Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Long before the druids came it was evident that Rhys had trouble in his sack and meant to loose it at his own good time. He alone of all the noblemen was truculent, objecting to his seat behind the rope, nervous and argumentative because his men were herded away from him, sarcastic because Caswallon and Fflur had better seats, impatient of delay and rising from time to time to peer as far as he could see around the ship. Tros had placed him carefully. At last, straining his neck, he detected the shape of a human victim shrouded under canvas on the ways.

  Instantly he was on his feet and was about to announce his discovery at the top of his lungs, but he checked himself. Blackmailer by profession, he foresaw more profit to himself from crime committed than from its exposure in advance. Instead of saying what he saw he cried out to Tros to come and speak with him and, nothing loath, Tros strode up looking splendid in his purple cloak trimmed with cloth-of-gold and ermine.

  “Lord Tros,” said Rhys, “there should be proof that no human sacrifice is made today. It is in your interest that somebody should stand near to the ship — some man of repute, myself, for instance, to take oath afterward that there were no black rites performed out of sight of the druids.”

  “None better than you, Lord Rhys!” Tros answered. “Everybody knows you are not my friend. If you can find nothing against me, none can! Come along.”

  But Rhys refused to come without his men.

  “You mean, don’t you, you are not my friend!” he retorted. “I would not trust myself alone within reach of your engines of destruction.”

  “Bring them then. Bring them by all means,” said Tros with a laugh and a gesture of lordly carelessness that mightily offended Rhys. But at sight of the gesture Conops pulled a string that warned the Northmen in the shed to hold themselves in readiness.

  The interested buzz-note of the crowd changed into a half roar of excitement as Tros strode beside Rhys to the ship with all of Rhys’s men in a double line behind them looking businesslike. There was even jealousy, expressed in catcalls. Was Rhys to have the special honor of a close-up view of the launching? Why? There were Caswallon and a hundred others better entitled to that than Rhys! There was even an effort to follow them down to the ways and Caswallon’s archers had their hands full checking it until a blare of music in the distance announced that the druids were coming downstream in their swan-necked barges. They came very slowly on the slack tide, chanting, and the crowd grew still, spell-bound by the beauty of the scene, for the sun shone on the gilded swans and on the gilded oar blades. And in the river’s bosom there were mirrored white clouds mingled with the limpid blue.

  “Lord Rhys,” said Tros, “I am minded you shall do your spying thoroughly. First look at this.”

  He led him to the canvas on the ways and raised it, showing dry grass underneath. Then, before Rhys could recover from that disappointment:

  “Let your men look into that shed,” he suggested.

  It was a double shed, with a long partition down the middle, and there were no windows, so it was dark inside. Several of the men peered in, reported nothing, but Tros refused to be satisfied. “Let them examine it,” he insisted. So Rhys, to save his own face, ordered them into the shed, retaining only six to guard himself.

  “And while they search within there,” Tros said, “you and I and these others will search the ship for such victims as you think I immolate. Up that ladder!”

  As Rhys turned to look at the ladder Tros shut the shed door quietly and slid the bolt. And as he did that Sigurdsen came glooming up with nine men, all armed with hammers, who placed themselves with their backs to the shed and began a prodigious pounding on a hollow log, breaking it up, and for no reason in the world unless it might be pagan pleasure at the noise. They made such thunder that if there had been a battle royal in the shed, none could have heard it.

  “Up you go. That way,” Tros said, pointing.

  The ladder was a wide one, resting on a scaffold with a platform at the top that hardly touched the ship’s side, so that there was no need to remove it for the launching. Rhys, half suspicious of a trap, began to climb it, hesitated, and continued when he saw Tros standing at the bottom, back turned toward him, seemingly considering the druids who were anchoring their seven barges in a line across the river nearly a hundred yards below the course the ship would take.

  At exactly high noon Rhys stood on the platform, startled by the fanfare of the druids’ golden trumpets; that, and the sudden silence by the shed door as the hammer swinging ceased. Sigurdsen and six men sprang up the ladder. Tros did not wait to watch them hustle Rhys and his six over the ship’s side and down into the hold. He ran, four Northmen following, toward the ship’s bow, blowing his silver whistle and, while they and the others who were waiting chopped and hammered at the chocks, he pulled the cord that held the sheet in place over the ship’s figurehead.

