Nele answered:
“Have patience.”
Thus they arrived before the king’s throne; and they trembled sore seeing his golden axe and his iron crown.
And he said to them:
“What are ye come hither to do, ye puny things?”
“I know thee, witches’ shoot,” added the King, “and thee too, sprout of the coalman; but having by the power of spells achieved the deed of penetrating to this laboratory of Nature, why have ye now your beaks locked like capons stuffed with crumb?”
Nele trembled, looking at the terrible demon; but Ulenspiegel, recovering his manly hardihood, replied:
“The ashes of Claes beat upon my heart. Divine Highness, death goeth throughout the land of Flanders, mowing down, in the Pope’s name, the strongest men, the sweetest women; her privileges are destroyed, her charters abolished, famine gnaweth her, her weavers and cloth merchants leave her to go to the foreigner seeking freedom for their work. She will die soon if no one comes to her help. Highness, I am but a poor mean fellow come into the world like any other, who have lived as I could, imperfect, limited, ignorant, not virtuous, in no wise chaste or deserving of any favour human or divine. But Soetkin died of the effects of the torture and her grief, but Claes burned in a terrible fire, and I was minded to avenge them, and did so once; I was minded also to see this poor soil happier, this poor soil in which their bones are sown, and I asked God for the death of the persecutors, but he did not hearken to me nor heed me. Weary and sick of complaints, I evoked thee by the potency of Katheline’s spell, and we come, I and my trembling she-comrade, to thy feet, to ask you, Divine Highnesses, to save this poor earth.”
The king and his spouse replied together: