Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  On the whole, Tros was in excellent luck. The water-casks were in good condition, and he found enough charcoal ashore to clean them thoroughly. There was enough wine, in skins and jars in the longshore sheds, for all hands for a couple of weeks on a liberal ration. There were huge jars of olive-oil, and tons of onions that some remarkably naive Egyptian trader had barged from the Nile Delta for sale; the trader had been executed on a charge of trying to avoid the import-tax, and his crew were now among the captured rowers.

  Very swiftly the hand of Tarquinius made itself felt. Ordered by Tros to hold his tongue, to deliver Cassius’s orders to the troops near Jericho, and to return without revealing any information, he had found some means of communication with Gaza, even though Tros had sent with him two faithful Argive veterans expressly to prevent his doing that. There came an almost continuous stream of men from Gaza, many of whom were almost without doubt spies in the Roman interest. But some of them brought reliable news. And more than a hundred hungry but competent fighting men offered themselves for enlistment. Tros accepted nearly all of them, distributing them among the ships, to be drilled in different maniples as a safeguard against conspiracy. Others he fed, and promised enlistment on condition that they should go and bring him independent news of Tarquinius’s failure or success.

  So when Tarquinius did return, at nightfall on the third day, although he came on a horse that he had ridden half to death, he was several hours behind the information that had come from Jericho by shorter valley-roads, on camel-back.

  “Lord Captain,” said Tarquinius, “you are a master-reader of the minds of men.”

  “I lack no skill to measure yours Tarquinius: Make your report.”

  “Proconsul Cassius’s legate, Horatius Vulpes—”

  “Yes — to whom you offered a plan to burn this fleet and to rescue Cassius, or else to burn and drown us all, including Cassius, and carry on without him—”

  “Not I, Lord Captain. Someone has been lying to you.”

  “And he answered you: ‘If Tros will set Cassius free, why should I go to the trouble? Tros might kill him, if I tried to rescue him. Or Tros might sail away and sell him. There is no food left in Gaza and the baggage wagons are already started on the road northward. These, that you bring me, are Cassius’s orders. I obey them gladly, as the legions also will; they have no relish for such a lousy camp as this one.’ Were not those his words, Tarquinius?”

  “That is nearly enough what he said. But it is not what I said.”

  “Said he not: ‘If Tros should permit you to have private speech with the proconsul Cassius, tell him his legions march; and say that I will send back two full centuries and half a century of horse to await him this side of Gaza and escort him northward’?”

  “Aye,” said Tarquinius. “That is nearly enough what he said. Who told you?”

  “Once again your treachery has turned like a fish upstream and served me! Thanks to your clacking tongue, I have a hundred new men. I am beginning to think you a luck-piece! Do you wish to be sent ashore with Cassius?”

  “Not I, Lord Captain.”

  “Then why did you try to serve him, and to betray me?”

  “I didn’t. I knew you were too clever to be caught. But I did think, that if I could force you to put to sea with Cassius, I might be able to do myself some good among his legions, what with their commanders quarreling and one thing and another. Kindly don’t set me ashore with Cassius. I can be useful to you.”

  “Go and tell Cassius your news.”

  But Cassius would have nothing to say to Tarquinius. Guarded by sentries, he spent the entire night on deck, fitfully dozing in a chair, pacing the deck at intervals, demanding wine, gulping a little and then tossing the remainder overboard. By daybreak he was slightly drunk and much less arrogant than he had been at any time since Tros captured him. He even smiled with a gracious wistfulness, of which he was quite capable when he chose, when Tros invited him to breakfast and told him the boat was waiting to take him ashore. He had thought of something, and Tros waited for it.

  “Tros, I must admit you have been magnanimous. Now that we have turned a page I can afford to say it to you. You might have delivered me to a more ignominious fate than Pompey’s on the Egyptian shore. Had you liked me, your conduct even so would have been remarkably generous. But you hate me, so it is even more commendable. However—”

  He paused. Tros made no comment. Even Tarquinius, who was listening, held his breath. Herod smiled, and Hero watched with the cat-like stare that she inherited from the long royal line of Lagidus.

