Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Suddenly he looked up — saw Tros — recognized him — struck his breast with theatrical gesture:

  “Dioscuri! You, Tros — Clear the room!”

  Attendant freedmen, lined against the wall, strode forward. The room was empty in a momenta Antony, almost as tall as Tros, strode forward and embraced him.

  “Welcome! Herod said you were in Crete. He has been telling me of your exploits. You and Herod must have a conference with me tonight, so keep sober. I have to see Octavian tomorrow and I need facts to oppose his sniffling hesitation. Herod told me all about your little affair with Cassius.”

  Tros broke into the wine-inspired flow of verbosity:

  “Good. Then I needn’t waste your time or mine retelling it. Lend me your ears for an urgent matter.”

  Antony laughed. “Urgent? There is so much urgency abroad that dalliance begins to have a market value! Which are you — idiot or statesman? There’s little difference, but which are you? Dioscuri! By the ghost of Caesar, Tros if you had done anything else to Cassius than let him go, I would have been your enemy for life! Cassius and Brutus, damn their hides, are the only two dependable allies I have! They’ll give me the game by obstructing each other and being jealous of good subordinates. But what did you gain?”

  “A fleet — didn’t Herod tell you?”

  “Cassius was worth more to you than thirteen ships, you Samothracian dreamer! Herod tells me you have fallen foul of Cleopatra. Easy to do, I don’t doubt. Tart little bitch. I remember her better than most of the women I’ve squandered time on — used to try to make love to her when Caesar had her in Rome, but she was too clever, or I hadn’t patience. I don’t know which. She corresponds with me at intervals. Her secret agents here in Rome are reptiles; I’ve beheaded a couple. Bacchus! I remember now, it was you who smuggled her out of Rome and back to Egypt, after Caesar’s death, in that great trireme of yours. What became of the trireme? Is it true she burned it? Is it true you have married her sister, or is that one of Herod’s fables?”

  He signed to the slave-secretary to drag up a chair for Tros, then set him the example and sat down with a thud, shouting “wine! wine!” He kept on shouting until a slave came on the run with a wine-jar. Like many a big man’s, Antony’s voice was high-pitched. He had trained it in a school of oratory to penetrate and shout down the discordant roar of crowds. It was a battlefield voice. But when he was drunk he forgot the rules of oratory, talked like a waterfall, leaped from thought to thought without pause and never waited for an answer until the sudden moment when he thumped a table and commanded climax.

  “Tros, why are you here? To have your head lopped for piracy, or to do me a service?”

  “You will do yourself no service if you think I ran this risk to play at which can out-guess the other,” Tros answered. “Destiny won’t wait upon our convenience. I have a fleet in being.”

  “What of those Alexandrine Romans that Herod speaks of?”

  Tros told him. He showed Varro’s letter. Antony tossed it on the secretary’s table. He laughed.

  “That damned fool Cassius would cut his own throat sooner than act sensibly!”

  “He hadn’t the courage. I gave him the chance to kill himself,” Tros answered.

  “Tros, if you had killed him, you would have made me your mortal enemy. Without Cassius as a living menace, I could hardly have brought that little pimply beast Octavian to terms. However, what about those Romans? What do you propose to do with them?”

  “They are worthless as troops,” Tros answered. “But as political friends, they might be of more or less value to you in Alexandria.”

  Antony nodded. “Can you do it?”

  “I propose to do it. Write them a letter. Promise them your protection. Bid them meanwhile to obey my orders.”

  “I will do that. How many ships have you? How many men?”

  Tros told him. Antony’s wits were as quick as lightning when he did use them. He had been a magnificent chief of staff under Julius Caesar. All he ever needed was a leader strong enough to discipline his genius. His eyes grew brilliant. He scowled, swallowed an enormous draught of wine, got up and paced the floor a time or two, then suddenly turned on Tros and slammed a hand on his shoulder.

  “Could you defeat Ahenobarbus? Would you dare to try it? He has more than forty ships — six quinquiremes — eight triremes. Spies report’ him on his way to Alexandria but it may be a false report. You have spoiled Cassius’s plan for invading Egypt. That’s good. I owe you a turn for that. Cassius and Brutus are beginning to concentrate toward Macedonia, because of rumors that Octavian and I have settled our differences and are ready to start against them. If Ahenobarbus could seize Alexandria, he and Sextus Pompeius between them could starve us out. Not a corn ship could reach Rome. We couldn’t possibly march into Asia.”

