“Then I would I had cast the speech off, too, if that is also a livery
of the tyrant’s class. But I tell you I saw all the oppression myself
from the oppressor’s side. I was high in Phorenice’s favour then.”
“That, too, is easy of credence. Ylga is the fan-girl to the Empress
now, and second lady in the kingdom, and those who have seen Ylga could
make an easy guess at the parentage of Nais.”
“We were the daughters of one birth; but I do not count with either
Zaemon or Ylga now. Ylga is the creature of Phorenice, and Phorenice
would have all the people of Atlantis slaves and in chains, so that
she might crush them the easier. And as for Zaemon, he is no friend of
Phorenice’s; he fights with brain and soul to drag the old authority
to those on the Sacred Mountain; and that, if it come down on us again,
would only be the exchange of one form of slavery for another.”
“It seems to me you bite at all authority.”
“In fact,” she said simply, “I do. I have seen too much of it.”
“And so you think a rule of no-rule would be best for the country?”
“You have put it plainly in words for me. That is my creed to-day. That
is the creed of all those yonder, who sit in the camp and besiege this
city. And we number on our side, now, all in Atlantis save those in the
city and a handful on the priests’ Mountain.”
I shook my head. “A creed of desperation, if you like, Nais, but,
believe me, a silly creed. Since man was born out of the quakings and
the fevers of this earth, and picked his way amongst the cooler-places,
he has been dependent always on his fellow-men. And where two are
congregated together, one must be chief, and order how matters are to be
governed--at least, I speak of men who have a wish to be higher than the
beasts. Have you ever set foot in Europe?”
“No.”
“I have. Years back I sailed there, gathering slaves. What did I see? A
country without rule or order. Tyrants they were, to be sure, but they
were the beasts. The men and the women were the rudest savages, knowing
nothing of the arts, dressing in skins and uncleanness, harbouring in
caves and the tree-tops. The beasts roamed about where they would, and
hunted them unchecked.”
“Still, they fought you for their liberty?”
“Never once. They knew how disastrous was their masterless freedom. Even
to their dull, savage brains it was a sure thing that no slavery could
be worse; and to that state you, and your friends, and your theories,
will reduce Atlantis, if you get the upper hand. But, then, to argue
in a circle, you will never get it. For to conquer, you must set up
leaders, and once you have set them up, you will never pull them down
again.”
“Aye,” she said with a sigh, “there is truth in that last.”
The torch had filled the captain’s room with a resinous smoke, but the
flame was growing pale. Dawn was coming in greyly through a slender
arrow-slit, and with it ever and again the glow from some mountain out
of sight, which was shooting forth spasmodic bursts of fire. With it
also were mutterings of distant falling rocks, and sullen tremblings,
which had endured all the night through, and I judged that earth was in
one of her quaking moods, and would probably during the forthcoming day
offer us some chastening discomforts.
On this account, perhaps, my senses were stilled to certain evidences
which would otherwise have given me a suspicion; and also, there is no
denying that my general wakefulness was sapped by another matter. This
woman, Nais, interested me vastly out of the common; the mere presence
of her seemed to warm the organs of my interior; and whilst she was
there, all my thoughts and senses were present in the room of the
captain of the gate in which we sat.
But of a sudden the floor of the chamber rocked and fell away beneath
me, and in a tumult of dust, and litter, and bales of the captain’s
plunder, I fell down (still seated on the flagstone) into a pit which
had been digged beneath it. With the violence of the descent, and the
flutter of all these articles about my head, I was in no condition for
immediate action; and whilst I was still half-stunned by the shock, and
long before I could get my eyes into service again, I had been seized,
and bound, and half-strangled with a noose of hide. Voices were raised
that I should be despatched at once out of the way; but one in authority
cried out that, killing me at leisure, and as a prisoner, promised more
genteel sport; and so I was thrust down on the floor, whilst a whole
army of men trod in over me to the attack.
What had happened was clear to me now, though I was powerless to do
anything in hindrance. The rebels with more craft than any one had
credited to them, had driven a galley from their camp under the ground,
intending so to make an entrance into the heart of the city. In their
clumsy ignorance, and having no one of sufficient talent in mensuration,
they had bungled sadly both in direction and length, and so had ended
their burrow under this chamber of the captain of the gate. The great
flagstone in its fall had, it appeared, crushed four of them to death,
but these were little noticed or lamented. Life was to them a bauble of
the slenderest price, and a horde of others pressed through the opening,
lusting for the fight, and recking nothing of their risks and perils.
Half-choked by the foul air of the galley, and trodden on by this great
procession of feet, it was little enough I could do to help my immediate
self much less the more distant city. But when the chief mass of the
attackers had passed through, and there came only here and there one
eager to take his share at storming the gate, a couple of fellows
plucked me up out of the mud on the floor, and began dragging me down
through the stinking darkness of the galley towards the pit that gave it
entrance.
