It was a full half-hour, Florian learned afterward, before Madame de Phalaris returned with a cortége of lackeys and physicians. These last attempted to bleed Duke Philippe, but found their endeavors wasted: La Tophania’s recipes were reliable, and to all appearance he had for some while been dead of apoplexy. The obscene toy discovered, hanging about his neck, when they went to undress him, surprised nobody: the Duke had affected these oddities. When the physicians made yet other discoveries, a trifle later, they flutteringly agreed this death must, without any further discussion, be reported to have arisen from natural causes. “Monsieur d’Orléans,” said one of them, jesting with rather gray lips, “has died assisted by his usual confessor.”
Florian had of course not needed to amass good precedents for putting out of life anybody who was to all intents a reigning monarch. As he glanced back at history, this seemed to him almost the favorite avocation of estimable persons. So, as Florian rode leisurely away in his great gilded coach, leaving behind him the second fruits of the attainment of his desire, if he lazily afforded a sidethought to Marcus Brutus and Jacques Clément and Aristogeiton and Ehud the Benjaminite, and to a few other admirable assassins of high potentates, it was through force of habit rather than any really serious consideration. For the important thing to be considered now was how to come by the sword Flamberge, for which Florian had, that day, paid.
14.
Gods in Decrepitude
OT one of the ambiguous guardians of the place in any way molested Florian in that journey through which he hoped to win the sword Flamberge. His bearing, which combined abstraction with a touch of boredom, discouraged any advances from phantoms, and made fiends uneasily suspect this little fellow in bottle-green and silver to be one of those terrible magicians who attend Sabbats only when they are planning to kidnap with strong conjurations some luckless fiend to slave for them at unconscionable tasks. That sort of person a shrewd fiend gives a wide berth: and certainly nobody who was not an adept at magic would have dared venture hereabouts, upon this night of all nights in the year, the guardians reasoned, without considering that this traveler might be a Puysange. So Florian passed to the top of the hill, without any molestation, in good time for the beginning of the Feast of the Wheel.
When Florian came quietly through the painted gate, the Master was already upon the asherah stone receiving homage. The place was well lighted with torches which flared bluishly as they were carried about by creatures that had the appearance of huge dark-colored goats: each of these goats bore two torches, the first being fixed between its horns, and the second inserted in another place. Florian stood aside, and watched these venerable rites of unflinching osculation and widdershins movings and all the rest of the ritual. One respected of course the motives which took visible form in these religious ceremonies, but the formulæ seemed to Florian rather primitive.
So he sat upon a secluded grassbank, beyond the light of the blue torches, and waited. It was quaint, and pathetic too in a way, now that the communicants were reporting upon their unimaginative doings since the last Sabbat. The Master listened and advised upon each case. To Florian it appeared a rather ridiculous pother over nothing, all this to-do about the drying up of a cow or the unfitting of a bridegroom for his privileges or the sapping away of someone’s health. Florian inclined to romanticism even in magic, whose proper functions he did not consider to be utilitarian or imitative of real life. It seemed to him mere childish petulancy thus to cast laborious spells to hasten events which would in time have happened anyhow, through nature’s unprompted blunderings, when the obvious end of magic should be to bring about chances which could not possibly happen. But the Master had an air of taking it all quite seriously.
Nor were the initiations much more diverting, however dreadfully painful they must be to the virgin novitiates. Florian could not but think that some more natural paraphernalia would be preferable, would be more logical, than that horrible, cold and scaly apparatus. It was interesting, though, to note what disposition was made of the relics of Philippe d’Orléans: and in the giving of four infants also, by the old ritual, Florian took a sort of personal concern, and he watched closely, so as to see just how it was done. He was relieved to find it a simple enough matter, hardly more difficult than the gutting of a rabbit, once you had by heart the words of the invocation. Florian assumed that Janicot would in due course supply the woman whose body must serve as the altar, and Florian put the matter out of mind.
Besides, to one with his respect for ancient custom and precedent, the fertility rites now in full course were interesting: he imagined that to a professed and not prudish antiquary they would be of absorbing interest, coming down, as these ceremonies did unaltered, from the dwarf races that preceded mankind proper. Still, as a whole, the Feast of the Wheel was rather tedious, Florian declared to his large neighbor. Florian had just noticed that others sat on this secluded grassbank, to both sides of him, in a twilight so vague that he could only see these other watchers of the feast were of huge stature and had unblinking shining eyes.