The Casque's Lark; or, Victoria, the Mother of the Camps
Page 5
CHAPTER III.
THE HORDES OF THE FRANKS.
I had hardly reached the shore, always holding the green oak branchaloft, when I saw a large number of Franks, belonging to the hordes oftheir army, rush forward from behind the rocks where they had lain inambush. They carried black bucklers and wore casques made of blackcalves' skin. Their arms, legs and faces were dyed black in order toescape detection when they march in the shadow of the forests orcontemplate an attack in the night. Their appearance was rendered allthe more hideous and strange, seeing that their chiefs were tattooedwith a bright red on their foreheads, their cheeks and around theireyes. My long sojourn along the Rhine enabled me to speak the Frankishtongue with sufficient fluency.
The black warriors emitted savage yells, surrounded me from all sidesand threatened me with their long knives, the blades of which also wereblackened in the fire.
"A truce has been concluded, several days ago," I cried out to them; "Ihave come in the name of the chief of the Gallic army with a message tothe chiefs of your hordes. Lead me to them. You surely will not kill anunarmed man?"
Saying this I drew my sword and threw it away. The barbariansimmediately precipitated themselves upon me, redoubling their cries formy blood. Some of them unwound the cords of their bows, and, despiteall my remonstrances, threw me to the ground and bound me fast.
"Let us flay him," said one. "We shall carry his skin to the chiefNeroweg, the Terrible Eagle. It will serve him as a bandage to wrap hislegs in."
I was well aware that the Franks often skinned their enemies alive withgreat dexterity, and that the chiefs of their hordes decked themselvestriumphantly with such human spoils. The proposition that I be skinnedalive was received with shouts of approval; those who held me down beganto cast about for a convenient place to perform the operation; othersstarted to sharpen their knives upon the pebbles.
At this juncture, the warrior in command of the band approached me. Theman was horrible to behold. A bright red tattoo encircled his eyes andstreaked his cheeks. The marks looked like bleeding wounds, standing offstrongly against his blackened face. His hair, raised after the Frankishstyle over his forehead and tied in a knot on top of his head, fell backlike the plume of a helmet over his shoulders, and was of a copperyyellow, due to the lime-water that those barbarians used in order toimpart a warm bright color to their hair and beard.[1] Around his neckand his wrists he wore a necklace and bracelets of rough wrought tin.His raiment consisted of a casque of black calfskin; strips of blackcalfskin fastened with criss-cross bandelets, covered his thighs andlower extremities. A sword and a long knife hung from his belt. Afterfixedly looking at me for a moment, he raised his hand and letting itdown on my shoulder said:
"I shall take and keep this Gaul for Elwig. He is my prisoner."
Muffled growls from several of the other black warriors greeted thesewords of their chief, who, raising his voice, proceeded to say:
"I, Riowag, will take this Gaul to the priestess Elwig. Elwig needs aprisoner for her auguries."
The chief's decision was acquiesced in by the majority of the blackwarriors; the growls ceased; and a mob of voices repeated in chorus:
"Yes, yes; the Gaul must be kept for Elwig!"
"He must be taken to Elwig!"
"It is many days since she consulted our tutelary deities!"
"And we," cried one of the black warriors who had bound me, "we objectto having the prisoner delivered to Elwig. We want to flay him andpresent his skin in token of homage to the chief Neroweg, the TerribleEagle; he will reward us with some present."
There is small choice between being skinned alive and being boiled in abrass caldron. I did not feel called upon to manifest my preferences,and took no part whatever in the debate. Already those who wished toflay me cast savage glances at those who insisted that I be boiled, andcarried their hands to their knives, when one of the black warriorsproposed a compromise to the chief:
"Riowag, do you want to deliver the Gaul to the priestess Elwig?"
"Yes," answered the chief; "yes, I want to, and it shall be done as Iorder!"
"And the rest of you," proceeded the conciliatory black warrior, "youwish to offer the Gaul's skin to the chief Neroweg?"
"That is what we propose to do!"
"Very well, you can be accommodated, both."
A profound silence fell all around at these conciliatory words. Theblack warrior proceeded:
"First, flay him alive, you will then have his skin; after that Elwigwill boil his body in her caldron."
The compromise seemed at first to satisfy both parties, but Riowag, thecaptain of the band, objected:
"Do you not know that Elwig needs a living prisoner to render herauguries certain? You would be giving her only a corpse if you firstflay the Gaul."
And he added in a terrific voice:
"Would you expose yourselves to the anger of the gods of the netherworld by depriving them of a victim?"
At this threat a shudder ran through the surrounding black warriors, andthe party that demanded my skin seemed about to yield to a superstitiousterror.
The peacemaker, the warrior who had proposed that I be first flayed andthen boiled, now spoke again:
"Some of you wish to present the Gaul as an offering to the greatNeroweg, others of you wish to present him to the priestess Elwig. Nowdo you not see that to give to the one is to give to the other also? Isnot Elwig Neroweg's sister?"
"And he would be the first to surrender the Gaul to the gods of thenether world, in order to render them propitious to our arms!" put inRiowag.
The captain of the black warriors pointed thereupon at me, and addedimperiously:
"Take the Gaul on your shoulders and follow me!"
"We want to have his spoils," said one of the black warriors who werethe first to seize me. "We want his casque, his cuirass, his blouse, hisbelt, his shirt. We want everything, down to his shoes!"
"The booty belongs to you," answered Riowag. "You will have it so soonas Elwig will have stripped the Gaul preparatorily to throwing him intoher caldron."
"We shall go with you, Riowag," replied the black warriors who made thearrest, "otherwise others than ourselves will take possession of theplunder from the Gaul."
My perplexity was now at an end. I knew my fate. I was to be boiledalive. I would have gladly looked a useful or brave death in the face;but the death that awaited me seemed so barren and absurd, that Idecided to make one more effort to save my life. Addressing the captainof the black warriors, I said:
"Your conduct is unjust. Frankish warriors have often come to the Galliccamp to solicit an exchange of prisoners. Those Franks have always beenrespected. A truce is now in force between us, during a truce only spieswho furtively enter the camp are put to death. I have come in opendaylight, with a green bough in my hand, and in the name of Victorin,the son of Victoria. I am the carrier of a message from them for thechiefs of the Frankish army. Take care! If you act without orders fromthem, they will be sorry for not having heard me, and they may make youpay dearly for your treachery towards a soldier, who comes unarmed,during a truce, and in broad daylight, with the bough of peace in hishand."
Riowag's answer to my words was a sign to his band. I was immediatelyraised up by four black warriors who placed me on their shoulders andcarried me off in the tracks of their captain, who marched with a solemnair in the direction of the Frankish camp.
At the moment when the barbarians raised me on their shoulders, Ioverheard one of those who wished to flay me alive say to one of hiscompanions in a mocking tone:
"Riowag is Elwig's lover; he wishes to make a present of the prisoner tohis mistress."
These words enabled me to realize that Riowag, the captain of the bandof black warriors, being the lover of the priestess Elwig, gallantlymade her a present of my person, just as in our country bridegroomsoffer a dove or a sheep to the young girl whom they love.
You will be astonished, my child, to find in this narrative that I haveused words tha
t sound almost droll in describing events that were sothreatening to my life. Do not imagine that this is due to thecircumstance that at the hour when I write these lines, I had escapedall danger. No. Even when the danger was most imminent--a danger fromwhich I was almost miraculously delivered--I had full control of myspirit, and the old Gallic sense of humor, a thing so natural to ourrace, however long it lay torpid under the weight of the shame and thetrials of slavery, revived in me as it did with so many others when weonce more tasted the boon of freedom. The observations that you willencounter, and which I have reproduced as they occurred to me at timeswhen death seemed inevitable, were sincere, they proceeded from my faithin that belief of our fathers that man never dies, that when he leavesthis world he enters others in which he proceeds to live.
Carried upon the shoulders of the four black warriors, I traversed asection of the Frankish camp. The vast bivouac which was arrangedwithout order, consisted of huts for the chiefs and tents for thesoldiers. It was a sort of gigantic village of savages. Here and therelay their innumerable war chariots sheltered under rude sheds made ofthe trunks of trees. Their indefatigable small, lean, rough-coated andshaggy-maned horses, that they managed with a halter of cord for onlybridle, were, as is the custom with these barbarians, tied to the wheelsof the chariots or to the trunks of trees, the bark of which they gnawedat. The Franks themselves, barely clad in skins of animals, their hairand beard greasy with suet, presented an aspect that was repulsive,stupid and ferocious. Some of them were stretched out at full length inthe warm rays of that sun that they started in search of from the depthsof their dark northern forests. Others found amusement in the hunt forvermin over their hairy bodies; these barbarians lived in such filththat, although they were in the open air, their encampment exhaled afetid odor.
At the sight of these undisciplined hordes, ill armed but innumerable,and whose forces were incessantly recruited by fresh migrations thatpoured down in mass from the glacial regions of the north to swoop uponthe fertile and laughing fields of our Gaul as upon a prey, certainwords of sinister omen that escaped the lips of Victoria came to mymind. Nevertheless supreme contempt speedily filled me for thosebarbarians, who, three or four times superior to our own armies in pointof numbers, never had been able, despite many a bloody battle deliveredfor a number of years, to invade our soil, but found themselves everytime driven back to the other side of the Rhine, our natural frontier.
While crossing a section of the encampment on the shoulders of the fourblack warriors who carried me, I was pursued by insults, threats andcries for my blood from the Franks who saw me pass. Several times wasthe escort that accompanied me obliged, upon orders from Riowag, to usetheir arms in order to prevent my being slain on the spot.
Thus we arrived at last near a thick wood. I observed in passing a largeand more carefully constructed hut than the others, before which ayellow and red banner was planted. A large number of horsemen clad inbearskins, some in the saddle, others on foot near their mounts andleaning on their long lances, were posted around the habitation, therebyindicating clearly enough that it was occupied by one of the leadingchiefs of their hordes. Again I sought to persuade Riowag, who nowmarched beside me, but still grave, silent and solemn, to conduct mefirst to that one of the chiefs whose banner I saw, after which, I saidto him, they might kill me if they so pleased. My requests were vain. Weentered the thick wood, and arrived at a large clearing, to the centerof which I was taken. At a little distance I noticed a natural grotto,formed of large blocks of grey rock, from between which saplings andstately chestnut trees shot upwards. A stream of living water thattrickled over the ledges of rock fell into a sort of natural basin. Notfar from the cavern stood a brass pan, rather narrow and of about thelength of a man. The opening or mouth of the infernal caldron wasfurnished with a net of iron chains. The latter was undoubtedly meant tokeep the victim, who was thrown in to be boiled alive, from jumping out.Four large boulders supported the pan, under which a bundle of largelogs of kindling wood lay ready. Human bones, bleached and strewnhither and thither over the ground, imparted to the spot the appearanceof a charnel house. Finally, in the center of the clearing, rose acolossal statue; it was surmounted with three heads rudely carved withaxes and adjusted to the enormous tree-trunk that, though shapeless, wasintended to represent a gigantic body. The aspect of the statue wasgrotesque and repulsive.
Riowag made a sign to the four black warriors who carried me to stop anddeposit me at the foot of the statue. He thereupon entered the grottoalone while the warriors of the escort called out aloud:
"Elwig! Elwig!"
"Elwig! Priestess of the underground gods!"
"Rejoice, Elwig, we bring you a prisoner for your caldron!"
"You will now be able to prophesy to us!"