by Talbot Mundy
“Drum now!” he ordered. “I want every last tremble of speed!”
Speed now. Nothing else counted. If Caesar was not in the neck of the channel waiting for him, all the warning in the world would reach the Romans too late. If he were there, nothing mattered but the impact.
There was only one way that Caesar could prevent him from escaping. Somewhere, somehow he might have collected small boats and have moored them across the channel, using a stout cable anchored at both ends.
That was what Tros argued he would have done in Caesar’s place, with every available man who could be crowded into the boats, ready to jump aboard the bireme when she struck the cable.
“Faster! Faster!” he commanded, peering forward on the port side for a glimpse of wrecks, stamping his foot to set time for the drum.
“Zeus!” he exclaimed suddenly.
He swung his whole weight against the steering oar, as a shower of arrows and a dozen javelins twanged aboard out of the fog.
“Row, you Britons, row!”
There were boats alongside, crowded with men. Caesar had outguessed him! Straight ahead, moored beam on to the channel, rolled two of the wrecks that had been floated in the night, and only Caesar would have thought of that! Caesar, and only Caesar could have done it. Only in the nick of time Tros saw the movement as they wallowed in the swell, and knew they did not mark the channel but obstructed it. In another second he would have struck the mud bank to the right of them. Their decks were black with men, and as he swung the helm he caught one glimpse of Caesar’s scarlet cloak, on the left-hand ship. Then the mist, and a hail of arrows whistling through it.
“Row!” he ordered, his voice cracking with excitement.
For a marvel his eleven Britons had not fired an arrow. Orwic jumped to the port-side arrow-engine just as the bireme’s beak struck Caesar’s floated wreck amidships and the crash threw every rower off his bench.
“Drum! Drum!” Tros thundered. “Back to your benches! Row! For Lud o’ Lunden — row!”
He heard the cable break, and through the ghosting mist he saw one hulk go swinging toward the mud to starboard, a volley of arrows from her rattling into the bireme’s bulwark, short by the length of the swing.
But Caesar’s hulk was on the ram, transfixed by it and sinking, holed under the bilge. Nine-tenths of the way was off the bireme. She was down by the head and refused to steer. The crowded boats were overtaking her. Unless the heave of the groundswell should shake off the wreck from her ram, the game was up!
“Orwic! Lay your arrow-engine forward! Caesar is on that wreck ahead of us!”
But Caesar was not. He was over the bireme’s bows already like a god out of the opal morning in his scarlet cloak, alone, and beckoning to his men. Orwic fired point-blank at him, and missed with all twelve arrows. Before he could load again there were a dozen legionaries on the bow, shields locked and Caesar in their midst. “Row! Row!” Tros thundered.
He did not dare let go the helm. The pursuing boats were thumping through the mist and the air was whistling with arrows. But one of Caesar’s legionaries blew a trumpet blast. The arrows ceased. Then Caesar’s voice, calm, with a hint of laughter:
“Tros! I believe you know me. I advise you to surrender at discretion.”
Tros swung the helm. He had a chance yet. Conops hurled his knife at Caesar, but it clanged on a soldier’s shield. Ten Britons clustered beside Orwic, crouching, forgetting bows and arrows, ready with their swords.
“Come on!” cried Orwic, and led them, all leaping from the poop and rushing forward past the citadel.
Marvel of all marvels, the thirty oarsmen never missed a stroke! The bireme was gaining headway, lurched, shook herself, buried her bow as a heavy wave passed under her stern, shook the wreck free from her ram and crushed it on the down plunge.
The shock of that sent the charging Britons staggering in a heap against the citadel, but the Romans, shoulder to shoulder with locked shields, contrived to keep their footing. Then the oars struck wreckage. An oar broke.
“Drum! Drum!” Tros thundered. “Slow beat! One-two! One — two! Stick to it, you Britons!”
Then, as they cleared the wreckage: “Conops, take the helm!”
He drew his sword. A Roman hurled a javelin at him, but he dodged it. Orwic and his ten were out of sight beyond the citadel. Tros knew where they were by the eyes of the Romans, who were watching them, alert to repel the expected charge.
