CHAPTER XXV
‘IN THE DEVIL-TREE’S LARDER!’
Leonard awoke from a deep sleep, on the morning after the fête, to find himself, like Templemore, in a place that was strange to him.
So profound had been the slumber induced by the drug that had been mixed with the drink, that he had been carried all the way to Coryon’s retreat in absolute unconsciousness. When he at last woke up, he was in one of the cells under the terrace within the reach of the great flesh-eating tree.
No words can describe the horror and anguish that filled his breast when, by degrees, he realised the dreadful truth. Not only did he shudder at the thought of his own too probable fate, but the fear that his sweet Ulama might share the same awful doom drove him almost to the verge of madness. He cursed the false sense of security that had led up to this terrible result. A few simple precautions would have frustrated this treachery! But it was too late!
Through the grated door he could see the great devil-tree, hear the swishing of its long, trailing branches, watch them come up to the grating and search about over its face for some opening large enough to penetrate, even trying to wriggle in through its small slits and perforations. In the centre of the cell was a block of wood fixed in the ground to serve as a table. A small stream of water ran down from a pipe above and fell into a channel in the floor, and a pitcher stood beside it. For chair there was a smaller log of wood; the ‘bed’ on which he had found himself was simply a bag of straw whereon were laid two or three rugs. An iron door shut off the back from an interior gallery, and the cell was partitioned off from others, on each side, by grated screens, like that in the front. The occupants of adjacent cells could, therefore, see each other.
As Leonard looked round in astonishment and alarm, and exclaimed, involuntarily, “Where am I?” a discordant peal of mocking laughter rang out from the cell upon his right.
“Where is he! He doesn’t even know where he is!” a harsh voice cried out. “He – one of the gods that wielded the lightning and thunder! After all, caught by Coryon, and brought here like the rest of us! Ha! ha! ha!”
Leonard, shocked and amazed, went to the side whence the sounds proceeded, and there saw, peering through the bars, a horrible face that grinned at him with hideous sneers and wild-looking eyes. The hair and beard were matted and dishevelled; the face and figure, so far as he could make them out, looked gaunt and thin. He was dressed in the black tunic with gold star that denoted one of Coryon’s soldiers.
“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed the mocking voice. “You don’t know where you are, eh? I’ll tell you, my lord, son of the gods, that can kill us soldiers with a magic lightning wand, but can’t keep yourself out of Coryon’s clutches – you are in the ‘devil-tree’s larder’!”
“The devil-tree’s larder!”
“Yes, my lord; the devil-tree’s larder. That means that they have put you here to keep you cool and in good condition, before they hand you over to be food for their pet out there.” And he pointed to the tree.
Leonard shuddered, and the awful truth of the man’s statement forced itself upon his mind, in spite of his wish to believe it too atrocious to be possible. He went up to the door in the front and examined it. He saw that it ran in grooves at the top and bottom.
“Ah,” said the mocking voice behind him, “that’s right. You see how it’s done now. They run that back from inside, sudden-like, some time when you don’t expect it; and in come the twisting branches that lay hold of you, and out you go to make him a nice meal. Ha! ha! ha!”
Leonard turned and stared in helpless horror. Was it possible that there was such cold-blooded, fiendish cruelty in the world? Yet – he remembered the fate of the poor puma. He trembled, and turned sick and faint; while the one in the next cell continued to jeer and mock at him.
“Where is your lightning-wand, my lord? Why have you not brought it to try it on the tree? You managed to get me brought here; and now you’ve managed to get here yourself!”
“I got you brought here? How? What then are you doing here?” Leonard asked, his surprise overcoming his disgust.
“What am I doing here? Why, the same as you – waiting in ‘the devil-tree’s larder’ till I’m given to him for a meal – as you will be. And it’s all through you; because you killed some of us and we others ran away; this is what they do with us.”
Leonard shuddered again, while the man went to the stream of water that, as in Leonard’s cell, was pouring down from a pipe above, and, filling the pitcher, took a long drink.
“Makes you thirsty, this sort of thing,” he said, with another jeering laugh. “You’ll find that water there mighty handy if they let you stay here long enough. Ha! ha! ha!”
The man was evidently in a state of high fever. The place was full of fœtid odours given off by the foul tree; and, apart from that, the want of sleep would superinduce fever, if, indeed, it did not drive mad the wretched occupants of the cells; for who could sleep for more than a minute or two at a time in one of those dens, where, at any moment, the door might be run back and the miserable prisoner delivered over to the fatal branches? It was this constant, ever-present dread that banished sleep, and must inevitably end in madness for the victims, provided they were kept there long enough.
