Zawis and Kunigunde/Chapter 23
CHAPTER XXIII.
MURDER OF ZAWIS BEFORE HLUBOKA.
Wenzel dispatched Jaroslav to Fürstenberg with instructions to observe and report the proceedings around that fortress. With Jaroslav and a few others,—close relations of persons in the same neighborhood—departed also several women; and the company soon rejoined Lord Boppo and his party. Approaching Fürstenberg, several of these persons purposely fell to the rear and disappeared. As they neared the fortress all eyes gazed on a dreadful scene.
In presence of the garrison who still held gates closed, and in fact all access barred, a number of ballistæ for the discharge of stone had been drawn up. Breastworks for the partial protection of bowmen sharpshooters had been erected. Seeing these preparations, the garrison hurled a defiance. On observing this proceeding, and expecting immediate hostilities, Duke Nicolas ordered a special guard to produce the wasted but still defiant person of Lord Zawis, to be fastened toa stake in the immediate front of the chief center of attack. A shout of rage, and the confusion of irresolution at once checked the operations of the defenders.
“Pay no heed to me,” loudly exclaimed Zawis to his followers; but his cry seemed not to have reached their hearing. Again and again he loudly exhorted his men to do their duty; and arrows on both sides fell around.
Hereupon Nicolas placed Zawis in the immediate front of the most advanced ballista. Here a stone from the walls crashed through the engine, striking splinters into the face of the exposed prisoner. “Not by our hands shall he die,” exclaimed his men. “We will forfeit our own lives first.” A parley succeeded and the garrison accepted terms, more favorable than they expected, as an encouragement to the others to surrender.
A similar exposure of the unflinching captive opposite the walls of Landskron and Landsberg produced a repetition of the same scene, with like results.
Having thus far succeeded, Nicolas next advanced against Hluboka. Here he published a proclamation offering terms to all except Witek, Wok, Drda, Boppo, and Solomon.
Within the fortress, accordingly, the menaced persons at once took refuge. With them entered a few others long associated with the household. To this proclamation Witek hurled a defiance in the form of a huge stone cast from the weightiest ballista on his wall.
Here had now assembled the last of the house of Fürstenberg, Witek, Wok, Lady Ludmila, together with Boppo, Solomon, Prokop, Agaphia Brszava, Sambor, Milada, and the strongest garrison the place could accommodate.
The men manned the walls and the women stood near to furnish fresh arrows, water, and sometimes stone, boiling water, and bundles of rags steeped in oil and then set on fire.
Again and again the assailants attempted escalade and were beaten back. Stones, arrows flew, and men on both sides fell rapidly. On the second day Drda fell from a blow of a stone that bruised his shoulder violently. Instantly Lady Ludmila knelt on the bloody rampart at his side. Cheering him up with affectionately soothing words, with the aid of a stout retainer she bore him to a shelter; and as he fainted from the shock she stooped and kissed him again and again; and raised his head, and gave him strong restoratives; and only left his side when the wounds had been bathed and bound, and he lay conscious but motionless on the soldier’s straw bed that her hands had smoothed and softened.
Gallantly did the defenders repel every attack, and the assailants seemed unequal to the reduction of the fortress.
On the fourth day Nicolas exposed his still defiant victim on the most conspicuous elevation whence the attack proceeded. Even this maneuver failed to check the storm from the wall, or diminish the resolution of the garrison.
Wenzel himself entered the besiegers’ camp; and perceiving the current of events, and finding himself not in fact the real commander, allowed Duke Nicolas to proceed with Zawis according to his pleasure.
Then with ostentatious purpose Nicolas ordered prepared a solid block of oak. This instrument he directed to be beveled down at one side until it formed a sharpened edge. Hardening this wooden knife in fire and setting it between two upright grooved posts, forming a sort of guillotine, Nicolas placed Zawis, bound to a plank underneath, so that his neck lay under the wooden knife raised up and weighted with stone. Then raising a shout, the assailants pointed to the rude scaffold, and tauntingly reproached the garrison with the murder of their master. A shower of stones and arrows answered; and Nicolas giving the order, the wooden knife descended, and with a horrid, jagged gash tore, rather than cut, the noble head of Lord Zawis from his body.
A pause intervened as the defenders stood agonized with the dreadful butchery. Siege operations temporarily ceased and even a few of the garrison ventured outside during the necessary burial of the dead. Among others Sambor went forth to inquire after former comrades. His good will towards Nicolas had not been augmented by the refusal of promised promotion when the opportunity came round. Among the dead lay two women, one closely veiled, her face wholly crushed by a stone, and unrecognizable. Nicolas, attracted by the report of the occurrence, repaired to the spot.
Sambor stood there among the soldiers.
“Can any person declare who that woman was?” asked Nicolas.
As yet no reply.
“I offer a reward and promotion to any one who can tell who that woman was.”
Then Sambor stepped forward; “I accept the offer,” he said, “if you will add to it a safe conduct from this place and from hence forward, in presence of these witnesses.”
“I accept the conditions,” replied Nicolas.
“Then,” said Sambor, “the woman who lies there, crushed and a bloody corpse, was your own mother! And as surely as Lord Zawis has met his death, as you say, by the hands of his own men, so surely has your mother met this fearful fate by your treachery and violence.”
