Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “You must walk through the streets with an arm around me,” she said, using the Gaulish with a funny, foreign accent that thrilled him almost as much as her breath in his ear. “You must look like a Roman nobleman who has seduced a girl and takes her home with him. We must walk swiftly and then none will interfere with us.”

  She rearranged the blanket, throwing one end of it over her head, as a girl ashamed of prying eyes might do, and led the way into the street where she shrank, as if she needed the protection, into Orwic’s left arm, under his pallium.

  “To the left!” she said. “Forward! Quickly!”

  The Jews’ door slammed behind them, and the procession at once became perfectly regular. Conops understood the game now. He walked in front, just close enough for Chloe to call directions to him, his long knife tapping on the scabbard as a warning to all and sundry to keep their distance. The two Numidians brought up the rear, striding as if they were owned by Balbus himself. Being slaves of a slave, they were much more harmless than they looked.

  Orwic’s Celtic diffidence prevented him from speaking. He was not exactly shy. He was ashamed of having failed Tros and of having to be rescued by a woman, half inclined to think the gods had personally had a hand in it, so sudden and mysterious the rescue had been, and not a little bewildered, besides thrilled. He hurried along in silence for ten minutes through a maze of winding alleys, thinking furiously before Chloe volunteered some information.

  “I sent my two women to Pkauchios to warn him to be up and ready for us.”

  But ignorant of who Pkauchios might be, Orwic simply turned that over in his mind. Developments seemed more mysterious than ever. Chloe went on talking:

  “Pkauchios may try to scare you with his magic, but remember what I tell you: his magic is all humbug. He gets most of his secret information from us girls.”

  “Us girls” did not sound like the words a princess would have used. Orwic’s wits were returning.

  “Who are you?” he asked, looking down at her, pulling aside a corner of the blanket so as to see her face. It was very dark; he had to bend his head, and at a street corner a drunken Roman stopped his litter to laugh raucously.

  “Ho there, Licurgus Quintus!” he roared. “I recognize you! Where did you find that pretty piece you have under your pallium? Mark me, I’ll tell Livia! I’ll tell them all about it at the baths tomorrow! Ha-ha-hah! Licurgus Quintus walking, and a girl under his pallium at this hour of the night. Ha-ha-ha-hah!”

  Four slaves bore the litter off into the darkness, with its owner’s legs protruding through the panel at the side.

  “That drunken fool is Nimius Severus,” Chloe remarked. “He offered to buy me last week. Bah! He has nothing but an appetite and debts to feed it with!”

  “Who are you?” Orwic asked again.

  “Chloe, the slave of Pkauchios of Egypt. I am called the favorite of Gades. Soon you shall see me dance, and you will know why.”

  “Oh!” said Orwic.

  He relapsed into a state of shame again, his very ears red at the thought of having mistaken a slave girl for a princess. Being British, he had totally un-Roman notions about conduct; it was the fact that he had made the mistake, not that she was a slave, that annoyed him. Chloe misinterpreted the change of mood, that was as perceptible as if he had pushed her away from him.

  “I expect to be free before long,” she remarked.

  Suddenly it occurred to Orwic that the best thing he could do would be to head straight for the beach and swim to the ship if there was no longboat waiting.

  “Tros — is Tros on the ship?” he demanded.

  But Chloe guessed rightly this time, understood that in another second he would be out of her reach, going like wind downhill toward the city gate.

  “No,” she lied instantly. “Tros is with Pkauchios.”

  Orwic detected the lie. She realized it.

  “Tros came in search of you,” she added.

  But by that time Orwic did not believe a word she said. It seemed to him he was escaping from one danger to be trapped a second time.

  “How did you learn where I was?” he demanded.

  “Tros told me.”

  They had halted and were standing in the moonlight face to face where they could see each other. Her clever eyes read his, and she realized she needed more than words to convince him.

  “Tros paid me to come and rescue you,” she went on, raising the edge of her chlamys, showing a yard of bare leg as she thrust her fingers into a tiny pocket. “Look, he gave me that to come and rescue you.”

