Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Cassius stared at the harbor in silence. He was quite familiar with the process. Tros was using Cassius’s own favorite method of breaking down another man’s self-confidence and arousing an impulse to make worse mistakes, by pointing out those he had made already. But though he recognized it, he was hurt by it, nevertheless.

  No man of Cassius’s accusing, overbearing type can shake off the effect of his own methods used on himself. Tros understood him. He had seen in Rome, the assassins’ panic after Caesar’s murder. It had been Caesar’s accurate, contemptuous, witty shafts of criticism that rankled in Cassius’s mind until he made the gross mistake of killing Caesar, to prevent himself from going mad of jealous inferiority. Cassius could endure any amount of mendacious accusation. But not the truth. That bit home. Bit into his self-esteem. He knew, as he watched Tros’s rowboat, bearing into the harbor the sealed orders to his troops that Tros had compelled him to sign, that his ignominious defeat had been due at least as much to his own bad judgment as to Tros’s audacity and vigor. That Tros was looting him and contemptuously letting him go, wounded his pride as bitterly as Caesar’s lofty forgiveness once had done. He ached to stab Tros for his magnanimity.

  And now he would be lucky if the whole world didn’t learn of his humiliation by an outlawed pirate. He would have to lie like a Trojan, and to invent skillfully, to prevent his legions from learning the truth. He might even have to kill his slave, on some excuse or other, to prevent him from talking. The prisoners in Pelusium would certainly talk, under torture if not of their free will. They would be sent to Cleopatra. She would be very likely to send them to Antony. Antony was nearly as good a propagandist as Caesar had been. He had, in fact, managed much of Caesar’s propaganda. Antony would somehow send the news to Brutus, who would then mistrust Cassius more than ever and would preach reproachful sermons about breach of faith. Cassius had promised Brutus not to invade Egypt. He had been caught red-handed attempting it. Brutus was quite capable of using that as an excuse for repudiating their partnership, and that would probably mean that all Cassius’s troops would desert him and join Brutus’s army.

  Suddenly he turned and faced Tros, typically snatching at a last straw:

  “Why do you choose to be my enemy? Change your mind, Tros. There is yet time. I am willing to forgive and to befriend you. Caesar forgave you, and you became his friend, and he yours, though you had done more than anyone else to prevent him from capturing Britain. Why not become my friend?”

  “You are Caesar’s murderer, not Caesar, Cassius. You slew him, with your own hand, for I saw you, treacherously, as any slave, or a woman in bed, or a snake could have slain him.”

  “Caesar slew his thousands!” Cassius retorted.

  “Aye, he was a cruelly ambitious man. That was why I was his enemy and offered my life and all I had to save my friends in Britain from his clutches. But Caesar was never a coward, and that is why I became his friend. He never stooped to such treacherous infamy and useless cruelty as yours and Brutus’s. And he never bore malice. Caesar and I forgave each other. I could trust him, and he trusted me. I would not trust you, Cassius, not even if I thought you capable of ruling the Roman world. However, I see that your captains obey you.”

  Tros’s little squadron rolled on the sky-blue waves and Cassius was too seasick to endure the motion without holding on. He even clutched at Tros’s arm when the ship hove her shoulder over a more than usually high wave. Tros ordered a chair brought for him from the midship cabin, and Cassius sat in that to watch his fighting crews abandon ship. They made no fuss, but that was nothing to be wondered at. Roman soldiers were not sailors. They hated the sea. They despised a man who liked it. That was one good reason why they faithfully and thoroughly suppressed the seamen’s mutinies which were a regular detail of every voyage; and why the seamen took advantage of every possible chance to escape; not less than a third of the Mediterranean pirate crews were deserters from Roman warships. Cassius’s marines took their standards ashore, but they appeared to be making no trouble about leaving their weapons behind.

  As ship after ship disgorged its marines, Tros sent boatload of men from his own ships to replace them, to seize the weapons and to prevent the seamen and rowers from going ashore. As he had expected, Cassius’s seamen were delighted to change masters. Service under Tros of Samothrace, as most seamen knew, meant stern discipline, but generous pay and justice. Jewish, Syrian, Greek fishermen, whose fate under Cassius’s whips would have been to man the oars until they rotted of scurvy or drowned in one of those amazing wrecks for which the Roman fleets were infamous, felt like men released from prison. They behaved like lunatics.

