Extracted from Adventure magazine, June 10 1925, pp. 03-66. Accompanying headpiece illustration may be omitted. A "Tros of Samothrace" story. The Discussion page contains a note by the author—whose "conception of Julius Cæsar has stirred up quite a lot of argument"—from the "Camp-Fire" section of the magazine.
PRISONERS OF WAR
A Complete Novel
by
Talbot Mundy
Author of "Tros of Samothrace," "The Enemy of Rome," etc.
CHAPTER I
THE BRITISH CHANNEL. AUTUMN B.C. 56
ABIREME, Julius Cæsar's until Tros captured it and used it against Cæsar, plunged and rolled before a westerly gale, not shipping much water, because Tros was at the helm, but swinging her fighting-top like a pendulum and making her working crew of British fishermen miserably seasick.
Forward, on the deck between the citadel and the bow, more than a score of British gentlemen lay dead, a sail spread over them and a guard of four not so badly wounded men posted in their honor. Below, in the dark of the creaking hold, the more severely wounded groaned and grumbled at the crude surgery of their unwounded friends, whose methods, whatever their motives, were abrupt and painful. They kept the rats at bay, whatever else.
Tros, amber eyes heavy with weariness, his great jaw grinding, shaking his head at intervals to throw the black hair from his eyes, steered a course far closer to the coast of Britain than was necessary to make Thames-mouth; he had come from the mouth of the Seine and might have stood nearly due East toward the Belgian sands in order to take full advantage of wind and tide.
Orwic, nephew of Caswallon, King of the Trinobantes, disguised like a Roman legionary, except that he had a mustache and his fair hair fell to his shoulders, swung himself up from the hold and climbed the poop by the broken ladder. For a minute or two he leaned overside and vomited, then worked his way hand over hand along the rail toward Tros and pointed at the coast of Britain, where the chalk cliffs stood like ghosts in a gray mystery of drifting fog.
"Too close!" he objected. "A Roman ship—we look like Romans. If we put in there, they'll—" he leaned overside, but managed to control himself—"remember the Northmen," he went on. "Two longships—ran from us toward Pevensey. They'll have burned some villages. The next foreign-looking ship that runs for shelter will"
He vomited again, clinging to the lee rail. Tros waited for him to recover and then gestured toward the opposite coast of Gaul, invisible beyond a howling waste of gray sea.
"I would run in for the sake of the wounded; this cold wind tortures them. Better a fight with Britons than another brush with Cæsar!" he said grimly. "But Cæsar has had time to reach Caritia[1] by chariot and put a dozen ships into the water. He has had time to set a dozen traps. He'll risk storm and everything to catch and crucify us. Twenty of us fit to fight—crew no good—torn sail—and who is to man the oars?"
"But if you hug the shore our own Britons may put out and throw fire into us," said Orwic. "That's what we always try to do to the Northmen."
"Not in this gale!" Tros answered. "Of two foes, shun the stronger. Cæsar is the craftiest of Romans. We have stung him, Orwic. We have made a mock of him before his own men. We have tricked a prisoner out of his camp by forgery and boldness. We have made him run; he had to swim for it. And I know Cæsar!"
"A pity we didn't catch him!"
"Aye, I am ashamed!" Tros ground his teeth. "And what shall I say to Caswallon, who lent me a hundred gentlemen to take Cæsar alive! Half of them dead or wounded—no plunder—nothing to show him but my father's corpse, for which I must beg obsequies!"
"Caswallon will remember who wrecked Cæsar's ships off Kent a while ago. You saved Britain for us, Tros. Caswallon will not forget that."
But Tros smiled sourly. "It is only grudges that endure. Kings' memories are as short as Cæsar's for a friendship."
Orwic, too weak to argue, lay down near the lee rail, hugging himself in his cloak. Not long ago he had ridden in triumph to Lunden to announce Cæsar's hurried midnight retreat from Britain; he relished no more than Tros did the prospect of slinking up Thames with nothing to show but a foreigner's corpse to offset more than sixty dead and wounded gentlemen.
Mere seamen would hardly have mattered; but by the irony of fate not one of the twenty hirelings had suffered a scratch, except when Tros and Conops hit them with belaying pins or knife-hilts to stir their energy. In a sense Orwic was as much responsible as Tros; it was he who had supported Tros first and last; he was second-in-command of the expedition. Worse! The Lunden girls had seen the bireme off; they would be waiting now to kiss victorious warriors—expecting to see Cæsar brought forth from the hold in chains.
Instead of Cæsar in his scarlet cloak they would see dead and wounded friends—relations—lovers.
Orwic was as young and as imaginative as the girls who reckoned him the bravest man in Britain.
Tros gave the helm to Conops, his Greek freed-man, whose one eye, keener than a gimlet, betrayed one sole emotion just then—curiosity. He looked comical in an imitation of a Roman tunic, with his red Greek seaman's cap pulled low over his brow, an impudent nose beneath it, and a slit lip that showed one eye-tooth like a dog's.
To him nothing mattered except that his master Tros was alive and in command. He worshipped Tros, regarded him, young as he was, as the greatest seaman in the world; and seamanship, in Conops' view, was much the greatest of all attributes; any fool could stand or run on dry land, but it called for something superhuman to control a storm-tossed ship in chartless seas, bully a mutinous crew and make a landfall after days and nights of beating against headwinds under a viewless sky.
Conops was merely curious to know what was to happen next; he had perfect confidence in Tros' ability to meet it. Hardship meant no more to him than other men's feelings or opinions; his whole interest in living was to serve Tros loyally; the one reward he craved, a nod from Tros, maybe a smile, and a word or two of terse, ungilded praise.
"Keep the wind at the back of your right ear," Tros commanded. "The tide 'll be slack in an hour; watch for the surf on the quicksands[2] on your starboard bow. Keep clear of that, and follow the tide around the coast when it starts to make. If there's any trouble with the crew, wake me."
HE WENT below, into the cabin where his father's body lay on Cæsar's bed, with Cæsar's scarlet cloak spread over it. And for a while he stood steadying himself with one hand on an overhead beam, watching the old man's face, that was as calm as if Cæsar's tortures had never racked the seventy-year-old limbs, the firm, proud lip showing plainly through the white beard, the eyes closed as in sleep, the aristocratic hands folded on the breast.
It was dark in there and easy to imagine things. The body moved a trifle in time to the ship's swaying.
"Sleep on!" Tros muttered.
He could not imagine his father dead, not even with the corpse before his eyes. No sentiment, not much emotion, had been lost between them. Tros actually loved his father more that minute than he had ever done. As a prince of Samothrace, deep in the Inner Mysteries, old Perseus had had scant respect for the claims of human personality, reckoning himself—as he was reckoned by the hierarchs—a failure to the extent that he had married and begotten a son, who might add to the afflictions of the world. He had spared no pains to educate that son, teaching him mastery of fear—since no man may escape fear, but a few may learn to rise triumphant over it—and above all, seamanship; but he had conceded nothing to the claims of mere human affection.
Not once had he tempted Tros to take the vow of an initiate, although that was his heart's desire, as Tros well understood. The first law of the Mysteries forbade the use of even the slightest influence, as between father and son for instance, to induce any one to become a candidate for initiation, and Tros had taken full advantage of that. He felt no impulse to devote himself to esoteric aims. He could not stomach non-resistance. His father had died not cursing and not blessing Cæsar, who tortured him, but utterly indifferent to Cæsar's crimes provided his own acts should pass the critical judgment of his own conscience. Tros on the other hand ached for revenge and determined to have it.
He could not have explained why. He had inherited his father's passion for free will and full responsibility, each man for his own acts. He did not question his father's right to submit to torture rather than reveal to Cæsar the least hint of what the secrets of the Samothracian and Druidic Mysteries really were; he would have done the same himself.
Nor did he question his father's right to be unvindictive; he was rather proud of the old man's conquest over self to the point where he could suffer torture and not shriek for vengeance or slaver with sickening meekness. He was immensely proud to be the old man's son.
Yet love him, in any ordinary sense, he knew he never had done; and, strangely enough, he hardly hated Cæsar. He was the enemy of Cæsar; he despised his vices and admired his genius, loathed his cruelty and liked his gentlemanly wit.
Old Perseus had been no man's enemy but all the world's friend, reserving his own right to be its friend in his own way. Tros gloried in being the enemy of Cæsar, of Rome, of any man or any power that dared to come between him and the freedom of earth and sea that his heart told him was a free man's heritage.
He fell asleep at once and his dreams were all of Cæsar, Cæsar standing on the bireme's bow in the mist at Seine-mouth, laughing, charmingly sarcastic, promising to crucify him by and by, plunging beneath a flight of arrows into the waves and continuing to laugh out of a fog-bank while the bireme pitched over the shoals at river-mouth and left Cæsar swimming safely out of reach.
He did not sleep long. He heard Conops shout from the poop and sprang out of the cabin sword in hand ready to deal with mutiny. But there was no mutiny. Conops and a dozen Britons were staring at a Gaulish fishing boat not far astern that looked as if it had been rebuilt by Roman engineers; it was plunging in masses of spray toward the British coast, making for Hythe in all likelihood;
"See the way they handle her!" Conops sneered. "Romans, or I'll eat my knife-hilt! Put about, master, and let's ram them! Did you ever see such landlubbers! Can't even quarter the sea! Straight from point to point like a plowshare into a field of turnips! There—they swamp!"
But the boat was decked, and the deck must have been strong and watertight. She rose out of a welter of gray sea, dismasted but right side up, and Tros could see men, who certainly were Romans, chopping at the rigging with their short swords.
"Go about and ram them!" Conops urged again, and Tros considered that for a minute. But he would likely enough lose his own sail if he tried to turn into the wind.
"They'll smash on the rocks when the tide carries them inshore," he prophesied and went below again to make up arrears of sleep.
He did not wake again until nightfall, when he relieved Conops at the helm. By that time the tide had carried them well out into the North Sea. The wind backed suddenly to the northwest, increasing in strength, and he had to heave to.
There were no stars visible, no moon, nothing to do but pace the poop to keep warm, judging the drift by the feel of the wind, with the cries of the wounded and the thought of that Gaulish-Roman fishing-boat with her Roman crew, to haunt and worry him.
Tros tried to persuade himself that the boat could not be Cæsar's. But calculations, made and checked a dozen times, assured him that Cæsar would have had time to reach Caritia by chariot from Seine-mouth and to send that boat in the teeth of the gale across the Channel; in fact, he would have had about two hours to spare, which was ample in which to choose and instruct men for his purpose, whatever that might be.
BLACK night on a raging sea was neither time nor place for shrewd guessing at Cæsar's newest strategy, but Tros did not doubt it would run true to form and be brilliant if nothing else. To land a dozen Romans openly on the shore of Britain would be madness; if they were not killed instantly they would be held as hostages. Direct overtures to Caswallon would be laughed at—Cæsar would not try any such foolishness as to send messengers to Lunden. What then?
Cæsar's notorious luck would probably throw up his men all living on the beach, or might even cause the mastless boat to drift into a sheltered cove. What then? What then?
Even supposing that boat should have been lost with all hands, the fact remained that Cæsar was attempting something. He would persist. He would send another boat. For what purpose? To avenge himself on Tros undoubtedly, but how?
Cæsar played politics like a game, staking kingdom against kingdom. Incredibly daring and swift decisions were the secret of his campaigns; but there was something else, and as Tros paced the poop, wet to the skin with spray, he tried to analyze what he knew of Cæsar, knowing he must outguess him if he hoped to escape the long reach of his arm.
He tried for a while to imagine himself in Cæsar's place; but that was difficult; the very breath Tros breathed was the antithesis of Cæsar's. Cæsar yearned to impose the Roman yoke on all the world; Tros burned to see a world of free men, in which each man ruled himself and minded his own business.
It was that thought, presently, that gave him what he thought might be the key. Well-bred, vain, self-seeking rascal though Cæsar was, there was something splendid in his method, something admirable in his constancy of purpose and in his ability to make men serve him in the teeth of suffering and death. What was it? In what way was Cæsar different from other men?
His vices were unspeakable; his treachery was a byword; his extravagance was an insult to the men who died for him and to the nations from whom he extorted money with which to bribe Rome's politicians. He had personal charm, but that was not enough; men grow weary of a rogue, however successful and however personally charming. There was some other secret.
And at last it seemed to Tros he had it! Rome! The glamour of the word Rome. The idea of Rome as mistress of the world, with all men paying tribute to her—one law, one senate, one arbiter of quarrels, one fountain-head of authority. A sort of imitation of Nature, with the fundamental truth of brotherhood and freedom left out! Cæsar served his own ends, but he served Rome first; he might loot Rome and make himself her despot, but he would leave her mistress of the world.
No other people, possibly no other man than Cæsar had that obsession fixed so thoroughly in mind that he himself was almost the idea. Foreigners might send their spies to Rome, and bribe her public men almost openly, but none could set Roman against Roman when Rome's profit was in question. On the other hand, Rome sent spies, or openly acknowledged agents, and successfully set tribe against tribe, faction against faction, until domestic strife ensued, and Rome stepped in and conquered.
The Britons, for instance, were divided into petty kingdoms, jealous of their own kings. Caswallon,[3] who had defeated Cæsar with Tros' help and sent him sneaking back to Gaul by night, had been at his wits' end to raise an army, even for that purpose. The half of one British tribe, the Atrebates, lived in Gaul and had accepted Cæsar's rule, under a king of Cæsar's making.
The Iceni traded horses to the men of Kent, but fought them between-times; and as far as the other British tribes were concerned, they were to all intents and purposes foreigners, loosely united by occasional marriages but with no real bond other than Druidism.
The Druids taught brotherhood, it was true; but that was too easily interpreted to mean friendship toward foreigners and strife at home.
The only enemy the Britons really held in common was the Northmen, who plundered the coasts whenever their own harvests failed or their own young men grew restless to wed foreign wives. But the Britons made friends with the Northmen, intermarried with them, let prisoners settle in their midst, and absorbed them, without making them feel they were a part of one united nation.
Self-seeking rogue though he was, then, Cæsar was Rome, to all intents and purposes; or so Tros argued it. Britain was a loosely knitted congeries of tribes, without any central authority, governed by chiefs who were hard put to it to have their own way, suspicious of one another. Cæsar, driven out of Britain, being Cæsar, would never rest until he had reversed defeat.
Therefore, that boat, undoubtedly containing Romans, must be a move in Cæsar's game, a move that would mean nothing else but an attempt to set Britons against Britons, since that was all a handful of men could do in an enemy country.
But Cæsar never neglected himself or his own feuds while he spread Rome's power abroad. He never failed to follow up his threats; never neglected to avenge personal defeat. He was not only Rome, he was Cæsar.
Tros had laughed at him, had tricked a prisoner away, had fooled him; out-guessed him, drowned a hundred men and almost caught Cæsar himself. It was safe, then, to wager that, coming so swiftly after that encounter, the gale-swept Gaulish fishing-boat in some way was connected with revenge on Tros.
SPIES might have told a great deal; but Cæsar was astute enough in any event to guess how strongly Tros stood in Caswallon's favor, and successful guile delighted Cæsar even more than winning battles.
It was not unreasonable to suppose that Cæsar had sent messengers in that boat—no doubt with expensive presents—to tell tales that should reach Caswallon's ears.
As he turned that over in his mind and calculated how much time the Roman messengers would have for intrigue—supposing that dismasted boat to have reached the coast—Tros almost made up his mind to run for the Belgian lowlands and seek refuge there. He did not doubt he could make good friends among the Belgæ.
All that restrained him was his own pride. He had made a promise to Caswallon; he would keep it. Those young gallants who had sailed with him—mutinous cockerels—had their rights; their dead should be buried in British earth.
But he almost wished the gods might relieve him of responsibility by sinking the bireme in that raging sea, that pitched and rolled her, wind across the tide, burying her bow in smothering green water as she lurched unsteadily to leeward, tossing the wounded about in the hold and shaking her spar and fighting-top until it was a mystery why the mast did not go overboard.
The gods—the pantheon of gods he sensed around him—knew drowning was no enviable death; but neither was the prospect anything but vile, of groaning wearily up Thames-mouth in a damaged ship, with two-thirds of her complement dead or wounded, their friends, expectant of victory, waiting to receive them, and a possibility, almost probable, that Cæsar's messengers had already bribed or cozened influential Britons into a distrustful, if not an openly hostile frame of mind. He was quite willing to drown just then, provided he might go down handsomely.
Orwic frankly friendly, throwing off the seasickness and gathering strength for another dive into the hold to tend the wounded, was aware of Tros' quandary and did his best to encourage him.
"Lud of Lunden is a good god. He will send us an achievement!" he yelled in Tros' ear, then swung himself down from the poop and disappeared in darkness.
"Achievment!" Tros muttered. "And thirty seasick men to wrest it from destiny! We will all do well if we achieve a decent death!"
For the first time in his life he had begun to think that destiny might be his enemy and not bis friend; that Cæsar, the Romans, Rome, might be fortune's favorites and he and his friends, the Britons, nothing but grist in the eternal mill.
The wind shrieked through the rigging; bitter cold spray drenched him. He had to cling to the rail, and his eyes ached, staring at stark, dark seas that pitched the bireme like a cork.
"I will die free. I will set others free. I must! I burn to live! But is it all worth the burning?" he wondered.
CHAPTER II
NORTHMEN!
ANOTHER day and another night of plunging in a confusing sea, hove-to half the time, cheating wind and tide by miracles of seamanship, found Tros wide-eyed at the helm and the bireme's bow headed at last into the hump-backed waves that guarded the Thames estuary.
There was no land in sight, but there were sea-birds and a hundred other signs that gave Tros the direction; he had run in the dark before a blustering wind, had caught the tide under him at dawn and was making the most of it, sure he was in midstream and as confident as a homing-pigeon of his exact position, well along into the Thames.
It was cold, and the wind bore rain with it that drenched the autumn air and settled into banks of blowing mist through which the watery sun appeared over the stern like dim, discouraged lantern-light. The wind howled through the rigging and the sea swished through the remnants of the basket-work that Tros had rigged around the bireme to make her look larger than she was. The great ungainly ram sploshed in the steep waves like a harpooned monster, and now and then the Britons, down in the hold, screamed from the torture of ill-tended wounds.
Conops relieved Tros at the helm, nodding when told to keep in midtide and to watch for land on the starboard bow. There was a Briton at the mast-head, one of the crew of fishermen who had been brought along to handle the sail; but he was afraid of the souls of the dead gentlemen on deck; and nobody, least of all himself, had any confidence in him. Tros went forward, to lean over the bow and think.
He could not throw off despondency. He began to wonder whether his father had not been right in saying that a man's delight in action was no better than the animals', that his brain was only a mass of instincts magnified, and that the soul was the only part of him worth cultivating.
There lay his father, dead, contented to be dead, with no man's injury to his discredit, having died without regret for unattained ambition, since he had none of the ordinary sort. His father, with all the resources of the Mysteries of Samothrace to count on, had never owned a house; even the stout ship, that Cæsar had ordered burned for the copper she contained, had hardly been his property, though he had built her and commanded her; he had regarded her as a gift to the Lords of Samothrace, at whose behest she had sailed uncharted seas.
But the father had never ached for action as the son did. Tros had the same compelling impulse to uphold the weak and to defy the strong, but he had a more material way of doing it. He could not see the sense of talking, when a blow, well aimed, might break a tyrant's head. Nor was he totally opposed to tyrants; an alert and generously guided tyranny appealed to him as something the world needed: a tyranny that should insist, with force, on freedom.
"Is there anything more tyrannous than truth?" he wondered, watching the waves yield and reappear over the ironshod ram.
Even his father had had to admit that a ship, for instance, could not be managed without despotism. There had never lived a sterner ship's commander than old Perseus; just though he had been and self-controlled, he was a captain who would brook no hesitation in obeying orders. Yet his father had failed, if the loss of his ship at Cæsar's hands, followed by torture and death, were failure.
Not even the Druids of Gaul, for whose encouragement his father had set forth from Samothrace, had gained in the least, as far as Tros could see; and if that was not failure, what was it? Yet his father had seemed quite contented with the outcome, had died appearing to believe his failure was success.
Had he, Tros, not the same right to believe this comparative failure against Cæsar was good fortune in disguise? It was only comparative failure after all. Cæsar had had the worst of it, twice. Once he had wrecked the greater part of Cæsar's fleet and saved Britain from his clutches. Then he had thoroughly worsted Cæsar in the fight at Seine-mouth. His father had never done anything as effective as that.
And yet, he, Tros, was miserable; and his father had died contented. He, Tros, had a chest full of Cæsar's gold, more money than most kings saw in a lifetime; his father had never had money enough to do more than keep a little ship well husbanded.
His father had hardly seemed to suffer when the ship was burned and her good, resourceful crew were beaten to death before his eyes by Cæsar's order: whereas he, Tros, who had not witnessed that cruelty, had writhed at the very thought of it and was sick at heart now because two-score friendly young Britons lay wounded in the hold. Was his father's attitude the right one? Or was his? Or were they both wrong?
Why, for instance, had his father taught him swordsmanship, if fighting was an insult to the soul, as he contended? Must a man learn how to do things, and then restrain himself from doing them? If so, why do anything? Why preach? Why eat and drink? Why live? What was the use of knowing how to sail a ship, if action was discreditable? Was war against the elements so different from war with men? Should he have let the sea win and have drowned, too proud to fight?
He thought not. He remembered how his father used to fight the elements; there had been no bolder seaman in the world. What then? Ought all men to be seamen and spend life defeating wind and tide? The mere suggestion was ridiculous. Nine men out of ten were as utterly incapable of seamanship as they were of penetrating the Inner Mysteries and living such a life as Perseus led. Besides, if all did one thing, who should do the other things that needed doing?
SLOWLY, very slowly, as he leaned over the bow and watched the changing color of the estuary water, Tros began to solve the riddle—of the universe, it seemed to him.
"A man is not a man until he feels the manhood in him," he reflected. "Then he does what he can do."
That seemed to be the whole of it. Each to his own profession, born leaders in the van, born blacksmiths to the anvil, born adventurers toward the skyline—he for one!—and each man fighting to a finish with whatever enemy opposed him, that enemy on every battlefield himself, no other!
Good! Tros stiffened his huge muscles and his leonine eyes began to gleam under the shaggy brows. There was dignity in that warfare, purpose and plan sufficient, if one should rule himself so manfully in every chance-met circumstance that victory were his, within himself, no matter what the outcome!
And now he remembered Perseus' dying speech, and how the old man had forbidden nothing, not even the sword, but had prophesied for Tros a life of wandering and many another brush with Cæsar. He and Cæsar were to help each other some day!
"Gods! What a prospect!"
Cæsar stood for all that Tros loathed: Interference with men's liberties, imposition of a foreign yoke by trickery and force of arms, robbery under the cloak of law, vice and violence, lies gilded and painted to resemble truth. And he was to help Cæsar! Some day!
He laughed. Yet he believed in deathbed prophecies. The thought encouraged him.
"If I am to help Cæsar, and he me, then my time to die is not yet. For I will injure him with all my might and main until my whole mind changes!"
He reflected that it takes time for a man's inclination to change to that extent.
"My will is not the wind!" he muttered. "I will live long before I befriend Cæsar!"
The wind changed while he thought of it, veering to the southward, blowing all the mist toward the northern riverbank until At last the sun shone on a strip of dark-green where the forest touched the tide-mud and Conops cried "Land-ho!" from the poop.
Swiftly then, that being Britain and the autumn, magic went to work on land-and sea-scape that changed until both wide-flung riverbanks gleamed in sunlight and the heaving estuary-bosom frilled itself with ripples in place of whitecaps on the surface of the waves.
Gray water brightened to steel-blue, stained with brown mud where the tide poured over shoals, and the sea-gulls came off-shore in thousands to pounce on mussel-beds before the tide should cover them.
Then another hail from Conops, and Tros returned to the poop, his mood changing with the weather. He was already whistling to himself.
"Yonder!" said Conops, nodding, his one eye staring upriver. "Too much smoke!"
"Mist!" remarked Orwic, but the wish was father to the contradiction.
He had seen that kind of smoke before; had more than one scar to show for it. One did not admit, until sure, that Northmen might be raiding British homesteads.
"Smoke!" Tros announced after a minute. He could almost smell it. "Orwic! Caswallon shall welcome us after all!"
Orwic shouted. A dozen Britons came out of the hold, to cluster on the poop and stare at the smudge on the skyline. They were handsome, bluntly spoken youngsters, dressed in plundered Roman armor that made the long hair over their shoulders look incongruous—easy-mannered gentlemen, who had twice had the best of Cæsar and were therefore more than usually ready to assert their views. Besides, they were no longer seasick, and were annoyed with Tros, who had compelled them to obey him but had failed to capture Cæsar.
"Northmen!" announced one of them, with an air of being able to read smoke on the skyline as if, it were Celtic script. "Those two longships Tros refused to fight the other day have found their way up Thames! It's Tros' fault! They have stolen a march while we plucked his oat-cake out of Cæsar's fire! By Lud of Lunden, we were fools to trust a foreigner!"
"Aye, and Lunden burning!" said another.
But that was nonsense; the smoke was much nearer than Lunden.
"Two longships and only thirty of us fit to fight!"
"Tros will want to run away again!" a third suggested.
Conops bared his teeth and Orwic, who had led an earlier mutiny to his own distress, made signals; but they deferred no more to Orwic than to Tros. Orwic was only Caswallon's nephew; they were as good as he, and equally entitled to opinions. Besides, as second-in-command, Orwic was responsible along with Tros for failure to capture Cæsar, and that, added to jealousy, was excuse enough for ignoring his signals.
"Any man can sail a ship upriver!" one of them suggested brazenly.
Tros almost brayed astonishment. He had thought he had tamed those cockerels! Cold, seasickness and battle on the deck had reduced the hired crew to the condition of whipped dogs, but these young aristocrats appeared to recover their nerve the moment they smelt a Northman!
It had not yet filtered into Tros' understanding how warfare with the men from over the North Sea was a heritage, almost a privilege, a sport, in which serfs were the prizes and women the side-bets. To mention Northmen near the coast of Britain was like talking wolf to well-trained hounds.
"Caswallon gave the command of this ship to Tros," said Orwic, standing loyally by his appointed chief.
Whereat they laughed. They were in their own home waters; not Caswallon himself might overrule their free wills! Each man thrilled to one and the same impulse. Some of the wounded crawled on deck and, learning what the commotion was about, cried out to Tros to get after the Northmen instantly, hoof, hair and teeth!
"I, too, am minded to make the acquaintance of these Northmen!" Tros remarked; and they grinned, although they did not quite believe him; from what they already knew of him, he was too cautious and conservative to lead them into the kind of fight they craved.
"We will introduce you!" a youngster answered, twisting his long mustache. "We will show you what fighting is!"
"You!" Tros answered; and they all backed forward along the poop because his sword was drawn, although none saw it whip out of the sheath. With his left hand he picked up a Roman shield.
"Orwic! Stand by!"
Orwic obeyed. Tros had beaten him roundly once and they had pledged their faith to each other afterward on that swaying poop on the dark sea off the coast of Gaul. The other Britons began to jeer at Orwic, although they chose their words, for he had been first into the sea at Cæsar's men when the Romans invaded Britain, and there was none but Tros who had ever beaten him on horse or foot.
"Silence!" Tros thundered, tapping with his sword-point on the deck.
One or two laughed, but rather feebly, and they all grew still before the rapping ceased, most of them clutching at their daggers, glancing at one another sidewise.
"Must I teach you young cockerels another lesson? Lud of Lunden! How many arrows have you? Not a hundred! You squandered arrows against Cæsar by the bas-ketful! Do you think Northmen will stand still to have their throats cut? Idiots!"
"We know how to fight Northmen," one man piped up. "We'll show you!"
"You? Show me?" Tros thundered.
He took a long stride forward and they backed away, uncomfortably close now to the poop edge; there was no rail there to lean against.
"By Lud, I'll beat the brains out of the first who speaks again without my leave!" He meant it, and they knew it. "Who has anything to say?"
His swordblade flickered like a serpent's tongue; he seemed able to meet all eyes simultaneously.
"Who speaks?" he repeated; but none answered him.
They could back away no farther; to advance meant instant death to two or three at any rate, and whether or not Orwic should take Tros' side.
