Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Rhys paused, stood up, made a gesture toward Caswallon and the council, watched Tros for the space of a dozen breaths with eyes that glittered coldly and resumed:

  “That serpent’s head curves upward from the ship’s bow. It has a long tongue that projects and moves. It has eyes that are made of garnets. It has teeth that were taken from wild boars. And beneath it, at the ship’s bow, there is the figure of a woman, carved by Cuchulain the minstrel, of the full size of a woman, painted blue but with the face pearl-colored, of crushed oyster-shell, the long hair golden and the head crowned. Unless rumor lies, the hair and the crown are both of solid gold. There are gold rings on the woman’s fingers, that are folded on her breast.

  “Now I accuse the Lord Tros of intending mark you, I say, of intending — I do not say he has done so yet, though I reserve my full right to my own convictions — I say, of intending to incorporate a woman’s soul into that figure of wood and metal!

  “Why else should he tempt Cuchulain the minstrel to commit such sacrilege as to carve a human figure? Why did he set free Boad, who was serving-maid to his own wife Helma, unless because he wished to sacrifice a free woman rather than a slave? Where is Boad?”

  Rhys sat down, brushing a new drop from his nose-end with his sleeve, and there was a murmur. Men nodded their heads, at which Caswallon on the throne- chair chewed his long moustache. It was true, and all men knew it; Boad had mysteriously vanished.

  Tros took two steps forward, so that he faced the semicircle and Caswallon in the midst. He was about to speak when Orwic, at Caswallon’s right hand, put a word in.

  “I accuse Rhys himself of having made away with Boad!”

  Orwic crossed one leg over the other and leaned back in the carved and painted chair as if he thought the whole discussion a mere nuisance. Before Rhys could spring to his feet indignantly, with a bored air he had tossed another brand into the blaze.

  “We all know how Rhys grew rich!”

  Rhys stuttered indignation, stood up and sat down again. There fell an awkward silence, broken after a pause by Orwic’s lazily amused voice:

  “Rhys might fight me, if he dares!”

  Then Tros, his face alight with sudden comprehension and assurance: “Nay! That is my privilege! I know now why a slave came hinting to me that I might do well to go and visit the Lord Rhys by night! The slave, I remember, suggested I should bring no witnesses! So! I will give the Lord Rhys until sunset to produce Boad, my freed woman, alive and unhurt. If he should fail—”

  But Rhys had left the council hall, slipping out behind his high-backed chair into the shadow and passing through the leather-curtained door into the vestibule where armed men saluted him with grounded spear-butts.

  “Noblemen,” said Tros, “I lost a young wife, through taking your part against Caesar. I have claimed no recompense from you on that account, and as for Caesar, he shall settle his own reckoning. I hired Cuchulain, the minstrel, who was taught in Gaul by Agoras, the Greek, to carve me a true likeness of my young wife for the ship’s bow. So, it may be, neither ship nor I will act unworthy of her memory. Now you have heard the whole of it.”

  But though they had heard and believed, they were shocked by the idea of a carving of a woman. Rhys sent Boad to the shipyard before evening, but she brought a husband with her, who frowned her into silence, and who was so obviously a spy in Rhys’s service that Tros turned both of them out into the rainy night. He might have canceled the girl’s marriage had he chosen. As a freed woman, she was his ward and none might marry her without his leave. But he was heartily glad to be rid of the wench and gave her a sound boxing of the ears for marriage portion. So she went off and lied about him, claiming he had tried to exercise the age-old tyranny — and she already three weeks married.

  That brought into play druidic prejudice. He went to see the druids to discuss the launching, and a middle-aged Lord Druid, recently promoted from the lower rank in the shuffle that had followed the death of the great Taliesan, took opportunity to lecture him on moral laxity, saying the druids could not countenance such practices or grant official recognition to a man suspected of them.

  “For what will become of Britain, if we encourage strangers who do such things in our midst?”

  But Tros knew he must have the druids at the ceremony, or risk disaster. There were too many men who would enjoy the opportunity to start a riot unless the launching should have druidic sanction.