  “It is of that I came to speak,” Tros answered.

  Antony was silent a moment, speculating, using his intuition; he was too drunk to use critical judgment. Suddenly he demanded:

  “Tros, what is your ultimate purpose? Why this woman, renamed Hero? Why, though Cleopatra burned your trireme, did you save her by preventing Cassius’s invasion? Are you scheming for the throne of Egypt for yourself?”

  Tros stood and faced him: “Antony, if I had craved a throne, I could have had one long ago.”

  “Yes, I remember Caesar spoke of it. Very well. What are you after?”

  Tros told him of his plan to sail around the world. “I need to build special ships for the purpose. All my wealth is in Alexandria, and that is the best place in which to build such ships as I need.”

  Antony roared with laughter. Tros stepped away from him, glaring. He had no sense of humor where his grand ambition was concerned. He was sorry he had mentioned it, too angry to realize that he had totally disarmed Antony’s suspicion. “Did you come to enlist me for the voyage?” Antony asked, swallowing wine.

  “I came to offer, on terms, to guarantee that corn shall reach Rome in sufficient quantity to break the blockade and to make it possible for you to march against Brutus and Cassius.”

  Antony grinned. “You’re a bold man. We don’t dare to send a fleet against Ahenobarbus. He might destroy a fleet that we need to protect our crossing of the Adriatic. So you’ll tackle him, eh? And your terms?”

  “The Roman senate has denounced me as a pirate.”

  “Very simple. I will have that annulled by noon tomorrow. What else?”

  “An appointment as Roman admiral, signed and sealed by you, giving me full authority to act at my own discretion against the enemies of Rome on land or sea.”

  “Impossible! Illegal! Octavian wouldn’t agree to it. Even I couldn’t get it through the senate without Octavian’s backing.”

  “Is the senate so important? Did the senate agree to the proscriptions — to the lopping of the heads I saw on spikes as I entered the city?” Tros retorted. “Are you Triumvir, or the senate’s catspaw? I am told you have murdered half the senate.”

  “Bacchus! You brought your courage with you!”

  “Furthermore, I demand your promise, to be faithfully kept, that you will aid me in all ways possible, as soon as possible, to start away fully found and equipped on my voyage.”

  “All right. That’s a bargain. You may as well perish that way as another. Otherwise your tongue will rob you of your head, unless Ahenobarbus gets you first. What else do you want?”

  “A letter from you to Cleopatra, telling her of my appointment.”

  “Hah-hah! Oh, hah-hah! That’s good. She’ll enjoy that, I imagine! Oh well, serve her right for being stingy with her money! Damn the little bitch, she only sent me a couple of million sesterces.”

  “I want your order in writing, permitting me to take the store-ships in Tarentum and their cargoes.”

  “Ammunition, yes, if you need it. But no corn, mind! We can’t spare a grain of corn.”

  “An escort to Tarentum — now — tonight!”

  “Tonight, eh?”


  Antony paced the floor, twice, with his hands behind him.

  He spread his shoulders, flexed his muscles. At last he paused in front of the slave at the table:

  “Write the appointment. Write the two letters he wants.”

  “Add, in the letter to the Queen,” said Tros, “that Antony requests full diplomatic courtesy and protection for Hero, wife of Lord Admiral Tros.”

  The slave raised his eyebrows. Antony nodded:

  “Yes, yes, write it. — Tros, do you know, you are the only visitor in a week who hasn’t begged mercy or money! Stay to dinner. I will send you on your way at midnight. What’s this rumor about civil war in Alexandria? Any truth in it? A spy — I hardly trust him — sent the news from Athens, where they say the Alexandrine Jews have risen in rebellion. There are several reports that Ahenobarbus is under weigh to take advantage of it. Sit down, man, sit down, have another drink and tell me all you know.”

  CHAPTER XLV. “Man the fleet!”

  Heavens, how many obstacles there are between a resolution and its fulfillment! How much compromising to be done with unessential issues, to preserve the main thing whole and worthy! Each new obstacle to be surmounted in its turn, its smashed entanglements converted into means toward the main end! And the main end never to be overlooked, forgotten, substituted, changed, abandoned nay, nor once dishonored by a coward doubt!

