THE HORDES OF THE FRANKS.
I had hardly reached the shore, always holding the green oak branch
aloft, when I saw a large number of Franks, belonging to the hordes of
their army, rush forward from behind the rocks where they had lain in
ambush. They carried black bucklers and wore casques made of black
calves' skin. Their arms, legs and faces were dyed black in order to
escape detection when they march in the shadow of the forests or
contemplate an attack in the night. Their appearance was rendered all
the more hideous and strange, seeing that their chiefs were tattooed
with a bright red on their foreheads, their cheeks and around their
eyes. My long sojourn along the Rhine enabled me to speak the Frankish
tongue with sufficient fluency.
The black warriors emitted savage yells, surrounded me from all sides
and threatened me with their long knives, the blades of which also were
blackened in the fire.
"A truce has been concluded, several days ago," I cried out to them; "I
have come in the name of the chief of the Gallic army with a message to
the chiefs of your hordes. Lead me to them. You surely will not kill an
unarmed man?"
Saying this I drew my sword and threw it away. The barbarians
immediately precipitated themselves upon me, redoubling their cries for
my blood. Some of them unwound the cords of their bows, and, despite
all my remonstrances, threw me to the ground and bound me fast.
"Let us flay him," said one. "We shall carry his skin to the chief
Neroweg, the Terrible Eagle. It will serve him as a bandage to wrap his
legs in."
I was well aware that the Franks often skinned their enemies alive with
great dexterity, and that the chiefs of their hordes decked themselves
triumphantly with such human spoils. The proposition that I be skinned
alive was received with shouts of approval; those who held me down began
to cast about for a convenient place to perform the operation; others
started to sharpen their knives upon the pebbles.
At this juncture, the warrior in command of the band approached me. The
man was horrible to behold. A bright red tattoo encircled his eyes and
streaked his cheeks. The marks looked like bleeding wounds, standing off
strongly against his blackened face. His hair, raised after the Frankish
style over his forehead and tied in a knot on top of his head, fell back
like the plume of a helmet over his shoulders, and was of a coppery
yellow, due to the lime-water that those barbarians used in order to
impart a warm bright color to their hair and beard.[1] Around his neck
and his wrists he wore a necklace and bracelets of rough wrought tin.
His raiment consisted of a casque of black calfskin; strips of black
calfskin fastened with criss-cross bandelets, covered his thighs and
lower extremities. A sword and a long knife hung from his belt. After
fixedly looking at me for a moment, he raised his hand and letting it
down 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 these
words of their chief, who, raising his voice, proceeded to say:
"I, Riowag, will take this Gaul to the priestess Elwig. Elwig needs a
prisoner for her auguries."
The chief's decision was acquiesced in by the majority of the black
warriors; 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 object
to having the prisoner delivered to Elwig. We want to flay him and
present his skin in token of homage to the chief Neroweg, the Terrible
Eagle; he will reward us with some present."
There is small choice between being skinned alive and being boiled in a
brass caldron. I did not feel called upon to manifest my preferences,
and took no part whatever in the debate. Already those who wished to
flay me cast savage glances at those who insisted that I be boiled, and
carried their hands to their knives, when one of the black warriors
proposed 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 I
order!"
"And the rest of you," proceeded the conciliatory black warrior, "you
wish 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. The
black warrior proceeded:
"First, flay him alive, you will then have his skin; after that Elwig
will boil his body in her caldron."
The compromise seemed at first to satisfy both parties, but Riowag, the
captain of the band, objected:
"Do you not know that Elwig needs a living prisoner to render her
auguries certain? You would be giving her only a corpse if you first
flay the Gaul."
And he added in a terrific voice:
"Would you expose yourselves to the anger of the gods of the nether
world by depriving them of a victim?"
At this threat a shudder ran through the surrounding black warriors, and
the party that demanded my skin seemed about to yield to a superstitious
terror.
The peacemaker, the warrior who had proposed that I be first flayed and
then boiled, now spoke again:
"Some of you wish to present the Gaul as an offering to the great
Neroweg, others of you wish to present him to the priestess Elwig. Now
do you not see that to give to the one is to give to the other also? Is
not Elwig Neroweg's sister?"
"And he would be the first to surrender the Gaul to the gods of the
nether world, in order to render them propitious to our arms!" put in
Riowag.
The captain of the black warriors pointed thereupon at me, and added
imperiously:
"Take the Gaul on your shoulders and follow me!"
"We want to have his spoils," said one of the black warriors who were
the first to seize me. "We want his casque, his cuirass, his blouse, his
belt, his shirt. We want everything, down to his shoes!"
"The booty belongs to you," answered Riowag. "You will have it so soon
as Elwig will have stripped the Gaul preparatorily to throwing him into
her caldron."
"We shall go with you, Riowag," replied the black warriors who made the
arrest, "otherwise others than ourselves will take possession of the
plunder from the Gaul."