Then the thought flashed upon him that Ulama also might be an occupant of one of these awful cells; and at that such a burst of grief and agony came over him that he hid his face within his hands and groaned aloud.
“Yah! don’t give way like that, my lord. Being here’s not so bad when once you’re used to it! Look at me! You don’t see me worry and cry like a great girl. I take it quietly; I’ve been too used to seeing others here. Many’s the time I’ve had the pulling back of these doors and have seen a man or a woman hauled out squealing and kicking like an animal going to be killed; and I’ve laughed at them. I thought it such fun! And now those who used to help me and laugh with me, they’re waiting to see how I like it; and they will laugh at me, too, just the same. But I don’t care. What does it matter? It’s nothing, I tell you, when you’re as used to it as I am.”
The wretched creature thus trying to delude himself with boastful talk and jeering at his fellow-captive, was himself, it was easy to see, worked up into the highest state of nervous dread and fear. The least sound made him start and look with straining eyeballs in the direction from which it came. He kept going to the pitcher for draughts of water, and never remained still for a single instant. If he sat down for a short space, the twitching of a foot, or leg, or hand, spoke of agitation within that would not be controlled.
Leonard turned from the sight with mingled feelings of disgust and loathing and, going to the other side, looked through the grating of the adjoining cell, to see whether it was occupied. And, looking, his heart seemed to come up into his throat when he saw a silent female form seated with its back to him. The exclamation that escaped him caused the form to turn, when he saw that the woman was a stranger. Her face was pleasing in its features, and good-looking, but had in its expression such a burden of unspeakable horror and despair that he shivered as he met her glance. At sight of it, for the moment, he almost forgot his own misery, and he asked gently,
“And who then are you?”
For a few seconds there was no reply; then, in a voice that had in it the suggestion of much sweetness, albeit now forced, and unnatural,
“I scarcely know. Once I was a happy young girl; then a well-beloved and loving wife and mother; now I am only something with which to feed yonder monster.”
“Yes,” continued the woman dreamily, “I was once good-looking, they said. Certainly, my husband thought so; and that was enough for me. But it was my curse, alas! for Skelda, the chief of the priests next to Coryon, thought so too. He stole me away from my home and my children and forced me to become one of his so-called wives. And now, because my sorrowing and pining have seared and furrowed my good looks, even as they had eaten into my heart, he has tired of me, and has sent me to the fate that, sooner or later, we all come to here – all of my sex, at least, as well as many of the other among those who are not priests. Yet,” she added, “it is but five years since they brought me here. What I look like now you can see for yourself!”
Leonard looked at her with pity; and there came into his mind the remembrance of Ulama’s words of the day before – “It seems almost wrong to be happy when I know so many others are unhappy” – and his own light rejoinder. And he reproached himself in that he had been content to bask in love and self-enjoyment while, close at hand, there were such abuses, such direful sufferings. True, he had not actually known their whole nature and extent; but he had known of the so-called ‘blood-tax’; and had heard enough to make it certain, had he given the matter due consideration, that there were evils in the land that cried aloud for remedy.
Then his thoughts reverted to Ulama, and he asked,
“Do you know aught concerning the Princess Ulama?”
“I know that she was to be brought to this place, and that she was to be put into the cell I occupied before they brought me here yesterday. It is underground; a long way from this part.”
At least, then, the poor child, Leonard thankfully reflected, was not in one of the cells in sight of the dreaded tree.
Presently he asked the woman whether she had known Zelus, the son of Coryon.
“Ah yes! Who did not in this land?” was the reply. “The monster! A great spasm as of relief and joy came upon us all – all the women, I mean – when we heard of his death. He was the worst of them all, though one of the youngest. No one was safe from him. Even the princess he sought to bring here to treat as he had treated so many others!”
“I know. I killed him when he was in the very act of raising his cowardly hand against the king’s daughter,” said Leonard quietly.
The woman turned and looked at him with more of interest in her manner than she had yet shown. She scanned him closely.
“Then,” she said, “you must be one of the strangers of whom we heard. But you are young, and not, as I have been told, of our race. We heard of one older, one who, it was said, belonged to our people. And when we heard that, we all rejoiced; for surely, we said, he brings us tidings of what all have been expecting. Therefore, we who were held here in a bondage that is a daily, hourly torture, a never-ceasing degradation, we welcomed your coming as a sign that the Great Spirit had at last brought our long punishment to an end. I, even I, dared to hope I should escape the fate that has befallen all others, and should live to see again my husband and children before I die. But, alas! it was but a dream – a delusive, passing hope, a thing too good to come in my time. Four months have passed and nothing has occurred, though ye smote the hated Zelus quickly; and even Coryon was filled with fear and dread. Why have ye failed to do more, and, instead, fallen victim to Coryon?”