  — From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace

  All the way to Tarentum Tros remembered Herod’s face at the banquet-table — opposite — halfway down the table — angry and humiliated. Tros had reclined at Antony’s right hand. Antony hadn’t let them even speak together. Clothed in the Triumvir’s clean linen, Tros had guardedly sipped wine from Pompey’s famous cellar that Antony gulped in goblets-full.

  “Do you agree, Tros? I like that fellow Herod — an artist — amusing company — clever — but I wouldn’t trust him not to go over to the enemy with all my secrets!”

  An uproarious banquet — forty guests — more than a hundred entertainers — decadent indecency — drunken extravagance — revelry of men who might be dead tomorrow. None knew whose name was on the list of suspected traitors, but all men knew Octavian’s sly genius for getting his political opponents daggered. Even at Antony’s banquet table, there were guards on the watch for Octavian’s spies.

  But Antony’s high spirits had seemed genuine. His drunkenness appeared to be a tribute to his own self-confidence. He sang with the singers. He got up and danced with the mimes. He wrestled with one of his Gaulish freedmen — threw him, with bawdily genial comments, three parts dead into the midst of a group of dancing girls.

  And he had been better than his word when midnight came — out Caesared Caesar with extravagance of generosity. He had ordered out the chariot in which Caesar used to burn up distances — a long thing, beautifully balanced, in which a man could sleep. There was a chariot full of choice wines and hampers of cooked food. There were six escorting chariots filled with legionaries of the Tenth, under a centurion named Sempronius Ruber, who had campaigned with Antony over half a world and knew the last hair-trigger trick of saving time on the road. There was a chariot for Tros’s servants, new clean clothing for them and a present of money that made them pop-eyed.

  And Antony had summoned the public official who had charge of the senate’s seal and had compelled him to countersign Tros’s commission without reading it. True, the senate’s seal was lacking, but it bore Antony’s, as red as blood, as big as the boss on a Scythian shield. The letter to Cleopatra was encased in a golden tube that had been plundered by Sulla from Mithradates’s palace; it referred to Tros as amicus meus, to Hero as uxor sua pulcherrima fidelis et sine criminis causa.

  In the hands of Sempronius Ruber was a document commanding port authorities to give Tros any stores he needed, against the centurion’s receipt. Antony had forgotten to exempt corn from the authorization. When they reached Tarentum, Tarquinius, who had snaffled himself a bribe from some credulous fool and was looking well pleased with himself, turned up with an accurate list of all the provisions afloat in the harbor. Not a man of the liburnians’ crews was missing.

  Wheat, barley, olive-oil, wine — two full cargoes, in seaworthy ships, with pressed Tarentine crews, were snatched from under the very noses of the authorities and orders to sea. The captain of one of the port triremes, overawed by Antony’s seal on Tros’s commission, and properly flattered by the glib-tongued Sempronius Ruber, undertook to escort the slow store-ships southward and eastward to a conjectural rendezvous at sea where Tros, on his way from Suda with his fleet, would overtake him.

  As a precaution, the only one he could think of, Tros shipped Tarquinius off on the trireme, to regale the trireme’s officers with any lies he pleased and keep them from abandoning their convoy or returning with it to Tarentum. Then he embraced Sempronius Ruber, gave him gold beyond a mere centurion’s dreams of affluence, and set sail — two liburnians in line ahead, whose crews knew only that the great Lord Captain’s grim impatience was the cue for even more than their usual seamanship.

  The liburnians flew, with a brisk nor’wester kicking up a sea behind them, but not fast enough for Tros and hardly fast enough to snatch another bone from the teeth of fate. One more hour, and Tros would have been too late at Suda.

  One day before his sails shone rosy in the rising sun in the mouth of the bay, the ransom had come for Sophax and his captains. It was partly in gold, partly in the form of a letter of credit on Jew-Esias in Alexandria, that Esias had given a year ago in payment for a cargo of African slaves. That was good acceptable currency.

