XXVIIt was dawn; mists covered the forest; not a wind stirred or sobbed amid the boughs. A vast grey canopy seemed to tent the world, a mysterious veil that tempered the sun and spread a spiritual gloom over rock and tree.The noise of horns played through the misty aisles--horns many-tongued, faint, clamorous, like the trumpeting of forest elves. There was the dull, rhythmic onrush of many thousand feet, the hurrying, multitudinous tramp of men marching. Armour gleamed through the glooms; casque and bassinet, salade and cap of steel flowed on and on as phosphorescent ripples on a subterranean stream. Pike, glaive, gisarme shone like stubble over the forest slopes. The sullen tramp of men, the clashing clamour of arms, the blaring of a solitary clarion, such were songs of the great pine forest on that July morning.Yeoland, rebel lady and saint, on a great white horse, rode at Fulviac's side in full armour, save for her helmet. Her horse was cased in steel--chamfron, crinet, gorget, poitrel, croupiere gleaming like burnished silver. She made a fine and martial figure enough, a glittering dawn star for a heroic cause. About her rode her guard, the pick of Fulviac's men, some fifty spears in all, masses of steel, each bearing a scarlet cross blazoned upon his white jupon. Nord of the Hammer bore the red banner worked by the girl's own hands. They were hardy men and big of bone, sworn to keep and guard her to the death.Fulviac and Yeoland rode side by side like brothers in arms. All about them were rolling spears and rocking helmets moving among the myriad trees. The sound of arms surged round them like the ominous onrush of a sea. War followed like a thunder-cloud on their heels.Fulviac was in great spirits, somewhat solemn and philosophic, but full of the exultation of a man who feels his ship surging on the foaming backs of giant billows. His eyes were proud enough when they scanned the girl at his side. His heart thundered an echo to the grim tramp of his men on the march."To-day," he said, making grandiose flourishes with his sword, "the future unrobes to us. We plunge like Ulysses into the unknown. This is life with a vengeance!"She had a smile on her lips and a far-away look in her eyes."If you love me," she said, "be merciful.""Ah, you are always a woman.""There are many women such as I am; there are many hearts that may be wounded; there are many children."He looked at her meditatively, as though her words were both bitter and sweet in his mouth."You must play the philosopher, little woman; remember that we work for great ends. I will have mercy when mercy is expedient. But we must strike, and strike terror, we must crush, we must kill.""Yet be merciful.""War is no pastime; men grip with gauntlets of iron, not with velvet gloves. Fanaticism, hate, revenge, patriotism, lust of plunder, and the rest, what powers are these to let loose upon a land! We have the oppression of centuries red in our bosoms. War is no mere subtle game of chess; the wolf comes from the wilderness; the vulture swings in the sky. Fire, death, blood, rapine, and despair, such are the elements of war.""I know, I know.""To purge a field, we burn the crop. To convert, we set swords leaping. To cleanse, we let in the sea. To move the fabrics of custom and the past, a man must play the Hercules. God crushes great nations to insure the inevitable evolution of His will. To move the world, one must play the god."It was noon when the vanguard cleared the trees, and spread rank on rank over the edge of a moor. A zealous sun shone overhead, and the world was full of light and colour, the heather already a blaze of purple, the bracken still virgin, the dense dark pines richly green against the white and azure of the sky.Fulviac, Yeoland, and her guards rode out to a hillock and took station under the banner of the Cross. The forest belched steel; rank on rank swept out with pikes glittering; shields shone, and colours juggled mosaics haphazard. Horse and foot rolled out into the sun, and gathered in masses about the scarlet banner and the girl in her silvery harness on the great white horse. The forest shadows were behind them, they had cast off its cloak; the world lay bare to their faces; they were hurling their challenge in the face of Fate. Every man in the mass might well have felt the future glowing upon his brain, might well conceive himself a hero and a patriot. It was a deep, sonorous shout that rolled up, when a thousand points of steel smote upwards to the heavens. Yeoland, amid her guards, had dim visions of the power vested in her slender sword. Where her banner flew, there brave men would toss their pikes with a cheer for the charge home. Where her sword pointed, a thousand blades would leap to do her bidding. Even as she pondered these things, the trumpets sounded and the men of the forest marched on.Fulviac's plans had been matured but a week. His opening of the campaign was briefly as follows. He was bearing north-west towards Geraint, and Geraint was to rise that night, massacre the King's garrison, and come out to him. Avalon lay in Fulviac's path. He was to smite a blow at it on his march, surprise the place if possible, and then hold on for Geraint. The same night, Gilderoy would rise; the castellan, who was with the townsfolk, would open the gates of the castle and deliver up all arms and the siege train that was kept there. From Geraint, Fulviac trusted to ride on with a single troop to take command at Gilderoy, leaving Nord, Prosper, and the girl Yeoland in command at Geraint. With his numbers raised to some twenty thousand men, he would have his force divided into two bodies--ten thousand at Gilderoy, ten thousand at Geraint. These two bodies would sweep up by forced marches, converge on Gambrevault, crush the Lord Flavian's small armament, shut him up in his castle. Assault or leaguer would do the rest. Meanwhile the peasantry would rise and flock in to the standard of the people.Free of the forest, Fulviac sent on a troop of horse towards Geraint to warn the townsfolk of his advance. With the main mass of the foot, he held northwards over hill and dale, and towards evening touched the hem of the oak woods that wrapped the manor of Avalon. The place was but feebly garrisoned, as the Lord Flavian had withdrawn most of his men to Gambrevault, dreaming little of the thunder-storm that was shadowing the land.Fulviac had his plan matured. Fifty men-at-arms in red and green, the Gambrevault colours, were to advance with a forged pennon upon the place, as though sent as a reinforcement from Gambrevault. The main body would follow at a distance and lie ambushed in the woods. If the ruse answered, and it was an old trick enough, the barbican and gate could be held till Fulviac came up and made matters sure. Thus Avalon would fall, proto-martyr on the side of feudalism.Nor were Fulviac's prognostications at fault. There were not sixty men in Avalon, and Fulviac's fifty gained footing in the place and held their ground till the rest came up. The affair was over, save for some desultory slaughter on the turrets, when Fulviac galloped forward over the meadows with Yeoland and her guard. The man kept the girl on the further side of the moat, and did not suffer her to stumble too suddenly on the realities of war. He feared wisely her woman's nature, and did not desire to overshock her senses. The butchery was over when they neared the walls. They heard certain promiscuous yelpings, and saw half a dozen men-at-arms, who had made a last stand on a tower, tumbled headlong over the battlements into the moat below. Fulviac did not suffer the girl to cross the bridge. What passed within was hidden by the impenetrable massiveness of the sullen walls.Thus Avalon, fair castle of the woods and waters, sent out her wistful prophecy to the land. In her towers and galleries men lay dead, bleak and stiff, contorted into fantastic attitudes, with pike or sword sucking their vitals. Blood crept down the stairs; dead men cumbered the beds and jammed the doors. There had been much screaming among the women; even Fulviac's orders could not cool the passions of the mob; it was well indeed that he kept Yeoland innocent in the meadows.Fanaticism, ignorance, lust were loose in Avalon like evil beasts. All its fairness was defamed in one short hour. Hangings were torn down, furniture wrecked and shattered, chests and cupboards spoiled of all their store. In the chapel, where refugees had fled to the altar, there had been slaughter, merciless and brutal. Bertrand, the old knight and seneschal, lay dead on the altar steps, with a broken sword and fifty rents in his carcase. Men were breaking the images, defacing the frescoes, strewing all the place with blood and riot. Nord of the Hammer stood over the cellar door with his great mace over his shoulder, and kept the men from the wine. Elsewhere the mob rooted like a herd of swine in the rich chambers, and worked to the uttermost its swinish will.When the day was past, Fulviac and his men, as hounds that have tasted blood, marched on exultantly towards Geraint. Night and great silence settled down over Avalon. The woods watched like a host of plaintive mourners over the scene. The moon rose and shone on the glimmering mere and swooning lilies, and streamed in through shattered casements on men sleeping in their blood, on ruin, and the ghastly shape of death.XXVIIGilderoy had risen.It was midnight. A great bell boomed and clashed over the city, with a roar of many voices floating on the wind, like the sullen thunder of a rising sea. Torches flashed and ebbed along the streets, with hundreds of scampering shadows, and a glinting of steel. Knots of armed men hurried towards the great piazza, where, by the City Cross, Sforza the Gonfaloniere and his senators had gathered about the red and white Gonfalon of the Commune. All the Guild companies were there with their banners and men-at-arms. "Fulviac," "Saint Yeoland," "Liberty and the Commune": such were the watchwords that filled the mouths of the mob.Cressets had burst into flame on the castle's towers, lighting a lurid firmament; while from the steeps of the city, where stood the palaces of the nobles, smoke and flame began to rush ominously into the night. Waves of hoarse ululations seemed to sweep the city from north, south, east, and west. Trumpets were clanging in the castle, drums beating, fifes braying. Through the indescribable chaos the great bell smote on, throbbing through the minutes like the heart of a god.It will be remembered that the Lord Flavian was in Gilderoy for the purchasing of arms. At midnight you would have found him in his state bed-chamber in the abbot's palace, tugging at his hose, fumbling at his points and doublet, buckling on his sword. He was hardly awake with the single taper winking in the gloom. The shrill ululations of the mob sounded through the house, with the clash of swords and the crash of hammers. The Lord Flavian craned from the window, saw what he could, heard much, and wondered if hell had broken loose."Fulviac and the Commune!""Saint Yeoland!""Down with the lords, down with the priests!"The man at the window heard these cries, and puzzled them out in his peril. Certainly he was a lord; therefore unpopular. And Yeoland! Wherefore was that name sounding on the tongues of brothel-mongers and cooks! Was he still dreaming? Certes, these rallying-cries carried a certain blunt hint, advising him that he would have to care for his own skin.Malise, his page, knelt at the door with his ear to the key-hole. The boy was in his shirt and breeches, and trembling like an aspen. Flavian stood over him. They heard a rending sound as of a gate giving, a roar as of water breaking through a dam, a yelp, a scream or two, a