CHAPTER VIII
CORNELIA OF GAUL
SO TROS' prisoners—since he had freed them and they were now his henchmen—became Caswallon's guests along with Tros in the great house on the hill top. In Caswallon's absence Orwic showed them almost too much courtesy, to the annoyance of servants and fair-haired British men-at-arms who luonged in the great hall or amused themselves at horse-play in the yard.
But it gave the Northmen an enormously high opinion of Tros; and when Orwic brought out Cæsar's treasure chest, so that Tros might pay off his hireling seamen, even Sigurdsen began to boast of being Tros' adherent and Helma put on airs toward the British women, who were friendly enough until she began almost to patronize them.
So the Britons brought forth horses and compelled the Northmen to try to ride, mounting them two on a horse; and into the deriding mob of onlookers Cornelia came, attended by a crowd of young bloods dressed in their choicest finery, wearing enough gold and bronze and amber among them to have overpaid one of Cæsar's legions for a year.
While they were laughing at the Northmen's efforts to ride half-broken stallions scared into a frenzy by men who despised the sea as only fit for fishermen, Cornelia studied Tros from a distance.
He had done paying his hirelings and was counting the rest of the gold, or rather pretending to count it, watching her between-whiles as adroitly as she watched him, each avoiding the other's eyes. Gathering her escort around her at last, she made her way outside the crowd toward where Tros sat on a chair on Caswallon's porch.
She walked with dignity that she had imitated from the Romans. Her dress and jewelry were Roman, aping the patrician style, pure white with a golden border, and she showed no trace of having suffered on her stormy way from Gaul. Her dark hair glistened in a net that held it massed behind her neck; gilded sandals decorated rather than concealed her feet. She looked expensive and calmly impudent. But her stock-in-trade was nothing tangible, although it was all in evidence: An air of knowing more than anybody else knew, of having influence that none could undermine, of laughing at life because she held the keys of fortune.
Those keys, too, were evident, brown eyes beneath long, dark lashes; carmine, daring, not exactly scornful but mocking lips; a figure that suggested limitless immodesty beneath cultured poise; a gown that clung precisely where it should cling to excite emotion when she moved with that apparently unstudied ease.
Tros knew her type. Helma did not, and stood nearer to him, light of northern sky blazing under flaxen brows, Norse jealousy hardening her young face. Helma was afraid; Tros felt her trembling when her elbow touched his. But the Gaulish woman with the Roman name had trained herself in far too many swift intrigues to show fear, even if she felt it. Rome had made a hundred conquests in the wake of women of her genius; and before Rome, Nineveh. Inborn in her was all the grace of courts and all the spirit of destruction.
"The noble Tros?" she asked, coming to a stand in front of him, not trespassing yet on Caswallon's porch.
And Tros was not yet minded that she should. He did not rise. He kicked his long sword outward so that its hilt rested on his knees and he could lay both hands on it, leaning back in the chair to stare insolently through suspicious, slumberous eyes.
"My name is Tros."
"I am Cornelia."
"Cæsar's light o' love?" he asked, raising shaggy black eyebrows just sufficiently to barb the insult. "Cæsar's slave?"
Helma, behind him, touched his shoulder gratefully. Conops, seated on Cæsar's treasure-chest, showed three more teeth through the slit in his upper-lip, rose and disappeared into the house.
"Cæsar's messenger!" the Gaulish woman answered.
There was no iron in her voice; nothing but challenging laughter. Cæsar had not picked a thin-skinned fool to pave Rome's way to conquest.
Conops came out of the house with Cæsar's scarlet cloak and draped it on Tros' shoulders, Helma assisting to arrange it, half-guessing its significance although she did not know that Tros had looted it along with the Roman's bireme.
The young Britons who had appointed themselves Cornelia's body-guard began to whisper to her. One of them grew bold and raised his voice—
"Tros, your insolence insults us all!"
Tros sneered; his mood was cynical. Orwic came out of the house to stand behind him. Orwic being in authority just then the crowd grew still, until Cornelia spoke in Latin:
"Cæsar's cloak, Tros! You foreshadow Cæsar! He will take that for an omen when I tell him Tros sat cloaked in imperial scarlet on the porch of Caswallon's house!"
"They talk Latin!" some one shouted. "Tros is Cæsar's man!"
There were more than a hundred people by that time on the green before Caswallon's house, not counting the stable-hands and other serfs, who were hardly to be reckoned with, not daring to offend their betters; some were men who had come too late to fight the Northmen, jealous of the victors' spoils and very anxious to assert themselves.
A tumult began, a few of them denouncing Tros as an intriguer, some shouting that Cæsar's message should be heard. A noisy, small group, nearest to the gate and safety, denounced Caswallon. Orwic swore under his breath, using the names of a dozen Celtish gods. Tros whispered to Conops:
"Bid my Northmen gather themselves behind the house and enter it from the rear. Take charge of them. Add yourselves to Orwic's men. Be swift."
Then he turned to Orwic.
"Now or never!" he said, with a careless shrug of his shoulders. "Is Caswallon king in Lunden? Gently, boy, gently! Not yet. Leave this to me. I will show you who rules this end of Britain!"
He stood up, letting his face light with laughter, gathering Cæsar's scarlet cloak around him. He addressed Cornelia, but in a voice that all the crowd could hear, and he spoke slowly, in Gaulish, as if answering her speech, and taking care that all should understand him, in spite of his foreign accent:
"Aye, woman! This was Cæsar's cloak. You, who were Cæsar's light o' love until he sent you to cozen me, were not so very clever when you recognized it! I am told you brought me a letter from Cæsar. I am told Caswallon burned it. I am told you are warning the Britons not to listen to Caswallon until they first hear me. Well: They shall hear me now. I am Caswallon's guest!"
HE COULD hear a tramping through the house behind him as the Northmen came with Conops to reenforce Orwic's men. There was a noise of weapons being lifted from the racks.
"Cæsar sent you to me. Are you ready, Orwic?" he whispered. "March out and surround her when I give the word! Therefore you are mine. I will see that none perverts you from right conduct in the realm of him who is host to both of us! Come!" he commanded, beckoning.
Cornelia appealed to her escort, too late. Orwic took the cue and rushed from the porch with forty men-at-arms behind him, twelve of them Northmen very anxious to repay bruises done at horse-play. It was risky work; the Northmen, fierce enemies a day ago, were likelier than not to cause indignant bloodshed; safety lay in doing the work so swiftly that there would be no time for a crowd without a leader to decide whether it really was indignant or was half-amused.
Conops and the Northmen surrounded Cornelia; Orwic and his Britons who thrust themselves between the Northmen and her British escort, joining spears before them like a fence-rail, forcing the astonished escort backward on their heels. And while Orwic accomplished that, Tros shouted, throwing up his right arm, shaking Cæsar's scarlet cloak to distract attention to himself:
"Ho, there! Caswallon's friends! There is a rat named Skell who brought this Cæsar's woman to cheat away your freedom! Where is Skell?"
Caswallon's friends were fewer than his enemies in that crowd, but the impulse of surprize was in their favor. By the time Cornelia had been hustled into the great hall in the midst of a group of grinning Northmen, who handled her none too gently, the loyalists had started a diversion, shout and counter-shout, that served until Orwic's summons on a silver bugle brought a dozen chariots charging from the stable to clear the green of friend and enemy alike. The crowd did not even try to stand against the chariots, although the front ones had no scythes fixed to the wheels. But there were two chariots in the rear that could have mown a crimson swath.
"And now swiftly!" said Tros, when Orwic strolled back to the porch trying to look self-possessed. "Where are those Northmen prisoners Caswallon took in the fight in the forest?"
"What of them? There are only three-and-twenty, some of them pretty badly hurt," said Orwic.
"Where are they? I know mobs! Your Britons will say that it was Northmen who snatched that woman away. They will kill those three-and-twenty! Then, they will come to kill my twelve and Sigurdsen! Then me, then you!"
"Bah! Who cares if they kill Northmen!" Orwic answered.
"I for one! Blood-lust grows. They will kill Caswallon next! Smuggle those prisoners to this place. Start a hue-and-cry at Skell's heels; that fox will give them a run to keep all Lunden busy! Send for Caswallon then, and bid him hurry. Bid him bring Fflur with him!"
Orwic hesitated, but Tros took him by the shoulders.
"Am I friend or enemy?" he thundered. "Boy! That woman will win Britain for Cæsar yet unless you act swiftly!"
Orwic yielded only half convinced and hurried away to instruct his friends, shutting the great gate and posting guards to keep another crowd from forming. Tros strode into the house, swaggering as if he owned it. Cornelia was seated near Caswallon's great chair under the balcony at one end of the hall; her dress was ruffled and a little torn, but she was laughing at the men who stared at her, and she mocked Tros, gesturing at Helma:
"Ah! You seize me, when you have that beautiful fair-haired prisoner! What use for poor me, when"
"I have a use for you!" Tros interrupted; and the hall grew still. "You were Cæsar's slave. Now you are mine!"
She was startled, but the scared look vanished in an instant; she had the professional intriguer's self-control. It was Helma who turned pale and came and stood beside Tros, watching his face.
"Tros!" said the woman of Gaul, speaking Latin, "Cæsar told me you are proud, and full of guile, and a great keeper of rash promises. You promised him enmity. You wrecked his fleet. You forged Cæsar's name and stole your father from the grip of three camped legions.
"That was an indignity to Rome as well as Cæsar. You sunk Cæsar's boats; you slew his men; you ducked Cæsar himself in the tide at Seine-mouth. So you kept your rash promise.
"Yet Cæsar's magnanimity is greater than the malice that pursues him. He is willing to forgive. He offers you full recognition by the Roman Senate and command of fifty ships, if you withdraw your enmity and promise him allegiance! I am Cæsar's messenger, not your slave."
Tros answered her in Gaulish—
"When I need fifty of Cæsar's ships, I will take them without his leave or Rome's!"
But that was for the Britons' ears. He had in mind more than to bandy words.
"Tros" she began again.
"Silence!" he commanded.
Then he pointed to the door of an inner room between the great hall and Caswallon's quarters. Helma bit her lip, and several of the men-at-arms laughed loud. But Tros kept on pointing, and he looked imperious in Cæsar's scarlet cloak.
So Cornelia rose out of her chair, bowed, smirked almost imperceptibly at Helma, and let the way in through the door, glancing over-shoulder in a way that gave Tros pause. He beckoned Helma.
"Bring your brother's wife and the widow!" he commanded.
So three Norse women followed Tros into the dimly lighted room; and one of them knew Gaulish. There were benches in there for men-at-arms, and one chair, on which Cornelia sat uninvited, arranging her draperies to show the shapely outline of her figure.
Tros slammed the door and slid the wooden bolt in place, with a nod to Helma and the other women to be seated on the benches. He seized Cornelia's chair then and dragged it into the shaft of light that fell through the one small window. He craved sleep, and had not time to waste.
"Turn your face to the light!" he commanded. "Keep it so! Now, no evasions! I am in no mood to split thin hairs of courtesy!"
"Truly, Tros, your courtesy is thin," she answered. "Cæsar is never discourteous, even to his enemies. I was told you are a prince's son. Where you were born are manners thought unmanly?"
"Answer this!" He rapped his sword-hilt on a table that he dragged up to the window-light. "What was written in Cæsar's letter that Caswallon took from you and burned?"
She smiled and tossed her head. "I gave it to the lord Caswallon. He had manners. He was too polite to take it from me!"
"What was written in the letter?"
"Since the letter was burned, what matters what was written in it!"
Her dark eyes dared him.
Tros drew his sword, his great chin coming forward with a jerk. He let the sword-point fall until it touched her bare throat.
"Answer me!"
Her eyes turned slightly inward as she looked along the sword-blade toward the marvelously steady hilt, but she did not wince. The sword-point pricked the skin. She did not even flinch from it.
"I will not tell! And you dare not kill me!"
Tros let the sword-point fall until it touched her naked foot between the crossed thongs of her sandal. A dancing-woman's foot was where her fear might lie closest to the surface! But she laughed.
"Before these women, Tros! What would the Britons say to you? Cæsar may torture women, and you might—though I think not, for I see a weakness—but the Britons don't even whip their children. Would Caswallon forgive you if you should nail my foot to the floor in his house?"
TROS owned to the weakness divined in him. He could kill, in cold blood or in anger, but the very thought of torture made him grit his teeth. The half of his hatred of Cæsar was due to his contempt for Cæsar's practises; he liked the Britons because they did not practise cruelty.
But he could be cruel in another way. Compunction that prevented torturing man or woman implied no inhibition against mental terrorism. He could hardly bear to see a fish gaffed if the hook would serve, and could not kill a cur like Skell unless his own life were in danger, but he could be as ruthless as the sea, as practical as fate in matching means to ends.
His eyes changed, and the woman noticed it. He glanced at Helma.
"Bring my man Conops!" he commanded, and he set his sword-point on the floor between his feet, to lean on it and wait.
He did not have to wait long. As Helma drew the bolt the door swung inward. Conops lurched into the room, shielding his head with his arm, in fear of the blow he had earned by eavesdropping, too wise in his master's ways to offer an excuse.
When the blow did not fall he peeped over his arm, then dropped the arm, blinked his eye and grinned, knowing danger was over. Tros' punishments were prompt, or else not meted out at all.
"News?" Tros asked him.
"None, master. Only I heard say they are hunting Skell; and a chariot went for Caswallon."
"Caswallon is coming, eh? Have you a wife?"
Tros knew the answer, but he chose that Cornelia should learn the truth from Conops' lips.
"No, master—surely you know that! The last woman I"
A frown convinced him he had said enough.
Tros turned to Cornelia.
"This man is no beauty, is he! He is not well bred. His manners are of the fore-peak quality. He disciplines a woman with a knife-hilt. He is single. He is old enough to marry. He would serve me better if he had a wife to keep him from longshore escapades. I will give you to Conops to be his wife—his wife, you understand me? Conops is a free man, he can own a wife."
He had her! She was out of the chair, indignant, terrified, appealing to the other women, ready to scream, in a panic, struggling to control herself. Tros' threat was something he could easily fulfil, since she was his by all the written and unwritten laws.
If she should claim that she was Cæsar's slave, then Tros, as Cæsar's enemy, might do as he pleased with her by right of capture, she having been sent to use her wiles on him, not on Caswallon. If she should declare herself a free-woman, she might fool Britons but not Tros, who knew the Roman law and knew the dreadful penalties that even Cæsar, who had sent her, would be forced to inflict should she be returned to him branded, a slave who had claimed to be free.
If Tros should make a gift of her to Conops, the Britons might be offended, but there would be no chance of their interfering. Marriage by gift was binding, all the more so if the woman were a slave or a prisoner of war. She would not become Conops' slave because he might not sell her; she would be bound to him for life, promoted or reduced to his rank—considering it promotion or reduction as she pleased—in theory free, in practise a sailor's drudge.
Conops was as much alarmed as she was.
"Master!" he exploded. "What use is she on a ship? Why, she can't even cook! She's"
"Peace, you drunken, blabbing fool! When I give you a wife, you'll take her and be grateful, or I'll break your head! Think yourself lucky to"
But she who had been Cæsar's light o' love could not face life with Conops.
"I will tell, Tros!" she said, and sat down on the chair again, shuddering. "You will not give me to that one-eyed thing?"
Tros nodded, grunted. He hated to bargain with her, but on the other hand it would have gone against the grain to ruin Conops by imposing such a wife on him.
"What Cæsar wrote to you, Tros, it was meant that the lord Caswallon should read. It was supposed that some one, some druid, would know Latin and translate it to him. But the lord burned the letter."
"What did Cæsar write?" Tros thundered at her. "And why in Latin?"
"He wrote, Lord Tros, that he trusted you, as agreed between you and him at Seine-mouth, to stir up the Britons against the lord Caswallon; in return for which he promised, as agreed, to confer high command on you so soon as sufficient Britons should recognize the advantage of welcoming the Roman legions into Britain. He concluded by reminding you of your pledge that there shall be no opposition to his landing on the coast of Britain when he comes again. And he charged you, to that end, to support the lord Caswallon's enemies.
Tros stroked his beard and pecked with his sword-point at the floor-boards.
"Why did he write those lies?" he demanded.
But he knew why. He knew she was telling the truth. He knew Cæsar's methods.
She recovered a trace of her former impudence.
"Who am I, to know Cæsar's mind?" she answered, and Tros recognized something else, that she was ready to betray any one for her own advantage. He clutched Conops' arm and pulled him forward.
"Answer me in full, or"
"Cæsar hoped that any of several things might happen. The lord Caswallon might kill you, which would be payment for your impertinence at Seine-mouth. Or the lord Caswallon might mistrust you and put you to flight, when you might fall into Cæsar's hands and be crucified.
"Or, learning of the lord Caswallon's mistrust, you might turn against him in self-defense and, joining his enemies, start rebellion against him, setting Briton against Briton, which would make invasion simpler. Or, you might be sensible and, accepting magnanimous forgiveness, take command of Cæsar's fleet, making use of your great knowledge of the British coast to forward an invasion."
