by Harold Lamb
When Arnulf urged him to form the mailed horsemen for a charge he laughed inside his steel dome:
“Arrow fight before sword stroke. Watch ye, little man!”
Amid drifting dust clouds three thousand desert men swarmed about the seven hundred Normans. They dashed forward in groups, round shields upraised, cloaks flying about them. And the long arrows of the Normans dropped them from the saddle.
The back-curving ends of the Christian arc were still too close to the ridge and Odo’s camp for the Moslems to cut in behind them, and the darting charges of the excited Arabs failed to break the Christian line. The short Moslem saddle bow was not effective at that distance, and the Norman archers began to enjoy good sport. As the Arabs rode over their dead, their fury grew, and their shouting became a pulsing roar—
“Allah ’I allahu!”
The Norman horsemen, standing beside their stirrups, chafed and grumbled. They dared not ride to their leader to protest, although they were ill content to be out of the affray. “’Tis not our lord’s way, to hang upon the leash.”
It was not, indeed, Odo’s way, and a rider galloped down from the closed pavilion—a man of Arnulf’s who sought the armiger beneath the upraised standard. And Arnulf shouted against Eric’s helm, holding up a gleaming signet ring. “The token of my lord the duke. He bids thee cease this play and go forward before the heat comes.”
Again Eric laughed in his dark dome. “Truly said I there was a sign between us. Let us try the sword strokes. Sound thy horns.”
At the blare of the horns the Normans mounted, and walked their horses between the archers, who moved after them. Before the standard bearer rode Eric, holding back until the mailed riders had closed in and formed a double rank. Suddenly his eyes swept from flank to flank and he urged on the gray charger. Behind him massive hoofs drummed the hard clay, and roared into a gallop.
The uplifted spears came down, the long shields were raised, and a war shout went up.
“Forward, with God!”
The Arabs had launched a counter charge, to strike the leading rank before it gained full headway. A thousand or more of the wild horsemen came on, their scimitars swinging by their knees, their horses maddened by blood.
But the first wave broke against the long Norman spears, and the lighter horses of the Moslems swerved or went down at the impact. A swirl and check—a brief clanging of steel—and the gray Norman line went on, gathering pace. Again the spears were lowered, as the Arabs closed in from all sides.
Eric, his ax-head resting on his shield arm, drove between two cloaked riders, took the lash of a scimitar on his shield and struck to the right. The curving edge of the ax sliced upward, beneath an Arab’s jaw, and Eric freed the weapon by a jerk of his wrist that laid open one side of the rider’s head.
A scimitar bruised the muscles of Eric’s right shoulder, and again the ax slashed out, catching the new assailant beneath the arm. And the arm and part of the shoulder flew off.
The Viking was little excited. The clash of weapons left him calm, and he struck out instinctively, knowing what the result would be, and always freeing his weapon swiftly. While the tall Normans lashed about them, shouting their exultation, he rode silently—a fighter plying his trade, a weapon man, killing where he willed.
Never before had he been so protected by steel. He felt an arrow jar into his thigh, and reached down his left hand to break off the shaft. Twice something crashed against his solid helm, and he shook his head and went on.
* * * *
So the hard-riding Normans broke the Arabs and followed up, until dark faces whirled past Eric again, and his ax rose and fell, scattering blood from its edge. And then his horse went down with a stagger and lurch—the length of a sword blade in its belly.
The Viking freed his feet from the stirrups and fell clear. He raised the shield over his head, and shortened his grip on the ax. Dodging, hitting out as he ran, he fought for a way out of the press of rearing and circling horses.
Hands caught at his ax arm, but the Viking heaved back, and an Arab tumbled to earth before him, and lay motionless a second later with his skull crushed in and his brains scattered over the ground. Eric strode over him, ran for a moment beside his horse—glimpsed a rocky knoll through his eye-slit and swung himself to the top of a four-foot boulder.
Arrows flicked past him and he swung his shield against the gleam of javelins. Arabs scrambled from their saddles to climb to the ground beside him, and with shield and ax he battered them down.
They reached up to catch his legs, but that giant body in its chain mail was firm rooted. Never, thought the Norman men-at-arms, straining to reach his side, had Odo fought with the sword as he now fought with the ax. “Aid for good Duke Odo!”
