by Talbot Mundy
Leander and Olympus loomed behind her, staring, listening, alert. She looked at Hero steadily. The gleam of torchlight on Hero’s armor wasn’t as fascinating as the flash of unmasked but, for the moment bridled hatred in those sisters’ eyes.
Hero said nothing, making the most of superior height and a smile that suggested triumph was beneath her young dignity. Cleopatra spoke:
“Tros, who is this? Present her to me.”
“She is my wife Hero. Hero, make obeisance of the Queen of Egypt.”
Hero bowed gracefully and then stared eloquent defiance.
“I congratulate you, Hero. And you also, Lord Admiral. She is beautiful, isn’t she? But what a task to be worthy of Tros! Hero, be a loyal wife to him and count me your friend! Lord Admiral, your friend Esias tells me your fortune is safe. He has it. His docks are at your disposal. He is at the moment busy trying to calm the Jews, who have been troublesome. He and his friends will be sorry, and I more than all, when you set out at last on your voyage around the world. But we will hospitably aid you. We will speed our guest, though we will all lament his going.” Then — suddenly, in a voice that curiously mingled anger, laughter, tears, humiliation and admission of guilt: “Now, Tros, are we friends again? Olympus said you demanded proof. Is this enough? Can you ask more than that I come and claim your protection? Are we friends again?”
“I was never your enemy,” he answered. Hero shuddered when he kissed her. Then Leander laughed aloud:
“Lord Admiral, you have a tougher task tonight than when you fought your way out of Pelusium!”
“The opportunity to thank you for your aid on that occasion is a privilege, Leander!”
Cleopatra saved that moment. “He obeyed me, Tros! He was loyal to me. I ordered it. Forgive him!”
“It is not my custom to forgive an officer for being loyal to his Queen! How now, Leander? You were saying?”
“Tros, unless you smash Ahenobarbus’s fleet, the Queen’s enemies will have closed a bargain with him before morning.”
“Is it known she has left the palace?” Tros asked.
“No,” said Cleopatra. “Not even Charmion knows — not yet.” Leander added: “If Ahenobarbus knew it, he would imitate Caesar and seize the palace.”
“He is a little late to try that,” Tros answered. “When I have beaten him, what of the throne?”
Cleopatra answered: “Do you think I would have begged your pardon, humbly like this, if I could have saved my throne without you? To your task, Lord Admiral! Defeat Ahenobarbus, and the city will kiss your feet and pay its fines for having flouted me!”
“Can you safely return to the palace?”
“No! If I were seen it would be said I had appealed to you and you had refused aid! They would offer to sell me to Ahenobarbus!”
“It may be a hard battle,” said Tros. “Ahenobarbus is a stout opponent. If you remain on my ship you may be injured — killed.”
“Better to die in battle than be a drab of a throneless Queen!” said Hero. Wish was mother to the thought. She didn’t even try to mask the malice. She hoped so eagerly that Cleopatra would be slain that Cleopatra laughed and blew her a kiss.
“You have a wife, Tros, whose opinions crackle like a thorn-fire. Let us hope they burn nothing!”
Tros put under Leander’s orders ten men armed with swords and shields, whom he could ill spare.
“Guard her with your lives! The safest place will be the midship cabin.”
But Cleopatra refused to enter the cabin. Nothing — no argument could persuade her to do it.
“It is my throne that you will fight for. I will share the full risk. And besides, I wish to see a well-fought naval battle!” Tros sent two boats around the fleet. He himself visited the nearest ships. Presently there stole forth from the lightless lines the store-ship loaded with explosives, under oars, guided by rowboats, steered by Conops, manned by seamen who had fought at Salamis, and towing boats into which the crew were to jump at the word of command. The flagship followed, showing one light astern, guiding an almost silent fleet in line ahead, dead slow. The thump of muffled oars was smothered by the roar of breakers on the rocks of Pharos. There was no telltale moon. The silence on Tros’s flagship was so tense that he could hear the oarsmen’s breathing and the thumb-strum of a bard who tuned a harp. He could hear the creak of a midship walk on which the oar-captains stood under lantern-light and beat time. It was perfect rowing; the oar-drip was nearly as quiet as rain.