Caesar seemed to be listening for the oar-beat of his own boats, but the wind, that had fallen calm, began to shift to westward, blowing the mist along in front of it. A sudden vista between hurrying fog banks revealed the fleet of small boats scattered hopelessly astern.
“Caesar!” said Tros, laying his left hand on the arrow-engine. “I believe you know me. I advise you to surrender at discretion!”
Caesar laughed. Less than a second later Tros knew why. Orwic chose that instant for the charge. He and his ten Britons leaped up on the bow and hurled themselves against the locked shields, with their own backs protecting Caesar and his men from arrow-fire. The Romans were past masters at that kind of fighting. The shields rose and fell almost leisurely, blocking attack, wearing down the adversary. Tros could see Caesar’s lips move as he spoke to his men in low tones, and though they stood the Britons off with shield and sword they made no effort to force them backward off the bow. Orwic’s point slew one man, but the locked shields merely closed the gap.
“You are a bold rogue, Tros!” said Caesar, in his pleasantest, amused voice that carried the effortless vibration learned in Rome’s schools of oratory.
A Briton hurled a short spear at him, but he ducked it without taking his eyes off Tros.
“Today, it would appear you have the best of it. Tomorrow — who knows?”
Orwic pulled his men off. He knew no Latin, thought all this was talk about surrender. But the Britons were still in the way of the arrow-engine’s fire. Tros whispered to Conops and signaled, trying to catch Orwic’s eye but it was Caesar who saw the signal. He made a superb gesture to Orwic, as if about to surrender to him. It deceived Tros for a moment, and it was to him, not to Orwic, that Caesar spoke:
“I don’t doubt, Tros, you are a man of discrimination, who will realize that Caesar’s ransom is worth more to you than Caesar’s dead body. Whereas you are worth nothing to me, dead or alive. And there is no one, Tros, whom I will crucify with less compunction when the proper time shall come!”
His eyes were on Tros, so he did not notice Conops signaling to Orwic. Orwic whispered to his men, but apparently Caesar was unaware of that, too. He went on speaking:
“I advise you, Tros, to think of your predicament, since it is dangerous to be the enemy of Rome, fatal to be the foe of Caesar! Neither Rome nor I forgive! Farewell!”
Almost without a gesture he turned and dived into the sea. The Britons sprang aside. Tros loosed a flight of arrows, but they clanged against raised shields, piercing them, sweeping down three legionaries.
Two followed Caesar, plunging after him feet first, but their armor dragged them under. Orwic and his Britons slew the rest, hacking them down as they tried to re-form the broken line.
“Arrows! Arrows!” Tros roared, reloading the arrow-engine, watching the waves.
Caesar’s bald head, and the scarlet cloak behind it, appeared after a moment. Tros fired, but Caesar ducked, and all twelve arrows missed.
Caesar shook off the scarlet cloak and towed it, breasting the waves like a grampus, plunging into them and swimming under water when the Britons took pot shots at him, until he disappeared into the mist.
There was too little sea room, too much fog and tide to turn the bireme and pursue him. His cold, amused laugh mocked Tros across unseen waves.
“By Lud of Lunden, that’s a clever fellow who ought to have been born a Briton!” said Orwic, with the end of a cloth in his teeth as he was bandaging a sword slash in his arm.
“By Jupiter of Rome, he will become one by conq
uest!” Tros retorted savagely, hating himself, above all hating deathbed prophecies, that undermined a man’s nerve, and created indecision.
Prophecy or not, he told himself the gods had delivered Caesar into his hand. He, Tros, had failed them.
“Conops!” he roared. “The crew are skulking in the forehold. Rouse them with a rope’s end! Make sail! Easy now, oars! The wind and tide serve.”
CHAPTER 27. The British Channel
The islands, the lands and the oceans are parts of the earth. The rivers are its veins. And even so, I tell you, races and peoples are parts of the Being of Man. Answer me then: should a finger destroy an arm for the sake of gain or pride or malice? Does the mountain hate the valley? Does the valley accuse the plain of enmity? And yet you fools make war on one another.
— from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan
ANOTHER westerly gale. The bireme plunged and rolled, not shipping much water, because Tros was at the helm, but swinging her fighting top like a pendulum. The working crew of British fishermen was miserably seasick.
