第64章

"Nobles! Let not any who are troubled by the piteous end of Horwendil be worried by the sight of this disaster before you; be not ye, I say, distressed, who have remained loyal to your king and duteous to your father.Behold the corpse, not of a prince, but of a fratricide.Indeed, it was a sorrier sight when ye saw our prince lying lamentably butchered by a most infamous fratricide-brother, let me not call him.With your own compassionating eyes ye have beheld the mangled limbs of Horwendil; they have seen his body done to death with many wounds.Surely that most abominable butcher only deprived his king of life that he might despoil his country of freedom! The hand that slew him made you slaves.Who then so mad as to choose Feng the cruel before Horwendil the righteous? Remember how benignantly Horwendil fostered you, how justly he dealt with you, how kindly he loved you.Remember how you lost the mildest of princes and the justest of fathers, while in his place was put a tyrant and an assassin set up; how your rights were confiscated;how everything was plague-stricken; how the country was stained with infamies; how the yoke was planted on your necks, and how, your free will was forfeited! And now all this is over; for ye see the criminal stifled in his own crimes, the slayer of his kin punished for his misdoings.What man of but ordinary wit, beholding it, would account this kindness a wrong? What sane man could be sorry that the crime has recoiled upon the culprit? Who could lament the killing of a most savage executioner? Or bewail the righteous death of a most cruel despot? Ye behold the doer of the deed; he is before you.Yea, I own that I have taken vengeance for my country and my father.Your hands were equally bound to the task which mine fulfilled.What it would have beseemed you to accomplish with me, I achieved alone.Nor had Iany partner in so glorious a deed, or the service of any man to help me.Not that I forget that you would have helped this work, had I asked you; for doubtless you have remained loyal to your king and loving to your prince.But I chose that the wicked should be punished without imperilling you; I thought that others need not set their shoulders to the burden when I deemed mine strong enough to bear it.Therefore I consumed all the others to ashes, and left only the trunk of Feng for your hands to burn, so that on this at least you may wreak all your longing for a righteous vengeance.Now haste up speedily, heap the pyre, burn up the body of the wicked, consume away his guilty limbs, scatter his sinful ashes, strew broadcast his ruthless dust; let no urn or barrow enclose the abominable remnants of his bones.Let no trace of his fratricide remain; let there be no spot in his own land for his tainted limbs; let no neighbourhood suck infection from him; let not sea nor soil be defiled by harboring his accursed carcase.I have done the rest; this one loyal duty is left for you.These must be the tyrant's obsequies, this the funeral procession of the fratricide.It is not seemly that he who stripped his country of her freedom should have his ashes covered by his country's earth.

"Besides, why tell again my own sorrows? Why count over my troubles? Why weave the thread of my miseries anew? Ye know them more fully than I myself.I, pursued to the death by my stepfather, scorned by my mother, spat upon by friends, have passed my years in pitiable wise, and my days in adversity; and my insecure life has teemed with fear and perils.In fine, Ipassed every season of my age wretchedly and in extreme calamity.

Often in your secret murmurings together you have sighed over my lack of wits; there was none (you said) to avenge the father, none to punish the fratricide.And in this I found a secret testimony of your love; for I saw that the memory of the King's murder had not yet faded from your minds.

"Whose breast is so hard that it can be softened by no fellow-feeling for what I have felt? Who is so stiff and stony, that he is swayed by no compassion for my griefs? Ye whose hands are clean of the blood of Horwendil, pity your fosterling, be moved by my calamities.Pity also my stricken mother, and rejoice with me that the infamy of her who was once your queen is quenched.

For this weak woman had to bear a twofold weight of ignominy, embracing one who was her husband's brother and murderer.