Adventure Magazine Cover — page 46: what you’re looking at

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44 “J am pledged to you, Tros.” “T will free you.” “No. He is only a Briton. You are a *sea-king. I-will bear your sons.” “Zeus!” he muttered, wondering. ‘Has “all the world gone mad? Come here!” he ordered. When she came, he kissed her and Conops cried shame at him from beneath an oar- bench. It was a dawn of mixed emotions as Opaque and changing as the Lunden mist. CHAPTER VIII CORNELIA OF GAUL O TROS’ prisoners—since he had freed them and they were now his hench- men—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 Cesar’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 Czsar’s legions for a year. While they were laughing at the North- men’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 pre- tending 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 Rornans. Her dress and jewelry were Roman, aping the patrician Adventure 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 ex- pensive and calmly impudent. But her stock-in-trade was nothing tangible, al- though it was all in evidence: An air of knowing more than anybody else knew, of having influence that none could under- mine, 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 emo- tion 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 herseli in far too many swift intrigues to show fear, even if she felt it. Rome had made a hun- dred conquests in the wake of women of hér 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 insolent- ly through suspicious, slumberous eyes. ‘““My name is Tros.”’ | “T am Cornelia.”’ “Ceesar’s light o’ love?” he asked, raising shaggy black eyebrows just sufficiently to barb the insult. “‘Czsar’s slave?” Helma, behind him, touched his shoulder gratefully. Conops, seated on Cesar’s treasure-chest, showed three more teeth through the slit in his upper-lip, rose and disappeared into the house. ‘““Ceesar’s messenger!” the Gaulish woman answered. There was no iron in her voice; nothing but challenging laughter. Cesar had not eomicbooks.com