Complete Works of Talbot Mundy, page 991
“She was wise to send you,” Tros answered. “Lover of hints and reticences though you are, I know you will tell no lies. I demanded a letter from her, in her own writing, signed with her name, and sealed. What of it?”
Olympus smiled. “She is Cleopatra, who admires you, remembers your services, sympathizes with your ambition to go sailing around the world. But she is also Royal Egypt. She is very angry with you. She needs your sword, but you have flouted her dignity. It is not to be expected that she would dream of writing such a letter as Pausanias said you demand. She has imprisoned him for having dared speak such insolence. She was so indignant that she even forgave Charmion for having interfered, and bungled, and let you escape by sea. Women are contradictory creatures.”
“Aye,” Tros answered. “I know all that, I have learned it. If I had loved Charmion, the Queen would have been her enemy and mine. If Charmion had been my friend in spite of my not loving her, the Queen would have married her off to some provincial governor. That Charmion hates me because I would not love her, is good, says the Queen. That she hates me more because I would not love the Queen her mistress, is better; that spells loyalty and vigilance. But if Charmion’s attempts to have me killed had been successful, she would have had her poisoned in a dungeon. Because Charmion tried, and failed, she kisses her and restores her to favor. Yes, I understand that.”
“The Queen,” said Olympus, “has no more loyal friend than Charmion. She is a better master of spies than perhaps a man alight be. Cleopatra relies on Charmion’s jealousy more than she trusts my reading of the heavens. She values me. She even fears my reproof. But she is not my friend. I am her servant. After I had read for her the indications of the stars, she sent me to reason with you, knowing you would trust me to tell you the truth.”
“What madness does she plan next?” Tros asked. “What has become of all the Romans whom she sent to sea in thirty rotten ships?”
“Who knows?” said Olympus. “Cassius demanded it. She complied. They are at sea without an escort. But I came to speak of other matters.”
He was interrupted by the arrival of Conops, who came, rowed from the other bireme. Tros made a gesture for silence while he listened to Conops’s report. Conops never had trusted Olympus. His one eye almost skewered the astrologer. His bow legs were as expressive as a Roman’s of insolent suspicion. He stood still, silent until Tros bung-started him:
“You unseamanly leper! Rot me any fighting man who hasn’t manners! Where is your salute for your captain’s guest?”
Conops saluted Olympus, exactly, smartly, but with irrepressible contempt. Tros resumed his homily:
“You filthy rogue, you haven’t shaved!”
“I was up all night, master. We’ve had to forge new straps for the futtocks to hold her together, and we’ve had to build a [...line missing...] collision. That two hours’ battle did a sight more than two days’ damage to hull and rigging. And our grapnels broke the bulwark; we’ve had to carpenter that.” There was pride in his eye. “But all the same, we’ve whipped the gear and cargo from the sunken ship, and from the other ship, too — tallied it all and stevedored it proper into those Gyppy grain barges. We’re tight. We aren’t leaking a dram. We can put to sea in a minute.”
“That is no excuse for looking like a drunken longshore tout! There is rust on your armor! I might have guessed what would come of promoting a dissolute toss-pot to command a ship! A fine example to your men! Are you ashamed of yourself, you evil-smelling blackguard?”
“Yes, master.” Conops looked about as ashamed as a fish, but slightly more discreet.
“Deliver your report.”
“They opened the city gates at daybreak, master — but they’ve shut them again. There’s an army coming. The scouts I sent ashore report at least two thousand men — about one hour’s march away along the shore road — that look as if they’d marched all night. Fifty chariots, two hundred of the Queen’s mounted guards, and the rest infantry, mostly archers. No baggage train to speak of.”
“Summon Sigurdsen!”
Conops fell away. The gigantic Northman came slowly, making the most of his recent wounds. Conops had neither rank nor breeding, but had been given command of a captured bireme. Sigurdsen, whose ancestors were kings since long before even the skalds began to memorize legends, was under Tros’s more immediate eye, second-in-command on Tros’s ship. But Sigurdsen knew Tros too well to speak of it. He tried to appear to ignore Conops — too proud to appear to hate him.
