Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Tros breathed relief. Whoever else was fickle, he knew Fflur. Caswallon’s wife was loyal to Caswallon, but no subtlety could undermine her judgment; she could see through men and their intrigues; she ruled her husband and his corner of Britain without his knowing it; and she was Tros’s friend.

  “In the meanwhile?” Tros asked.

  “I do not forget you were my friend,” Caswallon answered, “and though you have lost me sixty men on your adventure, you have saved me it may be a hundred in their place by sinking that Northman down-river. I am king here and the river rights are mine, but you may have that longship and your prisoners. That chest of Caesar’s gold you left with Fflur is yours, too. You may bury your father’s corpse in British earth. Thereafter we will hear what Fflur says.”

  Caswallon strode out on the deck and went to where the druids were tending wounds. Because he was the chief, a druid tried to insist on bandaging the spear-wound over his ribs, but Caswallon took the druid by the shoulders and shoved him back to the task he had left, standing then to watch the marvels of swift surgery the druids wrought.

  They had a drug that caused unconsciousness; they opened one man’s skull and inset bone from the skull of another who had been dead an hour or two; one druid opened his own vein and surrendered a quart of blood for the veins of a man who had nearly bled to death. But they amputated no limbs; if a leg or an arm was beyond their skill to repair, they let the man die whole, as he had come into the world, easing his death with an anodyne.

  Tros returned to the poop, where Sigurdsen sat glowering at the Britons, his wife wailing on the deck beside him, and the blue-eyed Helma standing, her back to the rail and her chin high, too proud to shed tears, too hopeless to speak even to her own kin.

  She looked away over Tros’s shoulder at the skyline, and Tros, who had seen well-bred women sold at auction in many a foreign port, turned over in his mind what he might say that should console her — possibly a little, if not much.

  “Can your people ransom you?” he asked.

  She met his eyes and answered with surprising calm, her voice not trembling:

  “No. These are all my people. There was war and the men of Helsing burned our villages. There was neither corn nor dried meat left, and the fishing is hard in winter, so we came to seize a holding here, my brother and Volstrum of Fiborg-by-Malmö, with their two ships and all the men that remained. Most of the women and children had been carried off by the men of Helsing. None can ransom us unless Volstrum comes up-river, and if he comes—”

  “He will not come,” Tros assured her. “I have sunk his ship. If he is not drowned he will fall into the Britons’ hands.”

  She betrayed no emotion at that news, but repeated it in Norse to her brother, who laid his head between his hands and groaned aloud.

  “Will you sell her to me?” asked a Briton, one of the men who had been in the thick of the fighting across the river and had boarded the bireme with Caswallon. “I bid you two man-slaves and two horses for her.”

  “No,” Tros answered, and the other Britons sneered at the man who made the bid.

  They all had slaves. Buying and selling was lawful; they now and then sold criminals and captives to foreign ship-owners to replace sailors who had died of scurvy; but they did not approve of barter in human beings.

  However, there was an atmosphere of enmity to Tros; some one had been spreading rumors. They held aloof from him, giving him two-thirds of the bireme’s poop instead of crowding to ask questions or to boast of their own prowess against the Northmen in the woods.

  “What shall I do with you?” Tros asked, meeting the girl’s sky-blue eyes.

  He knew what he would do with Sigurdsen unless destiny should interfere; so Sigurdsen’s wife was no problem, and the widow-woman, who was wailing in a corner below the poop, would dry her eyes before long and be chosen as some man’s mate. But this fair-haired girl puzzled him.

  “I said what I would do if Sigurdsen had beaten you!” she answered. “I would have put iron on your neck and you should have fetched and carried for me.”

  “But I beat Sigurdsen,” said Tros. “I am obliged to make provision for you. Shall I marry you to one of his men?”

  She bared her teeth.

  “Anything but that,” she answered scornfully. “They all ran from the men of Helsing. They ran! And their women and children became captives! Yonder in those woods they ran again, instead of dying where they stood!”

  Suddenly her eyes laughed, as if she saw the ultimate of irony and took delight in it.

  “I belong to you,” she went on. “Are you also a coward?”

  Tros stroked his black beard, squaring back his shoulders. Not so soon, if ever, would he link fate with a woman. His father had instilled into him at least that one conviction: Yielding to that lure and freedom of earth and sea were incompatible.

  “I have yet to meet the woman who can conquer me!” he answered.

  She glared as if she would like to stab him; but he saw something else in her eyes that he could not read, and he was aware of a prodigious impulse to befriend her.

  If she only had used the usual feminine ways of ensnaring a man, he would have felt more at ease; but she did none of that. She turned away from him and knelt beside her brother, speaking to him earnestly in Norse, which Tros could not understand.

  Sigurdsen stood up presently and looked straight at Tros. He was already in a fever from his wounds, and his eyes burned desperately, although his face was sad and was made to look sadder by the long moustache that drooped below his chin. He spoke about a dozen words, Helma interpreting, kneeling, speaking very loud because her back was toward Tros.

  “Put us all into the longship! Therein burn us! We will not seek to escape.”

  Tros laughed at that.

  “Not I,” he answered. “I need the longship and I need a crew. You and I might burn a fleet or two, Sigurdsen. Britons say Northmen are bold liars; Greeks have the name of being crafty ones, and Greek is my mother tongue, so how can you and I pledge faith?”

  Helma interpreted, glancing once at Tros over her shoulder.

  “I am Olaf Sigurdsen,” the Northman answered, and closed his lips. But Helma added to that, standing at last and holding her chin high:

  “If you were good Norse stock, instead of a barbarian with amber eyes, you would know what that means!”

  “Tell him he must keep faith better than he fights, if he hopes to please me,” Tros answered; for he liked the look of Olaf Sigurdsen; he wanted to prod him and find what lay beneath the sorry mask.

  The girl flared until her cheeks were crimson under the flaxen hair. Her breast heaved with passion; her hands grew white with pressure as she clenched her fingers; but she contrived to force a frozen note into her voice, speaking straight at Tros as if each word were a knife aimed at his throat:

  “He was a spent man when he fought you, or you would be his slave this minute. He has slain his two-score Britons in the forest. You — you do not know courage! You do not know faith! How shall I tell you the worth of his promises? You, who never kept faith! Olaf Sigurdsen’s fathers were kings when ice first closed in on the North and darkness fell at midday. I am a king’s daughter! Shall he and I waste words on you?”

  Tros liked her. He forbore to answer her in kind. And he had seen too often the results of promises exacted under force. Yet he needed friends; he needed them that minute.

  “Is he homeless, and has been a king? I, too, am homeless and the son of a prince. It seems to me we have a common ground to meet on,” he said, speaking very slowly that she might lose none of the significance. “When a man plights faith to me I hold him to it, but I repay him in kind.

  “Say, to Sigurdsen, I give him choice. He may fight me again when he has rested, tomorrow, or the next day, or a month from now; and in that case I will kill him. Or he may ask my friendship and make promise to obey me as his captain; and in that case he shall find in honorable service no indignity. Or, if he wishes, I will
give you all to Caswallon, who is a king, whereas I am not one. Let Sigurdsen speak his mind.”

  The girl’s reaction to that speech was vivid. She changed color, bit her lip, grew pale and red again, regarding Tros from another aspect altogether. She seemed to have grown nervous.

  “A prince’s son?” she said, and turned to her brother, speaking to him hurriedly in breathless sentences, clutching his sleeve, repeating short phrases again and again.

  Her brother watched Tros’s eyes, making no sign until she had finished. Then, after a minute’s pause, he said hardly a dozen words.

  “Olaf Sigurdsen desires your friendship. He will obey you but none other!” the girl interpreted; then added, “He means by that—”

  “I know what he means by that,” Tros interrupted, and turned to Conops, who was listening with unconcealed but mixed emotions. He pointed toward the Northman’s ax, its blade buried deep in the woodwork of the citadel.

  “Bring it!”

  Conops never disobeyed; but he obeyed that order like a dog sent to the kennel, taking his time about wrenching the ax free, and longer still about returning with it. Tros snatched it from his hand impatiently and offered it hilt-first to Sigurdsen:

  “Now let me hear your promise as a free man with a weapon in your hand,” he said deliberately. “Speak it without guile, as in the presence of your fathers’ gods ... ..For by the gods of earth and heaven I need friends,” he added to himself.

  But Conops swore Greek oaths below his breath, and glared at Sigurdsen as a dog glares at a new, prospective kennel-mate.

  CHAPTER 31. A Man Named Skell Returns from Gaul

  Be in no haste to accuse each other. Be slow of vengeance; swift to acknowledge kindness. Bait ye your traps for your enemies’ goodness; ye shall find that better than his badness that ye arouse and challenge! Ye fools without subtlety — ye burners of the roots of growing goodness! Know ye not that an enemy’s change of heart toward you is as timid as the voles, whose little snouts peep forth from hiding and vanish?

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  CASWALLON returned to the forest battlefield to count Norse prisoners and to look after wounded Britons, without speaking again to Tros. Even Orwic only waved a noncommittal farewell, and Tros was left alone with two ships, fifteen prisoners, and only Conops to help him manage them. The twenty hired seamen had returned from over-river, but they were certain to be enemies, not friends.

  The seamen demanded weapons, intimating that the prisoners might make a break for liberty; but their own only reason for staying was that Tros had not paid them, and he more than suspected they would try to pay themselves if provided with more than their own short, seamen’s knives.

  Even unarmed they were deadly unreliable; Caswallon’s men who had gone down the riverbank in pursuit of the one boat load of Northmen that escaped Tros’s arrow-fire would be sure to pass news along, so it would be only a matter of time before scores of longshore pirates would come hurrying in hope of loot.

  Tros’s hirelings would help them strip away everything portable, after which they would probably burn both ships in a wanton passion of destruction.

  Meanwhile, tide was flowing; both ships lay fast on the mud, no hope of moving either of them until long after dark. The druids carried wounded and dead ashore; chariots arrived, as by a miracle, from nowhere and galloped away with their burden around a clump of trees and over the skyline.

  There was no road in that direction, therefore, no prospect of assistance; the tracks of wheels cut in the turf were new, nearly at right angles to the riverbank, and not even approximately parallel to the direction from which the chariots had arrived.

  To reach Lunden would take several hours of drifting, and the distance very likely was too great for one tide, which would have to rise to three- quarters of its flow before it could lift the ships; and even so, the bireme would have to be pumped out.

  So Tros took a course few men would have dared to take; he returned their weapons to his prisoners, and brought them all up on the bireme’s poop, where they could have overwhelmed him easily. He could not understand their speech, nor they his; there was only Helma to act interpreter, and her smile proved that she understood Tros’s predicament. Her words confirmed it:

  “I have pledged no friendship!”

  “Have I asked it?” Tros demanded, staring at her. He felt inclined to box her ears, hardly knew why he refrained.

  Her eyes challenged his, but Tros seized the upper hand of her abruptly:

  “Make me a bandage for this cut on my cheek!”

  “There is Zorn’s wife!”

  “I commanded you.”

  He pointed to a box of loosely woven linen stuff that the druids had left on the deck.

  “Very well.”

  She smiled in a way that implied a threat, which Tros perfectly understood; he had heard that the Norse women were adept with poison.

  “Tell a seaman to carry it here,” she added; and for the space of ten more seconds she defied him.

  “You fetch it.”

  Tros’s amber eyes met hers more steadily than any man’s had ever done, and there was that behind them that Fflur had called the “ancient wisdom,” although Tros was only conscious of it as determination; he knew he must master this woman or lose control of all his prisoners. Far more than Sigurdsen, her brother, she was the pivot of opinion, although her brother doubtless thought he ruled the clan.

  Suddenly she made a mock curtsey and went down on deck to bring the bandages, carrying the box back on her head as if she were a bond-woman, avoiding the eyes of her own folk, artfully obliging them to see that Tros was making her a menial.

