Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  The flames roared nearer. Conops had told off a third of his fighting crew to man buckets and drench the decks. But the furled, dry sails were in the path of streaming sparks. Fifty yards to his south the fire had leaped the river; it was raging through the reeds toward him. An Egyptian commander told off a couple of hundred men to stem that menace by cutting the reeds. But the sparks leaped the river again, at their backs, and they were caught between two fires. Tros’s and Conops’s arrow-engines, and all the archers on both vessels, half-blinded by smoke, raked the Egyptian ranks with arrow-fire. The drums and cymbals thundered the full speed oar-boat. The river boiled to the thrash of the oars — the uttermost desperate effort of driven men — to whip — wild harps thrumming and the hoarse bards chanting the bawdy old song of the seventeen sons of Cyclops — oar-bench captains prancing on the midship plank between the towers, shouting, encouraging, beating time. The mud held. The wind increased. The fire came faster.

  The Egyptians fled from the terrific heat. They made a circuit inshore along the bank to attack the barges. Conops’s bireme caught fire, but his bucket-gang dowsed the flames. Tros quickened the oar-stroke, thunder and crash of drums and cymbals challenging his men’s last frenzy of effort — and suddenly the grounded bireme yielded to the strain. Both crews roared. Tros’s oarsmen quit rowing. They had to be bullied to take up the slack on the tow-rope. The flames crackled along the western bank, a charcoal-black cloud shot with leaping crimson. One barge fast on the mud on the eastern side, was safe from the flames, but not from arrow-fire; Antyllus’s archers, shooting through the reeds on the western bank, were making it impossible to use the oars to work the barge free. The other barge looked lost; if it didn’t fall pray to Antyllus’s men it would burn in a minute or two; the Jew rowers were leaping overboard.

  The river-boats were stacked high on the barges’ decks, and the long-boats were away; without those there was no reaching the grounded barge. But Tros’s after arrow-engines, all his archers and all four arrow-engines on the starboard broadside sent a bronze-tipped hail into the reeds. It checked Antyllus’s men — slaughtered them — smothered their archery. The expenditure of arrows was prodigious; basket after basketful came up from the hold, and the ship’s boys plucked out the enemy’s arrows from wherever they stuck in the woodwork. But Conops sent back Tros’s longboat, and two boats of his own, all loaded with ammunition. Then the Gauls, who had set fire to the reeds, came racing back along the eastern channel.

  Tros crowded all four boats with fighting men and sent them to try save the grounded barge. They took a line with them, bent to a tow-rope from the bireme’s bows. His own anchor came in hand over hand as he headed the bireme upstream, protecting the barge on the eastern mud, to give its crew a chance to haul out into the river. One of the longboats took a line from barge to barge.

  The four boats and two decimated companies of Antyllus’s infantry reached the other barge almost simultaneously. There was a hand-to-hand fight on the deck. Tros’s archers had to aim into the reeds, to prevent Antyllus from sending in reenforcements; they, would have slain their own friends, and their own wounded and the women had they tried to support the boats’ crews.

  But a boat’s crew made good with the line. The tow-rope followed. Tros signalled Conops. Both biremes towed with all their weight and might, Tros’s ship stern first, backing water — a merciless strain on the oarsmen, for about a tenth of the power that they could have exerted forward. But the current helped a little; and so did the strain on the warp between the two barges. Antyllus, or else Leander, from an invisible position beyond the reeds sent in two more companies of infantry, but they were floundering in mud, trampling one another and harassed by Tros’s arrow-fire. Both barges suddenly lurched off the mud and glided into midstream, almost at the moment when the crimson flame reached the Egyptian infantry.

  “Cease fire!”

  A decurion half-stunned an archer with a belaying pin for winging one last arrow on its way, although the arrow slew one of Antyllus’s men. Tros, who missed nothing, saw it; he promoted the decurion that instant. There was no need to do any more killing. Waist deep in the mud, scores of Antyllus’s infantry were caught by the fire in the reeds. The smoke, which streamed past Pelusium, effectually blanketed the view to southward, but in the wake of the fire the smoke was thin and the western bank lay exposed. Egyptian cavalry followed the line of the bank, careful to keep out of range of either bireme’s arrow-engines; they were merely a threat, to prevent a landing, or to report to Antyllus if the biremes should again go aground. Pursuit was now impossible, unless in small boats from Pelusium, which would have to come at top speed in the face of disciplined archery. Antyllus had no means of knowing that Tros’s reserve of arrows was near exhaustion.