  Tros could provide little more than a skeleton crew of fighting men for each ship. He put boatswains and carefully chosen leading seamen in command — men who knew little or no navigation, but who could be trusted to maintain discipline. He divided the fleet into three squadrons, -giving Sigurdsen command of the right wing and Conops the left. He ordered the store-ships towed out of the harbor, and found in one of them the thousand packages of Greek fire that were worth almost that number of men. He had saved a little of his own stenching explosive, that Eough the dwarf had taught him how to make in Britain; it had been safe in Esias’s shed in Alexandria when Cleopatra burned his trireme; he had it in one of the barges, along with the trireme’s gear and arrow-engines. He transferred all his own explosive to one store-ship, and all the wounded and the women to the other. They were good ships, fit for sea, fit to keep station.

  It was night, and Cassius was prostrated with sickness from the ship’s motion at anchor on the high-backed swell, before Tros had time to visit all eleven biremes and to receive the seamen’s homage. Torchlight added mystery and glamour. Conops had already made the rounds, telling them what treatment loyal seamen might expect at the hands of the great Lord Captain. There was nothing restrained or over-modest about Conops’s account and description of Tros, nor any lack of lordly quality about Tros’s deportment when at last he made the rounds. Hero accompanied him. None of those half-starved seamen and fettered rowers had ever before seen a girl in armor, though they had heard of goddesses with golden hair. They saw Hero’s eyes bright with excitement, and the brightness resembled the gleam of the stars. The torch-sheen on the polished bronze over her white himation might be some superhuman wonder-light. Her low-crowned helmet suggested Hermes rather than Athena. She walked like the flow of sunlight on waves at daybreak. She became a legend too soon. Superstition led them to expect too much of a love-happy girl in her ‘teens. But as a beginning it was good.

  Master of dramatic action that he was, Tros had reserved for Hero the graceful privilege of relieving the rowers’ misery. It was at Hero’s command that the fetters were struck from their ankles. The impatient armorers pounced on the rusty chains and anklets to reforge and return them to their original use as grapnel-chains. The rowers were lined up on deck for inspection, given wine to drink and promised freedom within three months in return for loyal labor at the oars. They didn’t quite believe that, but the wine took the edge off incredulity. Conops and a few of Tros’s dependable decurions had already looked them over, he talked with some of them. As Tros strode slowly along the breathless, awe-struck lines he paused at Conops’s barely noticeable signal and selected this and that lean Syrian, Jew or Greek to be armed and drilled, with his name on the muster of fighting men. Those were freedmen from that minute with the privilege of pay and a share of plunder, shore-leave whenever possible and freedom from punishment except by their commanding officer. They were told so. It encouraged the others.

  Then Tros chose bards. Men who can sing their native songs can be found in almost any company. Song works wonders, where the whip only makes rowers flinch and waste desperate effort. But he left until morning the very important business of redistributing the crews among the thirteen ships, to break up cliques already formed and to prevent too many men of one race from becoming a self-conscious unit that might make trouble. Mutiny on land i
s bad enough, but only fire is worse than mutiny at sea.

  It was long after midnight when he and Hero returned to the flagship. The wind had fallen and the sea had lost some of its mountainous heave. But the sleepless Cassius sat pale and ghastly beside his worried slave and groaned self-pity. He craved no other man’s, but his own self-pity comforted his bitter soul. Tros, accurately gauging the man’s state of mind, ingeniously misinformed him, using naked truth to clothe his Odyssean plan, and mockery of courtesy to sting into action the Roman’s will to believe what he wished to believe.

  “Proconsul,” Tros hadn’t called him that since he captured him, “I congratulate you on the good condition of the fleet you have surrendered. Food, wine, water, sails, cordage. Clean bottoms, newly scrubbed. But filthy bilges, Cassius. Foul oar-banks. Fetttered and wretched rowers. You are savages, some of you Romans. You enjoy the misery of men who were caught in arms against you. Such discouraged wretches are small loss to you, small gain to me. I shall be lucky to reach Cyprus — luckier yet if Cyprus can supply me with spirited rowers.”