confused medley of many voices.Flavian told Malise to open the door and look out into the gallery. He did so. A man, more zealous than the rest, sprang out of the dark and stabbed at the lad's throat. He fell with a whimper. Flavian plunged his sword home, dragged Malise within, barred the door again. Very tenderly he lifted the boy in his arms. Malise's hands clung about his lord's neck; he moaned a little, and was very white."Save yourself, messire!"Flavian bore him towards a door that stood open in the panelling. He felt the lad's blood soaking through his doublet; entreaties were poured into his ears."I die, I die; oh, the smart, the burn of it! Leave me, messire; let me lie still!""Nonsense----""It is no use; I have it deep, the man's knife went home."Flavian felt the lad's hands relax, saw his head droop on his shoulder. He turned and put him down on the bed, and knelt there, while Malise panted and strove to speak."Go--messire."Flavian was trying to staunch the flow from the boy's neck with a corner of the sheeting. His own doublet was drenched with blood. In a minute he saw the futility of such unconscious heroism; the flickering taper by the bed told that Malise's life would ebb before its own light would be gutted. Blows were being dealt upon the door. Flavian kissed the lad, took the taper, and passed out by the panel in the wainscotting.A stairway led him to a little gate that opened on the abbot's garden. He more than thought to find the passage disputed, but the place stretched quiet before him as he came out with sword drawn. The scent of the flowers and fragrant shrubs was heavy on the night air, and the shouts of the mob sounded over the black roofs, and rang in his ears with an inspiriting fury.There was a gate at the far end of the garden, opening through a stone wall into a narrow alley, and Flavian, as he scoured the paths, could see pike points bobbing above the wall, and a flare of torches. Men were breaking in even here, and he was caught like a rat in a corner. In an angle of the wall he found a big marrow bed, and crawling under the leaves like a worm, he smeared dirt over his face and clothes and awaited developments. In another minute the garden gate fell away, and a tatterdemalion rout poured in, strenuous and frothy as any tavern pack. They spread over the garden towards the house, shouting and blaspheming like a herd of satyrs. Flavian saw his chance, plunged from his dark corner, and joined the mob of moving figures. Dirty face and dirtier clothes were in kindred keeping. He shouted as lustily as any, and by dint of gradual and discreet circumlocutions, edged to the gate and escaped into the now-deserted alley.Running on, he skirted the abbey and came out into the square that flanked the abbey church, and the great gate. A hundred torches seemed moving behind the abbey windows. The square teemed and smoked with riot. Flavian went into the crowd with drawn sword, screeching out mob cries like any huckster, smiting men on the back, laughing and swearing as in excellent humour. His gusto saved him. As he passed through the mob he saw heads, gory and mangled, dancing upon pikes; he saw women drunk with beer and violence, waving a severed foot or hand, kissing men, hugging each other, mouthing unutterable obscenities in the mad delirium of the hour. He saw whelps of boys scrambling and struggling for some ghastly relic; scavengers and sweeps dressed up in the habits of the Benedictines they had slain. One man carried in his palm an eye that had been torn from its socket, which he held with a leer in the faces of his fellows. Further still, he saw half a dozen beggars dragging the dead body of a lady over the stones by cords fastened to the ankles, while dogs worried and tore at the flesh. He learnt afterwards that it was the body of his own cousin, a young girl who had been lately betrothed. Last of all, he saw a carcase dangling from a great iron lamp bracket in the centre of the square, and understood from the crowd that it was the body of the abbot, his uncle. Men and women were pelting it with offal.And he, an aristocrat of aristocrats, dirty and dishevelled, rubbed shoulders with the scourings of the gutter, shouted their shouts, echoed their exultation. At first the grim humour of the thing smote him in grosser farcical fashion; but the mood was not for long. He remembered Malise, whimpering and quivering in his arms; he remembered the body dragged about the square and worried by dogs; he remembered the carcase swinging by the rope; he remembered the dripping heads and the fragments of flesh tossed about by the maddened and intoxicated mob. It was then that his eyes grew hot with shame and his blood ran like lava through his veins. It was then that the spirit of a vampire rushed into his heart, and that he swore great solemn oaths by all the bones and relics of the saints. God give him a hale body out of Gilderoy, and this city scum should be scourged with iron and roasted by fire.He got across the square by dint of his noisy hypocrisy, and turned morosely into a dark alley that led towards the walls. Hot-hearted gentleman, the mere panic-stricken thirst for existence had cooled out of him, and he was in a fine, rendering passion to his finger-tips, a striding, blasphemous temper, that longed to take the whole city by the throat and beat a fist in its bloated face. He wondered what had become of his knights, esquires, and men-at-arms. It was told him in later days how they died fighting in the abbey refectory, died with the Benedictines at their side, and a rare barrier of corpses to tell of the swing of their swords.Flavian dodged into a dark porch to consider his circumstances and the baffling influence of the same. He had caught enough from the mob to comprehend what had occurred, and what was to follow. Certainly for many months he had heard rumours, but, like other demigods, he had turned a deaf ear and smiled like a Saturn. The largeness of the upheaval stupefied him at first; now, as he pondered it, it gave a more heroic colour to his passions.To be free of Gilderoy: that was the necessity. He guessed shrewdly enough that the gates would be well guarded. And the walls! He smote his thigh and remembered where the river coursed round the rocky foundations, and washed the walls. A big plunge, a swim, and he would have liberty enough and to spare.He set off instanter down alleys and byways, through the most poverty-stricken quarter of the city. The place had a hundred stenches on a hot summer night. Naturally enough, such haunts were deserted, save for a few hags garrulous at the doorways, and a few fragments of dirt, called by courtesy, children. The rats had gone marauding, leaving their offal heaps empty.Keen as a fox, he threaded on, and came before long to the walls, a black mass, rising above the hovels packed like pigsties to the very ramparts. Avoiding a tower, he held along a lane that skirted the wall, looking for one of the many stairways leading to the battlements. It was here, in the light of a tavern window, that he came plump upon two sweaty artisans, rendered somewhat more gross and insolent by the fumes of liquor. The men challenged Flavian with drunken arrogance; they had their password, to the devil. All the accumulated viciousness of an hour tingled in his sword arm. He fell upon the men like a Barak, kicked one carcase into the gutter, and ran on.He was soon up a stairway, and on the walls, finding them absolutely deserted. The city stretched behind him, a black chaos, emitting a grim uproar, its dark slopes chequered here and there with angry flame. Before him swept the river, and he heard it swirling amid the reeds. Further still, meadows lay open to the stars, and in the distance stood solemn woods and heights, touched with the silver of the sky.He moved on to where a loop of the river curled up to wash the walls. The water was in full flood at the place, and he heard it gurgling cheerily against the stones. Flavian took a last look at Gilderoy, its castle red with burning cressets, its multitudinous roofs, its uproar like the noise of a nest of hornets. He shook his fist over the city, climbed the battlements, jumped for it, plunged like a log, came up spluttering to strike out for the further bank.In the meadows the townsfolk kept horses at graze. Flavian, aglow to the finger-tips, with water squelching from his shoes, caught a cob that was hobbled in a field hard by the river. He unhobbled the beast, hung on by the mane, mounted, and set off bare-back for the road to Gambrevault.XXVIIIDawn climbing red over pinewoods piled on the hills; dawn optimistic yet ominous, harbinger of war and such perils as set the heart leaping and the blood afire; dawn that cried unto the world, "Better one burst of heroism and then the grave, than a miserable monotony of nothingness, a domestic surfeiting of the senses with a wife and a fat larder."Out of the east climbed the man on the stolen horse, riding out of the dawn with the lurid phantasms of the night still running riot in his brain. No sleep had smoothed the crumpled page, or touched the memory with unguent to assuage the smart. Maledictions, vengeances, prophecies of fire and sword rushed with the red dawn over the hills.With forty miles behind him, he came on his jaded, sweaty beast towards his own castle of Gambrevault, forded his own stream, saw his mills gushing foam, heard the thunder of the weir. How eternally peaceful everything seemed in the dewy amber light of the dawn! Away rolled the downs, billows of glorious green, into the west. Gambrevault's towers rose against the blue; he saw the camp in the meadows; his own banner blowing to the breeze.The meadows that morning were quiet as a graveyard, as the Lord Flavian rode through to the great gate of Gambrevault. Soldiers idling about, stiffened up, saluted, stared in astonishment at the grim, morose-faced man, who rode by on a foundered horse, looking neither to the right hand nor the left. He cut something of a figure, as though he had been in a tavern brawl, and had spent the night snoring in a cow-house. Yet there was an indescribable power and dignity in the tatterdemalion rider for all his tumbled look. The compressed lips, knotted brow, smouldering eyes spoke of phenomenal emotions, phenomenal passions. Not a man cheered, and the silence was yet more eloquent than clamour. He rode in by the great gate, and parrying the blank glances and interrogations of his knights, called for two esquires, and withdrew to his own state rooms.His first trouble was to acknowledge such necessities as hunger and cleanliness. He contrived to compass both at once, eating ravenously even while he was in the bath. His next command was for his harness, and his esquires armed him, agog for news, even waxing inquisitive, to be snubbed for their pains."Assemble my knights and gentlemen in the great hall," ran his order, and after praying awhile in his own private oratory, he passed down to join the assemblage, solemn and soul-burdened as a young Jove.There is a certain vain satisfaction in being the possessor of some phenomenal piece of news, wherewith to astonish a circle of friends. The dramatic person blurts it out like a stage duke; the real epicure lets it filter through his teeth in fragments, watching with a twinkling satisfaction its effect upon his hearers. The Lord Flavian's revelations that morning were deliberate and gradual, leisurely in the extreme. Many a man waxes flippant or cynical when his feelings are deep and sincere, and he is disinclined to bare his heart to the world. Flavian addressed his assembled knights with a certain stinted and pedantic courtliness; when they had warmed to his level, then he could indulge his sympathies