by Talbot Mundy
“Do the stars foretell another Caesar?” she asked. “Will Cleopatra reduce him, and then deify him, so that he may make her Queen of the World, as Caesar tried to?”
“The heavens foretell terror,” said Olympus. “Wars, famine, pestilence.”
“And for Egypt?”
“Night.”
Retort dwelt on her lips while she watched Herod come overside, followed by Tarquinius, who had been sent ashore to bid Herod make haste. Herod’s slave, the Northman escort and all the rowers came up burdened with flowers, fruit, choice wine and prodigious quantity of delectable things to eat, such as suckling pig, geese and guinea fowl.
“Egyptian night!” said Hero. “Cleopatra’s anger glowing like coals in the darkness! What a night for her lover!”
Olympus frowned. Herod, with the handsomest eyes and features in the world, and the winningest smile, framed in his Idumean headdress of striped Chinese silk, strolled up and whispered to Tros:
“Leander conspires with Antyllus! Make haste!” Then he took some flowers from the slave behind him and handed them to Hero.
“Vipers in them?” she suggested. “Like the hidden meanings in your compliments?”
He laughed. “Adorable woman, you flatter me. My thoughts and feelings are an open book. I envy Tros and can’t conceal, it, but I’m afraid of him, and I need him even more than I desire you. When you were Queen of Cyprus I would have come and carried you off, if I could have raised the money and men. I did have an understanding with the pirate Anchises. But Tros, with his usual good luck, defeated and slew him. I fear, too, that even if Anchises had defeated Tros, he would have had too much good sense to hand you over to me.”
He beckoned Tros aside, smiling as if he had a joke to tell:
“Our friend Leander just now offered me a talent — mind you a whole talent, almost a Caesarian sum of money, I have never seen a whole talent — to detain you here at anchor until Antyllus can cut off your retreat. It seems there are some barges that someone has told him about, hidden in the reeds to escape the tax on unused bottoms. He believes he can load them with sand and sink them between you and the sea. So I borrowed some money from Leander and bought provisions for a banquet, to detain you. Are your cooks as deadly as your archers?”
Tros ordered a signal made ready to hoist to the yardarm. He cautioned the drum and cymbal men to be ready to beat time for the oars. But there was no need for haste, or he thought not. He knew how difficult Leander’s task would be to block the channel; and Olympus was the Queen’s personal ambassador; there would surely be no hostilities as long as Olympus was on board.
“Who has bought Leander?” Tros asked.
Herod chuckled: “For a guards officer I found Leander almost intelligent. He thought at first of sending me to Cleopatra, in chains. I talked him out of that by reminding him that Cassius, you and Hero, would be more valuable. He can’t forestall Antyllus; it is too late for that. But he can cooperate. I promised to betray you all, in exchange for his promise to pay me a talent as soon as you’re captured or killed. Two promises of equal value. You had better hurry.”
Olympus overheard: “Tros, Leander promised faithfully to give me time to negotiate. This is not my doing. If he has betrayed you—”
Herod interrupted: “Tros, why shouldn’t he betray you? All you did was to spare his life, give him money and a lot of prisoners to hold for ransom, and then hoist him into high command! Gratitude is such a greasy emotion.”
Tros faced Olympus. “Jew Esias,” he said, “has nearly all my money. Tell the Queen to keep her hands off Esias.”
Herod interrupted: “If I wanted to make trouble for her, I would tempt her to antagonize the Jews. I know them!”
“I will not be a bearer of threats,” said Olympus.
“Tell the Queen that she has thrown my friendship to the winds, and I regret it. I will never again negotiate with her except on terms of ‘give me what I ask, or take the consequences.’”
“But that, too, is a threat,” Olympus objected.
“It is the plain truth. You may say so.”
Herod laughed. “I doubt it. Nobody tells the truth to kings and queens.”
“And you may tell the Queen,” said Tros, “that I demand from her my Basque seamen, whom she seized and condemned. I admit that they slew a dozen or more of the Queen’s police. But what of it? They have been punished enough. I need them. I will have them. If not, I will seize indemnity from her such as shall make her wish she had never seen my sail nor known me.”
