Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  So Tros had Rhys brought up from the water-cask and bade Sigurdsen return his sword and dagger to him. Rhys went ashore with Caswallon and Fflur in the barge, and Tros grinned as he watched him, looking down his long nose at Caswallon’s great white fist that shook to emphasize a torrent of expletive threats.

  But it was not the last Tros heard of Rhys. The while he trained the rowers with the ship at anchor, waiting for the tide, teaching them to back oars and to swing together in response to signals, dipping and catching the weight of the ship between the crash and echo of the cymbals, there came three boats alongside from the far bank of the river. They were full of weary-looking men, and a big shock-headed Briton in the leading boat shouted that he had a message for the Lord Tros. Tros put a hand to his ear, but the man refused to shout his information to the world at large, with all those other boats drifting to and fro within range of voices. So Tros let him come aboard, but kept a Northman handy to throw him overside in case of need.

  He was a well-dressed fellow — in a yellow linen smock over woolen breeches, and a big bronze buckle on his belt and a cloak of beaded deerskin. But he was soiled with travel, looked as if he had been out in the rain all night, and his leather-shod feet were smeared thickly with mud. He had a broad nose like a blackamoor’s, with wide nostrils and an iron-gray moustache like a pair of diminutive horses’ tails. He was excited — breathless from excitement; anxious brown eyes glittered under shaggy iron-gray brows.

  “Lord Tros, I am the Lord Rhys’s tenant. I am Eog, son of Louth, the blacksmith. Is it true you have the Lord Rhys prisoner?” Tros did not answer. He waited, watching the man’s face. Eog misinterpreted the silence.

  “And you sail in your great ship? Then sail away with him! Drown him out there in the sea!”

  The fellow glanced to right and left, fearful of being overheard, but there was only the Northman on the poop beside Tros. Orwic and his men had turned in to sleep off last night’s drunkenness. “Lord Tros, he traffics with the Romans! He has sold us to the Romans! He has sold your ship to the Romans! He has promised to let Caesar know by signal on the south coast when your ship sails, if he can’t prevent your sailing by having you executed! He is a cruel, hard landlord. We tenants hate him. But he has the council’s ear, and men say the Lord Caswallon fears him, so we don’t dare appeal against him. Kill him, Lord Tros! Kill him, and earn the blessings of his tenants!”

  Tros stroked his chin. “You are late, my friend. The Lord Rhys left for Lunden in the king’s barge.”

  Eog’s face fell.

  “You are undone!” he remarked, shaking his shock of hair over his eyes as he nodded. “The Lord Caswallon sent his men to Maeldon in the night. They seized horses, cows, sheep, chariots, arms, money. The Lord Rhys will beggar us to reimburse himself a little, but what he can wring from us will never satisfy him. He will send to Gaul or go to Gaul. He will betray you to the Romans for a great price! He knows you sent a messenger named Skell to Pevensey, for he sent my brother’s son, armed with a sword, on a skewbald stallion to overtake and slay him. We are all undone! We are all undone!”

  He wrung his hands. The corners of his mouth drooped. He looked pitifully at the men in the three boats who stared at the great ship as if salvation lay in her.

  “Who are they?” Tros asked.

  “Tenants and free laborers. Lord Tros, we are all liable for penalties for having left our holdings without leave. We have no right to leave our boundaries except on market days. The Lord Rhys will impose fines that will keep us beggared forever!”

  Tros summoned Orwic, who came sleepily, not pleased to have been routed out of his snug cabin.

  “Lud love a fellow, Tros! What ails you? Still at anchor?” His displeasure increased as he recognized Eog. “Dog!” he remarked. “I’ll wager not a tenant of my own keeps bounds this minute! What do you mean, sirrah, by gadding when your master’s back is turned? Are there no fields to till? No cows to milk? No clearing to be done? No fences to repair? Lud’s blood! If I were the Lord Rhys I would deprive you of your holding!”

  “He will! He will!” said Eog gloomily. “Already he takes two-thirds — two foals, two calves, two lambs, two pigs out of every three, two bushels out of three of all the wheat, two months’ labor out of three to plow his fields and mend his fences. Now he has been fined, and he will wring the fine from us.”

