Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Master, let them have the ship,” Conops answered nervously. “While they loot this galley you and I can swim ashore, and then find our way along the bank to Lunden. Our own Britons will cease rowing presently and then—”

  “Little man, all Caesar’s pay-chests lie under the hatch in the cabin below us.”

  “What is gold to a dead man, master?”

  “Or death to a live one. Nay, I think we are not far from Lunden.”

  “But I see more boats,” urged Conops. “Look — by the bend in the river ahead of us.”

  Arrows began humming into the galley. One rower fell off his bench, shot through the eye. The other rowers stopped work and began shouting to the Britons in the boats, who answered with yells and drew closer. Conops let go the helm and jumped for the arrow-engine, twisting at the crank and shouting to Tros to lay arrows in the grooves.

  But Tros took a torch from a box beside the water barrel, lighted it at an earthen firepot and brandished it around his head to make it blaze.

  “Now,” he roared down at the rowers. “Tell those pirates I’ll burn the ship unless they haul off!”

  He jumped into the ship’s waist and stood with his back to the cabin door, just as Conops sent a flight of arrows twanging from the engine. If the ship were burned and beached there would still be one chance in a thousand of recovering the gold, and at any rate he was determined not to let longshore pirates have it. The best place to fire the ship would be in the cabin under the poop, where there was plenty of stuff that was inflammable.

  There began to be a lot of shouting back and forth as the galley swung beam to the tide. Some of the rowers jumped overboard and swam for the already overcrowded boats; some stood on the benches to show they had no weapons and would not fight even if they had. Another flight of arrows twanged and whistled from Conops’ engine, but the galley’s crew yelled to the attacking parties not to answer it.

  “There are two men — only two men!” they kept shouting. “Keep away, or they will burn the ship!”

  Five or six more plunged overboard, and Tros decided to let them all go; he would be better off without them, better able to make terms. He swung himself up onto the poop, still brandishing the torch, and a spear thrown from alongside slit his cloak. He caught the spear and raised it as whalers hold a harpoon, leaning overside to hurl it through the bottom of the nearest boat, and paused, rigid, in that attitude.

  “They run,” remarked Conops from over by the arrow-engine. In some way he had jammed the mechanism and was jerking at it nervously. “Likewise, we drift into the mud.”

  He jumped for the helm and began straining his whole strength against it, with one foot on the bulwark rail, but Tros saw it was too late to keep the galley off the mud bank.

  “Let her take it as she drifts,” he ordered. “If she buries her beak she will lie here forever.”

  The galley’s oars sprawled this and that way like the legs of a drunken water beetle as she swung round on the tide and settled herself comfortably on the mud.

  The hide-and-wattle boats were scurrying away as fast as the paddles could drive them, but fourteen other boats, all wooden, rowed with oars and crowded with armed men, were coming on, down-river, against the tide, and in the stern of one of them, that had a gilded figurehead carved like a swan, there sat a woman, whose fair hair streamed over her shoulders.

  “Fflur!”

  Tros waved the torch and flung it overboard. There were still about thirty Britons in a cluster in the galley’s waist, and Tros had promised that every member of the crew who should stand by faithfully until the journey’s end should have a fair share of the loot. Not one of them had been what he considered faithful, and they were not at Lunden yet.

  “Whoever fears Fflur, swim for it!” he shouted. Nine or ten men heeded that suggestion.

  Tros counted the remaining men and made the count nineteen, including all three captains of the three crews he had started with. “Little man, we have the lion’s share,” he remarked to Conops.

  “I would sell mine for one drachma in hand,” said Conops.

  Then Fflur came, jumping up the galley’s side as actively as if she had been born to sailoring, not taking Tros’s outstretched hand, until her leather-stockinged feet were on the poop deck. She kissed him on both cheeks, laughing and friendly.

  In less than a minute after that the galley was a-swarm with Britons of the white-skinned, fair-haired type, some in peaked iron caps and all dressed handsomely, with their legs in dyed woolen trousers and their long shirts embroidered in three colors. They examined and laughed at everything, ignoring the crew as if they were some sort of inferior animals.

