CHAPTER XXI
IN WHICH DE SANCERRE WIELDS HIS SWORD AGAIN
THE royal cabin was the largest and most pretentious dwelling-house in the City of the Sun. Its walls were made of mud, sand and moss, and, hardened by time, had become both serviceable and sightly. The roof was formed of grass and reeds, united in a close embrace which defied the most penetrating rain or hail. Forty feet square, the main room of the palace—to give it a grandiloquent name—was furnished in a style befitting the exalted rank of its royal occupant. The Great Sun’s throne was simple in construction, being nothing more than a wooden stool four feet in height, but its inherent significance was indicated by the devices with which it had been decorated by reverential and cunning hands. Beneath the throne was stretched the rarest of the King’s household furnishings, a carpet made of costly furs, which, so tradition asserted, had aroused the cupidity of a Spaniard in a former generation, and still bore the stain of the lifeblood which he had vainly paid in his effort to rob the feet of royalty of their most valued luxury.
Audience-chamber, throne-room and sleeping-apartment, the main hall of the Great Sun’s abode, as de Sancerre entered it, after despatching old Noco to her cabin in search of Katonah, was a sight which might have delighted the eye of an impressionable painter, but would have aroused the temper of a conscientious housekeeper. The Great Sun’s sudden illness had begotten a confusion in the royal ménage which had transformed his abode from a picturesque cabin into a disordered hospital.
The stricken chieftain lay tossing from side to side upon a couch covered with painted and embroidered deer-skins. As de Sancerre approached his patient, a group of noisy women, the wives of the Great Sun, fled toward the shadows at the further end of the room. Following them, a white-robed, soft-footed sun-worshipper, casting a glance of malice at the Frenchman, deserted the sick King’s side and stole away into the darkness. The court physician, who, through the chief priest’s influence, had been succeeded by de Sancerre, had been availing himself of an opportunity to observe the effects of the Frenchman’s treatment upon the fever-racked scion of the sun.
Jealous of his prerogatives, but knowing that a cruel death awaited him should the Great Sun die, the royal physician had been torn by conflicting emotions as he gazed down upon the restless form of a chieftain whose bodily welfare had been his care for many years. While he longed, for the sake of his own safety, to see the King restored to health, he harbored a professional protest against the introduction to the royal cabin of this alien moon-magic, which, after all, seemed to consist in nothing more than the administration to the patient of a few drops of a liquid medicine at more or less regular intervals.
De Sancerre was not, in fact, jeopardizing his life—more than ever of value to him since he had solved the mystery of Coyocop—by risking the recovery of the Great Sun upon an answer to prayer, nor upon the chance that the royal sun-worshipper’s strong constitution might resist the attack of a sudden indisposition. The Frenchman, upon his first visit to the chieftain’s cabin, had quickly reached the conclusion that the Great Sun had fallen a victim to over-excitement and over-eating. De Sancerre’s experience in courts and camps had long ago familiarized him with the effects which follow a nervous strain accompanied by excessive indulgence in food and drink.
The Frenchman’s observant eye, trained in many climes to harvest large crops of details, had noted, as he approached the City of the Sun through a semi-tropical forest, a tree whose resinous inner bark vouchsafes to men a balsam of great curative powers. It was from this tree—the copal—that, obeying de Sancerre’s directions, old Noco had obtained the ingredients for a fever-quieting draught which had already begun to exercise a beneficent influence upon the Frenchman’s royal patient.
As he now gazed down questioningly at the Great Sun, whose kingly bearing had been replaced by that lack of dignity which an acute fever begets even where royalty itself is concerned, de Sancerre was rejoiced to discover that his simple febrifuge had already produced the effect which he had foreseen.