to the full. The atmosphere about those who wait to hear our experiences or opinions is often like cold water, somewhat repellent till the first plunge has been tried."Gentlemen," he said, "I regret to inform you that the Abbot Porphyry, my uncle, is numbered with the saints."So much for the first confession; it elicited a sympathetic murmur from those assembled, a very proper and respectable expression of feeling, but nothing passionate."I also have to inform you, with much Christian resignation, that Sir Jordan and Sir Kay, Malise, my page, and some twenty men-at-arms are in all human probability dead."This time some glimmer of light pervaded the hall. There was still mystification, silence, and an exchanging of glances."Finally, gentlemen, I may confess to you that a great insurrection is afoot in the land; that Gilderoy has declared against the King and the nobility; that the scum of a populace has made a great massacre of the magnates; that I, gentlemen, by the grace of God, have escaped to preach to you of these things."A chorus of grim ejaculations came from the knights and the captains assembled. Astonishment, and emotions more durable, showed on every face. Flavian gained heat, and let his tongue have liberty; at the end of ten minutes of fervid oratory, the men were as wise as their lord and every wit as vicious. Gilderoy had signalised her rising in blood; mob rule had been proclaimed; the peasantry and townsfolk had thrown down the glove to the nobles. These were bleak, plain facts, that touched to the quick the men who stood gathered in the great hall of Gambrevault. Not a sword was in its scabbard when Modred's deep voice gave the cry--"God and St. Philip--for the King."Then like a powder bag flung into a fire came the news of the storming and wrecking of Avalon. A single man-at-arms had escaped the slaughter, escaped by crawling down an offal shoot and hiding till the rebels evacuated the place and marched under cover of night for Geraint. The man had crept out and fled on foot from the stricken place for Gambrevault. It was a tramp of ten leagues, but he had stuck to it through the night like a Trojan, and, knowing the road well, had reached Gambrevault before the sun was at noon. They brought him before Flavian and the rest, fagged to the fifth toe, and hardly able to stand. He told the whole tale, as much as he knew of it, in a blunt yet dazed way. His senses appeared numbed by the deeds that had been done that night.Flavian leant back in his escutcheoned chair, and gnawed at his lip. This last thrust had gone home more keenly than the rest. That castle of lilies, Avalon the fair, was but a friend of wood and stone, yet a friend having wondrous hold upon his heart. He had been born there, and under the shadows of its towers his mother had taken her last sacrament. Men can love a tree, a cottage, a stream; Flavian loved Avalon as being the temple of the unutterable memories of the past. Desolation and ruin! Bertrand, his old master at arms, slain! He sprang up like an Achilles with the ghost of Patroclus haunting his soul."Gentlemen, shall these things pass? Hear me, God and the world, hear my oath sworn in this my castle of Gambrevault. May I never rest till these things are reprieved in blood, till there are too few men to bury the dead. Though my walls fall, and my towers totter, though I win ruin and a grave, I swear by the Sacrament to do such deeds as shall ring and resound in history."So they went all of them together, and swore by the body and blood of the Lord to take such vengeance as the sword alone can give to the hot passions of mankind.That noon there was much stir and life in Gambrevault. The camp hummed like a wasp's nest when violence threatens; the men were ready to run to arms on the first sounding of the trumpet. Armourers and farriers were at work. Flavian had sent out two companies of light horse to reconnoitre towards Gilderoy and Geraint. They had orders not to draw rein till they had sure view of such rebel voices as were on the march; to hang on the horizon; to watch and follow; to send gallopers to Gambrevault; on no account to give battle. Companies were despatched to drive in the cattle from the hills, and to bring in fodder. The Gambrevault mills were emptied of flour, and burnt to the ground, in view of their being of use to the rebels in case of a siege. Certain cottages and outhouses under the castle walls were demolished to leave no cover for an attacking force. The cats, tribocs, catapults, and bombards upon the battlements were overhauled, and cleared for a siege.Towards evening, human wreckage began to drift in from the country, bearing lamentable witness to the thoroughness of Fulviac's incendiarism. Gambrevault might have stood for heaven by the strange scattering of folk who came to seek its sanctuary. Fire and sword were abroad with a vengeance; cottars, borderers, and villains had risen in the night; treachery had drawn its poniard; even the hound had snapped at its master's hand.Many pathetic figures passed under the great arch of Gambrevault gate that day. First a knight came in on horseback, a baby in his arms, and a woman clinging behind him, sole relics of a home. Margaret, the grey-haired countess of St. Anne's, was brought in on a litter by a few faithful men-at-arms; her husband and her two sons were dead. Young Prosper of Fountains came in on a pony; the lad wept like a girl when questioned, and told of a mother and a sire butchered, a home sacked and burnt. There were stern faces in Gambrevault that day, and looks more eloquent than words. "Verily," said Flavian to Modred the Strong, "we shall have need of our swords, and God grant that we use them to good purpose."So night drew near, and still no riders had come from the companies that had ridden out to reconnoitre towards Gilderoy and Geraint. Flavian had had a hundred duties on his hands: exercising his courtesy to the refugees, condoling, reassuring; inspecting the defences and the siege train; superintending the victualling of the place. He had ordered his troops under arms in the meadows, and had spoken to them of what had passed at Gilderoy, and what might be looked for in the future. There seemed no lack of loyalty on their part. Flavian had ever been a magnanimous and a generous overlord, glad to be merciful, and no libertine at the expense of his underlings. His feudatories were bound to him by ties more strong than mere legalities. They cheered him loudly enough as he rode along the lines in full armour, with fifty knights following as his guard.Night came. Outposts had been pushed forward to the woods, and a strong picket held the ford across the river. On the battlements guards went to and fro, and clarions parcelled out the night, and rang the changes. In the east there was a faint yellowish light in the sky, a distant glare as of a fire many miles away. In the camp men were ready to fly to arms at the first thunder of war over the hills.Flavian held a council in the great hall, a council attended by all his knights and captains. They had a great map spread upon the table, a chart of the demesnes of Gambrevault and Avalon, and the surrounding country. Their conjectures turned on the possible intentions of the rebels, whether they would venture on a campaign in the open, or lie snug within walls and indulge in raids and forays. And then--as to the loyalty of their own troops? On this point Flavian was dogmatic, having a generous and over-boyish heart, not quick to credit others with treachery."I would take oath for my own men," he said; "their fathers have served my fathers; I have never played the tyrant; there is every reason to trust their loyalty."An old knight, Sir Tristram, had taken a goodly share in the debate, a veteran from the barons' wars, and a man of honest experience, no mere pantaloon. His grey beard swept down upon his cuirass; his deep-set eyes were full of intelligence under his bushy brows; the hands that were laid upon the table were clawed and deformed by gout."Gentlemen," he said, "I have not the fitness and youth of many of you, but I can lay claim to some wisdom in war. To my liege lord, whom, sirs, I honour as a man of soul, I would address two proverbs. First, despise not, sire, your enemies."Modred laughed in his black beard."Reverence the scum of Gilderoy?""Ha, man, if we are well advised, these folk have been breathed upon by fanaticism. I tell you, I have seen a meanly-born crowd make a very stubborn day of it with some of the best troops that ever saw service. Secondly, sire, I would say to you, turn off your mercenaries if the sky looks black; never trust your neck to paid men when any great peril threatens."Flavian, out of his good sense, agreed with Tristram."Your words are weighty," he said. "So long as we are campaigning, I will pay them well and keep them. If it comes to a siege, I will have no hired bravos in Gambrevault. And now, gentlemen, it is late; get what sleep you may, for who knows what may come with the morrow. Modred and Geoffrey, I leave to you the visiting of the outposts to-night. Order up my lutists and flute-players; I shall not sleep without a song."He passed alone to the outer battlements, and let the night expand about his soul, the stars touch his meditations. From the minstrels' gallery in the hall came the wail of viols, the voices of flute, dulcimer and bassoon keeping a mellow under-chant. He heard the sea upon the rocks, saw it glimmering dimly to end in a fringe of foam.So his thoughts soared to the face of one woman in the world, the golden Eve peering out of Paradise, whose soul seemed to ebb and flow like the moan of the distant music. He fell into deep forecastings of the future. He remembered her words to him, her mysterious warnings, her inexplicable inconsistencies, her appeal to war. Gilderoy had taught him much, and some measure of truth shone like a dawn spear in the east. A gulf of war and vengeance stretched from his feet. Yet he let his soul circle like a golden moth about the woman's beauty, while the wail of the viols stole out upon his ears.XXIXLittle store of sleep had the Lord of Gambrevault that night. War with all its echoing prophecies played through his thought as a storm wind through the rotting casements of a ruin. He beheld the high hills red with beacons, the valleys filled with the surging steel of battle. Gilderoy and its terrors flamed through his brain. Above all, like the moon from a cloud shone the face of Yeoland, the Madonna of the Forest.He was up and armed before dawn, and on the topmost battlements, eager for the day. The sun came with splendour out of the east, hurling a golden net over the woods piled upon the hills. Mists moved from off the sea, that shimmered opalescent towards the dawn. Brine laded the breeze. The waves were scalloped amber and purple, fringed with foam about the agate cliffs.The hours were void to the man till riders should come in with tidings of how the revolt sped at Gilderoy and Geraint. The prophetic hints that had been tossed to him from the tongues of the mob had served to discover to him his own invidious fame. Gambrevault, on its rocky headland, stood, the strongest castle in the south, a black mass looming athwart the perilous path of war. The rebels would smite at it. Of that its lord was assured.At noon he attended mass in the chapel, with all his knights, solacing his impatience with the purer aspirations of the soul. It was even as he left the chapel that Sir Modred met him, telling how a galloper had left the woods and was cantering over the meadows towards the headland. The man was soon under the arch of the great gate, his sweating horse smiting fire from the stones, dropping foam from his black muzzle. The rider