by Talbot Mundy
Tros stared. His father might have spoken to the druids of Gaul, who, in turn, might have told the secret to the British druids.
“Ye know how rivers run,” the old man went on in his gentle yet majestic voice. “A trickle, then a brook, then many little brooks, and then, at last, the river rolling seaward. All of it drops of water, rolling whence? Some rivers split and flow along two courses to the sea. Yet they are one and the same river, and the water comes from the self-same brooks, mingled and blended together, even as men are mingled and blended together from many sources, and become a race that flows on to its destiny.
“The Lord Tros’s mother was of the race from which many of you who call yourselves Britons, are descended. It is the mothers who bear the sons, who are the channels in which the streams of human races run.
“And now I will speak of a greater mystery. They who had invaded these isles found here an ancient wisdom, older than their own idolatry. Lo, it had been always in the world. Their very ancient ancestors had known it, but had fallen into darkness. It was ancient. It was wise. And it reabsorbed them. They were as children coming home. They abandoned all their false gods, even as a river’s branch goes wandering, and comes back to the stream at last.
“Now, yet another mystery. There were conquests here in Britain long before your forebears’ time. The swarthier tribes they found here had themselves been conquerors in their day, coming from the south, so long ago that none remembers when; yet the tribes whom they found, themselves had come centuries before they did from a continent that disappeared under the sea, because the guardians of the he law grew weary of its wickedness.
“Yet even they, who came from lost Atlantis, found, already here before them, druids who preserved the ancient wisdom. The ancient wisdom took them to herself and prospered them until they lost the key. Then others came, then others. Stronger men forever replace weaker men, as spring prevails over the decaying winter and as winter in its turn destroys the autumn foliage and covers all with snow. But beneath the snow life lives. None slays life, although he kills the body. None slays wisdom, though he act however foolishly.
“So they who were the keepers of the ancient wisdom, whom ye call druids — though there was another name for them in those days — prevailed over all conquerors, simply because of wisdom, forever forfeiting the semblances as trees let go their leaves when winter comes, but husbanding the sap in which lies the secret of life.
“Men who were mighty men of war found they must come to the druids for wisdom. The druids knew that conquests and reconquests are a little matter, being no more than the ebb and flow of tides within the tides of evolution in the destiny of man. They were able to give wise advice, well knowing that tides can come and go without blood poured on the rocks of hatred.
“The conquerors learned to listen, and grew spiritual in the paths of peace. Men die. And races die. The very rocks die, and are turned into tree- bearing earth, drenched by the rain and washed by streams and rivers to the sea, to become who knows what future continents. Those rocks that endure the longest, in the end are broken by the builder, by the icefield, by the earthquake. Even the sun will die when it has run its course, until a time shall come when even the sun is born again.
“What dies is but the outer shape. When ye are dead, ye are reborn into another mold and even the dead mold ye used is shredded up into its elements and used by trees and what not else in the unceasing alchemy of nature.
“And now observe — a tide comes. Shall men resist it? Rome comes on a tide of destiny — an old wolf, wise in war, serving and served by evil. What did it avail the men who fought your forebears? To this day they are slaves, a subject race. Yet, notwithstanding, such small vision as remained to them, ye, conquering them, have copied, abandoning the idols that your forebears brought over the sea and honoring the wisdom we taught, we, the druids.
“Had they not fought your forebears, they had not been conquered. Not a druid would have died, impaled by the new invaders. Hear me! It is not three hundred years since men, whose very names ye bear, were hunting down the druids here in Britain. Why? Because the blood-lust came of fighting. They believed the druids taught the men who defended Britain to resist them with bloodshed and anger. Whereas the druids taught the contrary, but they were deaf, and would not listen. And so your forebears slew the druids, even as the Romans do in Gaul and as they will do here in Britain if ye offer them resistance.
“Our wisdom bids us think in centuries, whereas ye think in terms of hours. So I say make peace with the Romans, for they come like an advancing tide. If ye make peace, ye may absorb their strength and, keeping peace, give no excuse to them to wreak their savagery. Thus, we who serve the ancient wisdom may prevail over their ignorance and, taking no account of time — which is a little matter — conquer Rome in peace!
