Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  But that they wished to put themselves at Antony’s disposal was almost too good to be true. Antony couldn’t possibly refuse to protect them, at least nominally. He would have to make some show of interest for his own reputation’s sake. He would have to recognize Tros as their saviour. Tros sent for Tarquinius.

  “Have you ever had plague?”

  “No.” Tarquinus blinked alertly, using a scrap of linen to his long nose to conceal emotion. He knew well enough there was nothing agreeable coming. Tros had been amazingly magnanimous, but magnanimity has limits.

  “It is worse,” said Tros, “than you are. It is the efflorescence, odor, bloom and seed of treachery and vile thoughts. There may be plague on Varro’s ship. That is your risk. Go and make Varro’s acquaintance. When we reach Crete I will expect you to inform me accurately as to Varro’s plans, his influence, the extent of the opposition to him, and, above all, the number of Romans on all those ships who might be capable of valiance, if armed and put to it. Get a letter from Varro, addressed to the Triumvir Marcus Antonius, commending me for coming to so many Romans’ rescue and promising full and faithful allegiance to the cause of Marcus Antonius. You understand that? Get it! This is your last chance, Tarquinius, to try to betray me.”

  “And what do I get if do well?”

  Tros pondered that for a moment. It was not his habit to buy men’s loyalty. It would be as easy to buy the wind as Tarquinius, and about equally sensible. A quoted price would only set him scheming to get a higher price from the men he was being sent to spy on. Herod, who was watching as usual, storing up studies of men for future reference, laughed aloud at Tros’s answer:

  “Do well, and you shall name your own reward, Tarquinius. If it is in reason, you shall have it.”

  Tarquinius gulped. He saluted. Tros sent him away in the longboat with a skin of decent wine and a bag of onions. Then he left Sigurdsen’s squadron to herd the Alexandrine ships along behind him, with three liburnians to keep the fleets in touch, and laid his course for Suda Bay. He was worried, and yet curiously light-hearted. His plan, sufficiently elastic to allow for unpredictable events, was made. It was clear in his mind as to all important details. Ahead of him, he knew’ was the most dangerous task he had ever attempted, and he kept staring at Hero in a way that made her wonder what wrong she had done. When she asked, he perplexed her even more:

  “It is the wrong you may do that makes me anxious.”

  They almost quarreled because he wouldn’t say what he meant. She tried to get Herod to give her advice. But all Herod could think of to say was:

  “Tros is a difficult man for a woman to understand. Women, who are able to conceive a man, and bring him forth and suckle him and teach him to walk and speak, forever think of men as children whom they can understand, and guide, and manage. So indeed most men are; as, for instance, I am, and as even Julius Caesar was to an extent. But Tros not. Tros thinks faster than a woman. While she puzzles over what he has done, he is doing; and while she thinks of what he should do, he has already done what he will. Tros should have been a king. He would have been a great one, and the world the better for it. He is a fool to wish to sail around the world. However, all great men are fools, and wise women worship them.”

  Tros, whose worries were beyond the sky-line, kept himself amused by visiting from ship to ship, drilling his men and lecturing his captains. He had no time now for fleet manoeuvres. When the wind fell, out oars. When the wind rose, full sail. He logged every league he could make between noon and noon, until a sunset crimsoned the eternal snow in the shadowy clefts of the hills of Crete, and he slightly changed the course to windward to gain an offing and descend by night on Suda Bay.

  CHAPTER XLIII. “Make haste, Herod”

  It is not the unpredictables that govern issues. It is the steady, unwavering, day by day persistent exercise of judgment, always hewing nearer to the line of Wisdom. Far though it be from Wisdom yet, that effort rarifies its maker’s thought, until he fits himself for swift and right decision in emergencies that baffle them who envision only purpose and let Wisdom wait, as if it were not, or as if it were a poet’s word for something unattainable or unknown.

