"I don't know, sir!"
The old man smiled a harrowing smile and said gently:
"My child, I'm asking you: is the chapel ready?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good. Tell Diederich to come here with a lantern and wait until I return. Have him bring a brazier of coals too. Is there light in the chapel yet?"
"Candles are burning by the coffin."
Siegfried put on his cloak and left.
Once inside the chapel, he looked around from the door to make sure no one was there, then closed it carefully. He approached the coffin, moved two of the six candles that burned beside it in great brass candlesticks, and knelt down.
His lips did not move at all—he was not praying. For a while he simply stared at the stiffened but still handsome face of Rotgier, as if searching for traces of life in it.
Then, in the silence of the chapel, he began to call in a subdued voice:
"Son! My son!"
He fell silent. It seemed he was waiting for an answer.
Next, reaching out his hands, he slid his thin, claw-like fingers under the cloak covering Rotgier's chest and began to touch him. He felt everywhere—in the middle, on the sides, below the ribs, near the collarbones—and finally, through the cloth, he found a gash running from the top of the right shoulder down to the armpit. He pressed his fingers into it, ran them along the entire length of the wound, and again spoke in a voice trembling with what sounded like lament:
"Oh! What a merciless blow! And you said that one—that other fellow—was just a boy! The whole arm! The whole arm! So many times you raised it against pagans in defense of the Order. And now a Polish axe has cut it off. And here is your end! Here is your limit! Christ did not bless you, because apparently one human wrong matters more to Him than our entire Order. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit: you did not defend the truth, you fell for a lie, without absolution—and perhaps your soul..."
The words died on his lips, his mouth began to tremble, and again a dead silence filled the chapel.
"Son! My son!"
Now there was a plea in Siegfried's voice, and he called even more quietly, like a man asking about some important and terrible secret:
"Merciful Christ! If you are not damned, give me a sign: move your hand, or open your eyes for an instant—because my heart is howling in this old chest. Give me a sign—I loved you—speak!"
He rested his hands on the edge of the coffin, fixed his vulture eyes on Rotgier's closed eyelids, and waited.
"Bah! How can you speak?" he said at last. "Cold and foulness emanate from you. But since you are silent, I will tell you something, and let your soul fly here between the burning candles and listen."
Having said this, he leaned down to the corpse's face:
"Do you remember how the chaplain would not let Jurand be finished off, and how we swore to him? And well: I will keep the oath, but I will gladden you, wherever you are, even if I myself should be damned."
Having said that, he drew back from the coffin, replaced the candlesticks he had moved earlier, covered the corpse with the cloak along with its face, and left the chapel.
At the door to the chamber, a servant lay asleep, overcome by deep slumber. Inside, waiting for Siegfried as ordered, stood Diederich.
He was a short, stocky man with bow legs and a square face, partly hidden by a dark, toothed hood that fell onto his shoulders. He wore an unbleached buffalo-hide tunic, and around his hips a buffalo-leather belt with a bunch of keys and a short knife tucked into it. In his right hand he held an iron lantern covered with horn panes, and in the other a copper brazier and a torch.
"Are you ready?" Siegfried asked.
Diederich bowed silently.
"I ordered you to have coals in the brazier."
The stocky man again said nothing, but pointed to the logs burning in the hearth. He took an iron shovel standing by the hearth, raked coals from beneath them into the brazier, then lit the lantern and waited.
"Now listen, you dog," said Siegfried. "Once you blabbed about what Komtur Danveld ordered you to do, and the komtur had your tongue cut out. But since you can still show the chaplain anything you want on your fingers, I'm warning you: if you show him, with even one motion, what you will do on my orders, I'll have you hanged."
Diederich bowed again silently, but his face tightened ominously at the terrible memory, for his tongue had been torn out for an entirely different reason than what Siegfried said.
"Now go ahead and lead me to Jurand's dungeon."
