you loose, candidate?’
‘Oh, Madam, yes, I am, if you please; but I do not think I want an ordeal.’
‘The ordeal is customary.’
‘Let me see,’ continued the honorary colonel reflectively. ‘What was the last ordeal we had? Can you remember, Captain Balan?’
‘The ordeal, Ma’am,’ said the friendly merlin, ‘was to hang by my jesses during the third watch.’
‘If he is loose he cannot do that.’
‘You could strike him yourself, Ma’am,’ said the kestrel, ‘judiciously, you know.’
‘Send him over to stand by Colonel Cully while we ring three times,’ said the other merlin.
‘Oh, no!’ cried the crazy colonel in an agony out of his remoter darkness. ‘Oh no, your ladyship. I beg of you not to do that. I am such a damned villain, your ladyship, that I do not answer for the consequences. Spare the poor boy, your ladyship, and lead us not into temptation.’
‘Colonel, control yourself. That ordeal will do very well.’
‘Oh, Madam, I was warned not to stand by Colonel Cully.’
‘Warned? And by whom?’
The poor Wart realized that now he must choose between confessing himself a human, and learning no more of their secrets, or going through with this ordeal to earn his education. He did not want to be a coward.
‘I will stand by the Colonel, Madam,’ he said, immediately noticing that his voice sounded insulting.
The peregrine falcon paid no attention to the tone.
‘It is well,’ she said. ‘But first we must have a hymn. Now, padre, if you have not eaten your hymns as well as your tirings, will you be so kind as to lead us in Ancient but not Modern No. 23? The Ordeal Hymn.
‘And you, Mr Kee,’ she added to the kestrel, ‘you had better keep quiet, for you are always too high.’
The hawks stood still in the moonlight, while the spar-hawk counted, ‘One, Two, Three.’ Then all those curved or toothed beaks opened in their hoods to a brazen unison, and this is what they chanted:
Life is blood, shed and offered.
The eagle’s eye can face this dree.
To beasts of chase the lie is proffered:
TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME.
The beast of foot sings Holdfast only,
For flesh is bruckle and foot is slee.
Strength to the strong and the lordly and lonely.
TIMOR MORTIS EXULTAT ME.
Shame to the slothful and woe to the weak one.
Death to the dreadful who turn to flee.
Blood to the tearing, the talon’d, the beaked one.
TIMOR MORTIS are We.
‘Very nice,’ said the peregrine. ‘Captain Balan. I think you were a little off on the top C. And now, candidate, you will go over and stand next to Colonel Cully’s enclosure, while we ring our bells thrice. On the third ring you may move as quickly as you like.’
‘Very good, Madam,’ said the Wart, quite fearless with resentment. He flipped his wings and was sitting on the extreme end of the screen perch, next to Cully’s enclosure of string netting.
‘Boy!’ cried the Colonel in an unearthly voice, ‘don’t come near me, don’t come near. Ah, tempt not the foul fiend to his damnation.’
‘I do not fear you, sir,’ said the Wart. ‘Do not vex yourself, for no harm will come to either of us.’
‘No harm, quotha! Ah, go, before it is too late. I feel eternal longings in me.’
‘Never fear, sir. They have only to ring three times.’
At this the knights lowered their raised legs and gave them a solemn shake. The first sweet tinkling filled the room.
‘Madam, Madam!’ cried the Colonel in torture. ‘Have pity, have pity on a damned man of blood. Ring out the old, ring in the new. I can’t hold off much longer.’
‘Be brave, sir,’ said the Wart softly.
‘Be brave, sir! Why, but two nights since, one met the duke ’bout midnight in a lane behind Saint Mark’s Church, with the leg of a man upon his shoulder: and he howled fearfully.’
‘It is nothing,’ said the Wart.
‘Nothing! Said he was a wolf, only the difference was a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, his on the inside. Rip up my flesh and try. Ah, for quietus, with a bare bodkin!’
The bells rang for the second time.
The Wart’s heart was thumping, and now the Colonel was sidling toward him along the perch. Stamp, stamp, he went, striking the wood he trod on with a convulsive grip at every pace. His poor, mad, brooding eyes glared in the moonlight, shone against the persecuted darkness of his scowling brow. There was nothing cruel about him, no ignoble passion. He was terrified of the Wart, not triumphing, and he must slay.
‘If it were done when ’tis done,’ whispered the Colonel, ‘then ’twere well it were done quickly. Who would have thought the young man had so much blood in him?’
‘Colonel!’ said the Wart, but held himself there.
‘Boy!’ cried the Colonel. ‘Speak, stop me, mercy!’
‘There is a cat behind you,’ said the Wart calmly, ‘or a pinemarten. Look.’
The Colonel turned, swift as a wasp’s sting, and menaced into the gloom. There was nothing. He swung his wild eyes again upon the Wart, guessing the trick. Then, in the cold voice of an adder, ‘The bell invites me. Hear it not, Merlin, for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell.’
The third bells were indeed ringing as he spoke, and honour was allowed to move. The ordeal was over and the Wart might fly. But as he moved, but as he flew, quicker than any movement or flight in the world, the terrible sickles had shot from the Colonel’s planted legs – not flashed out, for they moved too quickly for sight – and with a thump, with a clutch, with an apprehension, like being arrested by a big policeman, the great scimitars had fixed themselves in his retreating thumb.
They fixed themselves, and fixed irrevocably. Gripe, gripe, the enormous thigh muscles tautened in two convulsions. Then the Wart was two yards further down the screen, and Colonel Cully was standing on one foot with a few meshes of string netting and the Wart’s false primary, with its covert-feathers, vice-fisted in the other. Two or three minor feathers drifted softly in a moonbeam toward the floor.
‘Well