He heard their shout, saw their long blades sweeping nearer.
“Good blows, ye men of the Cross! Good blows!” his deep voice boomed.
And then he saw no Moslems before him. Norman men-at-arms were sitting in the saddle beneath him, panting, resting their bloodied sword arms. They were looking at him silently. Many of them had hated, and almost all had feared Duke Odo. But this leader of theirs in the dull and dented helm, the chain mesh hanging in shreds from his right arm, and blood bubbling through the links on his chest and thigh—this man had led them through four onsets of the Moslem masses, and they were ready to follow him hereafter to Jerusalem or to purgatory. The valley was theirs.
Eric blinked at his men through sweat-tormented eyes, steam rising from his body, the lust of conflict like hot wine within him. The steel helm, heated by the sun’s glare, irked him and he pulled at it with unfamiliar fingers, to tear it off. But it had been laced to his shoulder links by an expert hand, and he croaked for Arnulf to rid him of it.
A tall swordsman, black with dust, gripped his arm and pointed: “My lord, yonder is thy weapon bearer, and he is sped this life.”
Eric looked down, seeing the carcass of his own horse and, a space in back of it, Arnulf’s body outstretched. The Italian’s head lay to the rear, face down, an arrow fairly through his throat. So Arnulf must have turned back, when the Moslems surrounded the Viking, a moment before the charger was slain.
But Eric was not thinking of that. His eye had been caught by smoke and dust on the summit of the ridge where the duke’s camp stood. Through the haze moved cloaked horsemen, and gaunt yellow camels. At times steel flashed in the sunlight. He could hear no uproar but it seemed to him that the large pavilions of the knights were down and burning—and surely Odo’s pavilion had vanished from its stone summit.
The fleeting Arabs had turned aside to storm the camp. And Eric, who cared little for that, remembered the sleeping child who had held fast to his hand through the night’s watching. He thought of her shot through by arrows, falling under the galloping horses, or bound to an Arab’s saddle, and he leaped down from his high ground.
He pulled the swordsman who had spoken to him out of the saddle, and he swung upon the Norman’s charger, and lashed the horse to a gallop toward the ridge. The others made haste to follow.
But Eric was the first to climb the ridge. The Arabs had fled. Upon the knoll, the duke’s pavilion lay in flames.
The Viking urged his horse toward Sir Guy’s tent, and reined in.
“Here was fighting,” he muttered.
The tent was down, and atop the wreckage lay the figure of a Norman man-at-arms, his chain mesh broken, his body slashed open below the ribs. His head, encased in a basket helm, was turned to the sky, and upon him and about him sprawled the bodies of eight Moslems, all cut and crushed by gigantic blows.
Others of the duke’s men came up to stare, and to say—what Eric’s eyes had already told him—that they knew naught of Sir Guy and his daughter, save that no captives had been carried off by the Arabs. But when they said that, the folds of the linen tent stirred upon the wreckage, and a faint voice cried, “God for Bari!”
The Normans started back and exclaimed,
but Eric bade them cut through the tangle of cloth with their knives, and this they did after making the sign of the cross—for it seemed to them that the dead had spoken.
They found the tent pole and table piled against the pallet, and upon the bed the girl Ilga, shielding the head of her sick father with her body. When Eric bent over them she started back and looked around fearfully. The knight of the Mount raised himself upon his elbow.
“Forgive her, my lord duke,” he whispered. “She hath been sorely tried and all this day she looked for the tall Viking, who came not.”
“What befell here?” Eric’s voice was hoarse within the steel dome.
“Christ be my aid, a strange thing befell. Anon we watched thy charge and the main battle. Then there came to the tent a tall fellow, wearing a nobleman’s helm such as thine, but without device of any kind. He spoke not, but took Ilga up in his arms. She cried aloud for Eric the Viking, but this man laughed and heeded me not. He bore her to the entrance, and then we heard the shouting of the Arabs.”
