“Now may peace come upon us all,” he said, “for I may fulfill the oath that my family has taken and deliver this to the King. While the secret of its hiding place remained with me I might keep the crystal as long as I chose, but now that the secret is out, there is but one place where it may be guarded safely and that is in the palace of the King. Pan Kreutz is right. This jewel has already done too much harm in the world.”
“Then you may rid yourself of it at once,” broke in Jan Kanty. “The King returned to Krakow two days ago, and we may find him at the castle this very morning.”
CHAPTER XV
KING KAZIMIR JAGIELLO
Of all the wonders that the capital city of Poland possessed Joseph knew of none that stirred his imagination more than did this royal castle of the kings upon the Wawel. Impregnable through many sieges, its great rock base had stood, brick and stone heaped high above it in a great mass of towers, turrets, and walls. At its very heart, high above the winding Vistula and the town, stood a strangely built round tower enclosed and protected by the palace wings, where men in prehistoric times worshiped the old nature gods of the Slavs; a place of rest and seclusion where on rare occasions, when townsfolk might visit the castle, Joseph had stood thinking of things that had been in the old days.
He knew well the legend of Krakus, the hero of the dark ages, who slew a dragon that had once made this hill his habitation. There was a cave, so Joseph heard, that ran from the fortress underground beneath the river, a secret exit in time of siege; here had been the dragon’s lair, until the hero overcame him, and from that day men made the Wawel a home, from which might be seen climbing into the air, spires and belfries. All this Joseph had seen; he had fed his fancies upon every object that graced the bleak, majestic rock, and yet there remained one glory that had never yet met his eyes. That glory was Poland’s King.
But this morning after the fire, when the little company set out from the Church of Our Lady Mary toward the Wawel Hill, Joseph felt his heart leaping strangely in his breast at the thought of the adventure that was to be theirs. To see the King, to have audience before him—it made the blood sing in his ears and tingle in his finger tips.
They took the alchemist with them, on Jan Kanty’s advice, although he still seemed like a man in a dream.
“I found him wandering through the fire-swept streets early this morning,” said the scholar. “He had been running hither and thither all night long in the most dangerous parts of the city, and how he has escaped death from falling timbers and burning coals is more than I know. . . . The man has something on his mind, something that troubles him hugely, and with it all he seems to be acting like one in a spell.”
“Do you think it well to bring him with us?” asked Pan Andrew, who had doubted from the beginning that there would be any benefit from the man’s presence.