Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Even supposing that boat should have been lost with all hands, the fact remained that Caesar was attempting something. He would persist. He would send another boat. For what purpose? To avenge himself on Tros undoubtedly, but how?

  Caesar played politics like a game, staking kingdom against kingdom. Incredibly daring and swift decisions were the secret of his campaigns; but there was something else, and as Tros paced the poop, wet to the skin with spray, he tried to analyze what he knew of Caesar, knowing he must outguess him if he hoped to escape the long reach of his arm.

  He tried for a while to imagine himself in Caesar’s place; but that was difficult; the very breath Tros breathed was the antithesis of Caesar’s. Caesar yearned to impose the Roman yoke on all the world; Tros burned to see a world of free men, in which each man ruled himself and minded his own business.

  It was that thought, presently, that gave him what he thought might be the key. Well-bred, vain, self-seeking rascal though Caesar was, there was something splendid in his method, something admirable in his constancy of purpose and in his ability to make men serve him in the teeth of suffering and death. What was it? In what way was Caesar different from other men?

  His vices were unspeakable; his treachery was a byword; his extravagance was an insult to the men who died for him and to the nations from whom he extorted money with which to bribe Rome’s politicians. He had personal charm, but that was not enough; men grow weary of a rogue, however successful and however personally charming. There was some other secret.

  And at last it seemed to Tros he had it. Rome! The glamour of the word Rome. The idea of Rome as mistress of the world, with all men paying tribute to her — one law, one senate, one arbiter of quarrels, one fountain-head of authority. A sort of imitation of Nature, with the fundamental truth of brotherhood and freedom left out! Caesar served his own ends, but he served Rome first; he might loot Rome and make himself her despot, but he would leave her mistress of the world.

  No other people, possibly no other man than Caesar had that obsession fixed so thoroughly in mind that he himself was almost the idea. Foreigners might send their spies to Rome and bribe her public men almost openly, but none could set Roman against Roman when Rome’s profit was in question. On the other hand, Rome sent spies, or openly acknowledged agents, and successfully set tribe against tribe, faction against faction, until domestic strife ensued, and Rome stepped in and conquered.

  The Britons, for instance, were divided into petty kingdoms, jealous of their own kings. Caswallon, when he defeated Caesar and sent him sneaking back to Gaul by night, had been at his wits’ end to raise an army, even for that purpose. The half of one British tribe, the Atrebates, lived in Gaul and had accepted Caesar’s rule, under a king of Caesar’s making.

  The Iceni traded horses to the men of Kent, but fought them between- times; and as far as the other British tribes were concerned, they were to all intents and purposes foreigners, loosely united by occasional marriages but with no real bond other than Druidism.

  The druids taught brotherhood, it was true; but that was too easily interpreted to mean friendship toward foreigners and strife at home.

  The only enemies the Britons really held in common were the Northmen, who plundered the coasts whenever their own harvests failed or their own young men grew restless to wed foreign wives. But the Britons made friends with the Northmen, intermarried with them, let prisoners settle in their midst, and absorbed them, without making them feel they were a part of one united nation.

  Self-seeking rogue though he was, then, Caesar was Rome, to all intents and purposes; or so Tros argued it. Caesar, driven out of Britain, being Caesar, would never rest until he had reversed defeat.

  Therefore, that boat, undoubtedly containing Romans, must be a move in Caesar’s game, a move that would mean nothing else but an attempt to set Britons against Britons, since that was all a handful of men could do in an enemy country.

  But Caesar never neglected himself or his own feuds while he spread Rome’s power abroad. He never failed to follow up his threats; never neglected to avenge a personal defeat. He was not only Rome, he was Caesar.

  Tros had laughed at him, had tricked a prisoner away, had fooled him, outguessed him, drowned a hundred men and almost caught Caesar himself. It was safe, then, to wager that, coming so swiftly after that encounter, the gale-swept Gaulish fishing boat in some way was connected with revenge on Tros. Successful guile delighted Caesar even more than winning battles.