“Sigurdsen — get her about by oar. Anchor by the stern. Be ready to escape to sea.”
“Aye.”
Sigurdsen went and stood on the roof of the midship deckhouse. On any Roman ship that was, the easiest place from which to control the oars and con manoeuvres. Tros growled at Conops:
“Go and clean yourself, you lecher. Let me catch you again unshaven after daybreak in the presence of your betters and I’ll send you to the lower oar-bench to learn manners! Tell off a couple of wounded men to scour your armor. Get those boats on deck, and get your ship about. Feed your crew and stand by, ready to lead seaward when I signal. The two barges are to follow you. I will be rear-guard.”
“Aye, aye, master.”
“And now, you pardon, Olympus. Loyal rogues such as that one are too scarce in the world to be allowed to lack correction. We were saying — the Queen knows — ?”
“More than you know,” said Olympus, “saving that she does not know these ships are fit to put to sea. She knows that the proconsul Cassius is your prisoner on this bireme. She knows that once again you have spared the spy Tarquinius, and that you have him also. She knows that Prince Herod was with Cassius on the bireme, and that Cassius intended to make Herod King of Egypt, and to marry her to Herod, or to kill her if she would not. She knows that the girl whom you sent to the throne of Cyprus, calling herself Arsinoe is her own bastard sister Boidion. She knows that Hero, whom you have on this ship, and whose bed you share, is none other than her blood-sister Arsinoe, whom she hates and envies.”
“Without reason,” said Tros.
Olympus corrected him. “Nay. She is a woman. She has reason enough. Was Arsinoe, whom you call Hero and for whom you dare audacities, not Cleopatra’s rival for the throne of Egypt? Her successful rival for a while! She drove Cleopatra from the throne. Had it not been for Caesar, and incidentally you, Cleopatra might have died in exile. That is reason enough for any woman’s hatred. And now that the girl has changed her name to Hero, has she not for lover Tros of Samothrace, the very man whom Cleopatra wished to take dead Caesar’s place beside her on the throne? That, Tros, is a reason for bitterness. And as for envy, do you think a queen who raised and led an army at the age of eighteen, and who loves danger, who admires courage, who perceives the spiritual value of adventure on the Battlefield of Time, does not longingly envy the girl whom you have dared to steal that she may share your deeds?”
“Are you here to preach to me, Olympus?”
“No, but as your friend, to tell you what the Queen thinks and knows. Plague rages in Alexandria. Many say it is the vengeance of the gods on account of the sins of the court of Egypt. There are riots. The Jews are becoming troublesome again. The Queen needs all her troops. Nevertheless, she sends an army to destroy you, if she must. But she knows what is happening in Rome, and she would trust you to negotiate with Antony. So she sends me in advance of the army, to offer terms.”
Tros laughed. “It is I, Olympus, who will dictate terms, if there is ever again to be peace between her and me.”
“I read the heavens for her,” said Olympus. “I told her she may snatch peace from the very throat of war. But, as usual, she put her own interpretation on it. She has news from her spies in Rome and a letter from Mark Antony. He has patched up a peace with Octavian. He and Octavian have proscribed their enemies. There is such a slaughter in Rome, such butchery and confiscations as have not been seen since Sulla’s day. Antony has even had Cicero murdered. Antony begs her again for corn and money, at the same time warning her against intrigue with Cassius and Brutus. She hates Cassius and Brutus; they slew Caesar. She rather likes Mark Antony; he was Caesar’s friend. She believes she can manage Antony, if she can help to make him master of the Roman world.”
“Aye, Olympus, she fired Caesar with that ambition. When his enemies slew him, she chose me. But I would not, and I will not.”
“Now she chooses Antony. Tros, she will forgive you, if you ask it. She will make you free of Alexandria. She will forget, and deny to the world who Hero is, and she will recognize her as your wife. She will aid you to build a new ship — aye, and defray the cost of it; and she will speed you forth on your voyage—”
“If?”
“If you will surrender to her Gains Longinus Cassius—”
“For her to treat as once they treated Pompey on the beach not far from here?”
“For her to treat as Antony shall dictate.”