The executioner grabbed the handle of the brazier with his enormous hand, raised the lantern, and they left. Beyond the door they passed the sleeping servant, and going down the stairs, they turned not toward the main entrance but toward the back of the stairs, behind which stretched a narrow corridor running the entire width of the building, ending in a heavy wicket hidden in a niche in the wall. Diederich opened it, and they found themselves again under the open sky, in a small courtyard surrounded on all sides by stone granaries where grain supplies were stored in case of a siege. Beneath one of these granaries, on the right side, were the dungeons for prisoners. No guard stood there, because even if a prisoner managed to break out of the dungeon, he would find himself in the courtyard, whose only exit was through that same wicket.
"Wait!" said Siegfried.
He leaned his hand against the wall and stopped, because he felt something was wrong—he was short of breath, as if his chest were locked in too tight a breastplate. Simply put, what he had been through was too much for his old strength. He also felt his forehead growing damp under the hood with drops of sweat, and he decided to rest a moment.
After that gloomy day, the night had turned extraordinarily clear. The moon shone in the sky, and the entire little courtyard was flooded with bright light, making the snow glisten green. Siegfried greedily drew the fresh, slightly frosty air into his lungs. But at the same time he remembered that on such a luminous night Rotgier had ridden out to Ciechanow, from where he had returned a corpse.
"And now you lie in the chapel," he muttered quietly.
Diederich, thinking the komtur was speaking to him, raised the lantern and lit up his face—terribly pale, almost corpse-like, but at the same time resembling the head of an old vulture.
"Lead on!" said Siegfried.
The yellow circle of light from the lantern swayed again on the snow, and they moved on. In the thick wall of the granary there was a recess, where a few steps led down to a large iron door. Diederich opened it and began to descend the steps into a black abyss, raising the lantern high to light the way for the komtur. At the bottom of the steps was a corridor, with extremely low wickets on the right and left leading to prison cells.
"To Jurand!" said Siegfried.
After a moment, the bolts creaked and they entered. But the pit was completely dark, so Siegfried, unable to see well by the dim lantern light, ordered a torch to be lit. Soon, in the strong blaze of its flame, he saw Jurand lying on straw. The prisoner had shackles on his legs, and on his arm a somewhat longer chain, allowing him to raise food to his mouth. He was dressed in the same coarse sackcloth in which he had stood before the komturs, but now it was covered with dark traces of blood, because on the day when the fight had been ended—only after the knight, mad with pain and fury, had been entangled in a net—the knaves had wanted to finish him off and had inflicted a dozen or so wounds with their halberds. The local chaplain from Szczytno had prevented the killing, and the blows proved not to be fatal, though so much blood had drained from Jurand that he was carried back to the dungeon half-dead. In the castle, everyone thought he would die any moment, but his enormous strength overcame death, and he lived—even though his wounds had not been dressed and he had been thrown into a terrible underground cell where, during thaws, water dripped from the vaults, and during frosts the walls were covered with a thick rime of snow and ice crystals.
So he lay on the straw in chains, powerless, but so huge that, especially lying down, he gave the impression of a chunk of rock carved into human shape. Siegfried had the torch shone directly into his face and stared at it for a while in silence. Then he turned to Diederich and said:
"You see he has only one eye: burn it out."
There was a certain feebleness and decrepitude in his voice, but precisely for that reason the terrible command seemed even more dreadful. The torch trembled slightly in the executioner's hand. Nevertheless, he tilted it, and soon great, burning drops of pitch began to fall onto Jurand's eye, and finally covered it entirely from the brow to the protruding cheekbone.
Jurand's face contracted, his flaxen mustache rose upward, revealing clenched teeth, but he did not say a word—whether from exhaustion or from the innate stubbornness of his terrible nature, he did not even utter a groan.
And Siegfried said:
"You were promised that you would go free, and you will go free. But you will not be able to accuse the Order, because the tongue with which you blasphemed against it will be taken from you."