“I will not be a mouthpiece of threats,” Olympus insisted. But he could get no other message.
“Tell her this from me,” said Hero, “I am not her sister! I am happy with the man she couldn’t seduce! Tell her that Tros’s arms are more wonderful than glory itself. Say his breath isn’t bad like old toothache Caesar’s! — Say that!”
Herod interrupted, chuckling: “Say it tenderly, Olympus. Say it without malice!”
Conops was signalling wildly from the other bireme. Mounted men, on tired horses, had ridden into the ford to get a view of Tros’s ships, but Conops’s signals indicated danger to the northward in the direction of the sea. Tros ordered his signal hoisted to the yardarm. The anchors of all four vessels began coming in hand-over-hand. Sigurdsen signalled to the oar-bank with a roll of drums. There were shouted commands and the thunder of oars against the tholes.
“And now, Olympus, farewell. Give my greetings to Jew-Esias, and to any other man in Alexandria who bears me good will.”
“Farewell,” said Olympus, smiling, rather wanly; he looked gloomier than ever. “I hoped to make peace.”
“You shall see peace between us when she yields,” Tros answered.
They embraced. The crew saluted. Sigurdsen’s men helped Olympus into his boat. Tros climbed to the midship quarter deck:
“Both banks — both sides — half speed — forward!”
The bireme slid seaward, following Conops and the barges. On a tower of the fort there were frantic signals. Tros spoke to a seaman:
“Bring my helmet.” Then, bull-lunged: “Arrow-engines! Archers! Ready! Stand by!”
He had delayed too long. The reeds along the river bank were already alive with armed men.
CHAPTER XXXVI. “You can’t save that bireme!”
Certain philosophers, some priests, and many women have accused me of loving war. I hate it. I despise it as an arbiter of quarrels. Would that my intelligence and vigor might be put to a more creative use.
But I have seen that they, whose speech is most contemptuous of warriors, are also they whose blunders, acrimony, ignorance and malice aggravate the quarrels that produce war.
To avoid war, for the sake of friendship, aye, to prevent a quarrel, I am willing to risk all that I have and to forego my own ambition. But I will yield to no tyrant. And, when I find myself at war, I choose to win.
— From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace
“A wonderful day for a fight,” said Herod, glancing at the blue sky.
Hero ran for her armor. The Northman hustled Cassius into the midship deckhouse. Two of Tros’s bodyguard came and stood near him; of the remaining eight, three were too badly wounded to stand up; the others were under Conops’s orders on the other bireme.
Sigurdsen had the helm; Tros ordered Sigurdsen to follow exactly astern of the leading vessels. Ahiram knew the winding course better than Sigurdsen did, but he was delirious on a reed mat forward, likely to die of wounds and being sponged and fanned by an Egyptian woman. More than two score women on the barges set up a melancholy wail because they were leaving Egypt, but they would have wailed louder if they had been left behind. Neither their keening, nor the thump of oars, nor the rustling sigh of the rising wind in the high, reeds even flatted the sharp alarm of Conops’s golden trumpet.
“Stand to arms! To arms! To arms!”
Even the leading barge was already out of sight around a bend of the channel but Conops’s mast was visible.
There wasn’t room to pass the barges; their captains, promoted boatswains very dubious of their Jewish oarsmen, worried by the wounded and women and nervous of new command, hesitated to yield oar-room for fear of fouling the long-shore mud. Tros wished he had let them follow, even at the risk of their rowers jumping overboard. Three times he checked the speed of his own oars, although he could hear the quarreling whine of arrow volleys and the shout of battle. Conops, judging by the erratic movement of his topmast, was in difficulties. It was Conops’s first command of a ship of that size. Good sailor though Conops was, the responsibility for ships behind him in a narrow channel might make him lose his head, or his way, which would amount to the same thing. It was easier to enter than to leave Pelusium; on the way out, the only navigable course was masked and made confusing by the reeds and islands.
