But all this noise was as nothing to the frightful yell of savage joy which went up from us when we saw the raiders draw together on the shingle ridge of the beach, and knew instinctively by their pale, tideward faces and hesitation, that they were trapped—the sea was out, and their ships were high and dry!
Somehow, I scarcely know how it was, when those men turned grimly and prepared to make their last stand under their ships, a strange silence fell upon both bands, and for a minute or two the long, wild rank of our warriors halted at the bottom of the slope, every man silent and dumb by a strange accord, while opposite, against the sky-line, were the mighty Norsemen, clustered together, and looking down with fierce, sullen brows, equally silent and expectant, while the sun glinted on their rustling arms and tall, peaked casques.
We stood thus a minute or two, and I heard the thumpings of my own heart, like an echo of the low wash of the far-away sea—a plover piping overhead, and a raven croaking on the distant hills, but not another sound until—suddenly some British women who had come red-handed to a mound behind broke out into a wild war song. Then the spell was loosed, and we were again at them, sweeping the sea kings from the ridge into the tangle of long grass and sand and stunted bushes that led to the shore, and there, separated, but dying stubbornly, powerless against our numbers, we pulled them down, and killed them one by one, lopping their armor from them and stripping their cloths, till the pleasant lichened valleys of the seashore wood and the green footways of the moss were stamped full of crimson puddles and littered with the naked bodies of those tawny giants.
The last man to fall was a chief. Twice I had seen him hard pressed, and had lifted my javelin to slay him, but a touch of silly compunction had each time held my hand, and now he stood with his back to his ship, like some fierce, beautiful thing of the sea. His plated brass and steel cuirass was hacked and dented, his white linen hung in shreds about him; his arms were bare, and blood ran down them, while his long fair hair lifted to the salt wind that was coming in freshly with the tide, and the sun shone on his cold blue eyes, and his polished harness, and his tall and comely proportions, standing out there against the dark side of his high-sterned vessel.
But what cared the Britons for flaxen locks or the goodliness of a young Thor? He had in his hands a broken spear, his own sword being snapped in two; and with this weapon he lay about fiercely every now and then as the men edged in upon him. Luckless Viking! there is no retreat or rescue! He was bleeding heavily, and, even as I watched, his chin sank upon his chest. At once the Britons ran in upon him, but the life flared up again, and the gallant robber crushed in a pair of heads with his stave and sent the others flying back, still glaring upon the wide circle of his enemies with death and defiance struggling for mastery in his eyes in a way wonderful to behold. Again and again the yellow head of the young Thor nodded and sank, and again and again he started up and scowled upon them, as each savage cry of joy, to see him thus bleeding to death, fell upon his ears. Presently he wavered for a moment and leaned his shoulder against the black side of his ship, and his lids dropped wearily; at once the Britons rushed, and, when I turned my face there again, they were hacking and stripping the armor from a mutilated but still quivering corpse!
A few such episodes as this repulse of the Northmen, magnified and circulated with all the lying exaggeration that a coward race ever wraps about his feats of arms, made the Britons bold, and their boldness brings me to the end of my chapter.
Many a pleasant week and month did I live and enjoy all the best things life has to give: the master of my Roman mistress; the foremost spearman where the boar went to bay among the rocks on the hillside; the jolliest fellow that was ever invited to a lordly banquet; the penniless adventurer whose fortune every one envied—and then fate put me by again, and wiped my tablets clean for another frolic epoch.
It came about this way. The British grew more and more unruly as time went on, and legion after legion left us. At length, when the last of the Romans were down to the coast, about to embark, Electra made up her mind to go, too—and with all her hoards. But in this latter particular the new authorities in the neighboring town could not concur, and they sent two brand-new civilian senators to expostulate and detain her, the last representative of the old rule. Electra had those gentlemen stripped in the vestibule, and flogged within an ace of their lives, and then sent them home, bound, in a mean country cart.
All that afternoon we were busy sewing up the gold and bronze in bags, and by dusk a long train of mules set out for the coast, in charge of a score of our mercenaries, who, having served a long apprenticeship to cruelty and extortion, had more to fear from the natives than even we. Nor was it too soon. As the last of the convoy went into the evening darkness, Electra and I ascended the flat, wide roof of her home, and there we saw, westward, under the stormy red of the setting sun, the flashing of arms and the dust-wreaths against the glow which hung above the bands of people moving out and bearing down on us in a mood one well could guess.
Her ladyship, having safely packed, was disdainful and angry. Her fine lips curled as she watched the gray column of citizens swarming out to the assault; but when her gaze wandered over the fair valleys she had ruled and bled so long, she was, perhaps, a little regretful and softened.