He gave another sign to Diederich, but the latter uttered a strange, guttural sound and indicated by gestures that he needed both hands, and also that he wanted the komtur to hold the light for him.
Then the old man took the torch and held it out with a trembling hand. However, when Diederich pressed his knees against Jurand's chest, he turned his head and stared at the frost-covered wall.
For a moment the clanking of chains was heard, then the labored breathing of human lungs, something like a single dull, deep groan, and then silence.
Finally Siegfried's voice spoke again:
"Jurand, the punishment you have suffered was meant for you anyway, but in addition, I promised Brother Rotgier—whom your daughter's husband killed—that I would place your right hand in his coffin."
Diederich, who had already straightened up, hearing these words, bent over Jurand again.
After some time, the old komtur and Diederich found themselves again in that moonlit courtyard. Crossing the corridor, Siegfried took from the executioner's hands the lantern and a dark object wrapped in a rag and said aloud to himself:
"Now back to the chapel, then to the tower."
Diederich looked at him sharply, but the komtur ordered him to go to sleep. He himself trudged away, swinging the lantern, toward the illuminated chapel windows. On the way, he reflected on what had happened. He felt a certain certainty that his own end was coming, and that these were his last deeds on earth, for which he would have to answer only before God. And yet his Krzyżak soul—though by nature more cruel than deceitful—had become so accustomed, under the pressure of inexorable necessity, to evasions, trickery, and covering up the Order's bloody deeds that even now he involuntarily thought that he could cast both the shame and the responsibility for Jurand's torment off himself and the Order. After all, Diederich, being mute, could confess nothing; and though he could communicate with the chaplain, he would not do so out of sheer fear. So what? Who could prove that Jurand had not received all those wounds in battle? He could easily have lost his tongue from a spear thrust between his teeth, a sword or an axe could easily have cut off his right hand, and he had only one eye, so what wonder that it was knocked out when he himself, in his madness, had thrown himself against the entire garrison of Szczytno? Ah, Jurand! For a moment the last joy in his life shook the old Krzyżak's heart. Yes, Jurand, if he survived, must be set free! Here Siegfried remembered how once they had discussed it with Rotgier, and how the young brother, laughing, had said: "Let him then go wherever his eyes take him, and if he cannot find his way to Spychow, let him ask for directions." For what had happened had already been partly decided between them. But now, when Siegfried entered the chapel again, and kneeling by the coffin, placed Jurand's hand at Rotgier's feet, that last joy that had flickered in him a moment ago shone on his face for the last time.
"You see," he said, "I have done more than we agreed. King John of Luxembourg, though blind, still stood to fight and died gloriously, but Jurand will no longer stand and will die like a dog under a fence."
Here he again felt short of breath, as before when he had gone to Jurand, and a weight on his head like an iron helmet, but it lasted only a moment. He drew a deep breath and said:
"Well, it's time for me too. I had only you; now I have no one. But if I am destined to live still, I vow to you, my son, that I will place that other hand—the hand that killed you—on your grave, or die myself. Your killer still lives..."
His teeth clenched, a spasm seized him so violently that the words died on his lips. Only after some time did he begin to speak again in a broken voice:
"Yes... your killer still lives, but I will reach him... and before I reach him, I will inflict on him a torture worse than death itself."
He fell silent.
After a moment he stood up, approached the coffin, and began to speak in a calm voice:
"Well, I'll say goodbye to you. Let me look at your face one last time—maybe I'll know if you are pleased with the promise. One last time!"
He uncovered Rotgier's face. But suddenly he drew back.
"You're smiling," he said, "but you smile terribly."
Indeed, the body had thawed under the cloak, or perhaps under the warmth of the candles, and as a result had begun to decompose with extraordinary speed. The young komtur's face had indeed become terrible. His hugely swollen and blackened ears had something monstrous about them, and his blue, bloated lips were twisted as if in a smile.