Hero, dogged by her she-slave and by a bodyguard of four Cilicians, came and stood near Tros, in armor. She was laughing, joking with the master-archers: she imitated them — stuck a dozen arrows upright in the deckhouse roof and called them from Eros, Ajax, Aries, Leander’s End — each a name of its own to give it pride of purpose. There was no doubt now of Leander’s treachery. General Antyllus’s men had not had time to reach the river-bank in any considerable number. Antyllus was coming at top speed, screened from view by the reeds but undoubtedly close. Leander must have been secreting men in ambush in the reeds while Olympus held Tros in conversation. Smart work.
A master-archer called to Hero to take a sighting shot at a bird on the wing. She refused. Tros smiled then. Even with his mind on the danger ahead, he would have disciplined her savagely if she had dared to set a bad example. He had given the command to “stand by, ready,” and that meant “eyes on your captain and wait for the word!”
The channel widened a little. Downstream of a curving shoal blinded by reeds, it forked and passed on both sides of a swampy island that would not have showed above water at high-Nile. Conops was now in full view. A force that could not possibly be other than Leander’s men had stolen its way somehow through reeds on the western bank and had reached the island in fishermen’s punts and goatskin rafts. Conops had lowered two boats and sent them under cover of his arrow-fire, to cut their boats adrift. They were marooned now on the island, floundering in deep mud amid trampled reeds — perhaps a hundred men.
So far good. But the iron-shod Roman ram of Conops’s bireme had fouled the mud on the left bank of the western channel. Antyllus’s men were arriving in leg-weary groups; they and hundreds of Leander’s men were crashing through the reeds to storm Conops’s broadside; they were crushing down the reeds into a carpet to give foothold.
“Boat away!” Tros ordered.
Nine Gauls manned a longboat. It was overside in less than a minute, oars tossed, ready. Tros’s eyes were up-wind, calculating.
“Chalcas’s squad! Take two fire-pots, Chalcas. Top speed, down the eastern channel, to the north end of that island! Set fire to the reeds!”
The boat went away like something shot forth from the bireme’s side and slipped easily between the barges and the shoal along the eastern river-bank. But the barges, unarmed, loaded with wounded and women, blocked the fairway for the bireme. Herod came out of the deckhouse; he had found some plundered Roman armor, a bit too big for him, particularly the helmet; it made him look rakish and rather foolish, but he studied the situation as if only he could invent the right thing to do.
“Cassius,” he remarked, “has asked his slave to kill him, but the Northman wouldn’t permit it; he knocked the slave unconscious.”
Conops’s bireme, fast on the mud by the bow, had swung outward, broadside to the stream. That gave the Egyptians an enormous advantage; it reduced the number of arrow-engines that Conops could bring to bear on the attacking force. Beyond him, in the eastern channel, just beyond range of his archers, naked laborers were hauling a deeply laden scow out from the reeds and off the mud toward midstream. They obviously intended to sink it and block the channel. There was no way to prevent them. But the other channel, to the eastward of the island, was clear. On the eastern bank there was no enemy. Herod volunteered advice:
“Tros, the art of winning consists in giving dogs a bone to gnaw on. You have lost that other bireme. Put to sea, down the eastern channel — quickly, or they’ll catch us all!”
Tros gave his orders:
“Anchor ready! Stand by to let go!”
His ram was already within fifty feet of the rearmost barge.
“Hold your helm, Sigurdsen!” Then, with a right-arm signal to the drums and cymbals: “Full ahead! Six strokes!” He counted. “Stop her! Port oars — inboard!”
The cymbals crashed the well-known signal. The oar blades missed the barge’s shrouds by a hand’s breadth. Not an oar was broken, nor a rower unseated, as the hulls collided beam to beam. But the barge oars became splintered wreckage. A dozen of the ill-trained Jews were stunned. Others jumped overside; Tros’s archers, from the stern of the bireme, potted at them, killing some, discouraging the others. The deeply laden barge, rolling from the impact, yielded water, sideways toward the western mud-bank.
“Helm hard a-port! Starboard oars, full ahead!”
The mud boiled brown in the bireme’s wake. There was a sickening thud as she touched the mud to starboard, but the speed carried her off into midstream with the wallowing barge behind her.
“Hard a-starboard! All oars, full ahead! Steady your helm!”