Tros, amber eyes heavy with weariness, his great jaw grinding, shaking his head at intervals to throw the black hair from his eyes, steered a course far closer inshore than was necessary to make Thames-mouth; from the mouth of the Seine he might have stood nearly due east toward the Belgian sands in order to take full advantage of wind and tide.
Orwic was still wearing his Roman costume, but his moustache spoiled the effect and so did the fair hair that fell to his shoulders. He swung himself up from the hold and climbed the poop by the broken ladder. For a minute or two he leaned overside and vomited, then worked his way hand-over-hand along the rail toward Tros and pointed at the coast of Britain, where the chalk cliffs stood like ghosts in a gray mystery of drifting fog.
“Too close,” he objected. “A Roman ship — we look like Romans. If we put in there, they’ll” — he leaned overside, but managed to control himself— “remember the Northmen,” he went on. “Two longships — ran from us toward Pevensey. They’ll have burned some villages. The next foreign-looking ship that runs for shelter will—”
He vomited again, clinging to the lee rail. Tros waited for him to recover and then gestured toward the opposite coast of Gaul, invisible beyond a howling great waste of gray sea.
“I would run in for the sake of the wounded; this cold wind tortures them. Better a fight with Britons than another brush with Caesar,” he said grimly. “Caesar has had time to reach Caritia by chariot and put a dozen ships into the water. He has had time to set a dozen traps. He’ll risk storm and everything to catch and crucify us. Twenty of us fit to fight — crew no good — torn sail — and who is to man the oars?”
“But if you hug the shore our own Britons may put out and throw fire into us,” said Orwic. “That’s what we always try to do with the Northmen.”
“Not in this gale,” Tros answered. “Of two foes, shun the stronger. Caesar is the craftiest of Romans. We have stung him, Orwic. We have made a mock of him before his own men. We have tricked a prisoner out of his camp by forgery and boldness. We have made him run; he had to swim for it. And I know Caesar!”
“A pity we didn’t catch him.”
“Aye, I am ashamed,” Tros ground his teeth. “And what shall I say to Caswallon, who lent me a hundred gentlemen to take Caesar alive! Half of them dead or wounded — no plunder — nothing to show him but my father’s corpse, for which I must beg obsequies.”
“Caswallon will remember who wrecked Caesar’s ships off Kent a while ago. You saved Britain for us, Tros. Caswallon will not forget that.”
But Tros smiled sourly. “It is only grudges that endure. Kings’ memories are as short as Caesar’s for a friendship.”
Orwic, too weak to argue, lay down near the lee rail, hugging himself in his cloak. He relished no more than Tros did the prospect of slinking up Thames with nothing to show but a foreigner’s corpse to offset more than sixty dead and wounded gentlemen.
Mere seamen would hardly have mattered; but by the irony of fate not one of the twenty hirelings had suffered a scratch, except when Tros and Conops hit them with belaying pins or knife-hilts to stir their energy. In a sense Orwic was as much responsible as Tros; it was he who had supported Tros first and last; he was second-in-command of the expedition. Worse! The Lunden girls had seen the bireme off; they would be waiting now to kiss victorious warriors — expecting to see Caesar brought forth from the hold in chains.
Instead of Caesar in his scarlet cloak they would see dead and wounded friends — relations — lovers.
Orwic was as young and imaginative as the girls who reckoned him the bravest man in Britain.
Tros gave the helm to Conops, who looked comical in an imitation Roman tunic, with his red Greek seaman’s cap pulled low over his brow, an impudent nose beneath it, and a slit lip that showed one eye-tooth like a dog’s.
Conops was merely curious to know what was to happen next; he had perfect confidence in Tros’s ability to meet it.
“Keep the wind at the back of your right ear,” Tros commanded. “The tide’ll be slack in an hour; watch for the surf on the quicksands on your starboard bow. Keep clear of that, and follow the tide around the coast when it starts to make. If there’s any trouble with the crew, wake me.”
