’s stomach in a body-full of envy. If there is a horse in Cyprus, he found it and reached Salamis. But he won’t show himself to us. He likes to think he makes and unmakes kingdoms from behind the throne.”

  “I would have drowned him,” said Ahriam.

  “That is why you are twice my age and not yet captain of a ship,” Tros answered.

  There was activity at a stone pier at the harbor-front, difficult to make out because of the ships between and because the shadows of clouds were obscuring the view. Low visibility — a kind of hyphen-light between storm and storm. A small boat reached one of the Roman biremes, conveying a man in a glittering helmet. Presently he had himself rowed to the other bireme. Both biremes drew in their oars but continued to ride short to their anchors. Their decks were dark with armed men. The sun vanished. There came a squall of rain, then a sharp blast of wind from east-northeast, ice-cold from the Taurus Mountains. There would blow a Levanter before long.

  The longboat reached the trireme and two Gauls collapsed, rowed out, falling on their oars. Conops came up like a monkey, and the boat hard after him, walked up and swung inboard, crew and all, almost before Conops had reached the quarter-deck on the run. He saluted, more for time to get his breath than because he remembered manners.