Two strong men raised him aloft. Azya began to look at him closely, blinking, as if he wished to know what kind of man was climbing up to his height. Then the sergeant said,—
“The lady knocked out one eye, and I promised myself to bore out the other.”
When he had said this, he put the point into the pupil, twisted once and a second time, and when the lid and delicate skin surrounding the eye were wound around the spiral of the auger, he jerked.
Then from the two eye-sockets of Azya two streams of blood flowed, and they flowed like two streams of tears down his face. His face itself grew pale and still paler. The dragoons extinguished the torches in silence, as if in shame that light had shone on a deed of such ghastliness; and from the crescent of the moon alone fell silvery though not very bright rays on the body of Azya. His head fell entirely on his breast; but his hands, bound to the oak staff, and enveloped in straw steeped in tar, were pointing toward the sky, as if that son of the Orient were calling the vengeance of the Turkish crescent on his executioners.
“To horse!” was heard from Pan Adam.
Before mounting the sergeant ignited, with the last torch, those uplifted hands of the Tartar; and the detachment moved toward Yampol. Amid the ruins of Rashkoff, in the night and the desert, Azya, the son of Tugai Bey, remained on the lofty stake, and he gleamed there a long time.
CHAPTER LI.
Three weeks later, at midday, Pan Adam was in Hreptyoff. He had made the journey from Rashkoff so slowly because he had crossed to the other side of the Dnieper many times, while attacking chambuls and the perkulab’s people along the river, at various stanitsas. These informed the Sultan’s troops afterward that they had seen Polish detachments everywhere, and had heard of great armies, which surely would not wait for the coming of the Turks at Kamenyets, but would intercept their march, and meet them in a general battle.
The Sultan, who had been assured of the helplessness of the Commonwealth, was greatly astonished; and sending Tartars, Wallachians, and the hordes of the Danube in advance, he pushed forward slowly, for in spite of his measureless strength, he had great fear of a battle with the armies of the Commonwealth.
Pan Adam did not find Volodyovski in Hreptyoff, for the little knight had followed Motovidlo to assist the starosta of Podlyasye against the Crimean horde and Doroshenko. There he gained great victories, adding new glory to his former renown. He defeated the stern Korpan, and left his body as food to beasts on the open plain; he crushed the terrible Drozd, and the manful Malyshka, and the two brothers Siny, celebrated Cossack raiders, also a number of inferior bands and chambuls.