Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  There was a pause — a kind of supernatural hush. The howl of the storm and the thump of waves against the trireme’s bow became unnatural silence, as if gods attended. Anchises, beaten away from the quinquireme, two of his ships burned and two sunk by the Roman’s dolphins, with his choice between a lee shore and a last, desperate feat of arms, re-formed what was left of his squadron and signalled the vessels that Tros had beaten off. Some of them were trying to thrash to sea; others had anchored to ride the gale and rest exhausted rowers. They rallied to Anchises’s summons, gathered astern of the trireme and approached, plunging in two lines ahead, rowing like titans, the leading ships protected by a barbette of locked shields.

  Tros sent thirty more archers to the quarter-deck to be under Ahiram’s orders. Only two of his arrow-engines could be brought to bear astern, and of those one had been wrecked by the flying rigging. Ahenobarbus’s balistae could have raked the pirates’ broadside. They were just within the Roman’s range; a proportion of shots could hardly have failed to hit that sprawling target. But the Roman did nothing. If he awaited Tros’s signal for help, he wasted guess-work.

  Arsinoe laughed in Tros’s ear: “After you have slain my friends the pirates, will you do me the favor to teach your Roman friend a lesson?”

  He spared her a grin. He had seen smoke — no need to wish the Romans any worse luck! He watched his own midship arrow-engines taking instant advantage of any swerve in the pirates’ line, strode to the men at the after-catapults and warned them to be frugal with the few remaining fire-balls, climbed to the quarter-deck and clapped Ahiram between the shoulder-blades.

  “Good comrade!”

  “We should have used the oars,” said Ahiram.

  Tros stared astern at the oncoming pirates. True, he might have made open sea and comparative safety under oars in the teeth of the gale. Might have. It was too late now. The pirates’ archers on the leading ships already were getting the range; their arrows fell spent on the deck, but in another minute they would come in screaming dozens that would test helmets and armor. It was clear the pirates meant to grapple the trireme’s stern. They would be slaughtered like rats, but some of them would man-handle the flukes of their anchors through the cabin ports. Then the plunging vessels could lie lashed together, to be abandoned, to smash one another and sink. Anchises meant to win the trireme or perish. Tros ordered the catapult crews to bring their slings and fire-balls to the quarter-deck; he put them, too, under Ahiram’s orders.

  Then, with the exception of the crews who manned the arrow-engines, and their guards, he divided his remaining men and sent a full third of them to the bow under Conops’s command.

  The remainder he formed up in a solid mass, all forward of the mainmast, leaving the space between them and the quarter-deck to tempt Anchises. Lacking his beloved Northmen, he had no hope of keeping the pirates off the trireme. Even now, after all their losses, they outnumbered him two, perhaps three to one.

  They were desperate, well led, well armed, with certain death behind them, and with exhausted oarsmen they could not possibly escape into the storm. They had to win or perish. If they should anchor out of range, they would be catapulted out of existence as soon as the storm died. They were probably short of water, and of food too. If they should make for the shore they would be wrecked in the raging surf, and butchered on the beach if they could swim.

  They probably had Greek fire; it was one of the pirates’ secrets. If so, they would use it unless they should see a chance to seize the trireme. They appeared to have used it on Ahenobarbus’s quinquireme; her lower deck was ablaze, but the Romans, with nothing else to occupy them, had got the fire in control and were smothering it with wet sand. To fight Greek fire and pirates simultaneously would be an almost hopeless feat of arms; but they would hardly be likely to try to burn what they believed they might capture and put to their own use.

  So Tros had made the stern impregnable and left the ship’s waist apparently unprotected. Most of the men crouched below the bulwarks. He and a group of archers were in full view on the midship deckhouse, and the bow was crowded, but the waist of the ship was the jaws of a trap. There was another anchor ready to let go, in case Anchises should struggle to windward and cut the hawser; but the pirates’ rowers were spent; they were rowing to whip, slaves, some of them chained to the benches; they were bucketing, missing badly, laboring with the last of their strength against wind and sea. Anchises, leading on his long red slaver, saw the unprotected bulwarks, signalled his fleet and came on, flogging his floundered rowers until their oars smashed against the trireme and the heavy grapnel, swung by its chain from the slaver’s spar, crashed override and bit the trireme’s deck. It bit deep. It weighed a quarter of a ton; its chain was as thick as a man’s wrist.