  It was a weird retreat toward open sea, led by a scorched bireme, towing a larger one stern first, that in turn towed two laboring barges and four longboats. But the eastern channel was even narrower than the western; there was no chance, for more than two miles, to turn Tros’s bireme end-for-end; the important business was to get safe to sea.

  “You won a victory,” said Herod. “But was it worth the risk? Are the barges full of gold? And is the other bireme loaded with lovely women?”

  Tros ignored him. Herod turned to Hero: “I can’t see what Tros was fighting for. He has a good ship under him, in exchange for a couple of hulls that would hardly float. He has Cassius and his correspondence. He has you. He has me — he has the courtesy to call me a guest, but I’m a prisoner as a matter of fact, and I shall have to raise a ransom if he demands it. Cassius is going to have to pay through the nose. Why all that fighting for an extra bireme and a brace of barges?”

  “Fifty of Cassius, fifty of you, for one Conops?” she answered.

  “Cassius is a typical Roman politician. But where would you find fifty of me?” he retorted. “Don’t you appreciate my virtues?”

  “Yes, but who trusts you, Herod?”

  “Foolish women and wise men trust me.”

  He would have said more, but an archer interrupted, saluting and asking Hero for her bow. She gave it to him without thought and was turning away, but he spoke abruptly: “How many?”

  “Five that I counted, but some disappeared in the reeds and I couldn’t be sure.”

  The archer laughed. “That’s nothing. To hear some of our lads talk, you would say they had each slain at least fifty — and some a hundred. But it takes keen eyes to tell miss from hit in a hot engagement. However—”

  “One!” said Herod. “I am witness that she shot one.”

  The archer cut one small notch with his dagger on the thick part of the bow. He pricked his own arm and let a drop of blood fall in the notch. Then he gave the bow back and saluted, waiting. Hero turned to Tros:

  “May I have him?”

  Tros nodded. She touched the archer’s shoulder with her bow.

  “What is your name?”

  “Gorgias.”

  “Unto death, then, Gorgias, I grant you good will and accept you to be my faithful guard by night and day, on land and sea.”

  The archer knelt and kissed her hand, mightily pleased with himself. There were better archers than he on the ship and men who had been longer in Tros’s service; but he was the only one who had had wit enough to remember an ancient custom, and to claim a privilege that might not be denied him, provided he had not flinched in battle and his previous record was known and clean.

  CHAPTER XXXVII. Captain Conops

  No man, no matter how efficient, is fit for promotion if his fear of rivalry, or his desire to appear to excel, prevents him from training a subordinate to be able to take his place at a moment’s notice.

  — From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace

  The vedette boat came racing into the estuary under full sail, reeling before the Levanter that was kicking up a high sea on the shoals. Its crew reported an Egyptian fleet to westward — ten ships. Their sails, high prows and broadsides made a fine show.
But they were near the sky-line, using their starboard oars to help them to gain an offing from the lee shore. They were too late, and a lot too timid.

  Tros wondered whether Cleopatra would have hanged him if she could have caught him. In her latter-day dark mood she was very different from the boisterous, adventurous, chivalrous girl, who used to be magnanimous to enemies and very loyal to her friends. Nowadays she might prefer to kill, rather than feel under obligation for aid given to her generously in the past. Power had filled her with fear. Fear for her throne had made her heartless.

  But now that he was safe to sea Tros had no fear of an Egyptian war-fleet — none whatever. They were big ships, well manned, but they wallowed light on the rising sea and offered too much broadside to the wind, being nothing else than armed corn ships in ballast. Egypt already in Cleopatra’s father’s day had yielded sea-supremacy to Rome. Cleopatra had not yet had time, since Caesar’s death, to build a fighting navy and to train good crews. She had no conception of the value of command of the sea. Her sea-captains, too, were men who knew Tros’s battle record. They might have been willing to blockade him in the Nile until the garrison of Pelusium could finish him off; but not to meet him at sea. When he turned toward them they all changed helm and started home, no doubt to report to the Queen that they hadn’t seen his sail.