  “You shall come!” he retorted. “You are not such spiritual guides as was your teacher, the great Taliesan, or I would not dare speak to you in these terms. You are not men who possess the vision, or you would know that this woman’s tale about me is a lie — as the great Lord Druid Taliesan would certainly have known without my telling him. He had wisdom, but not you! I say to you, you shall come!”

  “I will curse you!” the graybeard answered. But the threat did not have the same effect on Tros that it would have produced on a native Celt — even on Orwic or Caswallon. Tros smiled and bowed with dignity more gracious than the druid’s.

  “I have seen curses,” he answered, “that returned like bad money to the forger! Curse carefully, Lord-brother of the dragons! If Taliesan had cursed me, I should be a dead man now. But he blessed. You will come and bless my ship, and for this reason: That if you do not, I will take those pearls and, letting all men know who gave them to me, I will scatter them by the handful into the River Thames as my ship takes water. And I will say, ‘Lo! These are druids’ pearls, a druid’s blessing.”’

  Eyes met, and the druid knew that Tros was wilful enough to carry out that threat.

  “Then,” Tros continued, speaking slowly, “having no pearls, but having returned them to the water whence they came, I would not be under obligations to you. I would suit myself what action I should undertake next.”

  Taliesan the Great would have made short work of such a threat. But Tros knew he was dealing with no Taliesan. It was an ambitious, weak-willed hierarchy that had yielded to demands for treasure in the first place. Such were not the men to stand their ground and see wealth wasted, this old rumor- monger — this repeater of slave-girls’ accusations, least of all.

  “Your heart is bold and bad, Lord Tros,” the druid answered. “But the evil dig their own pit. It is best we speed your going and soon see the last of you.”

  “Taliesan would never have made such a speech in my hearing,” Tros answered.

  More than ever he recognized weakness. He had built a ship, had drilled the odds and ends of flotsam of humanity into a crew of sorts, and knew that weakness is no good for a foundation. Unless discarded altogether, weakness must be beaten, pressed, hammered and backed up until it resists at last, and either breaks or is good for something.

  “I am your ally,” he went on, his amber eyes scanning their countenances that were stern but only masked irresolution. “Ye are willing to make use of me, but not to treat me as your friend. Now Taliesan, had he deigned to make use of me, would have reckoned my well being as important as his own. He would never have sent me forth without a full crew. He would have manned my ship with kings’ sons, had I asked him. Nor would he have prayed to see the last of me. Taliesan would have said one of two things to me. Either, ‘Thy heart is bad, so get thee hence!’ or, ‘How can I serve thee, thou who servest us?’ And I would have asked him for a hundred freemen, ten from each of ten tribes, to increase my crew. Where is the cloak of Taliesan? Who wears it?”

  His speech was received in silence. They withdrew into a corner to consult in whispers — nine gray-bearded men possessed of all the outer attributes of dignity, but with its cause lost. They did not know, they thought; they guessed; they were enamored of their own importance; they were echoes of a wisdom that had flowed through Taliesan but that did not penetrate beneath the crust of their ambition to be powerful.

  “We must send to Mona,” the Lord Druid said at last. “Mona is the seat of our authority.”

  Tros struck his own breast. “Mine is in my hea
rt!” he answered.

  “So was the Lord Taliesan’s. He would have said to me yes or no. He would have given me a crew of druids had he seen fit! And if he had sent a messenger to Mona or any other place, it would have been to say what he had done, not to ask whether it were right for him to do it! Speak ye your own minds. I listen.”

  So again they whispered in the corner, shaking heads and glancing at him where he stood in the dim whale-oil lantern-light, Tros realizing more and more, as they delayed to answer him, that something — though he could not guess what — had happened to provide him with an upper hand over them.

  “They would like me dead!” he told himself. “Yet they love their holiness too much to cause me to be slain.”