Ah! why? It was a question that now sank deep into Leonard’s soul and tortured him with vain regrets and self-reproach. For he had a heart that swelled with kindness towards his fellows, and a tender conscience; and the more he thought things over, the more difficult he found it to feel that he was without blame. He had been too selfishly wrapped up in his own personal feelings, he now acknowledged; too little interested in those very matters that, as the king’s future son-in-law, should have taken, if not the first, at least a prominent position in his mind. And then, to be ignobly trapped, at a time when there was nothing but feasting and amusement in their minds! Their arms taken from them – they who could have kept at bay all Coryon’s soldiers and dispersed them, had they but been vigilant and wakeful! It was a cruelly humiliating thought – it was worse; for the child-hearted, innocent Ulama, who had a right to rely on his protection, had been sacrificed also to his self-abandonment and want of watchfulness.
Thus did Leonard reason, now that his opportunities had vanished. He knew not what was the true explanation of the position in which he found himself; but a vague, half-formed idea crept into his mind that Coryon would hardly have ventured upon such a daring stroke unless he had felt he could rely upon the support, or, at least, the indifferent neutrality, of a certain proportion of the people. And if he, Leonard, had shown more interest in the affairs of the people over whom he was one day to be king, he might have gained so firm a hold on their confidence and affections as would have rendered Coryon’s schemes hopeless from the very start.
But such thoughts, whether well or ill-founded, came now all too late. Here he was, caged, and at Coryon’s mercy. His relentless enemy had but to give the signal and he would be consigned to an awful death.
He had some further talk with the woman, who told him terrible tales of indescribable barbarities and iniquities perpetrated by the priestly tyrants under the covering of their ‘religion’; tales that made the blood within him boil, and filled his soul with savage, though helpless, indignation. Then he asked the woman’s name, and was told it was Fernina.
At last, he asked the question that, though often upon his tongue, yet he had shrunk from giving voice to.
“And what do you suppose will happen – here?”
She sighed and shook her head, hopelessly, despairingly.
“Only what always happens,” she answered, in a dull, listless tone. “None that are once placed here ever escape the fatal tree; except that sometimes they are carried up above and laid on what they call ‘the devil-tree’s ladle.’”
“‘The devil-tree’s ladle?’”
“Yes; it is a contrivance on wheels; a kind of long plank shaped at one end like a great spoon. Those who are to be given to the tree are laid upon it, bound so that they cannot move, and then pushed out along the stone-work till they are within reach of the branches; those who push the plank at the other end being far enough away for their own safety. It is part of the system of terrorism and torture here,” Fernina added, “to place some of us, at times, in rooms that are in the rock above, and that overlook this place, and to keep us locked in there for days and nights, that we may be cowed and frightened at the scenes that are enacted here. Often, a hateful fascination compels you to become an unwilling witness; in any case, you cannot avoid hearing the shrieks and moans; imagination supplies the rest.”
Leonard turned away, not caring to hear more, and sat down to brood, eating his heart out with keen regrets, all now unavailing. The jeering of the half-mad wretch in the other cell had ceased; he, too, had fallen into a sort of brooding lethargy, and so was quiet; but a constant tap, tap, tap, of one foot on the stone floor told he was not asleep. Thus the hours dragged by in silence, save for the intermittent, stealthy rustle of the branches outside, as they came prowling over the face of the gratings in their sleepless seeking after the prey they seemed to scent within.
Once, a small grating at the bottom of the door of each cell was opened, and a platter with coarse food upon it was pushed in; then the space closed up again. The sounds made them all, for the moment, start; then they relapsed again into the stupor of despair. None touched the food or even noticed it. But the man in the further cell had now seated himself near the little stream of water and, every now and then, he roused himself to take long draughts.
When it grew dark, a lighted lantern was pushed under the door into each cell, as the food had been. Leonard felt drowsy and longed for rest; yet was afraid to lie down or to close his eyes. Now and again they even closed against his will in a short doze; but it was never of long duration, and each time he woke it was with a renewed sense of the horror of his situation.
He had just roused from one of these brief snatches of sleep, and had had time to remember once more where he was, when a low rumble made him spring up and look around. Then the man in the next cell gave an awful cry – a cry that rang in Leonard’s ears for many a day – and at the same moment the grated door of his prison slowly began to move. In his demented terror he banged himself against the partition between the two cells, tried to get his fingers into the slits that he might cling to it; then climbed up on to the wooden block in the middle of the cell. But the rustling branches neared him, sought for him on every side, and soon mounted the log and caught him in their deadly embrace. Slowly, but irresistibly, while he never ceased his cries or his vain struggles and clutchings, the coils around him tightened and dragged him out into the darkness, where his cries gradually became weaker, and were finally heard no more; and when they ceased, and he heard the door rolling back, with dull rumbling, to its place, Leonard tottered to the pile of rugs in the corner of his cell, and fell upon them in a swoon.
