The History of the Siege of Lisbon

Knight Heinrich's corpse was carried to his tent, where Ouroana, already informed of the tragedy, wept as was expected of a concubine, and that was that. The knight was laid out on his bunk, his hands joined in prayer and bound to his chest, and death having come so quickly, the expression on his face was quite serene, so serene that he might have been asleep, and, looking more closely, ' even wearing a smile, as if he were before the gates of paradise, with no other tower or weapon than the worth of his deeds on earth, but as certain of enjoying eternal bliss as of being dead. The heat is so intense that within hours his features will become distorted, his happy smile will disappear, between this illustrious corpse and another devoid of any special merits there will be no difference, sooner or later we all end up as equals in the face of death. Ouroana had uncombed her hair, as fair as that of any fair Galician, and she was weeping, somewhat weary of feeling no sorrow other than quiet pity for this man against whom her only complaint was that he should have abducted her by force, otherwise he had always treated her well, if we can imagine what the relationship must have been like between a concubine and her lord and master eight centuries ago. Ouroana was anxious to know what had happened to the faithful squire, for he must either be dead or gravely wounded not to be here mourning for his master, and they told her his body had been carried off immediately to the cemetery on the other side of the estuary, using this opportunity to clear away the charred beams and trunks lest they should impede the manoeuvre, so that both debris and intact corpses were removed in a single operation, while any smaller remains encountered were rapidly buried in a depression on the slope on this side, where it will be difficult for them to rise when the trumpets are sounded on the Day of Judgment. So Ouroana was now free of any master, direct or indirect, as she was at pains to show at the first opportunity, when one of knight Heinrich's armed guards, disregarding any respect for the deceased, tried to grab her when he found her on her own. In a flash, Ouroana was brandishing a dagger which she had removed with providential foresight from the knight's belt when they brought him to his tent, a crime that fortunately went undiscovered, for a knight must go to his grave, if not with all his weapons, at least with the smaller ones. Now then, a dagger in the frail hands of a woman, even if accustomed to working the land and looking after livestock, was not the kind of threat to dissuade a Teutonic warrior, undoubtedly aware of the superiority of his Aryan race, but there are eyes worth all the armaments of this world, and if the latter were incapable of scrutinising the heart of this wicked man, they could intimidate him from three paces away and their message could not have been clearer, If you lay a finger on me, I either kill you or I kill myself, Ouroana told him, and he drew back, less from fear of dying than for being held responsible for her death, even though he could always allege that the wretched woman, beside herself with grief, had taken her own life before his very eyes. But the soldier preferred to withdraw, imploring God that if he should survive these adventures on foreign soil, he might one day meet here, if here he were to remain, or in distant Germany, a woman like this Ouroana, who even if not Aryan he would accept with the greatest pleasure.