"At your hands I have suffered failure!" Tros went on. "It carks in me. I went for Cæsar. I bring back dead and wounded men. Whose fault is that? Yours, you disobedient young ! By the gods who grinned when you wasted arrows, it shall be my fault if I fail again! Now hear me! Not a man aboard this bireme shall see Lunden until we beat the Northmen first! Who questions that?"
He paused dramatically, but there was no answer. He had stolen their thunder by threatening to do what they had first proposed, like yielding to a wrestler's hold in order to upset him.
"Less than a hundred arrows! Not one throwing-spear! A torn sail! Two-score swordsmen fit to stand up! You have nothing but me to depend on! Eat that! Any one question it?"
"You can handle the ship," said one of them.
He seemed afraid to hear his own voice.
"Can I?" Tros' voice rang with irony. "Does any of you question that I will?"
"Come! No ill-temper, Tros! Nobody doubts your seamanship," another man piped up. "We have had proof enough of that."
"Not proof enough! Nay, by Lud of Lunden, not yet enough! Seamanship includes the art of choking mutiny! Who doubts that I command this ship and every Briton in her? Speak up! Who doubts it? I will abolish doubt!"
"Caswallon gave you the command. That is all right," said one of them. "Only lead us against the Northmen, that is all."
"Lead? I will drive you!" Tros retorted. "Stand out, the man who thinks I can't! Come on and let's settle the question! What? Haven't I a rival? Down off my poop then! Down you go!"
He strode toward them, point-first, and they scrambled off the poop in laughter at their own defeat. So Tros saw fit to smile too, as they crowded in the waist to hear the rest of what he had to say.
"Northmen!" he laughed, pecking at the planking with his sword-point. "I will give you such a bellyful of Northmen as you never dreamed! To your benches now! Out oars!"
AND they obeyed him. They had promised they would row when called on. They had disobeyed him more than once, and it was true that they had squandered ammunition contrary to orders—true that, unless he could think of some expedient, they would be helpless against the two or three hundred men the Northmen probably could muster.
But they also obeyed because it dawned on them that Tros was sick at heart from having lost so many men without a victory to show for it, and that he was bent on snatching a revenge from destiny.
Thirteen oars aside began to thump in unison, not adding much to the bireme's speed, but adding a great deal to the unanimity; and presently Tros added twenty more, compelling the hired seamen to man the empty benches, taking the helm himself, leaving Conops and Orwic free to man the sheets. The wind was falling, so that the sail flapped half of the time, but the tide served and with forty-six oars the headway was good enough.
Tros did not want to move too fast. He had never fought Northmen, although Caswallon and Orwic had told him of their methods—how they usually landed from two ships on two sides of a village and fought their way toward each other, burning as they went, to create a panic.
And he knew the British method of opposing them, by throwing fire into their ships if they could come alongside, and by cutting down trees in the forest for a rampart against them when they landed and advanced on foot.
The hundred young men he had taken with him on his venture against Cæsar constituted practically the whole of Caswallon's available fighting force in any sudden emergency. Excepting Lunden, which was only a little place, there were no towns from which to draw levies at a moment's notice; British settlements were scattered and Britons disinclined to obey their chief unless they saw good and sufficient reason for it, so it would take time to summon an army and Caswallon was probably in desperate straits.
It was late in the year for Northman raids, but if these were the two ships that Tros had refused to fight in the Channel on his way to attack Cæsar they might be on one of their usual plundering expeditions; in which case they would be in force and with their line of retreat extremely alertly guarded. Thirty men would be next to useless as an independent force against them and the only hope would be to reach Caswallon somehow and support him.
But it might be that the Northmen's home harvests had failed and they were up to their old game of wintering in Britain, doing all the damage within reach in order to force an armistice and contributions of supplies. In that event they would not be considering retreat, their ships might be unguarded and it might be possible to come on them unawares.
It seemed to Tros, and Orwic confirmed the opinion, that the smoke came from both sides of the river. The man at the mast-head was equally sure of it, and those were his home waters; he knew every contour of the Thames.
That might mean that the Northmen were divided, one ship's crew plundering on either bank; which was likely enough, since it would be good strategy, obliging Caswallon to divide his own forces and making it more difficult for him to gather men into one managable unit. The Britons were probably in scattered tens and dozens being beaten in detail for lack of one directing mind.
"A man does what he can," Tros reflected, glancing upward at the heavy fighting-top, that might be visible from a long way off upriver.
He called the man down from the mast-head, then turned to Orwic.
"You and Conops take axes. Cut the shrouds on the port side. Then chop the mast down!"
He called the hired seamen away from the oars, lowered and stowed the sail, set ten of them to hauling on the starboard shrouds and gave the word to Orwic. Three dozen ax-strokes and the mast went over with a crash, increasing the damage to the bulwark done by Cæsar's grapnels. Swiftly they chopped away the starboard rigging and Tros sent the seamen below to their oars again.
"And now," said Orwic, "I obeyed you, but I don't know why! Without a sail how can we attack two swift ships?"
Tros was not fond of explanations; they are usually bad for discipline; but he conceded something to Orwic's prompt obedience, which was a novelty to be encouraged.
"We should have lost the wind around the next bend anyhow. I would have had to take men from the oars to man sheets and braces. The Northmen are faster; we couldn't have run, sail or no sail. Gather all the arrows into one basket, set that by the starboard arrow-engine, and listen to me! I'll kill you if you loose one flight before I give the word!"
He did not dare to use the bull-hide drum to set time for the rowing, for the sound of a drum carries farther over water than the thump of oars between the thole-pins; he had to rely on gestures and his voice.
The bireme was in midtide, gliding upriver rapidly; the shore was narrowing in on either hand, with shoal-water projecting nearly into midstream at frequent intervals. The smoke of two burning villages, a dozen miles apart and one on either side of the river, was already diminishing from brown to gray and the nearest—not two miles up-river—appeared of the two to be the more burnt out. Tros began to whistle to himself.
BETWEEN the bireme and the nearest smoke there was a belt of trees that crept down to the river on starboard hand. The trees were lower near the water, but even so, now that the mast was gone, they formed an effective screen behind which he could approach without giving warning because the deep-water channel followed the bank closely.
"Orwic," he said quietly, "your Lud of Lunden is a good god, and the Northmen are on both sides of the river! Listen!"
A horn-blast and then another rang through the woods on the starboard hand. They were answered by two more, from not far away.
"Are those British signals?"
"No," said Orwic.
"The tide will serve us for an hour. How many arrows have we?"
"Ninety."
"Save them!"
Away in the distance, from across the river, came the faint sound of several horns blown simultaneously.
"Britons?" asked Tros.
"Northmen."
Tros laughed.
"Caswallon has them checked, I take it! They are summoning their friends!"
He sent Conops to stand below the poop and signal to the oarsmen to dip slowly, quietly. He only needed steerage- way; the tide was carrying the bireme fast enough, perhaps too fast. There was nothing but guesswork until they should pass that belt of trees.
The shoal-mud formed an island nearly in midriver, half submerged, and between that and the land the tide poured in a surging brown stream. There was no room to maneuver, hardly room to have swung a longship with the aid of anchors. A little higher up, beyond the belt of trees, the mudbank vanished under water and there was room enough there for a dozen ships to swing; deep enough water almost from bank to bank the full width of the river. Tros tried to form a mental picture of the riverbank at that point, but he had seen it only once before as he passed it on the outward journey.
"Is there a creek just beyond those trees?" he asked Orwic.
Orwic asked the man who had been at the masthead.
"Yes, a narrow creek. Fairly deep water."
Another horn-blast echoed through the trees. It seemed to come from close to the riverbank and was answered instantly. Like the echo to that from away up-river came a chorus of six horns blown in unison. There began loud shouting from somewhere just beyond the trees and, presently, the unmistakable thump and rattle of oars being laid in rowlocks. A moment later Tros' ear caught the steady, short stroke of deep-sea rowing, such as men use where the waves are steep and close together.
"Now!" he shouted. "Give way!"
There was nothing for it now but speed. If he had the Northmen trapped they were at his mercy; if he had guessed wrong, then the bireme was at theirs. He beat the bull-hide drum and bellowed to his fifty rowers:
"One! Two! One! Two! One! Two!"
Shouts responded from around the tree-clad corner of the bank, shouts and a mighty splashing as a helmsman tried to swing a longship in a hurry out of the creek-mouth bow-first to the tide, backing the port oars.
"Row, you Britons! Row!" Tros thundered, taking the helm from Conops.
He could hear the water boiling off the bireme's ram, and in his mind's eye he could see the Northmen's whole predicament, with no room to maneuver and a strong tide hitting them beam-on as they left the creek-mouth. He could hear their captain bellowing, heard the oar-beat change and knew the longship was attempting, too late, to turn upstream and run from the unseen enemy.
And it was better than he hoped! As the bireme's bow raced past the belt of trees the longship lay with her nose toward the midstream mud-bank, starboard oars ahead and port oars backing frantically, blue mud boiling all around her and panic on deck as a dozen men struggled to hoist the sail to help her swing. She was less than a hundred yards away! Tros could have sunk her, with that tide under him, without troubling the oars at all!
He beaked her stark amidships. As the Northmen loosed one wild volley of arrows, the iron-shod ram crashed in under the bilge and rolled her over, ripping out fifty feet of planking from her side. The shock of the collision threw the rowers from the benches and the bireme swung on the tide with her stern-post not a dozen feet away from the edge of the midstream shoal, then drifted up-stream with wreckage trailing from her bow and the wounded crying that she leaked in every seam.
TROS sent Conops below to discover what the damage really amounted to, and watched the Northmen. Their longship had gone under sidewise, so that not even her mast was visible. Most of her men were drowning; some had struggled to the mud bank, where the yielding mud sucked them under. Others, trying to make the creek-mouth, were being carried upstream by the tide; not many were swimming strongly enough to have any prospect of reaching shore. And as if they had been hiding in fox-holes, Britons began appearing from between the trees gathering in excited groups to cut down the survivors.
"The collision opened up her seams. I doubt she'll float as far as Lunden!" Conops announced.
"How much water has she made yet?"
"Half a cubit, master."
"Orwic, take some of the wounded and man the water-hoist!"
So they rigged the trough amidships, and the beam with a bucket at either end that was the Roman ship designers' concept of a pump.[1] Tros swung the bireme's head up-stream and began to consider that other smudge of brown smoke, half-a-dozen or more miles away.
"Now, if Lud of Lunden really is a good god," he remarked to Orwic, "we will catch another longship on our ugly snout without wasting a single arrow!"
"We might pray to Lud," Orwic suggested.
"No," said Tros. "The gods depise a man who prays. They help men who make use of opportunity. Get below there!"
The oarsmen were all leaning overside to watch the Northmen being cut down by Britons as they struggled through the muddy shallows close by the riverbank.
"Man the benches! Out oars! I'll show you a fight to suit you between here and Lunden Town!"
CHAPTER III
BATTLE!
IT WAS a desperate, dinning fight that raged to the south of the river and a few miles south of Lunden. The tide slackened and began to change; the bireme made slow progress; it was a long time before Tros made out the mast of another longship between the trees ahead of him. But long before that he could hear and see trees falling, as the Britons felled them in the Northmen's path. Orwic kept up a running comment:
"That's a good joke! They have burned Borsten's village; his father was a Northman! They'll have thought to scare Caswallon and force terms from him. Threats only make him fight! Did you see that tree fall? That's by Borsten's Brook. Caswallon has whipped a force together in the nick of time. He has them cut off from the river. There! another tree. They're ringing them around! Land us yonder, Tros; I know a short cut to where Caswallon stands praying to the gods for thirty extra men!"
"No!" Tros answered, with a jaw-snap that conveyed conviction.
Tros' eyes were on that longship. He lusted to possess it. It lay bow-out of water on the mud, with a kedge in mid-stream with which to haul off in a hurry in case of need. In all his wanderings he had never seen a ship with such sweet lines; she was almost the ship of his dreams—not big enough, but there were only three men guarding her and she would do for a beginning! One of the three men blew a horn-blast as he sighted the dismasted bireme. Tros' laugh was like an answering trumpet call; he knew that ship was his if only he could manage his excited Britons!
It was easy enough to read what had happened: A raiding party of Northmen caught ashore by the Britons and cut off from their ship; the men left to guard the ship summoned by horn to the rescue, only to find themselves in the same trap.
"The Britons will burn that ship, Lud rot them, unless I prevent!" Tros muttered.
But he was hard put to it to keep his own Britons rowing; they wanted to ram the riverbank and leap ashore to help block the Northmen's retreat. Half of them at a time, and sometimes all of them, left the oars to lean over the bulwark and instruct Tros how to lead in to the bank; it was only when they saw the bireme drifting backward down the river that they returned to the oars reluctantly.
There began to be downright mutiny again; one man threw a lump of wood that missed Tros by a hair'sbreadth; the wounded crawled on deck and cursed him for a coward alien. He thundered on the drum for silence, gesturing to Conops at the helm to hold the bireme in midriver.
"You young fools!" he roared. "If you take their ship away, what have they left to retreat to?"
But they did not see the point. They wanted to rush to Caswallon's aid and share in the glory of cutting down the hereditary enemy. Three jumped overboard and swam for it.
"Back to your arrow-engine, Orwic! Shoot the next man who leaves his bench! Row or Lud rot you! One! Two! One! Two! Easy, starboard. Port ahead. Now, all together, back her!"
He swung the bireme's stern toward the longship's kedge-warp, and sent Conops overside to bend another warp to it, making that fast to the bireme's stern. Then—down-stream now—he bullied them all to rowing until the kedge came up and the bireme swayed like a pendulum in mid-stream, mud boiling all around her.
"Watch those three Northmen, Orwic! Shoot if they try to cast off!"
The longship heeled. Her bow began to swing round on the mud. Two of the three who guarded her ran to cut the kedge-warp with their swords.
"Shoot!"
Orwic loosed twelve arrows in one flight and one man fell; the other hid himself below the bulwarks; the third sprang to the longship's stern and hacked the warp through with a battle-ax, but too late; the ship slid off the mud at last and glided into midstream.
The bireme shot ahead when the warp parted; it was a minute before backed oars could take the way off her; then, port oars forward, starboard oars astern, Tros swung her in a circle in midstream.
Two minutes after that they broke three oars as the bireme bumped the longship and a dozen Britons led by Orwic jumped aboard. The two Norsemen took to the river like water-rats; four Britons plunged after them; Tros lashed the ships together, beam to beam and let them drift down-river with the tide, which set toward the south bank, away from the fighting.
A quarter of a mile downstream he dropped two anchors, he and Conops standing guard over the cables lest the indignant Britons should cut them and try to row across to the other side. Only Orwic, and he nervously, stood by him; the remainder, wounded included, threatened, threatened and cursed him for a flinching coward; but as they could not swim, they could not leave him.
Tros watched the far bank, trying to imagine what he himself would do if he were a Northman hemmed in by determined enemies and cut off from his ship. Those Northmen doubtless had a leader wise in war, chosen to lead raids because of previous successes.
He did not believe they would have landed without exploring all the riverbank; it was at least an even chance that the two who had swum for shore had reached their friends to warn them the ship was gone.
Orwic bit his fingernails, torn three ways between loyalty to Tros, anxiety for his friends ashore and eagerness to lead his own men into the thick of the fighting.
"By Lud, we will be too late!" he grumbled. "Too late! Too late! Tros"
"If Caswallon can keep them away from the river, there's no need for us," Tros answered. "If they reach the river, they'll find boats and try to recapture their ship."
"But there aren't any boats!" Orwic objected.
"Then again, no need for us! But I will wager there are boats, among the reeds, and the Northmen know it."
"Then let's hunt for boats and burn them!"
Tros laughed.
"Set this crowd of ours ashore, and who'll keep them out of the fighting!"
The Britons, and some of the wounded with them, had nearly all jumped into the longship and were holding a sort of parliament, even the hired seamen taking part. An iron bolt hurled at Tros just missed him where he stood in the bireme's bow, and some one shouted—
"Cross the river, or we'll burn both ships!"
THEY had found the Northmen's fire-pot and meant business; there was smoke where half a dozen of them stooped over a box full of kindling, blowing on it. "By Pluto's teeth! Ye'll burn my prize of war?"
Tros would rather see a city burned than lose that sweet-lined ship! He leaped on the longship's bow, roared like a bull and charged them, scattering them right and left, kicking fire-pot and kindling overboard before they could draw their weapons; and by that time he had his back against the mast, the hilt of his long sword on a level with his chin, its point just sufficiently in motion to confirm the resolution in its owner's eye.
They were not afraid of him exactly. There was none, at that crisis, who would not have dared to try conclusions. They had all fought Romans on the Kentish beach, had beaten Cssar's men at Seine-mouth, had been trained, since they were old enough to hold a weapon, against the wolf, the Northmen and the neighboring British tribes.
Cowardice was their pet abomination. But he had them puzzled. They were Celts, hereditary gentlemen, much given to reflection and to arguing all sides of everything, deeply versed in chivalry and legend, and despising the notion of attacking one man in overwhelming numbers. Against any one except Northmen they preferred argument to violence. They admired him for his daring to defy them all.
Four of them kept him backed against the mast; six others engaged Conops in the longship's bow, fending off his vicious knife-thrusts, while two more hacked the cables through and set both ships adrift again.
But they drifted toward the wrong shore naturally, since the tide set that way.
Within a hundred yards they were aground on clinging mud, and in a moment after that there were only wounded left to reckon with, the remainder, hired seamen and all, had plunged overside and were struggling shoulder-deep to reach the swampy bank and hunt for boats, rafts, anything in which to cross the river.
Orwic hesitated. Tros took pity on him, and a shrewd thought for himself.
"Friend o' mine, I give you leave to go!" he said, laughing, and Orwic jumped overside without touching the bulwark.
"And so by law, if there is any law, the longship's mine!" Tros chuckled.
Some of the Britons began to swim across the river, using logs to help them breast the third of a mile of strong stream. Four men found a raft near the edge of the swamp and wasted several minutes arguing with seven wounded men who tried to take it from them, until Orwic arrived and seized command; he put the wounded on the raft and made the others help him swim the crazy thing.
Several men found horses—Britons could be trusted to smell a horse if there were one within five miles—and within fifteen minutes of the ships' touching the mud the last horse took the water with its long mane held by two men and a third—he had only one arm—clinging to its tail.
Battle raged unseen on the far bank, to the tune of horn-blasts and the crash of falling trees. Chariot and horseback fighting—the Britons' favorite method—had developed a type of defensive tactics to correspond; they were experts at felling trees in the path of an advancing or retreating enemy, ringing him around if possible, blocking the narrow forest paths and reenforcing the dense, tangled undergrowth with massive tree-trunks.
It was easy to read the wavering fortune of the battle by observing trees that fell, in different directions, three, four at a time.
Once it seemed as if the Northmen were surrounded, then as if they were making good retreat toward where they had left their longship. But that might have been a feint; the shouting and crashing changed direction; there followed a din of horn-blasts as the Britons reformed ranks and rushed to block a new line of retreat.
Once three Northmen, iron helmeted and armed with battle-axes, showed themselves on a bare hillock near by the ruins of a burned hut on the riverbank, but they were cut down instantly by a score of Britons who rushed out of the forest.
Once Tros thought he saw Caswallon, mounted, galloping along the river's edge to turn the Northmen's flank.
It was easy now to distinguish Norse from British horn-blasts; the Northmen's note was flat, blown on an ox-horn; the Britons used copper, and even silver instruments that rang through the woods with an exciting peal. Shouting and horn-blasts signified that the Northmen had fought clear of the felled-tree barriers, were retiring in considerable number almost parallel with the riverbank, their right flank possibly two hundred yards away from it, with an apparently impenetrable thicket in between them and the river.
By the sound they were circling that thicket on the far side. The Britons were striving to crowd them against it.
Except for a few feet of stump-dotted marsh it reached almost to the water's edge—an obstacle to Briton and Northmen alike; but once or twice Tros could see Britons creeping into it to take the Northmen in flank or from the rear, armed with spears with which to thrust at the Northmen's backs from behind the cover of the undergrowth.
Once, about two score Britons tried to make their way between the river and the trees, jumping from clump to clump of turf and rotting roots, but the strip of marsh came to an end in knee-deep mud in which they floundered until they gave up the attempt and struggled back again to hack a path through the undergrowth toward the enemy's flank.
Ten minutes after that, the Northmen's strategy revealed itself. They fought their way around the thicket to a creek that Tros could not see because of intervening trees. The news that they had reached it was announced by a frantic chorus of British bugle-notes.
Another thirty or forty Britons charged along the riverbank and tried to force their way to the creek-mouth, but were prevented by the mud that grew deeper the farther they went, until some of them floundered to the breast in it and had to be hauled out by their friends.
And presently, from behind the trees that shut off Tros' view of the creek-mouth, three small boats emerged crowded with Northmen, towing others who clung to the boats' gunwales helping to shove the boats along until the water grew too deep.
The Northmen's shields were a solid phalanx, behind which they crouched in the boats, protecting the paddlers against British arrows. Some of the men in the water swam with shields over the heads, but some were already drowning. Tros counted nearly sixty men, and there more behind them, too late for the boats or crowded out, dodging missiles as they swam.
THEIR leader stood in the first boat, a big man with long mustaches drooping to his chin and a bushy, clipped, red beard, young, hardly thirty by the look of him, but a giant in stature, with a head that drooped a little forward as if he were a habitual deep-thinker, or else wounded or very weary.
He was nearly a full head taller than the tallest of his men, two of whom stood beside him. Their eyes were on the Britons ashore, but his were on the longship. He stood recklessly, ignoring arrows, hardly troubling to raise the painted shield on his left arm. As the boats drew nearer Tros saw three women crouching among the men.
"If that chief loves a ship as I do, he will fight!" Tros said to Conops. "Swiftly bid our wounded show their heads above the bulwark."
The longship had had the inside berth when both ships took the mud, but the tide had carried their sterns around, pivoting them on the bireme's ram, which presently stuck fast, so that now both sterns were out into the stream, with the longship free except for the ropes that held her to the bireme's side.
Smashed oars, jammed between them, kept the ship's sides from grinding, and the water making in the bireme's hold brought her down by the stern, so that she lay now for two-thirds of her length on soft mud, immovable until they should pump the water out and the tide should turn again and lift her.
Tros climbed up to the bireme's poop, leaving Conops on the longship's bow, and carefully chose twelve arrows from the basket, laying them in the arrow-engine's grooves and cranking the clumsy mechanism that drew the bow taut. Then he studied the wounded, some of whom by using all their strength could hardly keep their heads above the bulwark; there was not one man among them fit for fighting; whoever could carry his weight had gone with Orwic to the battle in the woods.
"Men of Lunden," Tros said, for he knew they liked that better than if he had called them Britons, "we will burn both ships under us rather than let Northmen have them! But I think those Northmen have a bellyfull. Let your heads appear and reappear, as if there were a host of you crouching below the bulwark."
Many of them lacked strength to keep their chins above the bulwark for more than a few seconds at a time. They raised their heads, let go, and struggled up again to watch the approaching boats, which came very slowly, for lack of enough paddles and because of the overload and the strength of the tide in midstream.
On the far shore the Britons were using horses to drag felled trees into the water, laboring shoulder-deep to lash a raft together on which enough of them might cross to dare to give the Northmen battle.
But that was a work that required time; the Northmen had burned all the buildings within reach, so there were no doors or hewn timber available.
The Northmen appeared to have no information about arrow-engines, but they seemed to expect ordinary arrow-fire. As they won their way across-stream in slow procession, more than fifty yards apart, and the distance between them increasing, they kept their boats' heads pointed toward the ships' sterns to reduce the breadth of the target, and the men in the bows raised a sloping barricade of locked shields; but they were wooden shields. Tros' engine could have shot a flight of arrows through them as easily as an ordinary arrow goes through leather jerkins.
The Northman chief chose to lighten his boat. He growled an order and six men leaped into the water, leaving only twelve and three women. The six, along with those who had swum alongside all the way, turned back and made for the second boat, which was already overcrowded.
Leaning his weight against the table on which the arrow-engine turned, Tros let the leading boat approach within two ships' lengths before he tried conclusions.
"Who comes here to yield himself?" he shouted then in the Gaulish tongue, for he knew neither Norse nor any of the dialects of Northern Britain, which a Northman might possibly have understood.
That leading boat was at his mercy; it was a frail thing, nearly awash with the weight of men; but he could see those fair-haired women crouching among the men's legs, and though he would have taken oath before a pantheon of gods that his own heart was invulnerable—that whether a foe was male or female was all one to him—he held his finger on the trigger yet a while.
The Northmen seemed to hesitate. They let their boat turn sidewise, head upstream, exposing its whole flank to Tros. The chieftain in the midst uphove a great two-headed ax and gestured at the bireme's stern, shouting strange words in a voice that resembled waves echoing in caverns.
It appeared he was defying Tros to single combat, a disturbing possibility that Tros had overlooked. He was under no compulsion to accept a challenge, but he knew what the Britons—and their women in particular—would say of any man who should refuse one. It was part of the tactics of war so to fight as to provide an enemy no opportunity to issue such a challenge until the outcome of single combat could not affect the issue either way.
However, Tros was not sure he had understood yet; and there were no women in the third boat, which was laboring in midstream, losing headway against the tide. They were rowing with a pole and broken branches. He loosed the flight of arrows at it, plunking the whole dozen square amidships.
The wounded Britons yelled delight. The arrows pierced the shields and struck men down, who fell against the farther gunwale and upset the crowded boat. The others, jumping to save themselves, capsized it, and it drifted down-stream, bottom upward.
The second boat backed out of range, avoiding the men in the water because there was no room for them. It was nearly awash already without the added burden of strong hands on the gunwale and heavy men seeking to clamber overside; its crew of discouraged Northmen elected presently to drift down-stream, hoping perhaps to make connection with the crew of the other longship lower down.
So there was only one boat left to deal with for the moment, one boat, eleven men, and that great, grim Northman captain, with the women crouching at his knees. The Northman's eyes were on the longship; he was close enough for Tros to see them and to recognize despair, the mother of forlorn hope.
No ruler loves a kingdom as the true sea-captain loves a ship he built and navigated through the rock-staked seas. Tros knew that blue-eyed yearning; he could ever feel it in his own bones when he planned the queen of all ships he would some day build and sail into the unknown.
HE LAID another dozen arrows in the grooves and cranked the engine; but the Northman, who could see him plainly, stayed within range, flourishing his ax as if he courted death, bellowing his bull-mouthed phrases that to Tros conveyed less meaning than his gestures.
They were a challenge repeated again and again. There was no humility about that man; in his defeat he was as splendid as in victory, demanding a right that no brave man might keep from him. One of the wounded Britons called to Tros, interpreting his words:
"He bids you fight him for the longship! Beat him, says he, and he surrenders to you—he and his men and his women. If he beats you, he takes the longship and you must help him sail it home! But if each should kill the other, then his men- and women-folk are at Caswallon's mercy! Those are his terms. You must fight him, Tros!"
But it irked Tros to be told he must do anything. He could have shot that Northman down, and though the wounded Britons would have mocked him for a coward, he was strong-willed; he could face their scorn if he saw fit.
His eyes were on the farther riverbank, where now a hundred of Caswallon's men were working like beavers to build the raft, and he was calculating just how long they would require to finish it and to pole it across the river. He decided they would never be able to move such a clumsy platform fast enough through the water to overtake the Northmen, although if the bireme and the longship were attacked they might arrive in time to save both, and if they were successful they would claim the longship as their lawful plunder.
It was therefore up to him, Tros, to decide, and to do it swiftly.
He doubted Caswallon, remembered that Gaulish fishing-boat dismasted in the Channel storm, recalled to mind the likelihood that Cæsar's men had undermined him in Caswallon's favor by some ingenious means. Even if Tros should fight for the longship and defeat the Northman, Caswallon might claim as his own property all shipping captured in the Thames.
Cæsar's treasure-chest, left with Caswallon for safe keeping, would be a strong temptation to Caswallon's intimates, if not to the chief himself to force a quarrel, and the long ship, if Tros should claim it for his own, might prove an excellent excuse. It was a sharp predicament.
But the Northman kept on challenging, and the wounded Britons urged. And suddenly a blue-eyed girl stood up beside the Northman, with fair hair falling in long plaits nearly to her knees.
She set one foot on the gunwale and mocked Tros in the Gaulish language, calling him a coward among other names. The words were ill-pronounced, but her voice throbbed with such scorn as Tros had never listened to—he who had heard harbor-women scold their lovers on the wharfs of Antioch and Alexandria!
