To this question, asked for the twentieth time, Cyril could only give the stereotyped reply that Minics believed that his cousin had been sent back to Tatarjé, there to be examined by the heads of the conspiracy, and that if all went well it might be possible to rescue him in the course of a day or two. But this reminder of their past and present perils checked any tendency to further trivial conversation, and they marched on for the most part in silence.
Throughout the day’s journey over these sparsely wooded uplands they scarcely caught sight of a single person, and in only one case were they themselves seen, when they met a goatherd who consented to sell them a cupful of milk for the child. Cyril had succeeded in obtaining from old Minics a further supply of piastres in exchange for gold, and the transaction aroused no suspicion. Their frugal mid-day meal was eaten on the roadside near a stream, and a long rough walk followed—so long that the Queen was flagging visibly, and King Michael asking plaintively for his tea, before they reached the brow of the hill beneath which lay Karajevo, with a lofty mountain, its summit still covered with the winter’s snow, and its lower slopes clad with thick forest, towering above it on the other side. Over the city hovered a cloud which Cyril pronounced to be smoke.
“Evidently there has been a fire,” he said. “I only hope that the Bishop’s palace has not been burnt out, just as we want to test his hospitality. Well, we are nearly safe now; but we will not relax our precautions until we have claimed the Bishop’s protection. We will take our Thracian names again, and speak nothing but Thracian. You, madame, must be dumb, I fear, once more.”
They went on down the hill, but before they had reached its foot Cyril stopped again.
“I don’t like the look of this,” he said. “There is certainly something wrong, for there are houses on fire in two or three parts of the town, and the people seem to be moving about in crowds. We will make inquiries at the gate before we go in.”
But the gate proved to be deserted and falling into decay, and Cyril, noticing a small inn just inside the walls, thought that it would be a good place for inquiry. Telling the two women to sit down on the stone bench in front, he went indoors and asked for a glass of rye-beer. The woman who was serving looked at him apprehensively when he entered, and was obviously relieved to hear that he was a stranger.
“Is there anything wrong in the town?” he asked, as he sipped his beer. “It looks as though the Roumis had been making a raid.”
“Oh dear no! we have nothing of that sort nowadays,” replied the hostess hastily. “It is only that the townspeople have been expelling the Jews.”
“The Jews! Why, what have they done?”
“They have kidnapped the King, haven’t you heard? They want to make him a Jew, and they knew that their wicked spells would have no power over him if he was once made an Orthodox Christian, so they carried him off—to kill him and use his blood in their horrible rites, I daresay,” she added, with unconscious inconsistency.