27.Poictesme Reformed
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NOW the tale, for one reason and another, does not record the miracle which Yaotl performed. The Gods of Tollan were always apt to be misled by their queer notions of humor. Instead, the tale is of that Poictesme to which—borne by that favorable if malodorous wind which Yaotl provided and aimed,—Coth now perforce returned alone.
During the years of Coth’s absence there had been many changes. Nominally it was the Countess Niafer who ruled over this land, but she in everything seemed to be controlled by St. Holmendis of Philistia. About the intimacy between the Countess and her lean but sturdy adviser there was now no longer any gossip nor shrugging: people had grown used to this alliance, just as they were becoming reconciled to the reforms and the prohibitions which were its fruitage.
For now that Manuel was gone, Coth found, the times were changing for the better at a most uncomfortable rate. To Coth of the Rocks these days seemed to breed littler men, who, to be sure, if you cared about such kickshaws, lived more decorously than had livedtheir fathers, now that this overbearing St. Holmendis had come out of Philistia with his miracles: for this sacrosanct person would put up with no irregularity anywhere, and would hardly so much as tolerate the mildest form of wonder-working by anybody else. Even Guivric the Sage, who in the elder and more candid times had attended to all of Dom Manuel’s conjuring, now found it expedient to restrict his thaumaturgies to a wholly confidential practice.
For the rest, you could go for days now without encountering a warlock or a fairy; the people of Audela but rarely came out of the fire to make sport for and with mankind; and, while many persons furtively brewed spells at home, all traffic with spirits had to be conducted secretly. In fine, Poictesme was everywhere upon its most sedate behavior, because there was no telling when Holy Holmendis might be dealing with you for your own good; and the cowed province, just as Guivric had prophesied, stayed subject nowadays to a robustious saint conceived and nurtured and made holy in Philistia.
But yet another unsettling influence was abroad, nefariously laboring to keep everybody sanctimonious and genteel,—Coth said,—for over the entire land Coth found, and fretted under, the all-enveloping legend of Manuel the Redeemer. Coth found the land’s most holy place, now, to be that magnificent tomb which, in Coth’s absence, the Countess Niafer had reared atStorisende to the memory of her husband. And that this architectural perjury was handsome enough, even Coth admitted.
The intricately carved lower half of the sepulchre displayed eight alcoves in each of which was sealed the relic of one or another saint. The upper portion was the pedestal of a very fine equestrian statue of Dom Manuel with his lance raised, and in full armor, but wearing no helmet, so that the hero’s face was visible as he sat there, waiting, it seemed, and watching the North. Thus Manuel appeared to keep eternal guard against whatever enemy might dare molest the country which he had once redeemed from the Northmen. And there was never a more splendid looking champion than was this mimic Manuel, for the armor of this effigy was everywhere inset with jewels of every kind and color.
How Madame Niafer, who was, moreover, by ordinary a notably parsimonious person, had ever managed to pay for all these gems nobody could declare with certainty, but it was believed that Holy Holmendis had provided them through one or another pious miracle. Coth of the Rocks voiced an exasperated aspersion that they were paste; and declared paste gems to be wholly appropriate to the mortuary imposture. In any event, the Redeemer of Poictesme had been accorded the most magnificent sepulchre these parts had ever known.
And Coth found all this jewelry and tortured stone-work, as a work of art, to be wholly admirable, if youcared for such kickshaws. But as a tomb he considered it to lack at least one essential feature, in that it was empty.
Yet to most persons the emptiness of the great tomb was its peculiar sanctity. This spacious and proud glittering void was, to most persons, a perpetual reminder that Dom Manuel had ascended into heaven while yet alive, uncorrupted by the ignominy of death, and taking with him every heroic bone and bit of flesh, and every tiniest sinew, unmarred. That miracle—no more, to be sure, than the great Redeemer’s just due—most satisfactorily and most awfully accounted for the lack of any corpse, as surely as the lack of a corpse was the firm proof of the miracle; sublime verities here interlocked: and that miracle had been set above cavil when it was first revealed, by Heaven’s wisdom, through the unsullied innocence of a little child, lest in this world, men and women being what they are, by any scoffer the testimony of an adult evangelist might be suspected.
Coth, after hearing these axioms,—so unshakably established as axioms during the seven years of Coth’s absence,—would look meditatively at his young Jurgen, to whose extreme youth and comparative innocence this revelation had been accorded. The boy was now nearing manhood, he fell short in many respects of the virtues appropriate to an evangelist, and he confessed to remembering very faintly now that tremendous experience of his infancy. That hardly mattered, though, Cothwould reflect, when Poictesme at large was so industriously preserving and embroidering the tale which the dear brat had brought down from Upper Morven to explain away an over-night truancy from home.
“There is but one Manuel,” Coth would remark, to himself, “and—of all persons!—my Jurgen is his prophet. That kickshaw creed seems to content everybody, now that the rogue no longer bothers to provide an excuse for staying out all night.”