Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Tros laughed.

  “I have heard them say the gods love Rome,” he answered, “and I know Caesar.”

  “Caesar is beaten,” Orwic answered.

  He spoke with an air of calm, assured finality. One might as well have argued with the sunset — better, because the sunset could not have looked bored.

  The bags of gold were heaped on the chariot floor. Fflur drove the impatient stallions with Tros beside her, and Conops asleep again beside the charioteer.

  But Orwic and the other Britons waited for their horses to be brought, their youth and strength apparently too precious to be squandered on a mile’s walk, or perhaps it was contrary to their religion. At any rate, walking was something a man did not argue about, but did not do.

  The chariot galloped past a hundred houses that looked as if their roots were in the very soul of Britain, each in its own oak-fenced garden, with flower-beds, bee-hives, stables, cow-sheds, and a great front door of oak six inches thick.

  The window openings were screened with linen, loosely woven, grayed and yellowed by the wood smoke. The soft, mouse color of the woodwork was relieved by beautifully weathered paint on doors and shutters, blue, yellow, red — the earth colors that blend with autumn leaves and dew and lush green grass.

  The great house on the hill-top was surrounded by an oak fence half a foot thick, but not so high that a tall man could not see over it.

  Within the compound there were giant yews clipped into fantastic patterns and almost a village of stables, cow-sheds, quarters for the serfs and barns for the storage of corn and what-not else.

  The great door, with the deep, roofed porch in front of it, resembled nothing Tros had ever seen, although in some vague, indefinable way it recalled to memory the prow of a longship manned by reddish-haired, bearded strangers, that he had once seen ostensibly whaling off the western coast of Spain.

  “This is the house that Thordsen built,” said Fflur, as serfs ran forward to seize the stallions’ heads and she tossed the reins to them. “There is none other like it in Britain, although Thordsen told us that in his land all the kings are housed thus. The Northmen are great liars when they speak of their own land — good friends, bitter enemies. We never believe them unless they swear on their great swords, and even so they lie, if they are made to swear too often. But somewhere Thordsen must have learned to build like this.”

  Women of all ages, from dried-apple-cheeked old hags to young girls with rosy cheeks and skin like white rose petals in the dew, came out to the porch to greet Fflur and to stare at Tros.

  Fflur sent them running to prepare a bed for the distinguished guest, and he stared for a while at the great oak-paneled hall, with its gallery at one end and a fireplace big enough to roast an ox whole, with a chair like a throne under the gallery, and spears and shields hung on the walls, and rich, embroidered hangings.

  Then they all came back and kissed him one by one, until Fflur took him by the hand and led him to a small room off the great one, with no door between, but a leather curtain dyed and figured, and showed him a huge wooden bed all heaped with furs and woolen blankets.

  “Here you are safe among friends, Tros, and you may sleep to your heart’s content.”

  Fflur watched while the women pulled his outer garments off, taking the stained, slit cloak away, and brought him meat and mead, watched them lay a mattress on the floor for Conops, ordered the women away and watched, standing by the curtain, while a great, gray, shaggy hound went to the bedside, sniffed Tros cautiously and then lay down beside him.

  Then she nodded, as if the hound’s behavior had confirmed her own opinion.

  “Sleep until Caswallon comes,” she said. “He drives fast. He will be here at midnight.”

  Food, strong mead and the knowledge that he lay with friends, combined with sheer exhaustion to make Tros almost instantly lose consciousness. But he was first and last a seaman, with a seaman’s habit of responsibility. An eight-day battle with the wind and waves had fixed in that portion of the consciousness that never sleeps an impulse to arouse the senses suddenly, all nervous and alert.

  He could sleep deep, awaken, and be conscious of his whole surroundings in an instant; then fall off to sleep again when he discovered all was well, his senses swaying as if a ship still labored under him.

  The first thought that roused him was the gold. He remembered Fflur’s eyes when she first beheld it in the hole beneath the floor of Caesar’s cabin. But he dismissed that, knowing he was helpless if Fflur should see fit to deprive him of it. The gold seemed relatively unimportant with a mattress underneath him stuffed with goosebreast feathers.

