Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  At last, Ahiram dared an attempt at a conference and found Tros communicative. He trusted Ahiram at sea and was thoughtful of the Phoenician’s dignity; it was only on land that he classed him with all the other drunken sailors.

  “And now what, Lord Captain? Come a blow, we drown. And come a Roman ship, we get pirates’ dues. We’ve water, I’d say, for three days, and maybe food for a week if we can find it and get it up out of the hold. We can’t fight, nor we can’t run—”

  “Not in these two crates, no. But Cassius the Roman proconsul has plenty of ships. Cassius is planning to invade Egypt, Ahiram. He has a fleet in the harbor of Gaza. If I remember, there is seven fathom of water there.”

  “Aye — six-and-a-half, seven.”

  “But it is a small harbor. Room for only a small fleet.”

  “Aye, not many vessels.”

  “But likely good ones. Cassius has had his pick. He plans a very swift pounce on Egypt. He has called me a pirate. I will teach him what it means to call a free-born captain by a foul name.”

  “So we make for Gaza?”

  “Not yet. Cleopatra also has called me a pirate. Did you think I would leave Sigurdsen and more than a hundred men in peril of her malice?”

  “There is no room for any more men on these overloaded vessels,” said Ahiram.

  “And did you think I would desert my wife?”

  “Aye, aye, you have a woman. I forgot her. I suppose we shall all have to die for the woman.”

  Tros turned on him suddenly, savagely, setting his jaw, scowling.

  “You Phoenician ingrate! Dog of a shipwrecked pirate’s helmsman, whom I saved from Romans and the oar-bench! Show me a man of all my men who doesn’t owe me his freedom! You wenching toss-pot! Grudge me, do you? Shall I leave good, gallant seamen to be hanged or worse, and leave my loyal lady at the mercy of Caesar’s widow, to preserve you, you glutton, for debauch in dock-side taverns?”

  “Oh, aye,” Ahiram answered, “we’re your freedmen, true enough. And you pay us. You’re a man of your word, Lord Captain. I for one won’t flinch. You lead well, But — but—”

  “BUT WHAT?”

  “Hitherto we were venturers, with a stout ship and a safe harbor. Now we’re pirates. No good ship. No harbor. If we’re caught we’ll be enslaved or crucified. And then, there’s Sigurdsen. You’ll fetch him and all his men from wherever they are, no mater what risk to us all, and if we fetch them out alive that leaves me second-lieutenant again, with that big battle-axing savage to order me hither and yon—”

  “Ten times the seaman you are! Ten times your guts, Ahiram! He can out-grumble, out-drink, out-wench, out-brawl, out-swine you — aye, and then out-sail and out-battle ten of you! I can count on Sigurdsen. And by the Baltic Nor’easter that blows in his lungs, he may count on me!”

  “Oh, as for that, you can count on us all,” said Ahiram. But Tros was in no mood to be flattered.

  He was savage with himself on many counts, all contradictory, all challenging and stirring in him the very stuff that once had caused Caesar to offer him the command of all Rome’s navies; the same stuff that had made him decline the offer: the stuff that had made him Caesar’s enemy, and then Caesar’s friend.

  Self-critical because of his early Samothracian training; and taught from his youth to be mistrustful and even scornful of all women, he cursed himself for having fallen into Cleopatra’s clutches; for having been her friend; for having trusted her. Paradoxically, he cursed himself for having left Hero to her own resources. Educated by his father Perseus, initiate of the Mysteries and Prince of Samothrace, never to let love of woman come between him and duty, he had brought away his men and let the woman take care of herself if she could, telling himself he trusted her as he expected her to trust him.

  He did not trust her, as he knew he could trust Conops. He feared for her because he loved her. Having loyally saved his men first, he intended to risk his own life and theirs, too, in an utterly desperate attempt to find her and snatch her from danger, that she might share with him even greater dangers! She was a wilful, audacious girl whom it delighted him to master — a beautiful, brave, royal reckless girl, who had escaped from a throne, and very bravely escaped, to be free to love whom she pleased. Tros had no doubt whatever that she loved him. And he knew why. She loved the very quality that made him capable of taking her at her written word and leaving her to her own resources in the midst of danger, within reach of her sister’s deadly hatred. He knew she was proud of being left to her own resources.

