Mundy Tros of Samothrace

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-83-8148-696-5
Verlag: Ktoczyta.pl
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 1222 Seiten

The cable that Julius Caesar has made in helping find the best way to attack Britain is to play a double game. He must save his father and encourage the resistance of the British leaders to remove Rome from its legions that are ready to conquer the land of Gaul. Offenses, intrigue, and many murders pose a threat to accompaniment by Caesar's Caesar in his amphibian landings and battles.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mundy, Talbot

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1. Britain: The Late Summer of 55 B.C. These then are your liberties that ye inherit. If ye inherit sheep and oxen, ye protect those from the wolves. Ye know there are wolves, aye, and thieves also. Ye do not make yourselves ridiculous by saying neither wolf nor thief would rob you, but each to his own. Nevertheless, ye resent my warning. But I tell you, Liberty is alertness; those are one; they are the same thing. Your liberties are an offense to the slave, and to the enslaver also. Look ye to your liberties! Be watchful, and be ready to defend them. Envy, greed, conceit and ignorance, believing they are Virtue, see in undefended Liberty their opportunity to prove that violence is the grace of manhood.
–from The Sayings of the Druid Taliesan   TOWARD sunset of a golden summer evening in a clearing in a dense oak forest five men and a woman sat beside a huge flat rock that lay half buried in the earth and tilted at an angle toward where the North Star would presently appear. At the southern end of the clearing was a large house built of mud and wattle with a heavy thatched roof; it was surrounded by a fence of untrimmed branches, and within the enclosure there were about a dozen men and women attending a fire in the open air, cooking, and carrying water. Across the clearing from a lane that led between enormous oaks, some cattle, driven by a few armed men clothed in little other than skins dawdled along a winding cow-path toward the opening in the fence. There was a smell of wood smoke and a hush that was entirely separate from the noise made by the cattle, the soft sigh of wind in the trees, the evensong of birds and the sound of voices. Expectancy was in the air. The five men who sat by the rock were talking with interruptions, two of them being foreigners, who used one of the dialects of southern Gaul; and that was intelligible to one of the Britons who was a druid, and to the woman, who seemed to understand it perfectly, but not to the other men, to whom the druid had to keep interpreting. “Speak slowly, Tros, speak slowly,” urged the druid; but the big man, although he spoke the Gaulish perfectly, had a way of pounding his left palm with his right fist and interjecting Greek phrases for added emphasis, making his meaning even more incomprehensible. He looked a giant compared to the others although he was not much taller than they. His clothing was magnificent, but travel-stained. His black hair, hanging nearly to his shoulders, was bound by a heavy gold band across his forehead. A cloak of purple cloth, embroidered around the edges with gold thread, partly concealed a yellow tunic edged with gold and purple. He wore a long sword with a purple scabbard, suspended from a leather belt that was heavily adorned with golden studs. His forearm was a Titan’s, and the muscles on his calves were like the roots of trees; but it was his face that held attention: Force, under control with immense stores in reserve; youth unconquerable, yet peculiarly aged before its time; cunning of the sort that is entirely separate from cowardice; imagination undivorced from concrete fact; an iron will and great good humor, that looked capable of blazing into wrath–all were written in the contours of forehead, nose and jaw. His leonine, amberous eyes contained a hint of red, and the breadth between them accentuated the massive strength of the forehead; they were eyes that seemed afraid of nothing, and incredulous of much; not intolerant, but certainly not easy to persuade. His jaw had been shaved recently, to permit attention to a wound that had now nearly healed, leaving a deep indentation in the chin, and the black re- growing beard, silky in texture, so darkened the bronze skin that except for his size, he might almost have passed for an Iberian. “Conops will tell you,” he said, laying a huge hand on the shoulder of the man beside him, “how well I know this Caius Julius Caesar. Conops, too, has had a taste of him. I have seen Caesar’s butchery. I know how he behaves to druids and to kings and to women and to all who oppose him, if he once has power. To obtain power–hah!