  “Don’t you think that you might let me have Herod?” said Cassius.

  Even Herod’s mask of amused dissimulation fell. He resembled a startled fox with every cunning instinct alert. Tros enjoyed that for a moment. He gave Herod time to think of arguments that trembled on persuasive lips.

  “I might,” Tros said then. “But I will not. You may have my two Egyptian barges that I no longer need.”

  Herod smiled and relaxed with a sigh. “Count me your debtor, Tros!”

  Cassius smiled leanly and looked disappointed. But they all knew he had asked for what he did not want, in order to be refused, and thus to put Tros in a mood to grant something else rather than seem ungracious. It would have been clever enough, if he had only thought of it sooner, instead of making himself as nastily cantankerous as he could.

  “Then I will ask you nothing further for myself,” said Cassius. He eyed Herod. “I wish you comfort of your Idumaean friend! But I will invite your magnanimity for others, who have done you no injury, and whose gratitude is worth your winning.”

  Tros waited. He had a half-suspicion what was coming. Cassius was not alone in having racked his wits to think of every possible angle of the situation.

  “Recently,” said Cassius, “my envoy carried a demand to Cleopatra to evacuate from Alexandria all Romans of military age and to send them to me in Syria. I am informed that she did so, and that those Roman citizens are now at sea.”

  Tros nodded: “Yes, at sea in thirty rotten ships, commissioned hastily and ill-provided, probably without an escort, undermanned, against a head wind, at the mercy of any piratical fleet that may come across them. They may have the plague on board. What they will do for water I can’t imagine.”

  “It is for them,” said Cassius, “that I implore your magnanimity. I understand you are headed for Cyprus. If you should come across them on your voyage, and would protect them as far as the port of Salamis is, in return for that kindness to them what shall I promise you?”

  It was a palpable trap. Tros sailed straight into it, with a lordly air of being too much flattered to imagine treachery.

  “Poor wretches!” he exclaimed. “I pity them. Yes, Cassius, I saw them being herded on the ships. Among them are some of my acquaintances. If I should convoy them to Cryprus, will you guarantee me against attack by Ahenobarbus?”

  “Gladly.” Cassius grew almost naively confidential. “Tros, it was my original intention to send Ahenobarbus to sea to meet them and to escort Them to Tarsus. But my wishes were countermanded at the last moment by Brutus, who insisted it was more important that Ahenobarbus should continue reconditioning his fleet. How long do you expect to remain in Salamis?”

  “Water — provisions — rowers — perhaps ten days.”

  “Very well then. On your way, will you search for those thirty vessels?”

  “Yes.”

  “After watering and provisioning in Cyprus, when you are ready to leave, will you send word to Ahenobarbus that my Romans are there and he may send an escort for them?”

  Tros pretended to consider it. He paced the deck with knotted fists behind him. He scowled. Suddenly he turned his frown on Cassius:

  “Do you swear to me that Ahenobarbus’s fleet is unready for sea?”

  Cassius smiled. “If he were ready. I swear I would send him to destroy you! No, he is not ready.”

  Tros nodded. “Very well, Cassius. I hope that you and
I may never meet again, that we may never again offend each other. Farewell.”

  Tros returned him his sword. They saluted, but Cassius ignored the others. He even ignored Hero, turning his back toward her. His ten lictors looked a little forlorn without their fasces that Tros had thrown into the Nile; they were supplied with spears, but they had never been drilled to use them properly so it was not a very dignified red-cloaked escort that followed Cassius and his slave into the eight-oared boat.

  Hero, watching him rowed away, spoke her thoughts aloud:

  “Is he mad? Does he really believe we will go to Cyprus? If so, he will probably send word to Boidion to get some poisoned wine all ready for us! Boidion would love the chance to poison me and be Arsinoe once and for all!”