“If ye take arms against the Romans, it may be ye may hold them for a year or five or fifty. But in the end they will overwhelm you and their last fury will be ten times greater than the first.”
He was speaking to Tros as much as to the five kings. They heard him in breathless silence knowing he spoke of realities, distinguished from the unrealities that impose themselves as daily life. They knew that behind his words there was another meaning, and an inner within that, to which none but druids held the key. Not one, not even Tros, the son of an Initiate of Samothrace, but that respected him as a man who walked with gods and communed with them hourly.
But Gwenwynwyn, king of the Ordovici, rubbed his bottle nose and sought to twist that pause to his advantage, he being one of those who can see no profit to himself unless another loses. He feared Caswallon’s power. He hated Tros without rhyme or reason.
“Lord Dragon,” he began, in a voice that was as soft and gentle as his face was sly — for he came from the far west, many days’ ride distant beyond the mountains from a country where men’s voices were as musical as rain— “we ourselves know your words are true and sacred. But I am told the Lord Caswallon helps the Lord Tros to build a warship on the river nearby his town of Lunden. I am told, too, that he lent him men to raid Gaul. Is that the way to make the Romans treat us peacefully?”
Caswallon raised his fist to smite the chair-arm, but checked himself respectfully in time.
“Lord Druid,” he said, forcing his voice to moderation, “you spoke of holding Rome at bay maybe for fifty years. That is a man’s life. Shall we not play each of us a man’s part if we resist the Romans that long? If I should leave my corner of Britain free, I would not fear to meet the judges of the dead. Did Fflur, the mother of my sons, bear men to wear the Roman yoke?”
The rebuke he received was swift and chilling.
“How free is your corner of Britain now?” the old prelate asked sternly. “Are there no slaves?”
Gwenwynwyn laughed. Caswallon put his head between his hands and sighed. But Gwanar, king of the Iceni, did not care to see Caswallon grinned at by a man who came from so far to the westward that one might almost say he was a foreigner. Gwanar’s way was blunt and bluff when the Lord Druid’s eyes were not directed at him.
“Why does the Lord Tros build the ship?” he asked. “What can he tell us about that and about Gaul and Caesar? That is” — he had caught the eye of Taliesan— “if your holiness permits.”
Tros rose to his feet, and his sword that he had leaned against the chair, dropped to the floor with a clatter that startled all of them. “Lord Taliesan, lords of Britain,” he began.
The five kings shuddered when he used the Lord Druid’s name, but the old man, leaning to rest his chin on a hand far whiter than a woman’s, nodded him permission to continue.
“Lord Taliesan, most reverend druids, lords of Britain,” he began again, “I am a blunt man. I am not schooled in subtleties of discourse. I am used to shipboard, where the gear, aye, and the wind and every detail of the ship is known by its proper name to save confusion. I pray you bear with me if I call danger by its right name.
“I have kept peace where the other m
an would let me all my days. I have seen peace broken for the sake of plunder, for the love of women and for revenge. Caesar, the Roman, adds thereto a fourth way — ambition, greater than any the world has ever seen. Aye, greater than Alexander’s. He is learned. He is the first of Rome’s high priests. Caesar can split with you the fine hairs of philosophy and law. But he will come with legions and tax-gatherers. And when he goes, it will be with chains of prisoners, leaving his lieutenants to complete the harvest he began, a harvest of money and slaves.”
“The Lord Caswallon is for making ready one more — one last time, to smite the Roman legions when they set foot on the shore of Britain. I warn you, you will lose all and, not least, your old religion, unless the Lord Caswallon shall prevail over the Roman when that day comes.
“I know Gaul. End to end I know it. I have seen, with these eyes I have seen the druids burned alive by Romans, their own Gauls not daring to prevent. Druids I have seen, tied hand and foot and five together, roasted over slow fires while the legions cheered.”
There was a chorus of sibilant ejaculations. Not a king there but would rather die in agony himself than see a druid harmed. But the old Lord Druid nodded to Tros to continue.
