Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land Read online

  At eve the next day there came into the courtyard two of the guard, who had gone ranging, and with them that groom into whose care Lord Sane’s admired black charger had been given. They had come upon the hapless fellow, on his way far elsewhere, it seemed, and astride the horse—though the poor animal’s wound, and its stagger, were much the worse, indeed now beyond repair. The man was brought before his employer—trembling in justified terror, and begging, indeed singing in a heart-rending shriek for understanding, exculpation, mercy—Sane silent, and looking down upon him—then upon his quick word or two—which words compelled the miscreant to louder shrieks—the man was bound and carried to the stables, and prepared for the bastinado: which fearful process no one there present, perhaps not excepting even the one who was to undergo it, would have denied the foreign Lord the right to impose upon his servant for his dereliction. When all was in readiness, Lord Sane settled himself at a distance upon a stool brought for him. Ali—for he was specially commanded to be present, at his father’s side—stood behind. The Lord called for his pipe, which was quickly brought him, and a coal to light it with; and when it burned to his liking, he signalled—by a gesture as small as it was unmistakable—that the punishment should begin.

  Man’s ingenuity in the devices of torture and pain is endless—for it must have taken a deal of patient experiment to learn that the blows of a slim cane upon the bottoms of the feet, though not violent, are, when continued sufficiently, unbearable—the strongest man may not help crying out, and this groom was not of the strongest—no doubt he had seen others undergo what he now faced—and his wailing increased in pitch and volume before the first blow was struck. Lord Sane without expression went on smoking his pipe as the groom was beaten, unmoved even when it became apparent that the man’s bowels had loosened in his agony. It was in that hour that Ali learned that he hated cruelty—knew that from that time forward he would never, if he could with honour avoid it, inflict or cause to be inflicted such acts as this he witness’d upon any being unable to resist, be it human or animal. As all men do who live in society, he learned to abide cruelty, when he could not prevent it—which largely he could not, the world being at all times over-full of it—he learned even to jest at it, speak lightly of it, in the world’s way—but he would find himself unable to witness it with equanimity, and be compelled to stop it, when he could: as on that day he could not.

  When the punishment was done, Lord Sane gave over his pipe to his boy, and left the stables, where the groom still sang out his pain and shame—went to the courtyard, where the once-proud stallion hung its head—took a pistol from his belt, primed and cocked it, and shot dead the poor beast himself without a word.

  They went down from the mountains to the sea, through country almost without roads—though they passed a company in the process of repairing one of the few—a company of women, for in that land, in contrast to the homelands of the Turk, women are not put out of the world but do all the work that men do—nay, more—they are often driven like beasts, and not highly regarded. One among these women breaking stone—the youngest and loveliest of them—raised her blue eyes to see the strange party pass, and Ali as though stabbed to the heart believed for a moment that his Iman had somehow come to be transported here; the illusion quickly passed, and yet he still felt—for the first time in all its awful strangeness and permanency—that he had left his home, and all that he knew and loved he might never see again.