  But Tros sat down on the up-turned arrow-basket and submitted his face to be bandaged as if he had noticed nothing, pulling off the heavy gold band that encircled his forehead and tossing it from hand to hand while she opened his wound with her fingers and sponged it. She understood him.

  That gold band, though it might hang too loosely on her neck if he should place it there, would be a mark of servitude forever. There were letters and symbols graven on it, and although she could not read them she had no doubt they were his name and title.

  She could not make a bandage stay in place without wrapping folds of linen under his jaw and around his forehead, so he could not replace the band when she had finished. He gave it to her to hold for him and three of the Northmen made comments that brought blushes to her cheek. She answered savagely, tongue-lashing them to silence. Tros turned his back on her and roared to the hired seamen to man the water-hoist.

  Mutiny — instant and unequivocal. Maybe the bandage and the absence of the gold band made him look less like a king. The coolness toward him of Caswallon’s men had had effect, too; and none knew better than those hirelings that longshore pirates would arrive ere long.

  Why labor at the hoist when they would need their strength for looting presently, and for carrying away the loot to villages upriver? The tousle- headed, ragged, skin-clad gang defied him noisily, and Conops hurled a wooden belaying pin at the head of the nearest.

  But the pin was hardly more abrupt than Tros. He left the poop, cloak flying in the wind, like a great bird swooping down on them, seizing the heads of two and beating them against a third, discarding those — they lay unconscious on the deck — hurling a fourth man broadside into half a dozen of his friends, and pouncing on the ringleader, who had been captain of a vessel of his own until Tros hired him. Tros twisted an arm behind his back until he yelled, then rubbed his nose along the beam of the water-hoist, leaving a smear of blood the length of it.

  “Man that beam or eat it!” he commanded. “I will chop and stuff it down your throats if there’s a drop of water in the bilge at sunset, or one back- word from one of you meanwhile!”

  So they went to work and Tros rolled the three unconscious men toward the trough until the outpour drenched their heads and they recovered, when he cuffed and shoved them toward the beam and they began to
labor at it, too dazed to know what they were doing. Then, returning to the poop, he grinned at Sigurdsen, not glancing at Helma but signing to her to come near and interpret.

  “Did you build your longship, Sigurdsen?”

  The Northman nodded. He was sunk deep in the northern gloom and too dispirited to use his voice.

  “Who did the labor? These?”

  Sigurdsen nodded again, but a trace of pride betrayed itself as he glanced at his fellow-prisoners.

  “I — I taught them all,” he grunted.

  “Good! Then bid them caulk this bireme from the inside as the water leaves the hold; use linen, clothing, frayed rope, anything, so be she floats to Lunden, where we’ll beach her in the mud.”

  “Your ship is no good,” Sigurdsen said gloomily.

  “Hah! But her beak sunk Volstrum,” Tros retorted. “She has some virtues. We will pick her as the crows pick a horse’s ribs, and you and I will build a ship together that shall out-sail all of them.”

  Sigurdsen stared — hardly believed his ears — grinned at last, coming out of his gloom to order his men to work, with the three women to help them unravel rope to stuff into the leaking seams. But Tros bade Helma stay there on the poop; and when Conops had found rope and cloth enough, and the hammering began below deck, he stood in front of her, folding his arms on his breast.

  She supposed he intended to use her again as interpreter between himself and Sigurdsen and made ready to accept that duty willingly enough; it made her feel indispensable and the earlier look of ironic challenge returned into her eyes. But Tros surprised her.

  “Can you cook?” he demanded. She nodded, stung, indignant.

  “Then do it. These Britons have rotted my belly with cindered deer-meat until poison would taste like golden oranges from Joppa. Go. The cook-house is in the citadel. I hunger. Cook enough for sixteen people.”

  Her eyelids trembled, brimming with indignant tears, but she bit her lip and not a tear fell. She held out Tros’s gold forehead-band.

  “Keep it,” he said, “for your wages.”