Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Tros whistled softly to himself. Careful Esias had played safe, had he? Always on both sides, Esias, and yet never to be caught in an intrigue, because he never did too much, nor too soon.

  Arsinoe laughed. “Esias was so timid that I had to threaten to go straight to Alexandria and appeal to you. After that, though, I sold him the vessel and borrowed money from him — quite a lot of money. I was almost caught in Pelusium, because I paid my men with Esias’s money and they got drunk. But Esias hid me, and sent his slaves to round them up. It was from Esias that I learned how Boidion had crossed the desert, and how the border patrol had been bribed to know nothing about it. She had gone up the eastern branch of the Nile, she and her party, in a number of vessels that belong to the priests and are not subject to search.

  “I bought equipment in Pelusium — black Arabian tents and many other things. I, and my two women, and my four-and-twenty men went up the Nile in laden barges to Heliopolis. It was easy for my men to pretend they were travelers on the way to Arabia. No one questioned them. And as for me and my women, we were wives of Memphis merchants on our way home. I had bought two men-slaves in Pelusium, at a very high price, because Esias recommended them; so that we looked like respectable women. They are very good slaves. They have been spying for me. They brought me news of the arrival of Alexis and Aristobolus; and I knew then it would not be long before they would march on Memphis.”

  “Do you know Alexis?” Tros asked.

  “No. I daresay I have seen him, but I forget what he looks like. Tarquinius told me Cleopatra trusts Alexis, but that it was actually he who first invented the plot to make use of Boidion, and that he suggested it to Cassius.

  “I was camped on the far bank, as I suppose Conops told you. I had bought camels, and I was wondering how long it would be before camels and tents and four-and-twenty men would bring inquisitive people to find out whose camp it might be. However, Conops was the first. He came and tried to steal my boats. I didn’t know it was Conops — not then. But, as Sigurdsen has told you, one of my men came spying here and talked with Sigurdsen and brought back word. So I decided to come here, at all risks, and to try to rescue and enlist your Northmen. You had spoken so well of them. If I could get them, even if they hadn’t weapons, I would begin to feel more competent to challenge Boidion. Something would have to develop from that — I didn’t know what, but something. There was just a chance, too, that I might persuade a few Egyptian guards to join me.

  “I found Conops’s boat on this side of the river, and the men whom he had left to guard it talked like children, because they had seen me in battle on your ship. Sol learned you were coming. And then Conops nearly killed me by accident. And where the faithful dog is, his master is not far distant.”

  “Oh-heh! Number One! Conops!” cried a voice in outer darkness.

  “Oh-heh! Number Two! Conops!”

  “Oh-heh! Number Three! Conops!”

  Silence. Hurrying, staggering footfalls, deadened by the sand. Then a voice:

  “Where’s master?”

  “This way!”

  Ten men reeled through the open gate behind another who was bowlegged and hardly higher than the others’ shoulders. Conops’s unmistakable voice:

  “Halt! ‘Ten-shun! Fall out now and get yourselves a drink. Then down the hatch for a couple o’ snores and sleep like dead men! You’ll be needed at daybreak, sure as death. Stand at ease! Stand easy! Fall away!”

  He shoved himself a passage between seated men and stood with his back to the fire, saluting Tros. But he couldn’t keep his one eye off the Northmen. It danced sideways. He was grinning — dog-tired — merry.

  “Well? What?”

  “Did it, master! Easy. All the temple troops were on the march already, direction o’ Memphis. Nothing but a lot o’ priests to interfere with us; and they were saucy, so we burned the pier, too. Scuttled some boats, fired the others and stood by to be sure they burned good. Had to shoot about a dozen priests, I reckon. Then we cut the moorings o’ some and they drifted into dry reeds by the bank lower down. You’d ha’ thought all Egypt was burning. It stopped the troops. They halted and sent gallopers to find out whose army was into their rear. We came back downstream as fast as we could make it. Our boats are where you left ’em, and the watch awake. From that bit o’ high ground where you and I stood conning, I could still see that column on the march. They’ve connected that party o’ troops from the temple, in a pool o’ moonlight and there they’ve all dropped anchor. Wondering what next, I reckon. My boat’s crew are used up, master; I’ve dismissed ’em.”