  “Keep them out of the cabin below this poop,” said Tros.

  Fflur nodded.

  She had been a chief’s wife long enough to take hints swiftly. She gave an order in low tones. Four men did her bidding, standing by the cabin door in the attitude of bored alertness that the British climate breeds in gentlemen. They said nothing, did nothing, drew no weapon; but none offered to encroach on their preserve.

  Fflur’s gray eyes appeared to take in everything, including the slits in Tros’s cloak.

  “Caswallon will be in Lunden tonight,” she said quietly. “Caesar has left Britain with all his troops, after two battles and some skirmishing. He ordered us to send him hostages to Gaul, but Caswallon has been trying to prevent the men of Kent from doing that. Is this ship stuck fast? The beacon warned us of a Northman in the Thames, and when Caswallon is away that is my business.”

  Tros answered that the tide would probably lift them off the mud before long, but that he had no anchor. Then he whispered what lay under the cabin floor.

  “It is yours,” she said promptly, but Tros laughed.

  He had a way of smiling, when the laugh was finished, that was irresistible, holding his great head a little to one side and half closing his eyes.

  “Life and money are his who can keep them,” he answered. She nodded again.

  “Yes. And Britain is his who can keep it. Caswallon is a king still. You helped us, Tros. I will help you.”

  She went down the poop ladder before Tros could offer her a hand, and into the cabin, he after her. There was hardly more than head room underneath the beams, and the place was crowded with Caesar’s personal belongings — his bed, tent, chests of clothes, toilet articles and a chest full of memoranda written by his secretary, not yet annotated.

  Tros stirred among the tablets and parchments, with his cloak in Fflur’s way. Then together they moved the chest from off the hatch and discovered gold in bags beneath it, bags that even Tros found heavy.

  There were ten, and Fflur’s eyes glistened in the dim light through the partly opened door; but not so keenly as Tros’s eyes had blazed at the sight of Caesar’s seal in the box with the memoranda. While she looked at the gold he took the seal and hid it in a pocket in his cloak. Fflur called to her iron-capped gentlemen:

  “Put these ten bags into my boat. Guard them.”

  They obeyed without comment, summoning the inferiors to do the portering, two men to a bag, themselves surveying the proceedings leisurely, arranging among themselves which three should guard the gold when it was safely overside, and which one should wait with Fflur.

  He looked like the most casual cockerel who ever lived — a youngish man with a very long, tawny moustache, which he twisted whenever anybody looked at him. He wore a cloak of yellow dyed linen trimmed with beaver fur, and a golden-hilted sword in a scabbard inlaid with gold. There had been a big dent in his iron cap, but it had been hammered out again until only a vague shadow of it showed.

  “Anything else?” he asked in a bored voice, that was hardly insolent and yet contained no hint of deference.

  Tros gestured toward the chest of memoranda. The Briton ignored him, absolutely, seemed unaware of his existence.

  “Take that too,” Fflur ordered, pointing at the chest, and the Briton strolled to the door to summon a sailor, who carried
the chest overside.

  Fflur examined Caesar’s bed and all the other odds and ends that filled the cabin.

  “Is Caesar a woman?” she asked scornfully, opening a small chest of cosmetics that reeked of eastern scents.

  “I have heard strange tales of him,” Tros answered. “But it may be all that stuff is for the women he meets in his wanderings.”

  “And this?” she asked, holding up a bowl, in which lay a strange four- bladed knife.

  “He has the falling-sickness, and at such times they bleed him with that,” Tros answered. “He has them use a silver bowl because, he says, his blood is Caesar’s, which is blood of the gods, since he claims descent from Venus Genetrix. The blood is laid before her altar afterwards, and then burned with great ceremony.”

  The Briton in the iron cap returned and was at pains to appear disinterested, stroking his moustache and leaning his back against the doorpost. Fflur introduced him at last:

  “This is Orwic, son of my husband’s cousin. Orwic, this is Tros, my husband’s friend, a son of a Prince of Samothrace.”

  Orwic bowed almost imperceptibly; it was only his eyes that betrayed any real emotion.

