Prisoners of War/Chapter 10

HERE 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?"

ROS 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.

ELMA 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 [sic] 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 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."

O 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."