was Godamar, Flavian's favourite esquire, a ruddy youth, with the heart of a Jonathan.Modred brought him to the banqueting-hall, where Flavian awaited him in full harness, two trumpeters at his back."Sire, Geraint has risen.""Ha!""They are marching on Gambrevault.""Your news, on with it."Godamar told how the troop had neared Geraint at eve and camped in the wood over night. At dawn they had reconnoitred the town, and seen, to their credit, black columns of "foot" pouring out by all the gates. The Gambrevault company had fallen back upon the woods unseen, and had watched the Gerainters massing in the city meadows about a red banner and one in armour upon a white horse. Godamar had lain low in a thicket and watched the rebels march by in the valley. They had passed between two hundred paces of him, and he swore by Roland the Paladin that it was a woman who rode the great white horse.Flavian had listened to the man with a golden flux of fancy that had divined something of the esquire's meaning."Godamar," he said."Sire?""You rode with me that day when we tracked a certain lady from Cambremont glade towards the pine forest.""Sire, you forestall me in thought.""So?""I could even swear upon my sword that it is Yeoland of Cambremont who rides with the Gerainters."Flavian coloured and commended him. Godamar ran on."I threaded the thicket, sire, made a detour, galloped hard and rejoined our company. The Gerainters were blind as bats; they had never a scout to serve them. We kept under cover and watched their march. They came due west in three columns, one following the other. Six miles from Geraint, Longsword gave me a spare horse and sent me spurring to bring you the news."Flavian stroked his chin and brooded."Their numbers?" he asked anon."Ten thousand men, sire, we guessed it such."Before Godamar had ended his despatch, a second galloper came in breathless from Gilderoy. He had left Fulviac's rebels massing in the meadows beyond the river, and had kept cover long enough to see the foremost column wheel westwards and take the road for Gambrevault. The scout numbered the Gilderoy force at anything between eight and twelve thousand pikes. Fulviac had been on the march three hours.The Lord of Avalon stood forward in the oriel in the full light of the sun. Sea, hill, and woodland stretched before him under a peerless sky. There was the scent of brine in the breeze, the banner of youth was ablaze upon the hills. A red heart beat under his shimmering cuirass, red blood flushed his brain. It was a season of romance and of lusty daring, an hour when his manhood shone bright as his burnished sword.Thoughts were tumbling, moving over his mind like water over a wheel. Geraint stood ten leagues from Gambrevault, Gilderoy thirteen. The Geraint forces had been on the march six hours or more, the men of Gilderoy only three. Hence, by all the craft of Araby, they of Geraint were three hours and three leagues to the fore. Bad generalship without doubt, but vastly prophetic to the man figuring in the oriel, his fingers drumming on the stone sill.Strategy stirred in him, and waxed like a dragon created from some magic crystal into the might of deeds. The Lord of Gambrevault caught the strong smile of chivalry. A great venture burnt upon his sword. It was no uncertain voice that rang through the hall of Gambrevault."Gentlemen, to horse! Trumpets, blow the sally! Let every man who can ride, mount and follow me to-day. Blow, trumpets, blow!"The brazen throats brayed from the walls, their shrill scream echoing and echoing amid the distant hills. Their message was like the plunging of a boulder into a pool, smiting to foam and clamour the camp in the meadows. Swords were girded on, spears plucked from the sods, horses saddled and bridled in grim haste. In one short, stirring hour Flavian rode out from Gambrevault with twelve hundred steel-clad riders at his back. Those on the walls watched this mass of fire and colour thundering over the meadows, splashing through the ford, smoking away to the east with trumpets clanging, banneroles adance. There was to be great work done that day. The sentinels on the walls gossiped together, and swore by their lord as he had been the King.Gambrevault and its towers sank back against the skyline, its banner waving heavily above the keep. Flavian's mass of knights and men-at-arms held over the eastern downs that rolled greenly above the black cliffs and the blue mosaics of the sea. A brisk breeze laughed in their faces, setting plumes nodding, banneroles and pensils aslant. Their spears rose like the slim masts of many sloops in a harbour. The sun shone, the green woods beckoned to the glittering mass with its forest of rolling spears.Flavian's pride whimpered as he rode in the van with Modred, Godamar, who bore the banner of Gambrevault, and Merlion d'Or, his herald. The man felt like a Zeus with a thunderbolt poised in his hand. A word, the flash of a sword, the cry of a trumpet, and all this splendid torrent of steel would leap and thunder to work his will. The star of chivalry shone bright in the heavens. As for this woman on the white horse, the Madonna of the Pine Forest, God and the saints, he would charge the whole world, hell and its legions, to win so rich a prize.Turning northwards, with scouts scattered in the far van, they drew to wilder regions where the dark and saturnine outposts of the great pine forest stood solemn upon the hills. Dusky were the thickets against the sapphire sky, the cloud banners trailing in the breeze. The very valleys breathed of battle and sudden peril of the sword. Rounding a wood, they saw riders flash over the brow of a hill and come towards them at a gallop. The men drew rein before the great company of spears. Their leader saluted his lord, and glanced round grimly upon the sea of steel dwindling over the green slopes."Sire, we are well-fortuned.""Say on.""Ten thousand rebels from Geraint are on the march two miles away. Godamar has given you the news. We are on the crest of the wave."Flavian tightened his baldric."Good ground to the east, Longsword?""Excellent for 'horse,' sire.""To our advantage?""Half a mile further towards Geraint there lies a grass valley, a league long, four furlongs from wood to wood. The rebels will march through it, or I am a dotard. There stands your chance, sire. We can roll down on them like a torrent."Flavian took time by the throat, and called on his man of the tabard."Make me this proclamation," quoth he: "'Gentlemen of Gambrevault, strike for King and chivalry. Let vengeance dye your swords. As for the lady riding upon the white horse, mark you, sirs, let her be as the Virgin out of heaven. We ride to take her and her banner. For the rest, no quarter and no prisoners. We will teach this mob the art of war.'"The man of the tabard proclaimed it as he was bidden. The iron ranks thundered to him like billows foaming about a rock. Modred claimed silence with uplifted sword."Enough, gentlemen, enough. No bellowing. Muzzle your temper. We make our spring in silence, that we may claw the harder."A line of hills lay before them, heights crowned with black pine woods, save for one bare ridge like a great scimitar carving the sky. Flavian advanced his companies up the slopes, halted them in a broad hollow under the brow of the hill. A last galloper had ridden in with hot tidings of the rebels. The Lord of Gambrevault, with Sir Modred and Longsword, cantered on to reconnoitre. They drew to a thicket of gnarled hollies on the hilltop, and looked down upon a long grass valley bounded north and south by woods.Half a mile away came the rebel vanguard, a black mass of footmen plodding uphill, their pikes and bills shining in the sun. Pennons and gonfalons danced here and there, while in the thick of the column flew the red banner of the Forest, girt about by the spears of Yeoland's guard. She could be seen on her white horse in the midst of the press. The Gerainters were split into three columns, the second column half a mile behind the first, the third somewhat closer upon the second. They were marching without outriders, as though thoroughly assured of their own safety.Modred chuckled grimly through his black beard, and smote his thigh."Fools, fools!""Devilish generalship," quoth Longsword under his beaver. "We can crush their van like a wheatfield before the rest can come up. What say you, sire, fewtre spears, and at them?"Flavian had already turned his horse."No sounding of trumpets, sirs," he said; "we will deal only with their van. Call up our companies. God and St. Philip for Gambrevault!"Over the bare ridge, with its barriers of sun-steeped trees, steel shivered and spears bristled, rank on rank, wave on wave. With a massed rhythm of hoofs, the flood crested the hill, plunged down at a gallop with fewtred spears. Knee to knee, flank to flank, a thousand streaks of steel deluged the hillside. Their trumpets throated now the charge; the iron ranks clashed and thundered, rocked on with a rush of glittering shields.As dust rolling before a March wind, so the horsemen of Gambrevault poured down on the horde of wavering pikes. The storm had come sudden as thunder out of a summer sky. Before the hurtling impact of that bolt of war, the palsied ranks of foot crumbled like rotten timber. The Gerainters were too massed and too amazed to squander or give ground, to stem with bill and bow the rolling torrent of death. They were rent and trampled, trodden like straw under the stupendous avalanche of steel that crushed and pulverised with ponderous and invincible might."God and Gambrevault, kill, kill!"Such was the death-cry thundered out over the rebel van. The column broke, burst into infinite chaos. Yeoland's guards alone stood firm, a tough core of oak amid rotten tinder. Over the trampled wreckage the fight swirled and eddied, circling about the knot of steel where the red banner flapped in the vortex of the storm.Yeoland sat dazed on her white horse, as one in the grip of some terrific dream. Nord was at her side, snarling, snapping his jaw like a wolf, his great iron mace poised over his shoulder. The red banner flapped prophetic above their heads. Around them the fight gathered, a whirlwind of contorted figures and stabbing steel.Yeoland's eyes were on one figure in the press, a man straddling a big bay horse, smiting double-handed with his sword, his red plume jerking in the hot rush of the fight. She saw horse and man go down before him; saw him buffet his way onward like a galley ploughing against wind and wave. His leaping sword and tossing plume came steady and strenuous through the girdle of death.Fear, pride, a hundred battling passions played like the battle through the woman's mobile brain. She watched the man under the red plume with an intensity of feeling that made her blind to all else for the moment. Love seemed to struggle towards her in bright harness through the fight. She saw the last rank of the human rampart pierced. The man on the bay horse came out before her like some warrior out of an old epic.None save Nord stood between them, shaggy and grim as a great Norse Thor. She watched the iron mace swing, saw it fall and smite wide. Flavian stood in the stirrups, both hands to the hilt, his horse's muzzle rammed against the opposing brute's chest. The blow fell, a great cut laid in with all the culminating courage of an hour. The sword slashed Nord's gorget, buried its blade in the bull-like neck. He clutched at his throat, toppled, slid out of the saddle and rolled under his horse's hoofs.
XXVI
It was dawn; mists covered the forest; not a wind stirred or sobbed amid the boughs. A vast grey canopy seemed to tent the world, a mysterious veil that tempered the sun and spread a spiritual gloom over rock and tree.
