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Thus the murder of Segeric, which happened eighty-nine years later, and the murder of Attila by his Burgundian wife Ildico, are torn from their proper historical surroundings and fitted into the story. Boer, on the other hand, will not have it that there is any mythology at all in the Nibelungenlied, and, according to him, the nucleus of the legend is an old story of the murder of relatives.
And she threw herself on the Burgundian maiden's breast, weeping and laughing alternately. "Give me your needle your fine beautiful needle; I will thread it. No! I will sharpen it on steel; no, I will dip it in my perfume-flask, my own special little perfume flask, and then together we will sew up the Tiger's mouth, so that he can bite no more!" "Let me read your letter," Ildico interrupted.
Then they followed Prince Ellak, who had heard and understood every word, although he pretended not to know their language. In the women's house sat Attila's favourite, Cercas, and sewed the bridal veil. Ildico, the beautiful Burgundian, stood at the window lost in thought and absent-minded.
"To return to his bride: she is called Ildico; is she then a Christian?" "What does Attila care? He has no religion." "He must have one if he calls himself 'the Scourge of God, and declares that he has found the War-God's sword." "But he is indifferent as regards forms of religion. His chief minister, Onegesius, is a Greek and a Christian."
I heard the ring of George Meredith's words: "Attila, my Attila!" But I saw the wild warrior Attila, fighting in Champagne, not the dead man adjured by Ildico, his bride. I saw him "short, swarthy, broad-chested," in his crude armour, his large head, "early gray," lifted like a wolf's at bay.
Cercas, the favourite, had explained all this with malicious joy to her rival, and the haughty Ildico was on the point of forming a resolution. She had no friends in the palace, and could not approach the foreign princes. Cercas was sewing, and accompanied her work with a melancholy song from her home in the far East.
Before the king of the Huns evacuated Italy, he threatened to return more dreadful, and more implacable, if his bride, the princess Honoria, were not delivered to his ambassadors within the term stipulated by the treaty. Yet, in the mean while, Attila relieved his tender anxiety, by adding a beautiful maid, whose name was Ildico, to the list of his innumerable wives.
Ildico seemed to have collected her thoughts: "Can you lend me a needle?" she said, "I want to sew." Cercas gave her a needle, but it was too small; she asked for a larger one, and chose the largest of all. She hid it in her bosom, and did not sew. At that moment there appeared in the doorway a creature so abominably ugly and of such a malicious aspect, that Ildico thought he was a demon.
"You cannot. I will tell you what it says. He, our master, woos again for the hand of the daughter of the Emperor Valens Honoria, and this time he has vowed to burn us all; that he calls giving us an honourable burial." Ildico reached out her hand as an answer, "Very well, to-night. A single needle-prick will deprive the world of its ruler!"
He only placed a letter in Cercas' hand, and disappeared. When Cercas had read the letter, she changed colour and seemed to become a different being. Overcome with rage, she could not speak, but sang, "The tiger follows the lion's trail." "Ildico, you have found a friend," she said at last. "You have a friend here in the room, here at the window, here on your breast."
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