When he returned to consciousness a bright light was shining through the grated door. He got up and, like one who is but a helpless on-looker in a fevered dream, he went to the bars and gazed out. It was bright moonlight outside, and there he saw the same ghastly scene repeated that Templemore had witnessed a short time before. He saw the dead body of the latest victim of the tree’s insatiable thirst for blood dangling amongst the branches; caught up, now by the neck, and now by the feet, and passed on from one branch to another in what seemed a new dance or sport of death; and finally carried off by the great crawling reptiles that had come up to claim their share in the repast.
While the scene lasted, Leonard seemed incapable of volition; his limbs refused to obey the will of his reeling brain and to bear him away from the sight. But, when the creatures had disappeared, he turned and made his way once more to the low bed, where he remained in a state of torpor till the day was far advanced.
After what seemed a long interval, he sat up and rubbed his eyes, after the manner of one just awakened from the horror of a nightmare. Then he saw the woman who occupied the next cell standing with her eyes fixed on him; and, when she found he was once more awake and conscious, she addressed him.
“I am sorry for you,” she said. “Even in my own misery I am not so blinded but that I can see that your burden of sorrow is a heavy one – more than you can bear. Yet methinks, were I a man, I would not thus give way to it. I am but a woman, but my greatest wish – since nothing else is left me – is that I may see Coryon once more – stand face to face with him – and show him that all his calculated cruelty and subtle ingenuity of torture have not subdued my spirit, nor the scorn that a heart conscious of having done no wrong can feel for such as he. I would give him back look for look, hate for hate, as I have before to-day; and make his wicked eyes quail before mine with the consciousness that the spirit of one he has unjustly oppressed can show itself greater than his own. But with you– he will but laugh at you – for I feel, somehow, you will be taken from here to meet him. I suspect he has sent you here first to crush your spirit with the sight of the horrors that are perpetrated here. He – have you ever seen him?”
“No,” Leonard answered, staring at her in amazement.
“Ah! then you know not what he is like. I tell you,” the strange woman went on, her eyes lighting up with unexpected fire, “he is a man whose mere glance strikes terror into the souls of ordinary men. There is that about him that makes you shrink as from some unearthly incarnation of all the powers of evil; and in that he delights, yea, more, even, than in torturing his victims.”
Here she broke off abruptly; then resumed, in a different manner.
“I have been wondering whether you are he who was to have wedded the princess?”
“Alas! yes. You have divined aright,” Leonard answered sadly.
“Then,” said the woman, with increasing warmth, that gained as she went on an energy that was almost fierceness, “then, the greater the reason you should throw off this weakness and gird up your strength to meet the haughty tyrant and show him that your spirit is equal to his own. In all his ill-spent time upon this earth – and they say it has been a very long one – it is his boast and his pride that scarce any can meet his glance without quailing under it. Think! Think how he will triumph over you – how he will point the finger of scorn – turn the look of cold contempt upon the one who aspired to be the future king of this country – and that means to stand on an equality with himself – and yet, as he will declare, is but a weak, puling, or ordinary mortal. Ah! would I were in your place! You can but die. But I would make him feel that I had a heart, a spirit, more dauntless, more unconquerable than his own. Ay! I would die knowing that for many and many and many a year to come, the remembrance that he had met one spirit he could not intimidate or master would be to him an instrument of defeat and shame, eating into his proud heart, even as the suffering he has caused to me has gnawed into my own.”
The woman spoke at the last with a force that almost electrified her hearer. Leonard felt roused as, perhaps he had never been roused before.
“You are right, my friend!” he exclaimed, “and I thank you. As you truly say, he who aspires to high things should show himself worthy to achieve them, and not even the shadow of a dreadful death and cruel sufferings should have the strength to cow his spirit in the presence of this most cold-blooded and revolting tyrant. If I have shown weakness, it was not from personal fear, but from thought of the suffering of one dearly loved, and my self-reproach for having been the unintentional cause of it. It is well that I met you; for you have taught me how I should meet this Coryon!”
“And,” said the woman, “if you want one unerring shaft to launch at him – one that I know will pierce the armour of his pride and drive him to the verge of madness – tell him you know one woman whose spirit more than matches his; tell him that she is called Fernina.”