The noise of horns played through the misty aisles--horns many-tongued, faint, clamorous, like the trumpeting of forest elves. There was the dull, rhythmic onrush of many thousand feet, the hurrying, multitudinous tramp of men marching. Armour gleamed through the glooms; casque and bassinet, salade and cap of steel flowed on and on as phosphorescent ripples on a subterranean stream. Pike, glaive, gisarme shone like stubble over the forest slopes. The sullen tramp of men, the clashing clamour of arms, the blaring of a solitary clarion, such were songs of the great pine forest on that July morning.
Yeoland, rebel lady and saint, on a great white horse, rode at Fulviac's side in full armour, save for her helmet. Her horse was cased in steel--chamfron, crinet, gorget, poitrel, croupiere gleaming like burnished silver. She made a fine and martial figure enough, a glittering dawn star for a heroic cause. About her rode her guard, the pick of Fulviac's men, some fifty spears in all, masses of steel, each bearing a scarlet cross blazoned upon his white jupon. Nord of the Hammer bore the red banner worked by the girl's own hands. They were hardy men and big of bone, sworn to keep and guard her to the death.
Fulviac and Yeoland rode side by side like brothers in arms. All about them were rolling spears and rocking helmets moving among the myriad trees. The sound of arms surged round them like the ominous onrush of a sea. War followed like a thunder-cloud on their heels.
Fulviac was in great spirits, somewhat solemn and philosophic, but full of the exultation of a man who feels his ship surging on the foaming backs of giant billows. His eyes were proud enough when they scanned the girl at his side. His heart thundered an echo to the grim tramp of his men on the march.
"To-day," he said, making grandiose flourishes with his sword, "the future unrobes to us. We plunge like Ulysses into the unknown. This is life with a vengeance!"
She had a smile on her lips and a far-away look in her eyes.
"If you love me," she said, "be merciful."
"Ah, you are always a woman."
"There are many women such as I am; there are many hearts that may be wounded; there are many children."
He looked at her meditatively, as though her words were both bitter and sweet in his mouth.
"You must play the philosopher, little woman; remember that we work for great ends. I will have mercy when mercy is expedient. But we must strike, and strike terror, we must crush, we must kill."
"Yet be merciful."
"War is no pastime; men grip with gauntlets of iron, not with velvet gloves. Fanaticism, hate, revenge, patriotism, lust of plunder, and the rest, what powers are these to let loose upon a land! We have the oppression of centuries red in our bosoms. War is no mere subtle game of chess; the wolf comes from the wilderness; the vulture swings in the sky. Fire, death, blood, rapine, and despair, such are the elements of war."
"I know, I know."
"To purge a field, we burn the crop. To convert, we set swords leaping. To cleanse, we let in the sea. To move the fabrics of custom and the past, a man must play the Hercules. God crushes great nations to insure the inevitable evolution of His will. To move the world, one must play the god."
It was noon when the vanguard cleared the trees, and spread rank on rank over the edge of a moor. A zealous sun shone overhead, and the world was full of light and colour, the heather already a blaze of purple, the bracken still virgin, the dense dark pines richly green against the white and azure of the sky.
Fulviac, Yeoland, and her guards rode out to a hillock and took station under the banner of the Cross. The forest belched steel; rank on rank swept out with pikes glittering; shields shone, and colours juggled mosaics haphazard. Horse and foot rolled out into the sun, and gathered in masses about the scarlet banner and the girl in her silvery harness on the great white horse. The forest shadows were behind them, they had cast off its cloak; the world lay bare to their faces; they were hurling their challenge in the face of Fate. Every man in the mass might well have felt the future glowing upon his brain, might well conceive himself a hero and a patriot. It was a deep, sonorous shout that rolled up, when a thousand points of steel smote upwards to the heavens. Yeoland, amid her guards, had dim visions of the power vested in her slender sword. Where her banner flew, there brave men would toss their pikes with a cheer for the charge home. Where her sword pointed, a thousand blades would leap to do her bidding. Even as she pondered these things, the trumpets sounded and the men of the forest marched on.
Fulviac's plans had been matured but a week. His opening of the campaign was briefly as follows. He was bearing north-west towards Geraint, and Geraint was to rise that night, massacre the King's garrison, and come out to him. Avalon lay in Fulviac's path. He was to smite a blow at it on his march, surprise the place if possible, and then hold on for Geraint. The same night, Gilderoy would rise; the castellan, who was with the townsfolk, would open the gates of the castle and deliver up all arms and the siege train that was kept there. From Geraint, Fulviac trusted to ride on with a single troop to take command at Gilderoy, leaving Nord, Prosper, and the girl Yeoland in command at Geraint. With his numbers raised to some twenty thousand men, he would have his force divided into two bodies--ten thousand at Gilderoy, ten thousand at Geraint. These two bodies would sweep up by forced marches, converge on Gambrevault, crush the Lord Flavian's small armament, shut him up in his castle. Assault or leaguer would do the rest. Meanwhile the peasantry would rise and flock in to the standard of the people.
Free of the forest, Fulviac sent on a troop of horse towards Geraint to warn the townsfolk of his advance. With the main mass of the foot, he held northwards over hill and dale, and towards evening touched the hem of the oak woods that wrapped the manor of Avalon. The place was but feebly garrisoned, as the Lord Flavian had withdrawn most of his men to Gambrevault, dreaming little of the thunder-storm that was shadowing the land.
Fulviac had his plan matured. Fifty men-at-arms in red and green, the Gambrevault colours, were to advance with a forged pennon upon the place, as though sent as a reinforcement from Gambrevault. The main body would follow at a distance and lie ambushed in the woods. If the ruse answered, and it was an old trick enough, the barbican and gate could be held till Fulviac came up and made matters sure. Thus Avalon would fall, proto-martyr on the side of feudalism.
Nor were Fulviac's prognostications at fault. There were not sixty men in Avalon, and Fulviac's fifty gained footing in the place and held their ground till the rest came up. The affair was over, save for some desultory slaughter on the turrets, when Fulviac galloped forward over the meadows with Yeoland and her guard. The man kept the girl on the further side of the moat, and did not suffer her to stumble too suddenly on the realities of war. He feared wisely her woman's nature, and did not desire to overshock her senses. The butchery was over when they neared the walls. They heard certain promiscuous yelpings, and saw half a dozen men-at-arms, who had made a last stand on a tower, tumbled headlong over the battlements into the moat below. Fulviac did not suffer the girl to cross the bridge. What passed within was hidden by the impenetrable massiveness of the sullen walls.
Thus Avalon, fair castle of the woods and waters, sent out her wistful prophecy to the land. In her towers and galleries men lay dead, bleak and stiff, contorted into fantastic attitudes, with pike or sword sucking their vitals. Blood crept down the stairs; dead men cumbered the beds and jammed the doors. There had been much screaming among the women; even Fulviac's orders could not cool the passions of the mob; it was well indeed that he kept Yeoland innocent in the meadows.
Fanaticism, ignorance, lust were loose in Avalon like evil beasts. All its fairness was defamed in one short hour. Hangings were torn down, furniture wrecked and shattered, chests and cupboards spoiled of all their store. In the chapel, where refugees had fled to the altar, there had been slaughter, merciless and brutal. Bertrand, the old knight and seneschal, lay dead on the altar steps, with a broken sword and fifty rents in his carcase. Men were breaking the images, defacing the frescoes, strewing all the place with blood and riot. Nord of the Hammer stood over the cellar door with his great mace over his shoulder, and kept the men from the wine. Elsewhere the mob rooted like a herd of swine in the rich chambers, and worked to the uttermost its swinish will.
When the day was past, Fulviac and his men, as hounds that have tasted blood, marched on exultantly towards Geraint. Night and great silence settled down over Avalon. The woods watched like a host of plaintive mourners over the scene. The moon rose and shone on the glimmering mere and swooning lilies, and streamed in through shattered casements on men sleeping in their blood, on ruin, and the ghastly shape of death.
XXVII
Gilderoy had risen.
It was midnight. A great bell boomed and clashed over the city, with a roar of many voices floating on the wind, like the sullen thunder of a rising sea. Torches flashed and ebbed along the streets, with hundreds of scampering shadows, and a glinting of steel. Knots of armed men hurried towards the great piazza, where, by the City Cross, Sforza the Gonfaloniere and his senators had gathered about the red and white Gonfalon of the Commune. All the Guild companies were there with their banners and men-at-arms. "Fulviac," "Saint Yeoland," "Liberty and the Commune": such were the watchwords that filled the mouths of the mob.
Cressets had burst into flame on the castle's towers, lighting a lurid firmament; while from the steeps of the city, where stood the palaces of the nobles, smoke and flame began to rush ominously into the night. Waves of hoarse ululations seemed to sweep the city from north, south, east, and west. Trumpets were clanging in the castle, drums beating, fifes braying. Through the indescribable chaos the great bell smote on, throbbing through the minutes like the heart of a god.
It will be remembered that the Lord Flavian was in Gilderoy for the purchasing of arms. At midnight you would have found him in his state bed-chamber in the abbot's palace, tugging at his hose, fumbling at his points and doublet, buckling on his sword. He was hardly awake with the single taper winking in the gloom. The shrill ululations of the mob sounded through the house, with the clash of swords and the crash of hammers. The Lord Flavian craned from the window, saw what he could, heard much, and wondered if hell had broken loose.
"Fulviac and the Commune!"
"Saint Yeoland!"
"Down with the lords, down with the priests!"
The man at the window heard these cries, and puzzled them out in his peril. Certainly he was a lord; therefore unpopular. And Yeoland! Wherefore was that name sounding on the tongues of brothel-mongers and cooks! Was he still dreaming? Certes, these rallying-cries carried a certain blunt hint, advising him that he would have to care for his own skin.
Malise, his page, knelt at the door with his ear to the key-hole. The boy was in his shirt and breeches, and trembling like an aspen. Flavian stood over him. They heard a rending sound as of a gate giving, a roar as of water breaking through a dam, a yelp, a scream or two, a confused medley of many voices.