  “Lucky?” Cassius’s thin smile suggested that he knew more than he chose to tell. “Luck doesn’t last forever!” He glared at Hero. “Already you regret your throne of Cyprus? You will be lucky if you don’t end up in Delos. That is a market which I and Brutus have supplied very liberally of late with well-born women.”

  Tros wished him comfort of a night’s sleep, civilly enough, and led Hero away. They were no sooner within the deckhouse than she turned on him almost fiercely:

  “Tros, are you mad? Why did you tell him our next destination is Cyprus?”

  “Because it isn’t! But if Cassius believes it is — and perhaps he does — he will send by post to Tarsus, urging Ahenobarbus to weigh anchor, to set sail for Cyprus and to wait there on the watch for our sails. That will test Ahenobarbus’s patience while we train a fleet at sea! Crusty Ahenobarbus, who isn’t such a great commander as he imagines, might prove to be an overwhelming enemy, with forty ships, some of them quinquiremes, if we should meet him before we’re ready.”

  It was no part of Tros’s genius to seek, nor even not to do his utmost to avoid, a sea-engagement that he felt incompetent to win. If he could win what he needed without fighting another battle, he would hugely prefer that. But battle or not, he was beginning to feel confident of winning.

  “You are laughing,” said Hero. Her slave was pulling off her armor in the cabin. “Why? At what do you laugh?”

  “At Cleopatra!”

  “Why?”

  “Like Cassius, she won’t enjoy my terms. However, she is likely to accept them with better grace.”

  “Tros, how can you make peace with her! She turned on you like a treacherous tigress. Will you trust her again? You have hips now — good ones! Raid Alexandria! Burn! Loot! Punish!”

  He laughed. She put her hands on his shoulders and coaxed him.

  “Tros, I am her sister. I know her. I, too, would have been your enemy forever if you hadn’t loved me. This time her aim at you missed. Next time—” tie interrupted: “That she missed her aim at me is not a reason why I should be governed by her malice. And besides, girl, if I know Cassius and Ahenobarbus, they two will present us with a chance such as I love better than you have yet loved anything in all your life.”

  They argued, nearly until daylight, about whether or not she loved him more than he loved opportunity. But Tros could think his own thoughts behind the ebb and flow of that kind of talk.

  He thought about Ahenobarbus’s vigorous, obstinate nature and his Roman sense of strategy. He had left him in Tarsus, possessed of one damaged quinquireme and about a dozen ships that had been hauled out for repair. If it was true that he now had a fleet of forty ships, Brutus’s shipwrights must have performed almost a miracle. Certainly the crews could not be ready yet — or, if ready, surely not efficient. What would be Brutus’s and Cassius’s next move, to supply their armies with corn, and to keep supplies from reaching the Triumvirate? How would they employ Ahenobarbus?

  When daylight stole along the sea, Tros had puzzled it out. His plan was ready.

  CHAPTER XL. “Follow the flagship to sea”

  It is useless to expect a clever opportunist to obey, if given opportunity by disobedience to serve himself. Your aims, your plans, aye, and your dangers also, should he know them, would be the natural means by which he would secretly seek to advance himself, inevitably to your cost and perhaps to your ruin. There is one wise way, and only one, to make use of such men. Study their natural cunning, as the hunter studies animals, in order to be able to predict their probable behaviour when free to follow inclination.

  From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace

  Herod’s was an oriental gift of hiding dread beneath a mask of interest in something else. He was afraid Tros might send him ashore with Cassius, and he knew what to expect from Cassius. Herod put no faith in anyone’s promises; his own, he knew, were worthless if it should seem worth while to break them. So he began to make himself as useful to Tros as he could.

  Tros had not time to spare for Herod’s conversational genius, during the three days’ wait until Tarquinius returned from his mission in Jericho. But Hero had nothing to do. She was an intelligent listener, rapidly learning how to keep Tros’s confidence by accurately summarizing what she heard and telling it to him at the proper moment, facts first, and her opinion late, when asked. Herod had noticed that, and he was clever enough to perceive that Tros was conscientiously on guard against his normal impulse to mistrust any woman’s advice.