“I came to Gaul to help the druids. For the druids’ sake my father died, tortured to death by Caesar because he would not tell Caesar the druids’ secrets. I am no favorer of bloodshed, but I warn you, you must save this Isle of Britain from the Romans, or the ancient wisdom that your druids serve will become but a myth, a memory. Men will know no more of it.
“Rome tolerates all creeds, all priesthoods save and except that ancient wisdom. She guts, defiles and burns out by the roots whoever and whatever teaches that Rome — rotten, bold and greedy — is not immortal, the beginning and the end.
“Water will rust iron,” he said, looking straight at the old high priest. “I know, none better, that if the Romans conquer Britain, and though they rip the carcasses of all the druids into bleeding clay, or throw them living into the arena to be burned or torn by dogs, the soul of your religion will persist. In the end it will weaken Rome, as water corrodes iron. But the water will be stained, poisoned until none can drink it.”
He paused, looked at the five kings one by one, and then again at the white-haired Taliesan.
“I saw a man in Syria, who knew the secret of the fire. He carried hot coals in his hands. He walked on a bed of burning charcoal. He was unhurt. Scornful of men’s ignorance or, it may be, pitying them, he bade them do the same. Some listened. I have seen the burned hands and the tortured feet of men who did obey him.
“You see me. I am a navigator. I can sail a ship through storm and darkness, leagues beyond sight of land, and make my landfall. Shall I laugh and bid a landsman do the same?
“I have seen the Lord Caswallon ride an untamed horse, sitting the frantic beast as easily as I stand on a heaving poop or climb to a masthead. Shall he bid me ride the horse because he knows the trick of it?
“Shall a woman bid a man bear children?
“I have heard said and I believe you holy druids understand far more of the laws of life than ordinary mortals do. I see that kings pay homage to you. In all modesty I tender mine. And yet, no doubt because you must, you keep those holy secrets to yourselves as intimately as a woman keeps the secret of gestation in her womb.
“Because and if you know how to prevail against the iron heel of Rome, by dying, maybe as a tree dies that the seed may live, shall ye bid men who do not understand your Mysteries to do the same?
“Behold me. No man ever lived or shall live who can make me strike one blow against another country’s freedom. Saving your holy presence, none shall stay my hand from striking against Rome, if blow of mine can check that wolf- brood’s cruel course!
“Slaves are there in Britain? Holy Taliesan, Rome eats slaves as fire eats fuel! She imports them by the hundred thousand and they die like droves of rats. They sell the women to be perched in chairs along the mean streets to solicit passers-by. They send the strong young men into the arena to die fighting one another or to be tossed by bulls or torn by hungry brutes. They sell the heart-broken and unresisting to the landowners to toil under the lash on farms, thus forcing their own Italian freemen to become soldiers, since there is no work left for them to do. The soldiers go forth conquering more countries, capturing more slaves, plundering more treasuries for gold with which Rome may gorge herself.”
He paused.
“I build a ship. By the Lord Caswallon’s leave I build a ship. I build her to defend myself against the Romans and to set forth seeking some far corner of the earth that Rome has not polluted.”
He stooped, picking up his sword and held it by the scabbard, shaking it above his head.
“I crave peace,” he said in his ringing voice that thrilled with love of action. “My heart yearns for the sunlit skies, stars and the open sea. It is enough for me to wage that war within me that a man must before he may dare to hope for freedom. But I love life. It pleases me to call no king my master and to bind myself to obey no senate’s bribed and compromised decrees. Of all things, independence is my first love, freedom to go how, when and whither I will. Yet I say this—”
He paused dramatically, lowered the sword and leaned both hands on it.
“What I seek for myself, I will deny to no other man. What I seek for myself, I will fight for another’s sake. Myself, my ship, my men and all I have are at your service, if you yourselves will fight for your own freedom.”
He sat down amid grunts of approval, and Caswallon spanked his hand down on the chair-arm. But the druids sat still, and Gwenwynwyn of the Ordovici, on the prelate’s right hand, took advantage of the ensuing silence.