The captain of the leading barge didn’t wait to be thrust aside. He let go his anchor and then took the starboard mud-bank, out of range of the enemy’s archers. Many of his rowers jumped overboard, but he had enough archers on his own deck to shoot them before they could reach land. Some swam back. He only lost four or five rowers, all shot, none drowned or escaped.
“Arrow-engines! All archers! Fire when you get the range!”
The river widened a bit before it split into two channels, but it shoaled up badly at the head of the island. There appeared to be just exactly room to come about, and there was no other way to save both biremes.
“Boat away!”
The other eight-oared longboat, manned by Northmen, a particularly smart crew, took the water. Archers were ordered into it, with shields to protect the rowers. A line was passed to them; it was bent to the spare flax anchor warp.
“Fight your way in. Make fast! Stay there, under Conops’s orders!”
Hero tried a long shot, but her arrow fell short of a man on horseback; his horse was sinking in the mud amid the reeds and he was standing in the saddle to direct the men who were working their way toward Conops’s bireme. The port side forward arrow-engine let go a volley and slew horse and rider. Herod tried to borrow Hero’s bow and chaffed her mercilessly. “Anchor — let go!”
Suddenly it dawned on Herod what Tros intended. The bireme began to come about in midstream as the anchor-cable tautened and the oars obeyed drum and cymbal.
“Tros, you madman, you will have us all in chains in Cleopatra’s dungeon! You can’t save that other bireme. Let them have it. Look! Your fools have fired the reeds — the flames are coming down on us like Parthian cavalry! They will leap that channel and burn Conops’s ship! They will burn this one too, unless you make haste!”
Hero answered him: “Tros would give fifty of you for one Conops! And it would be a bargain.”
Tros’s bodyguard abruptly thrust themselves in Herod’s way. He shrugged his shoulders and went to watch an arrow-engine crew. They had the range of the men in the reeds on the western bank. Their deadly efficiency held him fascinated. Crank, with a quick but carefully gradual strain on the twisted gut cords — load, with an artful sweep of six hands, timed exactly, the triggerman’s hands last — lay, with eyes, ears, instinct strained for the moving right hand the monosyllabic “up — up — right — a trifle up — right” of the master-archer, prone on his aiming-beam. Fire! Then again, and again, and again, with the weazel-quick ship’s boys handing arrows from the baskets to the layers.<
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The Egyptians had found rafts and cockle-shell boats belonging to local fowlers and fishermen. They dragged them through the reeds to provide foothold on the mud. They were bringing arrow-fire to bear on Tros’s broadside, at short range. The air screamed. Deck and bulwarks rattled to the impact. Tros’s and Hero’s bodyguards were hard at it, turning aside arrows with their bronze shields. The whole deck was a sun-lit wonder of flashing shields in motion. But there were hits. There were men down. Hero’s gay laugh yelped above the tumult as she made a hit, then swore she made another and leaned exhausted on her bow.
“Saving the frenzy of love,” said Herod, “what excites a woman more than slaying men?”
Tros, with the aid of the anchor, worked his ship around by voice and gesture, dead slow, stirring the mud at stern and bow but governing the oars with patient skill that just saved her from going aground. He made haste slowly.
But the flames came fast, hard driven by the north wind. They were coming due south, the full width of the island, which lay northeast by southwest; every reed and tree on it would be burned to the mud. But the fire had done part of its task; it had put the soldiers on the island out of action; rafts and boats gone, they were swimming and trying to wade. There was no longer the slightest chance of their crossing the island to defend the eastern channel; that way to the sea lay open. But Conops’s bireme lay fast on the mud, and the flames came roaring like the red-hot scythe of death.
And the Egyptian troops had dragged up carts, planks, baskets, reed mats, broken and abandoned boats, the-roofs and doors of huts. They were making a negotiable causeway from shore to ship, along which four abreast could advance crouching behind their shields and covered by a hail of arrows from the bank behind them.
The crew of Tros’s longboat were caught in the withering arrow-five. There were nine of them down, including five of the Northmen rowers, before they lay alongside Conops’s bireme and passed their line over the stern. But then the new hemp hawser began to pay out from ship to ship, and in two or three minutes the biremes were stern to stern with half a cable’s length between then, and the cable hummed to the strain of the laboring oars.