  It was characteristic of him that he suddenly dismissed anxiety. He went to work, with almost incredible attention to detail, making ready to seize by the throat the unpredictable and shake from that the freedom of the seas. First, last, always the sea was his element. As some men yearn for a home and luxury, he burned for the great adventure into unknown oceans. And he laughed with new zest. He imagined himself showing all those hard-won sights to Hero, wondering under what strange skies she was destined to bear him sons.

  It stirred him. Almost impossible things began to happen. Rowing never ceased, except for the few moments when he signalled Conops to come alongside for instructions; and then Conops, too, began making miracles. Sleep never ceased. Relays of men lay snoring amid a tumult of hammer-and-adze. Even Tros snatched four hours’ sleep, amid the legs of straining men who pully-hauled the heavy arrow-engine fittings from the hold. Work never ceased for an instant. They rigged a false bulwark. fighting it over the tholes while the oarsmen kept on swinging to the ceaseless drum-beat. They sewed long canvas curtains hung on iron rings, to protect the decks from arrow-fire, furled until needed. And when night fell, and Tros changed helm, southward toward Pelusium, a steadily increasing north wind drove the wallowing hulls so fast that the new caulking, hurriedly done by torchlight in Esias’s yard, worked out in places from between the planking and they had to man the water-hoist.

  Conops was easily able to keep station by the blue-white glare of the charcoal-forge on Tros’s deck and by the sparks as the armorer’s sledges struck new purpose upon old and broken gear. They made grapnels and repaired old chain to be spliced to the warps. They rigged derricks for dropping the grapnels to an enemy’s deck. They set up arrow-engines and protected them with screens of wood covered with beaten iron. And all night they toiled at the clumsy water-hoist in relays.

  Tros watched the stars. It was pitch-dark — no moon. Even he, past-master navigator, did not dare to try conclusions in the dark with the shoals off Nile-mouth. He knew them too well. It had been through those shoals, soon after Pompey’s murder on the beach, that he had brought the girl Cleopatra away from her beggarly army of borrowed Arabs, and had taken her to Alexandria to sneak into her palace and stand naked in Caesar’s presence. But that had been in daylight. Now he had to time his landfall by dead reckoning, without water-clocks, and with nothing to guide him but the stars, his intuition, the feel of the wind and that rare, sensed accuracy that distinguishes the great sea-captain from the lesser men who are merely careful, competent and bold.

  He made it. He heard the first cry of the sea-birds, as the rim of the golden sun uprose into the mauve of the eastern skyline. He heard the breakers, saw the gulls’ wings, ordered the leadsman to the chains and signalled Conops, two or three hundred yards astern to follow him closely.

  “Down sail! Out oars! Stations!”

  They were a proud crew who stood to arms, crowded, but each in his place and a decurion to each ten. They had come near rebuilding a ship in a day and a night. A poxy, evil-smelling barrel of a coastwise rats’ refuge looked now like something to be reckoned with. Leaky she was. Slow and unhandy she was; deep-laden and down by the head. But they had even painted the false bulwark bright blue with Tyrian dye-stuff stolen from Esias’s sheds. She was a bristling battle-engine, fit at least to engage and to grapple and spew forth men beneath a hail of arrows. Neither Tros, nor a man, nor a ship’s lad grinning beside his arrow-basket, cared what came of her, so be they saw some
better ship that lacked room to run. There was nothing even theoretically wrong with piracy, from their viewpoint, not with a good Lord Captain on the quarter-deck and a whole world full of loot and wine and women.

  And as the wine and roasted wheat came up for breakfast from the cook-stove in the after hold, the good news came down with a roar from aloft:

  “Ship at anchor — ahead — in the channel! Two ships! Romans!”

  CHAPTER XXXI. “Grapnels — Let go!”

