XXV
Affairs in Poictesme
They of Poictesme narrate how Manuel and Niafer traveled east a littleway and then turned toward the warm South; and how they found a priestto marry them, and how Manuel confiscated two horses. They tell also howManuel victoriously encountered a rather terrible dragon at La Fleche,and near Orthez had trouble with a Groach, whom he conquered andimprisoned in a leather bottle, but they say that otherwise the journeywas uneventful.
"And now that every obligation is lifted, and we are reunited, my dearNiafer," says Manuel, as they sat resting after his fight with thedragon, "we will, I repeat, be traveling every whither, so that we maysee the ends of this world and may judge them."
"Dearest," replied Niafer, "I have been thinking about that, and I amsure it would be delightful, if only people were not so perfectlyhorrid."
"What do you mean, dear snip?"
"You see, Manuel, now that you have fetched me back from paradise,people will be saying you ought to give me, in exchange for the abodesof bliss from which I have been summoned, at least a fairly comfortableand permanent terrestrial residence. Yes, dearest, you know what peopleare, and the evil-minded will be only too delighted to be sayingeverywhere that you are neglecting an obvious duty if you go wanderingoff to see and judge the ends of this world, with which, after all, youhave really no especial concern."
"Oh, well, and if they do?" says Manuel, shrugging lordily. "There is nohurt in talking."
"Yes, Manuel, but such shiftless wandering, into uncomfortable placesthat nobody ever heard of, would have that appearance. Now there isnothing I would more thoroughly enjoy then to go traveling about atadventure with you, and to be a countess means nothing whatever to me. Iam sure I do not in the least care to live in a palace of my own, and bebothered with fine clothes and the responsibility of looking after myrubies, and with servants and parties every day. But you see, darling, Isimply could not bear to have people thinking ill of my dear husband,and so, rather than have that happen, I am willing to put up with thesethings."
"Oh, oh!" says Manuel, and he began pulling vexedly at his little graybeard, "and does one obligation beget another as fast as this! Nowwhatever would you have me do?"
"Obviously, you must get troops from King Ferdinand, and drive thatawful Asmund out of Poictesme."
"Dear me!" says Manuel, "but what a simple matter you make of it! ShallI attend to it this afternoon?"
"Now, Manuel, you speak without thinking, for you could not possiblyre-conquer all Poictesme this afternoon--."
"Oh!" says Manuel.
"No, not single-handed, my darling. You would first have to get troopsto help you, both horse and foot."
"My dearest, I only meant--"
"--Even then, it will probably take quite a while to kill off all theNorthmen."
"Niafer, will you let me explain--"
"--Besides, you are miles away from Poictesme. You could not even manageto get there this afternoon."
Manuel put his hand over her mouth. "Niafer, when I spoke of subjugatingPoictesme this afternoon I was attempting a mild joke. I will never anymore attempt light irony in your presence, for I perceive that you donot appreciate my humor. Meanwhile I repeat to you, No, no, a thousandtimes, no! To be called Count of Poictesme sounds well, it strokes thehearing: but I will not be set to root and vegetate in a few hundredspadefuls of dirt. No, for I have but one lifetime here, and in thatlifetime I mean to see this world and all the ends of this world, that Imay judge them. And I," he concluded, decisively, "am Manuel, who followafter my own thinking and my own desire."
Niafer began to weep. "I simply cannot bear to think of what people willsay of you."
"Come, come, my dear," says Manuel, "this is preposterous."
Niafer wept.
"You will only end by making yourself ill!" says Manuel.
Niafer continued to weep.
"My mind is quite made up," says Manuel, "so what, in God's name, is thegood of this?"
Niafer now wept more and more broken-heartedly. And the big champion satlooking at her, and his broad shoulders relaxed. He viciously kicked atthe heavy glistening green head of the dragon, still bleeding uglilythere at his feet, but that did no good whatever. The dragon-queller wasbeaten. He could do nothing against such moisture, his resolution wasdampened and his independence was washed away by this salt flood. Andthey say too that, now his youth was gone, Dom Manuel began to think ofquietness and of soft living more resignedly than he acknowledged.
