The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician

by Edwin Lester Arnold

There is but little to say of that quiet Saxon rest that befell me in pleasant Voewood. Between each line I pen you must suppose an episode of pleasure. In the springtime, when the woods were shot with a carpet of blue and yellow flowers, we lay a-basking in the sunny angles or rode out to count our swine and fallow deer. In the summer, when all Editha’s mighty woodlands were like fair endless colonnades, we basked amid the flickering shadows and watched the sunny sheen upon the treetops, to the orchestra of little birds. And autumn, that touched the vassals’ corn-clearings with yellow, saw my proud Norman charger grow fat and gross with new grain. September rains and mists rusted my silent weapon into its sheath; even winter, that heard the woodman’s axe upon the forest trees, and saw bird and beast and men and kine draw in to the gentle bounty of my white-handed lady, was but a long, inglorious holiday of another sort.

Many and many a time, in those merry months, did this Phœnician laugh to his mirror to see how fitly he could wear upon his Eastern-British-Roman body the Danish-Saxon-English tunic! It was all of fine linen the franklin’s own fair fingers had spun, and pointed and tasseled and parti-color, and his legs were cross-gartered to his knees, and his little luncheon-dagger hung by his jeweled belt, and a fillet of pure English gold bound down the long black locks that fell upon his shoulders. Every morning Editha combed them out with her silver comb, and double-peaked his beard, kissing and saying it was the best in all Voewood. He had more servants than necessities in those times, and almost his only grievance was a lack of wants.

The Normans for long had left us wholly alone, partly through the usurper cunning which prompted our new tyrant to deal gently with those who had stood in arms against him, but principally in our case since the strong tide of invasion had swept northward beyond us, and Voewood slept unharmed, unnoticed among its green solitudes—a Saxon homestead as it had been since Hengist’s white horse first flaunted upon an English breeze and the seven kingdoms sprang from the ashes of old Roman Britain.

So we lived light-hearted from day to day, forgetting all about the battle by Senlac, and drinking, as I have said, in our evening wassails confusion and scorn of the invaders who seemed so distant. It was a good time, and I have little to note of it. Many were the big boars which died upon my eager spear down in the morasses to the southward, and I came to love my casts of tiercelets and my hounds as though I had been born to a woodman’s cape and had watched the fens for hernshaws and followed the slot of wounded deers from my youth upward.

All these things led me into many a wild adventure and many a desperate strait; but one of them stands out from the rest upon the crowded pages of my memory. I had, one day when Editha was with me, mounted as she would be upon her palfrey, slipped the dogs upon a stag an arrow of mine had wounded in the foreleg, and, excited by the chase and reluctant as ever to turn back from an unaccomplished purpose, we followed far into the unknown distances, and all beyond our reckonings. I had let fly that shaft at midday, and at sundown the stag was still afoot, the dogs close behind him, and I, indomitable, muddy, and torn from head to foot, but with all the hunter instinct hot within me, was pressing on by my Saxon’s bridle rein. Endless, rough, and tangled miles had we run and scrambled in that lengthy chase, and neither of us had noticed the way, or how angry the sun was setting in the west.

Thus it came about that when the noble hart at length stood at bay in the lichened coverts under a bushy crag, there was hardly breath in me to cheer the weary dogs upon him, and hardly light enough to aim the swift thrust of my subduing javelin which laid him dead and bleeding at our feet. Yes, and before I could cut a hunter’s supper from that glossy haunch the dome of the sky closed down from east to west, and the first heavy drops of the evening rain came pattering upon the leaves overhead. Thor! how black it grew as the wind began to whistle through the branches and the murky clouds to fly across the face of the somber heaven, while neither east nor west could any limit be seen to the interminable vastnesses of the endless woodlands! In vain was it we struggled for a time back upon our footsteps, and then even those were lost; and, as the sky in the east burned an angry yellow for a moment before the remorseless night set in, it gave us just light to see we were hopelessly mazed in the labyrinths of the huge and lonely forest.

It was thus we turned to take such shelter as might offer, and that gleam shone for a moment pallid, yellow, and ghastly upon a cluster of gray stones standing on a grassy mound a quarter of a mile away. Thither we struggled through the black mazes of the storm, the headlong rain whistling through the misty thickets like flights of innumerable arrows, the angry wind lashing the treetops into bitter complaining, and waving abroad (in the sodden dismal twilight) all the long beards of goblin lichens hanging in ghostly tapestry across our path that dreary October evening.

Reeling and plunging to the shelter through a black world of tangled witnesses, with that mocking gleam behind shining like a window of the nether world, and overhead a gaunt, hurrying array of cloudy forms, we were presently upon the coppice outskirt, and there I stopped as though I had grown to the ground.

I stopped before that great, gaunt amphitheater of gray stones and stared and stared before me as though I were bereft of sense. I rubbed my eyes and pointed with trembling, silent finger, and looked again and again, while the Saxon girl crouched to my side, and my hounds whined and shivered at my feet, for there, incredible! monstrous!—yellow and shining in the pallid derision of the twilight, stern, hoary, ruinous, mocking—overthrown and piled one upon another, clasped and knotted about their feet by the knotted fingers of the woodland growth, swathed in the rocking mists which gave a horrid life to their cruel, infernal deadness, were the stones, the very stones of that Druid altar-place upon which I was sacrificed nearly a thousand years before!

Here was a pretty welcome! Here was a cheerful harborage! What man ever born of a woman who would not have been dazed and dumfounded at this sudden confronting—this extraordinary reminiscence of the long-forgotten? It overwhelmed for the moment even me—me, Phra the Phœnician, to whom the red harvest-fields of war are pleasant places, who have dallied with the infinite, and have been a melancholy coadjutor of Time itself. Even me, who never sought to live, yet live endlessly by my very negligence—who have received from the gods that gift of existence that others ask for unanswered.