  “A little mad, a little drunk,” said Herod. “Rome next, unless I am as drunk as Cassius! What will you and I wear when we reach Rome? Tros looks like a great man, always. He would look great even naked. You look like a goddess, unless you dress respectably; the Romans have a way of trying to degrade a goddess. As for me, I behave as I look; so I shall need at least clean linen.”

  Tros said nothing. Rome, yes. That was his plan, and Hero knew it. But the leagues of sea between were deadly with incalculable dangers. First, he had a fleet to weld into a unit. Neither he nor any of his captains had had any experience of fleet command. He had to learn and to teach at the same time, and to do it swiftly, lest Ahenobarbus catch him unprepared. Ahenobarbus probably would not set a trap in Cyprus, but that was too conjectural to count on.

  He was sure of Conops and Sigurdsen — as sure of them as of himself. But he doubted whether even they would rightly understand the code of signals that he, Hero and Sigurdsen had written down, that Conops had memorized and had drilled by word of mouth into all the other new, untried, improbably cool commanders of ships, of a type to which they were unused. He watched Cassius land and the eight-oared boat return, then flew his first fleet signal:

  “Weigh. By oar. Follow the flagship to sea in single line ahead. Liburnians last. Store-ships between the squadrons.”

  It was one of the proudest days of Tros’s life when the fleet obeyed the signal and not one ship missed her proper station in the line nor fouled another’s oars.

  CHAPTER XLI. “The Lord Captain is well pleased!”

  The test of a commander’s competence is battle. There is no other test. There is no denying a defeat. No argument annuls a victory.

  — From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace

  Two of the new commanders had to be demoted and replaced. One of them couldn’t maintain discipline. The other failed to learn the signals. Tros added to the code and simplified it day after day, but it remained his worst problem. Men who could not, or who could hardly read and write were quicker than those who could, at memorizing the code. The ships’ boys were the brightest at it. They were all promoted to the rank of signaller and rowers had to be fetched up from the holds to learn the business of passing arrows to the men who served the squandrous artillery.

  But darkness was ten times worse than daylight. The night system was an adaptation of the trick that the traitors used at Marathon, to betray the Athenians to the Persian host: a polished shield, protected from the weather by a deep box on a turntable. A lighted torch was flashed across the face of that and the box could be turned in any direction, so that one ship at a time, or one wing of the fleet, could receive the message. Night after night the fleet got thrown into confusion by mistaken reading of the flashed orders to change formation. But Tros stuck to it, and they improved, obeying trumpet-call and drum-beat orders to disperse when they drew too close in darkness.

  There was one very important point in Tros’s favor. He had sea-room and a fair wind. Sea-borne traffic had ceased, for fear of pirates, who were expected to take advantage of Rome’s civil war. But the pirates could perceive no profit in combing empty seas, so they too, for the most part remained in hiding. There were not even Greek fishermen far from land, who might have reported Tros’s movements.

  To convince Cassius that he really was headed for Cyprus, he followed the coastline northward for three days, wearing out his rowers against the steady north wind and almost breaking their hearts with incessant changes of fleet formation. When he calculated that his topmasts had vanished below the skyline he was still headed toward Cyprus. But then he changed helm and set a course for the island of Crete, with the wind on his starboard quarter. All the rowers had a day’s rest, before they, too, were drilled under arms — an unheard-of innovation.

  Many of the rowers were the stuff of which good fighting men are made. It encouraged them to be given weapons. Drill made them feel less like caged animals. And as Tros intended, it gave them, too, awareness that a weapon is an expert’s tool for letting life out through a skillfully made hole, directing their attention to the fact that mutiny against such experts as manned Tros’s battle stations might be worse than hazardous. And even such men would be better than nothing in a close engagement, hull to hull, when pirate or Roman rowers would be chained below. They were likely at least to fight with spirit against boarders, to preserve themselves from capture and the fate of being fettered to the lower oar-bank of the victor’s ship.