“Thanks be to St. Maturin!” he muttered, contentedly, glancing toward the end of the room to which the King’s wives and the discomfited court physician had withdrawn. “My surmise was correct. The Great Sun was too hospitable to the wandering moon. I have known more enlightened monarchs, in more highly civilized lands, to succumb to their excessive zeal for good-fellowship. Quiet, care, and a few drops of balsam are all that this old chief requires to make him a king again from top to toe. Nom de Dieu, another day like this one, and I’ll need medicine myself! The rôle of executioner is not so bad, but a physician—peste! May the devil fly away with that chief priest! I fear me he’s a snake. I should dare to hope that I might rescue Doña Julia from this bloodthirsty land if I could but trust that crafty Coheyogo, who’s as keen as Richelieu and as slippery as Mazarin! I must keep a sharp eye upon his reverence, or he will yet cast his sacred cords around my neck!”
To de Sancerre, thus standing in silent revery beside the Great Sun’s couch, came Noco, hobbling from the entrance with hurried step. Her appearance was greeted by a more insistent chorus from the gossiping women at the end of the room, to whom the outcome of their royal husband’s illness meant either life or death.
“Katonah!” panted the old crone, as she reached the Frenchman’s side. “She has disappeared.”
“Impossible!” exclaimed de Sancerre. “You know her not, señora. She would not leave your cabin without a word to me.”
“I am not blind!” cried Noco, angrily. “My house is empty and the girl is gone. And Cabanacte—”
“What of him?” asked de Sancerre, impatiently, as Noco paused for breath.
“I told him of Katonah’s flight, and he has set out in search of her.”
“The traitor!” muttered the Frenchman, peering down at the old hag who had brought to him such unwelcome news. “Your grandson, Doña Noco, has abandoned the spirit for the flesh—and left Coyocop without a guard! Surely, Katonah is safer in the forest than is the spirit of the sun in a city which pretends to worship her. I shall chide your grandson, Doña Noco, if I ever look upon his giant form again. But stay you here, señora. When this great Son of Suns awakens from his sleep give him a drink of balsam—and he’ll sleep again. I go to Coyocop, and will return anon.”
The moon had not yet arisen, and darkness and silence combined to cast a menacing spell upon the impressionable City of the Sun. De Sancerre’s spirits were at a low ebb as he groped his way toward Doña Julia’s unguarded cabin. The reaction from a day of excitement had come upon him, and the gloom of the deserted square did not tend toward the restoration of his former cheerfulness. It was true that he had escaped death through a combination of circumstances which apparently had won for him the good-will of the chief priest, but the outlook for the immediate future was not promising. De la Salle could not return from the South for several weeks, even if he and his followers escaped the perils which might menace them as they approached the mouth of the great river. Cabanacte, to whom de Sancerre had looked for the aid which might make his escape with the Spanish girl possible, had betrayed friendship at the instigation of a stronger passion. His return from the forest might be long delayed. As he approached the hut in which his grateful eyes had rested upon the pale, sweet face of Julia de Aquilar, de Sancerre felt a sinking of the heart, a sensation of utter hopelessness which was an unacceptable novelty to the vivacious Frenchman, against whose sanguine temperament the shafts of despair had heretofore been powerless.
As he stationed himself, with rapier in hand, before the entrance to Coyocop’s sacred cabin, there was nothing in his surroundings to relight the flame of hope in de Sancerre’s soul. Clouds had begun to darken the eastern sky, revoking its promise of a moonlit night. A moaning wind, damp and chill, had stolen from its lair in the forest to annoy a fickle city with its cold, moist kiss. The world seemed to be made of sighs and shadows. The great square in front of him, dark and deserted, strove to deceive the Frenchman with its tale of an abandoned town. Now and then the voice of some devout sun-worshipper, raised in hoarse prayer, would penetrate the walls of a hut and bear witness to the city’s swarming life.
After a time there came upon de Sancerre the impression that piercing black eyes watched him as he strode up and down in front of the silent, shadow-haunted hut in which the strange chances of life had imprisoned the only woman who had ever aroused in his mocking soul the precious passion of romantic love. He cut the darkness with his eager glance, but suspicion was not replaced by certainty. Nevertheless, the feeling grew strong within him that the night wind toyed with white robes not far away, and that stealthy footsteps reached his ears on either hand.
By a strong effort of will, de Sancerre routed the sensation of mingled consternation and impotence which the chill gloom and the presence of prying spies had begotten, and, drawing close to the doorway of Doña Julia’s cabin, hummed an ancient love-ballad born of the troubadours. The song had died in the damp embrace of the roving wind when the silence was broken by a voice which reached de Sancerre’s grateful ears from the entrance to the hut.