Suddenly Roman vedette boats blared a general alarm and scooted toward their fleet. Ahenobarbus’s quinquiremes and triremes slipped their cables with a great din of oars going out through the ports, shouted commands and trumpet-calls. The rest of the Roman fleet began hauling their anchors. The high-sided fire-ship, hardly visible, suddenly rattled as if hail-struck. All four quinquiremes had opened on it with their arrow-engines. Its rowers spurted. Conops’s golden trumpet tally-hoed a blast of triumph. Oars went overside. There was a rush for the boats. The store-ship crashed between two quinquiremes, whose heavy corvi fell well aimed and spiked its deck. Through the store-ship’s hatches burst a fountain of brilliant flame that cannonaded, crackled, exploded and sizzled skyward with a suffocating stench and dreadful heat that hurled back the Roman boarders. The locked quinquiremes crashed their sister ships. The triremes milled around them. From the stern of Tros’s flagship the thrice repeated signal flickered:
“Carry on as ordered!”
Trumpets then, and shouting. Wild harps, and the cannonade of oars unmuffled. Conops, back on his own ship, led his squadron hard behind Tros. Sigurdsen’s squadron raced along the harbor-front, between the shore and the burning quinquiremes, to engage the Romans’ lighter ships and hold them, while Tros and Conops poured a hail of arrow-fire into the colliding, locked, unmanageable fleet in mid-harbor. All four quinquiremes had caught fire; two whose corvi had spiked the fire-ship’s deck-beams were already done for, abandoned, most of their crews leaping overboard to drown. The crew of one drifting, blazing quinquireme had spiked a trireme with its corvus, to make a bridge for its crew to abandon ship. They were in the way, masking the trireme’s arrow-fire.
The holocaust illuminated the entire harbor — the long, defended Heptastadium — the dense crowds swarming along the harbor-front to view the spectacle — Sigurdsen’s squadron obeying orders, avoiding the Roman biremes’ deadly covi, outmanoeuvring them, delaying their efforts to come to the main fleet’s rescue — and in the midst of the harbor a fiery mirror on which black monsters struggled amid smoke and roaring flame.
Suddenly the fire-ship blew up. There was a moment’s glare like the death agony of a thousand meteors, ten thousand thunder-claps in one — then darkness, jewelled by the longshore torches mirrored on the water. Cleopatra’s voice and Hero’s, simultaneous in Tros’s ears, one on either side of him but hardly audible amid the din of battle and the shouts of ten or twenty men all bellowing the same news:
“Tros! there goes Ahenobarbus!”
“Lord Admiral, the Roman captain runs!”
Tros, too had seen him. Almost nothing escaped Tros’s eyes in battle. He had time, even in that minute, to observe that Conops’s four ships had broken a trireme’s oars, had rammed and grappled her, were at the throats of the Roman marines. Another trireme had gone to lend a hand against Sigurdsen’s ships. Another, backing water to get in position to use her ram, loomed ahead in the darkness, and toward that trireme Ahenobarbus was being rowed — he and his staff in the stern of an eight-oared boat.
“Lay all arrow-engines on the trireme forward. Full speed ahead!”
The air screamed with arrows. Tros caught the trireme turning, rammed her near amidship, rolled her half over with a gap in her underside that filled her in less than a minute — backed away, by the grace of discipline and masterly helmsmanship too swiftly to be caught by the ram in the rolling Roman’s death-wound. The sinking trireme’s captain yelled for quarter.
“Cease fire! Both boats away!
Bring me that Roman admiral alive! Starboard oars astern! Port oars forward! Full speed!”
He circled around to aid Conops. But that trireme also had struck. Conops and his crew were already disarming Roman prisoners. Tros ordered the trireme left adrift. Its oars were smashed; it was helpless.
“Go and aid Sigurdsen!”
Then Ahenobarbus came over the rail with his dejected-looking staff officers, respectfully but closely followed by Tros’s seamen. The Roman admiral strode up to Tros in the darkness. His staff saluted, but he didn’t.
“Do you strike?” Tros asked him.
“Yes.”
“Then let your captains know it!”
“How?”
Signalling — but no one saw the signals — trumpeting — but no one heard or heeded — Tros raced across the harbor to where Sigurdsen’s and Conops’s squadrons were at death-grips with what remained of the Roman fleet. It had become almost a land-fight. Grapples, rams, corvi had locked them into one swaying riot with a Roman bireme crushed in the midst, and one ship burning. Sigurdsen’s ship had been sunk by a Roman dolphin. Sigurdsen was battle-axing, bull-lunged in the van of boarders on a Roman deck.
