Prisoners of War/Chapter 4
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.