swered. "It will amuse you for quite a long
while and perhaps the results may meet the expenses of decipherment, if
they are worth publishing. I expect they are not, but then, I have read
so many old manuscripts and found most of them so jolly dull."

Well, that business was accomplished at a cost that I do not like to
record, and here are the results, more or less modernised, since often
Hubert of Hastings expressed himself in a queer and archaic fashion.
Also sometimes he used Indian words as though he had talked the tongue
of these Peruvians, or rather the Chanca variety of it, so long that he
had begun to forget his own language. Myself I have found his story very
romantic and interesting, and I hope that some others will be of the
same opinion. Let them judge.

But oh, I do wonder what was the end of it, some of which doubtless was
recorded on the rotted sheets though of course there can have been no
account of the great battle in which he fell, since Quilla could not
write at all, least of all in English, though I suppose she survived it
and him.

The only hint of that end is to be found in old Potts's dream or vision,
and what is the worth of dreams and visions?

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

THE SWORD AND THE RING

I, Hubert of Hastings, write this in the land of Tavantinsuyu, far from
England, where I was born, whither I shall never more return, being
a wanderer as the rune upon the sword of my ancestor, Thorgrimmer,
foretold that I should be, which sword my mother gave me on the day of
the burning of Hastings by the French. I write it with a pen that I have
shaped from a wing feather of the great eagle of the mountains, with ink
that I have made from the juices of certain herbs which I discovered,
and on parchment that I have split from the skins of native sheep, with
my own hands, but badly I fear, though I have seen that art practised
when I was a merchant of the Cheap in London Town.

I will begin at the beginning.

I am the son of a fishing-boat owner and was a trader in the ancient
town of Hastings, and my father was drowned while following his trade
at sea. Afterwards, being the only child left of his, I took on his
business, and on a certain day went out to sea to net fish with two of
my serving men. I was then a young man of about three and twenty years
of age and not uncomely. My hair, which I wore long, was fair in colour
and curled. My eyes, set wide apart, were and still are large and blu