but whether that be surname or forename"
Her smile became less mocking and more bitter. "I hight Basta, nothing more."
"Naught else? How meanest thou"
"I was born a slave. Like animals, slaves have no names save those their owners choose to give them. My mother was one of a thousand Tartar women sent by Tama Khan to Byzantium as an offering of good will to the Emperor Romanus. My father—perhaps he was a noble of the Emperor's suite, perhaps a guardsman or a muleteer. Who troubles to record the bedmates of a slave-girl, or a slave's paternity?
"At nine years I was sold to a bear-keeper in the circus. For the next three years I studied music, dancing and contortionism. I was a dancer in the Hippodrome at twelve. At thirteen I was given to a leader of the Greens, and taken by him to Ravenna when he went upon an embassy. Eyah! He lost horse and hound and hawk—and me—to a Borussian at the gaming-table, and my newest master carried me with other winnings to Cologne when we passed Count Otto's castle on the river."
She paused and shuddered slightly, as with sudden cold; then: "It was fortunate for me that I am beautiful. There were thirty members in my master's company. Ten were killed in trying to beat off Count Otto's men; the rest, including him who owned me, were pent up in the dungeons till the wolves desired sport and blood." She cupped her empty palms before her: "All are gone."
He dipped his fingers in a golden fingerbowl and dried them daintily on a damask napkin, for he had been most gently reared at the court of Ramon of Toulouse.
"And thou?" she asked.
"Tránseat!" He laughed, but not with mirth. "We be a well-assorted pair, we two. A slave-maid and a landless fugitive! My country is the Languedoc, the blessed land of Provence. It was a pleasant place, with smiling fields and bowered orchards and the warm sun overhead. Men lived happy and contented there. The husbandman worked in his fields and vineyards, in the halls the troubadours composed and sang gay songs, or gathered in the courts of love around the fairest of their ladies.
"Then came the wars—the Holy Wars—God save the Mark! Simon de Montfort and his butchers swept across the pleasant land as they had been a bloody plague. We fought them off, we Provenals, and Pedro, the good King of Aragon, rode in the field beside us with his chivalry, but we might as well have tried to beat the rising tide back with our swords. Our foemen showed no mercy. Captured knights were crucified on their own olive trees, or dragged to death at horses' tails. Seven thousand helpless babes and women suffered massacre when de Montfort stormed the town of Bezières, and beneath their flailing swords and pounding hooves the music of our troubadours and the chanting of our poets has been stilled for ever. Our fields are sown with corpses and our orchard trees are turned to gallows. All who remain alive are in one class or other, those who have yielded lands and goods and conscience to de Montfort, or those who fled with nothing but their lives. I was pushing toward the Polish kingdom with sword and services for sale when I met thee upon the mountainside. We be Fortune's fools, we two."
"Perhaps thy troubles near an end. Come, sit beside me," she commanded. "I'll rede the riddle of thy future, an it please thee."