The words—he knew their worth and could ignore them—might have left him careless, but the voice and her manner brought the hot blood to his cheeks. He had never seen a woman like her, had never before felt such strange emotions as her anger stirred in him. She looked not older than nineteen.
Tros threw his hand up in a gesture of command. Briton and Northman alike paused breathless at the signal.
"Tell me your name!" he demanded.
He had right to know that; a man did not engage in single combat with inferiors by birth.
"I am Olaf Sigurdsen of Malmoe."
"I am Tros, the son of Perseus Prince of Samothrace," Tros answered, laughing to himself.
His father would have been finely scandalized at the proceedings!
"I will fight you on your own terms. Come aboard."
They paddled the boat toward the bireme, but Tros bade them halt when they were half a dozen boat's length distant. He had heard that Northmen were colossal liars, although he had only heard that from their enemies, the Britons. He knew they were plunderers by profession; he doubted it was in them to keep faith if they should learn that only wounded men were on the bireme and that the longship lay defenseless. He summoned Conops, posted him at the loaded arrow-engine.
"Come aboard alone," he said then, speaking slowly, waiting for the blue-eyed girl to interpret to Olaf Sigurdsen.
He laid his right hand on the arrow-engine.
"You may put in to the riverbank. I will count it treachery if more than one man steps ashore. Then climb on to this bireme over the bow, and let the boat put out again into the river. You must fight me on my own poop, Olaf Sigurdsen."
"I will come, and yet, I have no proof of you," the Northman answered.
The blue-eyed girl translated that with such withering scorn that Tros winced. Olaf Sigurdsen sat down, perhaps to rest himself, but the girl stood, continuing to glare at Tros until the boat's bow touched the mud and she had to clutch the chieftain's head to keep her balance.
Conops turned the arrow-engine, following the boat, and went through ostentatious pantomime of taking aim; but Olaf Sigurdsen jumped ashore and they poled the boat out again into the stream, driving the pole into the mud presently to serve as an anchor against the tide.
Then Sigurdsen came up over the bow and, battle-ax on hip, stood, realizing how he had deceived himself. Tros' wounded Britons sprawled along the deck below the bulwark, most of them with hardly strength enough to grin at him, some almost in the grip of death, all bleeding through blood-stiffened bandages. He saw the shapes of dead men under the sail-cloth forward of the citadel and gave a great laugh, lifting his battle-ax high and shouting to his friends:
"Hah! They have had a taste of us! They must have met with Volstrum's ship down-river! Volstrum bit them to the marrow, all but two!"
The Norsemen cheered and all three women in the boat mocked Tros, the young girl thumping her breast and claiming him as her own slave, to fetch and carry for her and to feed swine.
"Don't slay him! Beat him to his knees!" she cried to Sigurdsen, and repeated it in Gaulish so that Tros might understand.
"You may come," said Tros, and drew well back along the poop, drawing his long sword, throwing off the Roman cloak and stepping close to the arrow-engine, so that Conops might unbuckle the breast-armor.
The wounded Britons cheered him when the armor fell on deck, for they despised a man who did not bare his naked breast to an assailant. Then, pulling off his shirt, Tros flexed his huge muscles so that the hairy skin moved in waves and the Britons cheered again, he keeping his eyes on Sigurdsen and speaking through the corner of his mouth to Conops:
"Now, no dog's work! Keep your knife to yourself! If you so much as lift a hand to help me I'll turn from the fighting to skewer you to the deck! You understand? Hands off!"
SIGURDSEN came slowly up the ladder to the poop, ready to jump backward if Tross hould spring at him before his feet were on the deck, but Tros gave him full law and a breathing spell, considering the iron links on the outside of the Northmen's leather jerkin, wondering whether the iron was soft or brittle.
The Northman wore no helmet; he had lost it in the fighting over-river. His reddish hair hung to his shoulders and his blood-shot eyes shone with a gleam of desperation under an untidy fringe; and he had brought no shield. He looked tired, but he was not wounded; the blood on his face was from a scratch caused by brambles as he fought his way out of the forest.
For a full minute he and Tros stood studying each other, Conops whispering advice that Tros ignored.
"The point, master! The point! Up, and under the chin! Remember, an ax is all blade. He can only swing with it, but he has a long reach. Keep close, where he can only use short chops, and use your point!"
At last the Northman growled like an angry bear and came on, his weight on the balls of his feet, which made him tower above Tros, holding his great ax forward in both hands.
Tros met him with the point, stock-motionless, not giving ground, until the Northman stepped back suddenly and with the speed of lightning swung at the sword to break it. Tros' wrist hardly moved, but the ax-blade missed the sword-blade by an inch and the point went in between two links of the Northman's mail.
The prick of that maddened him; he came on like a whirlwind, swinging the ax upward at Tros' jaw—missed, because Tros stepped back at last and, rising on both feet, aimed two-handed at the crown of Tros' head.
Tros sprang aside, expecting the ax would crash into the deck and leave the Northman at his mercy, but the blow was turned in middescent and swept at him as if his body were a tree-trunk, slicing the skin at his waist—then the same blow back again, back-handed, quicker than a snake's strike, and Tros had to jump clear.
The Northman rushed him, crouched a little, with his knees bent, thrusting upward at the sword-blade, so that Tros' lunge only skinned his crown, beginning at the forehead; but that brought blood down into the Northman's eyes, half-blinding him, and he missed his next swing wildly.
He tried to shake the blood off, spared his left hand for a second, but that cost him a thrust through the arm and Conops yelled retorts in Greek to the women who screamed encouragement in Norse.
Tros had his man now, knew it, carried the fight to him, side-stepping the prodigious swings and thrusting, forever thrusting with short jabs at the Northman's right arm, circling cautiously around him with his knees bent and his legs spread well apart.
The air screamed with the ax-blows. Twice the Northman knocked the sword-blade upward, rushed in under it and tried to brain Tros with the up-thrust, using the ax-end like a club; and Tros had never fought an ax-man; he caught the first of those blows underneath his arm-pit and for a moment it deadened his whole left side.
But every time the Northman pressed a savage charge home it cost him blood from some part of his body. Ten times Tros could have killed him and refrained. He kept on thrusting at the right arm until the blood streamed down and the ax-hilt slipped in the Northman's fingers.
Then for two or three titanic minutes Sigurdsen swung with his left alone, using his right to try to grab Tros' sword-blade; but Tros opened the cut in his forehead again and the Northman jumped back to the poop-rail, trying to shake blood out of his eyes.
"Now kill him, master!" Conops shouted. "Up under the chin and finish him!"
But Tros stood back, breathing heavily, point forward and his sword-hand high.
"Now yield!" he said to Sigurdsen, ignoring the yells of the Northmen in the boat, that might have put him on his guard if he had paid attention to them.
He spared one swift glance for the Britons over-river; they were coming at last, a hundred of them crowded on a crazy raft, with horses swimming loose on either side of it and two men clinging to each horse's tail.
But that one glance was nearly one too many. In the fraction of a second that he spared for it the Northman stiffened, whirled his ax and hurled it with both hands straight at Tros' head. It cut his right cheek as he side-stepped to avoid it, crashed against the citadel and stuck in the woodwork, humming.
"And now, Olaf Sigurdsen, yield yourself; for you and your women and those other men are mine!" said Tros.
Sigurdsen bowed his head and held up his right hand. Conops shouted at the top of his lungs in Greek, and the wounded Britons cheered, raising themselves by the bulwark to taunt the Northmen in the boat. Sigurdsen offered his throat for Tros' sword, but Tros wiped his blade on Conops' shirt and rammed it home into the sheath.
"And the longship, too, is mine!" he said.
Sigurdsen nodded. He and Tros could understand each other when the conversation was of such essentials as ships.
Tros held out his right hand.
"Can you see it, Sigurdsen?" he asked.
The Northman shook the blood out of his eyes again, stared dumbly for a moment, came two or three steps forward as if doubting what he saw and stood rigid, waiting. He was dazed. It seemed he still expected to be killed.
Tros seized him in both arms, patting him on the back, and Conops cried, being a Greek, who had few emotions of his own but huge capacity for feeling what he supposed Tros felt. The Northman sobbed as if his lungs would burst, but whether that was grief or anger none might say; and there came a keening from the boat alongside, led by women's voices.
They had had to keep faith, whether or not they had intended it, because the raft was nearly in midstream and there was no longer the slightest hope of escape from the hurrying Britons.
Tros kicked the arrow-basket and upended it, let Sigurdsen to sit there, and ordered Conops to bring water and cleanse his wounds. Then he pulled on his shirt and leaned overside to speak to the girl who had mocked him.
She was silent, dry-eyed, standing in the boat—it was the other, older women and the men who wailed. Her eyes met Tros' defiantly, bewildering blue eyes like flakes of northern sky under her flaxen hair, eyes that made Tros feel unfamiliar emotions; they seemed able to rob him of the fruit of victory.
"You may come up and tell me your name," he said gruffly.
"I am Helma, sister of Olaf Sigurdsen," She answered. But she made no motion to obey him; simply stood there with her hands clasped.
TROS vaulted the rail, descended midway down the wooden ladder that was spiked to the bireme's side and offered her his right hand. She refused it with an imperious chin-gesture that commanded him to climb and let her follow; so he laughed and led.
She was beside him almost before his own feet touched the deck. There their eyes met again and he smiled, but she turned her back, went to her brother's side to take the sponge from Conops and attend his wounds. She said not one word to Tros or to her brother or to any one.
CHAPTER IV
TROS MAKES PRISONERS AND FALLS IN NEED OF FRIENDS
THE raft drew near, and as the horses' feet found bottom they were harnessed to it to increase the speed. Caswallon, with Orwic beside him, stood in the raft's bow, wiping blood off the white skin over his ribs where a Northman's spear had entered an inch or two. He wore belted breeches, spear and shield, and a little peaked iron cap, but the blue designs painted on his skin made it look as if he wore a shirt, too, until he was a dozen yards away.
There was no news Tros could give him. Orwic had told about Volstrum's ship, sunk lower down the Thames. The Northmen whom Tros could claim as his own prisoners, men and women, had climbed aboard the bireme and were standing in the ship's waist looking miserable, all except Sigurdsen's wife, who was helping Helma tend his wounds.
The other woman was a widow; her man had been cut down by the Britons in the forest fighting and she was keening to the sky about her loss.
As many of the wounded Britons on the bireme as could stand up shouted to Caswallon and his men the news of Sigurdsen's surrender, including the terms of combat and the fact that the longship now belonged to Tros.
By the look on Orwic's face there was something in the wind beside the Northman business; he kept glancing at Caswallon and from him to Tros, who for his own part studied the prisoners and counted their weapons on the poop beside him. Conops, swearing Greek oaths, leaned against the arrow-engine, itching to loose its charge against the Britons on the raft if they should dare to invade the longship. He knew how much loot they would leave in it! They would burn it when every movable stick had been ripped away!
However, Caswallon came hand-over-hand up the bireme's ladder, followed by Orwic and six others; he ordered the men on the raft ashore to find some way of following the Norse fugitives down-stream. Half a dozen tried to disobey him, swarming up the bireme's side, but he jumped off the poop and beat them back with his spear-butt, the others laughing at them from the raft.
Then Caswallon looked the wounded over—a third of them were his blood-relations—and said a few words to each before he climbed the poop again and answered Tros' salute.
"So you have come home, Tros!"
He smiled, but he did not offer to embrace Tros as the British custom was. "Orwic tells me you are a great sea-captain."
His words were almost cordial; there only lacked a half-note and the old careless air of friendship to make him the same Caswallon who had seen the bireme on its way from Lunden ten days before—but that might be due to the fighting over-river and distress to see so many good men dead and maimed. Tros answered with his hands behind him:
"I bring my father's body, for which I must beg obsequies. I crave the favor that he may lie in British earth beside your own brave men. Caswallon, not a man is missing; dead or alive I have brought them all!"
Caswallon nodded, glancing to right and left.
"Are you well enough paid—with a longship and—how many prisoners?" he asked.
"I never asked payment," Tros answered. "Caswallon, what is wrong between us?"
Caswallon frowned, stroking his mustache and tossing the long hair back over his shoulder. For a moment he studied the blue-eyed girl who was washing her brother's wounds; but she turned her back toward him, and he met Tros' eyes again.
"If what I hear of you is true, I will nevertheless remember former friendship, Tros. If it is not true, it is better not spoken in men's hearing. Let us talk alone."
Tros led the way down from the poop and into the cabin where his father's body lay. The smell in there was stifling; Caswallon snorted, but Tros threw the door wide and they stood together studying the old man's face.
"Like a Druid," Caswallon said at the end of a long silence.
"Greater than any Druid!" Tros answered gruffly.
"What are those marks on his wrists?" Caswallon asked.
"Cæsar tortured him!"
They faced each other in the light that poured through the open door.
"Is it true, or is it not true, Tros, that you have made a pact with Cæsar?"
"It is not true," Tros said frowning. "Who has come telling you that lie?"
"Skell! You spared Skell's life when you had the right to kill him. You sent him to Cæsar, as you told me to help you to trick Cæsar. But now Skell returns with a tale about secret intriguing."
Tros whistled.
"I turned Skell over to Cæsar's men at Caritia, thinking they would put him in the pest-house. Has Skell won Cæsar's confidence so soon?"
"He is home again, and in strange company," said Caswallon. "I have not seen him, but"
Tros laid a hand on Caswallon's arm.
"I speak," he said, "in the presence of the dead. Believe me or Skell! Which shall it be?"
Caswallon turned his back and stood for a full minute in the doorway, stroking his chin, watching the wounded on the deck. Druids had arrived from somewhere; with their long skirts tucked into their girdles they were pouring liquid on to stiffened bandages, examining wounds, behaving workmanly, as if they knew their trade. Caswallon turned suddenly.
"Tros," he exclaimed, "I am beholden to you twice, and I would not take Skell's word for it that the sun is not the moon. Yet Orwic tells me you refused to fight the Northmen until you ran into them down-river and there was no room for you to run; he tells me that at Seine-mouth you spoke with Cæsar in Latin, which is a tongue we Britons don't understand."
"I called on Cæsar to surrender to me," Tros interrupted. "He had climbed over the bow when I sunk his boat and"
"And Orwic tried to capture him, but you called Orwic off. Cæsar did not surrender, but you and he spoke, after which he escaped! And now comes Skell to Hythe, whence he sends me a letter by a woman's hand; and the woman says Cæsar has promised you my kingdom when I am dead, in return for your having spared his life. She had a letter for you from Cæsar, written in Latin, which I can not read. These Northmen raided Hythe before they came up-Thames. How is it you were so long following them up-river?"
"Storms! I was hove-to in the ocean. Moreover, I did not know of Northmen in the Thames. When I saw the smoke of villages"
"My men say you refused to let them land and run to my aid!"
"Did I not sink a longship?" Tros asked indignantly.
"Yes, when there was no alternative! And now, when you might have shot these other Northmen down, you let one whole boat-load of them escape, and you accept their chief's surrender to yourself—their chief, three women and how many men? I find that strange."
"Will you listen to me?" Tros asked; and when Caswallon nodded he told his own story from the beginning, omitting no details, not even his own qualms and his thoughts of making for the Belgian coast.
"For I foresaw you might doubt me, and I knew Cæsar would be swift with some ingenious trick. Now it amounts to this, Caswallon: I am Cæsar's enemy, and your friend. But you and I are free men. You may end our friendship when it pleases you."
Caswallon hesitated, with his hands behind him. There was something on his mind still.
"I have told all. What are you keeping from me?" Tros asked him.
"You shall speak with Fflur," Caswallon answered.
Tros breathed relief. Whoever else was fickle, he knew Fflur! Caswallon's wife was loyal to Caswallon, but no subtlety could undermine her judgment; she could see through men and their intrigues; she ruled her husband and his corner of Britain without his knowing it; and she was Tros' friend.
"In the meanwhile?" Tros asked.
"I do not forget you were my friend," Caswallon answered, "and though you have lost me sixty men on your adventure, you have saved me it may be a hundred in their place by sinking that Northman down-river. I am king here and the river rights are mine, but you may have that longship and your prisoners. That chest of Cæsar's gold you left with Fflur is yours, too. You may bury your father's corpse in British earth. Thereafter we will hear what Fflur says."
CASWALLON strode out on the deck and went to where the druids were tending wounds. Because he was the chief, a druid tried to insist on bandaging the spear-wound over his ribs, but Caswallon took the druid by the shoulders and shoved him back to the task he had left, standing then to watch the marvels of swift surgery the druids wrought.
They had a drug that caused unconsciousness; they opened one man's skull and inset bone from the skull of another who had been dead an hour or two;[1] one druid opened his own vein and surrendered a quart of blood for the veins of a man who had nearly bled to death. But they amputated no limbs; if a leg or an arm was beyond their skill to repair, they let the man die whole, as he had come into the world, easing his death with an anodyne.
Tros returned to the poop, where Sigurdsen sat glowering at the Britons, his wife wailing on the deck beside him, and the blue-eyed Helma standing, her back to the rail and her chin high, too proud to shed, tears, too hopeless to speak even to her own kin.
She looked away over Tros' shoulder at the skyline, and Tros, who had seen well-bred women sold at auction in many a foreign port, turned over in his mind what he might say that should console her—possibly a little, if not much.
"Can your people ransom you?" he asked.
She met his eyes and answered with surprizing calm, her voice not trembling:
"No. These are all my people. There was war and the men of Helsing burned our villages. There was neither corn nor dried meat left, and the fishing is hard in winter, so we came to seize a holding here, my brother and Volstrum of Fiborg-by-Malmoe, with their two ships and all the men that remained. Most of the women and children had been carried off by the men of Helsing. None can ransom us unless Volstrum comes up-river, and if he comes "
"He will not come," Tros assured her. "I have sunk his ship. If he is not drowned he will fall into the Britons' hands."
She betrayed no emotion at that news, but repeated it in Norse to her brother, who laid his head between his hands and groaned aloud.
"Will you sell her to me?" asked a Briton, one of the men who had been in the thick of the fighting across the river and had boarded the bireme with Caswallon. "I bid you two man-slaves and two horses for her."
"No," Tros answered, and the other Britons sneered at the man who made the bid.
They all had slaves. Buying and selling was lawful; they now and then sold criminals and captives to foreign ship-owners to replace sailors who had died of scurvy; but they did not approve of barter in human beings.
However, there was an atmosphere of enmity to Tros; some one had been spreading rumors. They held aloof from him, giving him two-thirds of the bireme's poop instead of crowding to ask questions or to boast of their own prowess against the northmen in the woods.
"What shall I do with you?" Tros asked, meeting the girl's sky-blue eyes.
He knew what he would do with Sigurdsen unless destiny should interfere; so Sigurdsen's wife was no problem, and the widow-woman, who was wailing in a corner below the poop, would dry her eyes before long and be chosen as some man's mate. But this fair-haired girl puzzled him.
"I said what I would do if Sigurdsen had beaten you!" she answered. "I would have put iron on your neck and you should have fetched and carried for me!"
"But I beat Sigurdsen," said Tros. "I am obliged to make provision for you. Shall I marry you to one of his men?"
She bared her teeth.
"Anything but that!" she answered scornfully. "They all ran from the men of Helsing! They ran! And their women and children became captives! Yonder in those woods they ran again, instead of dying where they stood!"
Suddenly her eyes laughed, as if she saw the ultimate of irony and took delight in it.
"I belong to you," she went on. "Are you also a coward?"
Tros stroked his black beard, squaring back his shoulders. Not so soon, if ever, would he link fate with a woman. His father had instilled into him at least that one conviction: Yielding to that lure, and freedom of earth and sea, were incompatible.
"I have yet to meet the woman who can conquer me!" he answered.
She glared as if she would like to stab him; but he saw something else in her eyes that he could not read, and he was aware of a prodigious impulse to befriend her.
If she only had used the usual feminine ways of ensnaring a man, he would have felt more at ease; but she did none of that. She turned away from him and knelt beside her brother, speaking to him earnestly in Norse, which Tros could not understand.
Sigurdsen stood up presently and looked straight at Tros. He was already in a fever from his wounds and his eyes burned desperately, although his face was sad and was made to look sadder by the long mustache that drooped below his chin. He spoke about a dozen words, Helma interpreting, kneeling, speaking very loud because her back was toward Tros.
"Put us all into the longship! Therein burn us! We will not seek to escape!"
Tros laughed at that.
"Not I!" he answered. "I need the longship and I need a crew. You and I might burn a fleet or two, Sigurdsen! Britons say Northmen are bold liars; Greeks have the name of being crafty ones, and Greek is my mother tongue, so how can you and I pledge faith?"
Helma interpreted, glancing once at Tros over her shoulder.
"I am Olaf Sigurdsen," the Northman answered, and closed his lips. But Helma added to that, standing at last and holding her chin high:
"If you were good Norse stock, instead of a barbarian with amber eyes, you would know what that means!"
"Tell him he must keep faith better than he fights, if he hopes to please me!" Tros answered; for he liked the look of Olaf Sigurdsen; he wanted to prod him and find what lay beneath the sorry mask.
The girl flared until her cheeks were crimson under the flaxen hair. Her breast heaved with passion; her hands grew white with pressure as she clenched her fingers; but she contrived to force a frozen note into her voice, speaking straight at Tros as if each word were a knife aimed at his throat:
"He was a spent man when he fought you, or you would be his slave this minute! He has slain his two-score Britons in the forest. You—you do not know courage! You do not know faith! How shall I tell you the worth of his promise? You, who never kept faith! Olaf Sigurdsen's fathers were kings when ice first closed in on the North and darkness fell at midday! I am a king's daughter! Shall he and I waste words on you?"
Tros liked her. He forbore to answer her in kind. And he had seen too often the results of promises exacted under force. Yet he needed friends; he needed them that minute.
"Is he homeless, and has been a king? I, too, am homeless and the son of a prince. It seems to me we have a common ground to meet on," he said, speaking very slowly that she might lose none of the significance. "When a man plights faith to me I hold him to it, but I repay him in kind.
"Say, to Sigurdsen, I give him choice. He may fight me again when he has rested, tomorrow, or the next day, or a month from now; and in that case I will kill him. Or he may ask my friendship and make promise to obey me as his captain; and in that case he shall find in honorable service no indignity. Or, if he wishes, I will give you all to Caswallon, who is a king, whereas I am not one. Let Sigurdsen speak his mind."
THE girl's reaction to that speech was vivid. She changed color, bit her hp, grew pale and red again, regarding Tros from another aspect altogether. She seemed to have grown nervous.
"A prince's son?" she said, and turned to her brother, speaking to him hurriedly in breathless sentences, clutching his sleeve, repeating short phrases again and again.
Her brother watched Tros' eyes, making no sign until she had finished. Then, after a minute's pause, he said hardly a dozen words.
"Olaf Sigurdsen desires your friendship. He will obey you but none other!" the girl interpreted; then added, "he means by that—"
"I know what he means by that!" Tros interrupted, and turned to Conops, who was listening with unconcealed but mixed emotions. He pointed toward the Northman's ax, its blade buried deep in the woodwork of the citadel.
"Bring it and return it to him!"
Conops never disobeyed; but he obeyed that order like a dog sent to the kennel, taking his time about wrenching the ax free, and longer still about returning with it. Tros snatched it from his hand impatiently and offered it hilt-first to Sigurdsen:
"Now let me hear your promise as a free man with a weapon in your hand!" he said deliberately. "Speak it without guile, as in the presence of your fathers' gods! For by the gods of earth and heaven I need friends!" he added to himself.
But Conops swore Greek oaths below his breath, and glared at Sigurdsen as a dog glares at a new, prospective kennel-mate.
CHAPTER V
A MAN NAMED SKELL RETURNS FROM GAUL
CASWALLON returned to the forest battlefield to count Norse prisoners and to look after wounded Britons, without speaking again to Tros. Even Orwic only waved a noncommittal farewell, and Tros was left alone with two ships, fifteen prisoners, and only Conops to help him manage them. The twenty hired seamen had returned from over river, but they were certain to be enemies, not friends.
The seamen demanded weapons, intimating that the prisoners might make a break for liberty; but their own only reason for staying was that Tros had not paid them, and he more than suspected they would try to pay themselves if provided with more than their own short, seamen's knives.
Even unarmed they were deadly unreliable; Caswallon's men who had gone down the riverbank in pursuit of the one boat-load of Northmen that escaped Tros' arrow-fire would be sure to pass news along, so it would be only a matter of time before scores of longshore pirates would come hurrying in hope of loot.
Tros' hirelings would help them strip away everything portable, after which they would probably burn both ships in a wanton passion of destruction.
Meanwhile, tide was flowing; both ships lay fast on the mud, no hope of moving either of them until long after dark. The druids carried wounded and dead ashore; chariots arrived, as by a miracle, from nowhere and galloped away with their burden around a clump of trees and over the skyline.
There was no road in that direction, therefore, no prospect of assistance; the tracks the wheels cut in the turf were new, nearly at right angles to the riverbank, and not even approximately parallel to the direction from which the chariots had arrived.
To reach Lunden would take several hours of drifting, and the distance very likely was too great for one tide, which would have to rise to three-quarters of its flow before it could lift the ships; and even so, the bireme would have to be pumped out.
So Tros took a course few men would have dared to take; he returned their weapons to his prisoners, and brought them all up on the bireme's poop, where they could have overwhelmed him easily. He could not understand their speech, nor they his; there was only Helma to act interpreter, and her smile proved that she understood Tros' predicament. Her words confirmed it—
"I have pledged no friendship!"
"Have I asked it?" Tros demanded, staring at her.
He felt inclined to box her ears, hardly knew why he refrained.
Her eyes challenged his, but Tros seized the upper hand of her abruptly:
"Make me a bandage for this cut on my cheek!"
"There is Zorn's wife!"
"I commanded you."
He pointed to a box of loosely woven linen stuff that the druids had left on the deck.
"Very well."
She smiled in a way that implied a threat, which Tros perfectly understood; he had heard that the Norse women were adept with poison.
"Tell a seaman to carry it here," she added; and for the space of ten more seconds she defied him.
"You fetch it!"
Tros' amber eyes met hers more steadily than any man's had done and there was that behind them that Fflur, Caswallon's wife had called the "ancient wisdom," although Tros was only conscious of it as determination; he knew he must master this woman or lose control of all his prisoners. Far more than Sigurdsen, her brother, she was the pivot of opinion, although her brother doubtless thought he ruled the clan.
Suddenly she made him a mock curtsey and went down on deck to bring the bandages, carrying the box back on her head as if she were a bond-woman, avoiding the eyes of her own folk, artfully obliging them to see that Tros was making her a menial.
But Tros sat down on the up-turned arrow-basket and submitted his face to be bandaged as if he had noticed nothing, pulling off the heavy gold band that encircled his forehead and tossing it from hand to hand while she opened his wound with her fingers and sponged it. She understood him.
That gold band, though it might hang too loosely on her neck if he should place it there, would be a mark of servitude forever. There were letters and symbols graven on it, and although she could not read them she had no doubt they were his name and title.
She could not make a bandage stay in place without wrapping folds of linen under his jaw and around his forehead, so he could not replace the band when she had finished. He gave it to her to hold for him and three of the Northmen made comments that brought blushes to her cheek. She answered savagely, tongue-lashing them to silence. Tros turned his back to her and roared to the hired seamen to man the water-hoist.
Mutiny—instant and unequivocal! Maybe the bandage and the absence of the gold band made him look less like a king. The coolness toward him of Caswallon's men had had effect, too; and none knew better than those hirelings that longshore pirates would arrive ere long.
Why labor at the hoist when they would need their strength for looting presently, and for carrying away the loot to villages up-river? The tousle-headed, ragged, skin-clad gang defied him noisily, and Conops hurled a wooden belaying pin at the head of the nearest.
BUT the pin was hardly more abrupt than Tros. He left the poop, cloak flying in the wind, like a great birds wooping down on them, seizing the heads of two and beating them against a third, discarding those—they lay unconscious on the deck—hurling a fourth man broadside into half a dozen of his friends, and pouncing on the ring-leader, who had been captain of a vessel of his own until Tros hired him. Tros twisted an arm behind his back until he yelled, then rubbed his nose along the beam of the waterhoist, leaving a smear of blood the length of it.
