“Wait, señora,” exclaimed de Sancerre, seizing Noco by the arm at the very entrance to the royal hut. “Katonah! It is not well to leave her all alone. Go to your home and bring her here at once. This town’s a seething cesspool of dark-brown, white-robed treachery! Peste! If harm should come to her, I dare not look into the saintly Membré’s good gray eyes again. Come back at once. The Great Sun needs your care.”
With these words de Sancerre bent down to enter the royal cabin, while Noco hurried away to rescue Katonah from a lonely night.
CHAPTER XXI
IN WHICH DE SANCERRE WIELDS HIS SWORD AGAIN
The royal cabin was the largest and most pretentious dwelling-house in the City of the Sun. Its walls were made of mud, sand and moss, and, hardened by time, had become both serviceable and sightly. The roof was formed of grass and reeds, united in a close embrace which defied the most penetrating rain or hail. Forty feet square, the main room of the palace—to give it a grandiloquent name—was furnished in a style befitting the exalted rank of its royal occupant. The Great Sun’s throne was simple in construction, being nothing more than a wooden stool four feet in height, but its inherent significance was indicated by the devices with which it had been decorated by reverential and cunning hands. Beneath the throne was stretched the rarest of the King’s household furnishings, a carpet made of costly furs, which, so tradition asserted, had aroused the cupidity of a Spaniard in a former generation, and still bore the stain of the lifeblood which he had vainly paid in his effort to rob the feet of royalty of their most valued luxury.
Audience-chamber, throne-room and sleeping-apartment, the main hall of the Great Sun’s abode, as de Sancerre entered it, after despatching old Noco to her cabin in search of Katonah, was a sight which might have delighted the eye of an impressionable painter, but would have aroused the temper of a conscientious housekeeper. The Great Sun’s sudden illness had begotten a confusion in the royal ménage which had transformed his abode from a picturesque cabin into a disordered hospital.
The stricken chieftain lay tossing from side to side upon a couch covered with painted and embroidered deer-skins. As de Sancerre approached his patient, a group of noisy women, the wives of the Great Sun, fled toward the shadows at the further end of the room. Following them, a white-robed, soft-footed sun-worshipper, casting a glance of malice at the Frenchman, deserted the sick King’s side and stole away into the darkness. The court physician, who, through the chief priest’s influence, had been succeeded by de Sancerre, had been availing himself of an opportunity to observe the effects of the Frenchman’s treatment upon the fever-racked scion of the sun.
Jealous of his prerogatives, but knowing that a cruel death awaited him should the Great Sun die, the royal physician had been torn by conflicting emotions as he gazed down upon the restless form of a chieftain whose bodily welfare had been his care for many years. While he longed, for the sake of his own safety, to see the King restored to health, he harbored a professional protest against the introduction to the royal cabin of this alien moon-magic, which, after all, seemed to consist in nothing more than the administration to the patient of a few drops of a liquid medicine at more or less regular intervals.
De Sancerre was not, in fact, jeopardizing his life—more than ever of value to him since he had solved the mystery of Coyocop—by risking the recovery of the Great Sun upon an answer to prayer, nor upon the chance that the royal sun-worshipper’s strong constitution might resist the attack of a sudden indisposition. The Frenchman, upon his first visit to the chieftain’s cabin, had quickly reached the conclusion that the Great Sun had fallen a victim to over-excitement and over-eating. De Sancerre’s experience in courts and camps had long ago familiarized him with the effects which follow a nervous strain accompanied by excessive indulgence in food and drink.
The Frenchman’s observant eye, trained in many climes to harvest large crops of details, had noted, as he approached the City of the Sun through a semi-tropical forest, a tree whose resinous inner bark vouchsafes to men a balsam of great curative powers. It was from this tree—the copal—that, obeying de Sancerre’s directions, old Noco had obtained the ingredients for a fever-quieting draught which had already begun to exercise a beneficent influence upon the Frenchman’s royal patient.
As he now gazed down questioningly at the Great Sun, whose kingly bearing had been replaced by that lack of dignity which an acute fever begets even where royalty itself is concerned, de Sancerre was rejoiced to discover that his simple febrifuge had already produced the effect which he had foreseen.