Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  He tried discussing it with Sigurdsen. But Sigurdsen said, “Boys will be boys,” and shrugged his shoulders. He talked it over with Helma, who chose one of them as maid and kept two alert blue eyes on her. But that left eight, and eight ownerless women can play havoc among thirty or forty homeless sailormen. He asked Caswallon’s advice, but Caswallon only laughed.

  “Nay, nay, Tros! I have my own task kinging it, and Lud knows there are too many women, what with Caesar having killed so many young men on the beach, and Glendwyr’s revolt, and one thing and another. Those girls are yours. By law you have to feed them or else deed them to some one who will. Put them to use, I would, but that is your affair.”

  The trouble of it was, that they were not bad-looking women of the swarthier, smaller type descended from tribes that inhabited Britain before the Britons came. They had the conquered disposition that takes a century or two to acquire and another century or two to overcome, a disposition to assume inferiority, social as well as moral, and to take other folks’ assumption of a privilege for granted. But that also implied an ingrown subtlety and an alertness to take advantage of weakness wherever they found it or believed it to exist.

  Tros’s generosity was weakness in their eyes. They knew the law. They had no right to expect anything but slavery. If Tros had not helped Caswallon to suppress rebellion and so become possessed of their fathers and brothers along with themselves, their normal fate would have been to be swapped to the Iceni for horses, and thereafter possibly resold to the Northmen when the trade ships began coming from the Baltic in the spring. Or if, instead of trade ships, raiding parties should come, they might have been used to bribe the pirates to go away again.

  Meanwhile, in the ropewalk they were more trouble than they were worth, since they needed so much supervision. They did not lay the linen fiber properly or twist it evenly unless watched all the time, and the men capable of supervising them were needed for at least equally important work elsewhere.

  The other constant source of trouble was the visitors. The Britons came in droves to watch the ship-building, and there were many of them too important to be denied admission to the yard. No aristocrat, least of all Caswallon or his immediate friends, ever moved without a train of followers. They used to ride down or drive their two-horse wicker chariots and spend the day criticizing, asking questions and getting in everybody’s way.

  They were great humorists. One party of them asked Tros what name he intended to bestow on his great ship when it was finished. When he refused to tell, they named it for him — the dung ship, because of Eough’s explorations in the cave beneath Caswallon’s stable and the barrels full of yellowish crystals that had found their way subsequently to the yard. That name offended the Northmen mightily. There was very nearly a race riot that endangered the lives of all the Northmen in the yard.

  The spice of that jest seemed never to lose its flavor. Britons would make their grooms pick up hot horse dung and offer it as payment for admission at the gate. And when Conops, resenting about the dozenth proffered offering of that kind, flung the stuff in the face of one of Caswallon’s cousins, a fight ensued in which Conops used his knife, and Tros had to hand over two of his best British carpenters by way of damages.

  But there was one man among the constant visitors who made trouble of a more perplexing sort. He was a Sicilian by the name of Galba, an attendant of Marius the Roman. Nothing could persuade Caswallon or his followers that a guest or a guest’s companions might legitimately be regarded with suspicion. They said they were not spies. They were guests. Their word was taken for it, the aristocratic Britons having absurdly high-flung notions about chivalry. Marius and Galba had both eaten at Caswallon’s table and were being entertained in the great house on Lud’s Hill, Lunden Town. Ranking as Caswallon’s guests, Tros had to endure both of them, he being also a guest in Britain and beholden to Caswallon for facilities to build his ship.

  Galba came more frequently than Marius, gave himself lesser airs than the centurion did, but observed too closely and too much. He was apparently extremely aware of the fact that as a guest in Britain his life was sacrosanct and his liberty of movement unrestricted. Tros called him a spy to his face, but he only laughed and answered that Rome’s eyes were as far-sighted as her arm was long. He followed that observation with a thinly veiled threat:

  “What would the Britons do if they thought you were building this ship to use against them? A crew of Northmen, rebels, pirates — there are other kings beside Caswallon.”

  After that Tros gave the gods a dozen opportunities to terminate Galba’s lease of life. Once, when he had a great beam hoisted, ready to be swung into the ship and Galba stood beneath it looking at a newly invented boring tool, Tros knocked out the ratchet that held the crane-winch. But the beam struck the sheer-strake as it fell and was deflected, missing Galba by more than a yard.

  It was the same when bronze was being poured, and Galba stood close to the mold. Tros put a little water in a hollow of the fire-clay trough and stepped well out of range of the explosion. The trough was blown to pieces and about half the bronze was spilled, but Galba seemed to bear a charmed life; not even a drop of the whitehot metal touched him.

  But the closest that Galba came to death was when Tros was trying out the forward starboard catapult before hoisting and installing it. It was a thing entirely of his own invention that avoided the use of the twisted sinew springs the Romans relied on and that were so affected by dampness, dry wind, friction, heat and cold.

  Between two uprights, thirty feet high, with a big bronze pulley-wheel on top, he had a rectangular lead weight weighing a ton, encased in wicker-work and hoisted by a winch. When a lever was struck by a mallet, the weight fell, and the sudden force of that was transferred to the missile by means of ropes and a sliding mechanism that jerked the missile forward through a long trough, which could be moved on a hinge and turn-table to give the necessary angle and direction. To prevent the falling weight from injuring the bottom of the ship there was a cushion of willow wicker-work; and to secure the maximum efficiency and range, the force of the fall was transferred to the propelling mechanism just before the weight reached bottom.

  The first shot Tros fired with his new invention — a lump of rock the size of a man’s head — went clear across the Thames and knocked a branch from a tree a hundred yards beyond the farther mud-bank. It was the second shot that very nearly ended Galba’s campaign of investigation.

  Tros invited him to examine the mechanism, ordered the weight cranked up, and proceeded to show him the ingenious bronze levers by which the speed of the projecting instrument was multiplied. He persuaded Galba to lean over the trough to examine its oiled grooves, and then with his own hand struck the lever that released the weight. But Galba looked up to watch a wild goose flying overhead, so when the mechanism whizzed along its course his head still remained on his shoulders. But he grew very wary of Tros after that. He was a debonair, curly-headed, lightly framed Sicilian, who could be wary without inviting all the universe to pay attention to the fact.

  So Tros wasted a lot more ingenuity in the vain effort to send Galba to another world without himself incurring the responsibility. He even went to the length of entertaining Galba by Helma’s fireside, and was perfectly frank with Galba concerning the reason for it:

  “You are Caesar’s spy. For all I know, you may have been sent to murder me. In Britain, if you murder a man whose food you have eaten, without first serving notice on him that you have become his enemy, they first torture you and then burn you to death.”

  “I am no man’s enemy,” said Galba, sipping at Tros’s mead and apple guardedly, as if he thought it might be poisoned. “I studied philosophy in Syracuse. I believe that a man should attend strictly to his own conduct and leave others to govern themselves. Then such gods as there are, and whatever they are, preserve a man. They seem to have preserved me,” he added pointedly.

  “Nevertheless, I will make it known that you have eaten a
t my table,” Tros remarked.

  Galba spoke Gaulish with the skill of an intellectual, and that was the only tongue that Tros and Helma had as yet in common. Tros knew Greek, Latin and all the tongues of the Levant, including the Phoenician and Arabic, the Aramaic dialects and at least a smattering of Coptic. Helma knew only her own Norse and the Gaulish dialect men spoke in that corner of Britain, which differed only slightly in pronunciation from the speech of northern Gaul.

  So it did not take the observant Galba any time at all to discover that the relationship between Tros and Helma was on a very different basis from that of, say, a Sicilian and his wife, or a Greek and the prospective mother of his sons. They stood more on a basis of equality and there was confidence between them, as if they shared together a tremendous secret.

  Tros did not appear to be in love with his young wife or in love with anything except his ship, but he appeared to take it for granted that Helma also loved the ship, to regard her as a practical independent ally pledged to one course with himself. And that is a much more unbreakable bond between two people than any emotional love affair.

  The confidence was proven by Tros’s entire willingness to let Helma converse with strangers. In fact, he seemed to like her to take the burden of conversation, he alternately listening and lapsing into a brown study. Most of the time it was impossible to tell whether Tros was interested or was visioning new details for his ship; but when referred to, he invariably had an answer ready.

  So Galba made Helma’s acquaintance carefully at Tros’s fireside after the meal, while the slave-girl washed the dishes and Tros, in his great oak chair, removed the gold band from his forehead, solid, beaten from one of Caesar’s wreaths to replace the ancient one he had broken and bound on Helma’s arm that night he married her. It was heavy, and he liked to lay his head back and his feet up while he rested.

  The Sicilian was an artful talker, not too ingratiating, not too given to open flattery, rather frankly curious, making his approach to Helma as he had approached Tros’s shipyard, on a basis of privilege that might not be denied. He explained that he was one of Caesar’s gatherers of information about foreign lands. Caesar was writing a book, omnivorous of facts. Could Helma tell him of the distant north from which she came?

  So Helma told tales of the Baltic, and of the long nights farther north than that, where winter reigns for seven months, and of summers when there was no night. She told of fishing and of great whales, of fjords where the pines came to the water’s edge and fishing fleets might be land-locked for a month on end by winds that blew forever from the westward and the northwest.

  “And that is why Northmen are good at the oar, and why their ships are built to sail into the wind.”

  Presently, because Galba urged, she sang, her fingers plucking at imaginary harp strings and her strong young voice athrill with the heroic mystery of legend. But the words were Norse and neither Tros nor Galba understood them. Nevertheless, Tros leaned forward in his chair to listen, and the lean-lipped, sarcastic Galba changed color, drumming in time to the song with those dark-skinned, deceitful fingers that looked capable of anything at all except hard work.

  And so — because if you sing to a man of what your heart knows, you have given to him something you can not recall — there began a kind of intimacy, guarded indeed since Helma knew Tros mistrusted Galba, and she, too, mistrusted him; and not immoderately emphasized by Galba, who was subtle even in his method of discarding subtlety.

  In his own turn Galba sang of Syracuse and of the wars of Sicily, of Carthage and of tyrants who played a losing hazard of intrigue between the Wolf of the Aventines and the Punic Lion.

  Then Tros sang about Jason and the Golden Fleece, in a basso voice that crashed among the roof-beams, his eyes glowing as he all unconsciously revealed the grandeur of his own hopes and the splendor of his zeal to conquer far horizons. The words were Greek and Galba understood them; even he, though the apostle of all cynicism, understood Tros’s heart was on his lips that hour and more than ancient legend was unrolling to the sea-wave tune. The words might crash on the ancient beaches of an unknown Euxine shore; but to Helma, ignorant of Greek, and to Galba, ignorant of all but cynicism, there swung into the mental vision paths along the moonbeams to a chartless ocean where the sea-birds were the pilots, and the lure lay in a man’s own heart, not in the chink of commerce nor the clash of arms, nor even in the thump of oarbeats or the thunder of the wind in straining sails, though the thunder and the oar-beats seemed to pulse an obbligato to the song.

  And then Tros sang of the fall of Troy. He sang the Trojan view of it. Of Helen, fair-haired Helen, whom the Trojans thought worth dying for. He made a mystery of vision and ideals, raped from Greece — unworthy of them — and defended against all the gods of greed and envy and the men who hate those who have done what they failed to do themselves.

  “In the end you will die for a woman’s sake,” said Galba when Tros ceased singing and coughed, because the blue smoke filled his lungs. But Helma shook her head, thought otherwise.

  CHAPTER 43. The Conference of Kings

  Instead of blaming one another for the flood, have ye thought yet about aiding one another to withstand it?

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  MARIUS AND GALBA gave Tros less anxiety than did Taliesan, the Lord High Druid, and certain British kings who jumped at opportunity to balk Caswallon. Galba’s veiled threat materialized. Some said the Romans, through spies, had corrupted those kings, and that might be, for the Roman spies were everywhere. But none spoke of Taliesan except with awe. However, Fflur said they were jealous of her husband and suspected him of planning to make himself the paramount chief of Britain.

