The executioners, engaged in their last dispositions, feel no concern at what the three peasants may say. Their words can find no echo upon that deserted place. As soon as the iron trevet is at white heat, one of the tormentors cried: "Ready! We are ready for the job!"
The archers chain the three Jacques fast to the platform of the scaffold and deliver them to the executioners. These seize William Caillet and bind him down upon the seat attached to the stake in the center of the two blocks with sharp-pointed piles. Mazurec and Adam are stripped of their clothes except their hose, their hands are tied behind their backs and they are led to the two blocks. One of the executioners pulls off the woolen cap that covers the grey-headed William Caillet, while another seizes with a pair of tongs the little trevet, turns it upside down with its feet in the air, and placing the white-hot iron on the skull of the aged peasant cries out: "I crown thee King of the Jacques!"
Caillet bellows with the insufferable pain; his hair takes fire, the skin of his forehead shrivels, runs blood and rips open under the pressure of the incandescent iron. The axes of two other executioners rise over Mazurec and Adam, who are now on their knees each before one of the blocks.
"Brother!" cries Jocelyn the Champion, overcoming the nightmare pressure on his chest that suffocated and extinguished his voice; "Brother!"
At the heart-rending cry, Mazurec quickly raises and turns his head towards the window from which the cry proceeded. But that very instant the glint of the descending axe of the executioner flashes in Jocelyn's eyes; his brother's body sinks upon and his head rolls over the scaffold, reddening it with its blood. The champion is seized with a vertigo; his heart fails him; and he falls unconscious upon the floor.
When Jocelyn recovered consciousness he found himself unbound and stretched upon a pallet of straw in a lower hall. An archer mounted guard over him near a lamp. It was night. Gathering his thoughts as if he had awakened from some troubled dream, the champion soon recalled the horrible reality. The archer informed him that he was found unconscious by the equerries of the prince in the hall of the tower, had been transported to that place, and, after a fit of delirium, had fallen into profound torpor. The archer also informed him that his horse and arms were to be returned to him, and that he could leave Clermont whenever he wished. Jocelyn requested the archer to take him to one of the officers of the King of Navarre, hoping to obtain permission to render a pious homage to Mazurec. The prince granted the request, and Jocelyn, leaving the castle, proceeded to the place of the execution. By the light of the moon he mounted the scaffold which was guarded by soldiers. The corpses of the three Jacques were to remain exposed during the whole of the next day. After his torture, William Caillet had been beheaded like his two companions. His head and theirs were stuck to the points of the piles that surmounted the blocks. Jocelyn religiously kissed the icy forehead of his brother Mazurec, and turning to descend the scaffold, his foot struck against the iron trevet which had fallen down after the decapitation of William Caillet.
"This instrument of torture and witness of my brother's martyrdom shall join the relics of our family," said Jocelyn the Champion to himself, picking up and concealing the trevet under his cloak. He then hastened to his horse that was held ready at the gate of Clermont and left the town, hastening to rejoin Etienne Marcel in Paris.
PART IV
JOHN MAILLART
CHAPTER I.
THE WAYS OF ENVY.
About a month had elapsed since the death of William Caillet, Adam the Devil and Mazurec the Lambkin.