"Man that beam or eat it!" he commanded. "I will chop and stuff it down your throats if there's a drop of water in the bilge at sunset, or one backword from one of you meanwhile!"
So they went to work and Tros rolled the three unconscious men toward the trough until the outpour drenched their heads and they recovered, when he cuffed and shoved them toward the beam and they began to labor at it, too dazed to know what they were doing. Then, returning to the poop, he grinned at Sigurdsen, not glancing at Helma but signing to her to come near and interpret.
"Did you build your longship, Sigurdsen?"
The Northman nodded. He was sunk deep in a northern gloom and too dispirited to use his voice.
"Who did the labor? These?"
Sigurdsen nodded again, but a trace of pride betrayed itself as he glanced at his fellow-prisoners.
"I—I taught them all!" he grunted.
"Good! Then bid them calk this bireme from the inside as the water leaves the hold; use linen, clothing, frayed rope, anything, so be she floats to Lunden, where we'll beach her on the mud."
"Your ship is no good," Sigurdsen said gloomily.
"Hah! But her beak sunk Volstrum!" Tros retorted. "She has some virtues. We will pick her as the crows pick a horse's ribs, and you and I will build a ship together that shall out-sail all of them!"
Sigurdsen stared—hardly believed his ears—grinned at last, coming out of his gloom to order his men to work, with the three women to help them unravel rope to stuff into the leaking seams. But Tros bade Helma stay there on the poop; and when Conops had found rope and cloth enough, and the hammering began below deck, he stood in front of her, folding his arms on his breast.
She supposed he intended to use her again as interpreter between himself and Sigurdsen and made ready to accept that duty willingly enough; it made her feel indispensable and the earlier look of ironic challenge returned into her eyes. But Tros surprized her.
"Can you cook?" he demanded.
She nodded, stung, indignant.
"Then do it! These Britons have rotted my belly with cindered deer-meat until poison would taste like golden oranges from Joppa! Go! The cook-house is in the citadel. I hunger. Cook enough for sixteen people."
Her eyelids trembled, brimming with indignant tears, but she bit her lip and not a tear fell. She held out Tros' gold forehead-band.
"Keep it," he said, "for your wages."
That chance thrust brought tears at last; she choked a sob. Tros knew then he had conquered her, although her friendship might be yet to win, and deadlier than her anger!
"I don't work for wages!" she blurted.
There was more passion in her voice than when she had screamed to Sigurdsen while the fight waged on the poop. She could endure to be a prisoner, to fetch and carry for her brother's conqueror; but as one whose "fathers were kings when ice first closed in on the North and it was dark at noonday" death looked better than earned money.
"Keep it as my gift then," Tros retorted with an air of huge indifference.
"No!"
She thrust the thing toward him and, since he would not take it, flung it at his feet, then, sobbing, hurried down the ladder and disappeared into the citadel, whence smoke presently emerged.
Tros did not want to talk to Sigurdsen; he wanted to think. It suited him best to have no interpreter at hand. Sigurdsen, whose wounds were painful, soused his bandages with water and lay down in a corner of the poop, his eyes alight with fever.
Tros leaned against the rail, facing the river bank, whence longshore plunderers might come, yet thinking less of them than of the blue-eyed, fair-haired Helma. She annoyed him. He was vaguely restless at the thought of having to provide for her. Some spark of tyranny within him, not yet gritted out against the rocks of destiny, stirred him toward cruelty, and it was blended with an instinct to defend himself against all women's wiles.
The custom of the whole known world, as regarded prisoners, was even more rigid and compulsory than written law. He, Tros, was answerable for the fate of fifteen people; they were his property, to do with as he pleased, dependent on him, obliged to be obedient on penalty of death, their only remaining right, that of looking to him for protection.
He might set them free, but if he did so Caswallon, should he see fit, could punish him for succoring and aiding public enemies. If he should keep them in Lunden, it would probably be months before the Britons would begin to treat them civilly; they would be in danger of mob-violence.
Yet, if he should imprison them their usefulness would vanish; they would cease to feel beholden to himself and would either seek to escape or else intrigue against him with any personal enemy who might evolve out of the political tangle.
Britain was full of rival factions; hundreds of Northmen had found shelter and prosperity in Britain by lending themselves to one faction or another, and these new prisoners might find friends easily enough.
The probability was that Caswallon had met with political trouble during Tros' absence; some aspirant for power very likely had accused him of assisting Tros with provisions and men at a time when the tribe could ill afford it.
If Caswallon's power were in jeopardy the chief would be a fool not to consider his own interests and might even feel compelled to show him enmity. Skell, who was of Norse extraction and a natural born treason-monger, might easily enough have stirred such disaffection as would shake Caswallon's chieftainship.
The long and the short of all that was, Tros needed friends, and the only available possible friends in sight were his Northmen prisoners, whose gratitude he proposed to earn and keep. Not that he placed much faith in gratitude—at any rate, not too much.
Homeless men, beaten in battle and reduced to the status of serfs, can hardly be blamed for disloyalty if offered opportunity to regain independence.
Tros began to wonder just to what extent he himself was morally beholden to Caswallon. He even meditated taking the longship, which, having the lighter draught, would be first off the mud, and sailing down-Thames with his Northmen to seek safety on the Belgian coast. His only reason for dismissing the idea was his obligation to bury his father with proper obsequies.
He was particularly thoughtful about the young girl Helma. Instinct told him to beware of her, to give her no chance to ensnare him, to treat her with less than courtesy; intuition—which is as different from instinct as black from white—warned him that she was a friend worth winning, but that nothing could be won by a display of weakness.
Tros was no horseman, but he had picked up British terms from Orwic.
"She's a finely bred mare that must be broke before she'll handle," he reflected, grinning slyly at the smoke emerging through the cook-house window, grinning again as he thought of his lack of experience with women.
He wondered to whom he should marry her, the only ultimate solution that occurred to him.
AND while he thought of that, a boat came up the river, paddled furiously by eight men, keeping to the far bank to avoid the flowing tide, but crossing on a long slant presently and making straight for the two ships. A man sat in the stern whose features seemed vaguely familiar—a man in a fever of haste, who shifted restlessly and scolded at the straining crew.
"Skell!" Tros muttered. "Impudence—infinity—the two are one!"
He started for the arrow-engine, but thought better of it; he could deal with Skell single-handed, and there was Conops to help; the boat's crew were longshore Britons, of the type that might murder unarmed men, but would scamper away at the first threat of serious fighting, men of the sort that had been serfs for generations.
Skell came hand over hand uninvited up the ladder on the bireme's stern, and stood still on the poop with his back to the rail, surveying the scene, his foxy eyes avoiding Tros and his restless hands keeping ostentatiously clear of the sword and dagger he wore.
His fox-red beard was newly trimmed, and he wore good Gaulish clothes under a smock of dressed brown-stained deer-hide that came to his knees. He would have looked too well dressed if it had not been for the stains of travel.
"Tros, he said, meeting his eyes suddenly, "you and I should cease enmity. I did you a little harm, and you had revenge. Cæsar can employ us both, and I have word for you from Cæsar."
"Speak it," Tros answered.
He despised Skell, but he was not fool enough to shut his ears to news.
Skell might be Cæsar's man in theory, but a child could tell by his expression that it was Skell's advantage he was seeking first and last. He paused, picking words, and Tros had time to wonder how far such a reader of men's minds as Cæsar actually trusted him.
"I heard of these Northmen. They attacked Hythe," Skell said presently, "and I came overland to the Thames in hope of getting word with them, for I heard they were making for Lunden. I would have persuaded them to cross to Gaul with me and talk with Cæsar. Cæsar could have used such allies as these."
Tros nodded. Cæsar would ally himself with any one to turn an adversary's flank, and would reduce the ally to subjection afterward. But had Cæsar had time to say so much to Skell? Tros thought not; it was likelier that Skell was speculating on his own account.
"I met Britons down-river who told me you had sunk Volstrum's ship and captured this one," Skell went on, glancing repeatedly at the Northman who lay ten feet away from him clutching with fevered fingers at the haft of his great ax. "And I happen to know, Tros, that Caswallon has been turned against you by a new intrigue. Believe me, I know that surely."
"Aye," Tros answered, "none should know better than the man who managed the intrigue!"
Skell laughed; it began like a fox-bark but ended in a cackle like an old hen's; there was no more mirth in it than comes of greed and insincerity. But there was a note, that had nothing to do with mirth, which set Tros studying the fear in Skell's eyes.
"That is true, Tros!" Skell went on. "I sent a message to Caswallon. I brought a woman from Gaul with me, one of Cæsar's light o' loves. She will make all Britain too hot to hold you! But Cæsar thinks, and I think, you are a man of sense. Cæsar bade me win you over to his side, if I can. The Britons have turned against you, Tros."
Tros grinned. He grinned like an oger. Mirth oozed from him.
"Hah! Go and tell your new master, Skell, that I have his bireme and his gold; I gave him a cold swim at Seine-mouth, sunk his boats, drowned his men and wrecked his fleet! Say that is all preliminary! Tell him I'm minded to make friends with him at about the time of the Greek Calends! Cæsar will know what that means, he talks Greek very well."
"Would you care to trust me?" Skell asked.
"No," said Tros.
"Because," Skell continued, as if he had not noticed the refusal, "for my part I would rather trust you than Cæsar or the Britons. I have lived my life in Britain, but my father was Norse and I feel among these Britons like a fish on land. As for Cæsar"
"He is another alien, like me!" said Tros. "He and you were not bred under the same stars. Nor was I!"
"Cæsar is playing Cæsar's hand," Skell answered. "He would use you and me, and then forget us."
"He shall never forget me!" Tros remarked with conviction, grinning again hugely.
"I see you like Cæsar no more than I do," Skell began again; but Tros' laugh interrupted him.
"Like Cæsar? I admire him more than all the kings I ever met! He is the greatest of Romans. Compared to him, Skell, you are a rat that gnaws holes in a rotten ship! Cæsar is a scoundrel on a grand scale—a gentleman who measures continents, a gold-and-scarlet liar whom you can't understand, you who would tell lies just because your belly ached!"
Skell looked a mite bewildered, but Tros' grin was good natured, so he tried again:
"Let bygones be, Tros! I am no such fool as to believe in Cæsar's friendship; I would sooner trust you, though you call me liar to my face. Why not pretend with me to be Cæsar's catspaws, and snatch out a nice fortune for ourselves?"
Tros stroked his beard reflectively. It formed no part of his philosophy to refuse to make use of a rascal, provided he could keep his own hands clean. Skell was a mere pawn in fortune's game, not like Cæsar, who used fortune for his mistress and debauched her with cynical assurance. There was nothing to be gained by trusting Skell, but not much sense in incurring his spite; better to kill him and have done with it than to cultivate his enmity, and Tros preferred never to kill if he could help it.
"You are afraid to go to Lunden?" he suggested, by way of plumbing Skell's thoughts.
SKELL was about to answer when the door of the cook-house opened and the blue-eyed Helma came carrying a wooden dish of wheat and meat, her eyes fixed on it for fear of spilling. Skell whistled softly to himself.
"That girl is no serving wench!" he remarked, eying the amber shoulder-ornaments and the gold wire on her girdle.
He seemed amused, and before Tros could prevent him he was speaking to her in the Norse tongue, she standing still because she could not carry the dish and look upward at the poop. What he said did not please her; Tros noticed that.
Skell jumped down from the poop and took the dish from her, holding it while she climbed the ladder and then reaching up to set it on the poop edge; she had lifted it again in both hands and was facing Tros before Skell could climb up behind her.
She appeared to be trying to shame Tros by her meekness, she a sea-king's daughter and he making her cook and fetch and carry! But Tros curtly bade her set the dish down, sniffing, for he could smell the stuff was burned.
"What did Skell say?" he demanded, glaring at Skell across her shoulder, silently daring him to interrupt.
"Does it matter what he says?" she retorted. "He is neither fish nor bird, a Briton who talks Norse!"
"Tell me!" Tros insisted.
She turned and looked at Skell, and it appeared that her contempt for him offset her indignation at Tros' bruskness.
"He said I should look to him for friendship."
"So!" said Tros. "Sit down then, Skell, and eat with us. I would like to hear more about friendship. Ho there, Conops! Come and eat, and bring the Northmen. Bid those Britons lay off pumping for an hour, unless the water makes too fast. Give them bread and dry meat."
The giant Sigurdsen refused food, although Helma tried to tempt him, but the other Northmen came and sprawled on deck, crowding the women away from the dish. Tros sent Conops for another plate and heaped food on it for Sigurdsen's wife and the widow, but he made Helma sit beside him, whereat Skell laughed.
"She will not eat with the men," he explained.
"She will obey!" Tros retorted, and then listened curiously while the Northmen sang a grace of some kind, a melancholy chant that had the dirge of seas in it and something of the roll of thunder.
When they had done he added a sunlit, wine-suggestive verse in Greek, being ever respectful of other men's religions.
For a while they ate enormously, using their fingers, Tros stuffing food into Helma' s mouth until she laughed and had to yield, with her face all smeared with gravy. But the laughter brought tears to her eyes, and she only kept on eating because Tros insisted; shame at being made to eat with men was swallowed by a greater grief, and Tros began to pity her in his own bull-hearted way.
"Your brother Sigurdsen has made choice and cast in his lot with me. These other Northmen have no choice, but are my men henceforth. Now you shall choose," he told her. "There is Skell, and here am I. Whose fortune will you follow? I will give you to Skell if you wish.
Her scorn for Skell was so intense she almost spat at him.
"That half-breed!" she sneered. "You may bestow me where you will, Tros, for that is your right. But I will not die, I will live to see you writhe in ruin if you treat me as less than a king's daughter! I have heard you are a prince's son, so I submit to you, although I hate you. If I should have to bear your children, they shall be a shame to me but a pride to you."
Tros laid his huge hand on her shoulder.
"Peace!" he ordered.
Talk of that kind was as foreign to him as the Northmen's language that contained no word he understood. He was more perplexed about the girl than ever, utterly unable to imagine what to do with her. Abruptly, gruffly, he changed the subject.
"Tell us this plan of yours, Skell. How would she and you make use of me? What is your friendship worth to her?"
Skell tried to grin ingratiatingly. Since he had eaten Tros' food he had no fear of violence; the laws of hospitality were rigid; it was greater sin to break them than to steal or to seduce a neighbor's wife, and unless Tros were willing to incur contempt of the meanest slave in Britain he would have to let Skell get clear away before resuming enmity.
"Cæsar might love her!" Skell answered slyly. "Cæsar likes them young and well-bred. Why not send her to Cæsar to love him a while and make your peace with him?"
"Who is Cæsar?" asked Helma, cheeks reddening.
"He will be emperor of all the world, unless I succeed against him better than the last two times!" Tros answered. "Cæsar and I are as fire and water, but as to which is which you must judge for yourself! I hate him as you hate me, young woman. Do you understand that?"
She actually laughed. Her whole face lighted with a new humor that transformed it.
"Cæsar might like you if you would let him," she answered, and then looked away.
"What else?" asked Tros, staring straight at Skell.
"Did I not speak of one of Cæsar's light o' loves?" Skell answered. "The woman crossed from Gaul with me, in a boat that lost its mast almost within hail of your bireme. Take my advice and be rid of this one before that one casts her hook into your heart! Put this one to a wise use!"
"The woman's name?" asked Tros.
"She was named Cartisfindda, but the Romans changed it to Cornelia. She carried Cæsar's message to Glendwyr the Briton. Glendwyr plots against Caswallon, is ready to pounce at the first chance. You understand now? Cæsar can use you or ruin you! You and I and a handful of Northmen to help Glendwyr—man! We can help ourselves to the loot of Lunden Town! For a beginning I say, send this girl to Cæsar with your compliments."
Tros looked hard at Helma. There was laughter in his eyes, but Skell could not see that because he sat at Tros' right hand.
"Will you go?" he asked her.
"As your enemy?" she answered. "Yes!"
"Nay, I have enemies enough in Cæsar's camp!" said Tros. "Did you hear her, Skell? You must think of another means of making use of me!"
But it had occurred to him he might make use of Skell. "Are you afraid to come to Lunden?"
Skell looked frightened. For a moment he seemed to fear Tros might take him against his will, until he remembered that the ships were on the mud and he was Tros' guest, safe from violence.
"I am a stranger to all fear," he answered.
And he could look the part; he would have deceived a man who did not know him.
BUT the truth was, Skell was so full of fear that he could be trusted to change his plan at any moment and never to tell the truth where he had opportunity to weave a lie. His was the dread that makes misers and all meanness. He felt himself a toad beneath the harrow of misfortune, who could never afford to keep faith because of the initial handicap with which he started out in life.
He could recognize honesty—none more readily than he!—but only to try to take advantage of it; none less than he could cope with subtlety that uses truth for bait and candid explanations for a trap. But subtlety of that sort was Tros' instinctive weapon.
"Skell," he said, "you are a scoundrel who would slit your friend's throat for a woman's favor. I am not your friend; I have but one throat and I need it! I hope you are Cæsar's friend; yet I would hate to see a man like Cæsar brought to his end by a like you! However, that is Cæsar's problem and not mine."
Skell tried to look offended, but in his heart he felt flattered, as the smile in his eyes betrayed. Tros noticed that and continued the same vein of frankness:
"My difficulty, Skell, is this: That I have fed you. Therefore, you are my guest, and though I know you would never hesitate to kill me, if you could do it without danger, I dare not offend the gods by killing you. Therefore, I must make terms with you. But a bargain has two sides. I am minded you shall come to Lunden."
"Why?" demanded Skell.
"Because I like to have my enemies where I can see them!"
"And if I will not come?"
"You are afraid to come. You fear Caswallon. You know Caswallon knows you have intrigued with Cæsar. Yet you would like to go to Lunden because your house is there, and there are men who owe you money, whom you would like to press for payment.
"However, it may be that lure is not strong enough, so I will add this: Am I a man of my word, Skell? Yes? You are sure of that? Then listen: if you refuse to come to Lunden I will spend, if I must, as much as half of Cæsar's money that became mine when I took this bireme, I will spend it in cooking your goose for you!
"I will set Caswallon by the ears about you. And if all else fails me, I will seek you out and slay you with my own sword, much though it would irk me to defile good steel in such a coward's heart! Do you believe me?"
"And if I come to Lunden?" Skell inquired.
He was smiling. He enjoyed to talk of the issues of life and death when there was no presently impending danger.
"Then I will concede this: I will not move hand or tongue against you while you do the same by me. I will tell Caswallon you are a harmless rogue whose bark is far worse than his bite, for, as the gods are all around us, Skell, that is my honest judgment of you!
"I will tell Caswallon you have done us all a service, for that is true: Unless you had gone to Gaul in hope of betraying me to Cæsar, I could never have annoyed the Roman there at Seine-mouth.
"Skell, I almost captured him! So I will beg Caswallon to ignore your treachery; and if he should refuse, I will protect you with my own guest-privilege."
Skell meditated that a while. His foxy, iron eyes kept shifting from face to face, avoiding Tros but constantly returning to study Helma, who was kneeling beside Sigurdsen, aiding his distracted wife to soak the stiffening bandages.
"I mistrust your words," Skell said at last. "You are a man who keeps a bargain, but you bind one craftily and I suspect a trick. You must swear to me that there is nothing hidden in these terms of yours."
"Not I!" Tros answered. "I expect to make my profit. So do you, Skell. I will change no word of the agreement. Either you come to Lunden, subject to my stipulation, or you go your own way and I will rid the earth of you as swiftly as that first duty can be done! Now choose—for I hear oars—and the tide is turning."
Skell also heard oars, thumping steadily down-stream toward the bireme.
"I agree!" he said, snapping his mouth shut, looking bold and almost carefree; but Tros' amber eyes discerned the nervousness that underlay that mask.
Conops whispered in Tros' ear. Tros stood and glanced over the stern.
"Druids!" he said, and began straightening his garments to receive them with proper dignity. "They will be coming for my father's body. Heh! But Caswallon is a true host, friendship or no friendship! See in what state the druids come!"
CHAPTER VI
"A PRETTY DECENT SORT OF GOD!"
THE druids sang as they approached the bireme. In the bow of a long barge, under a bower of yew-branches, there stood an ancient of days, bald-headed, a white beard flowing to his waist, a golden sickle in his girdle, his white robe touching sandals laced with golden thongs.
He led the chant; young voices in the stern caroled joyful, almost bird-like regular responses; fourteen rowers droned a harmonied accompaniment, pulsing to the rythm of the gilded oars. Serenely, solemnly they hymned the ever-nearness of eternity; there was not one note of grief.
The barge was draped in purple cloth and the rowers wore sleeveless purple tunics over their white smocks. They who stood singing in the stern were robed, like the ancient in the bow, in white from head to foot; and all rowers included, wore wreaths of mistletoe.
In the midst of the barge, between the rowers, was a platform draped in white with a wide gold border, and over that a purple canopy was raised on gilded rods. The sides of the barge were white, adorned with gilded scroll-work.
The rowers tossed oars and the barge swung to a standstill under the bireme's stern; but the chant continued. Tros and his prisoners stood respectfully, Olaf Sigurdsen supporting himself on the shoulders of two men; the Northmen's lips moved as if they were trying to fit their own familiar words to druid music, that stirred their pagan hearts as only battle, and the North Sea storms and elemental mysteries could ever do.
Skell kept covering his face nervously; some half-familiar phantom had returned to haunt his brain. The women, except Helma sobbed as if the sobbing brought relief to tortured heart-strings; but she stood still, beside Tros, brave-eyed, almost glistening with emotions that not she herself could have explained.
Her shoulder touched Tros' arm and he could feel a thrill that made his flesh creep pleasantly. He drew his arm away.
The hireling Britons at the water-hoist ceased work and stood by the bulwark. Conops, irreverent and practical, threw a rope over the stern, but the druids ignored it; they held the barge to the bireme with gilded boat-hooks while two of the rowers drove long poles into the river-bed to serve for an anchor at either end.
Then they raised a wooden ladder with bronze hooks that caught the bireme's stern rail, and up that the old High-Druid came, pausing at every step to roll out his majestic hymn and wait for the response. He came over the taffrail, singing, moving his right hand in centuries-old ritual, as calmly as if that were a temple threshold. He hardly touched Tros' proffered arm as he stepped down to the poop.
There, eyes on the horizon, he stood booming his hymn to eternity until eight druids followed him over the stern. He needed no advice from Tros; Caswallon must have told him where the greater-than-a-druid's body was that he had come to bear away with ancient honors.
He strode forward, and down the short ladder to the deck, the other druids keeping step behind him; and when Tros, summoning all his dignity, swung himself down to the deck to open the cabin door and show the way, a druid motioned him aside. They let no uninitiated hand have part, let no untaught eye see the rites they entered to fulfil, let none but druids hear their whispered liturgy.
Two druids stood outside the door, their backs to it, lips moving, signifying with a nod to Tros that he should keep his distance.
So Tros stood, leaning on his drawn sword, his head bowed, until they came forth at last bearing the body between them. It was no longer covered with Cæsar's scarlet cloak, but robed in druid's garments under a purple sheet and laid on a gilded stretcher.
The old High-Druid swayed ahead of the procession, chanting. They ascended the poop-ladder, hardly pausing, skilfully passing the stretcher from hand to hand so that the body they honored was always feet first, always horizontal, paused on the poop to chant a changed refrain, then descended the ladder to the barge, with the rear end of the stretcher hung in slings, and no commotion or mismovement to disturb the dead man's dignity.
The chanting rose to higher melody, as if they welcomed a warrior home, when they laid the body on the platform in the barge's midst. Then the old High-Druid took his stand beneath the canopy; the rowers cast off from the anchor-poles; the barge moved out into the stream, and to a new chant, wilder and more wonderful, the oarsmen swung in unison, until they vanished in a crimson glow of sunset between autumn-tinted oaks, up river.
Then, Tros broke silence.
"Thus, not otherwise, a soul goes forth," he said. "None knoweth whither. They bear it forth; and there are they who shall receive it."
He spoke Greek; only Conops could have understood the words, and Conops' senses were all occupied in watching Skell and Helma, trying to guess what mischief they were brewing. Quietly he plucked Tros' sleeve, whispering:
"Master; better give me leave to kill that sly-eyed fox! Coax him forward of the cook-house. Slip the knife in back of his ear! As for the woman"
He did not offer to kill the woman; he was thrifty; he knew her value.
"whip her! Whip her now, before she thinks you easy and does you a damage! Take my advice, master, or she will cook a mischief for you quicker than she burned the stew!"
The sun went down; and in a haze of purple twilight Tros drew Helma to the starboard rail, backing her against it.
"What did Skell say this time?" he demanded.
Conops was listening, hand on knife-hilt, watching Skell, who leaned over the far rail whistling to himself. The hireling seamen having pumped the bireme dry had gone to the bow, where they were half-invisible, like fantoms herded in the gloom. The tide was rising fast; the broken oars between the ships already creaked to the longship's motion, but the bireme was still hard and fast.
Helma laughed mirthlessly, but she seemed to have recovered something of her former spirit.
"You are arrogant, and I obey you, Tros, but I don't know for how long! Skell says you are among enemies in Britain. He says they will not let you keep your prisoners or the longship. He bade me notice how the druids said no word to you.
Tros laughed. He knew the druids took no part in personal disputes, not interfering much in politics. The same law governed all their ceremony; nothing was allowed to interrupt it.
"Go on," he said. "What was Skell's proposal?"
"Skell said, if I go with you I shall be sold in open market by Caswallon's order."
Tros knew that Skell knew better. Even should Caswallon claim the prisoners despite his recent gift of them to Tros, he could not dispose of them like cattle without incurring the wrath of the druids and the scorn of a whole countryside. But it was a likely enough lie for Skell to tell to a prisoner, who might not know the British customs, though she could speak the tongue.
"So what did Skell suggest?"
"He said the Britons will come and loot these ships. They will kill the men and seize us women. Skell said, if I obey him, he will protect me and take me to Gaul."
Tros whistled softly, nodding to himself. There was no hurry; the longship floated; he could move her whenever he chose. Meanwhile, Skell had broken the guest-law and he had excuse to kill him or to kick him overboard. Conops read his gesture, took a step toward Skell, drawing his knife eight gleaming inches from the sheath.
"Stay!"
TROS seized him by the shoulder. It was a dangerous game to deal roughly with a guest in Briton. Skell had eaten from Tros' dish by invitation, all the crew had seen it. A prisoner's word that Skell had voided privilege could carry no weight against a free man's unless given under torture.
"What answer did you make to Skell?" he demanded, turning, but keeping hold of Conop's shoulder.
The girl laughed, mirthlessly again. "I would liefer die beside my brother than go, a half-breed's property, to Cæsar."
"Come here, Skell!" Tros commanded.
But he spoke too suddenly, too fiercely. There was a splash as Skell sprang overside. Then Tros' ears caught what Skell probably had heard first—song and splashing in the distance, down stream. He thought of the arrow-engine but refrained and pushed Conops away from it. Conops urged, but Tros knew his own mind.
"Let the rat run! I have a notion not to kill him."
"Notion!" Conops muttered. "I've a notion too! We'll all be gutted by pirates, that's my notion!"
Skell's boat left the bireme's side in response to his shouts and the Britons who had brought him hauled him out of water. Straight away he set them paddling toward the farther bank, where he could lurk in shadow out of sight of the approaching boats, whose crews sang drunkenly and splashed enough for a considerable fleet. But there was no moon, no stars, only the ghostly British gloaming deeply shadowed, and Tros could not see them yet.
"Into the longship!" he commanded. "All hands!"
The hirelings in the bow demurred. They knew the time was come for looting. Tros charged them, beat them overside with the flat of his long sword. Conops cut the lashings that held the ships together. There was no talk needed to persuade the Northmen to flee from drunken longshoremen; they were overside before Tros could count their flitting shadows, and Tros had hardly time to run for Cæsar's cloak before the longship yielded to the tide and drifted out into the river.
For a while he let her drift and listened. He could still hardly see the approaching boats, but it was evident that their occupants had seen the longship's movement; they had stopped and were holding a consultation, paddling to keep their craft from drifting nearer until they could decide what the movement meant.
There was no wind; the longship lay helpless on the tide, useless unless Tros could set his prisoners to work and make the hirelings help them; and if he should put the Northmen to the oars there would be none to help him repel boarders.