  It was not unreasonable to suppose that Caesar had sent messengers in that boat — no doubt with expensive presents — to tell tales that should reach Caswallon’s ears.

  As he turned that over in his mind Tros almost decided to run for the Belgian lowlands and seek refuge there. He did not doubt he could make good friends among the Belgae. Pride restrained him. He had made a promise to Caswallon; he would keep it. Those young gallants who had sailed with him — mutinous cockerels — had their rights; their dead should be buried in British earth.

  But he almost wished the gods might relieve him of responsibility by sinking the bireme in that raging sea. He was almost willing to drown just then, provided he might go down handsomely.

  Orwic seemed to sense his mood. He threw off the seasickness and yelled in Tros’s ear:

  “Lud of Lunden is a good god. He will send us an achievement.”

  “Achievement,” Tros muttered. “And thirty seasick men to wrest it from destiny!”

  For the first time in his life he had begun to think that destiny might be his enemy and not his friend; that Caesar, the Romans, Rome, might be fortune’s favorites and he and his friends, the Britons, nothing but grist in the eternal mill.

  The wind shrieked through the rigging; bitter cold spray drenched him. He had to cling to the rail. His eyes ached, staring at stark, dark seas that pitched the bireme like a cork.

  “I will die free. I will set others free. I must! I burn to live! But is it all worth the burning?” he wondered.

  CHAPTER 28. Northmen!

  So ye seek peace? Shall ye find it quarreling with one another?

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  ANOTHER day and another night of plunging in a confusing sea, hove-to half the time, cheating wind and tide by miracles of seamanship, found Tros wide-eyed at the helm and the bireme’s bow headed at last into the hump-backed waves that guarded the Thames estuary.

  There was no land in sight, but there were sea-birds and a hundred other signs that gave Tros the direction; he had run in the dark before a blustering wind, had caught the tide under him at dawn and was making the most of it, sure he was in midstream and as confident as a homing pigeon of his exact position, well along into the Thames.

  It was cold, and the wind bore rain with it that drenched the autumn air and settled into banks of blowing mist through which the watery sun appeared over the stern like dim, discouraged lantern-light. The wind howled through the rigging and the sea swished through the remnants of basketwork that survived on the bireme’s ends. The great ungainly ram sploshed in the steep waves like a harpooned monster, and now and then the Britons, down in the hold, screamed from the torture of ill-tended wounds.

  Conops relieved Tros at the helm, nodding when told to keep in mid-tide and to watch for land on the starboard bow. There was a Briton at the masthead who was afraid of the souls of the dead gentlemen on deck; and nobody, least of all himself, had any confidence in him. Tros went forward, to lean over the bow and think.

  He could not throw off despondency. He began to wonder whether his father had not been right in saying that a man’s delight in action was no better than the animals’, that his brain was only a mass of instincts magnified, and that the soul was the only part of him worth cultivating.

  There lay his father, dead, contented to be dead, with no man’s injury to his discredit. He had died without regret for unattained ambition, since he had none of the ordinary sort. With all the resources of the Mysteries of Samothrace t
o count on, he had never owned a house; even the stout ship, that Caesar had ordered burned for the copper she contained, had hardly been his property, though he had built her and commanded her; he had regarded her as a gift to the Lords of Samothrace, at whose behest she had sailed uncharted seas.

  But the father had never ached for action as the son did. Tros had the same compelling impulse to uphold the weak and to defy the strong, but he had a more material way of doing it. He could not see the sense of talking, when a blow, well aimed, might break a tyrant’s head. Nor was he totally opposed to tyrants; an alert and generously guided tyranny appealed to him as something the world needed; a tyranny that should insist, with force, on freedom.

  “Is there anything more tyrannous than truth?” he wondered, watching the waves yield and reappear over the ironshod ram.