  “You may lie on my cloak and get some sleep yourself,” Tros answered. “You have done well.”

  Conops saluted and backed away, almost into the fire. He grinned all around the circle.

  “Thought I smelt herring! Well, I’ve smelt worse! Battle-ax me if here isn’t old topmast himself, alive and growling natural! How’s Odin?”

  Sigurdsen rose to his feet. Tros interrupted:

  “Manners, you wharf-rat!”

  Conops came closer and faced Arsinoe. He straightened his face, straightened the knife at his belt, put his hands to his sides, his heels together, and bowed low.

  “Your obedient servant, Princess!”

  “Fall away!” Tros commanded. “Take my cloak and turn in!”

  “Aye, aye, master.”

  CHAPTER XIX. “Tros! Tros!”

  I know of no justification for the wars that men wage on one another. On the other hand, I know no reason, and perceive no wisdom in the floods and famines, pestilence and earthquakes, fire and hurricane, which priests say that the gods devise against us.

  — From the Log of Lord Captain of Samothrace

  “Cavalry! Chariots!” said Tros, aloud, then shut his mouth tight. He habitually thought in terms of swift manoeuvre, ruse, economy of men, and sudden impact. But he had no cavalry, and it was no use wishing. In fighting on land he lacked experience, and he knew it, but he didn’t share that secret with his men. They regarded him as almost a god of battles. Arsinoe, who watched him with a cat-wise alertness, wondering at his apparent self-assurance, ventured a half-mocking comment.

  “You will need to be lucky tonight! I came to die with you. Like Sigurdsen. I think we die here. Between Cassius’s and Cleopatra’s claws, perhaps death will be the best thing.”

  “Luck is on the side of him who knows luck when he sees it!” Tros answered. He didn’t want any of that kind of talk.

  Luck began to arrive, a full hour before dawn. Scores of the peasant-laborers, who had fled southward from the burning barracks, served as well as any screen of scouting cavalry. They gave ample warning that the enemy was marching to attack.

  They came phantoming back to avoid being caught and made to carry ammunition, water and other heavy burdens. Besides, they knew where the supplies of ground millet, onions, radishes and oil were hidden in tombs. They helped themselves. They were pounced on and looted in turn. Every man in Tros’s command had had a full meal before sunrise, chopping up the gate for fuel, building little fires behind the wall, out of sight of the advancing enemy. Fed bellies made stubborn fighters.

  Tros made his depositions long before daylight. He could not afford to occupy a wide front, against what would be overwhelming numbers unless his force was concentrated and kept well in hand. His scouts reported sixteen war-chariots; those were possibly from Memphis, they might have been concealed in a temple courtyard out of Conops’s view. If well handled they were a deadly menace. They would be manned by archers and used for out-flanking purposes. Tros chose his battle-fronts with chariots in mind. He took Sigurdsen, Conops and five decurions to point out to them exactly the positions they should take up. They marked their stations to avoid confusion. He let his men lie at ease behind the wall. Avoiding the usual Roman commanders’ mistake of upsetting nerves by getting tired men too soon into the battle-line.

  Arsinoe walked with him. There was no denying her, short of blunt rebuke, and he didn’t cho
ose to hurt her feelings, if he could help it. She seemed to be studying him and his depositions as if destiny depended, not on what he would do, but on her understanding how and why he did it. A long-thighed, actively striding girl, looking, beside Tros, like a lad of eighteen. Sigurdsen paid her a good deal of attention. He said her hair was like a Norse girl’s, and that it was a pity she should die so young and lovely.

  “For here we die. But we will hew our swath first! Perhaps they will take you prisoner — and what then?”

  “They won’t,” she answered.

  Satisfied with his own assigned position, Sigurdsen took a little interest in the rest of Tros’s arrangements, although he gave advice when asked. Tros made a point of asking him to keep the giant from glooming, to force him to try to think and speak in a way less likely to discourage the decurions. But Sigurdsen had always been worse than a pessimist until the actual fighting started.

