Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Has he spoken?” he asked.

  “Not a word,” said the Phoenician.

  But it was as if the old man had reserved his strength for what he knew was coming. His lips moved two or three times. Then the voice came, as if from another world, as if the soul had left the body and were using it for one last communication. It was so dark Tros could hardly see his father’s face.

  “Tros, my son, you would obey my will. But that is not my will. I, who was a fighter in my youth, ceased from fighting with men’s weapons. But I, Perseus, sowed the seeds of fighting when I fathered you. And now knowing the full strength of your obedience you dread what I will lay upon you. But I forbid nothing; since the seed that may not sprout in one way breaks forth in another.

  “Hear my last words and remember them. All warfare is with self. All that you know of Caesar is your own image, cast in the reflection of your own unconscious thought. Be brave. Be noble. You shall know strange seas.

  “But you shall not slay Caesar, though you try, since that is others’ destiny. Caesar shall serve you, and you shall serve him, each to the other’s undoing, but many things will happen before that time. And now, my son Tros, I have finished with the body that begat yours and its wanderings. In your hands, Tros, I leave it. Let it not be cast into the sea or lie unburied.”

  So Perseus died, in darkness, in a creaking ship, the silence pulsed with heavy breathing and stirred by the fluttering of nightingales in a swaying wicker cage. After a long while Tros and Conops wrapped the body carefully and rowed it to the galley, where they laid it on the bed that had been Caesar’s and covered it with Caesar’s own cloak.

  Then Tros returned to the Phoenician and said good-by to him.

  “For whether I fail tonight, or whether I succeed, you must run when Caesar’s ships come hurrying in on the tide. Your man saw three ships. There were likely six or seven; maybe more. Caesar has seen us anchor here. He will think we await the tide to take us up the river.

  “I am sure that beacon, yonder to westward, where a hill looms back of the coastline, is his signal to the ships to come out from their hiding place and follow us up-river.

  “So now you and I put to sea again, showing no lights, and when the last of Caesar’s ships puts in, I follow! But you turn homeward. God give you a fair wind, Hiram-bin-Ahab! And may we meet again!”

  CHAPTER 26. “Neither Rome nor I Forgive!”

  Speak not to me of forgiveness until ye first learn to forgive yourselves for all the treacheries with which ye have betrayed that Inner Light of which ye are the shrines, each one of you. It is a dark saying, but I tell you: None can forgive or be forgiven, who hath not learned to forgive himself his sins against himself.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  TROS boiled with mixed emotions. Had his father, dying, not assured him he would live and know strange seas? Could this night’s venture fail, then? Such men as Perseus speak prophetically on a deathbed.

  Tortures such as Caesar had inflicted flay away personal values and leave nothing in the thought but sheer fact, which was why courts applied torture to witnesses. If they had tortured the judges, too, there might have been some sense in it.

  He should not slay Caesar, since that was others’ destiny. Might he not capture Caesar? He and the Roman were to serve each other, each to the other’s undoing. Nothing in that about not punishing Caesar first.

  With all his heart and strength, with all his cunning, to the limit of the bold, storm-daring will that glowed behind his amber eyes, Tros burned to punish Caesar. He was in a mood that night to kill a hundred men, if only the lean rascal who had conquered Gaul might pay the price.

  And dark night favored him. Wind howled in the rigging, but there was not much weight behind it, and presently the rain came down in torrents, beating the waves flat. Tide served the Romans too, perfectly. Two hours before midnight he could count eight swaying lights to westward, and knew he had outguessed Caesar. The Roman ships were coming into Seine-mouth from some hiding place along the coast; they were sure he and the Phoenician were up the river and that they could cut off their escape.

  But the galley wallowed in the murk a good two miles to windward of them, under a scrap of sail, with the oars a-dip at intervals to keep her from drifting inshore. Farther, still, to seaward Hiram-bin-Ahab’s ship lay hove to, waiting for the last Roman light to sway clear of Seine-mouth shoals and turn up-river before she filled away with the northerly wind abeam and plunged for home.

  The shore line was invisible. But Caesar had set that beacon on a hilltop to guide his own ships. Now another light appeared, up the estuary, big, low down, almost as if a house were burning near the shore line.