"Or?"
Tros knew there was something left unsaid. He jabbed his sword into the floor, pulled back the hilt and let it go until it hummed. She understood him. She must speak before the humming ceased.
"Tros, I am trained. I sing and dance. Some men are easily tempted. Cæsar thought"
"Continue! What did Cæsar think?"
"I am not sure I know what he thought."
"Then I will tell you! Cæsar thought I might be fool enough to accept his promise from your lips! I might be fool enough to turn against Caswallon, might be fool enough to captain Cæsar's fleet a while, fool enough to come within his reach and serve him, until usefulness was spent and he could pick another quarrel, crucify me at his leisure. You were to beguile me and betray me to him at the proper time!"
"Lord Tros, I could not have done it! I could not betray a man like you! I was Cæsar's slave. Now I am yours. I would rather be yours. You are not wicked, as Cæsar is! Lord Tros, I will be your faithful slave. I will betray Cæsar to you! Only no degradation! I am not a common slave."
"I pity you!" Tros answered. "Pity shall make no fool of me nor a successful rogue of you! Answer my other question: Why did Cæsar write in Latin and not Gaulish? He knew the lord Caswallon knows no Latin."
"Ah! But if the letter were in Gaulish, the lord Caswallon might have been sharp enough to understand it was a trick to turn him against you."
Tros laughed in spite of weariness and anger, sheathing his sword.
"Who sups with Cæsar needs a long spoon!"
She tried to take advantage of his changed mood, gazing at him with dark, lustrous eyes that verged on tears.
"Lord Tros, you said you pity me. Do pity me! I was free-born. Romans destroyed our city when I was a young child. I was sold and they took me to Rome. Do you know what that means? To save myself from the worst that can befall a woman I strove to become so valuable that for their own sakes they would not throw me on the market.
"A dealer had bought me; he had me taught to dance and sing; he began to make use of me to entertain his customers; and so I learned intrigue.
"Once, when Cæsar was in Rome, I was sent to coax him to buy man-slaves. I entertained him, and he bought, at above the market rate for such cattle as I offered. Then, thinking better of it, he returned those man-slaves to the dealer and kept me, at the price of three of them.
"And since then he has used me for his purposes, bringing me to Gaul because I knew my mother-tongue. Lord Tros, 'like master like slave!' I have had to be wicked, because Cæsar is! Lord Tros, I will serve you as I never served Cæsar!"
She glanced at Helma, smiled with such meekness and such lustrous eyes that Helma was stirred to sympathy and rose from the bench, though Sigurdsen's wife whispered and restrained her.
"She is yours, too. Lord Tros, let me serve her!"
Helma shuddered. She had not expected that. She shook her head. But Tros was in a quandary and given to strange, masterful impulses when in that mood.
"You have joined your destiny to mine," he said to Helma. "You shall do your part. Take charge of her, keep her until Caswallon comes."
Helma protested in a flutter of mistrust. She whispered to the other women, then seizing Tros' arm, begged him to be more cautious.
"She will betray us all! Let Britons guard her!"
But Tros knew jealousy when he saw it. He laughed.
"I have given you your task," he answered.
"Then at least a guard of Northmen!"
"Zeus!" he exploded. But Helma saw the laughter in his eyes. "Are Northmen deaf? And you dumb? If they are my men, shall they not obey you?"
She dropped her eyes, apologizing, pleased.
"So be it. All, save Sigurdsen," she answered.
But when she looked up it was at Conops. She knew well enough she could manage Sigurdsen.
"Heh? What was that? Who disobeys you deals with me!" Tros answered.
He, too, suddenly faced Conops.
"You! You see that woman? Helma her name is. She is my bride. You obey her, save and except only when her orders clash with mine!"
Conops blinked. Helma smiled at him.
"Oimoi! We were master and man. Now we are three and take us!" Conops murmured.
For which impertinence Tros took him by the ear and cuffed him, but not hard enough to hurt.
Over Helma there crept a new, visible sense of possession. Nothing that Tros could have said or done could have made as much impression as that speech. She had come into her own; she was his mate, his partner!
Strangers they might be, with almost all to learn about each other, but Tros had laid a rock of confidence in place, on which to build the future, and her eyes glowed gratitude.