  But the sea then appeared, its blue prinked with diamond sparkles, at first glimpsed between the peaks, then the great plain of it reveal’d, which Ali could not at first conceive to be truly made of water, as the more travelled among the band assured him—laughing—that it was; and Ali in terror and delight rode down to where the small waves fell, but drew his horse away from the curdled foam that crept up the sands toward him, just as a maiden draws her skirts away from stain. Lord Sane, coming up after, commanded him—with many an imperious gesture—to enter into the water, which Ali would not do—perhaps not believing that his sire truly intended such a thing. ‘Go on, Sir!’ cried Lord Sane in his own tongue—and the meaning of this at least was clear enough to Ali—‘Go on, I say!’—‘The boy cannot swim, my Lord,’ said his chief of soldiery, in Romaic, and Lord Sane replied, ‘Of course he can n’t! But the horse can!’ And with that he struck with his crop the flanks of Ali’s horse, and struck again when it shied. Ali then—turning to face his tormentor, and to save his horse—glared upon his father—who seemed at once enraged and delighted with his son’s resistance, and pointed again to the sea. The bedeviled boy for a moment paused, as though at a choice, whether he would confront his father, or the Deep; then he pulled hard at the reins, turned his horse, kicked his heels into its side—and the horse raced across the strand and willingly enough into the waves! Ali gasped for the cold—though that sea is as warm to an Englishman’s limbs as a society hostess’ dish of tea—and for the reaching of the surf upon his clothes, as though it meant to seize and pull him down—but still he urged on his steed, possessed by a nameless rage and uncaring now if he drown, or ride to the other shore—if there be one! The brave horse swam well and steadily till all four of its feet were off the bottom (for indeed it could swim, as every mammal can, from cat to elephant, if it but choose to, or have a need ). Spray dashed in Ali’s face, and he tasted salt—impossible!—and felt himself slip from the horse’s wetted back—but he kept his seat—and knew a strange exaltation! When a great ninth wave (for as is well known, or at least commonly believed, each ninth wave of the sea is greater than its fellows) came near to swamping the horse despite its courage, Ali, barely clinging to his seat, turned it again to shore. Emerging thence—like Theseus’ bull—he was surprized to find that he now stood some fifty yards from where he had plunged in—the reader will understand by what action he had been carried, but Ali did not. Down the strand toward him raced the Suliotes, who in delight at Ali’s courage had drawn and now discharged their weapons—it is their common means of expressing any strong emotion. Lord Sane remained where he stood, and Ali, for the salt spray that burned his eyes, could not see clearly his father’s expression, nor read what it portended—of satisfaction, or scorn, or the contemplation of further exactions—he knew not.

  They went down the coast to Salora, the port of Arta on the Ambracian Gulph, to take ship for the greater port of Patras, where Lord Sane had intelligence of a British brig-of-war soon starting for Malta, thence by stages to the Isle of Albion, Ali’s new, as it was his ancestral, home. Yet there was a stretch of sea to cross between Salora and Patras, and Lord Sane sate a day in the pleasant garden of an inn in Salora, where captains were wont to refresh themselves and gather news; he fed his son on a pilaw, flavoured with a lemon he pluckt from the tree that overhung their table, and a pair of grilled eight-legged fish called octopodes, which he would not suffer his son to send away. Successful—as it then seemed—in his negotiations, he next day took his son and the captain of his soldiers aboard a little Greek Saick, forty men and four guns. The weather being fair and the winds light, they were away from the harbour by noon.

  Greek ships famously cling fast to well-known shores, and Greek sailors, though skilled, are uneasy when out of sight of land—it may be that those who sailed the long ships to Ilion felt the same—and thus our passengers were able to pass close to the ruins of Nicopolis, and later to behold the white Moon in the blue sky over the Bay of Actium—there where the Ancient World was won, and lost—where Cleopatra show’d herself no Admiral, however otherwise admirable she was—events of which Ali was wholly ignorant, and to which his father was as wholly indifferent. As night came on the wind arose, and the sea turned chopping; in such a wind—soon amounting, the Crew by a sort of democratic assent decided, to a gale to be feared—they were of a mind to take in sail, put up the helm, and give themselves to the whims of Æolus, till softer weather obtained; but Lord Sane overmastered them, and, the gale blowing fiercer, ordered them to run before it. The Captain of the v
essel, finding himself unable to refuse, ordered the Europeans below, and enjoined them to pray—which the Crew, in their several languages, had already commenced to do. Ali, who had never sailed a ship in any weather, supposed he was now to die—a common assumption of new travellers, in this instance shared by several of the Crew, who might be thought to know better; but though for a time he rocked and tossed in his stifling cabin below, could finally bear it no more, and climbed to the deck. There—where the seas came over the gunwales to polish the decks, and the helmsman was lashed to his Wheel—there sat Lord Sane, wrapt in his great black cloak, resting his back against the Mast, a fixed stare and a smile upon his face, as delighted in the uproars of Poseidon as though he had caused them himself.