  — From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace

  Tros’s sails had been seen from the hills. Lights invited him into Suda Bay. A lamp-lit boat came out to offer pilotage, and the pilot demanded a suspiciously reasonable fee. So Tros hove to and awaited daylight; but he seized the pilot, who was a sturdy rogue of Dorian ancestry, well mixed with negroid and Phoenician strains. He had a short thick neck; he didn’t like a noose around it.

  “Now then! All Cretans are liars. Lie to me and I will string you to the yardarm. Tell the truth, and I will pay you for the treason to your prejudices. Speak! Who holds Suda?”

  “None! We were raided by Sextus Pompeius, ten days ago. His men raped our women. He took away for his oar-benches all our able-bodied’ men who couldn’t escape into the mountains. Then he sailed away, we think, to Sicily, but we don’t know. He had a fleet of more than fifty ships.”

  “So you hoped to wreck my fleet to restore your fortunes! Who then are the wreckers? You have said you all fled to the hills.”

  “Some of our folk have returned from the hills. But we are all starving.”

  The man looked well fed. So did his crew. There wasn’t a gas-blown belly or a set of fleshless ribs among them. Tros ordered them all under close guard until daylight.

  The fleet staggered up during the night one by one and took station, until at last a liburnian picked up a ten times flashed command and lay alongside Tros’s ship, fifty feet to leeward, within easy hail. The liburnian’s captain, a promoted Gadean boatswain, was ordered aboard and carefully instructed. Then Herod was awakened. His slave was commanded to pack his belongings. Herod looked sleepy, but he was as awake as a fox that scents a hound in the night. The pully-haul and splash of a big water-butt being swung overboard in the darkness, to be picked up by the liburnian startled him so that he set his teeth to suppress an exclamation.

  “Where are we?” he asked. He could see nothing beyond the circle of lantern-light. He was afraid. When Hero came, he glanced at her as if he thought Tros suspected him of trying to seduce her.

  “Herod, I am sending you to Antony, in the hope that you haven’t lied about how well you know him.”

  “If he has forgotten me,” said Herod, “he has a short memory. When I was a boy in Rome he liked me well enough.” He laughed.

  “Do you owe me an effort?” Tros asked.

  Herod laughed again: “For all that you or I know, Tros, you saved me from becoming King of Egypt! Does that put me in your debt, or you in mine?”

  “That is for you to decide.”

  “Very well. I have decided. What do you wish me to try to do?”

  “Find Antony. Tell him, concerning me, whatever you see fit to say.”

  “You impose no conditions, no restrictions? You are wiser than I thought you.”

  “You may say to Antony, if it suits you, that your advice might swing me one way or another. I will not deny that, if Antony’s wishes should happen to agree with my convenience. Tell him I am seizing Suda Bay, and will hold it as long as I see fit. Tell him whatever else you please, and let us see what comes of it.”

  Herod nodded. His eyes sparkled. He recognized the kind of opportunity that exactly fitted his genius. But he was puzzled. He didn’t like being hauled out of bed and packed off at a second’s notice. He wasn’t quite sure whether Tros was fool enough to trust him too much, or a greater fool to trust him not at all. It might be Tros’s way of getting rid of an unwanted observer.

  “Here is more than enough money for your journey — take it, Herod. I am putting aboard the liburnian the best I have in wine and eatables. You will have your slave. For a personal escort I am giving you two Romans and six Jews chosen from those I took from Cassius; they have been suitably clothed and armed. They are yours. But make haste, Herod. The liburnian shall take you to
Tarentum, where it will wait for a message from you regarding Antony’s intentions. I am trusting you to send me full and trustworthy information.”

  He did not trust Herod to be anything but Herod. That was why he gave him no implicit instructions, no hint of his plans nor any information that Herod didn’t already have. Herod was homeless, penniless, almost friendless. More than anything else he needed influence in Rome. To get that he would certainly not minimize, for the grandiose Antony’s ear, the feats of arms nor the strategical position of a possibly useful ally who owned a well-manned and well-disciplined fleet. That part could be safely left to Herod.