  Its arrival had interrupted riots caused by some of the women having offered themselves to Varro’s Romans. Hero had demanded the return of the women and the Romans’ impudent refusal had put her command in jeopardy. Sigurdsen and Conops, mutually jealous, had supported Hero, but the men had done some fighting on their own account, and the Romans had Sigurdsen’s women, which had made him bull-angry and indifferent to sensible caution. He had battle-axed one Roman. Discipline was dangerously undermined. The bards were singing war-songs and the men were testing Hero’s resolution. She was hesitant, too anxious to be diplomatic, trying to gain time until Tros should return.

  Now the Romans were demanding half the ransom money, claiming, plausibly enough, that they had been the bait in the trap that enabled Tros to capture Sophax. Tros, they declared, had abandoned them all to their fate. He had been gone two weeks. Where was he? They demanded that the fleet should put to sea before provisions gave out and the Cretans came down on them. They had tried to enforce their demands by seizing and cutting off the water supply.

  Tros arrived in the nick of time to prevent a tight that would inevitably have brought down Cretans from the hills to attack both sides indiscriminately. Hero, Sigurdsen and Conops were preparing for a vigorous assault on Varro’s hurriedly fortified position.

  Tros took command. He showed himself in full view of the Romans. He deployed a hundred men toward the Romans’ rear, and they capitulated without striking a blow. They sent Varro to beg for terms.

  The terms were drastic. Varro was deposed and all except two hundred of the Romans were disarmed. All of them had to go to work at once to fill the fleet’s water-casks — a prodigious task; to save injuring the casks they had to sling them on poles and carry them from the filling-place to the shore. The two hundred who were not disarmed were volunteers, who begged to be enrolled for battle-duty. Tros grouped them in tens and distributed them on different ships, so that they couldn’t gang up for another outbreak.

  The severest part of the penalty Tros kept carefully secret, until he was ready and the Romans gave him the additional excuse that he had no doubt they would give, for indignant drasticism. What he needed was fighting men, not politicians, and he was short of good seamen. He had plenty of rowers; Cassius’s captured Jews were becoming good. They were beginning to believe they would be set free, so they put their hearts into the work.

&
nbsp; But Sophax’s men were sailors, and though the pirate claimed them when he paid his ransom, most of them preferred Tros’s offer of enlistment. Sophax and his captains had to leave them behind, and the man who had brought the ransom money also volunteered, and was accepted.

  Finally, Tros sent for the Cretan chiefs and paid them — overpaid them. He gave them all the Egyptian women except six, who were the property of Sigurdsen’s decurions; and even two of those fortunates he ordered whipped as an example to Hero’s slave, Sigurdsen’s freedwoman and half-a-dozen others, who might be said to be on the strength and not subject to be treated like cattle.

  Then he began driving. Conops’s golden trumpet sounded the assembly. The order went forth:

  “Man the fleet!”

  Tros’s men went to work, delighted. But the Alexandrine

  Romans demanded navigators and trained crews. Had not the pressed Rhakotis seamen deserted along with Cleopatra’s warship convoy? The experience of manning oars and sails was nothing they wished to repeat. Besides, Tros had taken two hundred of their best men, and had promised their best ships to the Cretans, whose chiefs were standing by, waiting for Tros to keep his bargain. It was then that he imposed his staggering decision:

  “You will remain here! I have already made terms with these Cretan chiefs for your protection. Queen Cleopatra shall pay their bill for feeding and protecting you until she sends a fleet to bring you back to Alexandria. Do you think me such a fool of a commander as to risk a second time such treachery as yours was the minute my back was turned? I sail on stern business. I need men, not trimmers.”

  They begged, they implored, they promised, they even wept, but he was adamant. He wanted no slow convoy of doubtfully friendly noncombatants to be fed and guarded while he combed the sea to force an issue with Ahenobarbus’s fleet. He had in mind, too, to discover how far he could trust the Cretans. Suda Bay was a splendid anchorage. Cleopatra was not yet — not by a long way yet defeated; even when defeated, she was likely to be as dangerous as ever. A day might come when he would need such a base as Suda, with dependable tribesmen ashore to protect him while he accumulated material and built the ships he had in mind, for the voyage around the world on which his heart was set. So let the Romans stay and test the Cretans’ idea of a bargain. He left the Romans as many provisions as he dared. He bargained shrewdly with the Cretans, promising not too much but enough to make it worth their while to keep faith.