“Why do they call it the dung ship?” he asked in his suave, soft, musical voice.
And three kings laughed. Gwenwynwyn dropped more water on the fire:
“Myself, I have come a very long way to discuss peace in the presence of the son of the Dragons. I could have heard the dunghill cockadoodles at home.”
“Lud’s blood!” Caswallon was quicker on his feet than Tros, but the old Lord Druid checked them both with no more than a gesture.
“No oaths here!” he said sternly. “No violence!”
They two sat down again, and both men looked ashamed.
“I have heard that the Lord Tros consults sorcerers about the dung and such matters as that,” Gwenwynwyn added.
“Peace!” Taliesan commanded. “Lord Gwanar, let us hear your view of this.”
But Gwanar, king of the Iceni, came from Lindum where impenetrable marshes to the south and eastward circled and divided up the pasture land. So were men’s minds, definite and plain in some things but venturing with caution onto unknown ground. He rose to his feet:
“Lord Druid, might we hear the Lord Caswallon first?”
The prelate nodded. Caswallon rose, the firelight showing up the woad- blue patterns on his white wrist as he twisted his moustache. Anger blazed in him when he met Gwenwynwyn’s eyes, but he controlled it when the old Lord Druid frowned.
“Brother of gods,” he began, then threw both hands behind him and his chin up in a gesture of resolution. “Like the Lord Tros I have sought peace, and I think you know that. I continue to seek peace. But the Cantii, to the southward, look to me to help them repel Caesar, who has sent ambassadors to me. I have not yet answered those ambassadors, except with a challenge to Caesar to fight me hand-to-hand, which they say they will not carry to him. I think that if my brother kings would lend me men so that Caesar should know we have an army too numerous for him to overcome, then we might have peace certainly.”
He sat down again and threw one long leg over the other, leaning back to study the faces opposite. But Tros noticed that his wrist was trembling. There was an explosion coming.
Gwenwynwyn, safe at the prelate’s right hand, stirred the danger mischievously, speaking in a voice as gentle as a child’s.
“If we should send men, then we would have non
e to defend us if the Lord Caswallon should try himself to conquer Britain.”
The explosion came.
“Send none!” Caswallon answered, leaping up. “I want no weaklings! You have no men strong enough to march the distance! Let them wait there in the west until Caesar comes and carries them to Rome in chains! I will be glad to see it!”
He paused because the old druid checked him.
“Lord Druid, may I speak? I will state this question plainly. No, I care nothing about the Lord Gwenwynwyn. Let the Romans have him and his people. I will say no more about him.”
“Speak courteously,” Taliesan commanded.
“Brother of gods, I speak in reverence,” Caswallon answered. He stood with bowed head, then looked up slowly. “You have said it is not wise to resist the Romans. But I am the one who must feel their heel first. I am a king and I must aid my people. I am willing. Caesar has sent ambassadors. They offer me Caesar’s friendship. They offer to make me king not only of a part of Britain, but of all of it.”
“There! There!” Gwenwynwyn interrupted. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you?”
“Peace! The Lord Caswallon speaks,” said Taliesan. He appeared unmoved, but he was almost supernaturally calm.
“Son of the Eternal Sun, I speak with reverence, but in despair. What I must suffer, let these suffer with me! I will do more than yield to Caesar. I will say to his ambassadors that he should come soon, swiftly.”
“No! No! No!”
Four kings were on their feet, gesturing indignantly, but they sat down when Taliesan motioned.
“There,” Gwenwynwyn interjected, suavely as a critic at a singing competition. “He is Caesar’s friend. I said so.”
And Caswallon thundered at him:
“If I must be Caesar’s friend to save the holy druids, then I will be!”
Gwanar, king of the Iceni, rose at that.
“Watch me then! See how soon I will overrun your country! I will burn Verulam and Lunden before ever you let Caesar come!”
“Who threatens? I will have no threats here!” Taliesan exclaimed in a voice that brought utter silence. For a minute there was no sound except heavy breathing and the crack of burnt wood falling on the hearth. Then he nodded to Caswallon to continue speaking, though he looked too tired to hear him.