  “Caesar,” said Tros to himself. “That’s where the troops are waiting. Hah! He’ll have twenty or thirty boats there, hidden among the reeds. And he’s as sure I’m up the river as I’m sure — Conops,” he exclaimed, taking the helm himself, “tide’s been making four hours. We’ve got until it turns — not a minute longer! Up-river, at grips with Caesar — out again on the flow at daybreak.”

  “And the dirtiest mess of mud shoals ever a ship sat on!” Conops retorted. “Wind enough to drive her beak in as if she’d grown there! A heavy sea astern!”

  “Make sail,” Tros answered. “Then get forward and take soundings. Keep on crying me the cubits until I say ‘Cease.’ If we do hit bottom, hurry aft and stand by me.”

  Came the creak and groan and thunder of a mainsail rising, impatient shouts from Conops; then the galley heeled and headed straight for Seine-mouth with a burst of rain behind her, that curtained everything except a glimpse of foam boiling in the pitch dark.

  Nothing but the wind to steer by; no sign of Caesar’s beacons. Thunder, solid and continuous, of surf on mud banks; then friendly thunder, from the sky, lightning, that made Tros swear at first, until he laughed aloud.

  It showed him a line of white surf boiling over shoals, and Caesar’s eight ships wallowing too close to it. Mean little ships, Gaulish coastwise trading vessels, black with men, not too near to the shoals if given sea room to the eastward, but much too near if crowded by an enemy. White water ahead of them, where the ‘tween-shoal channel narrowed.

  “Orwic! Four men in the fighting top! Man starboard arrow-engines! Ten men on the citadel! Line the starboard rail. Hold fire until I give the word — dagger the man who shoots without permission!”

  Flash after flash of lightning. Eight ships staggering before the wind in rough formation like a flight of geese, the shorter arm of the V to eastward. They were all too close together, aiming for a channel they evidently knew, too watchful to look behind them, or the lightning might have shown them the galley’s sail in time.

  “Ten!” howled Conops, pitching his shrill voice against the wind. The galley drew seven cubits.

  “Stand by! Ready, all!” Tros thundered, not changing the helm a hair’s breadth, trusting memory.

  “Nine!” yelled Conops.

  Then three vivid lightning-flashes in succession, and Tros did change the helm — excitedly. He saw dark water, headed for it.

  “Eight!” yelled Conops, as if the end of the world had come.

  He was heaving the lead from the starboard chains. The galley’s port side bumped the mud and her stern swung westward. But she heeled, for they did not let go the sheet, and the next wave, and the next, that crashed against the high poop drove her into deeper water.

  “Ten!” yelled Conops, hurrying aft, for she had hit the mud, and that was orders. “Deep water straight ahead, sir!” he bellowed in Tros’s ear.

  “Aye! And shallow to westward! We have them!” Tros answered. He was laughing, not at what the lightning showed, for that was tragedy; no sailor laughs to see men drown. He was laughing at his Britons, drenched to the skin, their bow-strings wrapped dry in their cloaks, who had not even known they were in danger when they bumped the mud!

  The Romans had seen him at last. They were in panic, with a boiling shoa
l on their right hand and an enemy coming down on them to windward. The rain ceased, but the wind rose.

  Caesar’s beacon shone out of the night like something that had been asleep. There was another, lower light to shoreward of it. Tros guessed they showed the channel and set his course straight for the two, keeping them in line, with the wind on his port quarter, racing to crowd those eight ships on the shoal to westward of the channel, where the estuary curved to the eastward. He had the wind of them and, slow though the galley was, she could outsail any of those eight.

  Three ships clawed around and tried to beat to sea again. He could hear the thumping and the shouts as they struggled to man the oars. One ship’s sail went with a crack as if her mast had gone, too. One was swamped within a bowshot of the galley’s bows.

  Tros beaked the third, driving the great iron-shod ram into her broadside, rolling her over and sinking her as the galley pitched on a wave.