  At Patras, which they achieved almost too late, they were piped aboard the British brig-of-war even as it swung away from the harbour, and out to sea—past Missologi and thro’ the doorposts of the two high Capes, of Araxos and Scrophia, bearing the noble Lord, and his plunder—a Son—as Lord Elgin bore away the marble children of that fair, unhappy land. Hail, Hellas, hail and hail again! All that has been stolen from thee—thy Liberty, the works of thy Genius—surely it will be returned to thee in the ripeness of Time—and sooner than thine Oppressor imagines!

  Aboard this brig, that now passes into the open sea, there was another English passenger—a scholar and a linguist, with all the mild intelligence of the best of that species. He was a small and circular fellow—his head a circle, and his stomach, his round eyes, and his spectacles—and Lord Sane contracted with this gentleman to instruct Ali in the English Tongue, for as long as the voyage lasted—‘Lessons to be continued at the bottom of the sea, should we arrive there,’ quoth the merry Lord. Ali, proving an apt pupil, with a natural gift for languages that surely would have lain unused had he not been thus transplanted, was soon able to understand something of his father’s speech to him over his port, and as well some of the cruel sport he made of the circular linguist—as, ‘Sir, your general design so resembles a bladder that I hold it as certain, were you to fall by evil chance into the sea, you would surely float beautifully—I propose to test this theory—how say you, Sir? Would you not chuse to advance Science by such an experiment? We shall write a letter to the Royal Society, whether we succeed or no,’ and much more of the same character, and the small man bowed—and smiled—and sweated—as well he might, if he knew aught of his Lordship’s jests on other occasions.

  So it went, until deep blue sea turned at last to green, and the ghostly cliffs of Dover appeared before Ali’s wondering eyes. Not only had he reached the end of the Earth—and how much farther was it than he had thought!—but a year, he supposed, had magically fled away in the passage, for surely now it was Winter, as witness these rolling clouds nearly close enough to touch, and this damp chill, and this fog; yet it was not so, as his Tutor exclaimed, it was still high Summer—only let Ali wait and see what Winter would bring! He suffered himself to be put into the ship’s boat—there was no choice!—and was brought to Plymouth, where Lord Sane’s Valet and major-domo awaited them.

  The man was the right and proper guide, Ali perceived, to the land where he had come, for he was as lean as a desiccated Corpse, white as Bone, and silent as the Grave. In the low Inn to which he conducted them—Ali in his Albanian dress the object of every loiterer’s eye—he found that this Valet, who shall hereafter be called Factotum, had laid out upon a bed a suit of clothes for Ali, which included boots, stockings, and breetches, a linen shirt, a buff waistcoat, and a coat of bottle green—to put on all which correctly, Ali must in profound shame ask the lean man’s aid. There was no time though for a proper toilet, even had Ali known the finer points of such—no time either for refreshment, or rest, for a hired coach was already at the door, and Lord Sane in furious haste had his impedimenta piled upon it, and thrust his Company within. No doubt he had reason to be gone, which reason may have been connected to the arrangements he had made with the Captain of the Brig—who was proceeding to the same Inn even as Lord Sane’s equipage was lashed out of town and abroad into the grey land of England. Poor Ali, in his tight carapace of English wool and leather, foist between father and corpse-like Factotum—both of whom to the boy’s astonishment fell quickly to sleep despite the vehicle’s juddering career—could but consider his situation as northward they flew.

  ‘Now am I become the ghost of myself,’ thought he. ‘I have no land, but this of mist and cloud; no dress but the dress of my father’s people, which is not my own. The only creature on earth who truly knows me and my heart, and loves me, is sundered from me by a limitless ocean; my tongue, with all that it alone could name, is shriven from me, and another’s put in its place, like dust in my mouth. Am I not truly dead, and in the land of the dead?’

