by Eugène Sue
“Oh, that I have not a single weapon to kill this dog who steals away my water!” groaned the pilgrim while redoubling his efforts to disengage himself. “In a minute I would have killed you; I would have cut you to pieces, vagabond!”
“I know this voice!” cried out Fergan, and brusquely pulling aside the folds of the tippet that covered the face of the traveler, the serf remained dumb with astonishment. Under him lay Neroweg, Worse than a Wolf!
The seigneur of Plouernel profiting by that moment of confusion, freed himself from Fergan’s hold, rose, and thinking only of his pouch of water, cast his eyes about him. He saw a few steps away Joan, radiant with joy, yet tearful, on her knees near Colombaik, and holding the pouch which the child pressed with his two little hands, while he drank with avidity. He seemed to regain life in the measure that he slaked his consuming thirst.
“That bastard is drinking up my water!” Neroweg yelled with fury. “In this desert, water is life,” and he was about to rush upon Joan and her child when the quarryman, recovering from his stupor, seized the Count of Plouernel between his robust arms: “We are not here in your seigniory; you covered with iron and I naked! Here we are man to man, body to body! In the midst of this desert we are equals, Neroweg! I shall have your life, or you shall have mine. Fight for it!”
A terrific struggle ensued, in the midst of the cries of Joan and Colombaik, who trembled for husband and for father. The seigneur of Plouernel was a man of redoubtable strength; but the serf, although weakened with privation and fatigue, drew energy from his hatred of his implacable enemy. A Gallic serf, Fergan was struggling with a descendant of the Nerowegs! The combatants swayed forward and back, silent, desperate, breast to breast, face to face, livid, terrible, foaming with rage, palpitating with a homicidal ardor, furiously pressing each other, under a brassy sky, in the midst of thick clouds of dust raised by their own feet. On their knees, their hands joined in prayer, passing alternately from hope to fear, Joan and Colombaik dared not approach the two athletes, who ever and anon reappeared through the cloud of dust, frightful to behold. Suddenly the thud of a heavy fall was heard, simultaneously with the exhausted voice of Fergan: “Woe is me! Oh, my wife! Oh, my child!” Fergan lay prone upon the sand, vainly battling against Neroweg, who, having gained the upper hand, sought to strangle his adversary. He held him under his left knee while raising himself by his right leg that he stretched out with a violent effort. At the cries of despair, “My wife! My child!” emitted by the serf, Colombaik ran to his father, threw himself flat on the ground and clinging to the bare and stiff leg of Neroweg, the child bit him in the calf. The sharp and unexpected pain drew from the Count a scream, and he turned back sharply towards Colombaik. Fergan, thus freed from the grasp of his seigneur, lost no time to spring upon his feet, and now keeping the advantage, succeeded in throwing Neroweg down. Calling his son to his aid, the serf managed to pinion the arms of the Count with a long cord that held his own robe at the waist, and to bind his legs with the fastenings of his own sandals. Feeling his strength exhausted by this desperate combat, Fergan, ready to faint, covered with perspiration, threw himself on the sand beside Joan and his son. These hastened to approach to his lips the pouch in which there still was some water left, while the seigneur of Plouernel, breathing fast and broken, shot at the quarryman looks of impotent rage.
“We are saved!” said Fergan when he had slaked his thirst and felt his strength returning. “By husbanding the water still left in this pouch, we shall have enough to reach Marhala with. I have a provision of dates in my knap-sack. The ass will serve you and the child to ride on, my poor Joan. I can still walk. As to the seigneur of Plouernel,” Fergan proceeded with a somber look, “he will soon need neither provision nor conveyance!” And rising to his feet, while his wife and child followed his movements with uneasy eyes, the serf approached Neroweg. The seigneur, still stretched upon the sand, writhed in his bands, tugging to burst them; then, exhausted by his idle efforts, he lay motionless. “Do you recognize me?” asked the serf, crossing his arms on his breast, and looking down upon the fettered seigneur of Plouernel; “Do you recognize me? In Gaul you were my seigneur, I your serf. I am the grandson of Den-Brao the Mason, whom your grandfather, Neroweg IV, killed of hunger in the subterranean donjon of Plouernel. I am a relative of Bezenecq the Rich, who died under the torture, in the presence of his own daughter, herself going crazy with fear, and dying at the very moment when I was rescuing her from her cell. I had to dig her grave among the rocks that lie about the issue of the secret passage from your castle.”
