CHAPTER XXXIII
Fulk ran back into the great hall, caught up his sword from the table, but did not tarry to think of shield or helmet.
His rage blew like a north wind, and his face met it, bleak and grim.
“God!”
He saw nothing but Isoult, naked and afraid, struggling in the hands of those two men.
And Merlin! The devil in Fulk was a silent devil, with hard eyes and a cruel mouth.
The group over the water was making away towards the beech woods. Fulk unchained the boat, sprang in, and laying his sword on one of the seats, took the pole and sent the boat surging over. The prow ran well up the bank, and stuck fast among the flags and sedges. He had scarcely set foot on the grass when two men dashed at him out of the thicket.
That sword of his looked a slim thing to tackle a brown bill and stout oak cudgel, but Fulk was as cool as the steel, though a devil’s temper raged in him. He was too quick and too fierce for these clumsy slashers. One had the point in his throat, the other was cut to the left ear. Fulk left them lying, and ran on.
Merlin and the rest had reached the beech woods, and a trampled track through the long grass showed the way they had gone. Fulk was not concerned with the possible odds. He was the male robbed of his mate, ready to rush at death, take wounds and not feel them. His sword felt like metal at white heat. It was thirsty. His face was not pleasant to behold, the grim white face of a man whose eyes see blood.
The track through the grass went into the beech wood where the trees stood at a little distance from each other with chequered stretches of brown leaves and short, sweet turf. Fulk glimpsed something ahead down one of the woodland ways. His nostrils expanded; his lips were nothing but a thin, hard line.
He ran on between the great smooth boles of the beeches and under boughs that swept within a bow’s length of the ground, his feet making the dead leaves crackle, or going noiselessly over the patches of grass. He could see figures moving ahead of him, a grey shape, pausing ever and again, a white face looking back, a man half hidden by some tree-trunk and handling a bow. Once he heard a half-smothered cry, and something leapt in him, a fury of tenderness that stung him like fire.
A sudden glade opened in the beech wood, and he saw all that he desired to see, someone to be rescued, someone to be spoken to with the sword. They had thrown an old red cloak about Isoult, and two men were holding her, one with a brown fist half hidden in her hair. Three more fellows were waiting like dogs at Merlin’s heel—Merlin who had faced about and was pointing towards Fulk with the knife that he had drawn from his girdle.
One man put a horn to his lips and blew a blast that whimpered into the distant woodlands. The others were handling their bows. Fulk gave them no leisure to shoot at him as they pleased. He ran in to give them cold steel.
Two arrows went past him. He saw Merlin leap aside, shouting to his men.
“Kill—kill!”
Fulk had an arrow through his sleeve before he marked out his first man. Maybe he had the mastery of these fellows before a blow was struck, for he came at them like a white-faced devil out of hell, and his eyes were as terrible as his sword. He slashed at one man’s bow, and the hand fell with it, the wretch staring stupidly at a bleeding stump. A little fat rascal with a poleaxe had the point under his ribs. A tall, raw-boned horse-thief stabbed at Fulk with a short sword, but not getting home with the blow, had his throat slashed as a judgment. One of the men who guarded Isoult had run forward to join in the tussle, but thought better of it and hung back.
Fulk heard Isoult utter a warning cry.
“Your back—guard your back!”
As he struck the fourth man down he had a vision of Isoult struggling and breaking free. She ran towards him.
“Behind you, behind you!”
Merlin had crept up like a shadow, knife raised. And as Fulk half turned, Isoult ran between them, striking at Merlin’s knife with her arm, and was stabbed between the wrist and elbow for her courage.
Fulk swung a hasty blow at Merlin and knocked him flat. But the blade had not bitten. A long, red bruise showed across the friar’s forehead. His wits had been rattled like dice in a dice-box.
“Run, run!”
She caught Fulk’s wrist, and he saw her arm all red where Merlin’s knife had smitten her.
“Let me settle with this damned priest!”
“You are blood mad—run! There are more to come, I tell you. Hear them giving tongue.”
True enough, they heard men running through the beech wood, shouting as they ran. Fulk shouldered his sword and gripped Isoult’s hand. It was to be a race to the mere; the feet that rustled the dead leaves in the wood came on like a March wind.
“Art faint, Isoult?”
He looked in her eyes as they ran side by side.
“It was nothing—a mere bodkin prick through the flesh.”
He lifted her arm and pressed his lips to it, even where the blood reddened it.
“My desire, twice have you given me of your blood.”
“Do I grudge it?”
“Not yet have I matched it with mine.”
They reached the grassland and saw the mere all silver with the slant of the morning sunlight, and the boat lying by the bank. Fulk fell behind Isoult now that they were in the open, letting her hand go. A glance over the shoulder showed him Merlin’s pack in full cry through the beech wood.
“Why are you behind me?”
“Keep your breath—and run.”
He was covering her, remembering how that chance arrow had struck her down that night when they had made a dash to escape from Merlin and his Sussex rebels.
They reached the mere. Isoult sprang into the boat, and Fulk followed, throwing his sword into the stern and picking up the pole. He had thrust the boat off as he climbed in.
“Down, Isoult, lie down.”
An arrow struck the gunwale and stood quivering there when they were half across the mere. A second hissed into the water close to the boat; another struck the pole and snapped in two.
The boat touched the landing-stage. Fulk dropped the pole and caught Isoult under the shoulders.
“Up; keep behind me.”
“I’ll not hide behind you.”
“Love is a shield.”
He half lifted her out of the boat, bent for an instant to throw the ring of the chain over the post and to snatch up his sword.
“Now!”
They made their dash for the house, and reached the porch untouched.
Fulk caught Isoult’s face between his hands and kissed her on the lips.