Part 7

The watcher sprang up at his post, troubled, alert. What did this portend? He leaned over to seek that minstrel who sang to prisoners, and send an arrow through him; but the minstrel had disappeared; nor was he heard from for weary weeks; but then came from England a demand for release so peremptory that Henry sulkily felt compelled to accept the ransom money and set King Richard free. Blithely the King took leave of his surly host whose hotel bill was so high, as is somewhat the fashion in that region to this day. The sun shone gloriously as it seemed sun never shone before. The birds made the air ring with music. Yet no melody that Richard ever heard again was likely to seem as sweet to him as did that song of Blondel's when it came stealing so helpfully through the narrow slits that served as windows in his dungeon cell.

This is the legend. Possibly it is true. But there is another story told about it which perhaps is the real one: for men do say that the emperor, Henry, was so elated with his luck in having as a prisoner the man he hated that he had to tell someone about it. The friend he chose to tell it to was Philip, King of France, or else Philip learned of it in some other way. At least he passed the news onward by letter to someone else; and so in time the ransom came and Richard was brought back again. I tell you this, because our story began in Myth, but now, as you see, already we have got to History.

SPARK XI.

HOW THE STAR WAS PRESENT AT THE GREAT GIFT OF THE BARONS.

If you think about it for a moment you will see that we cannot stop to tell of all the wonderful things which the Iron Star saw in its travels, nor can we talk of an event for every year. We must do as sometimes you see the swallows do when they go skimming across a lake, not stopping at every wave, yet now and then making a little splash as a beakful of water is scooped up, or perhaps a floating fly. And possibly you are wondering just why we took that last little dip of ours into the Crusades; but there was a reason.

You will remember that one of the first things that our Star did was to travel, and the boy and girl of that day travelled with it, thus seeing things which they never would have seen had they stayed at home. So now, the Crusades were the cause of many a young Englishman's starting off for a new land, and such of them as came back brought with them new ideas and memories of many strange bits of knowledge to talk about in the long evenings. To a land of wool and leather they brought back silks and other luxuries, and they had discovered that there were good things to eat in the world besides beef and mutton or wild venison; and the dignified manners and stately speech of the Arab chiefs, whom they met in moments of truce, had their effect as models in spite of race hatred. These were not bad matters for England to know about.

Unfortunately, in such a time the best and bravest men are apt to be among the first to go, while those who stay at home are more likely to be of the less worthy. Prince John, who stayed at home, so proved himself. First, when King Richard was away fighting, and his mother, Queen Eleanor, was regent--that is to say, was ruling the land for him until he returned--John lived in England like a prince, and a very bad prince at that. He ran in debt, he lived fast, and by his example he set such a wicked fashion for his friends to imitate that, outside of his set, no one could live and be safe and happy, the prince acting very much as though he were already king. When it was reported that Richard was a prisoner, instead of planning how to help him, John said to himself,

"Hurrah! now I will be king for myself, not king for my brother!" and plotted to do evil with his new power. In "Ivanhoe" it is stated that he even tried to have his brother killed when at last he reached home from his prison beyond the seas. It is very likely, as you will see from what did happen later.

A large part of what is now France in those days still was under English rule; or, more correctly, England was ruled by the king of that part of France and by the warriors who had come from there. Richard and John, _both Frenchmen_ by descent, had a young nephew named Arthur, who ruled over Normandy, Aquitaine, Bretagne and other French land, and this land John had long desired to add to his own private farm. One day Richard was killed while attacking a rebellious castle, and John at once said to himself,

"Now is my chance!"

He promptly made a prisoner of boy Arthur, and shut him up in a great tower. Very piteous tales are told of what happened next. Some say that John ordered a hardhearted servant to burn out Arthur's beautiful blue eyes with a hot iron. What John himself said was that "the boy died in prison," and that to him as next of kin belonged those fair lands of Aquitaine beyond the English Channel.

But what the world said, and especially the Pope, who at that time was the all-powerful ruler of all Christian men in matters of right and religion, was,

"You murdered him for his lands; but it shall profit you nothing, for not one penny of his wealth shall come to you. Another man shall be the heir." And it was so.

This made John very angry, but that did not give him the money for which he had so deeply sinned. We in our day wonder that he himself was not put in prison and killed in punishment for the deed. But kings had great powers in those days. They could condemn a man to death if they would; if it was not done too often, the rest of the world felt to make sure that more heads were not loose on their shoulders, and were too grateful to find them safe to murmur about the fate of other heads, lest a worse thing befall.

Perhaps, when things became _too_ bad, some revengeful man who had been deeply injured would try to meet evil with evil by murdering the king, or by getting up a war against him. In either case, many innocent men had to suffer from the evils that grew out of it.

But one day a better way was found. Louis of Daneshold was now a grave, broadshouldered, powerful man. The Crusades had knit together the knights and barons of England into a close brotherhood, and for the king to harm one was likely to arouse the wrath of all. The young men who had faced the Saracens and fought shoulder to shoulder in Palestine were now in England the men of mark, whose words had to be listened to and heeded by all who would keep out of trouble. Hotheaded John was not one to put a check on his tongue when it would be wise to do so, and hardly was Richard buried when John found himself at odds with Louis and his comrades. They would not submit to his evil doings as king. They would not permit him to take for his own use the lands, cattle, money which they had earned by hard fighting. And finally, when he had a war of his own on his hands in Flanders, fighting French nobles, the English lords flatly refused to follow him across the water, since they had neither love for him as a king nor confidence in him as a leader; and as to the war itself it was king against baron, and they sided with the baron. As a consequence, John came back to England again, well beaten; and he did not love those barons!

For a time after his return he tried to smooth things over and bring back the old way of kingly rule once more. But those stern-eyed men, clad in steel, had tasted freedom. They knew their own strength now. Was it likely that Louis of Daneshold, with the blood of Norse ancestors in his veins, and those Crusader comrades of his, every whit as sturdy fighters, would hold in great respect a tricky king, a murderer of little boys, a man who could not lead to victory in his own battle? No! a thousand times no! And iron clanged on iron when word from the King was brought to the nobles as they camped at London. Down came the mailed hand of many a knight with a resounding blow.

"No compromise! no treaty, save on our own terms!" was their warcry, and what those terms were, John Lackland of England was soon to know. One thousand two hundred and fifteen was the year; twenty-four years after Richard's last Crusade, and his death. The world had been moving fast meanwhile. Freedom was thought more of. The younger men had grown up to be great captains in their turn; and in this year they did a deed which was far reaching, for we feel the effects of it to this day.

Helmeted, and sword in hand, with a host of stalwart men-at-arms at their back, they called on John at Runnymede. It was not a friendly call. There was too much iron present for that. Iron glove meant iron hand that day, and John Lackland knew it. Sternly those assembled barons told him that the time for smooth words was past. "The divine right" of kings had been held up to the broad light of a modern day, and found to be motheaten by time. Its fabric was thin as cobweb, and there was nothing "divine" about it; nothing but the plain fact that "king's right" was merely the might of the strong, not the right of the just, and if it must come to that, they were muscular Christians too, and could behead a man as well as another. So then and there they laid before him a written agreement or "charter," as they called it, and told him to place at the end of it the written signature of the king, which would thus make it the law of the land.

It was a bitter moment for that sullen king. He would have refused to sign it had he dared. But there, to right and left of him, scowled the menacing faces of the fiercest fighters in all England. Crusader waved his hand to Crusader across the hall, and in that greeting the low clash of steel rippled through the ranks. To refuse that signature meant--not the death of his friends, his comrades, his helpers in doing evil. That result not greatly would have troubled him. No! It meant what to him was a more serious matter. It was his own life now which he must buy by his signature, or die. He was not ready for that, so John Lackland of England signed the charter.

What a great thing for England and the world it was! for among other things the agreement read that

"NO FREEMAN SHALL BE IMPRISONED OR PUT TO DEATH, OR HAVE HIS PROPERTY TAKEN FROM HIM, BUT BY THE JUDGMENT OF HIS PEERS (his equals) OR BY THE LAW OF THE LAND!"

And now, seven hundred years later, if it is claimed that a man does wrong and breaks the law he is arrested and brought before a judge. But before that judge can sentence him to death or long imprisonment the whole story is told before twelve men, called a jury, who decide whether he deserves punishment or not. And this is the great gift handed down to us by those barons of old from the days when, if he wished a person's death, it was enough for a king to say, "I do not like that man!"

To this day we speak of that agreement as "the great charter;" or more often, we use the words of the Latin language in which it was written (since all learned men then, whether Saxon, Norman, French or Dane, could read and understand that common tongue) words which mean the same, and we call it

"MAGNA CHARTA."

SPARK XII.

AND HOW IT WENT HALF ROUND THE EARTH, YET CROSSED AGAIN AT LAST THE TRAIL OF LEIF ERICSSON.

A thistle bloomed in a garden. A small boy forgot to pull it up. His twin sister saw it, but said that thistle-pulling was not her work, so it went to seed. One seed was caught up by a wind and went drifting, drifting, a little balloon of thistledown, until it reached the clouds and travelled westward with them for thousands of miles. Then the cloud struck a mountain and burst into rain. The seed went down among the drops. Months afterward a boy with a dark skin came stealing along that mountain slope, trying to get shot at a deer, and put his bare knee on an unknown plant that pricked him sharply,--so sharply that he said, "Oh!" or a word in his language which meant the same. It was lucky for the deer, which took fright and ran away, but the boy had no dinner that day.