  Tros packed him off on the liburnian, and laughed when Hero complained that he had put their fate into Herod’s keeping. When the thump of the liburnian’s oars had vanished into darkness, until daylight he discussed his plan with her. It was’ his plan now, not hers. It was beyond her wildest dream of daring. It made her breathless, speechless, until it dawned that he meant to trust her even more than he had ever trusted Conops. Then the spirit in her, that he did trust, surged and as they paced the deck she turned and faced him, laughing, saluting the way Conops always did.

  “Yes, master! But you call Cleopatra a cat-and-mouser. Your way is equally cruel, isn’t it? You demand at a moment’s notice all a woman’s courage, all her intelligence—”

  He interrupted: “Life is cruel, Hero. You have trudged through Rome in golden chains and lost two thrones, before you are yet twenty. Do you call that the tender mercy of a sentimental heaven?”

  “One throne,” she retorted. “The other I threw away for your sake.”

  “You regret it?”

  “Not I! But—”

  “Hero, if I had let you know my inmost thought too soon, you would have been craftily pumping Herod for advice. He is more crafty than you. He would have divined my purpose. And if Herod understands a purpose, he intrigues to bend it to his own ends. As it is, you have learned quite a little from Herod, and more from me. Your genius will rise to this occasion.”

  “If I lack that genius?”

  “Then I am a man of no judgment, and my destiny is written. I intend to trust you.”

  He knew he was about to impose on her more than was just. She had been trained by artful guardians to leave responsibility to others, and to have her own decisions whispered to her by men who used her as a catspaw. But there was no alternative. He had Sigurdsen’s and Conops’s jealousy to consider, as well as the probability of Herod’s gratitude becoming frayed and cynically thin as distance lent proportion to his views.

  Daybreak revealed too many problems for Tros to do any more explaining to anyone. He gave orders and saw them obeyed. The topmasts of the Alexandrine fleet were already reeling on the sky-line. Suda was a heap of ruined ancient splendor laid low by earthquakes, looted and looted again by Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, pirates, Romans, and quarried for building stone for jumbled slums and for the numerous small but well-built fortresses that more or less guarded the bay. There were forts in the hills. There were caves in the hills. There were clefts in the hills that probably provided steep and well-defended routes for sudden forays against invaders. There was smoke in the hills. There were probably hundreds of capable fighting men, whose actual home was, in the hills and whose town was nothing nowadays except a lure for incautious ships.

  The bay lay empty, except for the bones of a couple of wrecks. If there were any fishing boats, they had been hauled out and hidden. Sextus Pompeius, as the pilot said, had stolen all the useful shipping; had sunk what he couldn’t use. Evidently, too, he had far more than commenced to destroy the few substantial buildings — no doubt to compel the islanders to comply with his demands for provisions and men. It was a lean-looking, doubtful prospect.

  Tros anchored his fleet in two lines within bow-shot of the town, but the place appeared deserted. No one answered his signals. Nothing moved except dogs and a few stray goats. The pilot said the people had all taken to the hills, and he offered to go and find them and to carry a message.

  But Tros preferred to argue from a basis of accomplished fact. Cretans, he knew, were mountain tribes at continual war with one another, and as treacherous as wolves. The name Cretan was a common epithet to hurl at rogues, who, in any port, if they had any pride, would resent it with naked steel.

  So he landed two hundred men, under Conops and another of his captains, sending them right and left to seize the nearest stone forts. A few defenders fled at their approach. He landed more men, ship by ship, until most of his crews were ashore and all the longshore defences were in his hands. Then he marched against the fortified hovel-dwellings that commanded the boulder-strewn roads toward the mountains. After that he explored the town and found almost nothing except empty sheds and houses, and a fleet of small craft hidden under debris. They were good boats. So at last he delivered an ultimatum to the pilot:

  “One thousand bushels of barley or wheat. One thousand full jars, or the equivalent in skins, of tolerable wine. A thousand milch-goats, as a loan, to be returned in due course. Five thousand pounds of grapes. Two thousand pounds of goat-milk cheese. A thousand pounds of honey. All these by tomorrow noon, or I will destroy the town and the forts and burn the fishing boats. The chief and, if he wishes, his council also, may attend me at noon and learn from me what reward I am willing to pay for diligent obedience to my demands.”