  “Oh, Liafail!” he cried, and all men heard that wonder name, but the rest of what he said was swallowed by the crack of breaking timber, like explosions, as the ship’s weight broke inertia.

  There was movement, nigh invisible at first, increasing inch by inch. The crowd roared and the druids’ trumpets blared. The sheet fell away from the figurehead, revealing Helma’s image, blue, with golden hair and crown, and above that the great glittering serpent’s head, whose tongue moved on a gimbal, flashing four ways in the sun.

  Slowly, and then with a roar like the sound of an avalanche, to the blare of trumpets and the thunder of a hundred war drums, the ship slid down the ways until she shoved the reeking mud in waves to either side of her, pitched like a horse impatient of the bit, so that her serpent looked like a living dragon with a tongue of fire, rocked into mid-stream and lay rolling to the taut, complaining cables that had ripped the buried anchors ten feet forward through the earth. The druids’ barges rocked in obbligato to the big ship’s roll, as a hymn swelled forth across the river, praising Lud, the God of the River Thames, whose bosom bears the big ships to the ocean and the storms and deep-sea destiny.

  Tros laughed. He could not help but laugh to see his vision launched at last, his dream of dreams, his masterpiece that lay so graceful and enormous on the water — too high yet, for there were the ballast and the stores and water to be loaded; but exactly, to the inch, as he had known she would ride — bow high like a warhorse, with a flare to throw off head-seas, and as naturally even on her keel as if the gods had balanced her.

  “Oh, Liafail! Gods govern you! I am a man at last!” He laughed and clapped his hands together. “No blood! No man, no beast slain at the launching! Hah!”

  Then suddenly he thought him of the shed and went and shot the bolt back from the door. His Northmen came forth one by one, each with his weapon sheathed, but each with a pick-handle or an ax-helve in his hand. He counted them and they were all there, but some limped, and they all looked more or less the worse for what had happened in the dark.

  “How many?” he demanded, gesturing toward the shed. He had to ask twice, because the Northmen stared in silent admiration at the great ship they had toiled to build.

  “Oh, some are dead and some are tied. They fought. One way or another we did for all of them. I killed two, for they had skulls like eggs,” a Northman answered, then turned his head again to stare and grin at the great ship.

  Tros did not enter the shed just then. He was wondering whether the ship was actually launched before the blood flowed.

  “Blood!” he muttered. “Blood is not good at a ship’s launching. I should have had a druid cast her horoscope. I should have chosen another hour, another day. But a slack tide at high noon seemed auspicious. Blood!”

  He determined not to see the blood just then at any rate. He closed the shed door, turned his back and walked away. A vague uneasiness troubled him, but he steeled his mind to forget this seemingly bad omen.

  CHAPTER 58. The Lord Rhys

  I am a mystic. That is why I love action. I know that what I see I can never attain unless I now do what I can
and thereon step to something nobler. I have never known a coward or a scoundrel who did not believe a mystic is a fool of whom he could take advantage. But who has seen the result? Where is it?

  — from The Log of Tros of Samothrace

  CASWALLON cleared the yard to some extent by leading the way out of it with Fflur. Numbers of the younger people followed Orwic through the same gate, joking with him about his rumored intention to sail in the monster ship with Tros. But a number remained who defied Caswallon’s archers, hanging about the yard in disappointment at the shortness of the spectacle and hoping something else might transpire presently to make the waste of half a day worth while. There were sheds to be peered into, cranes to examine, the splinters to see on the ways where the great ship had slid riverward, scandalous waste of floating grease to be appalled at, and questions to ask of the slaves who were glad enough to talk if any one would listen to them.