  She showed him a pearl in the palm of her hand, and it was big enough to convince Orwic that it might be one of those pearls that the druids had given to Tros. He decided to let her lead him farther but his normal mistrust of women, that Tros had encouraged by every possible means, increased tenfold.

  “Though you hate me, you must walk as if you love me!” Chloe remarked, and he had to take her underneath his pallium again. The stars were bright and it lacked at least an hour of dawn when they emerged into a rather wider street that led between extensive villas set in gardens. Trees leaned over the walls on either hand. Toward the end of the street there was a bronze gate set into a high wall over which a grove of cypresses loomed black against the sky; a panel in that gate slid back the moment Chloe whistled; a dark face eyed her through the hole, and instantly the gate swung wide on silent hinges. There was a sound of splashing fountains and an almost overwhelming scent of flowers. Tiles underfoot, but a shadow cast by the cypresses so deep that it was impossible to see a pace ahead.

  Fifty yards away among the trees were lights that appeared to emerge between chinks of a shutter, but Chloe took Orwic’s hand and led him in a different direction, through a shadowy maze of shrubs that murmured in the slight sea breeze, until they reached a cottage built of marble, before whose door a lantern hung from a curved bronze bracket.

  Two Greek girls came to the door and greeted Chloe deferentially. One of them behaved toward Conops as if he were a handsome Roman officer instead of the ugliest one-eyed, horny-handed Levantine sailor she had ever set eyes on. The Numidian slaves found weapons somewhere — took their stand outside the door on either side of it, with great curved swords unsheathed. Chloe nodded to them as she led the way in.

  Orwic followed her because there was light inside and the place did not look like a trap or a prison, although the small, square windows were heavily barred. There was a fairly large room, beautifully furnished in a style so strange to his British notions that he felt again as if Chloe must be at least a princess. By the British firesides minstrels had always sung of princes and princesses in disguise who rescued people out of foul dungeons and conveyed them to bowers of beauty, where they married and lived happy ever after; and it is what the child is taught that the grown man thinks of first in strange surroundings. True, British slaves were very often treated like the members of a family, but he had never heard of a slave-girl living in such luxury as this.

  There was a second room curtained off from the first, and into that Chloe vanished, through curtains of glittering beads that jingled musically. One woman followed, and there were voices, laughter, splashing. Almost before Orwic had had time to let the other woman, on her knees before him, clean his sandals, and before Conops had done staring pop-eyed at the rugs and gilded couch, the little Greek bronze images of half a dozen gods, the curtains from Damascus and the pottery from Crete, Chloe stood rearrayed in front of them, fresh flowers in her hair, in gilded sandals, with a wide gold border on a snow-white chlamys. Over her shoulders was a shawl more beautiful than anything Orwic had ever seen.

  “You, a slave?” he said, staring, wishing his own tunic was not soiled from the night’s adventure.

  Smiling at him merrily, she read and understood the chivalry that stirred him. Suddenly her face turned wistful, but she was careful not to let Conops see the changed expression. Levantines were experts in incredulity.

  “Yes,” she said, “b
ut you can help me to be free. Will you wait here while I find the Lord Tros?”

  She was gone before he could answer, closing the door but not locking it, as Orwic was quick to discover. He would have followed her to ask more questions, but the two Numidians prevented him politely enough but firmly, drawing no particular attention to the great curved swords they held. Staring at them, realizing they were slaves, Orwic decided that he and Conops could quite easily defeat them if necessity arose. Noticing there was no lock on the outside of the door, but only a slide-bolt on the inside, he returned to question the two women.

  But they knew no Gaulish. One of them was fussing over Conops, putting up a brave pretense of being thrilled by his advances, which were seamanly of the harbor-front sort. Conops began to sing a song in Greek that all home-faring sailors heard along the wharves of Antioch, Joppa, Alexandria and wherever else the harpy women waited to deprive them of the coins earned in the teeth of Neptune’s gales. It was not a civilized song, though it was old when Homer was a youth in Chios, and its words aimed at the core of primitive emotion.

