Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Try again,” said Eough.

  The stuff was harder to ignite, but jumped and scattered as it burned, making a worse stench than ever. Satisfied, Tros filled up one of the leaden balls with the preparation and inserted an oil-soaked fuse into the hole. Then he filled the remaining nine lead balls in the same way, stowed those where Conops could find them in emergency and ordered the rest of the sulphur, resin, charcoal and yellow crystals carried on board the longship.

  CHAPTER 47. The Start of the Mad Adventure

  And if your cause be just, doth Wisdom bid you flinch because the unjust tell you courage is folly?

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  IT WAS bitter cold that night, with a bright half moon and no more east wind than sufficed to stir a ripple on the surface of the river. Caswallon came near midnight, swathed in furs, accompanied by two of his relations and one serving-man, with enough weapons between them to have furnished three times their number.

  Nearly all Lunden turned out to see Caswallon off, most of them wishing him druids’ blessings on his venture, all of them pleased that he was running his own risk instead of taxing them to ransom Fflur, but some of them crying farewell to him as if he were sailing on his last adventure. His oldest son, yet hardly old enough to use men’s weapons, clung to him, begging and pleading to be taken on the expedition.

  “Nay, my son, and for the last time!” Caswallon answered. “Stay here and obey Orwic. Study how to king it in my shoes if I should die over there in Gaul.”

  Then Eough, under a beacon flare, with cries and weird ceremony, investing Conops with underworld powers with which to guard the yard while Tros was absent; Caswallon adjuring his people to let the yard alone; Eough in person carrying the leaden ball into the middle of the yard, dancing around it, chanting incantation; Conops, torch in hand, as scared as any one.

  Conops lit the fuse and hid behind a pile of timber in great haste, although Tros had told him to withdraw with dignity. There was a splutter, a great gasp from the assembled crowd, and then, what had not been foreseen, an explosion. The bomb burst like a thunder-clap, its stenching contents scattering far and wide. It started three fires in the wood-piles, that had to be doused with earth and snow by terrified British slaves, and the stench, even out in the open yard, was suffocating, almost unendurable. The crowd vanished, most of them pursuing runaway horses.

  “Brother Tros, I fear this,” Caswallon announced. His face was ashen- gray. “Do we journey in league with all the underworld?”

  “No farther under than the bottom of the horse-dung in the cave beneath your stables,” Tros replied. “I never guessed that stuff would burst. Did you send that messenger to Gaul?”

  “He leaves Lunden tonight by chariot to Pevensey, thence in the ship of Lomar, the tin merchant, who put in for repairs three months ago on his way from Ictis and frets to reach Gaul, where he can sell his cargo to the Romans.”

  Tros laughed.

  “Let’s hope he didn’t see the hot stink burst. I’d rather he’d hear of it. They’ll magnify the story. He’ll multiply it in his head all the way between here and Gaul. By the time it reaches Caesar there’ll be talk of fifty thousand men on the way, all armed with the guts of earthquakes and the foul breath of Cocytus!”

  Caswallon murmured, but the thought of Fflur had him by the heart- strings. He was raised on ancient legend. High romance and derring-do were of the breath he breathed. Knight-errantry, however little practiced, lingered in the veins of every well-bred man in Britain, that and a sort of fatalism linked to faith in trial by ordeal. He proposed to confront Caesar, challenge him in person. He had no other plan, left all else to the Powers of the Unseen Universe that, he believed, took a deeply personal interest in the affairs of men.

  It was a mad adventure — only the wan moonlight on the Thames to help them clear the mud-banks, Northmen at the oars, chanting a low dirge about the fights of Odin, all the ship’s waist stinking with the crowd of charcoal-burners soaked in fish oil, and only Tros at the helm with any notion what the plan might be.

  And even Tros had hardly any plan at all. He only knew the half moon promised him fine weather, and remembered that his father on his death-bed, prophesied a long life for him on many lands and seas, with many a brush with Caesar, that should end in his becoming Caesar’s more or less ally at last. As he believed in death-bed prophecies, so he believed in giving prophecy an opportunity to work.