Yet there was no knowing what the end might be if he should employ his prisoners to defend a ship that had been theirs a dozen hours ago! They, too, might force the hirelings to the oars and make a bid for freedom! He had given them back their weapons; they could overwhelm him easily.
But out of the darkness down the river movement grew again. The Britons were advancing on the bireme, keeping silence. It was more than Tros could stomach to see pirates loot a valuable ship.
"Oars!" he ordered in a low voice. "Out oars!"
Conops leaped into the ship's waist, clawing, cuffing, beating with his knife-hilt, until presently a dozen hirelings manned the benches, the remainder hugging bruises in the dark.
"Too few!" Tros muttered.
Unused to those oars and that ship, a dozen men could hardly have provided steerage way against the tide. He could count nearly a dozen boats creeping close up to the bireme.
"Helma!" he commanded, turning his head to look for her.
The Northmen, except Sigurdsen, who lay murmuring in delirium, stood and grinned at him. Helma was behind them, urging something, speaking Norse in sibilant undertones.
"Helma!" he said again; and his hand went to his sword, for the Northmen's grins were over-bold.
One of them was arguing with Helma, with what sounded like monstrous oaths.
"To your oars!" he ordered, gesturing.
None obeyed. He seized the nearest Northman hurled him into the ship's waist, spun around again to fight for dear life, drawing sword and lunging as he turned.
"Hold Tros!"
That was Helma's voice. Ears were swifter than his eyes; he heard her in mid-lunge and checked barely in time to let a man give ground in front of him. Helma sprang to his side then, seized his sword-hilt in both hands, bearing down on it, screaming at the prisoners in Norse.
He understood she was fighting for him, scolding, screaming at her kinsmen to obey and man the oars. He caught the word Sigurdsen two or three times. She was invoking her brother's name.
Suddenly she let go Tros' sword and fairly drove the Northmen down in front of her, hurling imprecations at them, then watched Tros, watched what he would do, stood back in silence as he strode toward the helm, laughed when he seized it and stood at gaze, his left hand raised over his head ready to signal the rowers.
The longship had drifted away from the bireme stern-first and was now nearly beam to the tide. He signaled to the port oars first, to straighten her, then tried three strokes, both sides together, to feel what strength and speed he could command. The tide was strong, but they could move her better than he hoped, and he headed half a dozen easy strokes inshore where there was more or less slack water, due to reeds and lily-pads.
He could count nine boats now nosing toward the bireme. Two or three had disappeared, inshore probably. They were creeping cautiously as if expecting ambush. As their noses touched the bireme's shadow Tros shouted, bringing down his left hand:
"Row! Yo-ho! Yo-ho! Yo-ho!"
The longship leaped. Before the Britons in the boats could guess what the shout portended, a high prow, notched against the sky, came boiling down on them, jerking to the strain of ash oars as Conops beat time with a rope's end on the hirelings' backs. Three boats backed away in time; but six crowded ones were caught by the longship's prow, swept sidewise between the ships and crushed against the bireme's hull.
There were screams, and a splintering crash, grinding of broken timber, oaths, confusion in the longship where the rowers on the port side fell between the benches, a long, ululating cry from Helma and the longship swung alone down-river with a boiling helm as Tros threw all his weight against the steering oar.
"Now again!" he shouted, laughing. "Easier this time—with the tide!"
But the rowers needed minutes to recover equilibrium and breath. There were two men knocked unconscious by their own oar-handles. It took time to swing the longship, head up-stream. Tros roared his orders, Helma screamed interpretation of them; Conops plied the rope's end; but before the longship could be headed on her course again Tros saw the remnant of the fleet of boats scoot out of the bireme's shadow and race for the riverbank.
"Easy! Easy all!" he shouted; and again Helma studied him curiously, puckering her eyes to see his face more clearly in the gloom.
There were thumps, oaths, commotion in the ship's waist, where Conops fought three Britons. Unwisely they had sprung out of the darkness from behind to pay him for the rope's end, but they missed with their first onslaught, so the outcome was inevitable and Tros paid no attention to that minor detail. He was studying the bireme, measuring with his eye the height of water up her side. She was still heeled just a trifle, bow-end firmly on the mud.
BUT there were noises along the shadowy, marshy shoreline. Owls, half a dozen of them, rose into the night and vanished with the weird, swift flight that signified they were afraid of something. Presently sparks, then a blaze, then a whirl of red fire as a man waved a torch to get it properly alight.
Torch after torch was lighted from the first one, until the darkness fifty yards back from the riverline grew aglow with smoky crimson. The commotion in the ship's waist ceased and Conops came aft, leaning elbows on the low poop-deck.
"All ready, master," he said calmly; but he was breathing hard, and he snuffled because his nose was bleeding.
"Find a warp and come up here!" Tros ordered.
Conops disappeared again. Tros sang a "Yo-ho" song to time the oarsmen, giving just sufficient weigh to bring the ships abreast. Then, backing port oars with the aid of Helma's voice, he swung the longship's stern until it almost touched the bireme. Conops appeared then, dragging a wet rope, cursing its religion in outrageous longshore Levantine—which was a mixture of a dozen languages. Helma pounced on it and helped him haul, her muscles cracking like a firebrand.
"Jump and make fast!"
Conops nearly missed, for the longship's stern was swinging. But he had tied a small rope to the heavy warp and tied that to his waist, so he had two hands to clutch the bireme's stern. He clambered up it like a monkey and hauled the warp after him, Helma paying out the coils as the longship drifted away, beam to the tide, Tros straightening her with slow dips of the port oars.
"Make fast!"
Helma, sea-king's daughter to the marrow of her young bones, took three turns around an oaken bollard in the stern and held that until the warp began to feel the strain, paying out a foot or two until vibration ceased, before she made fast to the other bollard.
"Both banks—way!" Tros thundered and began his "Yo-ho" song, while Helma beat time and the mud boiled blue around them.
But the bireme stuck fast, though the longship swung and swayed, heeling to one side or the other as the humming warp took the strain to port or starboard. Conops yelled suddenly. A torch came curving out of darkness to the bireme's deck, followed by yells from the longshore Britons as Conops caught that one and tossed it overboard. Then another torch, and another.
"Row! Yo-ho! Yo-ho!"
The ash oars bent and the rowers sweated in the dark. Helma ran between the benches, whirling a rope's end, beating the Britons' backs. No need to urge the Northmen; they were working for dear life, whereas the Britons were in favor of the longshore pirates.
Tros labored at the helm to keep the long ship straight and haul the bireme off the mud at the same angle that she struck. But the warp hummed and nothing happened, except that torch followed torch so fast that Conops could hardly toss them overboard.
Then Conops yelled again and vanished like a bat toward the bireme's bow. There was shouting, splashing and a red glare in the darkness at her bow-end—a thump of wood and iron as Conops levered the great anchor clear and dropped it over-side—yells as it fell on heads below.
Then the glare increased; they were bringing more torches and burning brushwood. A dozen arrows flitted through the darkness near the longship's poop. Tros roared, bull-throated, to the rowers for a final effort; but they ceased, drooped, gasping on their oars, and the longship slowly swung inshore as the warp held her stern against the tide.
Tros did not dare to let his crew of Britons get too near the riverbank; they would mutiny and join their friends. Nor could he let the warp go; he would have died rather than leave Conops at the mercy of drunken savages.
"Now if Lud of Lunden would give me a south wind"
But Lud did better. He made some one mad. Tros would have needed time to set the sail. A shadowy boat flitted through the darkness and shot close up to the bireme's bow. A flat blast on a cow-horn split the night. Followed yelling. The red glare faded, giving place to moving shadows and din or argument. Conops returned in leaps to the bireme's stern and shouted, waving both hands.
"Way! Way! Yo-ho!" Tros thundered.
Helma plied the rope's-end; the exhausted oarsmen strained, half-mutinous; the longship heeled and turned her head to mid-stream, until suddenly Tros laid his whole weight and strength on the steering-oar and the bireme slid gently backward off the mud. The tide had lifted her at last.
They towed her stern-first for a mile, until the longshore shouting died in the distance. Then Tros backed oars in a wide reach of the river and lay alongside until Conops could make the warp fast in the bow, so as to bring the bireme's head up-stream.
"Who was it saved us?" he asked Conops.
"Tide and a madman, master! Skell came over-river, blew a horn-blast, startled them, told them then he knew Cæsar's gold was in the bireme, offered them half of it if they would cut the warp and scare you off before they set fire to anything, kept them talking until the tide crept under her. This Lud of Lunden is a pretty decent sort of god!"
"Aye, Lud of Lunden! Aye," Tros muttered. "Aye. I knew there was a reason for preserving Skell! Lud of Lunden! I will make a little giftlet to that godlet. I believe he smiles on effort. He shall laugh!"
CHAPTER VII
IN LUNDEN POOL
AGRAY, wet dawn was paling in the sky when Tros dropped anchor in the pool below the ford by Lunden Town. Caswallon's mouse-hued wooden roof, green-splashed with lichen, loomed through drifting mist between the autumn-tinted oaks.
Tros sighed for his sun-lit Mediterranean, but he noticed that his Northmen prisoners, oar-weary though they were and stiff from the fighting of the day before, were in an environment they liked.
They sniffed the autumn air, leaned over-side and praised the lush green meadows, nodded to one another sleepily as wooden and thatched roofs, barns and neat enclosures peeped out of the mist a moment to vanish again like dreams of fairyland. The lowing of cows asking to be milked appeared to fill them with excitement. They spoke of wealth in whispers.
Sigurdsen's high fever had abated. He had slept like a child and now seemed hardly to understand what had happened to him; his wife was talking in low tones, he answering in grunts, fingering the edge of the great battle-ax that lay across his knees and glancing from his wife to Helma, who sat facing him. The other woman was still keening her dead husband.
The Lunden Britons were late sleepers. Not a human being stirred along the water-front on either side of the river, although a dog howled a general alarm and a whole pack joined him, galloping from house yards to patrol the river and bay indignant challenge to the skies. There were several rotting ships among the reeds, all smaller than the longship, and not one even river-worthy.
"This will never be a nation!" Tros reflected. "There is no hope for them. Think of bringing two ships into Ostia, Tarentum, the Piraeus, Smyrna, Alexandria, and none but a pack of dogs to give the challenge! They will be overwhelmed by foreigners. They will cease. A hundred years hence none will know the name of Britain."
But he was nearly as tired out as his oarsmen and as Conops, in no true mood for prophecy. Unlike them, he might not curl himself to sleep under the benches. He had no more fear on account of his British hirelings, who would stick like leeches now until he paid them. But he did not propose to be caught asleep by any of Caswallon's men, who might remove his prisoners, might even execute them, especially if Caswallon should be away from home; and that seemed likely.
He thought it strange, otherwise, that there should be none to receive him and bid him welcome, for the sake of good manners, however unfriendly they might feel. Caswallon must have known he would bring both ships up-river. Or—the thought stirred Tros to rumbling anger—had Caswallon left him purposely hard and fast on the river mud in hope that longshore pirates would wipe a difficulty off the slate? To be roundly punished for it afterward, no doubt, since kings must punish criminals and friendships must be honored. When the first hot flush of indignation died he decided to give Caswallon the benefit of that doubt; but he found it difficult, knowing that kings have harder work than other men to keep faith, subtler means of breaking it, and more excuse. There was Cæsar's gold, for instance.
When he had watched shore-bearings for a while to make sure the anchor held, he turned to Helma, hoping to take his mind off one worry by considering another.
"How did you learn Gaulish?" he asked
"Some of us always do," she answered. "Don't we need it when we raid the coasts? I learned it from my nurse, who was a Briton taken in a raid and carried off to Malmoe. Britons are good servants, once they yield. She worked hard, I loved her."
"Love? Or was it belly-yearning?" Tros asked. "I have heard tell that Northmen think of nothing else but fighting, feasting and taking wives."
"None has had me to wife!" she retorted, and there was pride in her blue eyes such as Tros had never seen.
"Well—well you behaved last night," he said, looking straight at her. "You are a poor cook, for you burned the stew; but you shall cook no more for me. What shall be done with you? Speak. Will you return to Malmoe?"
She bit her lip, then stabbed out words like dagger-blades.
"The men of Helsing drove my brother forth. Shall I return and serve them, saying that with my brother's ship I bought myself to give to them?"
"You hate me. Why did you stand by me in the pinch last night?" Tros asked.
"I am a sea-king's daughter! Should I side with pirates?" she demanded.
"What were you when you raided the Thames or when you burned a south coast village?" Tros inquired.
"Good Norse stock!" she retorted. "We are vikings![1] "
Tros was puzzled.
"What if I should take you back to Malmoe, and try an issue with the men of Helsing and reestablish you? What then?"
"Ah, you laugh at me." But there was no laughter in his eyes, and she was watching them. "You might make my brother a king again, for you are a bold man and you can handle a ship. But the scalds would call me a black-haired foreigner's wife until the very serving-wenches mocked me."
"Said I one word about wifing?" Tros asked, astonished.
But she was astonished, too; backed away two steps from him looking as if he had struck her with a whip.
"I am a prisoner by my brother's oath of battle. I must abide that," she answered. "You are a prince? Have you a wife?"
"No," said Tros, watching her.
He knew now she was much more puzzled than he had been.
"You will not degrade me," she said with an air of confidence.
She implied they had both been talking in a foreign tongue and so could hardly understand each other. Biting her lip again, she calmed herself, made a nervous effort to be patient with him.
"I will speak with Olaf Sigurdsen," said Tros, and strode to where the Northman leaned against the stern all swathed in bandages, nervously thumbing his ax-hilt.
But Sigurdsen knew no Gaulish other than the words for mast and oar, beef, beer and a dozen place-names. Helma had to stand there and interpret.
"What shall I do with her?" Tros asked, signifying Helma with a sidewise motion of his head.
"She is yours!" said the Northman, astonished. "You won her!"
Helma interpreted, mimicking even the voice-note. Suddenly, as if she thought Tros had not understood yet, she pulled off her amber-and-gold shoulder ornaments and thrust them toward him.
"Have you a wife?" asked Sigurdsen.
Helma translated. Sigurdsen's wife stood up beside her husband, staring at Tros as if he were some new kind of creature she had never heard of. She began whispering, and Sigurdsen nodded, spoke, with a note of grandeur in his voice.
"What does he say?" Tros demanded.
"He says—you returned him his weapon; you accepted his oath as a free man; but you did not say you returned me to him Nevertheless, perhaps you meant that. Therefore, he being my brother and a king's son although without fief or following, and you his conqueror in battle and his sworn friend, he swears by Thor and Odin and his ax-blade I am born in noble wedlock and a fit bride; and he gives me to you, to be wife and to share your destiny on land and sea."
"Zeus!"
NO THOUGHT of marrying had ever entered Tros' head, except as something he would never do. He made no oath, but he had seen too many men grow fat and lazy in the meshes of a family not to promise himself he would die free of woman's ministering. He had something of his father's conviction that marriage was earthy of the earth, a good enough thing for the rabble but a trap that kept a strong soul from aspiring to the heights.
Sigurdsen spoke again, not knowing who Zeus might be, not understanding the explosion. He had never heard of a man's refusing a king's daughter.
"She is fair. She is young. She is a virgin. Call her wife before the Britons come and men speak ill of her."
Helma had to translate. She did it in womanlywise, her blue eyes—they were more blue, than the northern sky—accepting destiny as something to be met and very proudly borne.
"I think you did not understand me yesterday," she said. "Nor I you. You are a brave man, Tros, and I will bear you sons of whom you shall not be ashamed."
Brave! Tros felt as weak as a seasick landsman! He was ashamed. He might refuse, and he would hate himself. He might accept, and learn to hate the woman! He might give her to some other man, and evermore regret it! Why had he taken prisoners? Why hadn't he made a gift of them to Caswallon when he had the chance?
Slowly—he was striving to hear the inner voice that usually guided; but either the inner man was deaf or the voice was sleeping. He let his left hand leave his sword-hilt; he did not know why. She stepped closer, smiling. Both arms stretched toward the girl before he knew it. She came into them, her head on his breast and at that very moment Conops wakened.
"Master!"
It was the exclamation of a man bereft of faith in the one eye that Cæsar's torturers had left him. Love-and-run in half the ports of the Levant was Conops' history, brief interludes of lazy days and tavern-haunting nights between long spells of hardship and service to Tros on land and sea. Loose, superstitious morals for himself but rigorous aloofness for his master from all worldly ways, was his religion. He had but one eye because he had dared to rebuke Cæsar for insulting Tros. He rubbed the other one, crestfallen, as if the Tros he knew were gone and some one substituted whom he could not recognize.
Tros with a girl in his arms? He could not believe it. He came and glared, the tassel of his red cap down over his empty eye; the long tooth sneering through the slit in his upper lip; blood on his nose from yesterday. He fingered his long knife. He sidled three-quarters of a circle around Helma as if looking for an un-witch-protected opening through which to drive his knife.
"Master! And your father not buried!" he said, hardly reproachfully, rather as if he did not believe his senses.
He was jealous—jealous as a harbor-strumpet of a rival light o' love. The slobber blew in bubbles on his lean lips.
"Dionusus!"
Tros was in no mood to be reproved by a servant. He let out a lick with his fist—caught Conops on the ear and sent him sprawling between the oar-benches.
"Dog!" he thundered. "Will you judge your betters?"
Conops did not hear that. He lay hugging his bruised head, grateful for it, glad of anything that drove the greater anguish out of mind, rocking himself, moaning, knees and elbows bunched.
Angry—for emotions such as Tros had come through turn to anger as the sour milk turns to whey—Tros swung his hands behind him and stood breast out, grim chin high, staring at the shore, ignoring Helma. She was the real irritant. He told himself it was not born in him to love a woman. If he had thought he loved her—had he?—that was only the emotion of a drunken sailor. Worse! it was sordid backsliding. A descent from his own Olympian heights of manhood to the common level of unmoral fools like Conops!
What would old Perseus have said to it? Hah! Old father Perseus did the same thing, didn't he? Tros wondered who his own mother had been, and by what means she had wheedled a middle-aged saint into the snares of marriage!
Tros knew she had died when he was born, but others had told him she was a royal woman, born of a fine of kings whose throne was overturned by Rome. Perseus had forbidden speech of her, and as usual Tros had obeyed, only listening when other men dropped information.
Her death, as far as Perseus was concerned, had closed a life's chapter; thenceforth he had preached celibacy, not failing to instill into his son a wholesome—was it wholesome?—dread of women, or rather of the love of women and of the loss of spiritual vision that ensued from it.
"Yet here am I!" said Tros, his hands clenched tight behind him. "But for Perseus and a woman, I should not have been! I live! By Zeus and the immortal gods, I laugh!"
But he did not laugh. It irked him that Helma's eyes were on his back. He wished he had struck Conops harder. He wished all Lunden would awake and come down to the waterside. He would have welcomed anything just then, anything to save him the necessity of speech with Helma. He hated the girl! She and destiny between them had made a fine fool of him!
Yet as he turned to meet her gaze a new shame reddened his cheeks under the bronze. He realized he did not hate her. He knew he would be ashamed to withdraw the unspoken pledge he had made when he took her in his arms. She was his wife! He wished he had killed Conops!
HE HELD out his hand to her with a stubborn gesture, drew her beside him, made her stand hand-in-hand with him there on the ship's stern, gesturing to Olaf Sigurdsen to rouse his Northmen. And when they had rubbed sleep out of their eyes they stood up, grinning, until it dawned on them that something else was due.
Sigurdsen led the cheering then shaking his great battle-ax; and the din carried over-water to the houses near the riverbank, so that a dozen Britons came to stare, hitching their ungainly looking trousers.
Presently—being Britons, who would rather ride a dozen miles than walk one—horsemen came, riding bare-backed mounts into the river. A yellow-haired expert swam his horse all the way out to the longship, and mounted the stern, leaving the horse to swim where it chose.
"Lud love you!" he said, grinning, patting himself to squeeze water from his clothes. He eyed Helma appraisingly. "Norse girls are good. Those cursed red sea-robbers steal more of ours than we ever see of theirs, though! Wife, or ransom?" he asked not pausing for an answer. "Caswallon took some prisoners, but they say there's no hope of ransom; some other gang of pirates drove them forth, so they came to seize holding in Britain. No homes—no friends! Still—is she a virgin?
"She's a well-bred filly. Those Northmen who raided her home might like to pay a long price for her. Lud love me! Is that Sigurdsen? What have you done to him, Tros? He fought his way out of the woods without a scratch on him. What's he doing with his ax? He's a prisoner, isn't he? Lud look at them! They're all armed! Who's the prisoner—you?"
"Where is Caswallon?" Tros asked him.
"Over on the hilltop with the druids, hours away, loving the wounded, you know; wants to be popular. But it won't work. There are too many who say he shouldn't have fitted out your expedition, sixty or seventy killed and maimed. Lud think of it! As if these bloody Northmen weren't trouble enough!
"And there's a woman from Gaul—wait till you see her! You'll soon forget that one, Tros! She had a letter for you from Cæsar. Caswallon burned it in a rage, but she says she knows what Cæsar wrote, and she'll tell you. Caswallon didn't dare to treat her roughly, because half of us fell hide-and- hoof in love with her, and there are plenty who say he ought to make terms with Cæsar.
"She says you and Cæsar understand each other, and we all want to know what Cæsar's terms are. Skell came shortly after midnight, wandered all over town trying to wake people, but we were too tired to listen to him. Besides, Skell is a liar. He's in his own house now. I saw the smoke as I came by."
"Skell?" said Tros.
"Yes, Skell, the box you packed off to Caritia to talk to Cæsar. Skell the liar, Skell who said you helped him to wreck Cæsar's fleet, although everybody knew you did it all alone. Why didn't you kill him, Tros? Skell said something last night about having saved you in the river—longshoremen or something. Nobody believed him. He said you'd sent him ahead to warn us all not to listen to anything Caswallon says until we've heard you."
"Where is Fflur?" Tros asked, when the youngster paused for breath.
"With Caswallon, getting in the druids' way, I suppose, helping to hurt the wounded. What are you going to do with this ship? Burn it? Say—that's a good idea! Burn both ships! Make a floating bonfire in the Pool tonight! Tonight's the funeral. All the countryside in procession from Lunden to the burying-ground, chariots, torches. They say your father's corpse'll be right in front, ahead of everything except old 'Longbeard.' Why not have a bonfire of two ships when we come back? Something to show Cæsar's woman. Show her we Britons can stage a circus too!"
He paused for breath again.
"Where is Orwic?" Tros inquired.
"Nursing himself and trying to rule Lunden. Caswallon left him in charge. But Orwic isn't popular just now—lost too many men on your expedition. Everybody says it must have been his fault. And no loot—didn't bring a stick of loot back with him from Gaul.
"Everybody says, 'Caswallon's nephew is Caswallon's man,' and the chief hasn't been popular these ten days past. Besides, why did Orwic wait so long before he came to help us in the woods? Say, did you see me cut down three Northmen on the run, right down by the riverbank there, where the mud's deep and the thicket goes clear to the water?
"They're trying to make out now that I had help. Three men claim they were in that with me; but maybe you saw from across the river. Did you? Maybe you can swear I did it single-handed. Three great brutes of Northmen as big as Sigurdsen there! Did you hear the first one roar when I stuck a spear in him?
"The other two went down silent, but the first one made noise enough for all three. Did you hear him? Their weapons and armor are held for prize-court and those others'll lie me out of them unless you can uphold me. Can you?"
Tros did not answer. Orwic's boat came hurrying out of the reeds, and Orwic hailed him.
"Lud!" exclaimed the visitor. "Where's my horse? Gone? No matter!"
He plunged into the river and swam shoreward. Orwic, standing in a boat's stern, could not help but see him; he stared hard, watched the yellow head go rippling like a water-rat, but said nothing. He boarded the longship, saluting Tros with a genial grin that, nevertheless, not more than masked a feeling of restraint.
"Skell is here," he said, pursing his lips, staring hard at Helma. "So is Cornelia, a Gaulish woman with Roman paint on her. She says she knows you, Tros."
"She lies. She lies," Tros answered calmly.
"So does Skell!" said Orwic. "But they both lie artfully! The woman says Cæsar has appointed you his agent here in Britain. Skell says he preserved you from the river-pirates, in return for which you and he made peace. He says you grant him the protection of your privilege. Is that true? Is there any truth in it?"
"You were with me, Orwic. You heard all I said to Cæsar."
"Aye, but I know no Latin, Tros! I know you called me off when I was hard at Cæsar with eight men in the bireme's bows. What about Skell? Did you promise him anything?"
Tros grew hot under the bandages that swathed his head. He tore them off.
"I promised you my friendship!" he said grimly.
"Yes, I know you did. You beat me in fair fight, and I took your hand, Tros. Haven't I stood by you since? Caswallon is your friend, too. But don't forget, Tros, Caswallon is king here, and you are a foreigner. Your life and your goods are in our safe-keeping, but if you make difficulties for us we must think of ourselves first."
"If I am not welcome, I will go!" Tros answered.
Orwic hesitated, stroking his mustache. Tros' thought leaped to the chest of Cæsar's gold that Fflur, Caswallon's wife, was supposed to be keeping for him. Thoughtfully he eyed his Northmen prisoners, and wondered whether he could manage the longship with that scant crew. There was the Belgian coast; he might make that. And there was the unknown Norse country, that his bones almost ached to explore.
"I would bid you go," Orwic said at last, "but I dare not. There are too many now who believe you bring Cæsar's message, and they want to hear it. There are too many who accuse Caswallon of having sent you to make overtures to Cæsar; too many, again, who believe the contrary and blame Caswallon for having sent you to stir Cæsar against us. We are all divided.
"Some say Caswallon looks to Cæsar to make him king over all Britain; others say Cæsar will conquer Britain first and crucify Caswallon afterwards! There are some who want to kill you, Tros, and some who want to honor you as Cæsar's messenger."
"What say the druids?" Tros asked.
"That they will bury your father's body. And that unless we can persuade you there will be none to answer all these tales. They say: If you should go, then all men would declare Caswallon was afraid of you, and would turn against him; but if you should stay, Britons will be at one another's throats within a day or two!"
He paused a moment, watching Tros' eyes steadily, then suddenly advanced with a dramatic gesture.
"Tros, I speak you frankly! If we, Caswallon's friends, should treat you as less than an honored guest, your life would be in danger from our own hot-heads, who are ready to admire you if Caswallon does, or to hate you if he doesn't. They will follow his lead.
"But if we honor you, then Caswallon's enemies will hurl that as a charge against him. Nevertheless, those same men will befriend you, if you let them, and make use of you to attack Caswallon! What do you say, Tros?"
"I? What should I say?" Tros answered. "What do I care for the feuds of Briton against Briton? I come to attend my father's funeral."
"Are you Cæsar's man?" asked Orwic.
TROS flew into a rage at that. He clenched his fists and answered in a voice that made the Northmen jump and brought Conops knife in hand from between the benches.
"No! By Zeus and the dome of heaven, no! Do you understand what no means? Rot you and your muddy Lud of Lunden! Rot you all! I vomit on you! Cæsar may help himself to your wives and children! Let him enslave you! What do I care! War-r-r-ugh! You bickering fools—town against town—you are worse than my own Greeks!
"Do you listen to your druids? No! Do you listen to your chiefs? No! What do you listen to? Your belly-rumblings! You believe your colic is a cosmic urge! You think your island is the middle of the universe!
"You accuse your friends and make love to your enemies! You and your chariots! Look at your ships there, rotting! Look at me—" Tros struck his breast—"I grieve! Look at me! I weep! Why? On your account? The gods forbid it! I hope Cæsar treads you underfoot! I grieve that my father's dust must mingle with the dirt of Britain! Wo is me! Wo that I ever set foot in Britain!"
"Peace!" said Orwic, but Tros turned away from him, shaking with fury.
His violence had reopened the wound on his cheek and Helma stanched the blood, using the bandage he had tossed aside. Conops whispered to him; he struck Conops, hurling him headlong again between the benches. Then, black with anger, he strode up close to Orwic, hands behind him.
"Tell Caswallon, I attend my father's funeral. Say this: By Zeus I'll solve his difficulties! Can he fight? Is he a man? Hah! Let him believe either me, or else Skell and these other liars! Let him waste no time about it! If he chooses to call me an enemy, he shall fight me before all Lunden!"
Orwic forced a smile and tried to pour the oil of jest on anger.
"How would that help? They would say you fought him for the kingdom, Tros!"