Sir Guy brushed the sweat from his white face. “The man of the helm said nothing. He turned back and again he laughed, when he tossed Ilga down beside me. He laid the table—so—and heaved up the center pole, letting it down upon us, with all the canopy about us. Then he pushed his way clear of the cloth and took his stand near us, for we heard his battle shout. Aye, he struck heavy blows, and it seemed to me that a score of swordsmen came against him. Yet he held his ground, and shielded us. He had great strength, being a madman, touched with the sun, or God’s anger.”
“Not so.” The Viking thrust his fingers through the openings in his helm beneath his ears, and wrenched off the steel casque when the links and laces broke.
A hundred eyes stared at him mutely, until the maid Ilga left her father and caught the Viking’s arm against her heart. “Thou—thou didst leave me!”
Eric’s blue eyes clouded, and he nodded slowly. “True—it must be said that I have that weakness. When steel is bared, I have nothing else in my head.” And when she pressed her face against his torn shoulder he bent down, brushing his lips against the tangle of her hair.
A Norman strode up to him. “What then of my lord, the duke? Eric the Landless, it does appear to me thou hast stolen his gear, and helm.”
But Sir Guy lifted his hand. “Ill said! This smells to me of Odo’s trickery, and I doubt not that he will presently come out of his hole, like the fox he is.”
Before anyone could answer, the Viking’s deep voice checked them. “Not so!”
He stepped to the body upon the wreckage, and with the edge of his ax cut the thongs of the helm. He drew it off and cast it away, and in the silence that followed his action, leaned on his ax to look down into the pallid features and the open eyes of the dead duke, Odo.
“I am thinking,” his voice rumbled on, “that this was a man of hard deeds, but he met his death well. And it must be said, that is a great thing in any man.”
THE RED COCK CROWS (1928)
Piculph, the sergeant at arms, always made his rounds in the city of Tana at dusk. In that hour, after vesper bells and the muezzin’s call, wine flowed in the taverns and blood in the alleys. A watchful fellow like Piculph could always pick up something good.
Tana was a slave port—the last post of Europeans in Asia—at the far end of the Charnomar, that is now called the Black Sea. Over this sea the galleys from Constantinople brought Christian slaves, boys and young women, Greeks and all sorts, to be sold to rich Moslems. And from the East, along the caravan road, came the turbaned folk bringing red leather and hemp and musk and opium and sword blades. And Tana had never been noisier at dusk than this evening of the year of grace 1402.
Piculph went warily, turning the corners wide, with his ear cocked to the bickering and brawling that went on, only half seen. It was the hour, he had said more than once, when the Horned One held open market. Piculph himself was a Lombard redbeard with a knack of stabbing and a nice touch for stealing. He served Messer Andrea, the master of the slave brokers, and he held himself to be better than the masterless rogues, the ribalds of the alleys—such rogues as he now paused to watch.
In the deep shadow under the stone arch of an open gate in the city wall some half dozen ragged figures were clustered, looking out at the road. Piculph, being mounted, could see over their heads. Beyond this gate, out on the plain, the glow of sunset lingered. And Piculph’s curiosity grew as he watched.
Often he had watched stout Turks driving laden asses through that gate and sallow Armenians moving through the dust raised by their sheep and grim Tatars whirling lariats as they trotted beside the herds of their shaggy ponies. But he had never seen a man leading a horse.
And now a tall man was approaching with the long stride of one who had come far on foot. He wore boots of soft leather laced to his knees, a faded mantle gray with dust, and a tarnished steel cap set a little upon one side of his yellow head. Great of bone he was, and though alone he did not seem to fear the darkness under the gate. The sword slung upon his hip in its leather scabbard was too heavy and too long to be handy in a brawl. So thought Piculph.
And so thought the ribalds under the arch who had seen that the stranger led a lame horse, a gray Arab racer whose saddle cloth was gleaming cloth of gold. Since the stranger was alone and the horse one of price, the thieves made ready to slay the man—there in the darkness under the arch that smelled of charcoal and sheepskins.
Piculph grinned in his beard, for he saw what they were about, and he meant to ride in upon them after their work was done and seize the horse himself.
The stranger entered the arch, and the masterless men thronged about him.