Flavian told Malise to open the door and look out into the gallery. He did so. A man, more zealous than the rest, sprang out of the dark and stabbed at the lad's throat. He fell with a whimper. Flavian plunged his sword home, dragged Malise within, barred the door again. Very tenderly he lifted the boy in his arms. Malise's hands clung about his lord's neck; he moaned a little, and was very white.
"Save yourself, messire!"
Flavian bore him towards a door that stood open in the panelling. He felt the lad's blood soaking through his doublet; entreaties were poured into his ears.
"I die, I die; oh, the smart, the burn of it! Leave me, messire; let me lie still!"
"Nonsense----"
"It is no use; I have it deep, the man's knife went home."
Flavian felt the lad's hands relax, saw his head droop on his shoulder. He turned and put him down on the bed, and knelt there, while Malise panted and strove to speak.
"Go--messire."
Flavian was trying to staunch the flow from the boy's neck with a corner of the sheeting. His own doublet was drenched with blood. In a minute he saw the futility of such unconscious heroism; the flickering taper by the bed told that Malise's life would ebb before its own light would be gutted. Blows were being dealt upon the door. Flavian kissed the lad, took the taper, and passed out by the panel in the wainscotting.
A stairway led him to a little gate that opened on the abbot's garden. He more than thought to find the passage disputed, but the place stretched quiet before him as he came out with sword drawn. The scent of the flowers and fragrant shrubs was heavy on the night air, and the shouts of the mob sounded over the black roofs, and rang in his ears with an inspiriting fury.
There was a gate at the far end of the garden, opening through a stone wall into a narrow alley, and Flavian, as he scoured the paths, could see pike points bobbing above the wall, and a flare of torches. Men were breaking in even here, and he was caught like a rat in a corner. In an angle of the wall he found a big marrow bed, and crawling under the leaves like a worm, he smeared dirt over his face and clothes and awaited developments. In another minute the garden gate fell away, and a tatterdemalion rout poured in, strenuous and frothy as any tavern pack. They spread over the garden towards the house, shouting and blaspheming like a herd of satyrs. Flavian saw his chance, plunged from his dark corner, and joined the mob of moving figures. Dirty face and dirtier clothes were in kindred keeping. He shouted as lustily as any, and by dint of gradual and discreet circumlocutions, edged to the gate and escaped into the now-deserted alley.
Running on, he skirted the abbey and came out into the square that flanked the abbey church, and the great gate. A hundred torches seemed moving behind the abbey windows. The square teemed and smoked with riot. Flavian went into the crowd with drawn sword, screeching out mob cries like any huckster, smiting men on the back, laughing and swearing as in excellent humour. His gusto saved him. As he passed through the mob he saw heads, gory and mangled, dancing upon pikes; he saw women drunk with beer and violence, waving a severed foot or hand, kissing men, hugging each other, mouthing unutterable obscenities in the mad delirium of the hour. He saw whelps of boys scrambling and struggling for some ghastly relic; scavengers and sweeps dressed up in the habits of the Benedictines they had slain. One man carried in his palm an eye that had been torn from its socket, which he held with a leer in the faces of his fellows. Further still, he saw half a dozen beggars dragging the dead body of a lady over the stones by cords fastened to the ankles, while dogs worried and tore at the flesh. He learnt afterwards that it was the body of his own cousin, a young girl who had been lately betrothed. Last of all, he saw a carcase dangling from a great iron lamp bracket in the centre of the square, and understood from the crowd that it was the body of the abbot, his uncle. Men and women were pelting it with offal.
And he, an aristocrat of aristocrats, dirty and dishevelled, rubbed shoulders with the scourings of the gutter, shouted their shouts, echoed their exultation. At first the grim humour of the thing smote him in grosser farcical fashion; but the mood was not for long. He remembered Malise, whimpering and quivering in his arms; he remembered the body dragged about the square and worried by dogs; he remembered the carcase swinging by the rope; he remembered the dripping heads and the fragments of flesh tossed about by the maddened and intoxicated mob. It was then that his eyes grew hot with shame and his blood ran like lava through his veins. It was then that the spirit of a vampire rushed into his heart, and that he swore great solemn oaths by all the bones and relics of the saints. God give him a hale body out of Gilderoy, and this city scum should be scourged with iron and roasted by fire.
He got across the square by dint of his noisy hypocrisy, and turned morosely into a dark alley that led towards the walls. Hot-hearted gentleman, the mere panic-stricken thirst for existence had cooled out of him, and he was in a fine, rendering passion to his finger-tips, a striding, blasphemous temper, that longed to take the whole city by the throat and beat a fist in its bloated face. He wondered what had become of his knights, esquires, and men-at-arms. It was told him in later days how they died fighting in the abbey refectory, died with the Benedictines at their side, and a rare barrier of corpses to tell of the swing of their swords.
Flavian dodged into a dark porch to consider his circumstances and the baffling influence of the same. He had caught enough from the mob to comprehend what had occurred, and what was to follow. Certainly for many months he had heard rumours, but, like other demigods, he had turned a deaf ear and smiled like a Saturn. The largeness of the upheaval stupefied him at first; now, as he pondered it, it gave a more heroic colour to his passions.
To be free of Gilderoy: that was the necessity. He guessed shrewdly enough that the gates would be well guarded. And the walls! He smote his thigh and remembered where the river coursed round the rocky foundations, and washed the walls. A big plunge, a swim, and he would have liberty enough and to spare.
He set off instanter down alleys and byways, through the most poverty-stricken quarter of the city. The place had a hundred stenches on a hot summer night. Naturally enough, such haunts were deserted, save for a few hags garrulous at the doorways, and a few fragments of dirt, called by courtesy, children. The rats had gone marauding, leaving their offal heaps empty.
Keen as a fox, he threaded on, and came before long to the walls, a black mass, rising above the hovels packed like pigsties to the very ramparts. Avoiding a tower, he held along a lane that skirted the wall, looking for one of the many stairways leading to the battlements. It was here, in the light of a tavern window, that he came plump upon two sweaty artisans, rendered somewhat more gross and insolent by the fumes of liquor. The men challenged Flavian with drunken arrogance; they had their password, to the devil. All the accumulated viciousness of an hour tingled in his sword arm. He fell upon the men like a Barak, kicked one carcase into the gutter, and ran on.
He was soon up a stairway, and on the walls, finding them absolutely deserted. The city stretched behind him, a black chaos, emitting a grim uproar, its dark slopes chequered here and there with angry flame. Before him swept the river, and he heard it swirling amid the reeds. Further still, meadows lay open to the stars, and in the distance stood solemn woods and heights, touched with the silver of the sky.
He moved on to where a loop of the river curled up to wash the walls. The water was in full flood at the place, and he heard it gurgling cheerily against the stones. Flavian took a last look at Gilderoy, its castle red with burning cressets, its multitudinous roofs, its uproar like the noise of a nest of hornets. He shook his fist over the city, climbed the battlements, jumped for it, plunged like a log, came up spluttering to strike out for the further bank.
In the meadows the townsfolk kept horses at graze. Flavian, aglow to the finger-tips, with water squelching from his shoes, caught a cob that was hobbled in a field hard by the river. He unhobbled the beast, hung on by the mane, mounted, and set off bare-back for the road to Gambrevault.
XXVIII
Dawn climbing red over pinewoods piled on the hills; dawn optimistic yet ominous, harbinger of war and such perils as set the heart leaping and the blood afire; dawn that cried unto the world, "Better one burst of heroism and then the grave, than a miserable monotony of nothingness, a domestic surfeiting of the senses with a wife and a fat larder."
Out of the east climbed the man on the stolen horse, riding out of the dawn with the lurid phantasms of the night still running riot in his brain. No sleep had smoothed the crumpled page, or touched the memory with unguent to assuage the smart. Maledictions, vengeances, prophecies of fire and sword rushed with the red dawn over the hills.
With forty miles behind him, he came on his jaded, sweaty beast towards his own castle of Gambrevault, forded his own stream, saw his mills gushing foam, heard the thunder of the weir. How eternally peaceful everything seemed in the dewy amber light of the dawn! Away rolled the downs, billows of glorious green, into the west. Gambrevault's towers rose against the blue; he saw the camp in the meadows; his own banner blowing to the breeze.
The meadows that morning were quiet as a graveyard, as the Lord Flavian rode through to the great gate of Gambrevault. Soldiers idling about, stiffened up, saluted, stared in astonishment at the grim, morose-faced man, who rode by on a foundered horse, looking neither to the right hand nor the left. He cut something of a figure, as though he had been in a tavern brawl, and had spent the night snoring in a cow-house. Yet there was an indescribable power and dignity in the tatterdemalion rider for all his tumbled look. The compressed lips, knotted brow, smouldering eyes spoke of phenomenal emotions, phenomenal passions. Not a man cheered, and the silence was yet more eloquent than clamour. He rode in by the great gate, and parrying the blank glances and interrogations of his knights, called for two esquires, and withdrew to his own state rooms.
His first trouble was to acknowledge such necessities as hunger and cleanliness. He contrived to compass both at once, eating ravenously even while he was in the bath. His next command was for his harness, and his esquires armed him, agog for news, even waxing inquisitive, to be snubbed for their pains.
"Assemble my knights and gentlemen in the great hall," ran his order, and after praying awhile in his own private oratory, he passed down to join the assemblage, solemn and soul-burdened as a young Jove.
There is a certain vain satisfaction in being the possessor of some phenomenal piece of news, wherewith to astonish a circle of friends. The dramatic person blurts it out like a stage duke; the real epicure lets it filter through his teeth in fragments, watching with a twinkling satisfaction its effect upon his hearers. The Lord Flavian's revelations that morning were deliberate and gradual, leisurely in the extreme. Many a man waxes flippant or cynical when his feelings are deep and sincere, and he is disinclined to bare his heart to the world. Flavian addressed his assembled knights with a certain stinted and pedantic courtliness; when they had warmed to his level, then he could indulge his sympathies to the full. The atmosphere about those who wait to hear our experiences or opinions is often like cold water, somewhat repellent till the first plunge has been tried.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I regret to inform you that the Abbot Porphyry, my uncle, is numbered with the saints."
