God and his prophets! they would be down! Nor horse nor man could stand that boring pressure, that invincible strength. Wrist against wrist; and beneath them struggling legs and tails and fear-snorting crests!
There! over!--A confused heap upon the ground, but Babar uppermost with two swords in his hand.
A shout of triumph rose from the five hundred. But as the discomfited champion rode back without his sword, another rode forward to take his place.
This was not in the bond; still Babar, checking his laboured breaths to more even rhythm, threw away the second sword and sprang to his horse, which had risen unhurt but dazed.
"Come on, friend!" he shouted; "I am ready!"
This was a very different sort of adversary. A lean, ewe-necked horse, a nimble, dapper, little swordsman with a blade like a razor, who buzzed and wheeled, and settled and fled again like a hungry mosquito.
Babar with his half-dazed horse was at a disadvantage for a time and the razor-like edge caught him on the little finger once. But only once. The next instant in one furious charge, a back-hander with the flat of the sword had sent the King's antagonist spinning from his saddle like a tee-totum.
So it was with five champions, one after the other.
Babar more and more weary, yet more and more triumphant in fierce vitality with every victory, unhorsed, disarmed, or routed every one of them. Raising a laugh, indeed, in his own favour when Yakûb-Beg, last but one, escaped by hard riding from the rain of pitiless blows which fell instead on his horse's rump, urging it to greater speed.
Only once did sheer merciless anger leap to Babar's eyes, and that was when Nâzir, the Usbek, letting go his horse's bridle during a close-locked tussle of sword arms, drew a dagger with his left hand and would have plunged it in his adversary's heart.