Twenty times we were jostled by others hastening to the attack, either
from hunger for fight, or from appetite for what they could steal.
But we came to the open at last, and half-suffocated though I was, I
contrived to do obeisance, and say aloud the prescribed prayer to the
most High Gods in gratitude for the fresh, sweet air which They had
provided.
Our Lord the Sun was on the verge of rising for His day, and all things
were plainly shown. Before me were the monstrous walls of the capital,
with the heads of its pyramids and higher buildings showing above them.
And on the walls, the sentries walked calmly their appointed paces, or
took shelter against arrows in the casemates provided for them.
The din of fighting within the gate rose high into the air, and the
heavy roaring of the cave-tigers told that they too were taking their
share of the melee. But the massive stonework of the walls hid all the
actual engagement from our view, and which party was getting the upper
hand we could not even guess. But the sounds told how tight a fight was
being hammered out in those narrow boundaries, and my veins tingled to
be once more back at the old trade, and to be doing my share.
But there was no chivalry about the fellows who held me by my bonds.
They thrust me into a small temple near by, which once had been a fane
in much favour with travellers, who wished to show gratitude for the
safe journey to the capital, but which now was robbed and ruined, and
they swung to the stone entrance gate and barred it, leaving me to
commune with myself. Presently, they told me, I should be put to death
by torments. Well, this seemed to be the new custom of Atlantis, and I
should have to endure it as best I could. The High Gods, it appeared,
had no further use for my services in Atlantis, and I was not in the
mood then to bite very much at their decision. What I had seen of the
country since my return had not enamoured me very much with its new
conditions.
The little temple in which I was gaoled had been robbed and despoiled of
all its furnishments. But the light-slits, where at certain hours of the
day the rays of our Lord the Sun had fallen upon the image of the God,
before this had been taken away, gave me vantage places from which I
could see over the camp of these rebel besiegers, and a dreary prospect
it was. The people seemed to have shucked off the culture of centuries
in as many months, and to have gone back for the most part to sheer
brutishness. The majority harboured on the bare ground. Few owned
shelter, and these were merely bowers of mud and branches.
They fought and quarrelled amongst themselves for food, eating their
meat raw, and their grain (when they had it) unground. Many who passed
my vision I saw were even gnawing the soft inside of tree bark.
The dead lay where they fell. The sick and the wounded found no hand
to tend them. Great man-eating birds hovered about the camp or skulked
about, heavy with gorging, amongst the hovels, and no one had public
spirit enough to give them battle. The stink of the place rose up to
heaven as a foul incense inviting a pestilence. There was no order, no
trace of strong command anywhere. With three hundred well-disciplined
troops it seemed to me that I could have sent those poor desperate
hordes flying in panic to the forest.
However, there was no very lengthy space of time granted me for thinking
out the policy of this matter to any great depth. The attack on the gate
had been delivered with suddenness; the repulse was not slow. Of what
desperate fighting took place in the galleries, and in the circus
between the two sets of gates, the detail will never be told in full.
At the first alarm the great cave-tigers were set loose, and these raged
impartially against keeper and foe. Of those that went in through the
tunnel, not one in ten returned, and there were few of these but what
carried a bloody wound. Some, with the ruling passion still strong in
them, bore back plunder; one trailed along with him the head of the
captain of the gate; and amongst them they dragged out two of the
warders who were wounded, and whom revenge had urged them to take as
prisoners.
Over these two last a hubbub now arose, that seemed likely to boil over
into blows. Every voice shouted out for them what he thought the most
repulsive fate. Some were for burning, some for skinning, some for
impaling, some for other things: my flesh crept as I heard their
ravenous yells. Those that had been to the trouble of making them
captive were still breathless from the fight, and were readily thrust
aside; and it seemed to me that the poor wretches would be hustled into
death before any definite fate was agreed upon, which all would pass as
sufficiently terrific. Never had I seen such a disorderly tumult, never
such a leaderless mob. But, as always has happened, and always will, the
stronger men by dint of louder voices and more vigorous shoulders got
their plans agreed to at last, and the others perforce had to give way.
A band of them set off running, and presently returned at snails’ pace,
dragging with them (with many squeals from ungreased wheels) one of
those huge war engines with which besiegers are wont to throw great
stones and other missiles into the cities they sit down against. They
ran it up just beyond bowshot of the walls, and clamped it firmly down
with stakes and ropes to the earth. Then setting their lean arms to the
windlasses, they drew back the great tree which formed the spring till
its tethering place reached the ground, and in the cradle at its head
they placed one of the prisoners, bound helplessly, so that he could not
throw himself over the side.