  “Lud pity you!” said Orwic. “But you were born the Lord Rhys’s men. I couldn’t help you, even if my head weren’t splitting so I can’t think!”

  “Lord Tros, we are not sailors,” Eog said, watching Tros’s face. It was plain enough what he intended.

  “Where are your women and children?” Tros asked pointedly. “They are as good as slaves now,” said Eog. “They will be slaves if we leave them, and the better off!”

  Tros shook his head.

  “I have some thirty of the Lord Rhys’s men aboard my ship this minute,” he said, stroking his chin. “If I should add you and your companions, the Lord Rhys could indict me as a thief. Nay, nay.”

  “Lord Tros,” said Eog, but Tros interrupted him.

  “What say you, Orwic? Can a man take freemen in his service if he finds them wandering outside the jurisdiction of their king?”

  Orwic snorted with disgust.

  “They forfeit property and holdings if they leave the land,” he answered. “They are free then to serve any one they will, but who would employ runaways?”

  Tros went into his stateroom underneath the poop and filled a leather purse with minted copper coin, tossing it hand to hand while he debated with himself. Presently he returned to the poop and gave the purse to Eog.

  “For your services,” he said. “Three or four days, maybe a week from now I will drop anchor near the coast of Vectis. If any one should bring me information of the Lord Rhys’s movements, he would find me inclined to be generous. But mind you, no women and children! Leave them on the farms. And if the Lord Rhys’s luck is running half as lamely as I guess it is, you might — who knows? — be pleased to return to your wives and your children and your holdings. Eog, son of Louth, the gods are sometimes slow, but if a man has patience, they reward him in the end exactly on his merits. Remember, on whichever side of Vectis happens to be sheltered from the wind! Not later than a week from now!”

  And Eog, grinning, wondering, went overside.

  CHAPTER 60. Make Sail!

  I have listened to much talk of living. A man lives at rare moments, and the rest is hope or dread. Too many moments of life, and these carcasses in which we house our ignorance would burn up. I have seen men thrive on vice, and grow old in drudgery. But life burns. It is consummation. I have lived thrice: once in a woman’s arms, once when I launched my ship, once when I took my ship’s helm and let her fill away. Three more such moments might add me to the number of the gods, but for that my time is not yet.

  — from The Log of Tros of Samothrace

  THAT AFTERNOON, on top of the flowing tide, Tros let the Liafail drift downriver, cymbals and drums beating a slow measure that the oars might dip sufficiently for steerage way and no more. There were narrow channels between hidden mud-banks, and the Liafail had a deeper draft than any vessel that had ever sailed out of the Thames or into it.

  Hardly a longshoreman saw the start. Tros, not wanting a crowd of boats around him, had let it be supposed he would remain at anchor until the next day. No villages were visible. Like Lunden Town itself, those were well hidden from the frequent raiders by dense screens of forest that descended to the swampy margin at the edge of tide water. But here and there were clearings, fish traps and the smoke of homesteads rising half a mile away behind the trees. Whenever they passed such places, crowds came down to the river’s edge to watch.

  Tros knew the ship looked magnificent, even though the oars moved raggedly. Vermilion top-sides, with a gold-leaf, undulating serpent above where the polished tin began, and the vermilion oar-blades — all were reflected in the water. The three great curved spars we
re as graceful as swallows’ wings; and from the poop he could see the long bronze serpent’s tongue that shot forth this and that way, quivering to every motion of the ship.

  He knew, too, that there could hardly be a man in Britain who had not heard rumors, at least, of the great ship’s building. Judging by the crowd that had come to stare at the ship on the ways — to laugh, sell, steal, obstruct and volunteer the information that a ship with metal on her undersides would never float, he had supposed the spectacle was too familiar in that corner of Britain to cause more than passing comment. He began to receive new education in the workings of the human mind.

  At one point where the river curved so sharply around a mud shoal that he had hard work to find and keep the channel, two or three hundred men put out in small boats armed with tridents, spears and all the paraphernalia they used for dispatching stranded whales. Whether it was the gold on the figurehead and the long serpent that they coveted or whether the sheer beauty and the hugeness of the ship aroused their prejudice against all novelty, he never knew. They quailed before they came within their own short arrow range, and he supposed it was the crash of the drums and cymbals, as he called for more speed, and the flickering serpent’s tongue that frightened them. At any rate, he left them easily astern.