  Fire-balls lobbed into the ships astern. A hail of arrows swept the pirates’ decks; they hardly answered it, hauling along the counter under locked shields, two of them afire, their crews leaping from ship to ship; the burned ships, cut adrift to save the others, wallowed down-wind, their fettered, frantic rowers writhing in the smoke as they struggled to break free. Two vessels, caught by a mountainous wave as they changed helm, crashed and broke like egg-shells. Four fire-balls missed and fell harmless between colliding hulls, but a fifth found its mark down the hatch of the middle one of three vessels that were grappled together, made fast by one warp to the chain of Anchises’s grapnel. All three crews abandoned ship, many of them drowning, some crushed between the crashing hulls, others shot down by the trireme’s archers. About half of them reached Anchises’s crowded deck. He blew a trumpet-blast. It was answered from the far side, and then came the assault, from both sides of the trireme simultaneously. On the starboard side Anchises led — a six-foot Hercules, in Roman armor, with a Parthian scimitar, protected by two Scythians with studded shields. The pirate leader on the port side was a Greek, who fell dead on the deck, shot as he turned to encourage his men.

  Rain, and a tempest squall of wind — a heaving deck — thunder — lightning — hordes of well-armed pirates swarming overside — and then Tros’s bull-lunged order:

  “Charge! Clear the main deck!”

  He beckoned Conops. The pirate vessels were fast alongside and astern; there was no need now to guard the ship’s bow with more than an anchor-watch of a dozen men. Over the top of the superstructures, with the Jews behind him, and a third of the trireme’s crew behind them, Conops came like the heart of the storm. Tros leaped into the melee, the Jews hard after him. He slipped, staggered, fell on the heaving wet deck, but the flying wedge split the pirate ranks and in a second he was roofed by ten shields, hedged by ten swords, hauled out backward and helped to his feet by Conops.

  “All right, master?”

  “Aye. Clear away their grapnel. Cut their ships adrift.”

  “Aye, aye, master!”

  Tros sought Anchises. There was hardly room in the crowded waist to lunge and parry. He had seen Anchises try to storm the quarter-deck and fall back on the heads of his men. Then he vanished, but there was small doubt what he was trying to do. The sheer weight of his men behind him would be likely to burst the cabin door and overwhelm the steward and his fellow-archers. He would do all the possible damage he could before the now inevitable end. If he could fire the cabin he would do that.

  There was an archer, up beside Arsinoe on the top of the midship deckhouse, sending arrow after arrow down the passage in front of the door. Tros sent a Jew to command him to cease fire. Then he charged at the head of the flying wedge, through a shambles, dead and dying cluttering the deck, the pirates slashing at their opponents’ faces and Tros’s men putting to use the less spectacular, more deadly swordsmanship that he had drilled into them as part of the ship’s discipline, the day’s work, the efficiency that gave them freedom of the sea.

  Half of the pirates, under locked shields, climbing on each other, stormed the quarter-deck, but they were hurled back by Ahiram’s men. On the port side, under a leader with gold the arche
rs on the deckhouse. They clambered along outside the earrings and raven hair, some fifty of them tried to fight their way forward. They leaped to the shrouds and were shot down by bulwarks and were chopped by javelins. They charged along the blood-set deck and fell before Tros’s veterans. Each decurion and ten was a unit, taught to fight as a unit, but the pirates relied on sheer ferocity and paid for it — four, five, six for the drilled men’s one.

  On the starboard deck seamen and rowers, bully-damned by Conops and protected by whoever could get near enough, were rigging a purchase on the pirates’ grapnel. Presently, above the clash of arms, the thunder, the roar of the storm and the cries of wounded, came Conops’s triumphant brass-lunged bellow:

  “All clear! They’re adrift!”

  The weight of Anchises’s long ship, loosed and careened to a beam sea, hurled by a mountainous wave against the ships astern, broke chains and tore their grapnels from the oaken woodwork. Ship crashed ship. Ahiram’s men broke loose the port side grapnels. Swamping, colliding, foundering. Anchises’s whole fleet rolled shoreward.

  Then the pirates cried quarter, and Tros let them have it, being minded that some of them might make good replacements on the lower oar-bench; and he had seen another problem — a big one that brooked little delay. A few pirates, expecting to be crucified, jumped overboard in their armor, preferring to drown, but the others threw down their arms Tros glanced at the Roman quinquireme. He had to be quick.

