Whether it was his cries, or the, to them, awful sound and effect of the pistol shot, or what, I know not, but the other priests halted, paralysed and dismayed, and before they could come on again Sorais had called out something, and we, together with the two Queens and most of the courtiers, were being surrounded with a wall of armed men. In a moment it was done, and still the priests hesitated, and the people hung in the balance like a herd of startled buck, as it were, making no sign one way or the other.
The last yell of the burning priest had died away, the fire had finished him, and a great silence fell upon the place.
Then the High Priest Agon turned, and his face was as the face of a devil. “Let the sacrifice be sacrificed,” he cried to the Queens. “Has not sacrilege enough been done by these strangers, and would ye, as Queens, throw the cloak of your majesty over evildoers? Are not the creatures sacred to the Sun dead? And is not a priest of the Sun also dead, but now slain by the magic of these strangers, who come as the winds out of heaven, whence we know not, and who are what we know not? Beware, O Queens, how ye tamper with the great majesty of the God, even before his high altar! There is a power that is more than your power; there is a justice that is higher than your justice. Beware how ye lift an impious hand against it! Let the sacrifice be sacrificed, O Queens.”
Then Sorais made answer, in her deep quiet tones, that always seemed to me to have a suspicion of mockery about them, however serious the theme: “O Agon, thou hast spoken according to thy desire, and thou hast spoken truth. But it is thou who wouldst lift an impious hand against the justice of thy God. Bethink thee the midday sacrifice is accomplished; the Sun hath claimed his priest as a sacrifice.”
This was a novel idea, and the people applauded it.
“Bethink thee, what are these men? They are strangers found floating on the bosom of a lake. Who brought them here? How came they here? How know ye that they also are not servants of the Sun? Is this the hospitality that ye would have our nation show to those whom chance brings to them, to throw them to the flames? Shame on ye! Shame on ye! What is hospitality? To receive the stranger and show him favour. To bind up his wounds, and find a pillow for his head and food for him to eat. But thy pillow is the fiery furnace, and thy food the hot savour of the flame. Shame on thee, I say!”
She paused a little to watch the effect of her speech upon the multitude, and seeing that it was favourable, changed her tone from one of remonstrance to one of command.
“Ho! place there,” she cried; “place, I say; make way for the Queens, and those whom the Queens cover with their ‘kaf’ (mantle).”
“And if I refuse, O Queen?” said Agon between his teeth.
“Then will I cut a path with my guards,” was the proud answer; “ay, even in the presence of the sanctuary, and through the bodies of thy priests.”
Agon turned livid with baffled fury. He glanced at the people as though meditating an appeal to them, but saw clearly that their sympathies were all the other way. The Zu-Vendi are a very curious and sociable people, and great as was their sense of the enormity that we had committed in shooting the sacred hippopotami, they did not like the idea of the only real live strangers they had seen or heard of being consigned to a fiery furnace, thereby putting an end forever to their chance of extracting knowledge and information from, and gossiping about us. Agon saw this and hesitated, and then for the first time Nyleptha spoke in her soft sweet voice.
“Bethink thee, Agon,” she said, “as my sister Queen hath said, these men may also be servants of the Sun. For themselves they cannot speak, for their tongues are tied. Let the matter be adjourned till such time as they have learned our language. Who can be condemned without a hearing? When these men can plead for themselves, then it will be time to put them to the proof.”
Here was a clever loophole of escape, and the vindictive old priest took it, little as he liked it.
“So be it, O Queens,” he said. “Let the men go in peace, and when they have learned our tongue then let them speak. And I, even I, will make humble supplication at the altar lest pestilence fall on the land by cause of the sacrilege.”
These words were received with a murmur of applause, and in another minute we were marching out of the temple surrounded by the royal guards.
But it was not till long afterwards that we learnt the exact substance of what had passed, and how hardly our lives had been wrung out of the cruel grip of the Zu-Vendi priesthood, in the face of which even the Queens were practically powerless. Had it not been for their strenuous efforts to protect us we should have been slain even before we set foot in the Temple of the Sun. The attempt to drop us bodily into the fiery pit as an offering was a last artifice to attain this end when several others quite unsuspected by us had already failed.