  But Tros blew his whistle three times sharply, and at that signal Conops fired a pound or so of dampened chemical beneath a covering of sawdust. Ominous spluttering, flame, yellow and black smoke, and then the choking stench blew crosswise of the yard, and in a minute it was empty of archers as well as visitors, all racing for the trees beyond the fence. Tros’s slaves, now used to the appalling stuff, took refuge to windward, in their own long sheds, whither Tros betook himself to roust out nine of them to make up a boat’s crew. Ten minutes later he had climbed the Liafail’s high stern and stood there for a minute watching Sigurdsen bandage a wound on a Northman’s forearm and then put grease on a bruise on the same man’s head.

  “Blood!” he muttered. “Blood again. Not good! Where’s the Lord Rhys?”

  Sigurdsen showed him. Rhys sat fuming in the fore part of the after deckhouse, where the V-shaped slits of openings gave command of a whole broadside to the arrow-engines, covered under canvas now. Rhys’s wrists were lashed behind him to two rings in the deckhouse wall and his feet were stretched so tightly toward a table leg that he could hardly sit on the narrow bench. His weapons were gone, but he was unharmed-only shaken, ruffled and indignant.

  “Where are his men?” Tros asked.

  “One’s overboard — took a capstan-bar under the chin,” said Sigurdsen. “The rest are only stunned. They’re in the fore-peak, under hatches.”

  “Loose him.”

  Sigurdsen obeyed, and Rhys chafed tingling wrists while Tros kicked at his own scabbard as a hint that he was master of the situation.

  “You will pay for this!” Rhys snapped at him, and blew his long nose with his fingers. The effect was exactly as if he had spat, and Tros changed his mind abruptly how to deal with him.

  “Pay, shall I?” he retorted. “Whom?”

  “Me!” Rhys answered. “You will pay me! I am a member of the council!”

  Tros rubbed his iron jaw.

  “Sit down!” he commanded, for Rhys had risen as if to snap defiant fingers at him. “Now, I don’t know what you ever did, Lord Rhys, to earn the right to live, but you may earn my leave this minute or become a million pieces in the bellies of a million fish!”

  “Your — your leave!” Rhys stammered.

  He was furious. It had not dawned on his imagination yet that Tros might dare to kill him.

  “You would better offer me a price, Lord Tros! You bilked me in the matter of the slaves, but, believe me, this time you shall pay, or I know nothing!”

  “Tell what you know. That is the price I set,” Tros answered. “Come along now. Out with it! The Lord Caswallon begged your life of me, saying you are a member of the council who should be spared if possible. I promised him your life on one condition.”

  “You! You will never dare murder me!” Rhys stammered.

  It was beginning to dawn at last. Caswallon’s name had startled him.

  “Dare — yes! But do it — no! Unless you tell me what I wish to know, although I know it — but it will please me to hear it from your lips — you shall fight me, or whichever champion I name. I think I will name Sigurdsen, who hasn’t killed a man in weeks and needs practice. Sigurdsen fights with an ax. Now, which will you? Fight or speak? You may send a message to Caswallon if you wish.”

  Rhys grew a whole shade paler. He had counted on appealing to Caswallon. The mere threat of what Caswallon would be forced to do by way of vengeance if a member of his council should be harmed, he had supposed would be enough to bring Tros to his senses.

  “I may send — then you mean — the — the Lord Caswallon is a party to this outrage?”

  “He has begged your life,” Tros answered. “I have named the terms to him — that you must tell me all you know.”

  “About what? You have a charge against me?”

  “Yes,” said Tros, “I charge you with plotting to destroy me in league with Gwenwynwyn, king of the Ordovici! Caesar set a price of three Roman talents on my head. Gwenwynwyn will pay a third of that to whoever delivers my head to him. Now, make a clean breast of it or fight!”

  “Slay him, Lord Tros!” urged Sigurdsen. “I would liefer spare a wolf at lambing time! Here — let me have at him! There are no witnesses.”

  “You hear what he says?” grinned Tros. “You would have had my life. How did you propose to have it?”

  Rhys had his doubts of Tros’s willingness to kill in cold blood, but no man could have doubted Sigurdsen who, if necessary, could be made the scapegoat afterwards. That argument stared self-revealed out of his frightened eyes.

  “What do you want me to tell?” he demanded. “What if I tell? What then?”