By trumpet-call and messenger Tros had called off most of his own men before the Romans at last saw Ahenobarbus standing bare-headed on a torch-lit quarter-deck, and understood, and yielded. Two cataphracts and a trireme, three vedette boats and one bireme were making their way to the sea, circling wide near harbor-mouth to avoid the catapults on Pharos. Conops came vaulting override, saluting, grinning:
“Shall we give chase, master? I mean, Lord Admiral?”
“No. Bring Ahenobarbus’s eight-oared boat alongside.”
“Aye, aye, master.”
“Steward, provision the admiral’s boat.”
Ahenobarbus stared. He took no notice of Cleopatra, none of Hero. Cleopatra was about to speak to him, but Tros prevented her; he knew the grim, sardonic Roman hated her too savagely to be civil even if his life depended on it.
“So we have met again, Ahenobarbus. You promised, I remember, you would crucify me.”
“True. I meant that,” said the Roman.
“You can overtake your ships, I think, Ahenobarbus, if you make haste. Ashore you would be a dangerous guest. I don’t like crucifying gallant seamen. So I make you a present of the life of a brave commander!”
A slight smile flickered on Ahenobarbus’s iron face.
“I accept that,” he answered. “You yourself, Tros, are an honorable seaman. You should have been born a Roman. Farewell.”
He and his staff officers saluted. They ignored the women, turned away and marched like gladiators to the rail, where the seamen helped them overside. Then Cleopatra spoke:
“Tros, you are a madman. I have always known it. You should have cut off his head.”
“I prefer his respect,” Tros answered. “His head is valueless. It holds no wisdom.”
He gave orders to his lighter vessels to patrol the harbor-front, to prevent the Alexandrine mob from putting off in boats to loot Roman ships. He sent boats for the surviving Roman captains, and to rescue swimmers. But there wee very few swimmers; armor had drowned the men who jumped, and the chained Roman rowers had gone down with their burning ships.
The city roar became noticeable now — ululating tumult, echoed and re-echoed between marble walls. There was a lot of shouting on the Heptastadium. Along the harbor-front two regiments of cavalry, their weapons and brass ornaments reflecting torchlight, clattered and came to a halt abeam of Tros’s ship. They saluted with a great flourish of trumpets and thunder of drums. Tros send Leander to bring their commander aboard.
“Tros,” said Cleopatra, “you are as mad as Euroclydon, but you are as brave as Alexander and as generous as all the fools there ever were on earth. Now that you have let Ahenobarbus go — no doubt to be your relentless enemy! — what do you propose to do next?”
He was silent for several minutes, keeping her waiting while he watched the lights of his squadrons obeying orders to form in double line with the flagship on the right front and the captured Roman warships in a line down the midst.
“Next?” he said then. “I am Antony’s admiral.”
“Tros, you could have been my admiral. I offered it.”
“Aye, Egypt. I think now they will send their scapegoats and their hostages, to beg terms. We have the city at our mercy.”
He meant he had her at his mercy. He was too magnanimous to say so plainly, unless she forced him. She understood.
“Tros, what do you wish me to promise? I will do it.”
“Bring those wretched Romans back from Crete to Alexandria. Restore to them their property. Defray the cost of my ship that you burned. Faithfully observe the terms that I conveyed to you by the mouth of Olympus.”
“Faithfully I promise.”
Careful for their finery and followed by two orderlies, the cavalry commander and Leander clambered from a rowboat to the deck. The cavalry commander saluted with a magnificent gesture, but he looked sheepishly at the Queen and avoided her eyes. He wasn’t specially eager to look Tros in the face, but he had his speech ready, and Leander had told him of Tros’s new rank.
“A splendid victory, Lord Admiral! A gallant fight! Strategically perfect! Tactically superb! Timed as if the very gods themselves had—”
Tros interrupted: “Have you been in arms against your Queen?”
“No.”
Cleopatra put a word in. “He hadn’t the courage! he waited to see first what would happen!”
The cavalry commander began stammering denials and Leander laughed aloud. Again Tros interrupted:
“Where are the Queen’s ministers?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take your cavalry and go and find them. Bring them here to me.”