Nicolas turned away, and departed covered with ignominy. Stout hands raised the remains of the dead women; and Sambor contrived to withdraw, no difficult albeit a bloody task now, the golden key and chain that hung around the neck of one of them.
Returning to the fortress, Sambor sought Agaphia, and handed her the still bloody trophy. “I promised you that,” he said. “Take it. But I impose no conditions. I cannot look upon a woman’s face without recalling the horrible scene I have witnessed. Let us part simply as friends.”
Agaphia, strangely wondering, took the gift and laid it away where only her own hand could find it.
With fiercer fury than ever Nicolas renewed the fight. The strength of the garrison declined. The assailants possessed the country, and reinforcements. Witek, and Wok, finding that Wenzel’s presence rendered resistance hopeless, resolved to retire to Hungary, leaving to the garrison the terms of accommodation offered. Nicolas prepared beacons to illuminate the hills in case of attempted escape.
Solomon resolved to accompany his friends. Boppo declared he would as soon die in one locality as another, and as well now as at any time. Issuing from the fortress at midnight, the outlawed men gained but a short distance when sentinels discovered their movement. A beacon fire raised the alarm, but blinded the eyes and intensified the shadows. A company of fifty men assailed the fugitives. Boppo set himself in front and took the first shock.
Well the old hero kept the path until Witek and Wok made good their escape. Falling at last, covered with blood, the gallant knight shaded his face with his broad sleeve and there, in the midst of his enemies, breathed his last.
Solomon, apprehended mortally wounded, lay where he fell until morning; and then, as the sun’s first rays beamed upon the spot, and shed a golden glory upon his face, he too yielded his spirit, to mingle, as he hoped, with the great Oneness of the hereafter.
To the garrison the promised terms were harshly accorded. Drda reached his own domain in Moravia; and an amnesty at once issued by Wenzel, without any exception, rendered Drda’s home the refuge of many of the remaining friends of the murdered chieftain.
In Solomon’s raiment was discovered a memorandum of the recent events intended as the basis of a formal report to King Ladislaus.
It stated the course of the recent negotiations, and tragedy involving the death of Zawis. Solomon also had included the representations laid before Wenzel to secure a revocation of his orders. It closed by stating that a refusal on the part of Wenzel to accept the conditions offered having been avoided by his candid avowal of non-complicity except under duress, the guilt became transferred to the court of Vienna.
This memorandum contained statements of such high political importance at the time, that it was forwarded to Hungary by Wenzel’s direct order, without being submitted to his Aulic council.
Ladislaus received this communication with deep concern, and ordered its formal portions to be read to his chief advisers. The paper created intense agitation, especially the following passage: “Thus by profound dissimulation, the abandonment of that unity whereon alone can states establish permanence, or acquire cohesion of their essential elements, has the guilt of this crime been transferred from the persons really culpable to the crown of Bohemia. Such is the tendency of that insidious policy that I observe is being established in modern kingdoms. The royal power is constituted the executioner of decrees that it does not formulate, and is rendered the active oppressor of its own subjects by appeals to its overstrained religious sentiment. A sensitiveness hostile to the ordinary pursuits of men is cultivated that mistakes inquiry into nature’s truths for enmity to spiritual conceptions.
“The beneficence that supplies its myriad blessings to us from the limitless store of nature’s sweets and essences is banished from multitudes whose exhausted strength is famished by its loss. The nourishment that would mingle with our constituent elements, and fill them with life and energy, yielding health and cheerfulness, is brushed from hungry lips, and men are consigned to want, and waste, and the breaking down of tissues, decay, and disease and death. The divine gifts implanted in herb and fruit, whereof the human frame is but the inspissated combination, is banished from its natural completion in its application to human nourishment; and the supernal virtues of love, generosity, justice, and purity that are diffused through the charms and the riches of nature, and would adorn the human soul if instilled through nature’s bounties, are violently banished from society. Thus cruelty, treachery, hatred, and vicious destructiveness are being implanted in men’s hearts through denial of the enrichment that would infuse tenderness of fecling together with richness of the blood. Poverty of the mind springs from depravation of the body; and so long as men hate and persecute and torture, and deaden the sensibilities of their frame, the wonder of all creation, so long also must they inflict on themselves vices of the mind. As the world is filled with mortification of the one it droops and is cursed with the depravities and vices of the other. Virtue is generally good food, warmth, absence of anxiety, freedom from the despair in feelings that spring from wasted and unhealthy bodies, and the consequent fierce longings that produce a tendency in the very flesh to reproduce the same conditions that it sprang from. If the mass of mankind in our cities are not thus nurtured we must anticipate only fierce animosities and contentions. The spirit of persecution that now pervades Europe springs directly from the multiplied famines, pestilences, black deaths, and similar horrors, that have at length produced their natural result in the ferocity of the human soul.”
The Lady Judith and her son, and the Lady Ludmila, and Agaphia, Milada and other of their former co-sufferers continued to reside in quietness at Fürstenberg. Here Lord Drda, and Nicolas Jaroslav, and Sambor found always a ready welcome. Gradually the soothing alleviation of time replaced the keen sufferings of the moment with a subdued cheerfulness that welcomed sympathy and love with a profounder appreciation.
The monument to Solomon at Ofen, and the simpler memorial tomb of Boppo at Gran long expressed the high estimation extended to those honored and lamented worthies.