  When he had done piloting through the shoals and had turned the ship over to Sigurdsen, he and Hero inspected the wounded, recommending dreadful surgery — consulting with the men who thought themselves beyond hope of recovery and who wished to be killed; persuading some to try to live by threats of burial at sea — a prospect that no honest sailor relished; permitting others to be put out of pain by the surgeon. The bards, who were the surgeon’s assistants, were cruelly drastic unless watched. Tros gave one bard a liberal pasting of boiling tar.

  “You singing devil! Let that teach you tenderness to gallant men! That archer faced death while you were plucking a harp in safety!”

  The wounded laughed at the bard’s yells; the other bards were gentler for the lesson, when it came to pincering out barbed arrow-heads or driving them through with a hammer-blow, to be pulled out point first on the far side.

  The men on the barges, who had been wounded in the fighting two days ago, rolled on the rising sea and probably endured worse suffering than victims on the rack. The seasick women who were supposed to nurse them, were useless — worse than useless — a nuisance. But that was the fortune of war; freedmen, who followed captain of their own free will, in return for leadership, pay and equipment, had no right to complain of wounds, and they did not. They were fortunate, and they knew it, not to be abandoned to the vultures or to the longshore slave-hunters. Better the chance to recover or die among friends, than the alternative of death on the beach, or slavery again. Most of them had been slaves until Tros set them free. Tros was a stern task-master; but he was fair and generous, and, above all, he never abandoned a loyal man. They had seen him risk his life, his ship and all his crew, at least a dozen times, to rescue men who, according to Tros’s view, had earned the right to be loyally led.

  So they were fatalistic about wounds and death. Few, if any of them, understood Tros’s ideals, and nearly all of them dreaded his avowed determination to voyage around the world; far more than any human enemy, they feared the monstrous devils they were sure of meeting — dragons, mermen, behemoths, leviathans, and worse; and they were willing to bet the voyage would end in their all being swept into unimaginable but surely dreadful eternity in the grip of the ocean where, as everyone knew, it plunges over the rim of the earth.

  But Tros was a more compelling force even than that dread. He had the gift of spectacular leadership, the genius for doing right things at the right time. Now, in a rising sea, with three days’ supply of food and water, very little ammunition, Egypt and probably all the Roman world against him, and no safe port in which to replenish and refit, he had time to promote men who had earned it. He even fetched up certain rowers from the hold, to be promised promotion to duty on deck as soon as men could be found to replace them.

  Presently he flew a signal from his yardarm that summoned his little fleet as close together as the state of the sea permitted. He hove to, stood the crew to arms and manned the rail. Then another signal brought Conops, in the stern of an eight-oared longboat, thoroughly puzzled and staring one-eyed at the starboard ladder waiting for him. Conops usually handed himself up by a rope on the port side like a common seaman.

  Tros had donned his famous purple cloak, and his gold-hilted sword in the green and vermilion scabbard. Hero, in armor, stood beside him on the midship quarter-deck. Drums rolled and a trumpet blared when Gonops’s foot touched the ladder. When his one-eyed face, under a dented, crestless helmet, appeared above the rail there was breathless silence. As his foot touched the deck and his hairy, bowed legs stiffened to attention, Tros’s voice thundered:

  “Captain’s salute! Present — arms!”

  The disciplined clang of weapons. Conops, rigid at attention, never at a loss for self-assurance, but pop-eyed with curiosity. Six seconds of excited tension.

  “Order arms!”

  Then Hero’s voice: “Ovation for Captain Conops!”

  Conops was too puzzled to return the salute. He stood grinning. The bards led the cheering, and even the rowers below deck, who did not know what had happened, roared to the wild harp music. Even the wounded on the barges sang the Song of the Rising Sun. Many of them hated Conops for his ruthless, devil-driving efficiency; but they knew his loyalty to Tros, and they loved Tros. The goatskin wine-bags went the rounds, but there was none for Conops until Tros summoned him to the quarter-deck, and again there was silence.