“I will not,” Tros answered. “I will make my own terms with Cassius. You may tell the Queen I will not stoop to being a catspaw for a woman whose promises die barren on her lying lips.”
Olympus shuddered.
“She had the malice, Olympus, less than a week ago, thinking she had Hero in her clutches, to threaten to show me Hero’s head on the torturer’s pike, unless I would go and do her errand at my own risk. But it was Hero’s slave who was in prison, and even she is now on my ship.”
“Cassius is a merciless, rapacious devil,” said Olympus. “Does it become you to befriend him?”
Tros smiled. “Let Cassius answer!”
From a hatch, within six feet of Olympus’s back, the head of Cassius emerged. He looked like a ghost coming out of a tomb.
CHAPTER XXXV. “Olympus, you may tell the Queen—”
One of the hardest tasks for a commander is to draw the line between personal inclination, that is sometimes honorably hesitant, and the duty toward his men that never demands less than resolution and decision.
— From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace
Cassius was wearing a plain white patrician toga, not exactly clean. He glanced sourly at his disrobed lictors, who were scrubbing the deck under the scornful eye of one of Tros’s decurions. Very closely followed by a red-bearded Northman in armor, and attended by his personal slave, who carried towels, shaving bowl and razor, Cassius looked exactly what he was — a mean, rapacious cynic, suffering from indigestion. Insomnia, exasperating, hurt pride and the prevalent Syrian ague made him tremble in spite of his effort to seem proudly contemptuous. Lean though he was and strong-sinewed, he had the pear-shaped belly of a debauchee; it was only partly concealed by a rather evident corset. His glittering, almost-black eyes searched Olympus’s face. He ignored Tros. He put a hand on the Northman’s shoulder to steady himself as he turned his back and walked forward. The slave found him a box to sit on, and he learned back against the slave’s legs to be shaved with a gold-handled razor and scented Damascus shaving-cream.
Suddenly the masthead lookout shouted an alarm. Three scouts from the approaching army, perched high on camels, peered over the high reeds on the western bank. Both biremes became alive with pugnacious interest. Six of Tros’s master archers pulled the covers off their bows and betted noisily with the men near them. They demanded long odds because the range looked too great, but they could gauge it fairly accurately by means of little slotted sticks that they held at arm’s length. A decurion, remarking that the archers had the early sun behind them, set the odds at two to one against a hit by any of the six. They laid their money on the deck and it was promptly covered by a shower of coins that the decurion raked together with his foot. The archers drew.
Stag-gut bow-strings twanged a staccato volley amid breathless silence. Six arrows, all aimed at the nearest camel-rider, twanged away and curved in an elipse like shooting stars — one wide — two short — the camel-man struck two aside with his riding stick. The sixth one hit him in the mouth. He vanished. The other camel-riders fled. The crew roared and the archers claimed their money.
“Queen’s men!” said Olympus, frowning.
“Aye,” Tros answered. “My men’s answer to her calling me a pirate. She shall have an answer from me also.”
The shaving slave, startled by the bow-twang, cut Cassius, who struck him savagely in the face with the first thing to hand — a wet rope’s end. The lookout man at the masthead shouted again: Prince Herod was on the way, in a boat from Pelusium, followed in a second boat by the armed escort that Tros had lent him.
Olympus spoke again: “You befriend Herod?”
“Aye. A humorist. Better to be trusted than a pompous humbug — aye, or than Leander. Herod has been keeping bad company. To accept Cassius’s backing was a diplomatic error that I think he thoroughly regrets.”
“The Queen would pay you for him,” said Olympus. “She could make a catspaw of Herod.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
Hero came out of the midship cabin, where a slave had been washing her hair; it reached to her waist and shone in the sun like spun gold. She was wearing gilded sandals, sent from the city by Herod, who had found them in a shop in Pelusium. He had a gift for making tactful presents, paid for with other people’s money. Her only other visible garment was a rose-colored himation of exquisitely woven linen. She greeted Cassius and enquired civilly about his ague. He answered tartly:
“Can’t you see I am at my toilet? Have you no sense of decency?”