"Caswallon's kingdom? I? That for it!" Tros spat into the river. "Hah! Barter my freedom for the right to be disobeyed and chorused by long-haired horse-copers? Gods listen to him! Tell Caswallon I wouldn't thank him for what he calls his kingdom! Tell him I doubt his friendship! Bid him haste and prove it or else fight me! Go tell him!"
"Tros, those are unwise words!" said Orwic.
"They are mine! This is my sword!" Tros answered, tapping the gilded hilt of his long weapon.
"Tros, you and I swore friendship."
"Swore? What is a man's oath worth! Show me the friendship!"
"Tros, I spoke you fair. I only told you how the matter lies. I asked an honest question."
"Zeus! I gave an honest answer! Call me friend or enemy! By Zeus, it means nothing to me which way a fish jumps!"
"Your eyes burn. You are tired, Tros."
"Aye! Tired of you Britons and your ways! 'Am I Cæsar's man!' Ye gods of sea and earth! Get off my ship!"
But Orwic did not move, except to smile and hold his hand out.
"Nay, Tros. I rule Lunden in Caswallon's absence. Welcome to Lunden! I speak in Caswallon's name."
He showed a great ring on this thumb. Tros glared at it.
"I know you are not Cæsar's man," said Orwic.
At which Tros flew into another fury.
"Pantheon of Heaven! You! You know that? You, who saw me wreck all Cæsar's ships! You, who were with me at Seine-mouth and saw me rape Cæsar's lair! You, who saw my father's tortured body! You! You know I am not Cæsar's man—because I said it?"
Orwic smiled again, his hand outheld.
"You will admit, Tros, that you said it with a certain emphasis. A man may be excused if he believes you."
"Take my message to Caswallon!"
"I stand in Caswallon's place. I speak for him. I have received the message. I prefer to call you friend."
"Words again?" Tros asked.
He felt disappointed. He had enjoyed the burst of anger. In the moment's mood it would have suited him to carry challenge to conclusion.
"No more words," said Orwic. "Give me your hand, Tros. There."
He stepped close and embraced him, smearing his own cheek with Tros' blood.
"Welcome to Lunden! Now I go to make a good room ready for you in Caswallon's house."
"Young cockerel! Brave young cockerel!" Tros muttered, watching him overside, then turning suddenly to Helma:
"That is the man you should have married! Shall I give you to him? Orwic is the best bred cockerel in Britain."
She looked puzzled, wondering whether he imagined that was humor.
"I am pledged to you, Tros."
"I will free you."
"No. He is only a Briton. You are a sea-king. I will bear your sons."
"Zeus!" he muttered, wondering. "Has all the world gone mad? Come here!" he ordered.
When she came, he kissed her and Conops cried shame at him from beneath an oar-bench. It was a dawn of mixed emotions as opaque and changing as the Lunden mist.
CHAPTER VIII
CORNELIA OF GAUL
SO TROS' prisoners—since he had freed them and they were now his henchmen—became Caswallon's guests along with Tros in the great house on the hill top. In Caswallon's absence Orwic showed them almost too much courtesy, to the annoyance of servants and fair-haired British men-at-arms who luonged in the great hall or amused themselves at horse-play in the yard.
But it gave the Northmen an enormously high opinion of Tros; and when Orwic brought out Cæsar's treasure chest, so that Tros might pay off his hireling seamen, even Sigurdsen began to boast of being Tros' adherent and Helma put on airs toward the British women, who were friendly enough until she began almost to patronize them.
So the Britons brought forth horses and compelled the Northmen to try to ride, mounting them two on a horse; and into the deriding mob of onlookers Cornelia came, attended by a crowd of young bloods dressed in their choicest finery, wearing enough gold and bronze and amber among them to have overpaid one of Cæsar's legions for a year.
While they were laughing at the Northmen's efforts to ride half-broken stallions scared into a frenzy by men who despised the sea as only fit for fishermen, Cornelia studied Tros from a distance.
He had done paying his hirelings and was counting the rest of the gold, or rather pretending to count it, watching her between-whiles as adroitly as she watched him, each avoiding the other's eyes. Gathering her escort around her at last, she made her way outside the crowd toward where Tros sat on a chair on Caswallon's porch.
She walked with dignity that she had imitated from the Romans. Her dress and jewelry were Roman, aping the patrician style, pure white with a golden border, and she showed no trace of having suffered on her stormy way from Gaul. Her dark hair glistened in a net that held it massed behind her neck; gilded sandals decorated rather than concealed her feet. She looked expensive and calmly impudent. But her stock-in-trade was nothing tangible, although it was all in evidence: An air of knowing more than anybody else knew, of having influence that none could undermine, of laughing at life because she held the keys of fortune.
Those keys, too, were evident, brown eyes beneath long, dark lashes; carmine, daring, not exactly scornful but mocking lips; a figure that suggested limitless immodesty beneath cultured poise; a gown that clung precisely where it should cling to excite emotion when she moved with that apparently unstudied ease.
Tros knew her type. Helma did not, and stood nearer to him, light of northern sky blazing under flaxen brows, Norse jealousy hardening her young face. Helma was afraid; Tros felt her trembling when her elbow touched his. But the Gaulish woman with the Roman name had trained herself in far too many swift intrigues to show fear, even if she felt it. Rome had made a hundred conquests in the wake of women of her genius; and before Rome, Nineveh. Inborn in her was all the grace of courts and all the spirit of destruction.
"The noble Tros?" she asked, coming to a stand in front of him, not trespassing yet on Caswallon's porch.
And Tros was not yet minded that she should. He did not rise. He kicked his long sword outward so that its hilt rested on his knees and he could lay both hands on it, leaning back in the chair to stare insolently through suspicious, slumberous eyes.
"My name is Tros."
"I am Cornelia."
"Cæsar's light o' love?" he asked, raising shaggy black eyebrows just sufficiently to barb the insult. "Cæsar's slave?"
Helma, behind him, touched his shoulder gratefully. Conops, seated on Cæsar's treasure-chest, showed three more teeth through the slit in his upper-lip, rose and disappeared into the house.
"Cæsar's messenger!" the Gaulish woman answered.
There was no iron in her voice; nothing but challenging laughter. Cæsar had not picked a thin-skinned fool to pave Rome's way to conquest.
Conops came out of the house with Cæsar's scarlet cloak and draped it on Tros' shoulders, Helma assisting to arrange it, half-guessing its significance although she did not know that Tros had looted it along with the Roman's bireme.
The young Britons who had appointed themselves Cornelia's body-guard began to whisper to her. One of them grew bold and raised his voice—
"Tros, your insolence insults us all!"
Tros sneered; his mood was cynical. Orwic came out of the house to stand behind him. Orwic being in authority just then the crowd grew still, until Cornelia spoke in Latin:
"Cæsar's cloak, Tros! You foreshadow Cæsar! He will take that for an omen when I tell him Tros sat cloaked in imperial scarlet on the porch of Caswallon's house!"
"They talk Latin!" some one shouted. "Tros is Cæsar's man!"
There were more than a hundred people by that time on the green before Caswallon's house, not counting the stable-hands and other serfs, who were hardly to be reckoned with, not daring to offend their betters; some were men who had come too late to fight the Northmen, jealous of the victors' spoils and very anxious to assert themselves.
A tumult began, a few of them denouncing Tros as an intriguer, some shouting that Cæsar's message should be heard. A noisy, small group, nearest to the gate and safety, denounced Caswallon. Orwic swore under his breath, using the names of a dozen Celtish gods. Tros whispered to Conops:
"Bid my Northmen gather themselves behind the house and enter it from the rear. Take charge of them. Add yourselves to Orwic's men. Be swift."
Then he turned to Orwic.
"Now or never!" he said, with a careless shrug of his shoulders. "Is Caswallon king in Lunden? Gently, boy, gently! Not yet. Leave this to me. I will show you who rules this end of Britain!"
He stood up, letting his face light with laughter, gathering Cæsar's scarlet cloak around him. He addressed Cornelia, but in a voice that all the crowd could hear, and he spoke slowly, in Gaulish, as if answering her speech, and taking care that all should understand him, in spite of his foreign accent:
"Aye, woman! This was Cæsar's cloak. You, who were Cæsar's light o' love until he sent you to cozen me, were not so very clever when you recognized it! I am told you brought me a letter from Cæsar. I am told Caswallon burned it. I am told you are warning the Britons not to listen to Caswallon until they first hear me. Well: They shall hear me now. I am Caswallon's guest!"
HE COULD hear a tramping through the house behind him as the Northmen came with Conops to reenforce Orwic's men. There was a noise of weapons being lifted from the racks.
"Cæsar sent you to me. Are you ready, Orwic?" he whispered. "March out and surround her when I give the word! Therefore you are mine. I will see that none perverts you from right conduct in the realm of him who is host to both of us! Come!" he commanded, beckoning.
Cornelia appealed to her escort, too late. Orwic took the cue and rushed from the porch with forty men-at-arms behind him, twelve of them Northmen very anxious to repay bruises done at horse-play. It was risky work; the Northmen, fierce enemies a day ago, were likelier than not to cause indignant bloodshed; safety lay in doing the work so swiftly that there would be no time for a crowd without a leader to decide whether it really was indignant or was half-amused.
Conops and the Northmen surrounded Cornelia; Orwic and his Britons who thrust themselves between the Northmen and her British escort, joining spears before them like a fence-rail, forcing the astonished escort backward on their heels. And while Orwic accomplished that, Tros shouted, throwing up his right arm, shaking Cæsar's scarlet cloak to distract attention to himself:
"Ho, there! Caswallon's friends! There is a rat named Skell who brought this Cæsar's woman to cheat away your freedom! Where is Skell?"
Caswallon's friends were fewer than his enemies in that crowd, but the impulse of surprize was in their favor. By the time Cornelia had been hustled into the great hall in the midst of a group of grinning Northmen, who handled her none too gently, the loyalists had started a diversion, shout and counter-shout, that served until Orwic's summons on a silver bugle brought a dozen chariots charging from the stable to clear the green of friend and enemy alike. The crowd did not even try to stand against the chariots, although the front ones had no scythes fixed to the wheels. But there were two chariots in the rear that could have mown a crimson swath.
"And now swiftly!" said Tros, when Orwic strolled back to the porch trying to look self-possessed. "Where are those Northmen prisoners Caswallon took in the fight in the forest?"
"What of them? There are only three-and-twenty, some of them pretty badly hurt," said Orwic.
"Where are they? I know mobs! Your Britons will say that it was Northmen who snatched that woman away. They will kill those three-and-twenty! Then, they will come to kill my twelve and Sigurdsen! Then me, then you!"
"Bah! Who cares if they kill Northmen!" Orwic answered.
"I for one! Blood-lust grows. They will kill Caswallon next! Smuggle those prisoners to this place. Start a hue-and-cry at Skell's heels; that fox will give them a run to keep all Lunden busy! Send for Caswallon then, and bid him hurry. Bid him bring Fflur with him!"
Orwic hesitated, but Tros took him by the shoulders.
"Am I friend or enemy?" he thundered. "Boy! That woman will win Britain for Cæsar yet unless you act swiftly!"
Orwic yielded only half convinced and hurried away to instruct his friends, shutting the great gate and posting guards to keep another crowd from forming. Tros strode into the house, swaggering as if he owned it. Cornelia was seated near Caswallon's great chair under the balcony at one end of the hall; her dress was ruffled and a little torn, but she was laughing at the men who stared at her, and she mocked Tros, gesturing at Helma:
"Ah! You seize me, when you have that beautiful fair-haired prisoner! What use for poor me, when"
"I have a use for you!" Tros interrupted; and the hall grew still. "You were Cæsar's slave. Now you are mine!"
She was startled, but the scared look vanished in an instant; she had the professional intriguer's self-control. It was Helma who turned pale and came and stood beside Tros, watching his face.
"Tros!" said the woman of Gaul, speaking Latin, "Cæsar told me you are proud, and full of guile, and a great keeper of rash promises. You promised him enmity. You wrecked his fleet. You forged Cæsar's name and stole your father from the grip of three camped legions.
"That was an indignity to Rome as well as Cæsar. You sunk Cæsar's boats; you slew his men; you ducked Cæsar himself in the tide at Seine-mouth. So you kept your rash promise.
"Yet Cæsar's magnanimity is greater than the malice that pursues him. He is willing to forgive. He offers you full recognition by the Roman Senate and command of fifty ships, if you withdraw your enmity and promise him allegiance! I am Cæsar's messenger, not your slave."
Tros answered her in Gaulish—
"When I need fifty of Cæsar's ships, I will take them without his leave or Rome's!"
But that was for the Britons' ears. He had in mind more than to bandy words.
"Tros" she began again.
"Silence!" he commanded.
Then he pointed to the door of an inner room between the great hall and Caswallon's quarters. Helma bit her lip, and several of the men-at-arms laughed loud. But Tros kept on pointing, and he looked imperious in Cæsar's scarlet cloak.
So Cornelia rose out of her chair, bowed, smirked almost imperceptibly at Helma, and let the way in through the door, glancing over-shoulder in a way that gave Tros pause. He beckoned Helma.
"Bring your brother's wife and the widow!" he commanded.
So three Norse women followed Tros into the dimly lighted room; and one of them knew Gaulish. There were benches in there for men-at-arms, and one chair, on which Cornelia sat uninvited, arranging her draperies to show the shapely outline of her figure.
Tros slammed the door and slid the wooden bolt in place, with a nod to Helma and the other women to be seated on the benches. He seized Cornelia's chair then and dragged it into the shaft of light that fell through the one small window. He craved sleep, and had not time to waste.
"Turn your face to the light!" he commanded. "Keep it so! Now, no evasions! I am in no mood to split thin hairs of courtesy!"
"Truly, Tros, your courtesy is thin," she answered. "Cæsar is never discourteous, even to his enemies. I was told you are a prince's son. Where you were born are manners thought unmanly?"
"Answer this!" He rapped his sword-hilt on a table that he dragged up to the window-light. "What was written in Cæsar's letter that Caswallon took from you and burned?"
She smiled and tossed her head. "I gave it to the lord Caswallon. He had manners. He was too polite to take it from me!"
"What was written in the letter?"
"Since the letter was burned, what matters what was written in it!"
Her dark eyes dared him.
Tros drew his sword, his great chin coming forward with a jerk. He let the sword-point fall until it touched her bare throat.
"Answer me!"
Her eyes turned slightly inward as she looked along the sword-blade toward the marvelously steady hilt, but she did not wince. The sword-point pricked the skin. She did not even flinch from it.
"I will not tell! And you dare not kill me!"
Tros let the sword-point fall until it touched her naked foot between the crossed thongs of her sandal. A dancing-woman's foot was where her fear might lie closest to the surface! But she laughed.
"Before these women, Tros! What would the Britons say to you? Cæsar may torture women, and you might—though I think not, for I see a weakness—but the Britons don't even whip their children. Would Caswallon forgive you if you should nail my foot to the floor in his house?"
TROS owned to the weakness divined in him. He could kill, in cold blood or in anger, but the very thought of torture made him grit his teeth. The half of his hatred of Cæsar was due to his contempt for Cæsar's practises; he liked the Britons because they did not practise cruelty.
But he could be cruel in another way. Compunction that prevented torturing man or woman implied no inhibition against mental terrorism. He could hardly bear to see a fish gaffed if the hook would serve, and could not kill a cur like Skell unless his own life were in danger, but he could be as ruthless as the sea, as practical as fate in matching means to ends.
His eyes changed, and the woman noticed it. He glanced at Helma.
"Bring my man Conops!" he commanded, and he set his sword-point on the floor between his feet, to lean on it and wait.
He did not have to wait long. As Helma drew the bolt the door swung inward. Conops lurched into the room, shielding his head with his arm, in fear of the blow he had earned by eavesdropping, too wise in his master's ways to offer an excuse.
When the blow did not fall he peeped over his arm, then dropped the arm, blinked his eye and grinned, knowing danger was over. Tros' punishments were prompt, or else not meted out at all.
"News?" Tros asked him.
"None, master. Only I heard say they are hunting Skell; and a chariot went for Caswallon."
"Caswallon is coming, eh? Have you a wife?"
Tros knew the answer, but he chose that Cornelia should learn the truth from Conops' lips.
"No, master—surely you know that! The last woman I"
A frown convinced him he had said enough.
Tros turned to Cornelia.
"This man is no beauty, is he! He is not well bred. His manners are of the fore-peak quality. He disciplines a woman with a knife-hilt. He is single. He is old enough to marry. He would serve me better if he had a wife to keep him from longshore escapades. I will give you to Conops to be his wife—his wife, you understand me? Conops is a free man, he can own a wife."
He had her! She was out of the chair, indignant, terrified, appealing to the other women, ready to scream, in a panic, struggling to control herself. Tros' threat was something he could easily fulfil, since she was his by all the written and unwritten laws.
If she should claim that she was Cæsar's slave, then Tros, as Cæsar's enemy, might do as he pleased with her by right of capture, she having been sent to use her wiles on him, not on Caswallon. If she should declare herself a free-woman, she might fool Britons but not Tros, who knew the Roman law and knew the dreadful penalties that even Cæsar, who had sent her, would be forced to inflict should she be returned to him branded, a slave who had claimed to be free.
If Tros should make a gift of her to Conops, the Britons might be offended, but there would be no chance of their interfering. Marriage by gift was binding, all the more so if the woman were a slave or a prisoner of war. She would not become Conops' slave because he might not sell her; she would be bound to him for life, promoted or reduced to his rank—considering it promotion or reduction as she pleased—in theory free, in practise a sailor's drudge.
Conops was as much alarmed as she was.
"Master!" he exploded. "What use is she on a ship? Why, she can't even cook! She's"
"Peace, you drunken, blabbing fool! When I give you a wife, you'll take her and be grateful, or I'll break your head! Think yourself lucky to"
But she who had been Cæsar's light o' love could not face life with Conops.
"I will tell, Tros!" she said, and sat down on the chair again, shuddering. "You will not give me to that one-eyed thing?"
Tros nodded, grunted. He hated to bargain with her, but on the other hand it would have gone against the grain to ruin Conops by imposing such a wife on him.
"What Cæsar wrote to you, Tros, it was meant that the lord Caswallon should read. It was supposed that some one, some druid, would know Latin and translate it to him. But the lord burned the letter."
"What did Cæsar write?" Tros thundered at her. "And why in Latin?"
"He wrote, Lord Tros, that he trusted you, as agreed between you and him at Seine-mouth, to stir up the Britons against the lord Caswallon; in return for which he promised, as agreed, to confer high command on you so soon as sufficient Britons should recognize the advantage of welcoming the Roman legions into Britain. He concluded by reminding you of your pledge that there shall be no opposition to his landing on the coast of Britain when he comes again. And he charged you, to that end, to support the lord Caswallon's enemies.
Tros stroked his beard and pecked with his sword-point at the floor-boards.
"Why did he write those lies?" he demanded.
But he knew why. He knew she was telling the truth. He knew Cæsar's methods.
She recovered a trace of her former impudence.
"Who am I, to know Cæsar's mind?" she answered, and Tros recognized something else, that she was ready to betray any one for her own advantage. He clutched Conops' arm and pulled him forward.
"Answer me in full, or"
"Cæsar hoped that any of several things might happen. The lord Caswallon might kill you, which would be payment for your impertinence at Seine-mouth. Or the lord Caswallon might mistrust you and put you to flight, when you might fall into Cæsar's hands and be crucified.
"Or, learning of the lord Caswallon's mistrust, you might turn against him in self-defense and, joining his enemies, start rebellion against him, setting Briton against Briton, which would make invasion simpler. Or, you might be sensible and, accepting magnanimous forgiveness, take command of Cæsar's fleet, making use of your great knowledge of the British coast to forward an invasion."
"Or?"
Tros knew there was something left unsaid. He jabbed his sword into the floor, pulled back the hilt and let it go until it hummed. She understood him. She must speak before the humming ceased.
"Tros, I am trained. I sing and dance. Some men are easily tempted. Cæsar thought"
"Continue! What did Cæsar think?"
"I am not sure I know what he thought."
"Then I will tell you! Cæsar thought I might be fool enough to accept his promise from your lips! I might be fool enough to turn against Caswallon, might be fool enough to captain Cæsar's fleet a while, fool enough to come within his reach and serve him, until usefulness was spent and he could pick another quarrel, crucify me at his leisure. You were to beguile me and betray me to him at the proper time!"
"Lord Tros, I could not have done it! I could not betray a man like you! I was Cæsar's slave. Now I am yours. I would rather be yours. You are not wicked, as Cæsar is! Lord Tros, I will be your faithful slave. I will betray Cæsar to you! Only no degradation! I am not a common slave."
"I pity you!" Tros answered. "Pity shall make no fool of me nor a successful rogue of you! Answer my other question: Why did Cæsar write in Latin and not Gaulish? He knew the lord Caswallon knows no Latin."
"Ah! But if the letter were in Gaulish, the lord Caswallon might have been sharp enough to understand it was a trick to turn him against you."
Tros laughed in spite of weariness and anger, sheathing his sword.
"Who sups with Cæsar needs a long spoon!"
She tried to take advantage of his changed mood, gazing at him with dark, lustrous eyes that verged on tears.
"Lord Tros, you said you pity me. Do pity me! I was free-born. Romans destroyed our city when I was a young child. I was sold and they took me to Rome. Do you know what that means? To save myself from the worst that can befall a woman I strove to become so valuable that for their own sakes they would not throw me on the market.
"A dealer had bought me; he had me taught to dance and sing; he began to make use of me to entertain his customers; and so I learned intrigue.
"Once, when Cæsar was in Rome, I was sent to coax him to buy man-slaves. I entertained him, and he bought, at above the market rate for such cattle as I offered. Then, thinking better of it, he returned those man-slaves to the dealer and kept me, at the price of three of them.
"And since then he has used me for his purposes, bringing me to Gaul because I knew my mother-tongue. Lord Tros, 'like master like slave!' I have had to be wicked, because Cæsar is! Lord Tros, I will serve you as I never served Cæsar!"
She glanced at Helma, smiled with such meekness and such lustrous eyes that Helma was stirred to sympathy and rose from the bench, though Sigurdsen's wife whispered and restrained her.
"She is yours, too. Lord Tros, let me serve her!"
Helma shuddered. She had not expected that. She shook her head. But Tros was in a quandary and given to strange, masterful impulses when in that mood.
"You have joined your destiny to mine," he said to Helma. "You shall do your part. Take charge of her, keep her until Caswallon comes."
Helma protested in a flutter of mistrust. She whispered to the other women, then seizing Tros' arm, begged him to be more cautious.
"She will betray us all! Let Britons guard her!"
But Tros knew jealousy when he saw it. He laughed.
"I have given you your task," he answered.
"Then at least a guard of Northmen!"
"Zeus!" he exploded. But Helma saw the laughter in his eyes. "Are Northmen deaf? And you dumb? If they are my men, shall they not obey you?"
She dropped her eyes, apologizing, pleased.
"So be it. All, save Sigurdsen," she answered.
But when she looked up it was at Conops. She knew well enough she could manage Sigurdsen.
"Heh? What was that? Who disobeys you deals with me!" Tros answered.
He, too, suddenly faced Conops.
"You! You see that woman? Helma her name is. She is my bride. You obey her, save and except only when her orders clash with mine!"
Conops blinked. Helma smiled at him.
"Oimoi! We were master and man. Now we are three and take us!" Conops murmured.
For which impertinence Tros took him by the ear and cuffed him, but not hard enough to hurt.
Over Helma there crept a new, visible sense of possession. Nothing that Tros could have said or done could have made as much impression as that speech. She had come into her own; she was his mate, his partner!
Strangers they might be, with almost all to learn about each other, but Tros had laid a rock of confidence in place, on which to build the future, and her eyes glowed gratitude.
CHAPTER IX
TROS STRIKES A BARGAIN
TROS slept until Caswallon came, full pelt, with a yell to the guard at the gate, reining in foaming stallions with their fore-feet over the porch and leaping along the pole between them into the house, Fflur following a moment later. The chief and Orwic were conferring when Tros rose sleepily and bulked through the leather curtains that divided inner-room from hall. Caswallon eyed him swiftly, searchingly, then smiled and strode to meet him.
"Brother Tros!" he said, embracing in the British fashion, one cheek then the other, each man's right hand patting the other's back.
Caswallon was as swift of resolution and as emotional as a boy beneath that rather noncommittal surface. His mustache hid lips that gave the lie to the high cheek-bones; he was gentler than he seemed, although a mighty man in battle and stronger than his two strongest men-at-arms.
He thrust the pawing dogs away, pretending anger, and took Fflur's hand, she watching Tros as if she could read thoughts before he formed them. Three children came and clung to Fflur, but she hardly noticed them, although they laughed at her because her hair was all blown from the chariot ride and she was mud-bespattered from Caswallon's trick of driving through and over anything he met.
"What is this about the Gaulish woman?" Caswallon asked, when he had waited for Tros to speak and Tros said nothing.
"She was Cæsar's slave," Tros answered. "She was not entitled to be anybody's guest. Cæsar insulted you, me, all of us, every Briton of the Trinobantes, when he sent a slave to intrigue among us as an equal!"
"So!" said Caswallon, and tugged his mustache.
He glanced at Fflur, but she looked away and gave him no counsel.
"A slave, eh? Do you know that?" Tros laughed.
"I will sell her to you, if you wish! She is mine, since Cæsar sent her to beguile me! I will write you a bill of sale for her and sign it with Cæsar's name and seal. To make it full and binding I will wear his cloak that I took with his seal and treasure-chest! Do you want her?"
He was watching Fflur sidewise, considering the drama that her eyes revealed. Suddenly he caught her full gaze and she nodded; they understood each other.
"If you are my friend, Tros," said Fflur in her quiet voice, "you will keep that woman from Caswallon!"
"What is to be done with her?" asked Tros.
But instead of answering, Caswallon let go Fflur's hand and strode a dozen paces up the hall and back again.
"Tros!" he said at last. "She was swift, she was swifter than death! She came by night in a chariot, with a tale of shipwreck and the friendship of the men of Hythe. She said nothing of Skell. By morning she had won half Lunden! She came to visit me with more than thirty young bloods fawning on her! She showed me Cæsar's letter, and she spoke of you.
"In an hour, nay, in less than an hour, she had offered to betray both you and Cæsar. She gave me that letter, and I burned it. It was Latin, and besides, you had been my friend. I did not choose to let my eyes see proof against you. Then—we were alone then—she spoke to me of you and Fflur."
"He believed it!" Fflur interrupted. There was almost hatred in her eyes. "He took that woman's word that I, the mother of his sons, was"
"Fflur!" Caswallon did his best to smile, but the ire in her gray eyes chilled him. "You heard what the druid said. Did he not say an evil woman can corrupt the strongest man in a little while? Did the druid not say I was no more to be blamed than if I took a wound in battle? Have I not begged your forgiveness until my tongue stuttered against my teeth for lack of words?"
"Yes, words!" Fflur answered. "But you turned that woman loose to make worse mischief. You let her go and live with"
"Should I have kept her in my house?" Caswallon almost yelled at her.
"No!" said Fflur.
"Should I have killed her? What would the druids have said to that? What would half Britain have said that is forever urging me to listen to Cæsar's terms! Lud knows, it's hard enough to rule, without new excuses for dissension! I had to say I would take time for thought. And before I could think, those Northmen came plundering the river-villages."
Tros tried to pour oil on the waves of argument.
"The question is, what shall be done with her."
"That which should have first been done with her!" Fflur answered. "Send her back to Cæsar with a whipping, in a dress turned inside out and a whip in her hand as a gift to Cæsar! Bid her tell him that is Fflur's reply to Rome!"
Caswallon shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. His blundering, good-natured, gentlemanly sense of statecraft pulled him one way, his affection for his wife another.
"Fflur is forever positive," he grumbled, taking Tros by the shoulder. "But what would you do? Half my kingdom favors listening to Cæsar. Shall I ride it over them?"
Tros threw his hands behind him, legs apart, as if he stood deciding issues on his own poop.
"Let us hear Fflur. What says Fflur?" he answered.
"Lud! I have been hearing Fflur since"
Fflur interrupted. She went to Caswallon's side and held his hand, then burst into speech as if a ten-day dam were down, word galloping on word with sobs between:
"He is the best king Britain ever had! Bravest of them all! Generous—too just to every one except himself! They take advantage. Kindness is weakness in a king. He should rule, and he won't! I told him when to kill Skell, but he did not even hunt him out of Britain! Now Skell is back again. They say Caswallon's friends are hunting him. Orwic bade them"
"I thought of that!" said Tros.