"Very well, then," Manuel says, by and by, "let us cross the Loir, andride south to look for our infernal coronet with the rubies in it, andfor your servants, and for some of your palaces."
So in the Christmas holidays they bring a tall burly squintinggray-haired warrior to King Ferdinand, in a lemon grove behind the royalpalace. Here the sainted King, duly equipped with his halo and hisgoose-feather, was used to perform the lesser miracles on Wednesdays andSaturdays.
The King was delighted by the change in Manuel's looks, and said thatexperience and maturity were fine things to be suggested by theappearance of a nobleman in Manuel's position. But, a pest! as forgiving him any troops with which to conquer Poictesme, that was quiteanother matter. The King needed his own soldiers for his own ends, whichnecessitated the immediate capture of Cordova. Meanwhile here were thePrince de Gatinais and the Marquess di Paz, who also had come with thisinsane request, the one for soldiers to help him against thePhilistines, and the other against the Catalans.
"Everybody to whom I ever granted a fief seems to need troops nowadays,"the King grumbled, "and if any one of you had any judgment whatever youwould have retained your lands once they were given you."
"Our deficiencies, sire," says the young Prince de Gatinais, withconsiderable spirit, "have not been altogether in judgment, but ratherin the support afforded us by our liege-lord."
This was perfectly true; but inasmuch as such blunt truths are notusually flung at a king and a saint, now Ferdinand's thin brows went up.
"Do you think so?" said the King. "We must see about it. What is that,for example?"
He pointed to the pool by which the lemon-trees were watered, and thePrince glanced at the yellow object afloat in this pool. "Sire," said deGatinais, "it is a lemon which has fallen from one of the trees."
"So you judge it to be a lemon. And what do you make of it, di Paz?" theKing inquired.
The Marquess was a statesman who took few chances. He walked to the edgeof the pool, and looked at the thing before committing himself: and hecame back smiling. "Ah, sire, you have indeed contrived a cunning sermonagainst hasty judgment, for, while the tree is a lemon-tree, the thingthat floats beneath it is an orange."
"So you, Marquess, judge it to be an orange. And what do you make of it,Count of Poictesme?" the King asks now.
If di Paz took few chances, Manuel took none at all. He waded into thepool, and fetched out the thing which floated there. "King," says bigDom Manuel, sagely blinking his bright pale eyes, "it is the half of anorange."
Said the King: "Here is a man who is not lightly deceived by the vainshows of this world, and who values truth more than dry shoes. CountManuel, you shall have your troops, and you others must wait until youhave acquired Count Manuel's powers of judgment, which, let me tell you,are more valuable than any fief I have to give."
So when the spring had opened, Manuel went into Poictesme at the head ofa very creditable army, and Dom Manuel summoned Duke Asmund to surrenderall that country. Asmund, who was habitually peevish under the puckerelcurse, refused with opprobrious epithets, and the fighting began.
Manuel had, of course, no knowledge of generalship, but King Ferdinandsent the Conde de Tohil Vaca as Manuel's lieutenant. Manuel now figuredimposingly in jeweled armor, and the sight of his shield bearing therampant stallion and the motto _Mundus vult decipi_ became in battle asignal for the more prudent among his adversaries to distinguishthemselves in some other part of the conflict. It was whispered bybackbiters that in couns
el and in public discourse Dom Manuel sonorouslyrepeated the orders and opinions provided by Tohil Vaca: either way, theofficial utterances of the Count of Poictesme roused everywhere thekindly feeling which one reserves for old friends, so that no harm wasdone.
