champion in a luminous chariot drawn by scarlet mares. He was
golden-haired, with ruddy limbs, and was armed with a bow and arrows: he
too was silent, but he laughed, and you saw that he had several tongues.
After him came a young shining man who rode on a boar with golden
bristles and bloodied hoofs: this warrior carried a naked sword, and on
his back, folded up like a cloth, was a ship to contain the gods and all
living creatures. And the sixth Redeemer was a tall shadow-colored
person with two long gray plumes affixed to his shaven head: he carried
a sceptre and a thing which, Miramon said, was called an ankh, and the
beast he rode on was surprising to observe, for it had the body of a
beetle, with human arms, and the head of a ram, and the four feet of a
lion.

"Come," Manuel said, "but I have never seen just such a steed as that."

"No," Miramon replied, "nor has anybody else, for this is the Hidden
One. But do you stop your eternal talking, and pass me the salt and that
young crocodile."

With these two articles Miramon dealt so as to evoke a seventh ally.
Serpents were about the throat and arms of this champion, and he wore a
necklace of human skulls: his long black hair was plaited remarkably;
his throat was blue, his body all a livid white except where it was
smeared with ashes. He rode upon the back of a beautiful white bull.
Next, riding on a dappled stag, came one appareled in vivid stripes of
yellow and red and blue and green: his face was dark as a raincloud, he
had one large round eye, white tusks protruded from his lips, and he
carried a gaily painted urn. His unspeakable attendants leaped like
frogs. The jolliest looking of all the warriors came thereafter, with a
dwarfish body and very short legs; he had a huge black-bearded head, a
flat nose, and his tongue hung from his mouth and waggled as he moved.
He wore a belt and a necklace, and nothing else whatever except the
plumes of the hawk arranged as a head-dress: and he rode upon a great
sleek tortoise-shell cat.

Now when these unusual appearing allies stood silently aligned before
them on the seashore, Dom Manuel said, with a polite bow toward this
appalling host, that he hardly thought Duke Asmund would be able to
withstand such Redeemers. But Miramon repeated that there was nothing
like the decimal system.

"That half-brother of mine, who is lord of the tenth kind of sleeping,
would nicely round off this dizain," says Miramon, scratching his