  “I undertake an enterprise of hazard, knowing a man can not die until his time comes,” he assured Caswallon. “My time to die is not yet. Therefore I can not fail if I go forward.”

  Forward he went, down-Thames on the top of the tide, too busy admiring the longship’s motion and her easy steering to let conjecture worry him. He had the gift of letting the past go, living with all his faculties in each existing moment.

  “The future,” he said to Caswallon, “is the past reshuffled. Who were the Gauls who helped the Romans carry off our wives?”

  “The men of Murchan, king of Gwasgwyn who shall die, as I live!” Caswallon answered.

  “I remember, Eough said it.”

  Eough was at the masthead, watching stars, and nothing could persuade him to come down, despite the cold and though Tros shouted to him a dozen times that he could see the stars as well from the after-deck. When he did come down at last, Tros gave the steering oar to Sigurdsen and followed Eough forward to where the graceful bow began its upward curve toward the high serpent figurehead. There he cornered him.

  “What have you seen?”

  Eough shrugged his shoulders. No speech reveals an artist’s inner thought, and there were no words to tell what Eough had seen. The shrug was helpless.

  “Good or bad?” Tros asked.

  “Some won’t like it, but you can’t change it,” Eough retorted.

  “For me, success or failure?” Tros asked.

  “That depends on you,” said Eough.

  “For you, then — what?”

  “Depends on me,” Eough answered.

  Suddenly Tros felt afraid, not of the dwarf but of the dwarf’s intentions. Eough sensed it.

  “We will pay our fare. We are honest people,” he said, blinking, nodding, rubbing his legs to warm them.

  “You mean your fare to Gaul?”

  Eough nodded again.

  “You will do my bidding?”

  More nods, three in swift succession.

  “Why do you wish to go to Gaul?”

  “Britain is no more good for us. Taliesan is dead. There will be war. We get behind the war, to the place whence it comes. In the front of the war where the swords clash and the horsemen hunt men for the sake of killing, it is not good for charcoal-burners.”

  “Then you won’t return to Britain?”

  Eough laughed on a high note like a small boy.

  “Does a chicken return into the egg?” he asked.

  Tros made his first mistake then. He returned to the stern of the ship and took Caswallon into confidence.

  “Migration,” he announced, “like birds that fly south for the winter, only these birds won’t return. You’ll have to find new charcoal-burners around Lunden.”

  For a minute or two Caswallon refused flatly to believe him. As the truth began to filter through the crust of his autocracy, almost his very reason wavered. Rage burned into a frenzy.

  “Throw them overboard!” he exploded, gulping. “Lud’s liver! The ungrateful, treacherous dogs! Leave Britain, and without our leave? Bid your Northmen gut them! Swine! They have lived in our forests, and we let them live, not even burning their ghastly sorcerer, as we should have, but for Taliesan! This comes of taking reptiles in place of honest men. Here—”

  Tros had to restrain him forcibly. He would have leaped into the ship’s waist, sword in hand. He wanted to wreak murder on unnatural ingrates. Not that he had ever loved them or rejoiced in them as fellow countrymen. Far might that be from him! They were not even tax-payers. The point was, they had
no right to go and ought to be killed for wanting to. They were vermin, godless sorcerers and insolent, ungrateful swine.

  He came near to fighting Tros, because Tros dared to protect them.

  “I have a plan by which we can succeed with charcoal-burners better than with all your armed men,” Tros explained. “These people have been hunted for generations. They are adepts at concealment. They will not be noticed. None will suspect them. They will be grateful to me for taking them to Gaul, and to you, too, if you’ll only let them.”

  But Caswallon would hear none of it.

  “You will next ask me to be grateful to those swine!” he thundered.

  Nothing calmed him until the tide turned and the ground swell, aftermath of days of storm, pitched and rocked the longship until the rising sun danced like a drunken partner to the figurehead. The King of all the Trinobantes lay down then and vomited his spleen among the lazy, laughing waves.

