CHAPTER VI
HEROD BEN MORDECAI
TROS went to the deck and peered over the bulwark into darkness. There was a half-moon now, but the ship's shadow covered the long-boat and he could only vaguely see the shapes of four men sitting in the stern, one of whom was hugely fat, unquestionably Simon.
Sigurdsen climbed to the deck and grumbled, using Norse oaths:
"Helpless! Weighs like six men! Have to hoist him!"
"Orwic? Conops?"
"Haven't seen them. Fat man rode horseback to the beach. Asked for you. Others are his servants."
Sigurdsen ordered a rope rove through a block on the after yard-arm and a bight put in the raid of it. Tros leaned overside.
"Simon!" he called. "Simon ben Tobias?"
A hoarse voice answered him. Question and answer followed in a mixture of three languages, but Tros could hardly hear what Simon said.
"Ho there!" he exploded. "Put a parceling on that rope? Will you cut good Simon's rump in halves? Now steady. That's a nobleman of Gades, not a sack of corn!"
They walked the grunting weight up to the bulwark rail and swung him inboard, where Tros received him in strong arms.
"Simon, salaam! Salaam aleikum. Marhaba fik!"
"Peace? Blessing? There is none in Gades!" Simon answered, wheezing with fatness and asthma. "Curses on this night air. There is death in it! Tros, Tros, I can not pay the debt I owe you!"
Tros hurried him into the stateroom, a slave, who had clambered up the ship's side, fussily arranging shawls around the old Jew's shoulders. A second slave helped a lean man up over the bulwark, who followed in uninvited.
"Door—door—shut the door!" Simon gasped in Greek, the language he had grown more used to than his native tongue.
The two slaves slammed it and remained outside. Tros helped Simon into a chair beside the table and then turned to face the second man, an old Jew in a cloak and a dirty cloth cap, beneath which long black ringlets curled beside his eyes. He disliked the man at once instinctively.
"Who is this?"
Simon, coughing apoplectically, answered—
"Herod ben Mordecai."
It might have been the cough, but it appeared to Tros he did not like the name.
"A friend?" he asked.
Simon did not answer—only coughed again, his tongue between his teeth.
Herod ben Mordecai smiled, his lower lip protruding as he thrust his head and shoulders forward to peer into Tros' face.
"Let us hope we are three friends!" he said significantly. "Shall I sit on that chair or on this one?"
He began to peer about the cabin, his bright eyes appraising everything. Tros sat down on his own oak chair with his back to the stern of the ship and Simon on his right. Herod ben Mordecai helped himself to the third chair, facing Simon, with his back toward the corner in which Chloe and Horatius Verres crouched in hiding.
"Where are the Lord Orwic and the man I sent with him?" Tros asked, looking straight at Simon.
Simon's face, majestic, heavy-browed and framed in a patriarchal beard, but sallow now from ill-health, wrinkled into a worried frown. Old before his time and physically weak from being too much waited on, he looked too strong-willed to yield to death and yet unable to enjoy the life he clung to. His clothes were wholly oriental, of embroidered camel hair, and there were far too many of them, making him look even fatter than he was. An eastern head-dress, bound on with a jewelled forehead band, concealed his baldness and increased his dignity; and he wore heavily jewelled rings on three of the fingers of each of his fat hands. He had kicked off his sandals when he entered and his fat feet, stockinged in white wool, were tucked up under him and hidden by the bulge of his prodigious stomach.
"I haven't seen them!" he said hoarsely, with a gesture of both hands that disclaimed all knowledge. He looked at Tros, not at the Jew who faced him, and he dropped no hint by word or gesture. Tros could not have told how the information was conveyed, but understood that Herod ben Mordecai was the man who could answer his question.
"Then how did you get my letter?" he asked.
"Herod ben Mordecai brought it," said Simon and drawing short, asthmatic breaths, he folded both hands on his stomach. Plainly there should be no secrets told in Herod's presence. Tros stared at Herod hard, but the old Jew's brilliant eyes met his without a quiver.
"How did you obtain my letter?" he demanded.
"My friend," Herod answered in an unexpectedly firm, business-like voice, "you are lucky it fell into my hands. I took it straight to Simon, who keeps his house like a castle. There are not so many who could get to Simon at such an hour and, believe me or not, there are fewer who would not have gone straight to the Romans with the news that Tros of Samothrace is so near Gades!"
"I asked you, how did you get the letter?" Tros insisted.
"I heard you. I didn't answer," said the Jew.
"Very well," said Tros, "you are my prisoner!"
He made no move. He simply kicked his scabbard to throw the sword-hilt forward, and sat still. The Jew looked keenly at him, thrusting out his lower lip again, and for a minute there was silence, only disturbed by Simon's heavy breathing. Then Herod leaned across the table toward Tros, thrusting forward one hand, fingers twitching.
"You should make a friend of me," he said excitedly, "for Simon's sake. Let Simon tell it."
Herod resettled himself, twitching at his curled black beard and showing yellow teeth. Simon sighed heavily.
"Tros!" he gasped suddenly, "Herod knows too much!"
"He's a prisoner! What he knows won't sink the ship!" Tros answered.
Herod leaned forward again, elbows on the table, lower lip protruding, eyes as hard and glittering as jet.
"But it will ruin Simon," he retorted in a level voice.
SIMON blurted out the facts, a list of them, while Herod tapped a finger on the table as if keeping check.
"I am in debt. Caius Julius Cæsar owes me three million sesterces, and won't pay. Balbus owes me a million, and I daren't ask him for it. If a word gets out in Gades against my credit, there will be a run on me. I lent my warehouse to conspirators for—"
Tros whistled softly.
"Which faction now?" he asked.
"Oi-yoi! Gades is full of factions!" Herod remarked, rubbing his hands as if washing them. He seemed amused.
"—for the storage of weapons, Simon went on. "They paid well. I needed—need money. I didn't know those bales of merchandise were weapons until Herod spied on me and came and told me. Now, if Balbus learns of it, he will jump at the chance to seize my goods. He will tear up his own promises to pay. Cæsar's too for the sake of Cæsar's favor—and crucify me!"
"On a great—big—tree!" said Herod, laying both hands on his knees and smiling cruelly. "You would better tell Simon why you sent for him and make your proposal, whatever! it is, and let us all three consider it. I am a man of business. Offer me business or my young men will be at Balbus' door at dawn. Before he has bathed himself he will have sent his guards to Simon's warehouse, where they will find the weapons in bales and bags and barrels. Then a thousand slaves that Simon owns and his great house full of curios and his daughters' children—how many, Simon? How many daughters' children?—will all be sold. And Simon, well—he may escape on this ship. I don't know. But the two who went ashore tonight will remain in Gades, where they will suffer such tortures as only Balbus can imagine—rack, fire, spikes under the nails—"
"Tros!" Simon exclaimed wheezily, his nervousness increasing the effect of asthma. "We are old friends! You will not—"
"None knows what I won't do!" Tros interrupted, thumping his great fist down on the table. "My young friend Orwic and my servant Conops went ashore. If a hair of the head of either one is injured, this man—" he scowled and showed his teeth at Herod—"dies!"
"What if I don't know where they are?" said Herod, shrugging his shoulders impudently.
"So much the worse for you!"
"You heard me. Balbus will ruin Simon!" Herod insisted, thrusting out his lower lip again.
"We will cross the bridge of Simon when we reach it," Tros said grimly.
Herod showed anxiety at last. His eyes admitted he had overstepped his reach, grew shifty, glanced from one man to the other, rested at last on Tros' angry face.
"You're a fine friend, to talk of letting your friend Simon be sold up and crucified just for the sake of a Gaul and a Greek slave! Mind you, I can't stop it, not unless I go ashore. My young men know I went to Simon's house. They don't trust him—nah, nah! They don't trust him. They know what to do! Any of Simon's slaves might murder me, mightn't they? Any time. Dead men can't talk. So you see, if I don't return pretty soon from Simon's house, my young men will go straight to Balbus. I tell you, I can't stop it unless—"
"I'll drown you unless my men return!" Tros interrupted. "You may send a messenger ashore—"
"I'll go!" said Chloe's voice, and even Tros was startled. Simon nearly screamed.
She stepped out from the dark and Simon stared uncomfortably at her, looked like a man caught naked in the bath for all that he wore so many clothes and she so few. Herod ben Mordecai recovered from surprize and found speech first. He became all oily smiles, a mass of them, his very body writhed itself into a smile, and his lower lip grew pendulous like an elephant's.
"Ah, pretty Chloe! Clever Chloe! Who'd have thought of finding Chloe on the ship of Tros of Samothrace! Chloe and I are old friends, aren't we! Often I hired Chloe before she grew so famous and so expensive. Many a stroke of business Chloe had a hand in, eh, Chloe? Yeh-yeh. Chloe could tell who taught her how to turn a pretty profit now and then, eh, Chloe? Friendship, eh!"
He chuckled, as if remembering old mischief she and he had shared in, dug her in the ribs with his long forefinger, caught the edge of her damp chlamys, trying to pull her closer to him. She broke away, approached Simon from behind and stroked his forehead with her cool hands.
"Poor Simon!" she said merrily. "And he owes me two hundred thousand sesterces! Am I to lose it, Simon? And you so old! You'll never have time to grow rich again before you die, unless we help you! How shall we do it?"
Tros seemed to know. He reached for pen and ink and set them down in front of Herod. Then he clipped a scrap of parchment from a roll.
"Write!" he commanded. "To the people you refer to as your young men. Bid them release to Chloe, the slave of Pkauchios my two men from whom you took that letter. Add that secret business will detain you. They are not to be troubled on your account. They are not to go to Balbus."
Herod ben Mordecai shrugged up his shoulders almost to his ears, then shook his head.
"I won't!" he said. "Sometimes letters get into the wrong hands. And besides, I can't—I can't write."
Chloe chuckled. Tros reached into a locker behind his chair, chose a long knife, stuck it point first in the table, bent it back toward him and released it suddenly.
"You have until that stops quivering!" he remarked.
Herod began to write with great facility, using Aramaic characters. He covered both sides of the scrap of parchment and then signed his name. Tros scrutinized the writing carefully, then handed it to Simon for a second censorship before entrusting it to Chloe.
"There, you see, there. I have done exactly what you say," said Herod. "I was only bargaining. We all have our own way of bargaining. You had the better of it. Now let's be friendly. I wouldn't have hurt Simon for—"
He wilted into silence under Tros' stare. He looked puzzled—seemed to wonder what mistake he might have made in judging character. Tros turned to Chloe.
"Understand me now, my two friends first! Go bring them here."
"Too late!" said Chloe. "I will have to hide them. Remember, I must go to Pkauchios and send him hurrying to Balbus with a reading of the stars!"
TROS nodded, chose a pearl out of the pocket in his belt, held it for a moment between thumb and finger in the lantern light, and tucked it away again. None but he and Chloe was aware of that sideplay.
"Hide them then. Bring them here as soon as possible. I want an interview with Balbus. Do you think your master could persuade him to come to my ship?"
Chloe shook her head violently.
"There have been too many plots against his life of late," she answered. "In some ways he is careless, in others he is like an old fox for caution. If you were an informer, if you had some tale to tell him about new conspiracies—"
Tros grinned. She had touched his genius. His hero was the great Odysseus, and he knew the Odyssey by heart. He could make up a tale on the spur of a moment to meet almost any contingency.
"Let your master tell Balbus that I bring him opportunity to be a greater man than Cæsar!" he said confidently. "Bid him tell Balbus to trust me, that he may stand in Cæsar's shoes."
She smiled, stared, smiled at him, her eyes astonished.
"Are you a seer?" she asked. "Those lion's eyes of yours—I—I—"
"Go do my bidding!" Tros said, gazing at her steadily. He realized he had aroused her superstition, and if superstition might assist the pearls to bind her in his service, he could play that game as well as any man.
He rose from his chair and took Herod ben Mordecai by the neck. The Jew clutched at his wrists and tried to struggle. Tros shook the senses nearly out of him and dragged him out on deck, where he called a Northman.
"Put this man below. Fasten him up in an empty water cask," he commanded. Then suddenly he thought of Horatius Verres and turned to Chloe. "Go fetch your Roman."
She led out Horatius Verres by the hand. They looked like handsome children in the darkness.
"Verres," said Tros, "here is work for you. Let me see you earn my favor. Go below. Stand guard over this Jew. See he doesn't escape from the cask and that none has word with him."
There was a smile on Verres' face as he followed the Northman. The fellow had the Roman military habit of obedience without remark. Tros decided he liked him. He turned to Sigurdsen.
"Put this woman ashore. Nay," he said, taking his cloak from her, "that stays here! You may have a blanket." He returned to the stateroom, took a blanket from his bunk and threw it over her. "Now, I will be in Gades harbor with the morning tide, ready for action. If Balbus is friendly, be you on the beach. If you are not here, I will send a threat to Balbus that unless the Lord Orwic and my man Conops are on board by noon, unharmed, I will burn all Roman shipping. I make no threats that I will not fulfill. For you, in that case, there will be no pearls, no freedom, no Horatius Verres, for I will sail away with him! So use brains and be swift."
Chloe went overside like a trained athlete, hardly touching the rope-ladder that Sigurdsen hung carefully in place. Tros watched the boat until it vanished in gloom at the edge of the path of moonlight, then returned to Simon in the stateroom.
"Simon, old friend," he said, sitting down beside him, "in the fires of friendship men learn what they are and are not. I have learned this night that you are not so rich as I believed, nor yet so bold as you pretended. No, nor yet so wise as your repute. Tell me more of this Herod ben Mordecai."
Simon drooped his massive head in the humility of an oriental who acknowledges the justice of rebuke, and was silent for as long as sixty labored breaths. Then, wheezing, he revealed the sharp horns of his own dilemma.
"Tros, that Herod is a professional informer. Now he acts spy for the tax gatherers, now he betrays a conspiracy, now he plays pander to Balbus. Now he buys debts and enforces payment. Now he lays charges of treason, so that he may buy men's confiscated valuables at the price of trash. And he has found out what is true—that there are weapons in my warehouse!"
Tros thought for a minute, drumming with his fingers on the table.
"Simon," he said at last, "you are not such a fool as to have let that happen without your knowledge."
In silence Simon let the accusation go for granted. He stared at the table, avoiding Tros' eyes.
"Tros!" he said presently, hoarsely. "I am a Jew. I am not like these Romans who open their veins or stab themselves when their sins have found them out. Yet mine have found out me. I let myself be called the friend of Pkauchios, that cursed, black-souled dog of an Egyptian, a sorcerer! Hey-yeh-yarrh! It is the fault of all my race that we forever trust the magicians! We forsake the god of our forefathers. Too late, we find ourselves forsaken. Adonai! I am undone!"
"But I not!" Tros retorted. "I am not a Jew, so your god has no quarrel with me. Tell me more concerning Pkauchios."
"He has a hold on Balbus, through his sorceries. He knows that Balbus owes me a million sesterces. He knows I need the money. He knows Balbus would like to indict me for something or other in order to confiscate my wealth, such as it is—such as it is. I have a thousand slaves I can't sell, some millions I can't collect! Pkauchios plans an insurrection by the Spaniards, who will listen to any one because they groan under the Roman tyrrany. But forever they plot, do nothing and then accuse one another. I would have nothing to do with it. But Pkauchios knew of nowhere, except in my great warehouse, to conceal his weapons from the Roman spies. He offered me a price—a big, a very big price for the accommodation. And he threatened, if I should refuse, to whisper a false charge against me."
"And you were weak enough to yield to that?" Tros asked him, wondering.
"I grow old. I needed money. Tros, I had sent much money to Jerusalem for the rebuilding of the Temple. Aie-yaie, but will it ever be rebuilt!It was rebuilt several years later by Herod, the Great. Pkauchios swore that when Balbus is slain his debt to me shall be paid at once out of the treasury. I let him use my warehouse. And then Herod's spies! Ach-h-h! Herod came to me tonight with your letter in his hand. He would not say where or how he had obtained it. He said, 'What does Tros of Samothrace require of you? Tros is a pirate, proclaimed by Cæsar, as all know. There is a reward of three talents set on the head of Tros of Samothrace.' He offered to share the reward with me—two for him and one for me. He said, 'Let us tempt this fellow Tros ashore with promises. Let us tempt him into your house, Simon, and then send for Balbus.' And he made threats. He said, 'Balbus would be interested to learn where those weapons are hidden in barrels and bales and boxes!' So I came with him, bribing the guard at the gate. And Tros, I don't know what to say or what to do!"
SIMON bowed his head until it nearly touched the table, then rocked to and fro until the strong oak chair groaned under him. Tros closed his eyes in thought, and for a moment it appeared to him the cabin was repeopled. There were Fflur, Caswallon and the Druid, bidding him good-by. He could see Fflur's gray eyes. He could hear her voice—"Be bold. Lord Tros!" And then the Druid—"In the midst of danger thou shalt find the keys of safety!"
Tros leaned and patted Simon on the shoulder. "What of Chloe?"
"A slave. A Gades dancing girl," said Simon with an air as if that was the worst that could be said of any one. "From earliest infancy they are trained in treachery as well as dancing. That one has been trained by Pkauchios, than whom there is no more black-souled devil out of hell! None in his senses trusts the dancing girls of Gades. Balbus, so they say, trusts Chloe. He is mad—as mad as I was when I trusted him and Cæsar with my money! Uh—uh! Trust no dancing girl."
"She seems to have trusted you with her money," Tros remarked.
"Aye, and shame is on me. I took her money at interest, even as I took yours. I can not repay her."
"But I think you shall!" said Tros, and shut his eyes again to think. "You shall repay her and you shall repay me."
For a while there was silence, pulsed by Simon's heavy breathing and the lapping of light waves against the ship's hull.
"Simon!" Tros said at last. "I need the keys of Rome!"
"God knows I haven't them!" said Simon. "Until Crassus went to Syrian had a good, rich, powerful friend in Rome, but now no longer."
"But you have influence with Balbus since he owes you so much money?"
"Influence?" said Simon, sneering. "He invites me to his banquets, to over-eat and over-drink and watch the naked-bellied women dance. But I asked a favor only yesterday—only a little favor—leave to export a few hundred slaves to Rome. If they had been women he would have said yes, but he has placed an embargo on male slaves, to depress the local market so as to have cheap labor to rebuild Gades. He knows I have no female slaves, so it was no use lying to him. He answered, he would give permission gladly, only that Tros of Samothrace, the pirate proscribed by Cæsar, is at sea and might capture the whole consignment, for which he, Balbus, would be blamed. Bah! So much for my influence! He let Euripides, the Greek export a hundred women only last week, and that was since Cæsar's letter came. Pirates! What he fears is a rising market! He knows I need money. He knows I have a thousand Lusitanii that I bought for export. At his suggestion, too. I bought them at his suggestion! Tros, it costs money to feed a thousand slaves! That dog Balbus waits and smiles and speaks me fair and watches for the day when I must sell those slaves at auction, so that he may buy them dirt cheap for his labor gangs!"
"But you stand well with Cæsar," Tros suggested. "You say Cæsar owes you three million—"
"Phagh!" Simon's face grew apoplectically purple. "Cæsar is the greatest robber of them all!"
"But he has brains," Tros retorted. "Caius Julius Cæsar knows it is wiser to keep an old friend than to be forever hunting new ones. Why did you lend him the money?"
"Because his creditors were after him and he promised me his influence. Of what use to me now in, Gades is Cæsar's influence in Gaul? Tell me that! I wrote to him for my money, for a little something on account. No answer! I suppose a secretary read the letter. Tschah! With Cæsar it is face to face that counts. Nothing matters to him then but the impression he makes on bystanders. Vain! He thinks himself a god! He acts a drama, with himself the hero of it. Approach him, flatter him, ask for what he owes you in the presence of a dozen people and he will pay if it takes the last coin in his treasury. Pay if he has to capture and sell sixty thousand slaves to reimburse himself! That was how he repaid Crassus. Sixty thousand Gauls he sold in one year! Tschah! With a smile he will pay, if he has an audience. With a smile and a gesture that calls attention to his magnanimity and modesty and sense of justice! But a letter, opened by his secretary, read to him, perhaps, in a tent at night, when his steward has told him of a nice, young, pretty matron washed and combed and waiting to be brought to him—Tshay-yeh-yeh ! None but a Jew, but a Jew—would have let him have three million sesterces!"
Tros tried to appear sympathetic. He leaned out of his chair and patted Simon on the shoulder. But the news of Simon's difficulties only strengthened his own confidence. When he was sure that Simon was not looking, he permitted a great grin to spread over his face.
No Roman warships in the harbor, conspiracies ashore, Simon's warehouse full of weapons, between decks two hundred and fifty first class fighting men, demanding shore-leave and agreeable to act the rôle of slaves for the occasion, Balbus the Roman governor ambitious, greedy, superstitious and in the toils of an Egyptian sorcerer whose slave, Chloe, a favorite of Balbus, was in a mood to betray her master—it would be strange, it would be incredible, if the gods could not evolve out of all that mixed material an opportunity for Tros of Samothrace to use his wits!
"Simon!" he said. "Once you did my father a good turn in Alexandria. You did it without bargaining, without a price. I am my father's son. So I will help you, Simon. You shall pay your debts—"
"God send it!" Simon muttered.
"You shall be spared the shame of not repaying Chloe—"
"S-s-sheh-eh!" Simon drew in his breath as if something had stabbed him.
"We will both of us have our will of Balbus—"
"Uh-uh! He is all powerful in Gades. If they kill, him, there will only be a worse one in his place!"
"You shall have your sesterces, and I, the key to Rome!"
"God send it! Eh, God send it!" Simon answered hopelessly. "But I think we shall all be crucified!"
"Not we!" Tros answered. "I have crucified a plan, that's all. A plan that can't be changed is like a fetter on a man's foot."
He arose and kicked out right and left by way of illustration that his brain was free to make the most of opportunity.