“Speak not in Spanish and in whispers only, Mademoiselle de Aquilar!” exclaimed the Frenchman in a low voice, not changing his attitude of a swordsman doing duty as a sentinel. “There are listening ears upon all sides of me. If we converse in French, they’ll think we use the tongue of sun or moon.”
“I heard your voice, monsieur. Is there great danger if we talk a while?”
“I hardly know,” answered de Sancerre, striving again to read the secrets of the night. “But listen, for when the chance may come to me to speak to you again I do not know. Be ready at any moment, at a word from me, to leave this hut. I’ll use old Noco for my messenger, when I have made my plans. I dare not flee with you to-night, for, as I speak, I see the ghostly menace of a skulking temple priest. There’d be no safety for us beyond the town. Alas, we must abide our time!”
“But, oh, my heart is light, monsieur,” whispered the girl, from whose Spanish tongue the French words made rich music as they fell. “If this be not a dream, it cannot be that you have come in vain. One night I heard my father’s voice in Paradise. He spoke to me of you, and when old Noco told me that by the river there were white-faced men, I heard his voice again—and wrote my name upon the bark. It is a miracle, monsieur!”
“A miracle, indeed!” exclaimed de Sancerre, chafing under the tyranny of his grim surroundings and distrustful of an overpowering inclination to bend down and clasp the girl’s hand in his. “But the devil and the sun-priests, mademoiselle, are in league against us. Pray to the saints that we may foil them both! Ma foi, a half-done miracle is worse than none! But this I promise you, that whether you and I be playthings of a heartless Fate, or the favored wards of Mother Mary and her Son, I’ll plot and scheme and fight until I save you from captivity, or pay the price of death. And so, good-night! I dare not let you linger longer where you are, for already these white-robed spies are growing restless at our talk, and I hear them muttering in the darkness there, as if in resentment of my converse with their deity.”
A suppressed sob told de Sancerre how much his presence meant to the lonely girl.
“Can we not leave this awful place at once?” she moaned. “Forgive me, monsieur, but it has been so long since I have seen a ray of hope in this black hole that every moment since I knew that you were here has seemed a year. May Mother Mary guard you through the night! ’Tis well I love my prayers, monsieur! I will not sleep.”
“Nay, mademoiselle, ’tis well to pray, but not to lose your sleep. You’ll need the saints, anon—but also strength. Sleep, Doña Julia, for the love of—God! And so, good-night! I’ll watch beside your door until these slinking scoundrels have gone to feed their sacred fire.”
No sound save the complaining of the restless wind broke the stillness of the night, which had grown blacker as its age increased. Suddenly de Sancerre, as agile as a cat, sprang forward, barely in time to escape the clutch of remorseless arms. Turning, like a thunderbolt he drove his sword through a white-robed night-prowler, who died at his feet without a groan. So sudden and noiseless had been the attack and its fatal defence that it had not recalled Doña Julia to the entrance to the hut. On the instant, old Noco grasped de Sancerre by the arm, and, turning in anger, the Frenchman found himself confronted by Coheyogo.
“I’ve killed another snake, señora!” exclaimed de Sancerre, grimly, pointing to a white mass at his feet. “Will you say to the chief priest, Doña Noco, that I should more highly prize his friendship if he kept his temple priests from off my back?”
Coheyogo muttered a few words to the aged interpreter.
“The man you’ve slain has been rebellious and deserves his fate. He disobeyed a strict command,” said Noco, repeating the chief priest’s curt comment. “He’ll place a guard of trusty priests before the door of Coyocop, that you and I may seek the Great Sun’s side.”
“How kind he is!” muttered do Sancerre, petulantly. “A pretty plight this is for a Count of Languedoc! I’m tired of this Coheyogo’s domineering ways! But still, I dare not cross him now. Come, señora,” he exclaimed in Spanish, turning toward the King’s cabin and groping his way through the black night. “I trust my sword will find no more to do to-night! It has had a busy day!”