  Then he awakened suddenly to think of the galley being towed up-Thames by rowboats, to wonder how they would manage when the tide turned, whether they would not moor her out of sight among the marshes and then plunder her, sink her, perhaps, or burn her to destroy the proofs of pilfering.

  He desired that galley above all things except one, and even more than all that gold. She was much too heavy and unwieldy, and steered like a house in a gale of wind, but she was strong, with any amount of bronze in her, and there were changes he knew he could make that would render her almost un-Roman, by which he meant almost seaworthy.

  However, he remembered that the galley, like the gold, was in the hands of people who presumably were friends.

  The next he knew it was very dark and only a faint suggestion of crimson firelight gleamed between the curtain and the wall, making the darkness move a little as the low flames danced on the hearth. There was a coming and going of cloth-shod feet, with occasional clatter of dishes, as if women were spreading tables in the great hall.

  There was considerable noise in what he supposed must be the kitchen, several rooms away. But the arresting sounds, that held attention, were the voices of two men beside the curtain.

  He had a mental vision of them seated on a low bench with their backs against the wall, and after a minute or two he recognized one voice as Orwic’s. Orwic sounded rather bored, as usual, and spoke, when he did speak, as if he were yawning between every other sentence. It was the other man who carried the brunt of the conversation.

  “No, Orwic” — Tros heard the words distinctly— “I was not in the fighting on the beach, because a man can not be in two places. I was at Hythe when Caswallon came to turn out every able-bodied man. He made a fine speech, but all they promised was to hold Hythe, and very few went back with him to fight the Romans.

  “I would have gone with him, but I thought of a better idea. You remember what a storm there was three or four days later?

  “Well, there was a man named Tros in Hythe, a Syrian or a Greek or a Phoenician, I am sure I don’t know which, a big fellow, but a fool, with lots of pluck, who helped me drive three of Caswallon’s crews aboard two ships.

  “He took one ship, I the other, and we stormed along the coast ahead of the gale until we came on Caesar’s fleet at anchor and crashed into them, breaking the cables.

  “Tros was afraid at first, but I led the way and that encouraged him. And he was a pirate born, take my word for it, that fellow Tros was a pirate if ever there was one — hah!”

  He had a heavy, sonorous voice that carried distinctly, although he seemed to be trying not to speak loud. Tros, as wide awake now as he had ever been in his life, proposed that Conops should hear too, and reached out with his foot, but Conops was already awake and crouching by the curtain.

  “Master,” he whispered, creeping to the bedside, “there is a fellow out there claiming to have done what you did!”

  Tros laid a hand on his mouth and pressed him to the floor.

  “Pirate, you say?” said the voice of Orwic.

  “Aye, a pirate! I wish you had been there to see him. He was no sooner alongside a Roman ship than he boarded it and put out to sea. He did not wait to finish the work we had begun — not he!

  “He had what must have seemed to him a good ship after that leaky old trap he had smashed on the Roman’s bow
s, and no doubt he knew there was loot in the hold. Anyhow, he put to sea and left me to do the rest of it alone.”

  “You mean you were all alone?”

  “Not quite, but the crew wasn’t much good. They were afraid. I did all the work at the helm. You see, it was simply a matter of seamanship and steering straight before the wind.

  “Seamanship is in my bones. I was brought up on the South Coast, near Pevensey. I have crossed to Gaul a hundred times, in every kind of weather; and you know my father was a Northman. I sailed downwind and smashed those galleys, wondering why Caswallon had never thought of it. However, I did think; and I live to remind him of it. Caswallon owes me a turn now.”

  “What became of Tros?” asked Orwic.

  “Ask the sea-gods! But I wager he was drowned, and I know those channel waters. The gale shifted and I was driven back toward Vectis, where my rotten ship went to pieces under me. I crawled out on the beach near by the place where they trade tin to the Phoenicians. But it was a long time before I could find a boat to bring me back to Pevensey, and then I had a hard time getting horses. However, here I am.”

