第19章 4(7)

Once I heard a great uproar in the village. Men were shouting--women were screaming and moaning. After a time this subsided, and again there was a long interval of silence.

Half the night must have been spent when I heard a sound in the trench near the hut. It resembled muffled sobs.

Presently a figure appeared, silhouetted against the lesser darkness beyond the doorway. It crept inside the hut.

"Are you here?" whispered a childlike voice.

It was Mary! She had returned. The thongs no longer hurt me. The pangs of hunger and thirst disappeared. I realized that it had been loneliness from which I suffered most.

"Mary!" I exclaimed. "You are a good girl. You have come back, after all. I had commenced to think that you would not. Did you give my message to the queen? Will she come?

Where is she?"

The child's sobs increased, and she flung herself upon the dirt floor of the hut, apparently overcome by grief.

"What is it?" I asked. "Why do you cry?"

"The queen, my mother, will not come to you," she said, between sobs. "She is dead. Buckingham has killed her.

Now he will take Victory, for Victory is queen. He kept us fastened up in our shelter, for fear that Victory would escape him, but I dug a hole beneath the back wall and got out. I came to you, because you saved Victory once before, and I thought that you might save her again, and me, also.

Tell me that you will."

"I am bound and helpless, Mary," I replied. "Otherwise Iwould do what I could to save you and your sister.""I will set you free!" cried the girl, creeping up to my side. "I will set you free, and then you may come and slay Buckingham.""Gladly!" I assented.

"We must hurry," she went on, as she fumbled with the hard knots in the stiffened rawhide, "for Buckingham will be after you soon. He must make an offering to the lions at dawn before he can take Victory. The taking of a queen requires a human offering!""And I am to be the offering?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, tugging at a knot. "Buckingham has been wanting a sacrifice ever since he killed Wettin, that he might slay my mother and take Victory."The thought was horrible, not solely because of the hideous fate to which I was condemned, but from the contemplation it engendered of the sad decadence of a once enlightened race.

To these depths of ignorance, brutality, and superstition had the vaunted civilization of twentieth century England been plunged, and by what? War! I felt the structure of our time-honored militaristic arguments crumbling about me.

Mary labored with the thongs that confined me. They proved refractory--defying her tender, childish fingers. She assured me, however, that she would release me, if "they"did not come too soon.

But, alas, they came. We heard them coming down the trench, and I bade Mary hide in a corner, lest she be discovered and punished. There was naught else she could do, and so she crawled away into the Stygian blackness behind me.

Presently two warriors entered. The leader exhibited a unique method of discovering my whereabouts in the darkness.

He advanced slowly, kicking out viciously before him.

Finally he kicked me in the face. Then he knew where I was.

A moment later I had been jerked roughly to my feet. One of the fellows stopped and severed the bonds that held my ankles. I could scarcely stand alone. The two pulled and hauled me through the low doorway and along the trench. Aparty of forty or fifty warriors were awaiting us at the brink of the excavation some hundred yards from the hut.

Hands were lowered to us, and we were dragged to the surface. Then commenced a long march. We stumbled through the underbrush wet with dew, our way lighted by a score of torchbearers who surrounded us. But the torches were not to light the way--that was but incidental. They were carried to keep off the huge Carnivora that moaned and coughed and roared about us.

The noises were hideous. The whole country seemed alive with lions. Yellow-green eyes blazed wickedly at us from out the surrounding darkness. My escort carried long, heavy spears. These they kept ever pointed toward the beast of prey, and I learned from snatches of the conversation Ioverheard that occasionally there might be a lion who would brave even the terrors of fire to leap in upon human prey.

It was for such that the spears were always couched.

But nothing of the sort occurred during this hideous death march, and with the first pale heralding of dawn we reached our goal--an open place in the midst of a tangled wildwood.

Here rose in crumbling grandeur the first evidences I had seen of the ancient civilization which once had graced fair Albion--a single, time-worn arch of masonry.

"The entrance to the Camp of the Lions!" murmured one of the party in a voice husky with awe.

Here the party knelt, while Buckingham recited a weird, prayer-like chant. It was rather long, and I recall only a portion of it, which ran, if my memory serves me, somewhat as follows:

Lord of Grabritin, we Fall on our knees to thee, This gift to bring. Greatest of kings are thou! To thee we humbly bow! Peace to our camp allow. God save thee, king!

Then the party rose, and dragging me to the crumbling arch, made me fast to a huge, corroded, copper ring which was dangling from an eyebolt imbedded in the masonry.

None of them, not even Buckingham, seemed to feel any personal animosity toward me. They were naturally rough and brutal, as primitive men are supposed to have been since the dawn of humanity, but they did not go out of their way to maltreat me.