  Whatever Caesar’s failings may have been — and they were many, judged by whatever standard — Caesar, nevertheless was a man. He was a great man, though I say it, who was once his enemy on land and sea, and though I more than once accused him to his face of conduct unbecoming to a man. I saw that gang stab him to death — mean and unlovely cowards, mouthing about honor to make treachery and cowardice taste sweet. They were all guilty, and I don’t know why I hated Cassius more than the others. He was no more guilty than the others, and no less. But I hated him more. And I told myself that if an opportunity should come I would kill him with less mercy than I bestow on vermin. But when the day did come, if gods there be, I think they must have laughed to see me forced to save, not kill him.

  — From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace

  The crew gorged wine and hot wheat, in silence except for the gurgle and munch. Ahiram took the helm. Half-a-dozen oars on either side kept the ship in mid-channel. Tros went aloft, to con the situation with his own eyes, sure of only one thing; he could not put back to sea in those crowded, leaking ships. The first touch of an enemy’s warbeak would send either of them to the bottom. They would have served their last purpose if they should carry their crews close to better ships, whose captains lacked guts, alertness or the gift for keeping what Tros needed. Pirate was he? He would have the profit along with the name. Tros was taking all chances, that daybreak.

  True. The masthead man was right. They were Romans anchored in the fairway. One was a Tyrian built bireme, Roman manned, and beaked with iron. She looked reasonably fast — no catapults — no cumbrous midship citadel — a clean-lined, lateen-rigged cruiser; recently built. No corvus. No dolphin. Ample deck-space. The other vessel was smaller, two-masted, also a bireme but built more lightly than the other. Both ships had arrow-engines. Both were crowded with men in Roman armor. More ominous yet, on the deck of the larger bireme the red war-cloaks of several lictors were unmistakable. Lictors were the inseparable attendants of a Roman magistrate. A proconsul would have ten in his own territory. Tros could count six on deck; there might be others below or behind the deckhouse cabin. It would be just like Cassius to move secretly; equally characteristic of him to refuse to leave behind the lictors that Roman law forbade to set foot on foreign soil, lest Roman dignity be compromised. But would Cassius dare to be in Pelusium, with only two ships?

  The Romans should have seen Tros’s topmast, but they were keeping no masthead watch. They appeared to expect no attack from the sea. That was as typical of Roman arrogance, which they flattered themselves was confidence, as the presence of lictors. But it also looked as if Cassius — if Cassius it was — had been amply assured in advance of a friendly reception.

  It was a beast of a passage into Pelusium, blind with reeds, curving between sand-banks, narrow, with unmarked shoals and almost unnegotiable by a deeply laden ship. But near Pelusium, where the great granite fortress overlooked the ford across the Nile the passage widened, and beyond the ford there was quite an extensive harbor with bulkheads and narrow canals, in which numbers of Egyptian vessels were moored. A huge scow-shaped ferry lay at the ford’s western end; it was said to be able to carry a hundred camels. Nobody ever waded that ford if he could help it. It was low-Nile — not deep enough to let the Roman biremes pass to the pool beyond — probably just deep enough for shoal-draft Nile-boats — about shoulder deep to a man, and muddy. The centuries had seen more than one army perish trying to cross that ford. The fort parapets and bastions could sweep its full width with arrow-fire.

  The Egyptian, western bank of the river was densely cultivated. So was a narrow, irregular margin on the eastern bank, but beyond that was desert. Just visible, filing across the desert from the eastward, along the summit of a dune, with the early sun silvering their lance-points, came eight hundred or a thousand Arab horsemen with a sprinkling of Roman cloaks and helmets.

  Whose men? It seemed Cleopatra had told at any rate part of the truth. Was a Roman army behind them? Rome’s was an infantry genius; even Caesar had never developed an efficient cavalry; but cavalry were indispensable for swiftly terrorizing and suppressing newly conquered provinces. So there was almost no doubt that the Arabs must be Cassius’s irregulars, newly raised for the looting of Palestine, less expensive than Roman legions, superbly mounted and probably ably led by their own chiefs, held to the mark and critically bear-led by Roman centurions. There were also probably two or three Roman tribunes wearing Arab costume; that was the usual system.

