“My lord, I have enough; should a siege be threatened every mouth has to be fed. But it is to me, the leader, that the Christians look. It is I who am needed on the coast of Barbary. I have personally, too, great credit with the Moors; they are noble enemies.”
“I doubt it not,” is Roderich’s answer. “Wherever my trusty Espatorios draws the sword, victory follows.”
“My lord, it was but to excuse my hasty parting, not to ask for more supplies, that I spoke. To know that my daughter is well disposed of in a safe asylum is a balm to me greater than any boon you could bestow. My wife, Frandina, fights by my side. I have no fear for her, and our son is consigned to the care of the Archbishop Opas. Now, thanks to you, my lord, I am free-handed to face the Moors. I have but to settle more matters connected with Florinda, and to depart. The queen is at Toledo; I must accompany her thither.”
“By no means,” cries Don Roderich, “unless such is your wish. She shall go with me, accompanied by suitable attendants. I myself will present her to Egilona as our child.”
Meanwhile, the assemblage had gradually diminished. Each chief was in haste to depart, for the country was full of enemies, more especially in the south and east, where the vessels of the Moors continually landed Berbers and Arabs to plunder and carry off the inhabitants as slaves. That serious invasion was near at hand all understood, except perhaps Roderich and the idle young Goths who formed his court. As yet, it is true, Don Julian held the enemy at bay in Africa, but, his presence or his support withdrawn, the Moors would pour like a torrent on the land, and, save for a few of the old leaders who had survived the disastrous reign of Witica, and the enervating atmosphere spreading everywhere from the court into all ranks, who was there to oppose them?
CHAPTER III
Don Roderich’s Perfidy
HE court life shifts from the green Sierras of Cordoba to the old city of Toledo. Again we are in the corn-bearing plains, the outlines of the domes, pinnacles, and turrets of the Alcazar before us gay and jocund with the security of two hundred years of Gothic rule. What footsteps have echoed through those courts! What regal presences haunt them! Iberian, Roman, and Gothic; Recaredo, Wamba, Witica, and comely Roderich; to be followed by Moors, and Castilian kings; El Caballero, El Emplazado, El Valente, El Impotente; a red haired bastard of Trastamare succeeding his brother Don Pedro el Cruel, a swaggering Alfonso, Velasque’s, Philip, the staid dowager-queen Berenguela, fair Isabel the Catholic, the widow of Philip the Fourth, the mother of Charles el Soco, Johana el Loca, not to forget the Cid, first Christian alcaide and governor; a palace in old times marking the utmost limits of the known world, beyond which the East looked into the hyperborean darkness of the West; the geographical centre of all Spain—supremely regal, its foundations laid in legend, and its ramparts raised in the glamour of Oriental song; a refuge from Moorish invasion for the defenceless Goth, and the superb residence of later kings. In a hollow beneath rise the towers of the cathedral, and the outline of many ancient synagogues, for the Jews were always powerful in Toledo—El Transito and El Blanco are the principal ones, and hospitals for the chosen race. If Toledo was the Gothic capital, it was also long before known under the name of “Toledoth,” where the Jews came in great numbers after the sack of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. “The Jews fled to Tarshish,” says the Bible, and Tarshish is the scriptural name for Southern Spain.
Other churches and oratories there were, for the Goths were a pious people, also the house of Wamba over the Tagus, and the mystic tower of Hercules, rising on a rock, the entrance guarded by an inscription setting forth “that whenever a king passes the threshold, the empire of Spain shall fall”; a warning much respected by the Gothic kings—Wamba, Ervig, Eric, and Witica, who each in turn ordered fresh locks and chains to be added to make it fast. Baths there were also, and on the hills summer houses and huertas moistened by fountains and streams, the dark Tagus making, as it were, a defence and barrier about the walls.
One plaisance there was, particularly noted, on a terrace overhanging the river, where the spires and domes of many-painted pavilions uprose, with tile-paved patios, and arcades and miradores open to the sky, which Roderich had formed for Egilona, from the pattern of a Moorish retreat she loved at Algiers. Here soft fluffy plane-trees whispered to the breeze, violets blossomed in low damp trenches, and the blue-green fronds of the palms cut against the sky. A garden, indeed, most cunningly adapted to intoxicate the senses, where every tree and branch was vocal with nightingale and thrush, the soft rhythm of zambras and flutes thrilling through the boughs from invisible orchestras; a place in itself so lovely and so lonely that life passed by in an atmosphere of delight, akin to the houri-haunted paradise prepared for the brave Moslems who fall in battle. Hither came Egilona, as into the solitude of an Eastern harem, shut out from the foot of man. Even Roderich rarely entered to disturb her hours of innocent delight, surrounded by a band of fair damsels, who, like Florinda, had been committed to her care.