My perplexity was now at an end. I knew my fate. I was to be boiled
alive. 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 I
decided to make one more effort to save my life. Addressing the captain
of the black warriors, I said:
"Your conduct is unjust. Frankish warriors have often come to the Gallic
camp to solicit an exchange of prisoners. Those Franks have always been
respected. A truce is now in force between us, during a truce only spies
who furtively enter the camp are put to death. I have come in open
daylight, 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 the
chiefs of the Frankish army. Take care! If you act without orders from
them, they will be sorry for not having heard me, and they may make you
pay dearly for your treachery towards a soldier, who comes unarmed,
during a truce, and in broad daylight, with the bough of peace in his
hand."
Riowag's answer to my words was a sign to his band. I was immediately
raised up by four black warriors who placed me on their shoulders and
carried me off in the tracks of their captain, who marched with a solemn
air in the direction of the Frankish camp.
At the moment when the barbarians raised me on their shoulders, I
overheard one of those who wished to flay me alive say to one of his
companions in a mocking tone:
"Riowag is Elwig's lover; he wishes to make a present of the prisoner to
his mistress."
These words enabled me to realize that Riowag, the captain of the band
of black warriors, being the lover of the priestess Elwig, gallantly
made her a present of my person, just as in our country bridegrooms
offer 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 have
used words that sound almost droll in describing events that were so
threatening to my life. Do not imagine that this is due to the
circumstance that at the hour when I write these lines, I had escaped
all danger. No. Even when the danger was most imminent--a danger from
which I was almost miraculously delivered--I had full control of my
spirit, and the old Gallic sense of humor, a thing so natural to our
race, however long it lay torpid under the weight of the shame and the
trials of slavery, revived in me as it did with so many others when we
once more tasted the boon of freedom. The observations that you will
encounter, and which I have reproduced as they occurred to me at times
when death seemed inevitable, were sincere, they proceeded from my faith
in that belief of our fathers that man never dies, that when he leaves
this world he enters others in which he proceeds to live.
Carried upon the shoulders of the four black warriors, I traversed a
section of the Frankish camp. The vast bivouac which was arranged
without order, consisted of huts for the chiefs and tents for the
soldiers. It was a sort of gigantic village of savages. Here and there
lay their innumerable war chariots sheltered under rude sheds made of
the trunks of trees. Their indefatigable small, lean, rough-coated and
shaggy-maned horses, that they managed with a halter of cord for only
bridle, were, as is the custom with these barbarians, tied to the wheels
of the chariots or to the trunks of trees, the bark of which they gnawed
at. The Franks themselves, barely clad in skins of animals, their hair
and beard greasy with suet, presented an aspect that was repulsive,
stupid and ferocious. Some of them were stretched out at full length in
the warm rays of that sun that they started in search of from the depths
of their dark northern forests. Others found amusement in the hunt for
vermin over their hairy bodies; these barbarians lived in such filth
that, although they were in the open air, their encampment exhaled a
fetid odor.
At the sight of these undisciplined hordes, ill armed but innumerable,
and whose forces were incessantly recruited by fresh migrations that
poured down in mass from the glacial regions of the north to swoop upon
the fertile and laughing fields of our Gaul as upon a prey, certain
words of sinister omen that escaped the lips of Victoria came to my
mind. Nevertheless supreme contempt speedily filled me for those
barbarians, who, three or four times superior to our own armies in point
of numbers, never had been able, despite many a bloody battle delivered
for a number of years, to invade our soil, but found themselves every
time driven back to the other side of the Rhine, our natural frontier.
While crossing a section of the encampment on the shoulders of the four
black warriors who carried me, I was pursued by insults, threats and
cries for my blood from the Franks who saw me pass. Several times was
the escort that accompanied me obliged, upon orders from Riowag, to use
their 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 large
and more carefully constructed hut than the others, before which a
yellow and red banner was planted. A large number of horsemen clad in
bearskins, some in the saddle, others on foot near their mounts and
leaning on their long lances, were posted around the habitation, thereby
indicating clearly enough that it was occupied by one of the leading
chiefs of their hordes. Again I sought to persuade Riowag, who now
marched beside me, but still grave, silent and solemn, to conduct me
first to that one of the chiefs whose banner I saw, after which, I said
to him, they might kill me if they so pleased. My requests were vain. We
entered the thick wood, and arrived at a large clearing, to the center
of which I was taken. At a little distance I noticed a natural grotto,
formed of large blocks of grey rock, from between which saplings and
stately chestnut trees shot upwards. A stream of living water that
trickled over the ledges of rock fell into a sort of natural basin. Not
far from the cavern stood a brass pan, rather narrow and of about the
length of a man. The opening or mouth of the infernal caldron was
furnished with a net of iron chains. The latter was undoubtedly meant to
keep the victim, who was thrown in to be boiled alive, from jumping out.
Four large boulders supported the pan, under which a bundle of large
logs of kindling wood lay ready. Human bones, bleached and strewn
hither and thither over the ground, imparted to the spot the appearance
of a charnel house. Finally, in the center of the clearing, rose a
colossal statue; it was surmounted with three heads rudely carved with
axes and adjusted to the enormous tree-trunk that, though shapeless, was
intended to represent a gigantic body. The aspect of the statue was
grotesque and repulsive.
Riowag made a sign to the four black warriors who carried me to stop and
deposit me at the foot of the statue. He thereupon entered the grotto
alone 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!"