  Drill was continuous, day and night. The maniples took turns to practise every imaginable feat of arms and sudden tactics that a deck permitted. Twice each day the entire crew stood to arms for battle practise. At least once each day the ships’ commanders came aboard the flagship for instruction, to be lectured on the meaning of the word initiative, which is the heart and blood and guts of victory; but also on the art of timing an attack, awaiting signals, so as not to waste a life or lose one ounce of an united impact.

  “Break the enemy’s line!” was Tros’s incessant theme. “In a battle I will so manoeuvre as to strike an enemy in full force, as close as I can possibly contrive it to the middle of his line. Thus, though he may out-number us, he will lose the advantage of greater numbers. Avoid his grapnels, throw his line into confusion, then turn right or left as my signal commands and deal with half his fleet before his other half can recover. Speed! Speed! In battle, use a ship as if she were a maniple of swordsmen! Hurl her at the enemy, but don’t try to give him the ram until you’ve broken his oars and he can’t manoeuvre. Then you can avoid his corvus, if your own oars are unbroken. That is why I keep on telling you to train your rowers to snatch in their oars at the word of command. If I can win the weather gauge, you may depend on me to bring you down against an enemy with full sails, and we’ll break through his line — no doubt of that. But then the wind will be his; it will bear him down to leeward on to us. But with broken oars he can’t pursue us back to windward. So we come about, we win the weather gauge again. We repeat, until we have him so scattered that five or six of us can board him and gut him one by one.”

  Tros’s ten-Jew bodyguard became masters-at-arms, a school for swordsmen. Originally trained as gladiators, that is as professional duelists, Conops had taught them all there was to know about teamwork, flying wedge tactics and the strategy of suddenly retreating, to re-form and to smash home again and again in whirlwind charges. Four of them had been rather seriously wounded at Pelusium, but even they could criticize and teach, and they had picked up some of Conops’s scurrilous contempt for anything done merely well. They had learned to demand perfection, and to be caustically pawky in their praise even of that. They went from ship to ship and bully-damned the swordsmen into maniples that even Roman veterans might dread to tackle.

  Clean ships, clean water-casks, wine, olive-oil, good coarse bread and onions; song; hard work; the excitement of competition for promotion; speculation as to what Tros’s plans might be; fair weather, and the fortune, that always did follow great captains, combined to keep the crews in good health, and to keep down the number of severe punishments. There were very few floggings. The dreaded plague did not appear. There was not a single man down with scurvy or with any similar disease. Very few of the wounded d
ied, and many of them recovered in time to be employed in tasks that thus released strong men for heavier duty.

  The women on the store-ship were a nuisance; few of them were any good at mending sails; they were villainous bad cooks, and not much good at dressing wounds. They did their utmost to cause trouble by displaying their charms at every opportunity to crews whose instinct, and favorite sport, was to be free with any woman they could come upon. But Tros ordered four or five of the worst ones whipped, and more or less controlled the others by threatening to sell them into slavery at the first port. It had been a daring experiment, not to leave them behind; his purpose in bringing them had been to demonstrate to his men that he was thoughtful for their rights. True, they were stolen women, but they were not slaves or marriageable virgins, so possession of them was nine points of anyone’s law.

  However, he regretted having brought those women. He even resented the presence, on his own ship, of Hero’s hag-faced slave, whom Hero herself had chosen from Esias’s stock-in-trade in Alexandria. The woman was as faithful as a dog to her mistress. But her hideous appearance didn’t make her any less attractive to a number of dozens of men whose coarse flattery went to her head, so that she gave herself the airs of a reigning beauty. It was beneath Tros’s dignity to take her in hand, and Hero was too amused by the woman’s conceit to find fault with her. It was not until she insulted Conops, when he came one morning in his eight-oared boat for a consultation with Tros, that the wine of wisdom entered into her.

  “Out o’ my way, you camel’s sweetheart!”

  He struck her twice, like lightning, with his knife-hilt, on the funny-bone and on the spare rib, knocked her sprawling and kicked her half the length of the deck. After that she was so deeply in love with Conops, and so meek about it, that not even Hero could get her to smile except by mentioning Conops’s name.

  Conops suitably apologized to Hero: