King and Emperor

Chapter Eighteen

His face tight-lipped with fury, the Emperor Bruno whirled his horse on the narrow flame-lit path, the great stallion rearing up and striking out automatically with its steel-shod hooves. A fleeing trooper struggling to get by took one of them on the temple and fell sideways into the brush, there to lie unnoticed till the fire took him. Behind their enraged Emperor his guards and officers lashed out with fist and whip, trying to force panicked soldiers to stand firm, obey their orders, begin to spread out and make a fire-break along the line of the path. Bruno himself ignored the struggle and the confusion.

“Agilulf,” he bellowed. “Find one of these bastards who can speak a proper language. I have to know where that damned thing came down!”

Agilulf swung from his horse, obedient but doubtful. He seized the nearest man and began to shout into his face in the camp-Latin he used to the Greeks. The man he had seized, who spoke nothing but his native dialect of Occitan, and had never met anyone who spoke anything else; gaped at him uselessly.

Surveying the scene from his humble mule, Erkenbert the deacon intervened. In the swarm of runaways now being beaten into a standstill he caught the whisk of a priest's black robe. Some hedge-priest no doubt, called out with his parishioners. Erkenbert urged his mule towards him, extricated the man from the grip of one of Agilulf's yelling sergeants.

“Presbyter es,” he began. “Nonne cognoscis linguam Latinam? Nobis fas est…” Slowly the priest's fear died, he began to recognize Erkenbert's strange English pronunciation, he recovered himself enough to take in the sense of the question and to reply. Yes, they had seen the lights in the sky, they had taken them for signs of coming doom and the resurrection of the dead, the souls rising to meet their Master in the sky. Then someone had seen the flash of angel wings and his whole troop had fled in terror, urged on by the forest fire they could see beginning. And yes, he had seen the burning shape which had come swooping down.

“And what did it look like?” Erkenbert asked tensely.

“Certainly it was an angel flung from the sky in flames, no doubt for disobedience. It is a terrible thing that the Fall of the Angels should come again…”

“And where did the angel fall?” asked Erkenbert, before the man could start his lamentations again.

The priest pointed into the scrub to the north. “There,” he said. “There, where a small flame has started.”

Erkenbert looked round. The major fire was coming towards them out of the south. It looked as if the Emperor's men would be able to halt that along the line of the break they were cutting. They had hundreds of men at work already, and order was spreading out like oil on water. To the north, a small fire, blown on by the wind out of the south. It did not look dangerous, for it seemed to be on a barer patch of hillside. He nodded to the priest, turned his mule and rode it past the still-shouting Emperor, his sword now drawn.

“Follow me,” he called over his shoulder.

After a hundred paces the Emperor realized what Erkenbert was making for and forced his warhorse past the mule, charging into the scrub careless of thorns and tangles. Erkenbert followed the trampled path at a more sedate speed. When he came to the source of the fire, the Emperor was dismounted, standing with the reins over one arm, looking down at something on the ground.

It was the body of a child, lying crumpled amid the stones. There was no doubt the child was dead. His skull was cracked, and leg-bones stuck out through the flesh of his thighs. Slowly the Emperor reached down, picked the child up in one hand by the front of his tunic. The body dangled like a bag of chicken bones.

“He must have broken every bone in his body,” said Bruno.

Erkenbert spat in his palm and traced the sign of the cross on the split forehead in spittle. “It may have been a mercy,” he said. “See, the fire had caught him before he died. There are the marks of the burning.”

“But what set him on fire? And how did he fall? What did he fall from?” Bruno stared up into the sky as if to find an answer in the stars.

Erkenbert began to poke around amid the scraps and pieces lying on the ground, well lit by the fire now burning steadily away from them before the wind. Pieces of stick. Light stick, made from some kind of hollow plant, like an alder but tougher. And a few charred pieces of cloth. Erkenbert crumbled one in his hand. It was not wool, nor linen. The strange plant of the south, he thought. Cotton. Very fine-woven. Fine-woven to hold the wind, like a sail.

“It was some sort of machine,” he concluded. “A machine to hold a man in the air. But not a man. A boy. A small boy. There is nothing supernatural about this, nothing of the ars magica. It was not even a very good machine. But it was a new machine.

“I will tell you something else,” he went on, looking down again at the dead child, his fair hair, his eyes that might have been blue before the fire caught them. “That boy is one of my countrymen, I can tell from his face. Like a choirboy. It is an English face.”

“An English child flying in a new machine,” whispered Bruno. “That can only mean one man, and we both know who it is. But what has he done it for?”

Agilulf had caught up with them, heard the Emperor's question. “Who can tell?” he replied. “Who can fathom the plan of that fiend? I remember the strange ship at the battle in Denmark, I rowed past it at twenty feet and I still did not know what it was for till the battle was over.”

“The simplest way to understand a plan,” said Erkenbert, speaking now in the Emperor's native Low German so like his own Northumbrian English. “The simplest way to understand a plan is to assume that it's worked.”

“What do you mean?” snapped the Emperor.

“Well, here is the Emperor of the Romans standing round in a dark thorn-wood at night, with his advisers, none of them knowing what is happening or what to do. Perhaps that is what our enemy intended. Just that we should be standing here.”

The Emperor's anxious face cleared suddenly. He bent forward, gripped Erkenbert's scrawny shoulder with his usual delicate care, as if afraid to crush it.

“I will make you an Archbishop for this,” he said. “I understand. This is a distraction, to make us look the wrong way. Like a night attack on the side away from the real one. And it has worked! And all the time the bastards are heading for what we had shut up tight as a mouse's larder a few hours ago.”

He swung effortlessly back into the saddle. “Agilulf, as soon as the fire-break is made I want you to withdraw all the Lanzenbrüder from the line and send them back to the castle, at the double. And send six men round the inner ring to tell them to face about and watch both ways, inside and out.”

He paused a further instant before driving in the spurs. “And send a man back to pick up this child's body. He died like a hero and he shall be buried like one.”

The spurs drove home, the stallion crashed away down the rocky hillside. Agilulf followed to carry out his orders. Erkenbert, left alone, remounted his mule and trotted at a far slower pace in their wake.

Archbishop, he thought. The Emperor always fulfills his promises. And there is an Archbishopric free, in York. If the Church can once more extend her wing over the heretics and the apostates. Who would have thought that I would be the heir of Wulfhere, he of a great family and I the child of a country priest and his concubine? Strange what happened to Wulfhere. Dead of a stroke in his bath, they said. I wonder how long they had to hold him under. The Emperor is generous, and can pardon failure. Never idleness, though. All his dogs have to bark. And bite as well.

Light showed brightly along the edge of the rocky ravine along which Shef, Richier, Straw and the others were climbing, illuminating the forbidding mass of the stone castle above them. In the ravine, though, only black shadow. For a few moments they were shielded from sight. Shouts echoed into the darkness both from behind them, where the guards were still watching the lights in the sky, and from the castle walls above, where gaping sentries were being pushed and kicked back to their posts. Better be out of sight soon, Shef thought.

Richier pushed past him as they came up to the base of the wall, seeming to grow out of the native rock like a cliff. He turned, spoke harshly in his dialect. Shef saw Straw and the other youths turn their backs, hide their faces. Richier repeated his order, gesturing fiercely at Shef. Turn. Do not look. Slowly Shef obeyed.

For a few moments. He knew that Richier would look back once, twice, then carry on with whatever it was that he had to do. It was like playing the game they called “Grandmother's Footsteps,” where the child approaching had to guess when the child being stalked would turn round to look. Shef turned his head alone, watched Richier in the blackness.

He seemed to have pulled something slung round his neck from under his tunic. Was scraping at the wall, fitting the object to it. A key, an iron key. Shef looked back at Straw and the others an instant before Richier began to turn, waited, looked again. This time he heard the click. Something engaging. Now Richier reached up, seemed to be counting stones. He fixed on one, got fingers over its rough edge, pulled. The stone came out of the wall, projecting a good foot from the surface.

Nothing happened. Interested, Shef padded gently over to within arm's reach, met Richier's blazing indignant eyes as he turned round again. Ignored them.

“What now?” he whispered softly.

Richier gulped, then whistled gently. The five youths crept stealthily up out of the gloom of the ravine. Richier looked in all directions, as if expecting sudden discovery, then made his mind up. Bent and pushed at one of the massive unyielding stones of the base of the wall.

With hardly a sound the stone moved outwards. Outwards and inwards at once. On a pivot, Shef realized. Prevented from pivoting by the stone Richier had pulled out of the wall. That stone itself held in place by some contrivance the key had unlocked. And the keyhole? He looked at it more closely. Covered in moss, the moss just this moment scraped aside.

Richier had bent, was crawling through the gap. Shef followed immediately, twisting his broad shoulders to get through what could be only a two-foot gap. Inside, he put a foot down on stone, felt that he was on a narrow ledge. A ledge that narrowed in one direction. He stretched out a hand, felt stone wall ahead of him. He was on a staircase, a spiral staircase twisting down to the left. Carefully he edged past Richier in the dark, went up a step or two, heard the youths come rustling through. A heave, a grunt, and the stone slowly closing, cutting out even the faint glimmer of light from the ravine outside. In the dark, frightened breathing all around him, he could smell the stench of death, coming up from below. Coming up on a faint, barely perceptible current of air.

There were sparks in the blackness as Richier tried to strike a light, Straw holding out a bed of dried tinder for the sparks to fall on, one of the other boys clutching candles. Shef ignored them, began slowly and silently to climb the staircase. A call from below, first in dialect, then in Arabic. “Don't go up! We must go down.” Shef ignored it.

As he climbed the steps, the draught increased, and so did the other thing his straining senses had noted: noise. Noise coming through the stone. Through the stone?

No. As he gripped the iron handrail Shef realized that he could see a faint something, not light but a paler darkness. And he could hear now, quite clearly. Voices shouting, the whack of a rope or a belt across someone's back. Order being restored. Yes, and there indeed was the hole in the stone, smaller than a man's hand, but there just the same. Shef put his eye to it, peered out.

He could see almost nothing, just a red glow in the sky, and in front of him legs scurrying. First bare ones, and then metal greaves over heavy leather boots. And that was German they were shouting, Shef could almost understand it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw and recognized something else. A pickax left lying on the ground. The Emperor's miners were through to the secret place. Only they had not realized yet, had been distracted just at the vital moment.

There was Richier at his elbow, candle lit. Shef reached out, ground out the flame between finger and smithy-callused thumb. As Richier began to gabble he closed a hand over his mouth, pulled him forward, whispered, “Look. See the hole. See the pickax?”

As he took in the meaning of what he had seen Richier began to shake in Shef's fist. Shef whispered again, “Go down.”

A few turns of the stair and the boys were there, candles lit but unmoving, waiting for orders.

“We have only a short time,” Shef said in a more normal voice. “Lead on quickly.”

Richier took a candle, began to hurry down what seemed almost an endless stair, winding down into the heart of the mountain. After two hundred counted steps he stopped, and Shef realized that he was at last standing on level floor. In front of him was a stout door, its top rounded, of oak reinforced with iron. Richier had another key out. Before he inserted it he turned to the youths behind him and muttered something. All of them fell to their knees, made the strange zig-zag sign of their sect.

“This is our holiest place,” said Richier. “None but the perfecti may enter.”

Shef shrugged. “Better go in, bring everything out then.”

Richier looked at the forbidding figure of the man who had disarmed him, shook his head in exasperation. “Come in, you must. But remember this is holy.”

Straw and the others seemed to need no reminder. They hung back, let Shef follow Richier through the door. Looking round in the candlelight, Shef reflected that they had reason for their shyness.

It was a place of death. The stench he had detected was stronger here. And yet he had known worse, much worse, on the battlefields of England. Here the dry air seemed to quell corruption. In front of him, round the circular table, a dozen men—a dozen corpses—sprawled in their seats, some face down with skulls on arms, some fallen to the floor. Richier made his zigzag sign again, and childhood habit made Shef begin to make the sign of the cross. He corrected himself, turned it into a hammer. Thor, or Thunor, between me and evil.

“They died rather than take the chance of capture and torment,” said Richier. “They took the poison together.”

“It is for us to see they did not die in vain, then,” prompted Shef.

Richier nodded, braced himself, walked across the room, skirting the fallen bodies, till he came to a further door on the other side. Unlocked it, pushed it open.

“The place of the Graal,” he said.

Moving into the last room, Richier took on a sudden assurance, like one who knew every detail of the place, and was anxious to show his mastery. Candle in hand, he moved round the small circular room, lighting candle after candle in turn as they stood in great candlesticks. Golden candlesticks, Shef saw immediately. The light that shone from them lit up more gold, on the walls and on the furnishings of what seemed a Christian chapel. But in the place of honor there was no altar.

Instead, a coffin, a sarcophagus of stone, placed almost next to the far wall. And rising out of it, incongruous in the gleam of wealth, a plain wooden pole-ladder, three rungs on one side and two the other, its ends untrimmed, bark still showing here and there on the pale peeled wood.

“That is it,” said Richier. “The graduale on which our Lord was carried from Calvary. Rising from the coffin to show how we can rise again.”

“I thought Anselm said that Christ had not risen. That he died like an ordinary man. Is his body not here?”

“Not here. Not anywhere! For we do not rise as the Christians say, by the favor of the Church, mother of iniquities. We rise by denying the body. By becoming spirit alone! ‘How can an old man become young? And enter again into the womb of his mother?’ There is only one way—”

A moan of superstitious fear came from behind Shef as the listening boys heard the great question of their faith emerge in Richier's clumsy Arabic, which they too only half-understood. Richier gazed angrily round, realized he had said too much before the uninitiate, realized too that in this holiest of holies, about to be defiled, mere words meant little.

“Do not enter into the womb! Do not spill the seed! Pay no more tribute to him, to the Father who sent his Son to die, to the Prince of this world, the God who is rightly a devil! Die and leave no child as hostage to the enemy.”

No wonder Svandis wasn't raped, Shef thought, looking down at the working face, the angry eyes. Though it is not much of an answer. He glanced down into the empty coffin.

“Tell me. What is it we have to save? Besides the graduale.”

Richier nodded, collected himself. “There is the gold, of course.” He waved a hand round at the blaze of red metal surrounding them. “More important, much more important, are the books.”

“The books?”

“The holy testimonies of our faith. The true gospels, written by men who had spoken with the Son of God face to face. The Son of God grown to wisdom, no longer in the folly of his youth.”

Interesting books they must be, thought Shef. If they are not forgeries. “What do they weigh?” he asked.

“A few pounds, no more. And then… Then we must take with us the graduale.”

Shef looked at the ladder rising out of the coffin more doubtfully, stepped across to handle it. Behind him, breath hissed in fear and muted anger that an unbeliever should touch the relic. But that was what they were here for. That was why the unbeliever had been sent. And he had passed the ordeal of the perfecti, Richier told himself, even if his faith was not sound.

No more than seven feet long, thought Shef. He lifted it gently. Old wood, dry wood, wood eight centuries old and more if what they said was true. Yet it had been seasoned to begin with, never exposed to the weather. In the old legionary buildings of York Shef had been shown stairs and galleries that men swore dated from the time of the ancient Romans. There was no reason to think the graduale was false just because it seemed still sound. No doubt it fitted the doctrines of the sect not to have adorned it with gold and jewels as the Christians did with all the many fragments of the True Cross. The thing was light enough, anyway, to lift one-handed. Awkward to carry up a spiral staircase. As for the thorns and the brush outside…

“Very well,” said Shef, lifting the ladder from its place. “Richier, get your books, make a pack of them, you carry them. You boys, take the gold candlesticks, the plates, everything gold you can see, wrap each piece in cloth, divide them between you so you can carry them easily.”

“Cloth, master?” asked Straw.

“The gentlemen next door will not grudge you their robes. Not for this purpose,” added Shef, trying to shift the look of terror and awe. “If they were alive, they would tell you to do it. Their ghosts are with you.”

Reluctantly the boys turned and went to their macabre task. Still holding the ladder, Shef went back through the antechamber of death and stood in the stairwell, listening. In the silence deep underground he could still hear shouting from above. Not a good sign.

As they scuffed heavy-laden up the stairs, the sound was still with them, coming louder and clearer over the deep breathing of tired men. Shef tramped up and up, in the lead, no longer aware of how far they had gone or where the exit of the pivoting stone might be. He held the holy ladder in his left hand, to keep it away from the central pillar. Every time he knocked it against a tread or the outside wall he could feel Richier wince behind him, sometimes hear a suppressed complaint. If there were light enough the man would be collecting together every splinter of bark that fell from it.

A hiss from below. Shef halted, realized he had gone past the stone. Richier, careless now of secrecy, was fumbling with a projecting knob of rock. He pulled it out, and the seemingly solid wall shifted slightly, pivoting freely again. Shef hesitated, stacked the ladder carefully against the wall on a higher tread, stepped three steps down. As Richier pushed the upper half of the stone outwards, Shef evaded the slow rise of the lower half inside the stairwell, and peered out into the dark.

A dark still light. Fires burning out there, though they were red now, not the strange colors of the Arab flares. Had anyone seen the stone move? There were no cries, no shouts of alarm. In fact, outside the castle, everything was still. Shef could see the circle of thorn through which they had struggled, could see the hillside beyond. There were no men running in panic, no visible sentries, no sign of movement at all. It was light out there, Shef told himself, though where he was he was still hidden in the shadow of the castle wall and the ravine below.

His skin prickled. He ducked back inside, put his shoulder under the stone, heaved up till the stone sighed its way back into place. In the glimmering light of the one candle he had allowed, Richier looked at him, appalled.

“Too quiet,” said Shef briefly. “I've heard that quiet before. Means they're watching. Maybe both ways. Maybe they know we're inside.”

“We cannot stay here.”

“No. No.” A voice Shef had not heard before broke in, one of the youths with the packs. He was gabbling in the local dialect which Shef could not understand, but he could catch the unmistakable note in his voice. The boy's nerve had cracked, from the secret crawl, the fear of the holy place, the horror of robbing the dead, the chill of dark stone.

“Laissetz, laissetz me parti.” He was pushing at the stone, swinging it open again, only part-way, enough to find a crack and wriggle through it like a weasel, pack still slung on his back. Shef grasped at him, caught only a rag of tunic which tore in his hand. Then the boy was out. Shef left the stone open half a foot, bent and peered one-eyed through the crack.

He could see nothing, hear only a faint whisk of bare feet on stone. That too died. Silence, and a faint smell of burning coming on the wind. And then, as Shef was almost ready to override his fears and lead the others forward, faint but clear, a crack like a stick breaking, a shrill shriek instantly muffled, a clang like a far-off gong being beaten. Metal bouncing on stone.

Shef heaved the stone shut once again, this time with total finality. “You heard,” he said. “They got him. Now they know we're here.”

“We're trapped,” gasped Richier. “With the graal which our elders died to save.”

“The stairway goes up as well as down,” said Shef.

“We cannot break the wall down from inside, they would hear.”

“But there must be a doorway up there, a secret one like the one by which we entered, only inside the castle.”

Richier swallowed. “It comes out in an angle of the tower. The tower that was burnt, where Marcabru died.”

“So we'll come out in a pile of rubble, that's good.”

“It is across the courtyard from the main gate. I do not think there is any other way out. The courtyard is full of the Emperor's men, he has made it into a hospital for those wounded in fighting or injured in the work. We cannot just walk out. Not with a ladder over our shoulders! And besides the boys might pass as workmen or helpers, and I too, but you…”

Too tall, he meant, like a German but without the armor. And too distinctive.

“Show me where the stair comes out,” said Shef, a plan forming in his mind. “It cannot be far from where the pickax-men broke through.”

Bruno, by the grace of God Emperor of the Romans, in his own mind vice-regent of God on earth, stood at the center of the main gateway of the castle of Puigpunyent and surveyed the scene in its milling courtyard. Everywhere his eye fell, men sprang to more frantic efforts. He took no pleasure in it. That was as it should be. Though his face was impassive, his body was filled with such furious excitement that it would barely obey him. Twice on his frantic gallop back from the scene by the crashed fire-machine his involuntary clenching on the reins had dragged his stallion back on its haunches, almost unseating him. But he had returned in time. He was sure of it. Sure too that the whole display of lights and flame and portents in the sky had been exactly what his puny deacon had said: a distraction. Certain proof that the treasure he sought was within his grasp. If only he could stretch out his hand to take it. As he stood there, clutching the new-shafted lance which never left him, the Emperor allowed himself to do something he did only in moments of greatest stress: he rested his cheek on the very metal that had drunk the blood of his Lord, to feel coming from it the power and the assurance that were his by right.

Inside the courtyard the turmoil was like the last square of the harvest, filled with trapped rats running in all directions to avoid the scythes and cudgels closing in on them. But only to the untrained eye. The Emperor could see order being reimposed on chaos. The men who worked day and night to dig down to the foundations of this heretics' nest were rushing back to work with their picks and barrows, reeving the ropes and pulleys once again to the great crane that lifted the stone blocks and hurled them into the gulleys outside. In one corner their overseer, who had allowed them to desert their toil as the lights in the sky appeared, was screaming at a triangle of pike-shafts while two of Bruno's Lanzenbrüder sergeants methodically laid on the two hundred lashes which Bruno had ordered him. His deputy, new promoted, stood in the middle of the yard, pale with fear and shrieking orders.

What was causing the trouble was the hospital. Careful and solicitous of the welfare of those who served him properly, Bruno had ordered space made in the central courtyard for beds for the trickle of casualties who had come in from scuffles with the locals, and the greater trickle of men who had caught feet beneath blocks of stone or jammed their arms under moving ropes. Only in the castle was there pure water in abundance, from the well sunk deep into the living rock beneath. Water was what the sick needed more than anything. But now the fires and chaos outside were bringing in more than a trickle, a gush of casualties. Men burnt fire-fighting, men with broken bones from falls, fools who had tripped on their own weapons. He would have to countermand the order that injuries should be brought in, Bruno decided. Let them wait on the plain outside till daylight. They were beginning to impede the work-parties. There, in the angle, a stretcher-party rushing busily in entirely the wrong direction. He opened his mouth to hail them, then closed it, gestured grimly to Tasso to sort the fools out, turned and snarled his orders to the gasping Agilulf, who had finally caught up with him, to get the injured not already in their beds out of the way, and prevent any more entries.

As he turned back to watch the courtyard again, he saw a different group thrusting through the gateway. A group with a different look on their faces. Not fear, but glee and triumph. And as they entered, so too did the faithful Erkenbert, on foot, his mule abandoned at the base of the rock.

“What have you got there?” he asked.

“A rat,” said the Brüder in the lead, eyes gleaming in the red light. Wolfram, Bruno saw, a good brother from holy Echternach. “He came running out of the castle, right into the arms of Dietrich here.”

“Out of the castle? But you are posted out to the west, there is no gate there.”

“No gate we can see, herra. But out he came, down the ravine to the west like a little mouse. He had not climbed down the wall, or we would have seen him. He was running full pelt like someone scared out of his wits.”

“I tripped him with my lance-butt,” added the burly Dietrich. “His leg broke and he tried to squawk, but I gagged him. He has given no warning to anyone still inside.”

“And look, herra,” said Wolfram the sergeant, his face shining with pleasure and anticipation. “See what the rat had for his hoard.”

He tipped a makeshift sack out at the Emperor's feet. From it there rolled goblets and plates, a massive candlestick. The light of the fires still glowing out on the plain gave back glints of gold.

Bruno bent, picked up one of the plates, felt the unmistakable heft of it. Something engraved on it. He could not read it well. A letter “N” in flowing script?

“What do you make of that?” he asked, passing it to Erkenbert.

“Little enough,” said the deacon. “But this is no hedge-baron's hoard. More like the communion plate of the Holy Father in Rome. I fear we will have to ask the boy.”

Eyes turned to the captive. Boy he was, face screwed up in pain, one leg lifted to keep it from touching the ground. Dark face, ragged clothes. A native. After the sight of the crashed kite and its dead pilot Bruno had half-expected to see another damned Englishman.

“Have you tried to talk to him?”

Wolfram nodded. “Can't understand a word he says. Nor he us.”

“I will find an interpreter,” said Erkenbert. “Then we will do what needs to be done. Take him outside the gate.”

“One thing,” said Bruno. “I know you will not be over-kind. Nor will you hold back in any way from what I must have from him. But my advice is this. Never begin by hurting anyone just a little, and then working up. Courage grows with resistance. Hurt him very badly to begin with, more badly than he can bear. Then offer him the way out.”

“As soon as I can find a local priest to interpret for us,” promised Erkenbert.

The trapped youth looked from side to side. He had already seen what he needed to. What must he do now? Did he need to die like Marcabru and the garrison? He did not know.

A hundred yards down the path to safety, in a stream of evicted invalids and their helpers, Straw and his mates struggled with their burden: Shef, lashed firmly to the center-pole of the graduale itself, braced by the rungs that stuck out to either side as handholds for the bearers, his face with its betraying one eye covered like that of a burnt or dying man. Richier trotted behind them, face grey with fear, still clutching his precious pack of books. He had passed within twenty feet of the devil's incarnation on earth, the Emperor himself. Thank God, the true God whose power in this world had been usurped by the lying deity of the Christians, that all his attention had been on poor Maury. What would happen now to Maury—ah, that showed the power of the princeps huius mundi, whom even the true God could not entirely set aside in this his proper realm.

As they hurried down the hillside the terrible screams that began from behind them urged them on. Screams in a voice familiar to the other boys, even in its agony.