  BUT IN ALL THIS TIME, as we have examined his Pedigree, and his fore-history, the man himself (yet hardly more than a boy) has sat in the old Scotch tower before the horrid mystery of his father’s murder—sat, for his legs would not hold him upright! What colloquy he holds, while there he sits, with that Being strung up and staring without life or meaning at him, cannot be told—for there are things that words can but betray, by being words, and the stuff of conscious thought—of which the young Ali was then incapable.

  When he has somewhat recovered himself, he stands, takes from his side the sharp ataghan that was the gift of his godfather the Pacha, as recounted, and cuts away at the ropes that, like a spider’s web wound round its prey, have wrapt the body of his father. He grapples to him the horrid bundle in a filial embrace—or the picture of one—so that the great corse might not tumble down upon the floor; and he lowers it with what care he can to recline upon the stones—and he is attempting to free the dead man further—not knowing why he does these things, only that he is compelled to do something—when he hears, and sees too, on the path, a band coming upward toward him.

  It is the Watch—two Officers, the only two that the Royal and Ancient Burgh within which the house and tower stand affords; and others too, tenants of the Laird, bearing torches of pitch-pine, to light the way. Ali considers not how this band has gathered—how apprised that there was matter here requiring their attention—he knows nothing—for a long moment is unable to recognize his neighbours among the crowd, or even to believe with certainty that they are men.

  The leading Officer—the elder and graver—was a long man mounted on a very small galloway white with age; he wore a tricorn hat, the same; his progress would have been quicker had he gone on foot, but he perhaps thought this a diminishment of his dignity. He had dirk and broadsword; his smaller and dismounted fellow had a mousquet and brace. At the door of the tower they paused, and the long officer dismounted—took from a Citizen the flambeau he carried—and thrust it within the tower to illuminate Ali, who with his own sword in his hand was bent over the corse of his father.

  The Laird! The cry goes up. ’Tis the Laird! ’Tis the Turkish boy! ’Tis he!—Groans and cries of horror and rage mingle as these news are passed from front to back. As though he stands upon a stage, ‘discovered’ by the torches to this audience, Ali for the moment remains frozen. When he rises and steps toward the Officers, there is a general cry of alarm, and the tall one takes hold of his weapon.

  ‘How do you come to be here?’ Ali asks, for the curious aptness of the Watch’s arrival at this drear place, and in expectation of trouble, now dawns upon him.

  ‘We have had, Sir, intelligence,’ says the Watch very solemnly.

  ‘Intelligence! Why, what intelligence had you?’

  ‘We had that, Sir, that brought us hither. But too late, too late.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Ali says. ‘Come quick. You must not stand like stocks. We must find the one, or ones, who have done this deed.’ The wide eyes before him, and their stillness—as of stocks indeed, or stock fish—inform him that they see no need to go a-hunting, or to search any farther than this place.

  ‘I know nothing of this,’ Ali says—to which the Officer mak
es no reply—seeing no better a one than the scene before him. ‘Sir,’ says he, ‘you maun give up your weepon. I command you in the name of the Law.’ Only at that moment does Ali grow conscious of the sword in his hand, the gift of the Pacha. He knows a wild impulse to resist, to strike at the foolish faces that regard him. And yet he does not—though to say he thinks better of it were false, for indeed he thinks of nothing, as though he still walked asleep—and turns the handle of his sword to the Officer, who takes it gravely from him. ‘Now ye maun come along, young sair,’ says he then. ‘Offer no resistance, that it go not hard wi’ ye!’

  Injustice! Can there be a terror like it, to know that we are innocent, and yet found guilty—nay, proven guilty, our guilt clearly demonstrated, so irrefutable it can almost convince ourselves, however we know ourselves to be inculpable? And how much more so if the crime be one that a thousand times we have committed in our dreams, nay in our waking thoughts, in the dark haunts of our hearts?