Calgaich the Swordsman (30 page)

Fomoire shrugged. “The encyclopedia of pornography. They say Quaestor Lucius Sextillius has a copy.”

Lutorius picked at his yellowed teeth with a dirty fingernail. “You're damned right he has! Many's the time I saw him reading it when I served temporarily as a
calo
in his villa at Luguvalium. He'd pore over it and then hurry off to his bedchamber with a boy, a whore, or a goat, with his instructions fresh in his damned bald head. Try as I would to peek over his shoulder, I could never get a real crack at it.”

“If you could read,
calo,”
put in a bearded seaman of the Veneti, from the channel coast of northern Gaul.

“Shit!” Lutorius cried. “Who said anything about reading? I was looking at the pictures!'
⁵

The Venetus stood up with a jangling of his rusty chains and looked at the long lines of merchant ships moored to the quays. “What a row of tubs,” he sneered. “These piss pots would sink on a calm day off Gesoriacum. These damned Romans never did understand the sea. No wonder they're having such a hell of a time keeping those Saxons and Jutes from landing in Britannia.”

“But
you
understand the sea, eh, Venetus?” Calgaich asked, suddenly taking interest.

“My father was a whale and my mother was a dolphin. I was born at sea, with rope yarn for hair, and tar for blood. I was teethed on a marlinespike, and had flippers for hands and feet until I was three years old. I shit sea shells and piss salt water. Anything else you want to know?”

“By the gods, a human dolphin!” Lutorius cried. “How do they call you, Venetus?”

“Cunori, son of Struan. And you,
calo?”

“Lutorius, son of Bacchus!” The
calo
thrust out a hand and gripped that of the Venetus. “How did they happen to gather you in this cargo for death?”

“My little fishing craft met up with a fat Roman merchant ship in the channel. It was foggy. They didn't see us until we were alongside them and over their railing with our knives in our teeth. Then we found out what her cargo was.”

“And?” Calgaich asked. “What was it?”

Cunori shrugged. “A battalion of Batavian auxiliaries bound for Portus Adurna. It was a good fight while it lasted.” Cunori looked at the ships again. “I had hoped to slip away before we got this far south.”

“You'd' never make it back to the channel, Cunori,” Guidd put in. “Gaul swarms with auxiliaries.”

Cunori looked about as though someone might be listening. “I didn't figure on going north by
land
. I thought that when we neared here, I'd slip away and steal a small craft to sail back to my own country.”

“How?” Lutorius asked sarcastically. “Up the rivers?”

“I'm not joking.”

Calgaich looked quickly at the seaman. “You never meant to return by land, eh, Cunori?”

The Venetus shook his head and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “South first, then west, then north,” he said mysteriously.

“Beyond the Pillars of Hercules,” Foimoire suggested.

The Venetus nodded.

It was very quiet among the group of prisoners about the seaman. Those closest to him looked at each other secretively out of the comers of their eyes. Some of them looked back over their shoulders toward the Gaulish auxiliaries standing guard at the gate of the enclosure.

“It is said that few men have been beyond the Pillars of Hercules,” Lexus, a giant Gaul, murmured.

“Ne plus ultra.”
Chilo, a slim Greek tutor put in. “No more beyond. It is said that the Phoenicians, the world’s greatest seamen, saw such a message carved on the rocks at the Pillars of Hercules, and dared not go beyond them.”

“There have been many ships that have sailed out into the great sea to the west,” Fomoire added.

“And many of them did not come back,” the Greek argued.

Lutorius spat. “Shit! I passed that way when I was just a stripling. I was on a Greek ship loaded with tin. It was rough, and I was damned sick most of the way, but we made it.”

Cunori nodded. “I too have made that passage,
both
ways.”

“Then you must know the way.” Calgaich leaned closer to the Venetus. “Cunori, if you had such a craft, would you really go?”

“Try me,” the seaman suggested quietly. “It’s better to ‘ die in the clean sea with the fresh salt breeze against your face than to die like a slaughtered hog in the arena to amuse these damned Romans.”

“Aye!” Lexus, the Gaul, cried.

Guidd nodded quickly. His one eye glistened.

“We’d need someone to read the stars,” Cunori added. “We couldn’t hug the coast, for fear the Roman naval galleys in the ports of Iberia might be alerted.”

“You talk like fools,” Lutorius asserted. “Here we are in chains, under heavy guard, and you talk of stealing a ship and escaping to sea, as if there were nothing to it.”

"I can read the stars,” Fomoire said quietly.

Suddenly the gates crashed open, and a file of Gauls marched into the pen. Decrius Montanas followed them, holding a perfumed handkerchief to his nose. "Up on your feet, you dogs!” he shouted. "We’ve arranged passage on a first-class ship for some of you! The naval trireme
Neptunus.
Pride of the South Mediterranean Squadron! Up, up, I say, so that I may reward the best of you with this great prize!”

"That's one I'd like to take along with us,” Cunori said out of the side of his mouth. "We could hang him up by his prick to the yardarm for luck and hope it held together until we rounded the Iberian Peninsula into the great sea.” The centurion planted his hands on his hips and eyed the sullen prisoners. "Calgaich, the Great Swordsman; Guidd, the One-Eyed Rat; Fomoire, the Unhuman; Chilo, who raped his master's young daughter; Lexus, the Bull in Human Form; and the rest of you whispering dogs in that far corner there! I need a score of you, for a healthy voyage at sea! I assure you, my friends, that it will do you a world of good between here and Portus Ostiensis!” The selected score of captives were marched along the stone quays and halted beside the
Neptunus.
The strong odor of vinegar and hot tar, mingled with a clinging smell of incense, drifted from the moored ship. A thin wraith of bluish smoke arose from the altar set on the foredeck.

"She's getting ready for sea,” Cunori observed. "They've made an offering to the gods.” He looked at a Gaulish stevedore who lounged against a pile of bales which were to be loaded onto the trireme. "Is she a fever ship, mate?”

The Gaul nodded. "They've been burning pitch and sprinkling vinegar inside of her for a week to kill the fever within her rotten guts. She came in over a week past with half her rowers dead or dying from fever. She's a hoodoo ship.”

"Where's she bound?”

"Ostia. There's a rumor she's going to be blessed there, to kill the evil within her. Some British official has commandeered her to carry him and his women and slaves to Ostia. She's to leave on the afternoon tide."

“Wash the filth off that vermin before you bring them aboard my ship, Centurion!” the Greek captain of the
Neptunus
shouted at Decrius Montanas.

Grinning seamen hauled up buckets of filthy water and sloshed them over the prisoners. They held their noses as they approached to wash them down. Calgaich wiped the harbor filth from his face and squeezed the dirty water from his long hair.

A train of carts and horse litters rumbled and clattered along the quay to shipside. The drenched prisoners stood watching as the litters stopped. Curtains parted on one of the first, and Calgaich caught his breath as Morar extended a slim foot and ankle toward the ground. His eyes met hers for an instant before she looked away.

“By Zeus,” a seaman whispered. “Look at
her!”

Calgaich made an effort to harden his heart against her incredible beauty.

Quaestor Lucius Sextillius got down from his horse litter. He held his sharp little nose between a thumb and forefinger. “Pericol!” he exclaimed. “The stench is overpowering!”

“His loincloth must have shifted when he got down,” Lutorius said to Calgaich out of the side of his mouth.

Tribune Ulpius Claudius dismounted from his horse and hurried to help Morar get down from her litter. “They're used to it, Uncle!” he called back over a shoulder. “Have you ever been in the huts and halls of these northern barbarians? By Mithras, your eyes smart and your stomach turns over at the stench of them. They have no knowledge at all of the baths.”

Lucius Sextillius eyed the prisoners. “Will any harm come to them aboard the ship, Centurion? I want them in good enough condition so that they make a good showing in the Games.”

Decrius Montanas saluted the quaestor. “They have just covered about a thousand miles, mostly on foot, sir. Those who are still alive have proven their ability to withstand hardships. After a few days aboard the trireme at the oars, they should be in even better condition.”

Morar leaned on the arm of the tribune. Her great blue eyes again roamed about over the dripping prisoners. They came to rest for a matter of seconds on Calgaich, who again gave no sign of recognition. There was a puzzled expression on her lovely face as she looked away from him. Then Quaestor Lucius Sextillius and his entourage began to mount the gangplank to board the ship.

The house slaves and servants of the quaestor began to unload the luggage carts: Cairenn descended from one of the carts. She was dressed in a soft
stola,
and her dark hair was caught up in a silver band. She looked from one prisoner to another as she worked to unload the baskets on her cart. The men were dirty almost beyond recognition, but she knew Calgaich immediately. She hesitated in her task and looked fully into his eyes. She would know him anywhere despite his present condition and appearance. It was strange to see him without his weapons—the great war spear and magnificent sword of his grandfather, Evicatos the Spearman. Much had changed in Calgaich except the fierce light in his eyes. Nothing but death could ever dim that light. She walked toward the trireme, past the waiting prisoners. “Calgaich,” she called softly, but Calgaich had turned away. He wanted no one, least of all Cairenn, to see him as he was.

One of the male servants trudged toward the gangplank. He carried a great war spear over one shoulder and had a scabbarded sword in his hands.

“At least your weapons are still within reach, Calgaich,” Guidd whispered out of the side of his mouth.

“If I had my hands on them
...”
the warrior murmured.

Cairenn had taken her basket aboard the trireme and returned for another. Calgaich could sense that her eyes never left him as she passed, but he did not look at her again. She carried the last basket to the vessel where Morar stood waiting, having watched Cairenn as she passed the prisoners. She called for Cairenn to hurry and pointed for her to go below.

More carts were unloaded, and another group of horse litters drew up to the ship. Again the seamen stopped their work as another blonde woman descended from the litter. Bronwyn! Calgaich’s heart cried out. She looked pale and weak, although still beautiful. A guard rushed forward to escort her on board. She, too, looked for Calgaich in the crowd of prisoners as she passed the men still strung together by the chains around their waists. When she saw him, she tried to catch his eye, but he did not look at her. Disappointed, she went up the plank and joined Morar at the railing of the trireme. There the two sisters stood together like two shining suns, although Calgaich now knew that only one had a heart of gold.

The trireme was a large vessel. She was about two hundred feet long and was manned by one hundred and eighty oarsmen, a crew of twenty seamen, and an afterguard of thirty marines. An altar smoked on the foredeck.

The prisoners were led aboard in single file to one of the hatchways that led down into the depths of the hold. The stench within the cavernous hold thickened the deeper one descended into it. Even the strong acrid odor of the vinegar and the tang of the burning pitch had failed to overcome the sickening miasma compounded of stinking bilge water, human waste, and rotting food that had dropped from the rowers’ benches into the bilges. There was also the faint and persistent odor of death itself. The ship seemed to be a floating charnel house.

Calgaich, Lutorius, Fomoire, Guidd and Loam, of the Brigantes, were chained to one of the long oars and seated on benches that descended one below the other and side by side, to the inner bulkhead of the ship. There the oar protruded into the water, so that each man sat to accommodate the angle of the oar as it was being worked. The rest of the prisoners were assigned where there were other vacancies. The galley slaves were asleep, or lying on the deck between the benches. None of them raised their heads to look at the newcomers. It was not a life they were leading, merely an existence. The day would come when they would finally fail at the oar or perhaps drop dead. The end was always the same. The chains were struck loose, and the body was dropped over the side, while one of the relief oarsmen was immediately chained to the same oar, still warm from the sweat of the man who had just died. No one on the deck would even bother to look aft to watch the body sink into the sea.

A burly Numidian slave drove home the last of the heavy staples into the end of the chain that fastened Calgaich to the great oar. There was no recognition of his fellow men in his dull stare. He was like a machine. Once Calgaich looked up into the man's dark eyes. It was like looking into a black, bottomless tarn of stagnant water. There was no spirit within the twin pools.

Calgaich rested his head on the thick handle of the oar. Something hard poked him in the side. It was the vine staff of Centurion Decrius Montanas. Calgaich looked up into the flat, basilisk stare of the centurion. The
hortator,
or rowing master, stood beside the centurion. “These are the dogs to watch, Penis,” Decrius instructed the round-headed Sicilian. “Understand, the quaestor wants no harm to come to them, but see to it that they work themselves to the fullest."

The Sicilian's face was a set, emotionless mask. “It makes no difference to me, Centurion, as to
who
they are. Once they are chained to that oar, they are
mine
. They are not men, but merely rowing machines. They obey the commands. They row. They work to their fullest at all times, for if one oar in a bank begins to fail, the whole bank is thrown out, thus breaking the rhythm. If that happens, it is my responsibility, not theirs. You understand?"