"Glory to our holy bishop! Glory to the blessed Cautin! Hosanna!"
PART III
CHAPTER I.
LEUDES AT HOME.
The burg of Count Neroweg is situated in the center of a space once occupied by a fortified Roman camp. The structure is reared on a highland plateau that dominates a vast forest at its feet. Between the forest and the burg lies a wide expanse of meadow lands, watered by a swift-running river. Beyond the forest, far away, the horizon is bounded by the volcanic mountain peaks of Auvergne. The seigniorial residence that shelters the count and his leudes is built after the Germanic fashion: in lieu of walls stout beams carefully planed and fastened together, rest upon a broad stone foundation. At intervals, and with the view of steadying the one-foot thick beams, buttresses of masonry rise from the stone foundation up to the roof, which, in turn, is constructed of oaken shingles and boards, one foot square, laid over each other. The roofing is both light and proof against the rain. The building is a long square, a wide wooden portico ornaments its front entrance, and it is supported on either wing by other structures similarly put together. These are thatched and are devoted to the purposes of kitchen, storerooms, washhouses, weaving and spinning, shoe-making, tailoring, and all the other needs of a household. In these wings are also situated the kennels, the stables, the perches for the falcons, the pig-sty, the cattle-sheds, the wine-presses, the brewery, and large outhouses filled with fodder for horses and cattle. In the main, or seigniorial building are also the women's apartments reserved for Godegisele, the fifth wife of the count, whose second and third wives still live. There Godegisele spends her days in sadness; she rarely leaves her apartments and plies her distaff in the midst of her female slaves, who attend to the several duties of the needle and the spindle or loom. A frame chapel, in which a clerk, a messmate at the burg, officiates, is connected with the women's apartment, the latter being essentially a lupanar, to which no man save the count himself is admitted. There, under the very eyes of his wife, every evening after drinking, the count picks out his bed-fellow for the night. The leudes distribute themselves promiscuously among the outside female slaves.
These vast structures, together with a garden and a spacious tree-girt yard intended for the military exercises of the leudes and of the foot soldiers, all of whom were freemen and Franks, are surrounded by a fosse and earthworks, the ancient vestiges of the Roman camp which dates from the conquest of Julius Caesar. The parapets are considerably impaired by the centuries, but they still present a good line of defense. Only one of the four entrances of the fortified enclosure—facing, as was the custom, north, south, east and west—has been preserved. It is the one facing south. On that side, a draw-bridge built of rough logs spans the fosse during the day, in order to afford a passage to man, wagons and horses. But, as a means of precaution—the count is diffident and suspicious—the bridge is drawn at night by its keeper. The deep fosse, boggy by reason of the waters that it has drained from time immemorial and that stagnated in its bed, has so thick a layer of mud at its bottom, that any one who should attempt to cross the slough would be completely engulfed. At a little distance from the yard and far removed from the main building, but still within the fortified space, stands an ergastula, built, like all Roman structures, of imperishable bricks. The ergastula is a sort of deep cave, intended during the Roman conquest as a lock-up for the slaves who were employed in field labor and in the building of roads. Ronan, Loysik the hermit-laborer, the handsome bishopess, little Odille and several other Vagres, all who had not died of their wounds since their capture, have for the last month been imprisoned in the ergastula, the jail of the burg, being thrown there immediately after the combat in the passage of Allange, where most of the Vagres lost their lives. The rest fled into the woods.
Certainly the position of the burg, the noble Frank's den, was well chosen. The old Roman fortifications place the residence above the danger of a sudden attack. On the other hand, is the seigneur count minded to hunt wild animals, the forest lies so near the burg that during the first nights of autumn the loving stags and does can be heard belling for one another's company; is he minded to hunt birds on the wing, the meadows that surround his home offer to the falcons any number of flocks of partridges, while further away large ponds serve as a retreat to the herons who, often in their aerial contests with the falcons, transfix the latter with their long sharp beaks; finally, is the seigneur count minded to fish, his numerous ponds teem with pike, carp and lampreys, while azure-backed trout and purple-finned perches furrow the limpid streams.
Oh, seigneur Count Neroweg! How sweet it is to you to thus enjoy the delights of this land that your kings conquered with their own and the swords of their leudes! You and your fellows, the new masters of this soil that our fathers' labors fecundated, live in idleness and sloth. To drink, eat, hunt, play at dice with your leudes, outrage our wives, sisters and daughters, and then attend church every week—such is the life of the Franks who now possess the vast domains that they plundered us of! Oh, Count Neroweg! How good it feels to inhabit that burg, built by Gallic slaves who were carried away from their own fields, homes and families, and who were made to carry on their backs, under the threat of the clubs of your warriors, the timber from the woods, the stones from the mountain, the sand from the river and the lime from the bowels of the earth—after which, streaming with sweat, broken with fatigue, dying with hunger, receiving for their only pittance a handful of beans, they lay down upon the damp ground, their heads barely sheltered with a roof of rushes! At early dawn the bites of dogs woke up the sluggards—aye, and those selfsame keepers with sharp fangs, and trained for their office by the Franks, accompanied the slaves when they were led to their work, hastened their heavy steps when they returned at night bending under their heavy loads, and, if ever driven by despair, the Gaul assayed flight, the intelligent mastiff quickly drove him with its teeth back to the human flock, just as the butcher's dog drives back to the fold a recalcitrant ox or ram.
And did those slaves all belong, perchance, to the class of laborers and artisans, strong, rough men, broken from infancy to hard labor? No, no! Among those captives, more than one had been accustomed to comforts, often to wealth, and were carried away from their cities or fields with wives, daughters and sons, either at the time of the Frankish conquest, or later during the civil wars between the sons of Clovis; the women were consigned to the lodgings of the female slaves, there to attend to the female work of the household and furnish the Franks with subjects for debauchery; the men were assigned to hard out-of-door work, to the building of houses, making of roads or tending the fields. Other slaves, once teachers, merchants and even poets, were captured on the roads as they traveled in troops from one city to another in pursuit of their respective occupations, imagining themselves safe against any attack in these days of war, pillage and general devastation.