  So Herod entertained Hero by regaling her with amusing details of political intrigue in the area over which Cassius and Brutus were military dictators. He explained their military strength and their political weakness, as well as the viewpoint of the men who might be likely to revolt against them at the first opportunity.

  “If Tros would convey me to Rome, I could explain all this to the Triumvirate. Antony could learn more from me than from all his spies.”

  As a matter of fact, Herod understood Hero far better than he did Tros, whose mysticism was beyond the grasp of Herod’s intelligent and artistic but entirely unmystical mind. He employed disarming frankness:

  “I am simply an adventurer seeking a throne. Almost any throne would suit me, provided there were revenue enough. Tros could have almost any throne he wanted, but none would please him even if its revenues were prodigious. Imagine what I could do if I were King of Egypt! I would build, build, build! I would out-do all the ancient Pharoahs! — What a combination we would be! Supposing Tros should convey me to Rome and there agree with Antony to do what Cassius wanted to do — marry me to Cleopatra! Tros could do the necessary violence — none better! I would be a good King of Egypt. As for Cleopatra, if she wasn’t amenable, there would be ways and means of correcting that condition.”

  Hero had been kept as ignorant of real politics as designing tutors and guardians could contrive. Her ignorance was almost limitless, for the reason, well understood by her teachers, that she had been taught to consider every problem as entirely personal to herself and not to study it from any other angle. Even Caesar, who had taken prodigious pains with Cleopatra’s political education, had deliberately prevented the younger, more unconventional and therefore more dangerous sister from learning anything of any political importance. She was much too naturally clever to reveal a hint of Tros’s plans to Herod, but she reported all Herod’s ideas to Tros. And Tros was much too clever to attempt to turn the tables by making use of Hero to guide Herod’s thinking. It suited him far better to know what Herod was thinking about, in order to guess how Herod might behave when loosed to play his own hand uninstructed.

  Tros’s hands were full, with the details that make possible the blows that win campaigns. For one thing, he had left plague behind in Alexandria. He had seen plague and scurvy decimate the ranks of armies and destroy fleets. He, had a superstitious notion, mocked at by the priests and vehemently disputed by the doctor
s, that plagues were produced by rats, and by the filth and the resultant lice, that accumulate where many human beings gather in a crowded space. So he ordered the ships cleaned. And when Trod said “cleaned” he meant it. From lower bilge to topmast, every vessel in his fleet was to be as clean as the polished armor that shone on the decks in the sun. He paid a quarter of an Attic drachma for every dead rat produced and he decreed that in future all beetles, lice and bedbugs found on any of the ships should be served, cooked in the stew, in the officers’ mess for supper.

  Those Roman vessels were not badly armed for a fleet engagement in the Roman style of fighting. They were fairly well supplied with arrow-engines, and they all had metal rams, some bronze, some iron, that slowed them when under sail but made them dreadful in collision. Most of them, too, had been fitted with the heavy, iron-spiked corvus — a contrivance for spiking the enemy’s deck and providing a bridge, along which to charge an enemy’s deck. Those corvi had spelt victory in the early wars against Carthage, in the days when Rome sent a fleet to sea against real seamen, who could not otherwise be brought to close quarters. Rome, in her own tradition-ridden mind, was still fighting a Punic war. But Tros was not. He threw those corvi overboard, rendering the ships more stable by reducing the weight aloft.

  He had saved his own enormous arrow-engines from his lost trireme. They were safe and dry in one of the barges that he had brought from Pelusium. He ordered four of those installed on his flagship, two of them on Conops’s ship and two on Sigurdsen’s. They were mounted on turntables and it was a prodigious business to get them fitted, with all the other work going on at the same time, but it was done.

  One of the store-ships held a huge supply of arrows, and there were thousands more in the little fortress at the harbor-mouth. Most of them were a bit too short for Tros’s best bowmen, but they were long enough for use in the engines; and there were more than a thousand bundles of the Parthian-type arrow, made in Parthia and left behind in Syria by recent Parthian invaders.