  “Yes,” said Orwic. “And you look well preserved for a man who has done all that storming, and galley-smashing and swimming and what-not else. You look to me, Skell, more like a man who has sunned himself on benches of an afternoon.”

  “Aye, I have a strong frame and a great endurance,” said the gruff voice.

  “Orwic!” It was the voice of Fflur now, just a shade excited. “Summon our guest. Caswallon comes.”

  CHAPTER 17. A Home-Coming

  Listen to me, ye who judge a horse’s value by his paces, I will tell you a man’s paces. He who seeks a violent revenge upon one who has wronged him, trust ye that man never. That one is a coward; he is untrustworthy; he is afraid to trust the Law that in his act of vengeance he pretends to serve. Boasting of right, he does wrong; and he will do you a wrong when opportunity permits. But beware, and behave justly to the man who, seeing wrong done to himself, is neither humble nor yet vengeful but abides the time that Law shall choose to force the doer of the wrong to make such restitution as is meet. That man’s wisdom is like a wheel and its circumference is greater than the earth’s rim that ye see around you; whereas vengeance is only a sharp spear that a shield can turn aside and that a turning wheel can smash into a thousand pieces.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  CASWALLON came by torchlight, standing in a four-horse chariot, with fifty chariots behind him and a hundred mounted men in single file on either side of the procession.

  Lunden, man, woman and child, turned out to greet him, though it was midnight, and the windows glowed red behind shadowy trees that seemed afire in torch-smoke. They had Julius Caesar in effigy hanging from an arch of boughs under which Caswallon must pass — a thing with a long nose made of beeswax and a wreath on its head.

  The mist, that deadened voices, spread the light in moving whirlpools that made men seem like specters and Caswallon himself a great god in a golden chariot drawn by monsters.

  “The Lunden fog! The Lunden fog!” Fflur exclaimed. “I can’t see his face!”

  The crowd, on the whole, was silent. Now and then a horn blew. Here and there a woman cried half hysterically, as they lighted the bonfires and the smoky glare increased. Three times a cheer went in waves up-street and volleyed down again, the long, deep-throated, sobbing “Aa-a-a-a-a-h” of men who are too pleased with another man to care to say exactly what they think, a good, back-straightening, gutful sound.

  There was a bigger crowd than Lunden had any right to. Men had come from all the countryside, and even from the grassland beyond the forest to the north, where the Iceni raised horses. The Iceni had come south in scores, in the hope of selling remounts to the men who fought the Romans on the Kentish shore, and a group of them, by right of blood relationship, was standing not far from Fflur, all big men, fair complexioned, wearing sleeveless embroidered tunics over their long-sleeved shirts and woolen trousers — friends, in a sense, but not henchmen, and sarcastic when they spoke at all.

  Tros, clad in a new cloak that Fflur’s women had brought him, stood beside a lean Phoenician, a black-bearded man with a long, hooked nose, wrapped and wrapped again in shawls of camel-hair against the chill of the night, his black eyes red-rimmed, his whole body shaking as he coughed.

  He owned the lateen-rigged ship that lay with her nose among the rushes half a mile away and was a prince by British reckoning — no mean man by his own.

  Around Fflur there were druids, trousered philosophers in long robes whom Orwic treated with courteous contempt, ordering stools brought for them “lest they should tire out all their righteousness before the time for blessings came.”

  And behind the druids were the women, nearly fifty of them, fluttering with excitement, some fussing because Fflur had refused to wear hood or cloak.

  Fflur’s three young children stood beside her, sleepy and wrapped in woolen shawls, but her sixteen-year-old son was with his father in the second chariot behind him, driving his own team and laughing as if it were he alone who had sent Caesar sneaking back to Gaul.

  Fflur’s jewelry and her fair hair, beaded with the mist, shone in the flickering torchlight; but when she turned her head a moment it seemed to Tros that her eyes outshone them all and that her face was lighted from within.