Then the rude, savage, skin-clad mob stood back, and one who had
appointed himself engineer knocked back the catch that held the great
spring in place.
With a whir and a twang the elastic wood flung upwards, and the bound
man was shot away from its tip with the speed of a lightning flash.
He sang through the air, spinning over and over with inconceivable
rapidity, and the great crowd of rebels held their breath in silence as
they watched. He passed high above the city wall, a tiny mannikin in the
distance now, and then the trajectory of his flight began to lower. The
spike of a new-built pyramid lay in the path of his terrific flight, and
he struck it with a thud whose sound floated out to us afterwards,
and then he toppled down out of our sight, leaving a red stain on the
whiteness of the stone as he fell.
With a roar the crowd acknowledged the success of their device, and
bellowed out insults to Phorenice, and insults to the Gods: a poor
frantic crowd they showed themselves. And then with ravening shouts,
they fell upon the other captive warder, binding him also into a compact
helpless missile, and meanwhile getting the engine in gear again for
another shot.
But for my part I saw nothing of this disgusting scene. I heard the bolt
grate stealthily against the door of the little temple in which I was
imprisoned, and was minded to give these brutish rebels somewhat of a
surprise. I had rid myself of my bonds handily enough; I had rubbed
my limbs to that perfect suppleness which is always desirable before a
fight; and I had planned to rush out so soon as the door was swung, and
kill those that came first with fist blows on the brow and chin.
They had not suspected my name, it was clear, for my stature and garb
were nothing out of the ordinary; but if my bodily strength and fighting
power had been sufficient to raise me to a vice-royalty like that of
Yucatan, and let me endure alive in that government throughout twenty
hard-battling years, why, it was likely that this rabble of savages
would see something that was new and admirable in the practice of arms
before the crude weight of their numbers could drag me down. Nay, I did
not even despair of winning free altogether. I must find me a weapon
from those that came up to battle, with which I could write worthy
signatures, and I must attempt no standing fights. Gods! but what a glow
the prospect did send through me as I stood there waiting.
A vainer man, writing history, might have said that always, before
everything else, he held in mind the greater interests before the less.
But for me--I prefer to be honest, and own myself human. In my glee
at that forthcoming fight--which promised to be the greatest and most
furious I had known in all a long life of battling--I will confess that
Atlantis and her differing policies were clean forgot. I should go out
an unknown man from the little cell of a temple, I should do my work,
and then, whether I took freedom with me, or whether I came down at last
myself on a pile of slain, these people would guess without being told
the name, that here was Deucalion. Gods! what a fight we would have
made!
But the door did not open wide to give me space for my first rush. It
creaked gratingly outwards on its pivots, and a slim hand and a white
arm slipped inside, beckoning me to quietude. Here was some woman. The
door creaked wider, and she came inside.
“Nais,” I said.
“Silence, or they will hear you, and remember. At present those who
brought you here are killed, and unless by chance some one blunders into
this robbed shrine, you will not be found.”
“Then, if that is so, let me go out and walk amongst these people as one
of themselves.”
She shook her head.
“But, Nais, I am not known here. I am merely a man in very plain and
mud-stained robe. I should be in no ways remarkable.”
A smile twitched her face. “My lord,” she said, “wears no beard; and his
is the only clean chin in the camp.”
I joined in her laugh. “A pest on my want of foppishness then. But I am
forgetting somewhat. It comes to my mind that we still have unfinished
that small discussion of ours concerning the length of my poor life.
Have you decided to cut it off from risk of further mischief, or do you
propose to give me further span?”
She turned to me with a look of sharp distress. “My lord,” she said,
“I would have you forget that silly talk of mine. This last two hours I
thought you were dead in real truth.”
“And you were not relieved?”
“I felt that the only man was gone out of the world--I mean, my lord,
the only man who can save Atlantis.”
“Your words give me a confidence. Then you would have me go back and
become husband to Phorenice?”
“If there is no other way.”
“I warn you I shall do that, if she still so desires it, and if it seems
to me that that course will be best. This is no hour for private likings
or dislikings.”
“I know it,” she said, “I feel it. I have no heart now, save only for
Atlantis. I have schooled myself once more to that.”
“And at present I am in this lone little box of a temple. A minute
ago, before you came, I had promised myself a pretty enough fight to
signalise my changing of abode.”
“There must be nothing of that. I will not have these poor people
slaughtered unnecessarily. Nor do I wish to see my lord exposed to a
hopeless risk. This poor place, such as it is, has been given to me
as an abode, and, if my lord can remain decorously till nightfall in a
maiden’s chamber, he may at least be sure of quietude. I am a person,”
she added simply, “that in this camp has some respect. When darkness
comes, I will take my lord down to the sea and a boat, and so he may
come with ease to the harbour and the watergate.”