The Capsina: An Historical Novel

by E. F. Benson

About fifty Turks had kept together, and were coming up the path towards them at a double. Some two dozen Greeks had already begun running down the path after the others, and there were a few moments' tussle and fighting, two or three falling on both sides, but the Turks struggled through them and hurried on. Mitsos, the Capsina, and a few others fired coolly and steadily at them from cover, but they soon passed them and were lost in the wood behind. Mitsos threw his musket down.

"The knife and pistol for me," he said. "Come. The patrol outside will talk to those."

For the first few minutes the odds were largely against the Greeks, for many of the Turks, despairing of escape, had hidden themselves in clumps of brushwood, which, as the Greeks came on, spurted and bristled with fire, and some number were wounded, but a few only killed. But when once they got the ambushed Turks out of the nearer hiding-places, and on the move again, the odds were vastly the other way. The trees were so thick that, as Mitsos had seen, muskets were of little use, and it was hand-to-hand fighting, or pistols at close quarters. Pistols, however, required reloading, and time was precious, for the main object was to prevent the Turks from reforming, or gaining open ground where they could make an organized resistance. But knives were always ready to the hand, and needed no charging but the arm-thrust, and in a little while only occasional shots were heard, and hurrying steps slipping on the muffled floor of pine-needles, or the short-drawn gasp of the striker or the groan of the struck. Now and then a couple of figures, with perhaps two more in pursuit, would hurry across a piece of open ground, and but for that a man on the slope opposite would have seen only the hill-side, green and peaceful, and heard the whispering of the trees above his head, or what he would take to be the sound of the wild boars routing and tramping in the undergrowth, and have suspected nothing of that dance of death raging under the aromatic pines. He would, perhaps, have noticed that the hawks were wheeling in large numbers, and very silently, without their usual shrill pipe, above the trees, and would have said truly to himself that there was carrion somewhere below them.

Mitsos and the Capsina had kept close together, but Kanaris, cool and business-like as ever, had lost them almost at once among the trees, for he had turned aside a moment to investigate a musket-barrel which pointed out of a clump of oleander by the stream, and had been rewarded for his curiosity by having his hair singed by the fire which passed close to his temple. Mitsos had paused a moment and laughed as he saw Kanaris draw back a step or two and jump with knife raised into the middle of the clump.

He shouted "Good-luck!" to him, and turned in time to see the Capsina fly, like some furious wild-cat, holding her pistol by the barrel in one hand and her long knife in the other, at a man who was crossing her between two trees just in front. He saw the Turk's lips curl in a sort of snarl, and he put his hand to his belt a moment too late, for the next the Capsina's knife had flickered down from arm's-length to his throat, and the butt of her pistol caught him on the temple. He fell sprawling at her feet, and she had to put one foot on his chest as purchase to pull the knife out again.

"Yet she is a woman," muttered Mitsos to himself, and, wheeling round, "Ah, would you?" he cried, and another Turk, rushing at the Capsina, who was still tugging at her knife, got Mitsos's weapon between his shoulder-blades.

The girl turned. "Thanks," she said. "I owe you one. Pull my knife out for me, little Mitsos—pull; oh, how slow you are!"

Even in so short a time the tide had completely turned, and the Turks were but as game driven from one cover to another. The Greeks who had gone off in pursuit of those who had fled down the bed of the stream were returning, for no more of them were left to be slain, and the fight was centring round a copse of low-growing trees more in the open and higher up the hill. The majority of those Turks who were not yet slain had taken refuge here, and already the place had proved expensive to the Greeks, for more than twenty lay dead round it. The brushwood was so thick that it was impossible to see more than a yard or two, and while a man was forcing his way in after some Turk in front of him, a shot would come from the right or left, or from closer at hand a knife would lick out like a snake's tongue, and while he turned to his new enemy, the pursued became the pursuer.

Such was the state of things when Mitsos and the Capsina came up. The latter had received a nasty cut across her left arm, and Mitsos had tied it up roughly for her, being unable to persuade her to stop quiet out of harm's way while the work was finished. But she refused, laughing wildly, for drunkenness of blood was on her, and the two went forward together.

She paused a moment some fifty yards from the edge of the copse. From the ground above it every now and then a Turk would make a dash for the cover, sometimes getting through the Greeks, who were fighting on the outskirts, sometimes knifing one on his way, or more often falling himself; and once from behind them a man ran swiftly by, cutting at Mitsos as he passed, and disappeared with a bound into the trees. The Capsina looked round at the dead who were lying about, and her face grew set and hard.