Allan Quatermain by H. Rider Haggard (best historical biographies .TXT) 📗
- Author: H. Rider Haggard
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“And what art thou going to do with Sorais?” I asked her.
Instantly her bright brow darkened to a frown.
“Sorais,” she said, with a little stamp of the foot; “ah, but Sorais!”
Sir Henry hastened to turn the subject.
“You will soon be about and all right again now, old fellow,” he said.
I shook my head and laughed.
“Don’t deceive yourselves,” I said. “I may be about for a little, but I shall never be all right again. I am a dying man, Curtis. I may die slow, but die I must. Do you know I have been spitting blood all the morning? I tell you there is something working away into my lung; I can feel it. There, don’t look distressed; I have had my day, and am ready to go. Give me the mirror, will you? I want to look at myself.”
He made some excuse, but I saw through it and insisted, and at last he handed me one of the discs of polished silver set in a wooden frame like a hand-screen, which serve as looking-glasses in Zu-Vendis. I looked and put it down.
“Ah,” I said quietly, “I thought so; and you talk of my getting all right!” I did not like to let them see how shocked I really was at my own appearance. My grizzled stubby hair was turned snow-white, and my yellow face was shrunk like an aged woman’s and had two deep purple rings painted beneath the eyes.
Here Nyleptha began to cry, and Sir Henry again turned the subject, telling me that the artists had taken a cast of the dead body of old Umslopogaas, and that a great statue in black marble was to be erected of him in the act of splitting the sacred stone, which was to be matched by another statue in white marble of myself and the horse Daylight as he appeared when, at the termination of that wild ride, he sank beneath me in the courtyard of the palace. I have since seen these statues, which at the time of writing this, six months after the battle, are nearly finished; and very beautiful they are, especially that of Umslopogaas, which is exactly like him. As for that of myself, it is good, but they have idealized my ugly face a little, which is perhaps as well, seeing that thousands of people will probably look at it in the centuries to come, and it is not pleasant to look at ugly things.
Then they told me that Umslopogaas’ last wish had been carried out, and that, instead of being cremated, as I shall be, after the usual custom here, he had been tied up, Zulu fashion, with his knees beneath his chin, and, having been wrapped in a thin sheet of beaten gold, entombed in a hole hollowed out of the masonry of the semicircular space at the top of the stair he defended so splendidly, which faces, as far as we can judge, almost exactly towards Zululand. There he sits, and will sit for ever, for they embalmed him with spices, and put him in an air-tight stone coffer, keeping his grim watch beneath the spot he held alone against a multitude; and the people say that at night his ghost rises and stands shaking the phantom of Inkosi-kaas at phantom foes. Certainly they fear during the dark hours to pass the place where the hero is buried.
Oddly enough, too, a new legend or prophecy has arisen in the land in that unaccountable way in which such things do arise among barbarous and semi-civilized people, blowing, like the wind, no man knows whence. According to this saying, so long as the old Zulu sits there, looking down the stairway he defended when alive, so long will the New House of the Stairway, springing from the union of the Englishman and Nyleptha, endure and flourish; but when he is taken from thence, or when, ages after, his bones at last crumble into dust, the House will fall, and the Stairway shall fall, and the Nation of the Zu-Vendi shall cease to be a Nation.
I HAVE SPOKEN
It was a week after Nyleptha’s visit, when I had begun to get about a little in the middle of the day, that a message came to me from Sir Henry to say that Sorais would be brought before them in the Queen’s first antechamber at midday, and requesting my attendance if possible. Accordingly, greatly drawn by curiosity to see this unhappy woman once more, I made shift, with the help of that kind little fellow Alphonse, who is a perfect treasure to me, and that of another waiting-man, to reach the antechamber. I got there, indeed, before anybody else, except a few of the great Court officials who had been bidden to be present, but I had scarcely seated myself before Sorais was brought in by a party of guards, looking as beautiful and defiant as ever, but with a worn expression on her proud face. She was, as usual, dressed in her royal “kaf”, emblazoned with the emblem of the Sun, and in her right hand she still held the toy spear of silver. A pang of admiration and pity went through me as I looked at her, and struggling to my feet I bowed deeply, at the same time expressing my sorrow that I was not able, owing to my condition, to remain standing before her.
She coloured a little and then laughed bitterly. “Thou dost forget, Macumazahn,” she said, “I am no more a Queen, save in blood; I am an outcast and a prisoner, one whom all men should scorn, and none show deference to.”
“At least,” I replied, “thou art still a lady, and therefore one to whom deference is due. Also, thou art in an evil case, and therefore it is doubly due.”
“Ah!” she answered, with a little laugh, “thou dost forget that I would have wrapped thee in a sheet of gold and hung thee to the angel’s trumpet at the topmost pinnacle of the Temple.”