So much for the first confession; it elicited a sympathetic murmur from those assembled, a very proper and respectable expression of feeling, but nothing passionate.
"I also have to inform you, with much Christian resignation, that Sir Jordan and Sir Kay, Malise, my page, and some twenty men-at-arms are in all human probability dead."
This time some glimmer of light pervaded the hall. There was still mystification, silence, and an exchanging of glances.
"Finally, gentlemen, I may confess to you that a great insurrection is afoot in the land; that Gilderoy has declared against the King and the nobility; that the scum of a populace has made a great massacre of the magnates; that I, gentlemen, by the grace of God, have escaped to preach to you of these things."
A chorus of grim ejaculations came from the knights and the captains assembled. Astonishment, and emotions more durable, showed on every face. Flavian gained heat, and let his tongue have liberty; at the end of ten minutes of fervid oratory, the men were as wise as their lord and every wit as vicious. Gilderoy had signalised her rising in blood; mob rule had been proclaimed; the peasantry and townsfolk had thrown down the glove to the nobles. These were bleak, plain facts, that touched to the quick the men who stood gathered in the great hall of Gambrevault. Not a sword was in its scabbard when Modred's deep voice gave the cry--
"God and St. Philip--for the King."
Then like a powder bag flung into a fire came the news of the storming and wrecking of Avalon. A single man-at-arms had escaped the slaughter, escaped by crawling down an offal shoot and hiding till the rebels evacuated the place and marched under cover of night for Geraint. The man had crept out and fled on foot from the stricken place for Gambrevault. It was a tramp of ten leagues, but he had stuck to it through the night like a Trojan, and, knowing the road well, had reached Gambrevault before the sun was at noon. They brought him before Flavian and the rest, fagged to the fifth toe, and hardly able to stand. He told the whole tale, as much as he knew of it, in a blunt yet dazed way. His senses appeared numbed by the deeds that had been done that night.
Flavian leant back in his escutcheoned chair, and gnawed at his lip. This last thrust had gone home more keenly than the rest. That castle of lilies, Avalon the fair, was but a friend of wood and stone, yet a friend having wondrous hold upon his heart. He had been born there, and under the shadows of its towers his mother had taken her last sacrament. Men can love a tree, a cottage, a stream; Flavian loved Avalon as being the temple of the unutterable memories of the past. Desolation and ruin! Bertrand, his old master at arms, slain! He sprang up like an Achilles with the ghost of Patroclus haunting his soul.
"Gentlemen, shall these things pass? Hear me, God and the world, hear my oath sworn in this my castle of Gambrevault. May I never rest till these things are reprieved in blood, till there are too few men to bury the dead. Though my walls fall, and my towers totter, though I win ruin and a grave, I swear by the Sacrament to do such deeds as shall ring and resound in history."
So they went all of them together, and swore by the body and blood of the Lord to take such vengeance as the sword alone can give to the hot passions of mankind.
That noon there was much stir and life in Gambrevault. The camp hummed like a wasp's nest when violence threatens; the men were ready to run to arms on the first sounding of the trumpet. Armourers and farriers were at work. Flavian had sent out two companies of light horse to reconnoitre towards Gilderoy and Geraint. They had orders not to draw rein till they had sure view of such rebel voices as were on the march; to hang on the horizon; to watch and follow; to send gallopers to Gambrevault; on no account to give battle. Companies were despatched to drive in the cattle from the hills, and to bring in fodder. The Gambrevault mills were emptied of flour, and burnt to the ground, in view of their being of use to the rebels in case of a siege. Certain cottages and outhouses under the castle walls were demolished to leave no cover for an attacking force. The cats, tribocs, catapults, and bombards upon the battlements were overhauled, and cleared for a siege.
Towards evening, human wreckage began to drift in from the country, bearing lamentable witness to the thoroughness of Fulviac's incendiarism. Gambrevault might have stood for heaven by the strange scattering of folk who came to seek its sanctuary. Fire and sword were abroad with a vengeance; cottars, borderers, and villains had risen in the night; treachery had drawn its poniard; even the hound had snapped at its master's hand.
Many pathetic figures passed under the great arch of Gambrevault gate that day. First a knight came in on horseback, a baby in his arms, and a woman clinging behind him, sole relics of a home. Margaret, the grey-haired countess of St. Anne's, was brought in on a litter by a few faithful men-at-arms; her husband and her two sons were dead. Young Prosper of Fountains came in on a pony; the lad wept like a girl when questioned, and told of a mother and a sire butchered, a home sacked and burnt. There were stern faces in Gambrevault that day, and looks more eloquent than words. "Verily," said Flavian to Modred the Strong, "we shall have need of our swords, and God grant that we use them to good purpose."
So night drew near, and still no riders had come from the companies that had ridden out to reconnoitre towards Gilderoy and Geraint. Flavian had had a hundred duties on his hands: exercising his courtesy to the refugees, condoling, reassuring; inspecting the defences and the siege train; superintending the victualling of the place. He had ordered his troops under arms in the meadows, and had spoken to them of what had passed at Gilderoy, and what might be looked for in the future. There seemed no lack of loyalty on their part. Flavian had ever been a magnanimous and a generous overlord, glad to be merciful, and no libertine at the expense of his underlings. His feudatories were bound to him by ties more strong than mere legalities. They cheered him loudly enough as he rode along the lines in full armour, with fifty knights following as his guard.
Night came. Outposts had been pushed forward to the woods, and a strong picket held the ford across the river. On the battlements guards went to and fro, and clarions parcelled out the night, and rang the changes. In the east there was a faint yellowish light in the sky, a distant glare as of a fire many miles away. In the camp men were ready to fly to arms at the first thunder of war over the hills.
Flavian held a council in the great hall, a council attended by all his knights and captains. They had a great map spread upon the table, a chart of the demesnes of Gambrevault and Avalon, and the surrounding country. Their conjectures turned on the possible intentions of the rebels, whether they would venture on a campaign in the open, or lie snug within walls and indulge in raids and forays. And then--as to the loyalty of their own troops? On this point Flavian was dogmatic, having a generous and over-boyish heart, not quick to credit others with treachery.
"I would take oath for my own men," he said; "their fathers have served my fathers; I have never played the tyrant; there is every reason to trust their loyalty."
An old knight, Sir Tristram, had taken a goodly share in the debate, a veteran from the barons' wars, and a man of honest experience, no mere pantaloon. His grey beard swept down upon his cuirass; his deep-set eyes were full of intelligence under his bushy brows; the hands that were laid upon the table were clawed and deformed by gout.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I have not the fitness and youth of many of you, but I can lay claim to some wisdom in war. To my liege lord, whom, sirs, I honour as a man of soul, I would address two proverbs. First, despise not, sire, your enemies."
Modred laughed in his black beard.
"Reverence the scum of Gilderoy?"
"Ha, man, if we are well advised, these folk have been breathed upon by fanaticism. I tell you, I have seen a meanly-born crowd make a very stubborn day of it with some of the best troops that ever saw service. Secondly, sire, I would say to you, turn off your mercenaries if the sky looks black; never trust your neck to paid men when any great peril threatens."
Flavian, out of his good sense, agreed with Tristram.
"Your words are weighty," he said. "So long as we are campaigning, I will pay them well and keep them. If it comes to a siege, I will have no hired bravos in Gambrevault. And now, gentlemen, it is late; get what sleep you may, for who knows what may come with the morrow. Modred and Geoffrey, I leave to you the visiting of the outposts to-night. Order up my lutists and flute-players; I shall not sleep without a song."
He passed alone to the outer battlements, and let the night expand about his soul, the stars touch his meditations. From the minstrels' gallery in the hall came the wail of viols, the voices of flute, dulcimer and bassoon keeping a mellow under-chant. He heard the sea upon the rocks, saw it glimmering dimly to end in a fringe of foam.
So his thoughts soared to the face of one woman in the world, the golden Eve peering out of Paradise, whose soul seemed to ebb and flow like the moan of the distant music. He fell into deep forecastings of the future. He remembered her words to him, her mysterious warnings, her inexplicable inconsistencies, her appeal to war. Gilderoy had taught him much, and some measure of truth shone like a dawn spear in the east. A gulf of war and vengeance stretched from his feet. Yet he let his soul circle like a golden moth about the woman's beauty, while the wail of the viols stole out upon his ears.
XXIX
Little store of sleep had the Lord of Gambrevault that night. War with all its echoing prophecies played through his thought as a storm wind through the rotting casements of a ruin. He beheld the high hills red with beacons, the valleys filled with the surging steel of battle. Gilderoy and its terrors flamed through his brain. Above all, like the moon from a cloud shone the face of Yeoland, the Madonna of the Forest.
He was up and armed before dawn, and on the topmost battlements, eager for the day. The sun came with splendour out of the east, hurling a golden net over the woods piled upon the hills. Mists moved from off the sea, that shimmered opalescent towards the dawn. Brine laded the breeze. The waves were scalloped amber and purple, fringed with foam about the agate cliffs.
The hours were void to the man till riders should come in with tidings of how the revolt sped at Gilderoy and Geraint. The prophetic hints that had been tossed to him from the tongues of the mob had served to discover to him his own invidious fame. Gambrevault, on its rocky headland, stood, the strongest castle in the south, a black mass looming athwart the perilous path of war. The rebels would smite at it. Of that its lord was assured.
At noon he attended mass in the chapel, with all his knights, solacing his impatience with the purer aspirations of the soul. It was even as he left the chapel that Sir Modred met him, telling how a galloper had left the woods and was cantering over the meadows towards the headland. The man was soon under the arch of the great gate, his sweating horse smiting fire from the stones, dropping foam from his black muzzle. The rider was Godamar, Flavian's favourite esquire, a ruddy youth, with the heart of a Jonathan.
