A mortal panic falls on the Christians. Not only do they not fight, but they throw away their arms and fly!
For three whole days the Bedouins and Berbers, the fleetest riders among the Africans, pursue the flying Goths over the plains. But few of that vast host live to tell the tale. Alone, with a compact body of men, Teodomir manages to escape into the East, and Pelistes, carrying the body of his son, shuts himself up behind the walls of Cordoba.
And Roderich?
The Christian chronicler who furnishes these details records that the king fell by the sword of Julian, but this is too much of a monkish morality to be true. It is said that Orelia, stained with blood and disabled, was found entangled in a marsh on the borders of the Guadalete, the sandals and mantle of her master beside her.
But where history is silent romancers take up the tale, in those same ballads, parodied by Cervantes, in the inimitable scene of the puppets, in the second part of Don Quixote, when Master Peter, representing Roderich’s tragic death, grows alarmed at the Don’s frantic wrath, and his drawn sword, and cries, “Hold! hold! These are no real Berbers and Moors, but harmless dolls of pasteboard, picturing unhappy King Roderich, who said, ‘Yesterday I was lord of Spain, and to-day I have not a foot of land which I can call my own. Not half an hour ago I had knights and empire at my command, horses in abundance, and chests and bags of gold, but now you see me a ruined and undone man!’ ”
Roderich, say the ballads, did not perish in the battle of the Guadalete, but seeing that the day was lost, he fled. But not far, for the sleek-skinned Orelia, bleeding with wounds to death, soon fell. Then the king wandered on foot, faint and sick, his sword hacked into a saw, his jewelled mail drilled through. On the top of the highest rock (that is not much, for we are in the eternal plains) he sits down and weeps. Wherever he turns the sight of death meets his gaze. His valiant Goths have fallen or have fled. No refuge is left in the walled cities, or by the sea-shore. Toledo, his capital, is far away, and who knows if his banner still floats from the Alcazar towers? Below is the battlefield stained with Christian blood. There his royal banner trails in the dust. The bodies of his dying troops cover the plain. The shrill cry of the Arab comes sharply to his ear. He can discern the form of Julian, sword in hand, dealing destruction to such as still linger, and Tháryk, on his Arab courser white-turbaned, more terrible than the phantoms of the black kings who haunt the desert!