“No,” I answered, “I assure thee that I forgot it not; indeed, I often thought of it when it seemed to me that the battle of the Pass was turning against us; but the trumpet is there, and I am still here, though perchance not for long, so why talk of it now?”
“Ah!” she went on, “the battle! the battle! Oh, would that I were once more a Queen, if only for one little hour, and I would take such a vengeance on those accursed jackals who deserted me in my need; that it should only be spoken of in whispers; those women, those pigeon-hearted half-breeds who suffered themselves to be overcome!” and she choked in her wrath.
“Ay, and that little coward beside thee,” she went on, pointing at Alphonse with the silver spear, whereat he looked very uncomfortable; “he escaped and betrayed my plans. I tried to make a general of him, telling the soldiers it was Bougwan, and to scourge valour into him” (here Alphonse shivered at some unhappy recollection), “but it was of no avail. He hid beneath a banner in my tent and thus overheard my plans. I would that I had slain him, but, alas! I held my hand.
“And thou, Macumazahn, I have heard of what thou didst; thou art brave, and hast a loyal heart. And the black one too, ah, he was a man. I would fain have seen him hurl Nasta from the stairway.”
“Thou art a strange woman, Sorais,” I said; “I pray thee now plead with the Queen Nyleptha, that perchance she may show mercy unto thee.”
She laughed out loud. “I plead for mercy!” she said and at that moment the Queen entered, accompanied by Sir Henry and Good, and took her seat with an impassive face. As for poor Good, he looked intensely ill at ease.
“Greeting, Sorais!” said Nyleptha, after a short pause. “Thou hast rent the kingdom like a rag, thou hast put thousands of my people to the sword, thou hast twice basely plotted to destroy my life by murder, thou hast sworn to slay my lord and his companions and to hurl me from the Stairway. What hast thou to say why thou shouldst not die? Speak, O Sorais!”
“Methinks my sister the Queen hath forgotten the chief count of the indictment,” answered Sorais in her slow musical tones. “It runs thus: ‘Thou didst strive to win the love of my lord Incubu.’ It is for this crime that my sister will slay me, not because I levied war. It is perchance happy for thee, Nyleptha, that I fixed my mind upon his love too late.
“Listen,” she went on, raising her voice. “I have nought to say save that I would I had won instead of lost. Do thou with me even as thou wilt, O Queen, and let my lord the King there” (pointing to Sir Henry)—“for now will he be King—carry out the sentence, as it is meet he should, for as he is the beginning of the evil, let him also be the end.” And she drew herself up and shot one angry glance at him from her deep fringed eyes, and then began to toy with her spear.
Sir Henry bent towards Nyleptha and whispered something that I could not catch, and then the Queen spoke.
“Sorais, ever have I been a good sister to thee. When our father died, and there was much talk in the land as to whether thou shouldst sit upon the throne with me, I being the elder, I gave my voice for thee and said, ‘Nay, let her sit. She is twin with me; we were born at a birth; wherefore should the one be preferred before the other?’ And so has it ever been “twixt thee and me, my sister. But now thou knowest in what sort thou hast repaid me, but I have prevailed, and thy life is forfeit, Sorais. And yet art thou my sister, born at a birth with me, and we played together when we were little and loved each other much, and at night we slept in the same cot with our arms each around the other’s neck, and therefore even now does my heart go out to thee, Sorais.
“But not for that would I spare thy life, for thy offence has been too heavy; it doth drag down the wide wings of my mercy even to the ground. Also, while thou dost live the land will never be at peace.
“Yet shalt thou not die, Sorais, because my dear lord here hath begged thy life of me as a boon; therefore as a boon and as a marriage gift give I it to him, to do with even as he wills, knowing that, though thou dost love him, he loves thee not, Sorais, for all thy beauty. Nay, though thou art lovely as the night in all her stars, O Lady of the Night, yet it is me his wife whom he loves, and not thee, and therefore do I give thy life to him.”
Sorais flushed up to her eyes and said nothing, and I do not think that I ever saw a man look more miserable than did Sir Henry at that moment. Somehow, Nyleptha’s way of putting the thing, though true and forcible enough, was not altogether pleasant.
“I understood,” stammered Curtis, looking at Good, “I understood that you were attached—eh—attached to—to the Queen Sorais. I am—eh—not aware what the—in short, the state of your feelings may be just now; but if they happened to be that way inclined, it has struck me that—in short, it might put a satisfactory end to an unpleasant business. The lady also has ample private estates, where I am sure she would be at liberty to live unmolested as far as we are concerned, eh, Nyleptha? Of course, I only suggest.”
“So far as I am concerned,” said Good, colouring up, “I am quite willing to forget the past; and if the Lady of the Night thinks me worth the taking I will marry her tomorrow, or when she likes, and try to make her a good husband.”
All eyes were now
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