  “Yes, master?”

  “Captain Conops, henceforth you will address me by name.”

  “Yes, master.”

  “I said, by name.”

  “Lord Captain Tros, yes, master.”

  “You have served me loyally, by land and sea, since we first set forth from Samothrace. You have proved yourself competent to command a ship in battle. I promote you to the rank of captain, equal with Sigurdsen and Ahiram. I lose a good servant. See to it that I gain a better officer.”

  “Aye, aye, master. As you will, Lord Captain.”

  “Call me by name, Captain Conops.”

  “Aye, aye, Lord Captain. Lord Captain Tros. Yes, master.”

  The steward poured wine in a golden cup that had been Caesar’s. Tros had captured it when he and Caesar were at death-grips in Northern Gaul. It had belonged to Vercingetorix. Tros sipped and passed the cup to Hero; she drank and passed it to Conops; Conops drained it to the last dregs. Tros grinned:

  “You mannerless rogue, do you leave none for Sigurdsen?”

  He bade the steward refill the cup and summoned Sigurdsen from the helm. The giant Northman came and towered above Conops, silent, gloomy, scornful, proud of ancestry and jealous of anyone whom Tros trusted more than himself.

  “Pledge each other,” Tros commanded.

  “Captain, eh?” said Sigurdsen. He took the cup. He drank deep. “If you can command as capably as you obey your betters, you’ll be good. Count on me to teach you manners. You were born free; that’s something.”

  He grinned and passed the cup to Conops, who swallowed what remained and grinned back.

  “Herrings to you! Battle-ax me, you big drunkard, ’twasn’t your fault you were weaned in a northern night on frozen fish! Keep your brains as sharp and handy as your ax, and I’ll forget you’re a barbarian.”

  They saluted each other. Then Tros gave Conops his second-best sword, and his second-best cloak, to be cut down by one of the women to fit him. But though he had done justice, Tros had some doubt of the outcome. As long as Conops had been virtually chief of staff without any title or other handle to his name than some abusive or familiar epithet, Sigurdsen had been too proud to quarrel with him. But it would be different now. The giant Northman could be as jealous as a woman of a rival. Promotion was
n’t likely to teach a faithful dog new tolerance.

  “Now remember, Captain Conops: I have trained you, and you know my rule. No officer is worth his rank who can’t teach other men to step into his shoes in case he gets hurt or killed in battle. To the oar-bank with you, if I catch you lacking good subordinates,” then slowly, “or forgetting that you owe your equals the respect that I will exact from them also toward you.”

  “Aye, aye, master.”

  Conops went over the side with the air of an Olympic victor. Tros’s cloak was over his arm; but Hero’s slave-hag rather spoiled that effect by snatching the cloak away and raising roars of laughter by saying she would cut it into three to fit him. The sword, much too long for his height, was gripped in his left fist. His helmet was cocked at an angle that covered his blind eye. He was almost drunk with emotion. He forgot the ladder — vaulted the rail from habit — scrambled along the rubbing-strake — jumped to the boat below — then suddenly remembered and gave tongue:

  “You tow-haired druids, toss oars! You lubbers! Do you think a captain is a load o’ ballast, that you boat him away without a compliment? By Pluto’s teeth, I’ll each you Caesars’s leavings decent manners, or kill you trying! Ready! Give way! Hold your chin up, seven! Bow, you’re deep — get your hands down! you’re not fishing — Three, are you afraid to bend that stretcher? Legs to work, and row your weight, you lump o’ dunnage! — Now then, swing to it, my hearties — yeo — ho! yeo — ho!”

  It was the old Conops — nothing added to horn but a title.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII. “These are ridiculous terms!”

  To slay, except in fair fight when another, though offered quarter, will not yield, is to my mind, cowardice. I have not done it, and I will not do it — saving very rarely when a mutineer needs hanging as an act of justice toward men who kept faith at the risk of their lives. But I have won many a main, without a blow, by keeping secret from a man, who feared death, how ashamed I would be, did I kill him.