  However, first Anchises. Unwounded, unwearied, his scimitar unnicked, unbloodied, his gait a kind of bear-like crouch, he came forth from the shelter of the stewards’ lean-to, glaring, his chin on the edge of his shield, his eyes like black opals. Every archer on the trireme drew bow at him, but Tros roared “Hold!” and the bow-strings eased. Anchises was a king by his own reckoning, a bold adventurer by any standard. He had his rights, or at least his privilege.

  “Do you yield?” Tros asked.

  Anchises spat. He surveyed the carnage. He eyed Tros. In an unexpectedly cultured voice he answered:

  “Do I meet Lord Tros of Samothrace?”

  “If you make haste yes, Anchises.”

  Arsinoe leaped to the deck and stood near Tros, unnoticed; she was pushed aside by seamen who were stripping pirates’ bodies and heaving them overboard, dead or wounded. Conops, with his long knife flickering, came and shoved the Jews back in a line, to give Tros sword-room. He ordered corpses moved, yelled for a sand-box, spilled it and scattered the sand on the slippery deck. Ahiram shouted from the quarter-deck:

  “The Roman’s anchor drags, Lord Captain!”

  Tros already knew that. Anchises had the privilege to die by duel before Ahenobarbus might claim any favors. The crew roared as Tros strode to the midst of the deck and rutched his sandals on the spread sand. Conops, bent-kneed, crouching behind him in front of the fascinated Jews, stuttered advice:

  “He’s all edge, master! Watch for his back-hand upper-cut! Give him the point, and keep your shield low! He’ll slash at your face! When he does that, step in with a belly-ripper!”

  “Keep away, little man! No interference!”

  Suddenly Anchises moved. He approached like a bear, swaying, stalking toward the starboard hand to get the rain out of his eyes. There came a terrific roll of thunder — forked lightning — Anchises leaped at Tros as if he were the lightning’s rider — down the rolling deck, up-slashing with the scimitar. It glanced off Tros’s shield and he reeled backward with Tros’s point at his mid-riff, splitting the chain mail.

  “Blood! First blood!” yelled Conops.

  Tros had to wait for the roll of the ship; it gave Anchises time to recover and resume his crouch. Conops yelled a warning as the deck hove down to starboard and Tros lunged with the whole of his strength and weight. The pirate side-stepped, toward Tros’s right, turned the point on his shield and loosed a whistling slice back-handed, upward — by the half of a lightning-flash too late. It slid off Tros’s armored shoulder — nicked his helmet. Tros faced the rain and went in after him, forcing him back on his heels toward the Jews, who had to be beaten back by Conops. They were yelling, frantic, gesturing the gladiator strokes that Tros should make. Sword and scimitar flashed, clashed, clangored like sledge on anvil. Tros’s shield beat Anchises’s face and sent him reeling down-deck, Tros after him — over him, timing his lunge to the trireme’s roll. The pirate fell, slid, rolled into the scupper and, catching the roll again, scrambled free — on his feet in a second, but off-balance. Tros’s point struck him between the throat and chin. He fell dead. The crew roared. The Jews danced and sang a song about a man named Jeshua who made the sun stand still and slew a hundred thousand. Conops pounced to strip Anchises’s armor, as Tros’s booty, before some thieving seaman would steal the gold from the buckles and clasps.

  Ahiram shouted from the quarter-deck again:

  “Good sword, Lord Captain! But the Roman drags! Two anchors down! He drags fast!”

  Then Arsinoe: “Lord Captain Tros—”

  “You may have your dead pirate,” he answered. “Give him a grave in Salamis and carve there: ‘he obeyed a royal summons!’”

  She had to clutch Tros’s arm to keep her balance on the swaying deck. Rain streamed from their helmets. Her drenched, flimsy himation clung to her naked legs, and her disheveled, wet hair blew against Tros’s armor as he faced the rain and shouted. She could not have heard, had he spoken with less vehemence:

  “Now, next, we deal with Ahenobarbus!”

  “Let him wreck!” she answered.

  He roared to Conops: “Bid the steward clear his crew out of the cabin!” Then, to Arsinoe: “I am a huckster, not a monarch!”

  “You will sell me to Ahenobarbus?”