“Ya huk—ya hak!” they yelled in unison, the beggar’s cry of Asia’s streets. And at their call a pock-marked devil in a tattered cloak came running up with a lantern as if to light the way before the tall man. Instead he thrust the lantern close to the stranger’s eyes—clear gray eyes that looked at them out of a lean, sun-darkened face.
“Give, in God’s name!” whined a beggar, pushing through his mates until his groping hands closed upon the right arm of the stranger. The beggar was blind, his pupils white-filmed, his lids eaten by flies.
His comrades pressed in closer then, and Piculph saw that for which he had been looking. Behind the blind beggar appeared a stout Levantine boatman grasping a short ax, watching his chance to strike. The thieves clamored louder, and the boatman shifted his weight to his left foot, and the corners of his lips twitched in a snarl. Suddenly he struck, full at his victim’s eyes.
But the tall man had caught the flicker of steel in the light of the lantern. His right arm shot forward, thrusting the blind beggar back, and he himself bent back from the hips. The boatman’s ax swung harmlessly through the air.
At the same instant the stranger pulled clear his sword. The point of the long blade swept out and down, and the boatman shrieked. The sword’s edge had caught his wrist and cut through it. The ax, still gripped in hairy fingers, dropped to the earth.
The boatman staggered against the stones of the arch and fell. At the flash of the long sword his companions vanished, as dogs flee the rush of a wolf—the blind beggar scrambling after them. The stranger picked up the lantern quietly and hooked it to his belt—a broad leather belt, Piculph noticed, set with silver plates and a miniature shield,
“Por Bacco!” exclaimed the big Lombard, drawing closer, “what a cut that was!”
He had spoken in Italian, and the stranger neither answered nor sheathed his sword. Piculph saw now that he was younger than he had thought, but with the narrowed eyes and the lines about the mouth that come from hardship and long service.
“Whence are you, Messer Swordsman?” he asked, in the lingua franca that was the common speech of the Levant.
“From the road,” the stranger answered calmly, and Piculph was no wiser than before.
The Lombard glanced at the bloodstained ax and shrug
ged a plump shoulder. “Well, you had an ill welcome. Curs will use their teeth, and a good horse is worth a hundred ducats in Tana this night. Aye, many souls are fleeing the gates, and few are coming in. A time of trouble always cheapens women and raises the price of horses. Yesterday a Greek virgin, skilled at dancing and the guitar, sold for thirty-five pieces of gold. I saw it—I, captain of Messer Andrea’s men, and I swear by—”
“Enough!” said the tall man. “Lead me to your master.”
* * * *
“And may the foul fiend sit upon me, Your Grace, but I know not what he serves or seeks. He is no Prank or Lombard or man of Genoa like your illustrious lordship, and he keeps his tongue in his mouth. He wears the belt of a lord, but he came in alone from the Jerusalem road, and if he were a ghost and not a living wight, I would name him a mad crusader. ’Twas a sweet slice he dealt that clapper-claw—Zut!—and the dog’s paw was off. But he says he was sent to Your Illustrious Grace.”
Thus Piculph delivered himself to his master, Andrea the Genoese, sometimes called the Counter by reason of his great wealth in slaves and ships.
They were in the open gallery of the citadel, overlooking the flat roofs of the town and the bare masts of the galleys beyond. The last of the sunset glow had left the sky, and above the spluttering torch in its socket behind Messer Andrea the points of the Pleiades shimmered. Against the stars rose the dark bulk of donjon and corner towers, upon which moved slowly the vague figures of watchers.
Outside the glare of the torch Prince Theodore lay at ease upon a divan, a handsome young Greek, mindful of the dressing of his dark beard and the hang of the miniver cloak upon his shoulders, but at this moment sulky and out of patience.
Erect, clad in severe black velvet, Messer Andrea sat at a narrow ebony table inlaid with ivory, a roll of parchment between his bony fingers. His shallow face was dry and aged, his eyes expressionless, yet his voice was sharply imperious. Men in debt to the Counter feared that shrill voice more than the slither of drawn steel, and Prince Theodore—who tried to drown in his cups the memory that Tana had once been his and was now in the hands of the Counter—would say when he was very drunk that the Genoese knew the art of making silver out of copper and gold out of human souls.