  “Whereas,” said Fflur, discussing events with Tros and Helma up on the stern of the big ship amid the din of hammer-blows, “if they only would believe it, he would rather hunt deer and make merry than anything else the gods permit. He is too easy-going, too generous, too ready to make friends.”

  But Fflur was the daughter of Mygnach the Dwarf, and there was more insight and hind- and fore-sight in her heritage than in that of most women. She looked nearly young enough to be the sister of her oldest son; and yet there was old wisdom in her eyes and something akin to fear, as if she could see too much but could avoid too little.

  There was Gwanar, king of the Iceni, breeder of horses and more or less ruler of hard-bitten men who were forever coming southward to Caswallon’s country to sell mares. Gwanar and Fflur were first cousins, which tended to a peaceful settlement of most disputes, but Gwanar had not sent men to resist Caesar’s first invasion, and he either believed or pretended to believe that the Roman would never repeat the attempt.

  Then there was Caradoc of the Silures, who dwelt in the west where druidism was far more than a religion; it was almost life itself. Caradoc might not have interfered; he was of the darker, swarthier type of Briton, of Iberian ancestry, and his lands were too remote for him to have troubled his head about Caswallon’s alleged ambitions. But Madoc, king of the Coranians, had married his sister, who was known as a wise woman, wiser than Fflur. Madoc sent ambassadors to the Iceni and Caradoc followed suit.

  They three brought in Gwenwynwyn of the Ordovici, lover of his own importance, bottle-nosed and crippled of one arm, who loved intrigue far better than plain dealing. Gwenwynwyn of the Ordovici agitated and accused Caswallon to the druids, mainly about Tros, whom he had never seen, until there was nothing left to do but summon a five-king conference.

  The druids would have preferred to avoid it. They were not in love with Tros, although they regarded his father, Perseus, as a high priest, greater than all but a few of themselves. But they were not against him. And they were the only authorities who could guarantee the holding of such a conference without mismanagement or bloodshed.

  Normally the druids took no part in politics, but they recognized no boundaries to their own influence, which was as nearly entirely spiritual as it could be kept. Their supremacy wa
s everywhere conceded, and they performed the ceremonies when a king was girdled with the gold insignia of office. Without the druids’ sanction there could be no kings. Their mound-encircled hospices were held so sacred that no king would have dared or would have dreamed of daring to enter without permission, or to hale forth even a murderer who had taken refuge there.

  And the druids did interfere whenever the kings exceeded their proper authority or entered into combinations against one another. They were ever ready with advice when asked. They sometimes volunteered it. They were held in such universal awe and reverence that if they told a king to abdicate he had no choice but to obey.

  So it was always druids who presided when the kings met; druids who sent the invitations, although it was usually kings who pulled the wires that set druids’ influence in motion.

  “What I need,” said Caswallon to Tros one day when the invitation had arrived, “is an army of ten thousand men, ready to resist Caesar. Then Caesar would never invade. What they fear is that if I had such an army at my beck and call, I would use it to subdue all Britain. If the druids should say yes, then I could have the army in a week. If they say no, then I shall never have it.”

  “If Caesar should come, the druids would suffer most of all. He hates them. They know it. Surely they will let you have the army, since it is your land that will be invaded first,” Tros answered.

  Caswallon shook his head. He knew the druids, feared them, loved them in his own way, which was wholly Celtic. And he knew those rival kings.

  “We will go,” he said, “and at least thereafter we shall know the worst.”

  So Helma went with Fflur to stay at Merrow, where there was a sacred pool and near that, a farm belonging to Caswallon, they taking with them all those nine British slave-women who had given Tros such trouble. Fflur had a notion she could find them husbands among the hinds who watched sheep on Merrow Downs. Tros, yielding to Caswallon’s importunity, spared three clear days of winter sunshine when the planking of the upper deck was being laid, dreading lest the parsimonious Sigurdsen should skimp the oil on the layer of linen between the double planking, or lest they should omit to cramp the woodwork properly before they drove the spikes, and went with Caswallon to the druids’ mound-encircled hospice near by Verulam.