  He laughed. He pointed to the cabin. She refused to enter it. Shivering from cold, bedraggled, but brave she let go his arm, dismissed him with a gesture and then followed him to the quarter-deck, where a seaman found her cloak and wrapped it around her.

  CHAPTER VIII. Gnaeus Ahenobarbus

  No victory is won until its purpose is attained. Its purpose should be to prevent what was bad from becoming worse.

  — From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace

  Mutiny. The battle-weary rowers refused to man the upper oar-bank. They knew what that work meant, with the ship pitching and rolling on breaking waves. They demanded wine. Tros gave it to them, with the wine of his wrath to follow — fist-work, belaying pins, knotted ropes’ ends. With his Jews behind him, but his sword sheathed, he charged at the sulkiest groups and flung the strongest, the most vociferous the least tractable, heads over heels down the opened hatch. Conops worked with his knife-hilt. The decurions took courage and became aware of which side they were on. Two Gauls, who drew their weapons at Tros, were knocked senseless and lashed to the mast, for later punishment in case their brains had survived the beating.

  The bards were hauled out from the deckhouse surgery by the scruffs of their necks, kicked below and told to be obscenely merry if they loved their hides and bellies. The port covers came off. The waves swished in. But the long upper oars, manned double, went out on the tholes. The wild harps, thrummed and there began the oar-beat chorus about how sailors worship Aphrodite Kallipygos — her of the Olympian buttocks — a heartening song, as full of home truths as there are hairs on a woman’s head and dockside revelries in seamen’s history.

  Then a greater art than war, a greater miracle than love. Seamanship! Mastery — absolute courage — skill beyond the heart or competence of common mortals — godly, superb, unsung, incomparable stuff, for which sins are forgiven. Man’s will, for man’s purpose, imposed upon winds and waves that know no fear, law, judgment, tolerance nor mercy.

  Up-anchor, a broken capstan and the taut flax cable walked in, with the deck awash as the trireme buried her bow and shipped it green. A half-hour’s struggle, man relieving man at the blistering, bruising, bucking white-ash oars. A punctured goatskin full of whale oil, shot on a line from a forward catapult to slick down t
he breakers — a slick that spread down-wind and eased the Romans’ oar-work; they, too, had manned their upper sweeps to ease the strain on the dragging anchors, but the wallowing, top-heavy quinquireme bullied her cables and rolled her oar-ports under, nearer, each roll, to the beach where the pirate and liburnian hulls lay smashed in the hammering surf and two more quinquiremes, keels upward, rose and fell amid bursting breakers.

  Thunder and lightning. Torrents of icy rain that made high noon a dim gray gloaming. Two scraps of sail for the aid of the laboring helmsmen, set by Ahiram’s trusties in the teeth of a squall that blew the stinging spindrift mainmast high. Fathom upon fathom made good, diagonally, crabwise, until the quinquireme wallowed directly astern at last and, at a signal from Tros’s upflung right arm, Conops let go the bower anchor. It held. The thick flax hawser held.

  There was magic of helm and storm-sail then, manoevering for position, until Conops let go the second anchor. Then at last the cymbals clanged “Rest oars!” The after starboard catapult shot a bag full of sand down-wind on a line to the quinquireme. It killed a man, but the Romans bent on their hawser; that was walked aboard, and for a while both ships lay plunging to Tros’s trireme’s anchors. The Romans ignored his signals. He had to shoot them another sand-bag, with a written message, threatening to cut them adrift. After that they hauled up on their own anchors, labored by oar up-wind, let go again close to the trireme’s stern, and eased away.

  For a night, and a day, and the following night the trireme rode out the storm, with an after-watch ready with axes to chop through the Roman’s hawser in case the forward watch should signal that the anchors dragged, or that the chafing anchor-cables looked like parting in the strain. Tros spent hours with the wounded, advising this and that gruesome surgery. He ordered the dead laid in the lower hold, beneath one of the purple sails, because a seaman craves shore burial and seemly ceremonies for his bones. He attended to the exemplary flogging of some mutineers, studied the battle damage, promoted men to replace dead decurions, fettered the captured pirates in the gloom of the lower oar-deck to acquire a yearning for the good opinion of their fellow-men; slept, when he did sleep, in a hammock in the midship deckhouse, and avoided Arsinoe although he sent her plenty of water, and was interested that she washed her own himation.