"Yes, but it is your fault Skell is living, Tros—yours! You should have killed him when you had the chance! What kind of friend do you call yourself, if you can't slay Caswallon's enemies! Now Orwic says Skell has escaped them. Do you know what that means?"
She paused for breath; mastered a sob-shaken voice, and forced herself to speak with the slow, measured emphasis of tragedy:
"Skell will go—has gone to Black Glendwyr's place. Glendwyr craves Caswallon's shoes! Glendwyr leads the cowards who would live by Cæsar's leave! Skell will urge Glendwyr to revolt! He will speak of that Gaulish woman; he will lie about her; he will magnify her rank; he will tempt Glendwyr to win Cæsar's good will by befriending her and overthrowing you!"
She almost struck her husband, she was so bent on compelling him to understand his danger.
"Glendwyr will say you let the Northmen burn three villages. He will say you sent Tros against Cæsar, to irritate him when you should have sought peace. Father of my sons, Glendwyr will be in arms by tomorrow, with all the malcontents! I know it! I know it!"
"Pray Lud he is!" Caswallon answered.
"What have you done to be ready for him?" Fflur retorted. "Glendwyr has been brewing treason all these months! Did he help us against Cæsar on the beach? Not he! He saved his men to use them against you! Who helped this woman to reach Lunden with such speed? Skell? Whence should Skell get relays of swift horses? I tell you, Glendwyr did it!"
"How do you know that?" Caswallon asked, frowning.
"A druid said so."
"Lud rot the druids! They carry tales like kitchen-wenches!"
"The same druid told me that the woman came to Lunden in Glendwyr's chariot," Fflur went on, tight-lipped with anger, her eyes blazing.
"Why didn't you tell me that before?"
"I did. You didn't listen. You were in love with her dark eyes! You said no woman should be refused a hearing and you refused to hear me!"
"Mother of my sons, Lud knows my ears are full of your rebukes!" Caswallon answered, comically sorry for himself. "Peace, will you! Silence! Let us hear Orwic."
Orwic looked bored and smiled wanly, as usual when there was reason to be deadly serious, stroking his mustache as if good grooming were nine points of any problem.
"They've looted Skell's house. I think they'll burn it. Skell was gone, though, and they can't find him. Fifty or sixty others have gone, too. I daresay Fflur is right: They may have followed Skell to Glendwyr's place. But that needn't spoil the funeral. Glendwyr lives too far away to interrupt that."
"By Lud! He shall not interrupt it!" Caswallon exclaimed; and Fflur signed, as if it were no use trying to make her husband recognize danger.
She turned away and left them, making for the room where Tros had installed Helma and all his Northmen with the woman from Gaul under their close surveillance.
There was presently much talk from beyond the wrinkled leather curtain, while Caswallon, Tros and Orwic stood face to face considering what next to say to one another. They three stood in silence for a long time.
Suddenly Helma came to them, blinking at the sunlight through the great door. Her combed hair hung like spun-gold to her waist, lighter and fairer than gold might be, yet not so colorless as flax.
"Marriage or funeral first?" Tros asked. "By Lud, Caswallon, I would hate to see you buried in my father's grave! Yet if I were Skell—and if this Glendwyr is the man Fflur thinks he is—there would be more buryings tonight than the druids have prepared for! Yet if you die, they must bury me too, because I like to stand with friends. I would rather leave this girl a widow than dowerless. There is kings' blood in her veins."
He laid a hand on Helma's shoulder.
"My lord Tros," she said, "you are my protector, and you have done me greater honor than befalls a many prisoners. A while ago I cried to my brother Sigurdsen to slay you on your own ship. Shall I speak now, or be silent?"
"Speak," said Tros, half-bowing to Caswallon for permission.
"She of Gaul—Cæsar's woman," Helma began, and Caswallon swore under his breath; he was sick of that, subject. But Tros pricked his ears.
"She combed my hair, swearing she would serve me, speaking presently of Cæsar, and of you, most highly praising you by inference, contrasting you with Cæsar. So, a little at a time, she found out that I know little concerning the lord Caswallon; and that if I must choose, I should follow you, refusing to acknowledge him. Thereafter for a long time she was silent, while she dressed my hair.
"When she began to speak again she asked about those of my people whom the lord Caswallon had made prisoners in the fighting in the woods. She knows they are now in a great barn near the stables within the wall that surrounds this house. I think she overheard the command to bring them here.
"She said she supposed I could influence them, and for a while after that she talked of a dozen things—mainly of Gaul and the fate of Cæsar's prisoners.
"Then, when she had done my hair, she sat at my feet making a great show of humility, and cried a little, and then exclaimed how much better destiny had treated me than her, me, who am to be a great sea-captain's wife, and she but a slave.
"But after a while she held my hand, studying the lines across the palm, saying darkly I should feel the contrast if the noble Tros were slain before what I hoped should happen.
"So I questioned her, pretending credence in her art of reading what is written in lines on the palm of the hand, although I know such stuff is witchcraft, and a lie invented to entrap fools. Presently, having made much talk of voyages, and money, and—I think she said—five sons, she grew excited and very earnest, saying there was a grave disaster impending, that I might prevent if I were wise enough. And she said there was wisdom written on my palm, but too much overlaid with other lines that signify a willingness to submit to whatever fate may inflict.
"She was very full of guile. It was little by little, holding my hand and forever pretending to read it, that she hinted and then spoke more plainly, and then urged. She said it was written in my hand—mine!—that a revolt is coming, and that you, her protector she called you, would be slain unless I bade the Northmen seize you and carry you to safety elsewhere.
"I questioning, she seemed to go into a trance. She stared at the wall, her body rigid and her breath in gasps. She spoke then of men who will revolt against the lord Caswallon, intending to slay him and set another in his place. She said my destiny, and yours, and hers lay with the new man; but she did not name him.
"She spoke of tonight's funeral. She said she could see me left in this house with the Northmen and a very small guard of Britons. She said she could see me leading away the Northmen through the woods, guided by her and a Briton, toward men who made ready to attack the lord Caswallon.
"She said she saw the funeral, and you beside the lord Caswallon. Men seized you, she said, because she and I insisted, and they bore you off to safety in the woods. But the lord Caswallon, and the rest, she said they slew.
"Then she came out of the trance and asked me what she had been saying. She said she never can remember afterwards what passed her lips when those strange spells possess her. So I told her what she had said, and she seemed to grow afraid, asserting that a god had spoken through her.
"Then she urged me to be guided by the voice of her trance, saying she understood now what it all meant, how a certain lord Glendwyr, who had lent her chariot and horses to reach Lunden, would attack the lord Caswallon and himself become king.
"She said, 'Let us plan so that all the Northmen in a band together shall seize the lord Tros and convey him to safety, since neither you, nor he, nor I, nor the Northmen owe the lord Caswallon anything, but the lord Glendwyr will be glad to have us with him.'"
Tros and Caswallon met each other's eyes.
"How long have you known this Northwoman of yours?" Caswallon asked.
"We have all lived many lives and destiny plays with us like pieces on the board," Tros answered. "I know the truth when I hear it."
He drew Helma closer to him in the hollow of his left arm.
"Truth when a woman speaks?" Caswallon answered. "Phagh! I grow sick of these cross-purposes! This is but a trick again. Northmen are all liars! This is a plan to gather all the Northmen in one place. They would gain my confidence, then break for liberty. Cæsar's woman has had no time to learn Glendwyr's plans, suppose he has any. And who would trust Glendwyr against me? Not more men than I can snap my fingers at."
He snapped his fingers, then flexed his muscles and threw his shoulders back.
"Give me one good excuse to burn Glendwyr's roost!" he exclaimed.
But Tros grinned. It was an aggravating grin, as he intended that it should be.
"I have heard you say, 'Fflur is always right!'" he answered. "Cæsar's woman has had five days. Cæsar, himself swifter than the wind to snatch advantage, doubtless picked her for her swiftness. Zeus! Have you and I not seen how swift she is! And it may be that Cæsar knew beforehand of Glendwyr's plans.
"Cæsar has spies, and there are Britons who trade back and forth with Gaul, as for instance the Atrebates, who are not your friends, Caswallon. Why, they tell me that half of the Atrebates live in Gaul.
"Would it be wonderful if Cæsar should have learned about dissension in your realm? Rome's very life is staked on other folks' dissensions! So is Cæsar's! A dead dog smells the same whichever way the wind blows! If he can keep Rome by the ears, faction against faction, for his own advantage, will he not do it here?"
CASWALLON turned and paced the hall a time or two, the blue-veined skin of his face and neck looking deathly white against the hangings. He chewed his mustache; his fingers worked behind his back as if he were kneading the dough of indecision. Tros let go of Helma, almost pushed her from him.
"Cast up the reckoning!" he said. "Let us strike one woman off against the other, trusting neither. But a third remains, How often have you told me, 'Fflur is always right!' I say, take Fflur's word for it, and look sharply to Glendwyr!"
Caswallon stood still, mid-length of the hall.
"It would suit me well to fight him!" he said.
And he looked the part.
"Then fight him now!" Tros answered. "Glendwyr thinks tonight's obsequies will hold you occupied. Is he mad enough to spare you while your back is turned? To me it looks simple enough."
Caswallon came and stood in front of him, arms folded on his breast.
"Simple?" he said. "How long have you known Britain? Twenty years now I have kinged it, and I—I don't know my Britons yet!"
"If I should stand in your shoes, I would teach them to know me!" Tros retorted. "Bah! It is as simple as a mutiny at sea! Pick out the ringleader and smash him! Thus, then Cæsar's woman! Fill her ears! Let her learn by listening when she thinks none watches her, that you and every man you trust will attend the obsequies tonight, leaving this town unguarded.
"I will urge you, in her hearing, to guard the town well; you poohpooh it, laughing at me, and bid Orwic gather all your men for the procession. Then help her to escape or let Fflur dismiss her in a fury. Let Fflur give her a chariot and send her to the coast to make her own way back to Cæsar.
"Trust Fflur to put sufficient sting in it to make that plausible! The woman will go to Glendwyr; she will hurry to tell him Lunden is undefended! Good. You postpone the obsequies. You march! You catch Glendwyr unready in the nervous hour between preparation and the casting of the dice! You smite him in the night! Hang him! Hang Skell! Hang the Gaulish woman!
"Pack the three into a box and send it with your compliments to Cæsar! It will smell good by the time it reaches him! Then ride your bit of Britain with a rough hand, drilling, storing arrows, making ready! For Cæsar will invade again, Caswallon, as surely as you and I and Orwic stand here!"
"Clever! But you don't know Britain," Caswallon answered. "I am a king, but the druids say their Mysteries are more than kingdoms, even as a man's life is but a spark in the night of eternity.
"They have lighted the fires. They have informed the gods. They have found the right conjunction of the stars and set their altars accordingly. What the druids do, let no man interrupt."
"Lud rot the druids!" Orwic muttered.
But he was of a generation younger, that was more impatient with eternity.
"How many men has Glendwyr?" Tros asked.
"Maybe a hundred! Nor will he have more unless he can score an advantage. If I have hard work raising a handful to fight Northmen, what hope has he of raising an army? They might flock to him if he should win a battle, but not otherwise."
"And how many have you?" Tros asked.
"Maybe a hundred. I raised three hundred against the Northmen; but some were killed, some hurt and some have gone home. There will be a thousand in to-night's procession, and as many women, but nine-tenths would run.
"Britons are brave enough, but they say, 'A king should king it!' They leave their king to king it when the trouble starts. However, Glendwyr would never dare to interrupt the druids."
"Have you not watched Glendwyr? Have you no spies?" Tros asked.
"Yes. But my men go home to the feasting when a fight is over, whether they win or lose it! Glendwyr's men are feasting, too, I will stake my kingdom on it."
"I have seen kingdoms staked, and lost ere now!" said Tros.
Caswallon's indifference puzzled him. He suspected the chief of knowing more than he pretended, and yet, the almost stupid, bored look might be genuine. Orwic looked as bored and careless as Caswallon did.
Tros, both hands behind him, legs apart, considered how he might earn fair profit that should leave him free of obligation to the man who paid.
"I have a bride, a longship and a crew of thirteen men. I need more men," he remarked.
"Lud love me, I can spare none!" said Caswallon.
"You have three-and-twenty Northmen prisoners," said Tros, "and they once belonged to my man Sigurdsen. They are no good to you for ransom. They are seamen. They can build ships. I can use them. If Glendwyr should attack Lunden while your back is turned"
Caswallon smiled, a little grimly, but said—nothing.
" they would naturally help Glendwyr if he turned them loose. But I have Sigurdsen, their former chief. And I have Helma, whom they love. If I should promise them their freedom under me, they would fight at my bidding. Will you give them to me, if I guard you tonight while your back is turned?"
Caswallon stared hard. "Will you not attend your father's obsequies?" he asked.
"That I would dearly love to do," said Tros, "but you are my friend. I think you are in danger. I would rather strike a hard blow for a living man than shed tears following a dead one to the grave. Give me the Northmen!"
"What will you do with them?" Caswallon asked.
"I will guard your back tonight."
"You mean, you will dare to hold Lunden Town for me with six-and-thirty men?" Caswallon asked.
He hid his mouth behind his hand as he watched Tros' eyes, and once, for about a second, he glanced at Orwic.
"Aye," Tros answered. "I am no fair-weather friend. As for my father, if he could come from the dead, he would bid me attend to the task of living and leave comfortably dead men to the druids!"
"You are mad, Tros!" said Caswallon. "But I like you, though I did doubt you a while back. You are a fool; Northmen are poor laborers on land. I will give you instead as much land as you can stride the length of on your own feet from dawn to sunset. With Cæsar's gold you can buy mares and cattle. I will give you the gray stallion I bought a month ago from the Iceni. Helma to wife and a holding in Britain, what more do you want?"
"Freedom! A ship and the sea!" Tros answered. "Nay, no bondage to the dirt! Will you give me the Northmen?"
"They are yours," Caswallon answered. "But you are more mad than a hare in the furrows in spring!"
Nevertheless, he nodded at Orwic as if Tros' bargain suited him, and Orwic smiled behind a hand that stroked his long mustache.
CHAPTER X
RASH? WISE? DESPERATE? OR ALL THREE?
THERE was a deal of talk still, interrupted by men who came in to ask about the night's procession, and by the servants who set up the long table in the hall, putting benches in place and silver plates for folk of high degree, wooden ones for ordinary mortals. Britains never moved, whether for war or peace, until they had gorged enormously.
"A poor enough wedding feast!" Caswallon said. "I would rather you waited, Tros, until"
Tros interrupted him with one of his deep-sea laughs that rose from somewhere near his middle where the sword hung:
"Until Glendwyr runs me through, and you give Helma to a man who loves horses and pigs? Nay, Caswallon, you shall marry me this day! Then if I die, Helma will be dowered with money and ship, so she may choose, and not be chosen!"
He swaggered with his deep-sea captain's gait toward the long room at the rear where all his Northmen lay glooming, their eyes on Cæsar's woman, who sat between Sigurdsen's wife and the widow.
Sigurdsen rose to his feet as Tros entered; he looked as if recovering from too much mead; his eyes were red; his knees shook; a northern gloom possessed him such as grays a winter's sea; but he met Tros' eyes as faith to faith, without emotion.
He would have spoken, but Tros checked him with one of those gestures of confidence that convey more than a hundred words. Sigurdsen sat down again among his men, his back toward a leather-curtained wall.
Tros smiled at Cæsar's woman. She smiled back, remaining seated. She did not glance at Helma, who had followed Tros into the room, but she let Tros see that she understood Helma had told of the palm-reading and the trance. Her liquid eyes were more intelligent than lovely—too alert, too knowing.
Tros out-acted her. Over his bold face there swept such visible emotions as a man might feel who found himself mistaken, who had doubted, to discover that his doubt was wrong, who envied brains more subtle than his own, who held the upper hand, yet felt a diffidence in using it, because he must seek favors of his victim.
There was vague regret depicted, and a little laughter at the ebb and flow of destiny; a gift of guile that could admire guile, the expression of a clever gambler, losing, who will pay the bet.
"If you stay, Fflur will tear you to pieces!" he said, grinning, stroking his chin, letting the black beard straggle through his fingers.
"I am your slave," she answered.
She laid chin on hands, both elbows on her knees, to watch his face.
He nodded.
"Careless kings are weak friends," he said darkly. "Caswallon cares nothing about you. Fflur will not endure you. You may go. I will send you to Glendwyr's place. Tell Glendwyr I would have come with you, but I attend my father's obsequies. Say, if he takes Lunden before dawn, I will befriend him with six-and-thirty Northmen."
"Noble Tros," she answered, "I will tell Glendwyr how many men guard Lunden, if you inform me."
"None!" said Tros, almost whispering.
She stared. He nodded, one arm across his chest, resting the other elbow on it, chin on hand.
"Tell Glendwyr I arranged that. I pay for service rendered, handsomely. You understand me?"
"Noble Tros, I am your slave! You shall be king of Britain and Cæsar's friend, if you will trust me!"
"I judge words by performances," Tros answered. "Come!"
He led her to the stable-yard, where Orwic had a chariot for her yoked and waiting.
"How far to Glendwyr's place?" he asked her, as if that were an afterthought.
"Four or five hours," she answered. "But Glendwyr waits only three hours' ride away, or it may be less. I know the place. His charioteer, who brought me, showed me where the road turns off by a stream in the forest."
"Go fast!" said Tros. "Bid Glendwyr hasten! Say, if he fails this night, I will never again trust him. And you likewise! Fail me, and you will find Cæsar a more forgiving man than me! Serve me, and I am more generous than Cæsar!"
Orwic opened a side gate, standing behind it, so that she did not catch sight of him, although her appraising eyes swept every corner of the yard, and Tros was sure she knew the count of chariots that stood pole-upward, the number of restless horses in the long sheds, and how many serfs played knuckle-bones under the eaves.
Those eyes of hers missed nothing, except that Tros laughed when her chariot went plunging through the gate, and that it was Orwic, Caswallon's nephew and his right-hand-man, who slammed the gate shut behind her.
"A mare's nest!" said Orwic, rather melancholy. "There will be no eggs in it! I know Glendwyr; bold when it pays to lie low, coward at smiting time! If he had come to fight the Northmen, yes, he might have won a following against Caswallon afterward.
"But he lay low then, and he will lie low now, until Caswallon has an army at his back. Then the fool will have at us—Lud help him! He shall lie low then for all time!"
Tros' amber eyes glanced at the sky.
"Northeast wind backing to the north!" he answered; but what he meant by that he did not say, any more than he knew what Orwic's air of information in reserve might mean.
He returned to where Helma waited whispering to Sigurdsen. The Northman looked at Tros with new appraisal in his eyes, and actually smiled at last.
"Can he fight?" Tros asked. "Is he fit for an adventure?"
Sigurdsen nodded and talked back to Helma in a singsong growl that sounded like the sea on jasper beaches, but Tros did not wait for all that outburst to be interpreted; when Helma turned to speak he took her by the shoulders and, in short, hurried phrases told her of the plan in mind.
So she told Sigurdsen, and he, laughing, told the others, bidding one of them help him strip off all the bandages that impeded his arms and his huge shoulder-muscles.
Tros led the way then toward the yard, but Conops met him in the door, gesturing secrecy, mysterious as if he came from snooping in a graveyard.
"Master! One word!"
"Aye! And I will count the word! Be swift!"
Conops drew him back into the room and whispered:
"Master! Women are no good! I know! I never dallied with a woman but she robbed me! That one you have sent away would sell her lover to a press-gang for the price of a drop of scent! This one, this yellow-haired young one will scold you, day in, day out! When she is older she will be like Fflur, who scolds Caswallon until he daren't even drink without her leave, and drinks because she worries him! Master, don't marry her! Don't! Don't! And your father not yet in his grave!"
Tros took him by the neck, laughed, shook him until his teeth clattered like castanets
"Stand by!" he said. "Stand by! You hear me? Stand by for dirty weather, if you smell the wind! If she should scold me, I will take it out on your hide, little man, you little one-eyed, split-lipped, red-haired, freckled, dissolute, ugly, faithful friend o' mine! Belay advice!
"Out oars, you knife-nasty, wharf-running, loyal old dirty-weather sea-dog! Stow that tongue and stand by me as I endure you, dock-rat, drunkard, shame of the Levant, impertinent, devoted trusty that you are! No back-talk, or I'll break your head! I'll buy a wife for you, and make you keep her! Now, are you satisfied?"
TROS banged his head against the wall by way of clinching argument and strode at the head of his Northmen to the stable-yard, they tramping in his wake like henchmen who had served him since the day they carried arms, with Conops fussing along behind them ragging Sigurdsen because he did not keep step.
But Sigurdsen was too proud to fall into the rhythm of the tramp, and rather too long-legged; also, he was not at all disposed to do what Conops told him, or even to take notice of him, or to admit that he understood.
When they reached the great barn where Caswallon's Northmen were confined, Orwic was waiting and unlocked the complicated wooden contrivance that held the beam in place across the double door. There was no armed guard; the prisoners knew they were safer there than if at liberty until the rage against them should die and Britons resume their usual easy-going tolerance of friend and former foe alike. They were lying in straw, their wounded wrapped in clean white linen.
Those who could rise were on their feet the moment Sigurdsen stood bulked against the light; there were only two who lay still, although a dozen of them had to struggle from the straw, being stiff from painful wounds.
But there was none hurt beyond fairly swift recovery, or he would have been "finished" where he lay on the battlefield as unfit for slavery, half-slavery of service to a British chief, or ransom.
Tros, with Helma next to him, stood one side of the long barn where the failing sunlight pouring through the door shone on their faces. Sigurdsen, his Northmen at his back, stood facing Tros; and there began such rhetoric as Tros had never heard.
For Sigurdsen's fever had left him and left his brain clear. A beaten chief, hopeless of ransom, Tros had given him far better terms than even over-generous Caswallon would have dared to give.
The Britons would have put him to hard labor for a year or two, a dismal execution overhanging him if he should fail to please; thereafter, little by little, they might have let him rise from serfdom to a holding of his own, half-subject to one of the numerous minor chiefs.
But Tros had offered him a free man's post of honor, second-in-command to Tros himself, and great adventure on the unknown seas.
So Sigurdsen waxed eloquent. The rhythm of the northern sagas rang among the barn-beams as his throat rolled out in Norse a challenge to defeated men to rally to a new prince, Tros of Samothrace, sea-captain without equal, loved of Thor and Odin, brave and cunning, Tros who stood before them, Tros who had claimed the fair-haired Helma, daughter of a hundred kings, to be his bride!
There seemed no stopping him now that he had broken his long silence. He recited Helma's pedigree, commencing in the dim gray dawn of time with mythical half-deities and battles between gods and men. He made the roof-beams ring to the names of heroes and fair-haired heroines whose record seemed to consist exclusively of battlefield betrothals, glittering wedding feasts and death on fields of honor.
He chanted of a golden age when his ancestors were kings, it seemed, of half a universe, with wisemen to support them and defeat the magic of the witches and trolls who counseled enemies, whose only purpose in existence was, apparently, to act as nine-pins for heroes to knock down.
And presently he sang of Tros. His measured, rhythmic prose grew into singsong as imagination seized him, until almost one could hear the harp-strings picking out the tune. He had no facts to hamper him, except the all-important one that Tros had conquered him in single fight and, recognizing a descendant from the gods, had pledged with him faith forever on an oaken poop, "a sea-swept poop, a poop of a proud ship, mistress of the gales, a strong ship, a longship, a ship that Tros, a mighty man in battle, saw and seized—he, single-handed, slaying fifty men!"
He made a pedigree for Tros. He chanted of his black beard and his amber eyes, that were the gift of Odin treasured through endless centuries by high-born women who were born into the world to mate with offspring of a hundred gods. He sang of seas that roared in cataracts across the far rim of the world, where Tros had met strange fleets and smitten them to ruin, "and the bare bones of the foemen strew the beaches; and the rotting timbers of the wrecks lie broken on the sand!"
He crowded half a century of fighting into Tros' short life, described his father as a "king of kings" who died in battle against fifty thousand men, and ended with a prophecy that Tros would found a kingdom in which kings and queens should be his vassals, dukes and earls his serving men, and "amber the stuff his cups are made of, platters of gold to eat from."
A hundred sons and grandsons, men of valor, should comb the earth in rivalry of manhood to deserve the privilege of wearing Tros' sword when, "ripe in years and splendor," he should go at last "to where the gods and all his ancestors make merry amid feasting in Valhalla!"
Tros did not understand a word of it, but Helma told him as much as she could remember of it afterward, when they had all done roaring "Hail!" to him and the charioteers and stable-men crowded in the doorway—first with a notion that trouble was brewing and then, because Orwic appeared well pleased, adding their own shouts to the tumult.
All the Northmen kissed Helma and did fealty to Tros, each touching the hilt of his long sword and murmuring hoarse words that sounded like an echo of a longship launching off the ways. There was a roll of thunder in it, and the names of Thor and Odin.
HELMA smiled through tears, a gleam of grandeur on her face. But she was serious when she repeated to Tros what Sigurdsen had sung, she walking hand-in-hand with him toward Caswallon's hall, with the Northmen tramping in the rear supporting the wounded between them.
It did not appear to occur to her that there might be any untruth in Tros' pedigree as Sigurdsen unfolded it, or that there might be anything far-fetched in the account of Tros' wanderings and battles at the far rim of the world. That he was not so old as Sigurdsen and could not possibly have done a hundredth part of all that Sigurdsen ascribed to him, meant nothing to her.
She was proud of her new lord beyond the limit of expression, far beyond the commonplace dimensions of such tawdry facts as time and space. She walked beside him worshiping, her young, strong, virgin heart aglow with such emotion as no years can limit.
"Lord Tros," she said. Her voice thrilled. There was vision in her eyes. "My brother saw beyond the veil of things. The gods sang through his mouth. It is honor and joy to me beyond words that I will bear your sons."
Whereat Tros went searching in his mind for words such as he had never used to man or woman, marveling how lame a thing is language and how a tongue, not given to too much silence, can so hesitate between one sentence and another, falling between both into a stammering confusion. So that he felt ashamed.
"Whether I be this or that, and a strong man or a weak one, I will do that which is in me, so that you be not sorry if my best may make you glad," he said at last.
And he took comfort from the speech, although it irked him to be picking and choosing, yet to find no proper words. And he did not think of his father at all, although he was conscious that he did not think of him—which would have puzzled him still more if he had pondered it.
The sun went down and servants lighted the oil-fed wicks in long bronze sconces on the wall when they all came to Caswallon's table and the noisy men-at-arms filed in—Caswallon's relatives by blood or marriage, most of them—heaping their arms in the racks in the vestibule and quarreling among themselves for right of place at table.
Some of them had wives who sat each beside her husband, because Fflur was at table, beside Caswallon's great gilded throne-chair that had been pulled forward from under the balcony. Unmarried women served the food, receiving it from serfs at the kitchen door.
Tros sat next to Fflur, with Helma on his, right; beyond her, Sigurdsen, his wife and all the Northmen faced curiously aimiable Britons, who seemed to think it a good joke to be eating and drinking on equal terms with men whom they had beaten in battle recently. Conops stood behind Tros, selecting the best dishes as they came and snatching them to set before his master.
First came the mead in beakers that the women carried in both hands. Caswallon struck the table with his fist for silence, then, beaker in hand, stood up and made the shortest wedding-speech that Tros—and surely Britain—had ever heard:
"Men of Lunden, we go presently to where the druids speed brave comrades, through the darkness men call death, into a life that lies beyond. And none knows what the morrow shall bring forth; so there are acts that should be done now, lest death first fall on us, like rain that shuts off a horizon. Hear ye all! This is my brother, Tros. To him I give this woman Helma to be wife, and all these Northmen, who were mine by victory, to be his faithful men-at-arms and servants. Tros!"
He raised his beaker and drank deep, up-ending it in proof there were no dregs. And when that swift ceremony was complete they all drank, except Tros and Helma, then cheered until the great hall crashed with sound. Fflur, rising, gave a golden flagon into Tros' hands, from which he and Helma drank in turn, Tros finishing the mead with one huge draught that left him gasping when he set the flagon bottom-up. Then he spoke, and was briefer than Caswallon:
"Lord Caswallon, you have named me brother. I abide that name. At your hands I accept this woman. She is my wife. I accept these men. They shall obey me; and, whatever destiny may bring, they shall at least say they have followed one who stood beside his friends in need and kept faith whatsoever came of it!"