To the contrary, Dom Manuel now developed an invaluable gift for publicspeaking, and in every place which he conquered and occupied he madepowerful addresses to the surviving inhabitants before he had themhanged, exhorting all right-thinking persons to crush the militaryautocracy of Asmund. Besides, as Manuel pointed out, this was a strugglesuch as the world had never known, in that it was a war to end warforever, and to ensure eternal peace for everybody's children. Never, ashe put it forcefully, had men fought for a more glorious cause. And soon and go on, said he, and these uplifting thoughts had a fine effectupon everyone.
"How wonderfully you speak!" Dame Niafer would say admiringly.
And Manuel would look at her queerly, and reply: "I am earning yourhome, my dear, and your servants' wages, and some day these verbaljewels will be perpetuated in a real coronet. For I perceive that aformer acquaintance of mine was right in pointing out the differencebetween men and the other animals."
"Ah, yes, indeed!" said Niafer, very gravely, and not attaching anyparticular meaning to it, but generally gathering that she and Manuelwere talking about something edifying and pious. For Niafer was now adevout Christian, as became a Countess of Poictesme, and nobody anywhereentertained a more sincere reverence for solemn noises.
"For instance," Dame Niafer continued, "they tell me that these lovelyspeeches of yours have produced such an effect upon the Philistinesyonder that their Queen Stultitia has proffered an alliance, and haspromised to send you light cavalry and battering-rams."
"It is true she has promised to send them, but she has not done so."
"None the less, Manuel, you will find that the moral effect of herapprobation will be invaluable; and, as I so often think, that is themain thing after all--"
"Yes, yes," says Manuel, impatiently, "we have plenty of moralapprobation and fine speaking here, and in the South we have a saint towork miracles for us, but it is Asmund who has that army of splendidreprobates, and they do not value morality and rhetoric the worth of anold finger-nail."
So the fighting continued throughout that spring, and in Poictesme itall seemed very important and unexampled, just as wars usually appear tothe people that are engaged in them. Thousands of men were slain, to theregret of their mothers and sweethearts, and very often of their wives.And there was the ordinary amount of unparalleled military atrocitiesand perfidies and ravishments and burnings and so on, and the endurerstook their agonies so seriously that it is droll to think of howunimportant it all was in the outcome.
For this especial carnage was of supreme and world-wide significance solong ago that it is now not worth the pains involved to rephrase forinattentive hearing the combat of the knights at Perdigon--out of whichcame alive only Guivric and Coth and Anavalt and Gonfal,--or to speak ofthe once famous battle of the tinkers, or to retell how the inflexiblesyndics of Montors were imprisoned in a cage and slain by mistake. It nolonger really matters to any living person how the Northmen burned thebridge of boats at Manneville; nor how Asmund trod upon a burned-throughbeam at the disastrous siege of Evre, and so fell thirty feet into themidst of his enemies and broke his leg, but dealt so valorously that hegot safe away; nor how at Lisuarte unarmored peasants beat off Manuel'sfollowers with scythes and pitchforks and clubs.
Time has washed out the significance of these old heroisms as the coloris washed from flimsy cloths; so that chroniclers act wisely when theywave aside, with undipped pens, the episode of the brave Siennese andtheir green poison at Bellegarde, and the doings of the Anti-Pope there,and grudge the paper needful to record the remarkable method by whichgaunt Tohil Vaca levied a tax of a livre on every chimney in Poictesme.
It is not even possible, nowadays, to put warm interest in those oncenotable pots of blazing sulphur and fat and quicklime that were emptiedover the walls of Storisende, to the discomfort of Manuel's men. Foralthough this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of highmoral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon bothsides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or theruin, of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering andgeneral breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after allother wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had beenunprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious tosay so.
Therefore it suffices to report that there was much killing and miseryeverywhere, and that in June, upon Corpus Christi day, the Conde deTohil Vaca was taken, and murdered, with rather horrible jocosity whichused unusually a heated poker, and Manuel's forces were defeated andscattered.