Siegfried quickly covered that horrible human mask.
Then he took the lantern and left. On the way he was short of breath for the third time. Returning to his chamber, he threw himself onto his hard monastic bed and lay motionless for a while. He thought he would fall asleep, but suddenly a strange feeling came over him. It seemed to him that sleep would never come to him again, and instead, if he stayed in this chamber, death would come at once.
Siegfried was not afraid of death. In his immense weariness and with no hope of sleep, he saw in it some great rest, but he did not want to yield to it that night. So sitting on the bed, he began to say:
"Grant me time until tomorrow."
And then he distinctly heard some voice whispering in his ear:
"Leave this chamber. Tomorrow it will be too late, and you will not fulfill what you promised. Leave this chamber!"
The komtur rose with difficulty and went out. On the battlements, the guards were calling to each other from the corners. Near the chapel, a yellow glow from the windows fell onto the snow. In the middle of the courtyard, by the stone well, two black dogs were playing, tugging at some rag. Otherwise, the courtyard was empty and quiet.
"So it must be this very night?" said Siegfried. "Oh, I am weary beyond measure, but I am going. Everyone sleeps, only I cannot sleep. I go, I go, because death is in the chamber, and I have promised you. But after that, let death come, since sleep will not come. You smile there, and I lack strength. You smile, so you must be pleased. Only, you see, my fingers have gone numb, my strength has left my hands, and I cannot do it myself. The servant girl who sleeps with her will do it."
Talking thus, he walked with a heavy step toward the tower standing by the gate. Meanwhile, the dogs that had been playing by the stone well ran up to him and began to fawn. In one of them, Siegfried recognized the mastiff that was Diederich's inseparable companion, so much so that they said in the castle that it served him as a pillow at night.
The dog, having greeted the komtur, barked softly once or twice, then turned toward the gate and began to walk toward it, as if guessing the man's thoughts.
Siegfried found himself after a moment in front of the narrow door of the tower, which was bolted from the outside at night. He slid back the bolts, felt for the railing of the stairs that began just beyond the door, and began to climb. Having forgotten the lantern in his mental turmoil, he went up in the dark, stepping carefully and searching for steps with his feet.
Suddenly, after a few steps, he stopped, because above him, just overhead, he heard something like the panting of a man or an animal.
"Who's there?"
There was no answer, only the panting grew faster.
Siegfried was a fearless man—he was not afraid of death—but even his courage and self-control had drained to the bottom on this terrible night. A thought flashed through his mind that the way was blocked by Rotgier, or perhaps an evil spirit. His hair stood on end, and his forehead broke out in a cold sweat.
He retreated almost to the very exit.
"Who's there?" he asked in a choked voice.
But at that moment, something struck him in the chest with such terrible force that the old man fell backward through the open door, unconscious, without uttering a groan.
Silence fell. Then a dark figure slipped out of the tower and, stealthily, began to flee toward the stables lying next to the arsenal on the left side of the courtyard. Diederich's great mastiff ran after it in silence. The other dog also leaped after them and disappeared into the shadow of the wall, but soon reappeared with its head lowered to the ground, trotting slowly back as if scenting the tracks of the others. In this way it approached the motionless Siegfried, sniffed him carefully, and finally sat down by his head, lifted its muzzle, and began to howl.
The howling echoed for a long time, filling the grim night with renewed sorrow and horror. At last the door hidden in the recess of the great gate creaked open, and the gatekeeper appeared in the courtyard with a halberd.
"Plague take this dog!" he said. "I'll teach you to howl at night."
He leveled the blade and was about to thrust it into the animal when he saw that someone was lying near the open door of the tower.
"Herr Jesus! What's this?"
He bent down, looked at the face of the man lying there, and began to shout:
"Come! Come! Help!"
Then he jumped to the gate and tugged with all his might at the bell rope.
END OF PART V.
The text is in the public domain. License details on the author's website: Henryk Sienkiewicz.