  To keep him entertained, the women danced for him when one of them had brought out wine from the inner room. And because the dance was not the bawdy entertainment of the beach-booths, but a sort of poetry of motion beyond Conops’ ken, they kept him half excited and half mystified, thus manageable until Chloe came back, lithe and alert in the doorway, with a look of triumph in her eyes.

  “Tros?” Orwic asked her instantly.

  “He has gone with Pkauchios to Balbus’ house,” she answered. But it was once more clear to Orwic she was lying. Tros, he knew, would never have gone away without first setting eyes on him, or, at any rate, without first sending a message, if only a word or two of reassurance.

  “What did he say?” he demanded.

  “He was gone when I got to the house.”

  That, too, was a lie. She had been gone too long not to have talked with somebody; and there was a look of triumph in her eyes, that she was trying to conceal but could not.

  “I, too, go to Balbus!” said Orwic. He gestured to Conops to follow, and strode for the door with his left hand on his sword-hilt.

  Chloe slammed the door shut and stood defiant with her back against it.

  “Prince of Britain!” she said, laughing, but her laugh was challenging and confident. “Be wise! All Gades would like Chloe for a friend! All Gades fears the name of Pkauchios! You are safe here. I have promised the Lord Tros no harm shall happen to you, and he holds my pledge.”

  Orwic sat down on the gilded couch to disarm her alertness. It offended his notions of chivalry to feel obliged to use force to a woman, but the mystery annoyed him more than the dilemma. It had begun to dawn on him that he was dealing with a girl whose instinct for intrigue prevented her from telling stark truth about anything. For a second, observing Conops’ antics through the corner of his eye, he even thought of making love to her; but he was too much of an aristocrat for that thought to prevail; he would have felt ashamed to let Conops see him do it.

  Above all else he felt stupid and embarrassed in the strange environment, aware that he would be as helpless as a child by daylight in the city streets. He had not even the remotest notion how a Roman would behave himself in Gades, and was sure the crowd would detect his foreign bearing in an instant. His Celtic diffidence and thin-skinned fear of being laughed at so oppressed him that he actually laughed at his own embarrassment.

  “That is better!” said Chloe and sat down beside him.

  But he noticed she had shot the door-bolt, and he did not doubt there was some trick to the thing that would baffle anybody in a hurry.

  “Why do you keep on lying to me?” he demanded.

  “Don’t you know all women lie?” she asked him. “We arrive at the truth by other means than by telling it. Prince of Britain, if I told you naked truth you would believe me mad, and you would act so madly there would be no saving you!”

  Conops was becoming rougher and more like an animal every minute. Chloe’s two slave-women were having all their work to keep out of his clutches, the one teasing while the other broke away, turn and turn. At last he seized one woman’s wrist and twisted it. She screamed.

  Chloe sprang to the rescue, broke a jar over Conops’ head, and had his knife before he could turn to defend himself. He knew better than to try to snatch the knife back. His practiced eye could tell that she could use it.

  “Pardon, mistress!” he said civilly. “I was only playing with the girls.”

  Chloe tossed the knife into the air and caught it, noticing that both men wondered at her skill. She said something in Greek, too swift and subtle for Conops’ marlin-spike intelligence — more dull than usual just then from the effect of honeyed wine and an emotion stirred by dancing girls — then frowned, her mind searching for phrases in Gaulish.

  “You can use weapons,” she said, her gesture including both men. “I, too. The Armenian who trained me meant me for a female gladiator. But the aedile to whom I was offered said it would be bad for Roman morals, so I was sold to Pkauchios. You are male and I female. What else is there that you are, and I not?”

  Orwic smiled his way into her trap.

  “Are you free?” he suggested. “I am a prince of Britain.” He said it very courteously.

