“Let them begin,” the royal figure commanded. The archbishop bent to where Sigurd Olafson stood, below the royal enclosure.
“The King waits,” he said. Sigurd instantly gave the order for the prisoner to be brought forth. There was a brief pause, then a new flourish of trumpets, and from the dark archway, that yawned like a wolf’s mouth in the side of the amphitheatre, Perpetua was brought in, chained and guarded, and led in front of the royal throne. “She looked very pale,” wrote an old Norman chronicler, “and very fair, and as brave as a sainted martyr.”
The archbishop of Syracuse rose and addressed her.
“Woman, you are charged by the King’s sainted majesty with working by witchcraft against his sovereign person, delivering him to his lips enchantment in a draught of seeming water, to the hurt of his body and the peril of his soul. If you are guilty and will confess yourself, we need not waste some precious moments in a vain contest for your sinful flesh.”
Perpetua answered very quietly and very clearly, and all men in Syracuse heard what she had to say that day.
“I am not guilty. My soul is as clean of sin as on the day my mother gave me birth. I pray Heaven’s forgiveness for the King.”
The archbishop flushed angrily.
“Do not blaspheme,” he commanded. “Then you persist in your appeal to the ordeal of battle?”
“I do appeal,” Perpetua answered, firmly, “hoping that Heaven will strengthen the hand that is lifted to-day in my cause, which is God’s.”
The archbishop frowned.