  Decaying priesthoods, well he knew, are desperate and justify all evil done to prop up their own despotism. But he knew, too, decadence takes time. Great Taliesan was hardly three months dead; druids would hardly stoop to doing murder or procuring it until a score or so of years should overlie his influence.

  “They hey have news. If I wait and persist, I will learn it,” he assured himself. “They wish me gone. They are afraid of me. They dare not to offend me too much. Why?” he wondered, and he folded his arms, standing very erect, to await what the gods should bring forth.

  “I see destiny in travail,” he reflected.

  Presently the new Lord Druid came toward him, fingering the golden sickle at his waist. The lamp-light shone on the yellow metal and on the druid’s eyes, that were mild enough and not grown worldly, but betrayed doubt where there should have been assurance, built on inner strength. But instead of assurance there was arrogance of glance and gesture; and instead of strength there was ambition to appear strong.

  “There are mysteries you may not know,” he said, stroking his long beard.

  “I can read your heart,” Tros answered, and his hands were still. He was like a rock, whereas the druid came at him like water feeling for a line of least resistance.

  “But if we trust you with a secret—”

  “That you will not do,” Tros interrupted. “You know as well as I, that whoever tells a secret can not expect another man to keep it. Therefore, whatever you will tell me, you will have decided first is not a real secret, but only something with which to mystify me. Speak. I listen.”

  “You remember King Gwenwynwyn of the Ordovici?”

  The druid’s white hand continued stroking at his beard as he watched Tros’s eyes. All Britain knew that Tros and King Gwenwynwyn of the withered arm were enemies. They had quarreled even in the presence of the mighty Taliesan. The lamp-light showed no change in Tros’s expression; his frown dissolved into a fighting smile too slowly to be observed.

  “Gwenwynwyn,” said the druid, “went to Gaul and has returned. Gwenwynwyn spoke with Caesar, who has pledged him friendship. Caesar set a price on your head of three Roman talents, and Gwenwynwyn will offer the third of that to whoever shall kill you and bring your head to him.”

  “My head is worth more than three talents to Caesar,” Tros answered with a gruff laugh. “Gwenwynwyn should have made a better bargain!”

  He was studying the druid’s face now with all his power of intuition keyed up to the limit of alertness, although on the surface he was perfectly unruffled. It was not the news that puzzled him. To set a big price on his head was Caesar’s obvious recourse, and since his first success against Caesar he had expected that. He had been absolutely sure of it since he and Caswallon took Caesar captive and exchanged him against Fflur. But it was beyond his power to guess why the druids should reveal the information to him now.

  “What you tell is not news to me. Why do you tell?” he answered.

  The druid smiled with an air of superior knowledge — not as the great Taliesan would have smiled, for Taliesan took no delight in knowing more than other men.

  “Gwenwynwyn has no army,” he said, fingering the sickle at his waist. “But he is Caesar’s friend, and Caesar has an army.”

  Tros let out one of his deep-chested monosyllabic laughs. “At Verulam,” he said, “where I met Gwenwynwyn, he accused Caswallon of being Caesar’s friend and tried to persuade Taliesan to rebuke Caswallon for it.”

  The druid made a gesture of indifference, suggesting that Gwenwynwyn’s treacheries were nothing new.

  “Gwenwynwyn has no army,” he repeated, “and he lives afar off in the west. He is afraid if he should cause you to be murdered, he would have to meet Caswallon’s vengeance, for he knows Caswallon is your friend. It would be hard for Caswallon to march all the width of Britain with an army to attack him, but he knows Caswallon’s energy in action just as surely as he knows his carelessness in repose. So he has made a stipulation to which Caesar has agreed.”

  The druid paused and eyed Tros curiously. All the other druids gathered nearer, making no sound. They were like disembodied spirits, bearded faces framed in shadow.

  “Caesar is to send five hundred Spaniards to Gwenwynwyn’s aid! They are to land in Dyvnaint and to march to Merioneth. They will be commanded by a Roman, but they are to obey Gwenwynwyn, whom they will defend if you should be slain and Caswallon should try to avenge you.”