“Dead?”
“No. Alive.”
Cleopatra interrupted: “They are traitors. Let him kill them.”
Tros repeated: “Bring them here to me alive! — Egypt, I will hold them on my ship as hostages until you find others to put in their place. — Stay here, Leander. Have you any loyal guards at the palace?”
“Yes, now they know who is master!”
“Summon their officers here to receive my orders! Squadron-commander Conops!”
“Aye, aye, master — coming!”
“Detail fifty men to escort the Queen! Hold them ready to set her ashore on the Heptastadium with Captain Leander and Olympus when I give you the word. Thence, escort her to the palace, and report to me.”
“Aye, aye, Lord Admiral. Ready in half a jiffy!”
Cleopatra turned to Hero, whose archer bodyguard was nicking two more notches in her bow. Hero was watching, listening, smiling. There was no doubt what Cleopatra’s fate would be, if she, not Tros were in command.
“Enviable sorceress!” said Cleopatra. “If I might sail away, as you will, I would think a kingdom well lost!”
Hero nodded. Tros smiled. “Egypt — keep it well won!”
“Tros — you fool,” she answered, and she glanced again at Hero, “you could have been King of Egypt.”
THE END
THE THUNDER DRAGON GATE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1. “Country of origin — Tibet; home town Lhasa.”
CHAPTER 2.
CHAPTER 3. “Say it, then, behind his back, to Ambleby!”
CHAPTER 4. “If you can do it!”
CHAPTER 5. “They should rate you AAA One Hundred Plus.”
CHAPTER 6. “Have your meals with me while you’re in Delhi.”
CHAPTER 7. “Memo. buy some american chewing-gum.”
CHAPTER 8. “Said it was a shang-shang. Then he said it was his own soul looking at him.”
CHAPTER 9. “Tee-Hee! Isn’t she a lulu!”
CHAPTER 10. “You and I are equally in danger.”
CHAPTER 11. “But on whose side is Dowlah?”
CHAPTER 12. “Your chewing-gum kills rats.”
CHAPTER 13. “Young man, you remind me of a bomb with the fuse ignited.”
CHAPTER 14. “Tum-Glain! Tum-Glain!”
CHAPTER 15. “What are you looking peaked about, Mr. Grayne?”
CHAPTER 16. “I had no right to exact that promise.”
CHAPTER 17. “Guilty. I shouldn’t have done it.”
CHAPTER 18. “I’ve no right to look in his pockets.”
CHAPTER 19. “You’re a mongrel. but I’ll give you a chance.”
CHAPTER 20. “Did you have trouble with this man?”
CHAPTER 21. “Quite a scholar, the old abbot.”
CHAPTER 22. “Fine.”
CHAPTER 23. “They’re taking Thö-Pa-Ga away!”
CHAPTER 24. “Sign your name as representative plenipotentiary!”
CHAPTER 25. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 26. “Who would speak of such a valley?”
CHAPTER 30. “Bandits! Let us turn back!”
CHAPTER 31. “I was in trouble some years ago.”
CHAPTER 32. “This is a dreadful place.”
CHAPTER 33. “Got to get into the monastery.”
CHAPTER 34. “Any dog can kill!”
CHAPTER 35. “Banzai!”
The first edition’s cover
CHAPTER 1. “Country of origin — Tibet; home town Lhasa.”
IT was one of those days when not even Cockneys like London. Spring had made a false start. Fog, wind, rain, sleet, and a prevalent stench of damp wool. Even the street noises sounded flat and discouraged. Big Ben was invisible through the fog from Trafalgar Square, and the lions around Nelson’s monument with rain streaming from their granite flanks resembled mythical ocean monsters. Lights in the windows of Cockspur Street suggested warmth, and there was a good smell of hot bread and pastry exuding through the doors of tea shops, but that only made the streets feel more unpleasant.
Tom Grayne turned up his overcoat collar, stuck his hands in his pockets, and without particular malice cursed the umbrellas of passers-by.
No one noticed him much. He was fairly big, tolerably well dressed. He was obviously in the pink of condition; he walked with the gait of a man who knows where he is going, and why, and what he will do when he gets there — the unhurried, slow-looking but devouring stride of a man who has walked great distances.