Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face by Charles Kingsley (e book reader TXT) 📗

‘Five minutes’ good fighting, and no one killed! This is a shame!’ quoth another. ‘Blood we must see, and it had better be yours, master monk, than your betters’,’—and therewith he rushed on poor Philammon.

He spoke the heart of the crew; the sleeping wolf in them had been awakened by the struggle, and blood they would have; and not frantically, like Celts or Egyptians, but with the cool humorous cruelty of the Teuton, they rose altogether, and turning Philammon over on his back, deliberated by what death he should die.

Philammon quietly submitted—if submission have anything to do with that state of mind in which sheer astonishment and novelty have broken up all the custom of man’s nature, till the strangest deeds and sufferings are taken as matters of course. His sudden escape from the Laura, the new world of thought and action into which he had been plunged, the new companions with whom he had fallen in, had driven him utterly from his moorings, and now anything and everything might happen to him. He who had promised never to look upon woman found himself, by circumstances over which he had no control, amid a boatful of the most objectionable species of that most objectionable genus—and the utterly worst having happened, everything else which happened must be better than the worst. For the rest, he had gone forth to see the world—and this was one of the ways of it. So he made up his mind to see it, and be filled with the fruit of his own devices.

And he would have been certainly filled with the same in five minutes more, in some shape too ugly to be mentioned: but, as even sinful women have hearts in them, Pelagia shrieked out—

‘Amalric! Amalric! do not let them! I cannot bear it!’

‘The warriors are free men, my darling, and know what is proper. And what can the life of such a brute be to you?’

Before he could stop her, Pelagia had sprung from her cushions, and thrown herself into the midst of the laughing ring of wild beasts.

‘Spare him! spare him for my sake!’ shrieked she.

‘Oh, my pretty lady! you mustn’t interrupt warriors’ sport!’

In an instant she had torn off her shawl, and thrown it over Philammon; and as she stood, with all the outlines of her beautiful limbs revealed through the thin robe of spangled gauze—

‘Let the man who dares, touch him beneath that shawl!—though it be a saffron one!’

The Goths drew back. For Pelagia herself they had as little respect as the rest of the world had. But for a moment she was not the Messalina of Alexandria, but a woman; and true to the old woman-worshipping instinct, they looked one and all at her flashing eyes, full of noble pity and indignation, as well as of mere woman’s terror—and drew back, and whispered together.

Whether the good spirit or the evil one would conquer, seemed for a moment doubtful, when Pelagia felt a heavy hand on her shoulder, and turning, saw Wulf the son of Ovida.

‘Go back, pretty woman! Men, I claim the boy. Smid, give him to me. He is your man. You could have killed him if you had chosen, and did not; and no one else shall.’

‘Give him us, Prince Wulf! We have not seen blood for many a day!’

‘You might have seen rivers of it, if you had had the hearts to go onward. The boy is mine, and a brave boy. He has upset a warrior fairly this day, and spared him; and we will make a warrior of him in return.’

And he lifted up the prostrate monk.

‘You are my man now. Do you like fighting?’

Philammon, not understanding the language in which he was addressed, could only shake his head—though if he had known what its import was, he could hardly in honesty have said, No.

‘He shakes his head! He does not like it! He is craven! Let us have him!’

‘I had killed kings when you were shooting frogs,’ cried Smid. ‘Listen to me, my sons! A coward grips sharply at first, and loosens his hand after a while, because his blood is soon hot and soon cold. A brave man’s grip grows the firmer the longer he holds, because the spirit of Odin comes upon him. I watched the boy’s hands on my threat; and he will make a man; and I will make him one. However, we may as well make him useful at once; so give him an oar.’

‘Well,’ answered his new protector, ‘he can as well row us as he rowed by us; and if we are to go back to a cow’s death and the pool of Hela, the quicker we go the better.’

And as the men settled themselves again to their oars, one was put into Philammon’s hand, which he managed with such strength and skill that his late tormentors, who, in spite of an occasional inclination to robbery and murder, were thoroughly good-natured, honest fellows, clapped him on the back, and praised him as heartily as they had just now heartily intended to torture him to death, and then went forward, as many of them as were not rowing, to examine the strange beast which they had just slaughtered, pawing him over from tusks to tail, putting their heads into his mouth, trying their knives on his hide, comparing him to all beasts, like and unlike, which they had ever seen, and laughing and shoving each other about with the fun and childish wonder of a party of schoolboys; till Smid, who was the wit of the party, settled the comparative anatomy of the subject for them—‘Valhalla! I’ve found out what he’s most like!—One of those big blue plums, which gave us all the stomach-ache when we were encamped in the orchards above Ravenna!’