Hero’s hideous slave, who lurked behind her, made murderous faces more like an ape’s than a human being’s. Tros beckoned to Hero to come and greet Olympus. She was quite capable of rebuking Cassius, but Tros preferred to take that duty on himself. He went and stared at Cassius as if he were a specimen on exhibition.
“I have just refused,” he said, “to send you in chains to Alexandria. If I should change my mind—”
Cassius shrugged his shoulders insolently. “I am not afraid of your changing it. You are not such a fool as to forego my ransom, and you’d never get it if Cleopatra once set hands on me. So don’t waste empty threats. Surely you don’t expect me to be humble to a pirate’s mistress? Are you going to sea now? Where are my officers?”
“They are in the fort in Pelusium. Leander will send them to Cleopatra. She is likely to send them to Rome, to betray your plans to Antony.”
Cassius bit his lip, then answered slowly in a harsh voice:
“Tros, for each one of my officers, when your day comes to be crucified for these indignities to me, I will remember to order you scourged with a hundred extra lashes.”
The bireme’s oars ceased churning; she was headed seaward now, anchored stern to the stream. Sigurdsen handed himself carefully down from the deckhouse roof and stood with his hand on his hips. He had overheard:
“Lord Captain, you should have killed him when we caught him!”
Tros turned his back. It was after all rather beneath his dignity to have words with a prisoner. His lieutenant could do it. Sigurdsen, in execrable Greek, let flow a torrent of ill temper that wasn’t sweetened by the ache of healing wounds. He had a voice that could out-roar thunder on a raging sea. He loved Hero. He hated anyone except himself who showed Tros less than courtesy.
“You ungrateful dog with a snarl for your betters!” he roared at Cassius. “In my land we would have tied a rock to your neck and drowned you! Two days gone the Lord Captain’s lady was your prisoner — insulted — questioned — threatened — gagged — a dagger in her throat! That was your treatment of her. Now you are our prisoner. How does she treat you? Courteously! And you dare to sneer, you mangey Roman wolf that hadn’t grace enough to die when the Lord Captain gave you leave to cut your lying throat! You thieving murderer!”
Those were fine words from the lips of a Viking, whom Tros had caught and beaten to his knees up Thames-mouth, raiding British homesteads for a winter’s keep and for captured widows for his men! Tros chuckled and walked aft, to eat breakfast with Hero and Olympus — wine, and good wheat porridge soused with honey.
The astrologer was reserved in Hero’s presence. It alarmed him to be in conference with Cleopatra’s outlawed sister. As a mystic, he admired her courage, because true courage is the mystic’s goal; but as an ascetic he shrank from her physical loveliness. Such beauty as hers unnerved him more than the sight of death, that he could face unflinching. And Olympus lacked laughter; he could neither understand nor share a girl’s delight in flouting tradition and convention, to live dangerously with the man she loved.
Tros respected and even, in his own way, loved Olympus. But he spared him none of the discomfort that a man of mysteries and half veiled confidences feels in the presence of rebels against a throne upheld by priestly influence. More than a priest, Olympus was a lay communicant of far-off Philae, the unacknowledged but actual envoy at the court of Egypt of the Hierophants, whose names not even kings might know. It shocked Olympus to hear irreverence. Hero was irreverent of everything on earth except her own determination to share Tros’s adventures and become the mother of his sons. Young though she was, she had suffered more than most women. But she knew the sting of public degradation and the cruelty of glory. Ptolemy though she was and blood-royal of the proudest lineage on earth, she had none of her sister Cleopatra’s faith in the divinity of kings. She had been taught she was a daughter of the god Zeus-Ammon, and no one who valued his reputation for respectability would have dared to doubt that teaching. But Hero had the gift of self-ridicule. She only spoke respectfully of gods and goddesses, like Tros, for diplomatic reasons, to impress or else not to offend less thoughtful folk. She could talk with outrageous wit about her mother’s indiscretion with an adulterous god and her father, King Ptolemy’s cuckoldry. She had not yet understood the stubborn ruggedness of Tros’s mysticism. Nor did she quite understand his respect for the gloomy astrologer.
So she was inclined to poke fun at Olympus. He viewed life seriously. He believed her a mere pleasure-huntress.