  “Am I a fish?” he groaned. “O Lud! O mother of my sons, that you should have brought me to this pass! Tros, brother Tros, I die! Whoooo-up! waw-hu-ep-ah! Bear me a last message to my wife. O Fflur — eeyuerup — Ca-Caswallon dared the sea for love of you and — whooerreeup!”

  Eough massaged him until the blood returned to head, hands, feet and vertigo departed. Caswallon threatened the dwarf with death for touching him, but Eough persisted and Caswallon’s own attendants were too sick to interfere. At last the dwarf contrived a fearsome draft of fish oil mixed with onion juice and made Caswallon swallow it, forcing his jaws apart with iron fingers, rolling him over on his back and holding his nose until the mess was down. Caswallon retched and gurgled, but the sickness ceased.

  Before long he was sitting up and swearing like a gentleman, rinsing his mouth with sea-water to change the taste, and presently demanding food. Eough cooked it, using charcoal in a sand box forward. And whether the roe venison was hung exactly long enough, or whether Eough wrought miracles of cooking, Caswallon voted it the best food he had eaten in a dozen years.

  “You dog of a sorcerer!” he roared. “If shame didn’t forbid, I could forgive you!”

  But Eough, sure of Tros’s protection, cared not at all for kings and went forward to mix ground sulphur with the crystals, charcoal and resin with the sawdust, damping the lot with sea-water and then filling the ten leaden bombs. But he did not insert the fuses yet. He seemed to have a cautious reverence for the offspring of his alchemy, which profoundly impressed the whole ship’s company.

  Not long after dawn there came a light wind, biting cold but favorable, and Tros set sail. Then, having set a course “with the wind under the lobe of your left ear,” he gave the steering oar to Sigurdsen and lay down to sleep on a pile of sheepskins. But Caswallon was in no mood for sleep and insisted on asking questions.

  “I will tell you whither we go when the gods tell me! I will sleep on it,” Tros answered irritably.

  But Caswallon did not believe in that kind of divination, any more than Tros believed in discussing plans that were as yet but half formed in his mind. They had to compromise, each having half his own way, the plan not outlined, but the problem definitely stated.

  “I know Caesar,” Tros began. He always began discussions of Caesar that way. “He does his dirty work by proxy. If it succeeds, he takes the credit; if it fails, he blames his agent. They were the men of Murchan, king of Gwasgwyn who carried off our wives. They will not go to Caritia where Caesar may be, but will return with their prisoners to Gwasgwyn, where Caesar will presently follow them, unless the gods prevent.

  “But Gwasgwyn is far distant on the western coast of Gaul, so this being winter time, two things are certain. They will not travel all that way by sea, because of risk of storms. Nor did they come all that distance by sea in the first place. Their ship came from some harbor on the northern coast of Gaul, and will return thither, whence they will proceed to Gwasgwyn overland.

  “It would be in keeping with Caesar’s character to pretend to rescue our two wives from Murchan’s men as the party travels across country. Marius and Galba, you may be quite sure, will hurry to Caesar’s winter quarters by the shortest route, give him all the necessary information, and thereafter hold their tongues or say what Caesar puts into their mouths.

  “Now we are not so far behind that Roman ship. They put to sea in a gale, it is true, but with the tide against them. Later, the wind shifted to the southwest. Then it failed. This ship of ours sails half as fast again as anything the Romans have this side of the Gates of Hercules. If they should go as far as Seine-mouth we might even overtake them, although that is too good to expect. They will make all haste. They will whip the oarsmen.

  “I am hoping they will make for Seine-mouth, and I think that likely because it would be an easy place for them to have obtained a fairly good ship and a Gaulish pilot who would know something of the course between there and Thanet. Caesar has had hard work to find pilots who knew the coast of Britain, but I know there was one such at Seine-mouth because I myself had information from him last year.

  “Calculating tides, the wind and one thing and another, I believe they can not reach Seine-mouth much before tonight, near midnight. At any rate, I think they will not sail farther to the west than Seine-mouth, and we may be fairly sure they will make some kind of signal before they reach whichever port they have in mind. That signal will be answered from the shore. If it is night-time, we shall see the signals, a flare from the masthead, some sort of beacon on land. They will not see us, and I know the Seine-mouth estuary. I can creep in unseen in the dark. Thereafter, leave it to the gods, who I think are our friends, not Caesar’s.”