  “Now! This morning!” she retorted. “How about tonight? My father and my mother were free citizens of Athens, if you know where that is. The Roman armies came. I was sold at my mother’s breast. She died of lifting grape baskets in a Falerian vineyard, and I was sold to the Armenian, whose trade was the invention of new orgies. But I was not quite like the ordinary run of slave-girls, so I was spared a number of indignities for the sake of the high price I might bring. If the Armenian had not set such a high price on me, I think the aedile would not have talked so glibly about morals. Today I am a slave. Tonight I think I will be a freed woman; tomorrow, wholly free. And you? Does it occur to you, Prince of Britain, that there is none but I who can keep you from falling into Balbus’ hands? Balbus would condemn you as an enemy of Rome. He would put you up at auction to the highest bidder. Why, you might be my slave in a week from now!”

  She had his attention at any rate. He laughed and his hand went to his sword-hilt, but his eyes looked worried. Conops watched her with a gleam in his one, steely eye, his muscles tightening for a sudden leap at her; but she understood Conops perfectly and changed the long knife from her left hand to her right with a convincing flicker of the bright Damascus steel.

  “You sit there and keep still!” she ordered. “I am not concerned about you in the least. You may die if you wish! You,” she said, looking at Orwic, “shall not be harmed if I can help it. You must make up your mind you will trust me, or else—”

  “Why did you lie?” Orwic asked her.

  She laughed.

  “You are here. You are safe. If I had told you the Lord Tros was on his ship, would you have come with me?”

  Orwic shrugged his shoulders. “Well, what next?” he asked. “You must do exactly what I say. Pkauchios knows you are here. He has gone to Balbus to persuade him to let the Lord Tros anchor in the harbor unmolested.”

  “Could he prevent that?” Orwic asked, remembering Tros’s great catapults and arrow-engines.

  “And to persuade Balbus to invite Tros ashore for a conference under guarantee of protection. When Pkauchios returns, I will take you to him and leave you with him. I have told Pkauchios, and I will tell him again that you are a superstitious savage. Remember that. You are to agree to anything that Pkauchios proposes, no matter what it is.”

  “And you?”

  “I go to Tros and perhaps also to Balbus. I take Conops with me because Tros, perhaps, might not believe me when I tell him you are unharmed, and I think the Lord Tros is not easy to manage. Also, Conops is a nuisance, who will get drunk presently, and there is no place to lock him up except in the ergastulum. And I can take Conops through the streets in daylight because he is a Greek who will
arouse no comment.”

  “And if I refuse to trust you?” Orwic asked.

  “I will have to lock you both in the ergastulum. It is not a pleasant place. It is dark in there, and dirty. There are insects. Listen!” she said, obviously making a concession to his prejudices.

  A blind man could have guessed it went against the grain in her to lift a corner of the curtain of intrigue.

  “You will spoil everything unless you obey me absolutely! Tros wants — I don’t know what. But I will get it for him. I go presently to make sure that Balbus’ promise of protection shall be worth more than the breath he breathes out when he makes it. Simon the Jew wants his money. Tros, I think, can get it for him. I want my freedom. Pkauchios, well, Pkauchios himself will tell you what he wants. Are you still afraid to trust me? Listen then. Tros holds a pledge of mine worth more to me than all the wealth of Gades. He keeps my lover on his ship!”

  If Orwic had known more about the reputation of the Gades dancing girls, he would have mistrusted her the more for that admission. But she would not have made it to a man of more experience. She was as shrewd as he was innocent. Conops, cynically sneering, merely rallied Orwic’s inborn chivalry:

  “Huh! In Gades they change lovers just as often as the ships come in!”

  Whatever she was or was not, Chloe looked virginal in that Greek chlamys with the plain gold border and the flowers in her hair. And whatever she felt or did not feel, she could act the very subtleties of an emotion instantly. She looked stung, baffled, conscious of the servitude that made her reputation any man’s to sneer away, ashamed, albeit modest and aware of inner dignity. She blushed. Her eyes showed anger that she seemed to know was useless. Orwic passionately pitied her.

  “You dog!” he snarled disgustedly through set teeth. “Go with her! Go back to Tros! And when I come, if I learn you have not treated her respectfully, I will have Tros tie you to the mast and flog you — as he did the rowers when they shamed those girls in Vectis!”

  “Oh, never mind him,” said Chloe. “He is only a sailor.”