Then Tros took the broad gold band that he had replaced on his forehead, and by sheer strength broke it, signifying that a chapter of his life was ended.
He began the next by binding the broad gold around his bride's right arm, she staring at the symbols carved on it and wondering what gods they charged with her protection.
But there were some who murmured it was witchcraft; and a married woman cried aloud that the breaking of the golden circle was an omen of ill-luck.
Thereafter Tros had hard work to prevent his Northmen from drinking themselves useless, since the mead flowed without limit and as host Caswallon was too proud to check them.
But Tros imposed restraint by promising the widow-woman to the soberest, whereat Conops, in a panic, began drinking behind Tros' back.
And when the hurried feast was nearly at an end there came a bare-back galloper, mud-spattered, sweating, who burst into the hall and ran to Caswallon's chair, thrusting his head and shoulders between the chief and Fflur. He whispered, but Tros heard him:
"Lord! Make ready to hold Lunden! Glendwyr and two hundred men are marching! They are at the king's stone[1] by the Thames! They mean to make Glendwyr chief while you stand on a hill-side communing with dead men's souls! All Lunden is empty! Not a light! No guard at Lud-gate! They have all gone to the druids' circle!"
"Aye. Why not?" Caswallon answered.
But he glanced at Tros.
"Lord! Stay and fight Glendwyr! He will burn your house!"
"Not he!" Caswallon laughed. "Lud rot him, he would like too well to live in it! Two hundred men, you say? Did you count them?"
"Nay, I rode! But I heard two hundred."
Caswallon laughed again.
"Maybe he rides like us to the burying."
But he glanced at Tros.
"Lord Caswallon, I have warned you. I have done my part!"
"Nay, not yet the whole of it," Caswallon answered.
And he looked a third time straight into Tros' eyes, while he wiped his mustache with a freckled, blue-veined hand.
"Take a fresh horse. Ride and find Glendwyr. Bid him meet me at the hill-side where the druids wait. Say—there—when the souls of the dead have traveled their appointed path and all the fires die, I will fight him, he and I alone. It will be dawn before the fires die. Say I will fight him for my house and Lunden when dawn rises over the druids' hill."
"He will not believe me."
"Show him this," Caswallon answered; and he pulled a great gold bracelet off his wrist.
But Fflur shook her head and sighed, as if words failed her.
The man would have gone at once to ride his errand, but Tros, who had been whispering to Fflur, leaned behind her and caught the fellow's arm.
"Let him wait. Let him see us all go," he whispered, wrenching at the man's arm so that he swore aloud and struggled, not hearing what was said. "Let him first see me and my men march out with the rest."
Caswallon nodded.
"Wait," he ordered. "Ride when I tell you."
SO THE man went and sat by the fireside, drinking mead and rubbing a wrist that Tros had come near breaking.
"Caswallon, will you hear me?" Fflur asked.
"Nay, for you are always right!" he laughed, "and I know what you will say, Fflur: That the druids rule Britain, which is true enough. But you will tell me I should ride it rough over the druids, which I dare not, right though it may be you are. A druid's neck may break like any other man's, and I could butcher a herd of them, maybe, like winter's beef, but can I convince Britons I am right to do it?
"How long would they be about raising a new king to rule in place of me? The druids would choose that king, and be stronger than ever! The druids summoned you, me and all Lunden to the burying tonight. Obey them?
"Nay! I am the king! But I go, nevertheless, and so do you go, and all my men, and all Lunden Town, because a king's throne has four legs, of which the first is a druid; and the second is ceremony; and the third is mystery; and the fourth is common sense. But the druids did not summon Tros, nor any of his new men."
He looked hard at Tros again.
"They left that courtesy to me to undertake and, it maybe I forgot to mention it!"
He did not wait for Fflur to answer. He rose, gesturing toward the door, through which the sound of stamping stallions came and the crunch of bronze wheels on the gravel drive.
"Now, Tros," he said, "I would not leave you here unless I knew this Glendwyr business is a little matter. And I know, too, that you need a hook on which to hang your coat, as it were, if you are to winter here in Britain. I need a good excuse to lend you house and countenance in spite of jealousy and tales against you.
"So—Glendwyr is no great danger but he will serve your end. If he has fifty men, that is more than I think; and the half of those will run when the first one yells as a spear-point pricks him at Lud's Gate! Glendwyr counts on Lunden turning against me, if he can steal my house. Take care then that he never enters it! For my part, I will let the men of Lunden know you saved their town for them tonight when their backs were turned!"
Tros answered him never a word.
"Is he a rash fool, or so wise that he can laugh at rash fools, or a desperate king with druids on his neck, or all three things at once?" he wondered.
But Caswallon marched out looking like a man who understood all the rules of the game of "kinging it."
CHAPTER XI
THE BATTLE AT LUD'S GATE
TROS gathered his Northmen, the wounded and all, for they could eat and drink and walk, whatever else might ail them, and, with Helma at his side, brought up the rear of the procession behind fifty chariots that swayed in the crimson glare of torches held by men on foot.
Far away to the north-westward, beyond the forest and the marsh, there was a crimson glow against the sky, where druids' fires burned; and all the distance in between was dotted with the irregular glow of torches where the folk of Lunden and the neighboring villages formed one continuous stream.
"Zeus! Those druids have the Britons by neck and nose!" Tros muttered. "Would my father have asked burial at the risk of a man's throne? Not he! He would have ordered them to throw his body on a dung-heap, and defend themselves! If he is not too busy in another world, he will forgive me for not attending his funeral!"
The long procession filed through the circle of solemn yew-trees, where the altar was on which a daily sunrise sacrifice was laid; and there Tros halted, gathering his men around him, bidding Helma explain his plan to Sigurdsen:
"Now we march back. One has ridden to warn Caswallon's enemies that his house is empty and the town unguarded. He saw us all march away, and though that man is Caswallon's friend, the information will leak out of him like the smell of strong wine through a bottle-neck. There is none in Lunden, save the fire-guard, a few old women and, it may be, a handful of drunken fishermen down by the riverside."
"Who is the fire-guard?" Sigurdsen asked; for he knew next to nothing of Britons, except that they were not fit to be reckoned with at sea, although great fighters on horse-back, and on foot in their forests.
"They," said Tros, "are about a score of old men, who sleep by day and are supposed to patrol by night. This night, instead of snoring in the watch-house, they shall serve a purpose. Conops! Go find the fire-guard. Wake them. Keep them awake. See that each cripple of them arms himself with two good torches. Hide them within Caswallon's wall, with a small fire handy at which to light the torches swiftly when I blow three blasts somewhere near the town-gate.
"When I do that, make all the noise possible and run downhill toward the gate, as if at least fifty of you were coming to my aid. If the running kills them they will die in a good cause, so spare none! No talk now! Go about your business! Hurry!"
"How much of a fight is this to be?" asked Sigurdsen. "A third of us are stiff with wounds."
He flexed his own great muscles, but it hurt him.
"Neither more nor less than any fight," Tros answered. "Tell him, Helma, that a man does what he can do, and neither gods nor men should ask more or expect less!"
He saw that nothing could be gained by telling Sigurdsen how great the danger was. The Northmen had too recently been beaten to thrill at any thought of a folorn hope. He must make them think their task was easy; so he led off, whistling to himself.
And first he returned to Caswallon's house to rifle the great racks of arms that lined a storeroom near the hall. There was no guard, no lock. He laughed as he served out bows and arrows, laughed again, as he thought of that gold he had won from Cæsar.
Fflur was supposed to be guarding it. It was probably under her bed! He wondered where Caswallon's own treasure lay, all the golden money coined in the mint at Verulam.[1]
"Honesty, unless all other men are honest, is no better than Achilles' heel!" he reflected. "Britons are madman. Caswallon is the maddest of them all!"
He marched his men out through Caswallon's gate slowly, because some limped and had to lean on others, and downhill between the neat, fenced houses, leaving Sigurdsen's wife and the widow-woman with orders to attach themselves to Conops' torch-brigade. But Helma he kept with him, since he had no other means of instructing his men.
They marched into a creeping gray mist ascending from the river, that made trees and houses loom like ghost-things from another world.
Except that once or twice a tied hound bayed at them and cows lowed in the barns as they went by, there was no sign of life until they reached Lud's Gate with the wooden bridge beyond it.
There was a guardhouse built of mud and timber either side the gate, but no lights and only one man fast asleep on a bench within an open guardhouse door. When Tros wakened him he said he was there to entertain belated strangers, and he pulled out a bag of roasted wheat, supposing that Tros and his men wished food and lodging for the night.
He was a very old man, trembling with the river-ague, but Tros pressed him into service since he admitted that he knew every nook and corner of the sparsely wooded land that lay beyond the bridge.
Tros decided not to close the town gate. It was ajar when he arrived, because the old man was too thoughtful of his ague to wish to struggle with it if a stranger should seek admittance. Tros flung it wide, and lighted the bronze lamps in both guardhouse windows, so that any one coming would know there was no obstruction and might elect to ride full-pelt across the bridge.
The wall reached either way into obscurity. It was a thing of mud and lumber, useless against battery, but too high for an enemy to waste time climbing if he should see a gap that he might gallop through. Beyond, were occasional clumps of trees that loomed through the drifting mist, a low gurgle from the swamps at the river-edge, and silence.
"Now," said Tros to Helma, "you shall be a widow on your bridal night, or else shall wife it with a man who stands firm in one king's favor! It seems to me the Britons are all fools, not alone Caswallon. So I think this man who comes to seize Caswallon's throne is no whit wiser than the rest. If I am wrong, then you are as good as married to a dead man! But we shall see."
He took Helma and the old guardhouse man across the bridge with him, ignored a clump of trees and undergrowth—since any fool might look for an ambush there—and, after ten minutes' stumbling over tufted ridge and muddy hollow, chose a short stretch of open country where the road crossed what apparently was level ground.
But he noticed it was not actually level; mist and darkness were deceptive. Fifty feet away to one side the smooth, grazed turf was half a man's height higher than the road, and from that point it fell away again into a mist-filled hollow. He could have hidden a hundred men there.
He glanced at the town gate, wide, inviting. Lamplight shone across the opening, blurred by fog, and he whistled contentedly as he realized what a glare Conops' torches would make, seen from that viewpoint through the lighter mist uphill. But there was something lacking yet.
"If they come they will come in a hurry. They will charge the open gate. They will get by before we can check them!"
He observed again. On his left hand, almost exactly midway between his chosen ambush and the town-gate, was the clump of trees and undergrowth that looked like such a perfect lurking place.
"Helma," he said, pointing to it, "take this old skinful of ague and hide yonder in the trees. I will give you the three worst-wounded men as well, and there is flint and tinder in the guardhouse. Mark this place in your mind. When the enemy comes abreast of me—for I will hide here along with Sigurdsen and all the others—you strike flint on steel and make a good noise in the bushes. If that does not check them, light a torch or two."
"I would liefer die beside you," Helma answered.
"You will do my bidding!" Tros retorted, and she said no word to that.
SO TROS went for his Northmen, putting the three most badly wounded, along with the old gatehouse-keeper, in Helma's charge; and them he hid carefully in the clump of trees, showing them precisely between which branches to make their sparks and how to thrash the undergrowth; but as to the proper time to do that, he trusted Helma.
"Wife or widow!" he said, throwing an arm around her, laughing gruffly, for he had a long road yet to travel before he would trust the gentler side of him. "Do your part and I will do mine. So the gods will do theirs; for they like to see men and women prove themselves!"
With that he left her to her own devices and tramped away with Sigurdsen, the other Northmen following; and presently he hid them all on the shoulder of the slope above the road, where even if mounted men should spy them from the higher level of horse or chariot, their heads would look like tree-stumps in the mist. He was careful to space them at unequal intervals, not in a straight line.
But the Northmen were nervous. They had drunk too much and had been told too little; nor had they any interest in fighting, except that they would rather, for their own sakes, please Tros than offend him. It was hard to keep them quiet, although Sigurdsen went down the line whispering hoarsely, rebuking, even striking them. They complained of their wounds and the chill night air, repeatedly crowding together for warmth, protesting that the turf was damp, yet neglecting to keep their bow-strings dry.
Then a stallion neighed not far away; another answered, which sent the shivers up Tros' spine. Orwic had told him which way Glendwyr must come if he should come at all; but those stallions were somewhere behind him, whereas the road spread in front to left and right until it turned away through distant trees and followed the riverbank.
His next trouble was that the Northmen, even Sigurdsen, grew sleepy; some of them snored and he had to throw stones at them. All of them were half-asleep when he caught the sound of horsemen in the distance; and it was the sound of so many horses that he feared for one long minute his chilled, indifferent men would welcome panic and take to their heels.
But Sigurdsen sensed the panic, and stood up, swearing he would die beside Tros. Tros had to force him down again before the advance-guard of what seemed to be at least a hundred horsemen began looming through the mist. Then, to the rear again, three horses neighed; but it sounded strangely as if the neighing were half-finished, smothered. Some of the advancing horses answered it, but there was no reply.
"Zeus, we are in for it!" Tros muttered to himself. "A hundred coming—more! Another lot behind us waiting to join them! No quarter! Horsemen front and rear! Well, there's a laugh in everything. My Northmen have nowhere to run! Zeus! What a mad fool must Caswallon be, to leave me and this handful to defend all Lunden!"
He took a long chance, crept along the line to see that bow-strings were all taut, shaking each man as he passed, growling orders that accomplished more because the Northmen could not understand a word he said. If they had understood him they might have tried to argue.
The leading horsemen riding slowly, peering to left and right, drew nearly abreast of the ambush. One of them turned and shouted. At least a hundred in the mist along the road began cantering to catch up.
Helma heard that. Her sparks flashed and there began a crashing in the underbrush, just as the advance-guard began to spur their horses to a gallop. They saw, heard, drew rein again, began shouting to the men behind; and in a moment there was a milling mass of men and horses, those ahead pressing back, into an impatient orderless squadron that came plunging into them. A mêlée of ghosts in the mist! Somewhere away behind Tros stallions neighed again.
Shouts, yells, imprecations, argument! And into that Tros loosed his Northmen's arrow-fire! He could hear the clatter of bronze wheels and the thunder of hoofs behind him now. He knew he was between two forces, one careering from behind him to make junction with the other. He blew three bugle-blasts that split the night, and watched for Conops' torches, heard an answering bugle-blast, and saw them come pouring through Caswallon's gate, a splurge of angry crimson, whirling and spreading in the mist.
"Shoot! Shoot! Shoot into the mass!"
He seized a bow and arrows from a man who did not understand him and launched shaft after screaming shaft into the riot, where fallen horses kicked and men cursed, none sure yet whence the arrows came and each men yelling contrary advice, as some fell stricken, and some saw the torches coming downhill.
Tros' men were on their knees to take advantage of the shoulder of the rise; from in front they were hardly visible. But Sigurdsen saw the havoc they had wrought already, heard the thunder of hoofs and wheels approaching from behind, sensed climax and rose to his full height, roaring. No more bow for him! He dropped the thing and stood in full view, whirling his ax, bull-bellowing his men to charge and die down there at handgrips with the Britons!
The Northmen rallied to him in a cluster on the ridge. No more bows and arrows if they had to die; they drew swords and axes.
Tros, since he had lost control of them, took stand by Sigurdsen and sent one final shaft death-whining into the mob before trying to face his party both ways. The chariots were almost on them from behind, din of hoofs and wheels, no shouting, din deadened by the turf.
Three-score men in the road had rallied somehow, saw Northmen's heads against the skyline, spurred their panicky horses and wheeled to charge uphill. But even as they wheeled, a squadron of chariots hub-to-hub came thundering through the night on Tros' right-hand and crashed into the riot in the road, a wave of horsemen following, and then another. Before Sigurdsen could lead his men ax-swinging into that confusion, where they could never have distinguished friend from foe, the half of Glendwyr's men were in headlong flight, hard followed. It was over in sixty seconds.
Tros beat his Northmen back with the flat of his swordblade, until Helma came breathless and, clinging to Sigurdsen, screamed at them all to let the Britons fight among themselves. But nobody quite understood what had happened until Caswallon loomed out of the mist, drawing rein, resting one foot on the wooden rim above the chariots wicker-work.
"Brother Tros," he said, "did you think I would leave you in the dark to guard my back? By Lud, no! Kinging it means trusting enemies to do their worst and watching friends lest they suffer by being friends! I told you this would be a little matter; but it was no small thing for you to prove you are my friend and not Cæsar's!"
"You came between block and knife!" said Tros, his foot on the hub of the wheel.
"Not I! Didn't you hear my stallions squeal before we silenced them? Have you seen Glendwyr?"
THE chariot-horses reared and shied, and Tros had to jump clear of the wheel before he could answer, for Conops came rushing up, torch in hand, and all the king's horses or all the king's men meant nothing to him until he knew Tros was safe.
But when he had thrust the torch close to Tros' face and made sure there were no wounds, he thought of loot and vanished in the direction where the loot might be. There was a glare of torchlight in the town gate, where his breathless veterans stood hesitating, doubtful, ready to welcome whichever side was victor.
Then a shout out of the darkness, Orwic's voice—
"We have the young Glendwyr!"
Orwic's chariot, crowded with five or six men, drew up beside Caswallon's. Three men were holding one. He struggled. But he ceased to struggle when they dragged him from the chariot and stood him close to Tros beside Caswallon's wheel. In a minute the whole party was surrounded by dismounted horsemen, whose held horses kicked and bit while their owners clamored for young Glendwyr's death.
But Caswallon waited, tugging his mustache, until the clamor died; it was not until men hardly breathed, and they had somehow quieted the horses, that he spoke to the prisoner suddenly, and when he did speak his voice had a hammer-on-anvil note.
"You hear what these say. Where is your father?"
"Dead!"
The youngster's voice was insolent, hoarse with anger. He was possibly eighteen, but it was not easy to see his face because the mist came drifting like smoke on a faint wind and the torchlight cast fantastic shadows, distorting everything.
He had black hair that fell on to stalwart shoulders, and he stood straight, with his chin high, although two men held his arms behind him and were at no pains to do it gently.
"How did he die? When?" Caswallon asked.
The youngster answered scornfully, as if Caswallon, not he, were the accused:
"Lud's mud! You are the one who should ask that! You, who sent Cæsar's woman to him! You who sent a lying messenger to challenge him after her dagger had done its work!"
"Lud knows I would have fought him!" Caswallon answered pleasantly enough.
"You! You lie! You sent word to him to meet you at the Druid's Hill, and a woman to make sure he should never reach there!"
"Like father, like son!" Caswallon answered. "If your father is dead, why didn't you ride to fight me in his place, instead of sneaking through the dark to loot my Lunden Town? I have caught you in your father's shoes! But how did he die?"
"I say, she stabbed him!"
Caswallon made a hissing sound between his teeth.
"Where is she now?" he demanded; and the youngster chose to misinterpret the flat note of dissatisfaction in his voice.
"Aye," he sneered back, "she has earned Fflur's place! But you will have to win her first from Skell! Lud's mud! If there is any manhood in you, fight me before Skell comes with a dagger for your back!"
"Boy, I would have fought your father gladly, or you in his place," Caswallon answered. "I am vexed not to have slain him. But as for you now, you will do well to bridle impudence. You are not free, so you have no right to challenge any one."
"Lud's blood!" the youngster swore, "I came to burn your house! I'll ask no mercy!"
He spat, and a Briton close beside him would have struck him in the face, but Caswallon prevented that:
"Let him be. He has fire in his brain. Boy, I will not kill you, nor shall any woman kill you while you are at my charge. Will you lie in fetters until some foreign ship puts in needing rowers? Or shall I give you to my friend Tros?"
The youngster nearly wrenched his two guards off their feet as he turned to glare at Tros, whose amber eyes met his and laughed at him.
"Be still, boy!" Tros advised him. "If I say no to this, you will die of scurvy on some Phenician's deck, or else be sold to be chained to an Egyptian oar."
The youngster bit a word in two and swallowed half of it. He did not like to be laughed at, but it had only just begun to dawn on him that he was lawfully Caswallon's property, a prisoner caught in the act of rebellion, henceforth with no more rights than if he had been born a slave, not even the right to be hanged or burned alive.
"How many prisoners are taken?" Caswallon asked in a loud voice, and there was some calling to and fro through the mist before Orwic answered—
"Nine-and-thirty; also a dozen or fourteen who are hurt so they will not live."
"Brother Tros, how many will you need to build and man this ship your heart desires?" Caswallon asked.
"Ten score, at the least," Tros answered.
Caswallon laughed.
"Well, you have your Northmen, and now nine-and-thirty Britons, forty of them counting young Glendwyr. Maybe my men will catch a few more rebels for you. However, a man needs enemies, so they shall let some go! Boy, you belong to my brother Tros, but all your father's lands and property are mine."
Young Glendwyr hung his head and the men who held him would have tied his wrist if Tros had permitted; but Tros put two Northmen in charge of him, which stung the youngster less than if he had been tied, and mocked, by his own countrymen. Caswallon sent the other prisoners into Lunden under guard, to await Tros' disposition.
"For the wine of excitement might go to your head if I should leave you in charge of them tonight, Tros. You might try your own turn at seizing Lunden!"
"Lunden is a good town, but it would irk me to have to govern it!" Tros answered.
Caswallon laughed, turning his head to listen to sounds approaching through the mist, wheels, hoofs and a voice.
"Pledge me your promise," he said suddenly.
Tros hated promises; like all men who habitually keep them, he regarded a blind promise as stark madness. Yet there was madness in the mist that night, and all rules went by the board. He heard a gasp from Conops, somewhere in the mist behind, as he raised his right hand and swore to do whatever service Caswallon might demand of him.
He could see Caswallon whispering to Orwic, and Orwic passing word along, but it was Conops who gave him the first inkling that he might be called on that night for performance, Conops, and then Helma, seizing his hand and pressing close against him. Conops said:
"Master, he will make a fool of you! Take back that promise before he"
Helma said:
"Lord Tros, I am your wife, is it not so? This is my night. Will you "
SOUNDS in the mist interrupted, sounds that included one familiar voice. A chariot emerged into the torch-glare, horses snorting clouds of vapor as they slid to a thundering halt, all feet together; and the first face Tros recognized was Fflur's, the torchlight in her eyes. She looked like an avenging goddess. It was she who drove, who reined the horses in, her hair all fury on her shoulders.
"I have them both!" she remarked. Her voice was flat—determined. There were issues in the mist that night!
A chariot behind hers plunged to a standstill and Tros saw Cæsar's woman's face, white in the mist, with Skell's beside hers; and Skell looked like a ghost from beyond the borderland of death, with such fear in his eyes as a beast shows in the shambles. His arms were tied so taut behind him that his breast seemed ready to burst and the sinews of his neck stood out like bowstrings.
"Now prove you are a king, Caswallon!" Do a king's work!" Fflur said; and her voice was flat again, no music in it.
"I will!" Caswallon laughed. "Bring them. I am good at kinging it!"
But Fflur appeared to doubt that; she watched like an avenging fury while men dragged Skell and the Gaulish woman from the chariot and stood them in front of Caswallon, where he considered both of them a minute without speaking.
Then suddenly he raised his voice, and though he spoke to all present it was plain enough that his words were aimed at Fflur—
"Shall a king protect men's property, or shall he squander it?"
All knew the answer to that. None spoke, not even Fflur, although she bit her lip.
"Shall a king offend the druids, or shall he abide their teachings?" Caswallon asked, speaking loud and high again.
They knew the answer to that, too. None spoke except the Gaulish woman. She cried aloud:
"Not the druids! Kill me!"
Then she began screaming, and a man clapped a cloth over her mouth, desisting when she grew calm.
"As for this woman," Caswallon said, "she was Cæsar's slave, and she now belongs to Tros—my brother Tros."
The woman flung herself sobbing in the mud at Tros' feet, clinging to his legs, crying to him:
"Lord Tros, mercy! I knew you were for the lord Caswallon! I stabbed the lord Glendwyr lest he should slay you! I am your slave! My knife is yours! My life is yours!"
"Be still!" Tros ordered gruffly.
He knew predicament was coming, needed all his wits to meet it. Emotion, such as she showed, angered him, and in anger there is not much wisdom.
"As for Skell, what say the druids?" asked Caswallon, raising his voice louder than before.
There was a murmur at that, but Skell was speechless; fear held him rigid, the whites of his eyes glistening. Caswallon spoke again, his head a little turned toward Fflur:
"The druids say, a good deed is for men to repay—evil deeds are for the gods to punish. What say you?"
There was murmuring again, but no words audible. Fflur's lips were white with pressure, and her eyes blazed as Caswallon turned to face her:
"Mother of my sons," he said, "this Skell was once a friend of mine. He helped when Lunden burned. He helped rebuild it. Shall I slay?"
Fflur answered him at last, thin-lipped, breathing inward:
"You will never listen to me! It must be your decision!"
"Nay!" he answered, laughing, "you are always right! What shall I do with him?"
"Do what you will! You are the king!" she answered angrily.
Caswallon laughed again.
"True. I should not forget I am the king!"
"You let other men forget it!" Fflur retorted.
"Skell shall remember!" Caswallon turned from her and looked straight at Tros. "Brother Tros, you have told me you will build a ship, for which you will need a great crew. Just now you have made me a promise to do whatever I choose to ask. Was that in good faith?"
"It was my spoken word," said Tros; but he answered guardedly—he did not care to be public executioner, even of such a treacherous sneak as he knew Skell was.
"Then take Skell! He is your slave! Use him! Set him on an oar-bench and sweat the treason out of him! Work manhood in, for that must come from outside, since what he had of it he seems to have lost!"
Fflur laughed, high-pitched and cynical. Skell looked at Tros as a tied steer eyes the butcher.
"Slave?" he said, wetting his lips with his tongue. "I was born free. Oar-bench?"
"Aye!" Tros answered. "Loose him, lest his arms grow weak! I will keep that promise," he said, grinning at Caswallon. "His hands shall blister and his hams shall burn. If he has freedom in him, he shall earn it!"
So they loosed Skell, and the Northmen took charge of him with low-breathed insults, despising him as neither Norse nor Briton, but a traitor to both races, speaking both tongues. Tros, arms behind him, stared at the Gaulish woman, who was kneeling in the mud.
"Mine?" he wondered. "Mine? By Pluto, what should a seaman do with you?"
And Caswallon chuckled, waiting. The woman tried to smile, but fear froze her again when Helma stood beside Tros, taking his hand to remind him of her rights.
"I need no wench to wait on me!" said Helma.
"You shall go to Cæsar!" Tros said finally. "You shall take my message to him.
"You shah say: 'Whatever Tros needs that Cæsar has, Tros will take without Cæsar's leave or favor!'
"Bid him send me no more slave-women, but guard himself against a blow that comes! And lest you lie about that message, woman, I will chisel it on bronze and rivet that to a chain around your neck!"
"So! Then this business is over," said Caswallon. "The druids wait. Send your Northmen back to Lunden with your prisoners, Tros. We must make haste."
He signed to the Northmen to take the prisoners away, and offered Tros and Helma places in the chariot beside him, then shouted to the team and drove like a madman through the mist.
He said not another word until the horses leaped a stream and the bronze wheels struck deep into the far bank; then, when they breasted a mist-wreathed hill beneath dripping branches and he had glanced over-shoulder to make sure Fflur followed, and Orwic, and a score of mounted men behind their chariots, he tossed speech to Tros in fragments:
"Too many druids, not enough king! If druids keep me waiting, men say 'Hah! even Caswallon must cool his heels!' But if I keep them waiting, they say 'Caswallon is irreligious!' Nevertheless, unless I king it carefully there will be neither king nor druids!
"And the druids know that. They must wait for me. And I think that dawn is a better time for funerals than midnight, because at dawn men hope, whereas at night they are afraid.
"So, Brother Tros, you shall attend your father's funeral after all, and all my people shall believe you are my friend. I will bid the druids thank you that Lunden wasn't plundered while they prayed! On yon horses. Ho, there! Hi! Hi-yi! Which is the hardest, brother Tros, to king it or to captain a ship at sea?"
But Tros did not know the answer to that question; he only knew which of the two tasks he himself preferred.
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