Lusnia did not know how grievous those words had made death to Azya; had he known, he would have repeated them during the whole journey.
But there was no time for regrets then; everything must give way before the execution. Lusnia stooped down, and taking Azya’s hips in both his hands to give them direction, called to the men holding the horses—
“Move! but slowly and together!”
The horses moved; the straightened ropes pulled Azya’s legs. In a twinkle his body was drawn along the earth and met the point of the stake. Then the point commenced to sink in him, and something dreadful began—something repugnant to nature and the feelings of man. The bones of the unfortunate moved apart from one another; his body gave way in two directions; pain indescribable, so awful that it almost bounds on some monstrous delight, penetrated his being. The stake sank more and more deeply. Azya fixed his jaws, but he could not endure; his teeth were bared in a ghastly grin, and out of his throat came the cry, “A! a! a!” like the croaking of a raven.
“Slowly!” commanded the sergeant.
Azya repeated his terrible cry more and more quickly.
“Art croaking?” inquired the sergeant.
Then he called to the men—
“Stop! together! There, it is done,” said he, turning to Azya, who had grown silent at once, and in whose throat only a deep rattling was heard.
The horses were taken out quickly; then men raised the stake, planted the large end of it in a hole prepared purposely, and packed earth around it. The son of Tugai Bey looked from above on that work. He was conscious. That hideous species of punishment is in this the more dreadful, that victims drawn on to the stake live sometimes three days. Azya’s head was hanging on his breast; his lips were moving, smacking, as if he were chewing something and tasting it. He felt then a great faintness, and saw before him, as it were, a boundless, whitish mist, which, it is unknown wherefore, seemed to him terrible; but in that mist he recognized the faces of the sergeant and the dragoons, he saw that he was on the stake, that the weight of his body was sinking him deeper and deeper. Then he began to grow numb from the feet, and began to be less and less sensitive to pain.
At times darkness hid from him that whitish mist; then he blinked with his one seeing eye, wishing to see and behold everything till death. His gaze passed with particular persistence from torch to torch, for it seemed to him that around each flame there was a rainbow circle.
But his torture was not ended; after a while the sergeant approached the stake with an auger in his hand, and cried to those standing near—
“Lift me up.”
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.
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