  Even his father had had to admit that a ship, for instance, could not be managed without despotism. There had never lived a sterner ship’s commander than old Perseus; just though he had been, and self-controlled, he was a captain who would brook no hesitation in obeying orders. Yet his father had failed, if the loss of his ship at Caesar’s hands, followed by torture and death, were failure.

  Not even the druids of Gaul, for whose encouragement his father had set forth from Samothrace, had gained in the least, as far as Tros could see; and if that was not failure, what was it? Yet his father had seemed quite contented with the outcome, had died appearing to believe his failure was success.

  Had he, Tros, not the same right to believe this comparative failure against Caesar was good fortune in disguise? It was only comparative failure after all. Caesar had had the worst of it, twice. He had wrecked the greater part of Caesar’s fleet. He had thoroughly worsted Caesar in the fight at Seine-mouth. His father had never done anything as effective as that.

  Was his father’s attitude the right one? Or was his? Or were they both wrong?

  Why, for instance, had his father taught him swordsmanship, if fighting was an insult to the soul, as he contended? Must a man learn how to do things, and then restrain himself from doing them? If so, why do anything? Why preach? Why eat and drink? Why live? What was the use of knowing how to sail a ship, if action was discreditable? Was war against the elements so different from war with men? Should he have let the sea win and have drowned, too proud to fight?

  He thought not. He remembered how his father used to fight the elements; there had been no bolder man in the world. What then? Ought all men to be seamen and spend life defeating wind and tide? The mere suggestion was ridiculous. Nine men out of ten were as utterly incapable of seamanship as they were of penetrating the Inner Mysteries and living such a life as Perseus led. Besides, if all did one thing, who should do the other things that needed doing?

  Slowly, very slowly, as he leaned over the bow and watched the changing color of the estuary water, Tros began to solve the riddle — of the universe, it seemed to him.

  “A man is not a man until he feels the manhood in him,” he reflected. “Then he does what he can do.”

  That seemed to be the whole of it. Each to his own profession, born leaders in the van, born blacksmiths to the anvil, born adventurers toward the skyline — he for one! — and each man fighting to a finish with whatever enemy opposed him, that enemy on every battlefield himself, no other!

  Good! Tros stiffened his huge muscles and his leonine eyes began to gleam under his shaggy brows. There was dignity in that warfare, purpose and plan sufficient, if one should rule himself so manfully in every chance — met circumstance that victory were his, within himself, no matter what the outcome!

  And now he remembered Perseus’ dying speech, and how the old man had forbidden nothing, not even the sword, but had prophesied for Tros a life of wandering and many another brush with Caesar. He and Caesar were to help each other some day!

  “Gods! What a prospect!”

  Caesar stood for all that Tros loathed: Interference with men’s liberties, imposition of a foreign yoke by trickery and force of arms, robbery under the cloak of law, vice and violence, lies gilded and painted to resemble truth. And he was to help Caesar! Some day!

  He laughed. Yet he believed in deathbed prophecies. The thought encouraged him.

  “If I am to help Caesar, and he me, then my time to die is not yet. For I will injure him with all my might and main until my whole mind changes!”

  He reflected that it takes time for a man’s inclination to change to that extent.

  “My will is not the wind,” he muttered. “I will live long before I befriend Caesar.”

  The wind changed while he thought of it, veering to the southward, blowing all the mist toward the northern riverbank until at last the sun shone on a strip of dark-green where the forest touched the tide-mud and Conops cried, “Land-ho!” from the poop.

  Swiftly then, that being Britain and the autumn, magic went to work on land- and sea-scape that changed until both wide-flung riverbanks gleamed in sunlight and the heaving estuary-bosom frilled itself with ripples in place of white-caps on the surface of the waves.

  Gray water brightened to steel-blue, stained with brown mud where the tide poured over the shoals, and the sea-gulls came off shore in thousands to pounce on mussel-beds before the tide should cover them.

  Then another hail from Conops, and Tros returned to the poop, his mood changing with the weather. He was already whistling to himself.

  “Yonder!” said Conops, his one eye staring up-river. “Too much smoke!”

  “Mist,” remarked Orwic, but the wish was father to the contradiction.

  He had seen that kind of smoke before; had more than one scare to show for it. One did not admit, until sure, that Northmen might be raiding British homesteads.

  “Smoke,” Tros announced after a minute. He could almost smell it. “Orwic! Caswallon shall welcome us after all!”

  Orwic shouted. A dozen Britons came out of the hold, to cluster on the poop and stare at the smudge on the skyline.

  “Northmen!” announced one of them, with an air of being able to read smoke on the skyline as if it were Celtic script. “Those two longships Tros refused to fight the other day have found their way up-Thames. It’s Tros’s fault. They have stolen a march while we plucked his oat-cake out of Caesar’s fire! By Lud of Lunden, we were fools to trust a foreigner!”

  “Aye, and Lunden burning!” said another.

  But that was nonsense; the smoke was much nearer than Lunden.

  “Two longships and only thirty of us fit to fight!”

  “Tros will want to run away again!” a third suggested.

  Conops bared his teeth and Orwic, who had led the earlier mutiny to his own distress, made signals; but they deferred no more to Orwic than to Tros. Orwic was only Caswallon’s nephew; they were as good as he, and equally entitled to opinions. Besides, as second-in-command, Orwic was responsible along with Tros for failure to capture Caesar, and that, added to jealousy, was excuse enough for ignoring his signals.

  “Any man can sail a ship up-river,” one of them suggested brazenly.

  Tros almost brayed astonishment. He had thought he had tamed those cockerels. Cold, seasickness and battle on the deck had reduced the hired crew to the condition of whipped dogs, but these young aristocrats appeared to recover their nerve the moment they smelt a Northmen.

  It had not yet filtered into Tros’s understanding how warfare with the men from over the North Sea was a heritage, almost a privilege, a sport, in which serfs were the prizes and women the side bets. To mention Northmen near the coast of Britain was like talking wolf to well-trained hounds.

  “Caswallon gave the command of this ship to Tros,” said Orwic, standing loyally by his appointed chief.

  Whereat they laughed. They were in their own home waters; not Caswallon himself might overrule their free wills! Each man thrilled to one and the same impulse. Some of the wounded crawled on deck and, learning what the commotion was about, cried out to Tros to get after the Northmen instantly, hoof, hair
and teeth!

  “I, too, am minded to make the acquaintance of these Northmen,” Tros remarked, and they grinned, although they did not quite believe him; from what they already knew of him, he was too cautious and conservative to lead them into the kind of fight they craved.

  “We will introduce you,” a youngster answered. “We will show you what fighting is!”

  “You!” Tros answered; and they all backed forward along the poop because his sword was drawn, although none saw it whip out of the sheath. With his left hand he picked up a Roman shield.

  “Orwic! Stand by!”

  The other Britons began to jeer at Orwic, although they chose their words, for there was none but Tros who had ever beaten him on horse or foot.

  “Silence!” Tros thundered, tapping with his sword-point on the deck.

  One or two laughed, but rather feebly, and they all grew still before the rapping ceased, most of them clutching at their daggers, glancing at one another sidewise.

  “Must I teach you young cockerels another lesson? Lud of Lunden! How many arrows have you? Not a hundred! You squandered arrows against Caesar by the basketful. Do you think Northmen will stand still to have their throats cut? Idiots!”

  “We know how to fight Northmen,” one man piped up. “We’ll show you!”

  “You? Show me?” Tros thundered.

  He took a long stride forward and they backed away, uncomfortably close now to the poop edge; there was no rail there to lean against.

  “By Lud, I’ll beat the brains out of the first who speaks again without my leave!” He meant it, and they knew it. “Who has anything to say?”

  His sword-blade flickered like a serpent’s tongue; he seemed able to meet all eyes simultaneously.

  “Who speaks?” he repeated; but none answered him.

  They could back away no farther; to advance meant instant death to two or three at any rate, and whether or not Orwic should take Tros’s side.