"So Zalim didn't offer himself for the child?" he said to himself in his soul.
And he waited.
Meanwhile, something began to darken in the crenellations of the walls. Fur caps appeared, dark cowls, and even iron plates, beneath which curious eyes gazed at the knight. More and more gathered with each passing moment, for even that fearsome Jurand, waiting alone beneath the Teutonic gate, was no ordinary spectacle for the garrison.
Whoever had seen him before them had seen death, and now they could look at him safely. Heads rose higher and higher, until at last all the nearer crenellations were covered with men-at-arms. Jurand thought that surely the officers too must be watching him through the barred windows of the gate tower, and he raised his gaze upward, but the windows there were cut into the deep walls, and it was impossible to look through them except into the distance. Instead, on the battlements, the crowd that had at first stared at him in silence began to call out. One and another repeated his name; here and there laughter broke out, hoarse voices shouted as if at a wolf, louder and more insolent, and when clearly no one objected from within, they started finally to throw snow at the knight standing below.
He moved his horse forward, as if involuntarily, and for a moment the snowballs stopped flying, the voices fell silent, and even some heads disappeared behind the walls. Fearsome must Jurand's name truly have been. But soon the most cowardly recovered themselves, recalling that a moat and a wall separated them from the terrible Mazur, and so the coarse soldiery began to hurl not only clumps of snow, but ice, and even gravel and pebbles, which clattered off his armor and the caparison covering his horse.
"I offered myself for the child," Jurand repeated to himself.
And he waited. Noon came, the walls emptied as the men-at-arms were called to dinner. The few whose turn it was to stand guard ate on the walls, and after finishing their meal, they again amused themselves by tossing gnawed bones at the hungry knight. They also began to taunt one another, asking who would dare to go down and strike him on the neck with a fist or the shaft of a spear. Others, returning from dinner, called out that if he was tired of waiting, he could hang himself, for on the gallows there was one free hook with a ready noose. And amid such mockery, shouting, bursts of laughter, and curses, the afternoon hours passed. The short winter day gradually declined toward evening, but the drawbridge still hung in the air and the gate remained closed.
Toward evening, the wind rose, scattered the mists, cleared the sky, and revealed the sunset glow. The snows turned blue, then violet. There was no frost, but the night promised to be fair. The men withdrew from the walls except for the guards; ravens and crows flew from the gallows toward the forests. Finally the sky darkened, and complete stillness fell.
"They won't open the gate before night," thought Jurand.
And for a moment the thought crossed his mind to turn back to the town, but he immediately abandoned it. "They want me to stay here," he said to himself in his soul. "If I turn back, they'll surely not let me go home, but will surround me, and then they'll say they owe me nothing because they took me by force, and even if I ride through them, I'll still have to return..."
The extraordinary endurance of Polish knights in cold, hunger, and hardship—admired by foreign chroniclers—often allowed them to accomplish feats beyond the reach of more effete men from the West. And Jurand possessed this endurance to an even greater degree than others; so although hunger had long since begun to twist his insides, and the evening chill had penetrated his fur-lined, iron-plated coat, he resolved to wait, even if he should die beneath that gate.
Suddenly, however, before complete darkness fell, he heard the crunch of footsteps on the snow behind him.
He turned: six armed men with lances and halberds were coming toward him from the direction of the town, and in their midst walked a seventh, leaning on a sword.
"Perhaps they'll open the gate and I'll ride in with them," thought Jurand. "They won't try to take me by force—there are too few of them; but if they do attack me, it'll be a sign they mean to keep nothing, and then—woe to them!"
With this thought, he raised the steel ax hanging at his saddle—so heavy that it would have been too heavy even for the two hands of an ordinary man—and rode toward them on his horse.
But they had no intention of attacking him. On the contrary, the men-at-arms immediately planted the butts of their lances and halberds in the snow—and since the night was not yet fully dark, Jurand noticed that their hands trembled somewhat as they held them.
The seventh, who appeared to be their leader, hastily extended his left arm toward him, palm upward with fingers spread, and spoke:
"Are you, Knight, Jurand of Spychów?"
"I am."
"Are you willing to hear what I was sent to tell you?"
"I am listening."
"The mighty and pious Komtur von Danveld bids me tell you, my lord, that until you dismount from your horse, the gate will not be opened to you."
Jurand remained motionless for a moment, then dismounted from his horse, which one of the spearmen immediately rushed to take.
"And your weapons are to be given to us," said the man with the sword again.
The lord of Spychów hesitated. What if they then attacked him unarmed and stabbed him like an animal? What if they seized him and threw him into a dungeon? But after a moment he reflected that if that were their plan, they would have sent more men. For if they meant to rush him, they wouldn't pierce his armor at once, and then he could snatch the weapon from the nearest man and kill them all before help arrived. They knew him, after all.
"And even if," he said to himself, "they intend to draw blood from me, that is no other purpose for which I came."
With this thought, he threw down his ax, then his sword, then his misericorde—and waited. They gathered everything up, and then the man who had spoken to him, after stepping back a dozen paces, stopped and began to speak in a bold, raised voice:
"For all the wrongs you have done to the Order, on the Komtur's orders you are to put on this coarse penitential sack I leave for you, tie your sword scabbard around your neck with a rope, and wait humbly at the gate until the Komtur's grace sees fit to have it opened."
And after a moment, Jurand was left alone in the darkness and silence. On the snow before him lay the black penitential sack and the rope, and he stood a long time, feeling something in his soul unravel, break, die, and perish—and that in a moment he would no longer be a knight, no longer be Jurand of Spychów, but a wretch, a slave without name, without fame, without honor.
So long moments passed before he approached the penitential sack and began to say:
"How can I do otherwise? You, Christ, know—they will strangle the innocent child if I do not do everything they command. And You also know that for my own life I would not do this! Bitter is disgrace!... bitter! But they humiliated You too before Your death. Well, in the name of the Father and the Son..."
Then he bent down, put on the sack, in which holes had been cut for his head and arms, then hung the sword scabbard around his neck on the rope—and dragged himself before the gate.
He did not find it open, but now it was all the same to him whether they opened it sooner or later. The castle sank into the silence of night; only the guards called out to one another occasionally from the corners. In the gate tower, one small window shone high up; the others were dark.
The hours of the night flowed one after another; the crescent moon rose into the sky and illuminated the grim castle walls. The silence became so complete that Jurand could have heard his own heartbeat. But he was benumbed and completely petrified, as if his soul had been taken from him, and he no longer comprehended anything. Only one thought remained: that he had ceased to be a knight, Jurand of Spychów, but what he was—he did not know... At times, too, something flickered through his mind: that in the night, from those hanged men he had seen in the morning, Death was coming toward him softly over the snow...
Suddenly he started and woke fully:
"O merciful Christ! What is that?"
From the high window in the gate tower came some sounds of a lute, barely audible at first. Jurand, riding to Szczytno, had been certain that Danusia was not in the castle, and yet that voice of the lute at night stirred his heart in an instant. It seemed to him that he knew those sounds, and that no one else was playing but she—his child! his beloved! So he fell to his knees, clasped his hands in prayer, and trembling as if in a fever, listened.
And then a half-childish voice, as if filled with immense longing, began to sing:
"If I had but little wings,
Like a goose so light and free,
I would fly away, my dear,
To Silesia, following thee..."
Jurand wanted to speak, to cry out the beloved name, but the words stuck in his throat as if gripped by an iron band. A sudden flood of pain, tears, longing, and misery swelled in his chest, so he threw himself face-down in the snow and in rapture began to call out to heaven in his soul, as if in thankful prayer:
"O Jesus! I still hear the child! O Jesus!..."
And sobbing began to wrack his giant body. Above, the yearning voice sang on in the undisturbed stillness of the night:
"I would sit me down, my dear,
On the Silesian fence so low;
Look upon me, Jasieńko,
On your orphan girl, brought low..."
In the morning, a thick-bearded German man-at-arms began to kick the knight lying by the gate in the hip:
"On your feet, you dog!... The gate is open, and the Komtur has ordered you to appear before him."
Jurand woke as if from a dream. He did not seize the man-at-arms by the throat, did not crush him in his iron hands; his face was quiet and almost humble. He rose and, without saying a word, followed the soldier through the gate.
But he had barely passed through when the grating of chains sounded behind him, and the drawbridge began to rise upward, while in the gate itself a heavy iron portcullis crashed down...