I like to think that splinters from my Iron Star are journeying across the world somewhat more solidly than thistledown, yet making themselves felt wherever they stop to rest. I like to think that possibly one splinter was forged into the identical steel needle which formed the indicator in the office of the first Atlantic cable, that three-thousand-mile-long wire, covered with gutta percha to keep out the salt water, which was laid from England to America under the ocean. You know that we telegraph by electricity, which is lightning in harness. But you may not know that this first deep-sea wire sent messages which were read by the way in which a flash of light was reflected in a mirror, wavering to and fro; and that the very first message was a greeting of peace and goodwill from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan.

The first message sent by the cable read as follows:--

"To the President of the United States, Washington

"The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work, in which the Queen has taken the greatest interest.

"The Queen is convinced that the President will join with her in fervently hoping that the electric cable, which now connects Great Britain with the United States, will prove an additional link between the nations, whose friendship is founded upon their common interest and reciprocal esteem.

"The Queen has much pleasure in thus communicating with the President, and renewing to him her wishes for the prosperity of the United States."

Let us pick up the thread of the story of one sharp splinter which we have lost sight of;--the sword which Louis of Daneshold lost in battle, which Wulf had carried and which Ulf had made far back in the days of the Northmen.

Men do not linger long around a battlefield after the fight is over, unless it is their fate to stay there forever; and with rattle of mailed harness and blare of trumpet-calls the Crusaders tramped heavily away through the sand, leaving behind them here and there a red spot on the earth, here and there a Saracen. Then, in time, a lightfooted, lightfingered troop of Arabs dashed into the little valley, sharply scanning the ground to right and left for forgotten weapons worth the picking up.

One wild, swift riding young fellow came sweeping along with his white burnous, or robe, trailing behind him in the air, and down he bent to earth like a circus rider as his eye caught a flash of sunlight. With a shout of triumph he snatched up a straight cut-and-thrust sword, which in weight and size seemed exactly made for him. This was unusual luck; for, as he said gleefully to his comrades, while Frankish swords were not uncommon trophies of war yet usually they were heavy, clumsy things, not easily wielded by the hands of Eastern men. So, that night by the camp fire at the little well under the date palms, Mohammed Ali Ben Ibyn, no longer a wild, reckless horseman, but a grave, dignified young man, thrust a fresh coal into the bowl of his long stemmed pipe, handed it politely to an elder friend, and beckoned to a slave to bring him that new weapon from his tent. Taking it he made a few passes and cuts at the empty air to learn the balance of it, then set the point of it on the metal boss of a small shield at his feet, steadily pressing downward.

Down, down went the hilt while the splendidly tempered blade curved under the pressure into a bow, until before their astonished eyes hilt and point kissed each other. Then the spring of the steel slowly overcame the muscle in the arm that bent it, and the hilt turned ever so slightly in the hand, yet quite enough; for the point glanced from the metal and sank into the leather, the blade sprung into line, and with a whiz the little buckler slid out from under foot, flew up from the sand as though it had wings and skimmed away far beyond the firelight.

"Allah kerim!" cried the astonished Arab. "God is merciful! This is a sword for a sultan. See, it is as straight as when it was made. No chief in the army of Saladin has a better blade."

"True, O son of Sheik Ibyn. The blade is perfect. But the hilt is not. Seest thou not that it is made like the cross of the infidel, the unbeliever? Good luck will not follow thee, wielding that sign."

"That is easily remedied,--" began Mohammed Ali, but got no further; for from one of the other fires a tall Arab stepped forward, clad in a long robe and a white turban, and with a beard that reached his waist. Lifting his powerful voice he sent it forth in a chant that made itself heard from end to end of the camp; and far out in the surrounding desert the jackals that whined and skulked among the sandhills dropped to earth hushed by the sonorous call. Not a leaf in the palms was astir. Not a breath of the night wind swayed a tent curtain. The chant rang through a stillness broken only by the low snap and crackle of the fires.

"Ashhadu an la illah illa-llah, Ashhadu anna Mohammadar ra-sool ulla."

chanted the long robed priest. "God is God, and Mohammed is his Prophet! There is no God but God! To prayer, O sons of the Faithful!-- "just as at that hour, all over Arabia, other priests in other places were sending out their warning summons in camp and city, under the palms and from the lofty minarets of countless round-domed mosques or temples, wherever ruled the might of the Eastern faith.

Forth from their fires stepped the dark skinned warriors and formed in line, facing Mecca, the birthplace of their prophet Mohammed, and to them a most holy place. Not ashamed were they to say their prayers to the Father of All, nor to ask for help and guidance; and the wildest fighter of them all knelt and prayed as earnestly as a child, knowing well that if God was with him it mattered nothing if the whole world was against him; although in the desert the Arab's own proverb says that "No man meets a friend."

Then, their prayers ended, it was night, and time for sleep. And, after all, it was not Mohammed Ali Ben Ibyn's hand which put a new hilt to that sword, but another's; for its fame, in that land where a good weapon is beyond price, was carried from camp to camp, and the sword itself became the cause and centre of a little war all its own. Once a man stole it, and on a swift camel he fled by night only to fall into the power of still greater thieves and wickeder men. Thus the sword, like a firebrand, was passed from hand to hand. At one time it even got as far south as Abyssinia, in Africa, and became by purchase the property of a Hamran Arab, one of the most daring, reckless, fearless, skilful hunters that ever walked on earth, as his people are to this day.

He was one of four brothers, and every day in the hunting season they used to ride out together elephant hunting, yet armed with nothing but their swords. In spite of his great size an elephant is wonderfully quick in movement, and it is a good horse that can outrun him. Yet one of these four brothers, the smallest and lightest of them, would ride up close to the head of a wild elephant and tease him into a charge. The instant that the great ears were cocked forward and the wicked little eyes flashed the warning that he was coming, round would whirl the good horse and away he would fly with the great grey beast striding after him like a runaway steam-engine, screaming with rage. Then up from the rear would come the other brothers like hawks; a leap to the ground while at full speed, sword in hand! a swift, circling blow, and the steel would bite deep into the thick leg just above the heel, and like a gadfly the hunter would be away and in saddle again before the blow of the whistling trunk could reach him.

Another tempting by the youngest brother, another vain charge, another flash of the circling sword in the sun, and with the sinews cut in both hind legs that elephant's running days would be over, and presently he would die almost a painless death from loss of blood, slain in spite of his great size by just two strokes of a sword! Then at the nearest village there would be great rejoicing. The young girls would clap their hands and praise the courage of the brothers; all the older people would sharpen their knives and prepare to go to market, for even one elephant could not be carried home in a basket. It would provide steaks and roasts enough for a whole village; while the four brothers would carefully cut out the great tusks of gleaming white ivory,--each perhaps weighing half as much as a man, and worth a little fortune to them when traders reached their tribe. For such ivory was sold from hand to hand until sometimes it reached even far- away Britain, where it was made into sword-hilts, thrones, and other things for kings.

Those were peaceful days for the sword, and useful ones. It is no small matter to provide food for a whole village full.

Centuries rolled away, and men went with them. From hand to hand went the sword of Ulf, ever the possession of one who knew its worth, and more than one etched on its blade, with acid or otherwise, brief sayings, each in their own tongue--now forgotten; just as even nowadays you may sometimes find on a Spanish blade some good word as a warning to the user, such as,

"Draw me not without cause; sheathe me not without honour." One day, to Ghent, in the Netherlands, there came a man, short, though broadly built. His hair was chestnut, and in his eyes there was a glint of the same red, especially when he was angry, which was not seldom; for as he said of himself, "A little pot is soon hot."

English he was by birth, and of a noble family; yet for many a year he had lived the life of a soldier, and to some of the great captains who warred in that time against the Turks he was not unknown as one who did daring deeds when in the mood, or when it was his duty. In Ghent, then, there lived an old armourer to whom this man did some great service in protecting his goods and very possibly his life from robbers.

The soldier made light of the matter, but the old armourer took a different view and was very grateful; so grateful, indeed, that from his store of arms of all sorts he brought forth a curious sword which had a curious story, for he told a long, rambling tale of love and war in which the weapon had figured, claiming that it came from Persia last, yet was made in Damascus, a city of great fame as a place where the best sword-blades were forged. It was of splendid steel, it is true, yet if the old man had trusted his eyes instead of his ears he would have seen that, whether it came last from Persia or not, whether the hilt was put on at Damascus or not, yet that nearly straight, cut- and-thrust blade was not the fashion in which Eastern swords were made. On the contrary, it was distinctly a Western style. This weapon the armourer insisted on the soldier accepting as a gift; and he, seeing how much the giver desired it, was not unwilling, taking care at a later time to do the armourer another good turn in a matter of a large order for arms and armour, although the old man knew it not. Thus he kept the balance of favours even.

Now this sword had inscriptions etched on it in unknown tongues, and also the sun, moon, and stars of the night deeply bitten in by the craft of some former owner. I will not say that it was the sword of Ulf. I will say only that I like to think it might have been; for the short soldier took it, whistled it through the air around his head a few times, and straightway went and had a few signs of his own engraved upon it.