  Tros curled himself among the sheepskins then and snored in answer to Caswallon’s questions. Prods in the ribs took no effect. Apparently he did not hear demands for information as to what use charcoal-burners might be put to, and how he proposed to employ the murderous, hot stinkballs.

  But when, after two or three hours, Caswallon himself lay down to sleep, Tros awoke as if by intuition, and, after conning the ship’s position, went up to the bow to talk with Eough. They talked for at least an hour in undertones, whereafter Tros lay down again and slept like a man without a trouble on his mind.

  CHAPTER 48. The Liburnian

  Any fool can stir anger. Cowards, liars, hypocrites and thieves can stir enmity. Ye need no manhood in the broth of vengeance; its ingredients are on the lips of fools, and in the hearts of the proud whose pride is meanness, and of the mean whose pride is ill-faith. But which of you can change anger into good-will? Which of you can change enmity into friendship? That one hath manhood. Aye, he useth it. The Lords of Life will not neglect to test him. He is worthy, that one, of the hammer-blows of Wisdom, on the anvil of life.

  — from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan

  THE WINTRY wind blew fair for them that whole day long, and the Northmen slept in watches, resting to be ready for the oar work if the wind should fail. When the half moon rose, it fell calm — one of those rare, shimmering nights with stars like silver, when the tinkling sea resembled polished glass and the ice froze brittle on wet rope-ends.

  Eough went to the masthead. It was Eough who reported three bright beacons in a row, a mile or more inland, beyond the shadowy low marshes. Seine-mouth estuary lay on the port bow, many miles away. The tide was slack — about to set against them, but also against the enemy, so be the enemy were there. They had seen no glimpse of any ship, but Tros felt more than ever sure his guess was accurate.

  “When I sleep, the gods instruct me,” he assured Caswallon.

  But Caswallon, stamping his feet on deck to keep warm, breaking ice from his moustache, was doubtful of that and of every other article of Tros’s faith, until Eough cried out again from where he swayed, a motionless, small phantom, dark against the starlit sky. “Two lights now on a ship’s spar. One at either end!”

  Caswallon saw them as the longship lurched over a silent swell. “Out oars! Row!” he yelled excitedly. “Tros, get your hot stink. engin
es ready! Lud! We have them! Luck o’ Lud o’ Lunden! Row, you rascals!”

  Distance was deceptive on that dark expanse of water. Tros took thought.

  “They could hear oars,” he warned. “They have thirty or forty fighting men. If we outrow them and throw the burning stink aboard, we might kill Fflur and Helma. Think, man, think! Don’t waste breath.”

  But Caswallon could only think in terms of chariots and horses, of ambush and sudden swoops on a surprised foe. He cursed the wind that had failed them. He cursed the sea because he could not walk on it. He cursed Tros, because he could not race that Roman ship and ram her, pitch the burning stink into her hold and snatch the prisoners away before it sank with all its crew. He was for action, swift and resolute.

  “The stinkballs would kill us as well as them,” said Tros, taking the steering oar.

  He knew those waters. Setting slow time for the oar-beats, husbanding the Northmen’s strength, he set a course in-shore to where the tide would flow against him with less force.

  And then the unexpected happened. He caught the sound of oars between him and the enemy.

  He ordered silence — let the ship swing any way she pleased — climbed to the masthead and clung there beside Eough. Once, then again, he caught the flash of moonlight on an oar-blade, but the cold air filmed his eyes, and the ship’s motion, adding to the heaving of the moonlit waves, made vision difficult. It was a long time before he made out the hull of a long, low rowing boat.

  “Liburnian,” he muttered.

  It was one of those fast boats the Romans used for harbor work and for taking messages to ships at sea, rowed by eight or a dozen men.

  He watched with running eyes until the cold grew unendurable, then returned to deck.

  “That might be Caesar himself in that liburnian,” he said. “And if I knew it were I would take all chances.”

  Caswallon did not hesitate.