  The druid paused again, drew in his breath and sighed.

  “So you see, Lord Tros, you have brought invasion on us. You have brought on us the curse of foreign soldiers in our midst. Civil war may follow.”

  “But?” said Tros. “I can discern ‘but’ that lurks — to be discovered presently! What is it? Butt it forth!”

  “The Spaniards have not yet started. To send them will cost Caesar money. If either of two events should happen, Caesar might not send those men.”

  “Aye,” Tros answered, nodding, “if I were dead and Caesar knew it, he might not send them. What is the other alternative?”

  “If you were gone and Caesar knew it — Go soon! Go soon, Lord Tros, and leave us to our own peace!”

  Tros threw his head back and laughed.

  “Nay, I will not go!” he retorted. “Nay, nay! Hah!” He began to pace the floor, both hands behind him, knotted fingers clenching and unclenching. “Five hundred men!” he muttered.

  He had the news at last! Suddenly he turned and faced the druids.

  “I will bargain with you!”

  The Lord Druid appeared horrified. A blunt proposal to drive bargains was an insult to druidic dignity. Not yet, surely not yet, had they descended to such depths that they might not cover bargaining beneath a gloss of condescension. Nevertheless, beneath the horror Tros saw readiness to drive a bargain, should the terms of it appeal.

  “We give or we withhold,” the druid answered. “He who wears the golden sickle neither buys nor sells.”

  Tros made a gesture of concession. He would not split hairs of definition. He came bluntly to the point.

  “I will go, and as soon as may be. I will make no more demands on you. But you shall keep my going secret. You shall tell Gwenwynwyn I will not go. You shall tell him — and no untruth, for you hear me threaten now — that you have heard me boast I will explore the coast of Britain in my ship, until I come to Merioneth where withered-arm Gwenwynwyn kings it in the woods! You shall take no steps to keep those Spaniards from coming. You shall leave that business to me. And meanwhile, you shall guard my life. You shall bless me publicly, that men may know I am not lightly to be murdered.

  “You shall lend me countenance by coming to the launching of my ship with ceremonial procession and the minstrels and a choir. And if I send a man to Gaul,” Tros added, with one of those swift afterthoughts that often mean more than the whole of what preceded them, “you shall give him secret introduction to the Gauls, to the end that they may help him to spy on Caesar. That is all. Now, play the Taliesan for once! Say yes or say no. Say it only like men, that I may count with or without you.”

  The druids went again in a conference, whispering together where the darkest shadow fell beyond the heaped-up sacks of grain. Tros paced the floor, no longer thinking of the druids, knowin
g, because he understood their dread of foreign soldiers, that their answer would be yes.

  “Five hundred men!” he muttered. “And Skell anxious to redeem himself! Hah!”

  CHAPTER 57. Liafail

  As a man is in his heart the sea reveals him to himself. Be he strong, the sea shall test him. Be he weak, the sea shall discover his weakness. Be he heedless, bold or cunning, or all three, the sea shall find him out and face him with his strength and weakness that he knew not.

  — from The Log of Tros of Samothrace

  IT WAS not yet dawn. Tros, sword on the table in front of him, sat by the fireside in darkness except for the flickering fire on the hearth and, the night being gusty, the room was filled with smoke that spread itself in layers. Conops, squatting by the hearth, baked bread for breakfast. Skell stood and faced Tros, eyes watering in the stinging smoke, and both men coughed at intervals.

  “You are a fool,” said Tros, “and an irksome problem to me. When you were my enemy, I laughed, but now I grieve because a fool is a danger to his friends and deadlier yet to his master.”

  “Lord Tros, you sent for me,” Skell answered, shivering, for he was only half-clothed. “I think you did not send for me at this hour to call names or because sleep fails you. I take it, you will use my folly. I am willing.”

  Tros crashed the table with his fist and made the sword jump. “Idiot! You cost me three men recently by giving the alarm when all my Britons bolted in the night. I had to swap three in exchange for three slain horses. Another year of your loyalty — and I am beggared!”