  But at another place, down-river, where the tide flowed swiftly between shoal and shore — the place where, in the bireme won from Caesar, he had caught a Northman longship beam-on and had rammed her to destruction — there was evidence of well-laid plans to wreck the Liafail before she could leave the Thames. They had felled great trees and staked them across the narrow channel, leaving a gap through which the tide poured at such an angle as to force any passing ship on to the longshore mud.

  He backed oars and dropped two anchors over-stern. A shower of arrows hummed into the planking of the upper deck. He ordered the port-bow catapult into action, lighted the fuse on a leaden stinkball and sent it crashing into the trees, where it failed to explode but set the wood on fire. It burned with a stench that drifted on the light wind riverward and nearly threw the port-side oarsmen into panic.

  One stinkball was plenty; that and the crash and the hum of the catapult with the responding flash and shudder of the serpent’s tongue, so that it looked as if the serpent might have spat the burning stench forth. There was no more arrow fire. No longshore Briton showed himself. Orwic was for landing with the Northmen and imposing penalties for evil manners.

  “I know their villages. I will burn them and flog their headmen.” He pulled on his little peaked steel helmet.

  But Tros, remembering the Lord Rhys, chose discretion. Delay might bring surprises long prepared by Rhys who — if it was he who had planned to wreck the ship — would certainly have let fall hints enough to turn out all the countryside in readiness to loot and kill. A wrecked ship was in theory the lawful profit of the king, who owned all river rights, including stranded whale and sturgeon, but in practice it was first come, first served, and the wrecker’s trade was plied without distinction between friend and foe.

  Tros lowered boats and sent two dozen Northmen overside to clear the passage under the protection of his catapults and arrow-engines, and it was nearly dark before Sigurdsen reported all clear and the logs adrift. By that time the tide was beginning to change and it was risky work to navigate uncharted, only half-remembered channels in the gloaming. Tros dropped half a mile or so downstream and, when he found deep water under him where the river began perceptibly to widen into estuary, he dropped anchor for the night, conscious, however, that as night fell he would lose all the advantage against river pirates that the awe-inspiring serpent and the long range of his catapults provided.

  One precaution that he took was to bend two warps to the big bronze anchor that he let go from the bow. One warp took up the strain, the other lay slack, sinking below water. Leaving Sigurdsen and Orwic on the poop, he himself took the anchor watch and lay down to sleep with the slackened warp under his neck, and with the port bow engine aimed so as to discharge twelve arrows straight along the warp at the first touch of the trigger.

  Before long Conops awakened him, reporting oar strokes in the dark. There was no moon yet; it was impossible to see as far as twenty feet beyond the ship’s bow. All was quiet on the poop where Sigurdsen was droning Baltic tunes to Orwic. The deck watch, ten men, paced to and fro like shadows, bare feet falling silently; there were no sounds except the tinkle and suck of the water alongside, the slight squeak of the spars and one other, hardly audible, that might be swish and drip from where the anchor warp met water.

  “Shoot!” urged Conops.

  But Tros was thrifty; he did not care to loose twelve irrecoverable bronze-tipped arrows without knowing where the target lay. Squanderer of gold-leaf and vermilion on the ship, reckless of the price of tin and royally extravagant of linen sails and cordage, it had irked him sadly to have to use one stinkball more or less at random. To have loosed twelve arrows without due reflection were a sin. He waited, listening — too long.

  The loose warp tautened suddenly and hummed. The tight warp slackened, cut through close to the waterline. He pulled the trigger then. The quarreling arrows whined into the dark and two or three of them hit woodwork. Then a man screamed, like a wounded horse — frightful, sudden — an unhuman sound. A torch shone for a moment somewhere over on the riverbank. Then rain that drowned the rising moon and drummed on deck, blotting out all other noises.

  Tros did not dare to sound the alarm unless, or until, he had work at the oars for the slaves to do. They were unarmed men, as liable to panic in the darkness as so many sheep. Nor did he dare to get up anchor before sunrise except as an absolutely last recourse.

  “Turn out all the Northmen!” he commanded. “Station them along the bulwarks. Go you below, and if the slaves wake, keep them seated on the benches. You may have the two oar captains to help you. Run!”

  Conops vanished and Tros, ears strained, caught the sound of approaching oars. Impatiently, biting his nails, he waited for the Northmen to turn out, and as one of them, ax in hand, came leaning into the rain to take his stand below the break of the bow, he sent him below in a hurry to the magazine to bring up one of the leaden stinkballs. By the time a fire-pot had been brought too, and the oil-soaked fuse inserted, there was no more doubt as to what was coming toward them on the rising tide. The longshore Britons had a barge all fenced about with wickerwork; he could hear the squeaking of the withes as well as the splash of at least a dozen oars.

  So he lighted the fuse and held the leaden ball in both hands overhead.

  “Man arrow-engines!” he commanded, and the Northman ran to pass along the order.

  It took time to get the covers off the carefully housed engines; time for the fuse to burn down to the neck of the infernal thing Tros held in both hands. He had time to wonder what rash idiocy Orwic would commit when a general alarm should split the night, and time to curse himself for having started on a voyage without assigning battle quarters to each Northman and inventing a system of signals by which to control all hands in darkness and emergency.

  At last, before he thought the enemy was near enough, he had to fling the stinkball, lest it burst and kill him, aiming at the sound of oars and leaning overside into the rain watching the curved course of the spluttering fuse, shuddering then as a dozen arrows plunked into the woodwork all around him. But there was no splash. He heard the leaden weight fall hard, and instantly there was a burst of flame that threw a whole barge full of Britons into view, crowded so tightly together behind a screen of willow withes that they could hardly move.

  They yelled and a volley of arrows screamed through the great ship’s rigging, but the stinkball functioned perfectly without exploding. They could not go near it to throw it overboard; the heat melted the lead casing; the blazing chemical spread, setting fire to the barge, and in the reflected flare from that, the golden serpent’s head stood forth — an apparition in the night!

  Twenty, thirty hastily lighted
torches came whirling through the rain on to the Liafail’s deck, along with lumps of burning fiber, soaked in pitch and tallow, but the rain extinguished those. A terror-stricken Briton yelled that the serpent was moving toward them; and the barge, emitting clouds of yellow, green and crimson smoke, become a perfect target for the arrow-engines.

  Volley after volley screamed into the holocaust until Tros blew his whistle shrilly to stop the waste of arrows; blew it to small purpose because Orwic on the high poop kept on shooting as fast as he could lay the arrows in the grooves and crank the great yew bow.

  The men on the barge were jumping overboard; the barge was drifting up- stream with the tide; there was no more danger from that source and the light from it, mirrored in pools in the river, showed dozens of smaller boats flitting away like phantoms. There was, strangely, little shouting; now and then a swimmer cried to the nearest boat for help, and some one in the distance, who appeared to be controlling the attack, bellowed through a tube of some kind.

  “In again! It is only a wooden serpent! Attack from all sides! Cut the cable!”

  It was a hollow, haunting voice.

  Tros went to the poop, pausing as he passed to rebuke each Northman for an arrow wasted.

  He shoved Orwic away from the poop arrow-engine and bade Glendwyr cover it again.

  “Great sport!” said Orwic, shaking the rain off the rim of his peaked helmet.

  “Sport!” Tros came near to exploding with disgust. “Sport in killing poor fools who obey a rascal? Catch me that bellowing knave who cries the pack on, but keeps himself out of harm’s reach! To work now! To a man’s task! Sigurdsen! Lower a boat. Take axes, eight of your own men, Orwic, and his four. Bring me back that bellower alive!”

  The boat went overside and Tros patrolled the deck, ears strained for warning of another attempt to creep down on him in darkness. He could hear the voices of Conops and two Northmen threatening a thrashing to the slave who should dare to leave his oar bench, and he heard the oar-blades rattle against the ports in readiness to be pushed out the full distance, so he knew he could get instant headway against the tide if the enemy should cut that second warp, though it made him shudder to think of losing a bronze anchor.