CHAPTER XXVI
Crescent and Cross
On the same day that witnessed the deliverance of Rennes, the rising sun, lighting up a wild mountain pass in southern Spain, revealed two shadowy figures crouching behind a huge briar-clad rock, halfway up the hillside. Both kept glancing impatiently down the gorge, as if expecting some one from that side, but both seemed anxious to avoid being seen themselves.
The watchers had the light hair and fair faces of northern Europe, and wore armour of English fashion, which made their presence all the stranger in a region where, at that time, any Christian who dared enter it took his life in his hand. For the Moorish power in Spain, though tottering, still held all Andalusia; and hence the passes of the Sierra Morena (which, dividing that province from New Castile, formed the frontier between Christian and Moslem) were then, owing to the ceaseless raids of the light Saracen cavalry, one of the most perilous regions in Spain.
“They come not yet,” said the taller man, who wore the gold spurs of a knight, glancing down the pass for the tenth time; “but they will doubtless haste to cross the border with their booty ere daylight overtake them. They cannot be much longer now.”
“Unless they have taken another road and escaped us,” growled the other, a square, sturdy man-at-arms, whose dinted armour told of hard service.
“I think not so,” said the knight, calmly. “Yon shepherd who brought word of their coming must know these mountains well, and has little cause to love the Saracen robbers, who have taken his all; and this is their nearest way to their own land. Trust me, by this pass they will come; and while a hope is left of meeting them, and rescuing our fellow-Christians whom they are carrying into bondage, here will I abide, as surely as my name is Alured de Claremont.”
It was indeed Brother Michael’s penitent knight, who had had many a strange experience since that memorable evening on the hilltop above Carcassonne.
Setting himself zealously to the work assigned him by the pilgrim-monk, he had led his wild followers into Spain, and thrown himself, heart and soul, into the age-long Crusade, by which the Spanish Christians were winning back their own land, foot by foot, from its Moslem conquerors. No task was too hard for him, no peril too great; and though ever foremost in danger, he seemed always to escape unharmed.
So striking, in fact, was this strange immunity, that his men believed him made proof against weapons by the special grace of Heaven; and his Moorish foes were equally convinced that he was a mighty enchanter, against whom neither skill nor valour could avail. Such, indeed, was their superstitious awe of “The White Knight” (as they called him from his bright armour and the snowy plume in his helmet), that when he was known to be abroad, the boldest Saracen raiders were chary of venturing over the border.
It was to intercept one of these raiding parties that he was now in ambush with some of his best men; for the rocky ridges flanking the gorge, voiceless and lifeless as they seemed beneath their shroud of thin white mist, were all alive with armed men, ready to leap from their covert at the first gleam of steel far down the shadowy valley, and straining their ears for the hoof-tramp of the returning spoilers.