  The Britons squandered arrows, orders or no orders, Orwic with the rest of them, smiting Conops on the mouth, backhanded, when the Greek tried to pull him away from the poop arrow-engine. Then arrows began to rain on the galley’s deck from the five ships that struggled with wind and tide like dancing phantoms in the wedge-shaped channel entrance.

  One of them went aground and the waves burst over her with a din like thunder. Four, under staggering oars and badly handled sail, raced neck and neck, masking one another’s fire, Roman-fashion risking all in one supreme effort to grapple and have the fight out on the bireme’s deck.

  Tros beaked the nearest as she swung, with her sheets let go, but a dozen Romans leaped into the bireme’s bows, where they were massacred with arrow fire from Orwic’s engine, that came near cutting down the Britons who rushed to use their swords.

  There was no discipline. No order, no command could have been heard above the shouting and the crash of breaking ships.

  Two more of Caesar’s ships collided, and Tros beaked them both, breaking the first on the bows of the other and leaving both to drift on the deafening shoal. But their arrows swept the citadel, and the shock of collision had stopped the bireme’s way, nearly splitting the sail.

  Conops let both sheets go in the nick of time to save the bireme from capsizing. And before they could get the mainsail sheeted down again, with ten of Orwic’s Britons dragged and driven aft to help the sailors, the last of Caesar’s ships had crashed alongside.

  Grapples struck into the deck and pierced the bulwark. Fifty of Caesar’s legionaries leaped up the bireme’s side, and the fight was on in darkness, with the two ships grinding together in the trough of steep waves.

  Then the beacon lights went out, or else were screened. The wind increased to a full gale, and though the moon showed once or twice between the racing clouds there was nothing to show the channel’s course. The Romans, silent, shoulder to shoulder on the heaving deck, were driving the Britons fore and aft in front of them.

  Tros trusted then to the gods, and his father’s prophecy, and the strength of the Roman’s grappling chains. He put the helm hard up, until the small ship struck the mud and the bireme’s weight hammered her into it.

  Then he sprang from the poop, let go the sheets and, with a shout that the Britons heard above the din of sea and crashing timbers and loose sail, plunged into the fight.

  Part of the bireme’s bulwark broke away. She swung down wind in mid- channel, anchored by the other grapnel to the wrecked, swamped, smaller ship, tugging at it like a hooked sea monster, until none could keep his footing and Tros nearly rolled through the gap in the broken bulwark, at grips with a Roman centurion.

  Blood and spray churned into scum. A dozen Britons, cornered in the bow, loosed flight after flight of arrows humming through the darkness, so that both sides struggled for the shelter of the citadel. And it was there that Tros’s long sword began to turn the tide of battle, for he caught the stoutest Roman of them all and skewered him through the throat against the bulkhead.

  Then Orwic sprang beside him from the shadow, dripping blood from scalp wounds — his Roman helmet had gone overboard — and Conops found Tros, guarding his back with a flickering two-edged knife. They three swept that section of the deck, rallying other Britons to them, until Tros thought of a ruse. But as he thought of it the bireme broke the grapnel chain at last and plunged up-channel, beam to the waves and swaying drunkenly before the wind.

  So he seized Orwic’s quivering arm and tugged him — no need to signal Conops, who was like a dog at his master’s heel. They three, and a dozen after them, sprang for the poop, where Conops took the helm and tried to keep mid-channel. Tros stood sword in hand at the edge of the poop bull-bellowing, in Latin, lungs out-thundering the din:

  “Omen! An omen! Caesar’s eagle, falling from the sky!”

  His voice burst on a pause. Briton and Roman were gathering for another rush. The Romans, superstitious about omens to the verge of madness, turned to look at him.

  The eagle they saw was Tros, feet first, leaping on them from the poop. He landed on two men, ran a third through the head, and vanished scrambling away into the darkness of the scuppers. Orwic came next. Almost before the Briton’s feet touched deck Tros was up beside him and they two charged forward, bellowing:

  “Lud of Lunden! Lud of Lunden!”

  The Britons rallied to that cry until all the deck was clear, except of dead and dying, and there were only half a dozen Romans left to deal with, who had fought their way into the citadel and held it.

