Prisoners of War/Chapter 2

NOTHER 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?

LOWLY, 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 [sic] 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!"

ND 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.

ETWEEN 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.

ROS 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. 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 [sic] 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!"