  The left wing was to rest on the long wall with the gate fifty yards to its rear — seamen under the command of two decurions, Pertinax and Thestius. The right wing, under Conops, consisting of the ten Jews and thirty seamen, was to rest against a honeycomb of open tombs that would make them very difficult indeed to outflank. Sigurdsen and his battle-ax-men were to hold the centre, facing nearly due south. Tros himself, with three decurions and thirty men, would take position with their backs to the wall, in reserve, to reinforce any part of the line that looked like breaking. Between the centre and the wings, on either side, some captured laborers were put to digging short trenches, in which the archers were to keep cover and be frugal with their perilously scanty ammunition. Facing south by southwest, with the pyramids on their Left hand, they would not have the sun in their eyes, as the enemy would have, should they attempt a turning movement.

  At last Arsinoe broke silence. “And I, Lord Captain? Where is my place?”

  “Your men will be distributed to fight under my decurions. I have ordered it so.”

  She answered him very calmly and without heroics, but she held her chin high.

  “Is this not my battle? Is it yours only? Do you think, because I am a woman, and a Ptolemy, I am unfit to lead my own men? They are my men.”

  “You will obey me.”

  “Then command me!”

  It was true, he had ignored her. He could have told her to hide in a tomb, but he knew he would have to assign valuable men to keep her from coming out.

  “You will stand by me with the reserve.”

  She saluted. He returned into the enclosure and talked to the men, explaining to them what they would be called upon to do, wasting no breath on bombast.

  “You men know me, and I know you,” he said finally. “Let us remember we are proud to be comrades-in-arms!”

  There was no mistaking their answer. It was the growling roar of men who will do their ungrudging utmost. After that, he led his archers to the trenches and gave each man careful instruction.

  Daybreak revealed the enemy less than half-a-mile distant, but Tros’s position would remain for a long while yet in shadow. The intervening sand was ominously strewn with mummies that resembled blackened corpses on a stricken battlefield. Evidently Conops had only seen about half of the men at the temple up-river; the combined forces of the enemy, in dense formation, looked like five or six hundred men. Some of them were probably non-combatants; but there seemed, too, to be armed men in reserve, in the shadow around and behind a quite small pyramid. There were sixteen two-horsed chariots out in front, in line, and in one of them stood a woman, not in armor. She had two fan-bearers up behind her. Fans such as those were the royal insignia. Her chariot was surrounded by a dozen footmen in splendid armor. Scouting ahead was a line of about thirty men, advancing timidly, expecting to be met by arrow-fire from ambush.

  “Boidion!” Arsinoe laughed. “Boidion, you poor fool!”

  Not Boidion’s chariot, but another, came trotting forward alone. The intention was obvious. From behind the screen of scouts its occupant proposed to harangue Tros’s men, to offer terms, and perhaps to offer a price for Tros himself, dead or alive. But there was no sign of Tros’s actual position until the chariot approached too near to the hurriedly dug trenches. Then a bow drawn by a Cretan archer twanged. The plumed and cloaked occupant of the chariot fell backward, clutching an arrow that pierced his throat. The charioteer whirled his horses and galloped away. The dead man’s cloak became a range-mark for the archers.

  It was then that Conops’s trumpet sounded “battle stations!” They poured through the gate in good order, in no haste, to their appointed places in the line. It was too late then for the enemy to alter a plan of battle conceived in the dark in overconfidence; a manoeuvre now, at such close quarters, would have offered Tros too good an opportunity to strike and rout the manoeuvring companies. Nor was it possible to come at his flank without being thrown into confusion by the honeycomb of open tombs; and to get behind him would entail a long march, leaving a reduced force facing him.

  Their strategy was as evident as daylight: failing overtures, to rely on overwhelming numbers. They could no more afford to try to starve Tros out than could he afford to refuse battle.

  They must snatch swift victory or else abandon hope of taking Memphis. The city would surely not surrender to them, and incur the risk of Cleopatra’s subsequent revenge, if there were a Queen’s force, undefeated, within striking distance.

  Alexis might be in command, but at any rate he was certain to have painted a vivid picture of Tros’s small force and scanty supplies. He would have represented the Queen as lacking any loyal troops to send to Tros’s support. But Memphis would know nothing of Alexis’s story — not yet. What Memphis did know was, that the Queen held hostages. If rebellion failed she would be ruthless. Memphis would wait and see. For the rebels it was fight, or fail before rebellion had well begun; they had to smash Tros or else confess failure.