Modred brought him to the banqueting-hall, where Flavian awaited him in full harness, two trumpeters at his back.
"Sire, Geraint has risen."
"Ha!"
"They are marching on Gambrevault."
"Your news, on with it."
Godamar told how the troop had neared Geraint at eve and camped in the wood over night. At dawn they had reconnoitred the town, and seen, to their credit, black columns of "foot" pouring out by all the gates. The Gambrevault company had fallen back upon the woods unseen, and had watched the Gerainters massing in the city meadows about a red banner and one in armour upon a white horse. Godamar had lain low in a thicket and watched the rebels march by in the valley. They had passed between two hundred paces of him, and he swore by Roland the Paladin that it was a woman who rode the great white horse.
Flavian had listened to the man with a golden flux of fancy that had divined something of the esquire's meaning.
"Godamar," he said.
"Sire?"
"You rode with me that day when we tracked a certain lady from Cambremont glade towards the pine forest."
"Sire, you forestall me in thought."
"So?"
"I could even swear upon my sword that it is Yeoland of Cambremont who rides with the Gerainters."
Flavian coloured and commended him. Godamar ran on.
"I threaded the thicket, sire, made a detour, galloped hard and rejoined our company. The Gerainters were blind as bats; they had never a scout to serve them. We kept under cover and watched their march. They came due west in three columns, one following the other. Six miles from Geraint, Longsword gave me a spare horse and sent me spurring to bring you the news."
Flavian stroked his chin and brooded.
"Their numbers?" he asked anon.
"Ten thousand men, sire, we guessed it such."
Before Godamar had ended his despatch, a second galloper came in breathless from Gilderoy. He had left Fulviac's rebels massing in the meadows beyond the river, and had kept cover long enough to see the foremost column wheel westwards and take the road for Gambrevault. The scout numbered the Gilderoy force at anything between eight and twelve thousand pikes. Fulviac had been on the march three hours.
The Lord of Avalon stood forward in the oriel in the full light of the sun. Sea, hill, and woodland stretched before him under a peerless sky. There was the scent of brine in the breeze, the banner of youth was ablaze upon the hills. A red heart beat under his shimmering cuirass, red blood flushed his brain. It was a season of romance and of lusty daring, an hour when his manhood shone bright as his burnished sword.
Thoughts were tumbling, moving over his mind like water over a wheel. Geraint stood ten leagues from Gambrevault, Gilderoy thirteen. The Geraint forces had been on the march six hours or more, the men of Gilderoy only three. Hence, by all the craft of Araby, they of Geraint were three hours and three leagues to the fore. Bad generalship without doubt, but vastly prophetic to the man figuring in the oriel, his fingers drumming on the stone sill.
Strategy stirred in him, and waxed like a dragon created from some magic crystal into the might of deeds. The Lord of Gambrevault caught the strong smile of chivalry. A great venture burnt upon his sword. It was no uncertain voice that rang through the hall of Gambrevault.
"Gentlemen, to horse! Trumpets, blow the sally! Let every man who can ride, mount and follow me to-day. Blow, trumpets, blow!"
The brazen throats brayed from the walls, their shrill scream echoing and echoing amid the distant hills. Their message was like the plunging of a boulder into a pool, smiting to foam and clamour the camp in the meadows. Swords were girded on, spears plucked from the sods, horses saddled and bridled in grim haste. In one short, stirring hour Flavian rode out from Gambrevault with twelve hundred steel-clad riders at his back. Those on the walls watched this mass of fire and colour thundering over the meadows, splashing through the ford, smoking away to the east with trumpets clanging, banneroles adance. There was to be great work done that day. The sentinels on the walls gossiped together, and swore by their lord as he had been the King.
Gambrevault and its towers sank back against the skyline, its banner waving heavily above the keep. Flavian's mass of knights and men-at-arms held over the eastern downs that rolled greenly above the black cliffs and the blue mosaics of the sea. A brisk breeze laughed in their faces, setting plumes nodding, banneroles and pensils aslant. Their spears rose like the slim masts of many sloops in a harbour. The sun shone, the green woods beckoned to the glittering mass with its forest of rolling spears.
Flavian's pride whimpered as he rode in the van with Modred, Godamar, who bore the banner of Gambrevault, and Merlion d'Or, his herald. The man felt like a Zeus with a thunderbolt poised in his hand. A word, the flash of a sword, the cry of a trumpet, and all this splendid torrent of steel would leap and thunder to work his will. The star of chivalry shone bright in the heavens. As for this woman on the white horse, the Madonna of the Pine Forest, God and the saints, he would charge the whole world, hell and its legions, to win so rich a prize.
Turning northwards, with scouts scattered in the far van, they drew to wilder regions where the dark and saturnine outposts of the great pine forest stood solemn upon the hills. Dusky were the thickets against the sapphire sky, the cloud banners trailing in the breeze. The very valleys breathed of battle and sudden peril of the sword. Rounding a wood, they saw riders flash over the brow of a hill and come towards them at a gallop. The men drew rein before the great company of spears. Their leader saluted his lord, and glanced round grimly upon the sea of steel dwindling over the green slopes.
"Sire, we are well-fortuned."
"Say on."
"Ten thousand rebels from Geraint are on the march two miles away. Godamar has given you the news. We are on the crest of the wave."
Flavian tightened his baldric.
"Good ground to the east, Longsword?"
"Excellent for 'horse,' sire."
"To our advantage?"
"Half a mile further towards Geraint there lies a grass valley, a league long, four furlongs from wood to wood. The rebels will march through it, or I am a dotard. There stands your chance, sire. We can roll down on them like a torrent."
Flavian took time by the throat, and called on his man of the tabard.
"Make me this proclamation," quoth he: "'Gentlemen of Gambrevault, strike for King and chivalry. Let vengeance dye your swords. As for the lady riding upon the white horse, mark you, sirs, let her be as the Virgin out of heaven. We ride to take her and her banner. For the rest, no quarter and no prisoners. We will teach this mob the art of war.'"
The man of the tabard proclaimed it as he was bidden. The iron ranks thundered to him like billows foaming about a rock. Modred claimed silence with uplifted sword.
"Enough, gentlemen, enough. No bellowing. Muzzle your temper. We make our spring in silence, that we may claw the harder."
A line of hills lay before them, heights crowned with black pine woods, save for one bare ridge like a great scimitar carving the sky. Flavian advanced his companies up the slopes, halted them in a broad hollow under the brow of the hill. A last galloper had ridden in with hot tidings of the rebels. The Lord of Gambrevault, with Sir Modred and Longsword, cantered on to reconnoitre. They drew to a thicket of gnarled hollies on the hilltop, and looked down upon a long grass valley bounded north and south by woods.
Half a mile away came the rebel vanguard, a black mass of footmen plodding uphill, their pikes and bills shining in the sun. Pennons and gonfalons danced here and there, while in the thick of the column flew the red banner of the Forest, girt about by the spears of Yeoland's guard. She could be seen on her white horse in the midst of the press. The Gerainters were split into three columns, the second column half a mile behind the first, the third somewhat closer upon the second. They were marching without outriders, as though thoroughly assured of their own safety.
Modred chuckled grimly through his black beard, and smote his thigh.
"Fools, fools!"
"Devilish generalship," quoth Longsword under his beaver. "We can crush their van like a wheatfield before the rest can come up. What say you, sire, fewtre spears, and at them?"
Flavian had already turned his horse.
"No sounding of trumpets, sirs," he said; "we will deal only with their van. Call up our companies. God and St. Philip for Gambrevault!"
Over the bare ridge, with its barriers of sun-steeped trees, steel shivered and spears bristled, rank on rank, wave on wave. With a massed rhythm of hoofs, the flood crested the hill, plunged down at a gallop with fewtred spears. Knee to knee, flank to flank, a thousand streaks of steel deluged the hillside. Their trumpets throated now the charge; the iron ranks clashed and thundered, rocked on with a rush of glittering shields.
As dust rolling before a March wind, so the horsemen of Gambrevault poured down on the horde of wavering pikes. The storm had come sudden as thunder out of a summer sky. Before the hurtling impact of that bolt of war, the palsied ranks of foot crumbled like rotten timber. The Gerainters were too massed and too amazed to squander or give ground, to stem with bill and bow the rolling torrent of death. They were rent and trampled, trodden like straw under the stupendous avalanche of steel that crushed and pulverised with ponderous and invincible might.
"God and Gambrevault, kill, kill!"
Such was the death-cry thundered out over the rebel van. The column broke, burst into infinite chaos. Yeoland's guards alone stood firm, a tough core of oak amid rotten tinder. Over the trampled wreckage the fight swirled and eddied, circling about the knot of steel where the red banner flapped in the vortex of the storm.
Yeoland sat dazed on her white horse, as one in the grip of some terrific dream. Nord was at her side, snarling, snapping his jaw like a wolf, his great iron mace poised over his shoulder. The red banner flapped prophetic above their heads. Around them the fight gathered, a whirlwind of contorted figures and stabbing steel.
Yeoland's eyes were on one figure in the press, a man straddling a big bay horse, smiting double-handed with his sword, his red plume jerking in the hot rush of the fight. She saw horse and man go down before him; saw him buffet his way onward like a galley ploughing against wind and wave. His leaping sword and tossing plume came steady and strenuous through the girdle of death.
Fear, pride, a hundred battling passions played like the battle through the woman's mobile brain. She watched the man under the red plume with an intensity of feeling that made her blind to all else for the moment. Love seemed to struggle towards her in bright harness through the fight. She saw the last rank of the human rampart pierced. The man on the bay horse came out before her like some warrior out of an old epic.
None save Nord stood between them, shaggy and grim as a great Norse Thor. She watched the iron mace swing, saw it fall and smite wide. Flavian stood in the stirrups, both hands to the hilt, his horse's muzzle rammed against the opposing brute's chest. The blow fell, a great cut laid in with all the culminating courage of an hour. The sword slashed Nord's gorget, buried its blade in the bull-like neck. He clutched at his throat, toppled, slid out of the saddle and rolled under his horse's hoofs.