Red Axe | Page 3

seen Duke Casimir often enough in the castle, or striding across the court-yard to speak to my father, for whom he had ever a remarkable affection. He was a tall, swart, black-a-vised man, with a huge hairy mole on his cheek, and long dog-teeth which showed at the sides of his mouth when he smiled, almost as pleasantly as those of a she-wolf looking out of her den at the hunters.
But I had never seen the Duke of all the Wolfmark come riding home ere daybreak, laden with the plunder of captured castles and the rout of deforced cities. For at such times my father would carefully lock the door on me, and confine me to my little sleeping-chamber--from whence I could see nothing but the square of smooth pavement on which the children chalked their games, and from which they cried naughtily up at me, the poor hermit of the Red Tower. But this night my father would be with the Duke, and I should see all. For high or low there was none in the empty Red Tower to hinder or forbid.
As I waited, thrilling with expectation, I heard beneath me the quickening pulse-beat of the town. The watch hurried here and there, hectoring, threatening, and commanding. But, in spite of all, men gathered as soon as their backs were turned in the alleys and street openings. Clusters of heads showed black for a moment in some darksome entry, cried "U-g-g-hh!" with a hateful sound, and vanished ere the steel-clad veterans of the Duke's guard could come upon them. It was like the hide-and-seek which I used to play with Boldo, my blood-hound puppy, among the dusty waste of the lumber-room over the Hall of Judgment, before my father took him back to the kennels for biting Christian's Elsa, a child who lived in the lower Guard opposite to the Red Tower.
But this was a stranger hide-and-seek than mine and Boldo's had been. For I saw one of the men who cried hatefully to the guard stumble on the slippery ice; and lo! or ever he had time to cry out or gather himself up, the men-at-arms were upon him. I saw the glitter of stabbing steel and heard the sickening sound of blows stricken silently in anger. Then the soldiers took the man up by head and heels carelessly, jesting as they went. And I shuddered, for I knew that they were bringing him to the horrible long sheds by the Red Tower through which the wind whistled. But in the moonlight the patch which was left on the snow was black, not red.
After this the crooked alleys were kept clearer, and I could see down the long High Street of Thorn right to the Weiss Thor and the snow-whitened pinnacles of the Palace, out of which Duke Casimir had for the time being frightened Bishop Peter. Black stood the Gate Port against the moonlight and the snow when I first looked at it. A moment after it had opened, and a hundred lights came crowding through, like sheep through an entry on their way to the shambles--which doubtless is their Hall of Judgment, where there waits for them the Red Axe of a lowlier degree.
The lights, I say, came thronging through the gate. For though it was moonlight, the Duke Casimir loved to come home amid the red flame of torches, the trail of bituminous reek, and with a dashing train of riders clattering up to the Wolfsberg behind him, through the streets of Thorn, lying black and cowed under the shadows of its thousand gables.
So the procession undulated towards me, turbid and tumultuous. First a reckless pour of riders urging wearied horses, their sides white-flecked above with blown foam, and dark beneath with rowelled blood. Many of the horsemen carried marks upon them which showed that all had not been plunder and pleasuring upon their foray. For there were white napkins, and napkins that had once been white, tied across many brows. Helmets swung clanking like iron pipkins from saddle-bows, and men rode wearily with their arms in slings, drooping haggard faces upon their chests. But all passed rapidly enough up the steep street, and tumbled with noise and shouting, helter-skelter into the great court-yard beneath me as I watched, secure as God in heaven, from my perch on the Red Tower.
Then came the captives, some riding horses bare-backed, or held in place before black-bearded riders--women mostly these last, with faces white-set and strange of eye, or all beblubbered with weeping. Then came a man or two also on horseback, old and reverend. After them a draggled rabble of lads and half-grown girls, bound together with ropes and kept at a dog's trot by the pricking spears of the men-at-arms behind, who thought it a