  “If I should ever find her equal, I would marry,” he said quietly to Conops.

  But Conops demurred to that: “Master, you would be the slave of such a wife. Freedom is good — the world is full of easy women.”

  “Aye, and of whoring seamen,” Tros answered testily.

  Then he saw Orwic, plucked him by the cloak and asked who Skell might be. Orwic, now apparently not bored at all, grew tersely communicative.

  The cheering increased in volume as the procession came slowly uphill to where Fflur waited in the open gateway. There was much more torchlight there, for all the notables of Lunden were on the green common in front of the gate to see Caswallon greet his wife, without missing the burning of the effigy of Caesar afterwards and all the dancing around bonfires that was sure to take place.

  They had their serfs with them — two or three serfs to each man and woman — and some of Fflur’s own domestics were having hard work to keep the space clear. Serf to serf was simple enough, but Lunden’s citizenry took it ill when they were smitten on the shins with holly cudgels.

  There was quite a little shouting about freemen’s rights, and a couple of dark-skinned serving-men were roughly handled, until Orwic took five other stalwarts like himself and swaggered blandly around the circle a time or two. There was no argument with Orwic. He was roundly cheered and most abominably bored by the ovation.

  Then, into the torch smoke and the glare, Caswallon came, holding back the four dun stallions to a plunging walk, until he wheeled them in front of where Fflur stood, threw the reins to the man beside him, and reached over and lifted her in his arms. No fool for ceremony was he, simply a shock-headed gentleman who loved his wife and did not even greet the druids until he had hugged her and kissed his children.

  Then the druids crowned him with oak leaves as he stepped down from the chariot. Horns blew a blare that split the ear-drums — for every Briton had a hunting horn — and the crowd called him king!

  “King Caswallon! King!”

  He turned and faced them in the gateway, laughing, holding Fflur’s hand, with the children clinging to his knees, signing to the other chariots to open up to right and left. And then, because the crowd still could not see him, he shook off the children and the great hound that sprang at his shoulders whimpering affection, and, leaping on the gate-post, stood there, upright as a graven image, with his right hand raised until they all grew still.

  “Not bad,” Tros muttered. “Nay, not bad. That man is fit to rule.”

  “Men of Lunden,” Caswallon said, “and men of the Iceni — for I see a number of you — ye are pleased to call me ki
ng, and I am proud to answer you that this our land is free. No living Roman rests on it. Our own dead and the Roman dead lie buried where the sea sings dirges. And I listened to the dirges. And the sea said ‘Again — and again — and again!’ And I listened, and the wind blew. And the wind said: ‘I blow sails over the waters.’ And the rain fell and I listened. And the rain said: ‘He who owns this shall defend it.’

  “Then the sea gulls mewed above the surf, and I could see the cliffs of Gaul and the short seas between, and I listened. And the gulls cried: ‘Gaul was set against Gaul — Ohe — Gaul is Caesar’s!’

  “So I think not many new moons shall look down on us before we fight once more. For the Romans come as the springtide rolls up Thames — little by little at first, and then in full flood, with the eagles screaming overhead.

  “Now ye are free, and ye have called me king. I am king. But ye shall choose between me and Caesar before long. Caesar shall not rule me, for I will die first. I will lie beside those men whose widows mourn them on the shore of Kent. I know a thousand who will die with me, aye, more than a thousand, rather than submit to Caesar.

  “Bear ye in mind: That if ye let a thousand of us die, lacking your aid, in defense of this good land we all call ours, they will have died in vain; and ye who value life more than you do your friends shall learn what a mean and melancholy thing is life under Caesar’s heel.

  “Ye men of Lunden, whose chief I am — ye men of the Iceni, whose friend I am, whose chief I am not — I have spoken.”

  He jumped down from the gate-post, hugged his wife again and led the way into the house, followed by his sixteen-year-old son, and all the owners of the other chariots, many of whom bore Roman shields in proof that they had stood their ground against the invading legions.