  Tros left the Britons to attend to that. He looked for the crew, and found them at last, below-deck, hiding among water casks. He hauled them out of darkness one by one, cuffed them and drove them on deck. The bireme had worked under the lee of a low hill and was turning slowly in mid-current, drifting toward unimaginable mud banks over which the waves were gurgling as a river gurgles when it overflows the fields.

  Tros left Conops at the helm and drove the crew forward, where he belabored them until they dropped the heavy anchor overside and the bireme came head to wind at last.

  For a while he waited in the bow, watching to discover whether the anchor dragged or held; but there was nothing to judge by; he could see no land-marks, only gloom, and beyond it a long, deep shadow that was land.

  The Britons were busy stripping Romans of their armor; he heard them drag the last one from the citadel; heard the splash as the body went overboard, then Orwic’s voice:

  “Nine-and-forty! Not bad! How many have we lost?”

  There was a long pause, full of murmurings. Tros sat down on the bitts, rubbing bruises thoughtfully, feeling himself from head to foot, his spirits falling, falling as the minutes sped, and the count was not yet done. At last Orwic’s voice again:

  “Are you sure that’s all? Seven-and-twenty dead. How many hurt?”

  Again a long count, interspersed with argument as to whether or not a sword slash was an injury. Then an answer:

  “Two-and-thirty.”

  “Almighty Zeus!” Tros murmured. “One-and-forty of a hundred fit to fight, and Caesar waiting for me down the river! Caesar with eight ships and about four hundred men! Caesar with wind in his favor and dawn to see by! Caesar and all Gaul to draw from! Hah!” he laughed, heaving himself to his feet, “but I’ll con the channel seaward by the bones of ships! By Caesar’s grief, I’ll find the way!”

  No lights. He did not dare to show a light, not even in the hold among the water casks where they laid the wounded, with a few men who could crawl around to serve out water to them, binding wounds by the feel with thread-drawn linen that Caswallon’s wife had sent aboard.

  The dead they laid on the deck in one long row, face upward, and covered with the spare sail. Then Tros cast about for the strongest men and sent them to the benches, fifteen to each side.

  There were scarce two hundred arrows left of all the thousands they had brought with them, and though they added to the number scores more that the Romans had shot into the woodwork, there were even then not more than ten or el
even excited Britons could use up in as many minutes.

  Then a leak to plug, below the water-line, where one of the ships the bireme beaked had opened up a seam; thereafter, the scared and sulky seamen to be driven into the rigging to patch that, and to get the sail rebent where the wind had wrenched it from the spar.

  Then gray dawn; sea-birds crying over wastes of marsh; gulls screaming where a corpse lay drifting in the mist; wind still in the north, but less of it; a great swell rolling up the estuary and lumping where it met the tide that had begun to flow down-river. “Up anchor, Conops!”

  Oars, and only thirty weary men to man them, the bireme beginning to feel the flowing tide, but prone to swing before the wind, and bucking on the lumpy water so that the oarsmen repeatedly missed stroke.

  No drum for fear of warning Caesar. Groans from the dark hold, as discouraging as the chilly daybreak, but a fog coming in on the wind in hurrying gray wisps, with patches of clear air between, for which Tros thanked the gods of Gaul.

  “If only Caesar sleeps.”

  The wish was father to that thought, as always. Tros’s eyes were heavy. Every fiber of him ached from too much strain and no relief. His head swam and things multiplied themselves. He had to look three times to see a land-mark once. The wrecks of Caesar’s ships, glimpsed between scurrying drifts of gray, seemed never in the same place twice.

  But minute by minute the tide flowed faster, the wind lessened and the fog increased. There was no sound but the surge of water, the muffled thump of oars, and the cry of sea-birds. Tros could sense a coming shift of wind, and he knew he had twice as much sea-room as the night before, because the tide was higher.

  “All’s well, master! We have given him the slip!” said Conops as the first wreck loomed in the fog for a moment and vanished astern.

  He was heaving the lead from the poop, lest the sound of his voice should carry as he cried the changing depths.

  But Tros knew Caesar was the last man in the world to leave an outrage to the Roman dignity and eight vessels unavenged.