Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/368

344 He, as if unconsciously, moved forward with his horse, then in one instant the lumps of snow ceased to fly, the voices stopped, and even some heads disappeared behind the wall. Terrible indeed must have been Yurand's name. But even the most cowardly recollected that a moat and a wall divided them from the terrible Mazovian, so the rude soldiery began again to hurl not only balls of snow, but ice, rubbish, and small stones, which rebounded with a noise from his armor and the horse-trappings.

"I have sacrificed myself for my child," repeated Yurand to himself.

And he waited. Then noon came; the walls were deserted; the soldiers were summoned to dinner. Not many were those whose duty it was to stand guard, but they ate on the wall, and after eating amused themselves again by throwing bare bones at the hungry knight. They began also to talk among themselves, and inquire one of the other who would undertake to go down and give the knight a blow on the neck with a fist or the shaft of a lance. Others, after returning from dinner, called to him, saying that if disgusted with waiting, he might hang himself; for there was one unoccupied hook on the gibbet and a rope with it. Amid such ridicule, cries, outbursts of laughter, and curses, the afternoon hours passed away. The short winter day inclined to its close gradually, but the bridge was ever in the air, and the gate remained fastened.

Toward evening the wind rose, blew away the fog, cleared the sky, and disclosed the brightness of evening. The snow became blue, and afterward violet. There was no frost, but the night promised clear skies. The people went down from the walls again, except the guards; the crows and rooks flew away from the gibbet to the forest. At last the sky became dark, and complete silence followed.

"They will not open the gate till sometime about night," thought Yurand. And for a while it passed through his head to return to the town, but immediately he rejected the idea. "They want me here," said he. "If I turn back they will not let me go to a house, but will surround me, seize me, and then say that they are not bound to me in anything; for they took me by force; and, though I should ride through them, I should have to return."

That immense power of Polish knights in enduring cold, hunger, and toil, admired by foreign chroniclers, allowed them frequently to perform deeds which more effeminate