–he pretends sometimes to be magnanimous. To keep it–” Tros made a gesture with his right fist, showed his teeth in a grin of disgust and turned to the other Samothracian* beside him. “Is he or is he not cruel, Conops? Does he keep Rome’s promises? Are Rome’s or his worth that?” He snapped his fingers. Conops grinned and laid a forefinger on the place where his right eye had been. Conops was a short man, of about the same age as Tros, possibly five-and-twenty, and of the same swarthy complexion; but he bore no other resemblance to his big companion. One bright-blue eye peered out from an impudent face, crowned with a knotted red kerchief. His nose was up-turned, as if it had been smashed in childhood. He had small brass earrings, similar in pattern to the heavy golden ones that Tros wore, and he was dressed in a smock of faded Tyrian blue, with a long knife tucked into a red sash at his waist. His thin, strong, bare legs looked as active as a cat’s. “Caesar is as cruel as a fish!” he answered, nodding. “And he lies worse than a long-shore Alexandrian with a female slave for hire.” The druid had to interpret that remark, speaking in soft undertones from a habit of having his way without much argument. He was a broad-faced young man with a musical voice, a quiet smile and big brown eyes, dressed in a blue-dyed woolen robe that reached nearly to his heels–one of the bardic druids of the second rank. It was the woman who spoke next, interrupting the druid’s explanation, with her eyes on Tros. She seemed to gloat over his strength and yet to be more than half-suspicious of him, holding her husband by the arm and resting chin and elbow on her knee as she leaned forward to watch the big man’s face. She was dressed in a marvelously worked tunic of soft leather, whose pricked-in, barbaric pattern had been stained with blue woad. Chestnut hair, beautifully cared for, hung to her waist; her brown eyes were as eager as a dog’s; and though she was young and comely, and had not yet borne a child, she looked too panther-like to be attractive to a man who had known gentler women. “You say he is cruel, this Caesar. Is that because he punished you for disobedience–or did you steal his woman?” she demanded. Tros laughed –a heavy, scornful laugh from deep down near his stomach. “No need to steal! Caius Julius Caesar gives women away when he has amused himself,” he answered. “He cares for none unless some other man desires her; and when he has spoiled her, he uses her as a reward for his lieutenants. On the march his soldiers cry out to the rulers of the towns to hide their wives away, saying they bring the maker of cuckolds with them. Such is Caesar; a self-worshiper, a brainy rascal, the meanest cynic and the boldest thief alive. But he is lucky as well as clever, have no doubt of that.” The druid interpreted, while the woman kept her eyes on Tros. “Is he handsomer than you? Are you jealous of him? Did he steal your wife?” she asked; and Tros laughed again, meeting the woman’s gaze with a calmness that seemed to irritate her. “I have no wife, and no wife ever had me,” he answered. “When I meet the woman who can turn my head, my heart shall be the judge of her, Gwenhwyfar.”* “Are you a druid? Are you a priest of some sort?” the woman asked. Her glowing eyes examined the pattern of the gold embroidery that edged his cloak. Tros smiled and looked straight at the druid instead of at her. Conops drew in his breath, as if he was aware of danger. “He is from Samothrace,” the druid remarked. “You do not know what that means, Gwenhwyfar. It is a mystery.” The woman looked dissatisfied and rather scornful. She lapsed into silence, laying both elbows on her knees and her chin in both hands to stare at Tros even more intently. Her husband took up the conversation. He was a middle-sized active-looking man with a long moustache, dressed in wolf-skin with the fur side outward over breeches and a smock of knitted wool. An amber necklace and a beautifully worked gold bracelet on his right wrist signified chieftainship of some sort. He carried his head with an air of authority that was increased by the care with which his reddish hair had been arranged to fall over his shoulders; but there was a suggestion of cunning and of weakness and cupidity at the corners of his eyes and mouth. The skin of his body had been stained blue, and the color had faded until the natural weathered white showed through it; the resulting blend was barbarously beautiful. “The Romans who come to our shore now and then have things they like to trade with us for other things that we can easily supply. They are not good traders. We have much the best of it,” he remarked. Tros understood him without the druid’s aid, laughed and thumped his right fist on his knee; but instead of speaking he paused and signed to them all to listen. There came one long howl, and then a wolf-pack chorus from the forest. “This wolf smelt, and that wolf saw; then came the pack! What if ye let down the fence?” he said then. “It is good that ye have a sea around this island. I tell you, the wolves of the Tiber are less merciful than those, and more in number and more ingenious and more rapacious. Those wolves glut themselves; they steal a cow, maybe, but when they have a bellyful they go; and a full wolf falls prey to the hunter. But...