  So the chariots wheeled away to the enemy’s left flank — fifteen of them, all in one direction. Tros told off a man to watch them. A fanfaronade of trumpets split the morning air. There arose a roar from the enemy’s ranks. The advance commenced, in a hurry, with barely space enough between the serried companies to cushion the inevitable pressure of the wings on the centre as they charged a narrower front than their own.

  Tros, up on the well-coping with his back to the wooden gallows-post, groaned for his trireme’s arrow-engines. They were a motley host that came against him — men of all races, armed as happened. Greeks in light hoplite armor; archers in bronze and leather; pikemen in heavy armor, helmeted like Roman gladiators; coal-black Nubians in lionskin with oxhide shields and iron-bladed stabbing spears that danced in the sun to the time of their thundering song. In the centre marched a heavy phalanx, eighty strong, of men who looked like Thracians. A scattering of Roman uniforms; some turbaned Parthians; Arabs; but no native Egyptians, except the wretched peasantry, who lugged heavy arrow-baskets in the rear of the thundering ranks. Ninety per cent of the officers were kilted Greeks, out in front of their men.

  It was a force that should have wilted away under the fire of well drilled archers. Tros’s archers were experts; but he had had to order them to hold fire until they could make every last arrow count at close range. Men had been told off to gather the enemy’s arrows to replenish the few dozen that each archer had stuck in the sand in the trench beside him.

  Sigurdsen’s men crouched in the archers’ trenches, leaving a tempting gap for the advancing phalanx. It came on at the double — a slow, heavy-pounding jog-trot, to break Tros’s line at the gap. Tros’s archers, at less than fifty yards range, sent a sudden, screaming hail of arrows into the light infantry on either flank of the phalanx, checking, for a moment halting them in confusion. The phalanx came on alone, led by a Macedonian protected by two swordsmen. All three fell to Sigurdsen’s ax — three swipes that split them down before they could think how to engage the unfamiliar weapon. Those were the first three to be slain in close combat.

  Sigurd
sen went berserker. Heaving the-officer’s corpse left-handed, he hurled it against three spearmen, leaped into the gap and battle-axed a swath for his men to follow through. They went in wedge-wise. Long spears, once their front was broken, were as useless against axes as so many ornamental awning-poles. They were worse than useless. The swinging axes shore through bronze armor, or beat men to earth by the sheer weight of the blow. The recovering, back-handed upswing was equally deadly, cleaving arm-pits, laying bellies open, splitting unguarded chins. The phalanx went down, and was not. Three wounded Northmen rolled into an archer’s trench, and Sigurdsen went forward, he and his men roaring their battle-cry:

  “Tros! Tros!”

  That was contrary to orders. Tros had forbidden a charge until he should perceive the right moment. Both his wings were being hard pressed. Conops on the right wing appeared to be doing well against Nubians, who were no match for the seamen who had stood off boarders in the storm off Salamis. But the seamen on the left wing under Pertinax and Thestius were being forced backward along the wall. The line was becoming bent like a taut bow. Two companies of the enemy formed a column and rushed at a converging angle to split Tros’s line in half by storming the gap that the Northmen had left in their rear. The Northmen were cut off — surrounded — fighting back to back.

  Tros went into battle then. He charged with all his reserves behind him, to make the gap good.

  There was ten minutes’ carnage. Wounded, with an arrow through the calf of his leg, recklessly protected by his seamen, Tros held the line, until at last the storming companies recoiled and Sigurdsen, ten Northmen shy, fought his way back, exhausted, bleeding, leaning on his axe to recover breath while his men rallied in line in the gap. Tros’s archers reopened a withering fire with the enemy’s squandered arrows. The enemy’s centre was beaten, discouraged, and out of control.

  “Charge!” yelled Sigurdsen.

  Tros smote him. There was no other way to check that battle-drunkard. The left wing was curling up. The enemy had fought their way along the wall. The wall was in the way of a right-handed man, but they had won by weight of numbers.