  He forbade the chopping up of doors and beams; he sent men foraging for fuel, and they brought in several hundred goats, discovered hidden in ravines and caves. By the time the Alexandrine fleet dropped anchor in the bay at sunset Tros was ready for them, quarters and water and fuel and all. But it was nearly midnight before the last Roman had landed; they had burned their boats for fuel and had to wait until Tros’s men could row them ashore.

  Provisions were now the obsessing problem. True, the fleet could cruise in search of corn ships; with corn in such demand in Rome, African ships of all sorts would be trying to run the blockade of Sextus Pompeius and of the pirates who were in a sort of elastic alliance with him. But to comb the seas for corn ships would be a long-drawn-out business and might lead to nothing. Tros felt fairly confident that his present demands would be met, but to expect the Cretans to continue to support more than four thousand invaders would be utter madness. If the ransom money should arrive, he would be able to pay for what he took, but the Cretans could not eat gold; they would hide in their hills and carry on a grim guerrilla warfare.

  He could hold Suda, for the present, easily. Most of the Romans had swords, and he could arm them in addition with the weapons taken from the pirates. Tarquinius brought him an encouraging account of the Romans’ attitude; and he was waited on by Varro, at the head of a committee, nearly all of whom Tros had known in Alexandria. They dreaded Rome, or said they did, but they preferred even that prospect to the dire alternative of serving in Brutus’s or Cassius’s army. When Tros promised to return them all to Alexandria; although he did not tell them how or when they knew at least that they were dealing with a man who always tried to keep his promises. They agreed to form themselves into a military unit, under Varro’s command, and to obey Tros’s orders. They accepted the task of garrisoning all the little forts around Suda Bay and between Suda and the hills. That left Tros’s own men to hold the town itself, ready to take to the ships at a moment’s notice. An attack from the sea was improbable; the fleet looked too big. Sextus Pompeius, the only man likely to dare to attack, was hardly likely to return to a port that he thought he had stripped of supplies.

  But Tros ran no risks that could be foreseen. He made haste with methodical calm that masked a furious impatience, telling his real plan to none but Hero, and employing Tarquinius to bring him secret information as to what Varro and his Romans were talking and thinking about.

  The provisions arrived, on the backs of asses and on the heads of slaves and women from the secret storage caverns in the mountains. Tros promised the chiefs not only more money than they had a right to expec
t but four of the Alexandrine ships as well, as a present, to replace their own that Sextus Pompeius had sunk or stolen. But neither money nor ships unless, meanwhile, they remained in the hills, reported approaching ships, and faithfully prevented other tribes from raiding Tros’s position. Then, in return for a promise of two more ships, he even exacted a promise of more provisions, that they agreed to obtain from a neighboring tribe, and that he agreed to pay for at a price that would yield them a profit. But he put no faith in that bargain; it was little more than a ruse on his part, to give those Cretans something else to think about than retaliation. Sooner or later they were sure to attempt to recapture the town if only for the sake of the fishing, and because they put no more faith in his promises than he did in theirs. He was careful to let them see his archers at practise and his men being drilled by Sigurdsen and Conops.

  He didn’t spring his surprise on his own men until three days after he had landed, when he had made every provision he could think of, against every imaginable danger. Then he sent for Varro and his subordinates, and all his own captains and subordinate officers. In their presence he appointed hero to the supreme command, with Sigurdsen and Conops ranking equally as chief-lieutenants. He demanded an oath of loyalty and obedience to her. Mystified they gave it, one by one. He gave her his own ten Jews for a bodyguard. Then he paraded all his men and announced the news. They listened breathless.