  Tros had not answered when the thump of oars alongside announced the arrival of Caswallon in a boat rowed by his own retainers. He came alone into the deckhouse, eyed Rhys coldly for as long as sixty breaths, said nothing and walked out again, slamming the door behind him.

  “The Lord Caswallon has his own fish to skin with you. He wishes to know nothing about mine,” said Tros. “We will pick mine first. Unfold the plot between you and Gwenwynwyn!”

  Rhys capitulated, deathly fear behind his eyes, convinced at last that he was wholly at Tros’s mercy. He kept licking his lips as he spoke.

  “There is no plot between me and Gwenwynwyn, who is a coward and a fool. It is true that Caesar offered him three talents for your head, but he is afraid to kill you for fear of Caswallon’s vengeance, even though Caesar is sending him five hundred soldiers to protect him. So Gwenwynwyn sent his minstrel to me with a promise of one third of the money if I would send him your head in a basket.

  “Lord Tros, I believe you to be a public enemy. It is no disgrace to me that I determined there and then for legal cause to have you executed. But why should I share the reward with Gwenwynwyn? I could take your head to Caesar, couldn’t I? And I would do no murder. Gods forbid that I should murder any man! But to seize a public enemy and lay a proven charge against him, whether of human sacrifice or what else, to cause him to be executed and to take his head to Caesar to prove he is dead, and thus to remove one of Caesar’s excuses for making war on us — that would be a service to my country. Lord Tros, your heart, if you have one, must tell you I am right. There would be no disgrace if I should make a profit for myself by ridding my country of a dangerous alien, such as I hold you to be.”

  “No, no!” Tros commented. “Not you! No, you could not be disgraced that easily! However, you are my prisoner. Your men attacked mine.”

  “They did not!” Rhys interrupted, blazingly indignant.

  A false charge against himself aroused the uttermost depths of his resentment.

  “Your men attacked mine in the shed down yonder by the waterside,” Tros continued, making up his story to fit the circumstances, stroking his jaw with his right hand, head a little to one side. “You planned to have your men seize me. That is why you tried to decoy me on board my ship, you mounting the ladder and turning to tempt me to follow, as all men saw! Caswallon saw it. All the council saw it, and their wives and all the public! Everybody saw your men invade my shed.”

 
; “It is a lie!” Rhys snarled.

  “Maybe. Maybe. It is something like what you intended, though it happened I was ready for you, and your plan failed.”

  “I say it is a lie!”

  “I heard you. But it is also a lie that I intended human sacrifice. It is a lie that I am a public enemy. And it is not a lie that you are my prisoner. What do you propose to do about it?”

  “I? Nothing! What should I do?”

  “No offer you would care to make?”

  “You mean money? I—”

  “You could offer, for instance, to tell me what arrangements you agreed on between Caesar and Gwenwynwyn, in the event that Caesar should pay those three talents for my head! How many men will you provide to help Caesar against Caswallon when the invasion comes? How many chariots? How many horses? Bah! I know your breed! There are rascals such as you in all lands — liars who can lie within a hair’s breadth of the truth, plotters who can plot under a mask of loyalty, law breakers who can make the law a whip for other men. Lud’s blood! If I were king in Britain I would whip your head off faster than a cook kills chickens!”

  Tros strode to the door, opened it and nodded to Caswallon, who came in, this time followed by a pair of gentlemen-at-arms.

  “Rhys, these are witnesses,” he said. “I charge you that the tribute money is near two years in arrear. I charge you that you tried to start a riot in the shipyard yonder, where a thousand saw your men invade Tros’s shed. I fine you double of the tribute money. And for your lawless conduct in the shipyard you shall pay ten chariots with bronze wheels, a hundred four-year-old horses, a hundred bronze swords, a hundred bronze spear-heads, a hundred shields, a hundred sets of harness, a hundred yew bows, two thousand arrows, bronze-tipped, wild goose-feathered, a hundred helmets, two thousand yards of woolen cloth, a thousand ewes, a hundred steers, and ten farms — those that lie nearest Lunden!”