“By the tomb of the Saviour! Is it you, vagabond, who penetrated to the turret of Azenor the Pale? You helped her in her flight?”
“I went to look in your den for my child, whom you see yonder.”
“Woe is me! I am alone in this desert, without arms, bound hand and foot, at the mercy of this vile serf. How comes this dog to have survived this long journey? A curse upon him!”
“I have survived in order to avenge upon you the wrongs you have perpetrated upon my kin. This is not the first time that a descendant of Joel the Gaul locks horns with a descendant of Neroweg the Frank. Before us, in the course of centuries that rolled by, the ancestors of us two have met arms in hand. Fate so wills it. It is a war to death between our two races. The struggle, mayhap, will continue yet ages to come. Neroweg, I am the evil genius of your race, as you and yours are the persecutors of mine.”
“That I should have to meet this miserable runaway serf, and find myself in his power in the midst of a Syrian desert!” muttered the seigneur of Plouernel, a prey to superstitious terror. “Jesus, my God, have mercy upon me! I am a great sinner! Mighty Saint Martin, come to my help!”
“Neroweg,” proceeded Fergan, after a moment’s reflection, “the heat grows suffocating, despite the sun’s being veiled behind that reddish mist that is slowly rising heavenward. My wife and I shall not proceed on our journey until the moon rises. You and I shall have time to talk matters over, before taking leave of each other forever.”
The seigneur of Plouernel contemplated the serf with a mixture of astonishment, defiance and terror. Fergan exchanged a look with Joan, and sat down on the sand at a little distance from Neroweg. Indeed, the atmosphere was becoming so stifling that the travelers, panting for breath, and streaming in perspiration, yet, without making any motion, would have been unable to resume their journey.
“In Gaul, at your seigniory, you were at once indicter, judge and executioner over your serfs. To-day, my seigniory is this desert! and you my serf! In my turn I shall be the indicter, the judge and the executioner. The indictment I shall draw up will be the recital of my journey. You may then, perhaps, understand the horror that you, seigneurs, inspire your serfs with, when you will have learned the dangers that we brave to escape your tyranny and enjoy a day of freedom. When we left your seigniory, we were three thousand Crusaders, men, women, or children. Our numbers increased daily. Thus, after we had traversed Gaul from west to east, from Anjou to Lorraine, we were more than sixty thousand when we crossed over into Germany. Other troops of Crusaders, no less numerous than ours, and also proceeding from Gaul, to the north from Flanders, to the south from Burgundy or Provence, struck like ourselves the route for the Orient. After traversing Hungary and Bohemia, skirting the Adriatic to Wallachia, and following the banks of the Danube, we arrived at Constantinople. Thence we entered Asia Minor, and from Asia Minor we made into Palestine, where we now are. What a journey! For poor serfs, barefooted and in rags, the road is long. To tramp fifteen hundred leagues in order to escape the oppression of the seigneurs! But unhappy serfs that we are! We flee the seigneurs, and the seigneurs pursue us into Palestine. The seigneur Baudoin seizes Edessa, and there you have a ‘Count of Edessa’; Godfrey, Duke of Bouillon, takes Tripoli, and there you have a ‘Prince of Tripoli.’ When we shall have arrived in Galilee, in Nazareth, in Jerusalem, we may live to see a ‘King of Jerusalem,’ a ‘Baron of Galilee,’ a ‘Marquis of Nazareth!’ —
a full seigniorial hierarchy.”
“This miserable serf has gone crazy,” muttered the seigneur of Plouernel to himself. “He may, perhaps, forget to kill me.”
“Our troop left Gaul, as I said, sixty thousand strong, under the lead of Cuckoo Peter and Walter the Pennyless. On the road the inoffensive inhabitants were pillaged, ravaged and massacred to the cry of ‘God wills it!’ Deceived on the length of the journey and in their ignorance, hardly had the Crusaders left Gaul, when, at the sight of each new town they asked: ‘Is that Jerusalem?’ ‘Not yet,’ answered Cuckoo Peter, ‘we must march on!’ And we marched. At the start it was a joy, a delirium, a triumphal procession! Serfs and villeins were the masters. People fled and trembled at our approach. The ‘soldiers of Christ’ sacked or burned the towns, set fire to the harvests, killed the cattle that they could not drag along, slaughtered old men and children, raped the women and then cut them to pieces, heaped up booty, and from city to city repeated the question: ‘Is not that Jerusalem, either?’ ‘Not yet!’ answered Cuckoo Peter and Walter the Pennyless. ‘Not yet! March on, march on!’ And we marched. The strangers, at first taken by surprise, allowed themselves to be pillaged and massacred by the ‘soldiers of the faith.’ But, soon apprised by report of the ravages committed by the Crusaders and of their ferocity, these were fought with determination, and so effectively were they cut down, that our troop, consisting of more than sixty thousand people at the start, numbered at its arrival in Constantinople only five or six thousand survivors. During the journey through Asia Minor and Palestine, that number was reduced by one-half through battles, the pest, hunger, thirst and fatigue. Among the survivors, some, seized and kept for serfs of the new seigniories of Edessa, Antioch or Tripoli, have been forced to cultivate these lands for the seigneurs under the killing sun of the Holy Land. Others, and I am of the number, preferring freedom to renewed servitude, risked their lives in order to continue their march to Jerusalem. Some expect to find considerable booty in the Holy City; others imagine they will gain Paradise by rescuing the tomb of Christ. Of them all, I alone wish to reach Jerusalem, in order to see the places where, now a thousand and odd years ago, my ancestress, Genevieve, witnessed the death of the young man of Nazareth. This is how was accomplished the pilgrimage of those thousands of serfs and villeins, whose bones mark a long trail from the frontiers of Gaul to this place. Fatality drove them. They were forced to move on, or perish on the road. Thus, myself, fleeing from your seigniory to escape your gaolers, would but have been exposed to renewed servitude had I stopped in Gaul. Beyond the frontiers, to separate myself from the Crusaders, and take my chances with my wife and child among nations in arms against the ‘soldiers of the cross,’ would have been insanity. There was no choice but to march, and march again. Moreover, miserable as it was, yet our vagrant life was no worse than the life of serfdom. That’s how it happened, Neroweg, that we meet here in the desert where you are mine, just as in your seigniory I was yours, — at my will and mercy, in life and death. Do you understand?”
The seigneur of Plouernel muttered in a hollow voice, expressive of concentrated rage: “Oh, to perish by the hand of a vile serf!”
“Yes, you shall die. But I mean to make your dying hour a long-drawn torture. The vain-glory, the cupidity, the ambition of founding seigniories in the Orient, the hope of buying back your forfeitures and of escaping from the claws of the devil have driven you seigneurs to the Crusade! Oh, how stupid you were! How many of you, haughty seigneurs, after having sold or mortgaged your lands to the Church, are not this hour ruined by gaming and debauchery, and reduced to beg your way! How many have not been massacred or abandoned by your serfs a few miles from your seigniories! How many of you have not died of the pest or under the scimiter of the Saracen! Let this thought embitter your dying hour, Neroweg, you are about to die like a beggar midst the sands of Syria, while the Bishop of Nantes, your mortal enemy, having slipped through your fingers, now enjoys the largest part of your domains! At this hour you groan with a rage that is impotent, and my vengeance begins.”
“A curse upon that Italian priest whom I captured with the Bishop of Nantes! That Jeronimo turned my head speaking to me of the Crusade. He made me fear for my salvation, pointing out that the hand of God weighed heavy upon me by the death of one of my sons, killed by his own brother!”
“Both your sons are dead, Neroweg! I myself felled the fratricide with a blow of my iron bar at the moment he was about to do violence to the daughter of Bezenecq the Rich! Both the wolves and the whelps of the seigniories are beasts of prey and of carnage. They must be exterminated!”
“My son Gonthram did not die, and Jeronimo promised me, in the name of God, that if I departed for the Crusade and let the Bishop of Nantes free, I would insure the recovery of my son. Oh, heart-broken at the sight of one son dead and the other dying, I was bereft of reasoning! I obeyed the priest and departed for Palestine, — to my greater undoing. Bitterly I repent the day!”
Fergan, struck at the tenderness that the seigneur of Plouernel had not been able to suppress at the mention of his son Gonthram, said to him: “You love your son?”
Neroweg shot with his eyes daggers of hatred at the serf as he lay stretched out on the sand at the latter’s feet. Two tears rolled down his savage face. But wishing to conceal his emotions from Fergan, he turned his head brusquely aside. Joan and Colombaik, having drawn near the quarryman, listened in silence to his dialogue with Neroweg. While the seigneur sought to hide his tears, the woman saw them and said in a whisper to her husband: “Despite his wickedness, that seigneur weeps at the thought of his son. His sorrow affects me.”
“Oh, father,” put in Colombaik, joining his hands, “if he weeps, be you merciful! Do not harm him!”
The serf remained silent a moment, then, addressing his seigneur said: “You are moved at the thought of your child, and yet you meant to have mine strangled. Do you imagine a serf has not, like you, a father’s heart?”
Neroweg answered with an outburst of sarcastic laughter.
“What are you laughing about?”
“I laughed as I would if I heard an ass, or other beast of burden, talk about his ‘father’s heart,’” rejoined the seigneur of Plouernel. “You vagabond, were I not in your power now, I would kill you for the vile dog that you are!”
“In his eyes a serf has no more soul than a beast of burden!” repeated the quarryman. “Yes, this man speaks in the sincerity of his savage pride. He weeps for his own child. After all he is human. And yet, what is a serf to him? An animal without heart, reason or feeling! But why should I wonder? Neroweg cannot choose but share with his likes that opinion of our animal abjectness. Our craven attitude confirms it. Our conquerors are thousands, while we, the conquered, number millions, and yet we patiently bear the yoke. Indeed, never did more docile cattle march under the whip of a master, or stretch the neck to the butcher’s knife!” After a moment’s silence, Fergan resumed: “Listen, Neroweg! You are in my power, disarmed and fettered. I am about to fulfil a great act of justice by braining you with my cudgel like a wolf caught in a trap. It is the death that you deserve. Had I a sword, I would not use it on you. But what you have just said has made me think and somewhat spoils my pleasure. I admit it; by reason of our brutishness and cowardice, we deserve to be looked upon and treated like cattle by you, our seigneurs. ’Tis true, we are as craven as you are ferocious, but if our cravenness explains your criminal conduct, it does not excuse it. So, you shall die, Neroweg! Yes, in the name of the horrid ills that your race has made mine suffer, you shall die! I only wish to keep a memento of you, a descendant of the Nerowegs,” and Fergan leaned forward over the seigneur of Plouernel. The latter, believing his last hour had come, could not restrain a cry of anguish. But the serf only pulled from Neroweg’s robe one of the shells that it was sprinkled with, as symbols of a pious pilgrimage. For an instant Fergan contemplated the shell with a pensive mien. Joan and her son, following with astonished and uneasy looks the movements of th
e quarryman, saw him raise his ragged kilt, that only half-covered his thighs, and detach a long belt of coarse cloth that was wound around his waist. Inside the belt the quarryman carried several pious mementos, that had been handed down from generation to generation in his family, and which, before finally marching away with the troop of the Crusaders, he had taken with him. To them he added the shell he had just pulled from the robe of Neroweg VI. Refastening his belt, the serf cried out: “And now, justice and vengeance, Neroweg! I have accused you, judged and condemned you. You shall now die!” Looking around for his heavy and knotted staff, he grasped the massive implement with both his powerful hands, while his wife and child implored aloud: “Mercy!” The serf, however, throwing himself upon the seigneur of Plouernel planted one foot on the latter’s breast: “No, no mercy! Did the Nerowegs know mercy for my grandfather, for Bezenecq the Rich, or for his daughter?” Saying which, the quarryman raised the cudgel over the head of Neroweg, Worse than a Wolf, who, gnashing his teeth, faced death without blanching. It would have been over then and there with the seigneur of Plouernel had not Joan embraced the knees of her husband, imploring him aloud: “For the love of your son, have mercy! Without the water that you took from this seigneur, Colombaik would have expired in the desert!”
Fergan yielded to the prayers of his wife. Despite the justice of the reprisal, it went against his nature to kill an unarmed enemy. He threw his staff far away; remained for an instant gloomy and silent and then said to his seigneur: “It is said that despite your crimes, you and your likes at times remain true to your vows. Swear to me, by the salvation of your soul and by your faith as a knight, to respect from this moment the life of my wife, of my child and of myself. I do not fear you so long as we are alone in this desert, but if I meet you at Marhala or Jerusalem with the other seigneurs of the Crusade, I and mine will be at your mercy. You could order us burned or hanged. Swear that you will respect our lives, I shall then have mercy upon you, and set you free.”