  “Oh, are you Tros? I saw you smash Caesar’s fleet off the beach eight days ago. I am glad to meet you.”

  His manner altered. He looked more cordial.

  “Were you in that fight on the beach?” Tros asked him.

  “Oh, yes.”

  Fflur added details:

  “His chariot was the first into the water. He was the first to slay a Roman hand to hand. It was he who slew the Roman standard-bearer of the Tenth, and he who led the boarding of a Roman galley. He was the last in retreat when the Romans won their landing on the beach. Caswallon sent him with me, in my chariot, to Lunden as a mark of honor.”

  “I liked the ride with you, of course,” said Orwic, looking miserably self-conscious. “Fflur, do we wait here forever, or—”

  “Choose twenty of the safest men and put them in charge of this ship, responsible to me,” Fflur answered. “I will take Tros and his man to Lunden in my boat. Order all the captains of the other boats to fasten ropes to this ship and tow it to Lunden as soon as the tide lifts it off the mud. Tell them to be sure that the men who came with Tros have food and drink, and say that if a thing is stolen or a man harmed, Caswallon will do the punishing.”

  “And I?” asked Orwic.

  “Come with me in my boat.”

  Orwic heaved a deep sigh of relief and strolled out on the deck to issue orders, pulling his moustache and looking languid, as if the mere suggestion of having anything to do bored him to the verge of death.

  “A man?” Tros asked, raising his heavy eyebrows.

  Fflur met his gaze and nodded, nodded twice.

  CHAPTER 16. Lunden Town

  None can lie concerning nothing. Never hath lived the liar who did not hear, or see, or imagine a truth, that he might betray it. Truth is necessary to a lie as bones are necessary to a man. But concerning any truth whatever, a resourceful, or a reckless, or a stupid man can tell as many lies as there are stars on the face of heaven. Look ye, therefore, for the truth amid the lies that men tell for one sake or another.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  LUNDEN lay amid the marshes in a forest so dense that the nearness of a town was unsuspected until one came on it around a river bend.

  Then there was a gray mist on the river and the wooden buildings were wreathed in that and in smoke that rose straight up and hung like a veil between earth and sky. The sunset glowed through the haze as if all earth to westward were on fire, silhouetting the masts and spars of nearly a dozen ships, at which Tros wondered.

  He had dozed away a time or two on the long row up the Thames — Conops snored shamelessly, with his head on one of Caesar’s bags of gold — and now, between sleeping and waking, he was not sure at first whether he was awake or dreaming.

  “How came such ships to be here?” he demanded, speaking first in Greek, because that was his native tongue, and not remembering to talk Gaulish until Fflur laughed.

  Eight storm-thrashed days and nights he and Conops had stood watch and watch over a mutinously superstitious crew, who would have sacrificed them to the sea-gods if they could have managed it. Now to Tros, with his weary frame relaxed and the rhythmic oar thump in his ears, his head on a seat beside Fflur’s knees and good cool mead under his sword belt, it almost seemed as if he had died and were in another world. There was nothing in focus, nothing as he had supposed it should be. However, Fflur’s quiet voice enlightened him:

  “Those are all merchant-ships from Gaul, and from the lowlands where the Belgae live, and from the cold lands to the northward.”

  He began to remember, as in a dream, how the longshore Britons had hunted him up Thames-mouth.

  “How get they here?”

  “None harms a merchant-ship,” she answered. “It is only when the longships come in quest of slaves and tribute that there is any fighting, except when the merchant crews get drunk in Lunden and a little blood flows.”

  “I have been told, and I told Caesar, that there is no such place as Lunden,” Tros said sleepily. “I was told it is a myth place, like the land- locked sea to northward of which a man named Pytheas told two centuries ago on his return from many wanderings.”

  “Three of yonder ships are from that land-locked sea,” Fflur answered.

  Tros felt all the blood go tingling through his veins anew, for he would rather journey into unknown lands than be the emperor of all the known ones. Fflur felt, or saw the change in him and ceased smoothing his hair — he had hardly felt it.

  “If the Romans knew of this river and this town,” he said, musing.