  It looked as if Cassius’s invasion had already commenced, in a typical, secretive way, that could be called a mistake, or a raid by bandits, or a diplomatic excursion, should it happen to miscarry. There was a mysterious absence of warlike demonstration from the fort. The city, clustered around the fort, was as still as a jungle when the beasts of prey are prowling. The sentinels on the parapet appeared to take no notice of Tros’s ships, although from that height they could easily have seen them. At the Egyptian end of the ford, on high ground, barely beyond range of arrow-fire from the Roman biremes, was a small force of Egyptian cavalry — not more than a hundred men — perhaps fewer; the sun shone on their brass accoutrements, and they made a brave show, but they looked about as useful as painted statuary against the oncoming Arabs. It was just possible to distinguish the plumes of the horses’ heads that proclaimed them a detachment of the Queen’s bodyguard. Was the Queen secretly treating with Cassius?

  And now another puzzling detail. Half a mile to the southward, coming northward down the Nile, toward the ford, were ten rowboats, crowded with men in armor, and by people who might be women, unarmed. The boats were rather badly rowed by dark-skinned men, undoubtedly Egyptian peasants. In the bow of the leading boat, with his armor aflash in the rising sun, stood a giant — who might be Sigurdsen — who probably was Sigurdsen — too distant yet to be clearly recognized but — yes, Sigurdsen, the Viking, by his gestures! — Sigurdsen bringing the billeted men from the villages where Conops left them — bringing them straight into a trap, with Arab cavalry to his right, the fort on his left and Roman warships waiting for him with their anchors down near the bed of the ford!

  Sigurdsen might have Hero with him. Who else could have summoned him down to the sea? But how swift she had been. And what a blazing, loyal, dunderheaded fool was Sigurdsen! Thoughtful of saving his men for battle-duty, he had brought Egyptians to man the oars, and then undone his forethought by rank stupidity! Was the man drunk?

  “Stand to arms! Ahoy there — Conops!”

  Tros returned to deck. He put on his armor and donned his purple cloak over it. The crew knew what that meant. They would be able to see that cloak and rally to him. His ten Jew freedmen formed in line and went down on one knee so as not to obstruct his view, but ready — ready for anything. The two ships came together perilously, stem to stern, and Gonops leaped the taffrail with his golden trumpet in his left fist.

  “Sound the rally! Sigurdsen is bringing our flotilla head-on into two Roman biremes. Probably he thinks they’re ships we’ve taken!”

  “Your lady must have found him mighty sudden, master! Where’s her sailboat?”

  “Sound the rally!”

  The trumpet-call startled a million birds from the reeds in the swamps on either bank. Perhaps Sigurdsen heard it, perhaps not. It was the best that could be done at the moment. Certainly the Romans heard it. Tubas began blaring on the biremes, around the bend, a quarter of a mile away. Tros beckoned Ahiram to overhear the orders he gave to Conops and thus save precious s
econds.

  “The biremes haven’t room to turn. If they slip their cables they’ll come toward us stern-first. I’ll take the big one. You take the other, Conops. Open fire the moment you can see them. Go in fast and grapple! Lay aboard all hands and gut them before they can bring their archery to bear on Sigurdsen’s boats!”

  Conops leaped the taffrail, shouting orders to his crew. Tros wasted no more seconds.

  “Cymbals! Both sides — full speed ahead!”

  Tros to starboard, Ahiram to port, they conned the winding course, as the pulsing cymbal and drum-beat stirred the oarsmen. They whipped up a wake that boiled in the river reeds.

  “Archers — ready!”

  Off came paulins. Dry bow-strings. Arrow-engines squeaking taut. Ship’s lads, alert and trembling with excitement, crouching by the baskets of arrows, cuffed for getting too close with their ready reloads. Master-archers taking sighting-shots at birds on the wing.

  “Cymbals — starboard easy! Full ahead, the port side! Faster! Faster! Now then — both sides, let her have it! Full speed! Archers — engage!”

  Around a blind island of reeds, with every seam leaking to the strain of the oars, and only a hundred yards to go. The Romans caught unready — disciplined but bewildered. A hail of Roman arrow-fire, baffled by Tros’s sailcloth curtains that came clashing on their rings along the lines to protect his crowded crew. Tros’s and Conops’s arrow-engines — twelve arrows to each volley. Romans falling in heaps as they tried to man their bulwarks.