He went below, into the cabin where his father’s body lay, with Caesar’s scarlet cloak spread over it. And for a while he stood steadying himself with one hand on an overhead beam, watching the old man’s face, that was as calm as if Caesar’s tortures had never racked the seventy-year-old limbs, the firm, proud lip showing plainly through the white beard, the eyes dosed as in sleep, the aristocratic hands folded on the breast.
It was dark in there and easy to imagine things. The body moved a trifle in time to the ship’s swaying.
“Sleep on,” Tros muttered.
He could not imagine his father dead, not even with the corpse before his eyes. No sentiment, not much emotion, had been lost between them. He actually loved his father more that minute than he had ever done. Perseus had had scant respect for the claims of human personality.
He had died not cursing and not blessing Caesar, utterly indifferent to Caesar’s crimes provided his own acts should pass the critical judgment of his own conscience. Tros on the other hand ached for revenge. He was determined to have it.
He could not have explained why. He had inherited his father’s passion for free will and full responsibility, each man for his own acts. He did not question his father’s right to submit to torture rather than reveal to Caesar the least hint of what the secrets of the Samothracian and Druidic Mysteries really were; he would have done the same himself.
Nor did he question his father’s right to be unvindictive; he was rather proud of the old man’s conquest over self to the point where he could suffer torture and not shriek for vengeance. He was immensely proud to be the old man’s son.
Yet love him, in any ordinary sense, he knew he never had done; and, strangely enough, he hardly hated Caesar. He was the enemy of Caesar; he despised his vices and admired his genius, loathed his cruelty and liked his gentlemanly wit.
He lay down and slept. His dreams were all of Caesar, Caesar standing on the bireme’s bow in the mist at Seine-mouth, laughing, charmingly sarcastic, promising to crucify him by and by, plunging beneath a flight of arrows into the waves and continuing to laugh out of a fog-bank while the bireme pitched over the shoals at river-mouth and left Caesar swimming safely out of reach.
He did not sleep long. He heard Conops shout from the poop and sprang out of the cabin, sword in hand ready to deal with mutiny. But there was no mutiny. Conops and a dozen Britons were staring at a Gaulish fishing boat not far astern that looked as if it had been rebuilt by Roman engineers; it was plunging in masses of spray toward the British coast, making for Hythe in all likelihood.
“Romans, or I’ll eat my knife-hilt!” Conops sneered. “Put about, master, and let’s ram them. Did you ever see such land-lubbers! Can’t even
quarter the sea. Straight from point to point like a plowshare into a field of turnips! There — they swamp!”
But the boat was decked, and the deck must have been strong and watertight. She rose out of a welter of gray sea, dismasted but right side up, and Tros could see men, who certainly were Romans, chopping at the rigging with their short swords.
“Go about and ram them,” Conops urged again, and Tros considered that for a minute. But he would likely enough lose his own sail if he tried to turn in that wind.
“They’ll smash on the rocks when the tide carries them inshore,” he prophesied and went below again to make up arrears of sleep. He did not wake again until nightfall, when he relieved Conops at the helm. By that time the tide had carried them well out into the North Sea. The wind backed suddenly to the northwest, increasing in strength, and he had to heave to.
There were no stars visible, no moon, nothing to do but pace the poop to keep warm, judging the drift by the feel of the wind, with the cries of the wounded and the thought of that Gaulish-Roman fishing boat with her Roman crew, to haunt and worry him.
He tried to persuade himself that the boat could not be Caesar’s. But calculations, made and checked a dozen times, assured him that Caesar would have had time to reach Caritia by chariot from Seine-mouth and to send that boat in the teeth of the gale across the channel; in fact, he would have had about two hours to spare, which was ample in which to choose and instruct men for his purpose, whatever that might be.
Black night on a raging sea was neither time nor place for shrewd guessing at Caesar’s newest strategy, but Tros did not doubt it would run true to form and be brilliant if nothing else. To land a dozen Romans openly on the shore of Briton would be madness; if they were not killed instantly they would be held as hostages. Direct overtures to Caswallon would be laughed at — Caesar would not try any such foolishness as to send messengers to Lunden. What then?
Caesar’s notorious luck would probably throw up his men all living on the beach, or might even cause the mastless boat to drift into a sheltered cove. What then? What then?