  “Too many know,” Fflur answered. “Never a year but we must fight a dozen times to keep the Northmen from laying Lunden waste. And that is strange, because we like the Northmen, and they like us. Some we have made prisoners and have given wives to, and they have settled down among us, some even becoming lesser chiefs, and helping to fight their own folk when the longships come.

  “In the spring of the year they come, and in the autumn now and then, when their own harvests have been scant and they dread the long dark winter without corn enough to keep their bellies easy, and no seed in the spring.

  “And in the spring, if they have eaten all the seed that winter, they come in twos and threes and dozens, fighting one another for the right to enter Thames-mouth first. Then there is red war that lasts sometimes for weeks, and we have been hard put to it at times to drive them forth, but sometimes we burn their ships behind them.

  “Once, when Caswallon had been chief not more than a few months, they sacked Lunden and burned it. But he rallied his men, and burned one ship, and sank another and made Thordsen the Northman prisoner — him and all his men.

  “So Thordsen rebuilt Lunden for us, using wood and teaching us the trick of chimneys and adze-hewn timber. Caswallon gave Thordsen his own sister to wife, and she lives where the nights and days are half a year long, or so I have been told, but the Northmen are great liars.

  “None of us has seen the girl since then, although we hear of her at times. It was after that Caswallon married me. My folk are the Iceni, who breed the best horses in Britain and have fought the Northmen since the world began.”

  Orwic, who steered the boat, and the three other young bloods, who guarded the bags of gold without appearing to admit, even to themselves, that they were doing anything unusual, betrayed interest in nothing except the wild- fowl that swarmed among the reeds on either bank, commenting on those and naming them, as grebe, duck, mallard, geese, snipe and half a dozen other sorts appeared and vanished.

  To listen to their conversation, nothing was wrong with Britain but the vermin that destroyed the game. Twelve rowers labored at the oars, and nodded when game was discussed, but they seemed to disapprove of Fflur’s remarks about the Northmen.

  They skirted the swamps around Lunden and broug
ht the boat alongside a tiny pier that jutted out into the river where a shallow brook flowed out between the bulrushes. To their right a low hill rose jeweled in the setting sun, enormous oaks and the roofs of painted wooden houses glowing in a mystery of mist and smoke.

  There was a wall of mud and wattle, reinforced at intervals with oaken beams, that curved around the hill and out of sight; and there were thatch- roofed houses close to the wall, with their backs toward it.

  Chariot tracks, some rutted deep into the clay, crisscrossed in every direction toward other houses half-invisible among the trees, but there seemed to be only one regular street, that ran between two rows of solemn and tremendous oaks toward the summit of the hill, where the red roof of a mansion bulked above ancient yews against the skyline.

  There were not many people in evidence, although a number of swarthy- skinned, dark-eyed serfs, men and women, were filling water bags and buckets at the brook and carrying them uphill with an air of having done the same thing since the world began.

  But wood smoke came from a thousand chimneys and from holes in thatch roofs, suggesting supper time and plenty. The air was full of the cawing of rooks that wheeled over the trees in thousands, and the lowing of home-coming cattle, with the occasional bay of a hound or the neigh of a horse who heard the corn bin being opened.

  “Lunden is a good town,” said Fflur, springing out of the boat and waiting for the chariot that came galloping downhill toward them. “The druids say Lunden was a town a thousand years ago, and will be a town forever until Britain disappears under the sea, because the gods know no dearer place and will preserve it.”

  “The gods will have to show you how to build a better wall,” said Tros, eyeing the defenses sleepily.

  He had seen walls twenty times a man’s height, of solid stone and thicker than a house, go down before the Roman battering rams. But Orwic betrayed interest at last:

  “That wall keeps the serfs at home, and the knee-high children within call,” he said. “We have the forests and the swamps to fight behind. Time and again we have caught the Northmen in the swamps by felling trees around them. As long as we can hunt the wolf and stag and fox, and know the forest better than the beasts do, it seems to me likely that our wall will serve its purpose well enough. Besides, as Fflur just said, the gods love Lunden.”