"Victoria! Victoria!" we heard him crying. "Forward, forward! swords and pikemen!"
"Sancta Maria!" replied his soldiers, in a thousand varying tones uniting in one roar; "Sancta Maria! Vivat—vivat!" and that wild cry of the Austrians was echoed by the wilder hurrah of a regiment of Croats, who had leaped from their white horses, and were levelling their long carbines at us, point-blank over their saddles, with deadly precision. As the foe approached I looked at Ian. With his eyes flashing under the peak of his helmet, and both hands clenched on the hilt of his claymore, he was surveying the scene below with stern calmness. Phadrig Mhor, with a Lochaber axe, stood by his side, and the M'Farquars, with their empty muskets clubbed, stood grimly in their ranks. They were a dark, a savage, and picturesque group.
"You see, my cousin," said Ian, in that grim jesting tone which he could assume at times; "that King Christian has resolved we shall pay dearly for declining the Danish cross. We shall all find our graves by the shore of the Elbe."
"Ye say truth, M'Farquhar," said Dunbar, as he pressed to the front with a partisan in his hand, and a pair of pistols in his belt; "but if ever we have a Hegisippus to relate our story, he shall never, like a lying loon, have it to say that we feared the face of man. But that king, whose life was saved by the Scottish Rittmaster Hume, on the day he fled from the battle of Lütter, should have remembered that trifling circumstance; and also that his sister had the honour to be queen of fair Scotland. But bide ye—hark!"
Above the uproar in the trench below us, the fire of the Croatian calivers, and the shouts of the stormers, we heard the clang of a horse's hoofs on a paved street, and saw a cavalier lightly armed, galloping in mad haste across the bridge of the Elbe, and in three seconds he dashed into the heart of the sconce amongst us.
"The Baron Karl of Klosterfiord, aide-de-camp to the king!" exclaimed Ian and others.
"Herr Dunbar," said he, breathlessly: "you are to abandon the sconce, spike the cannon if you cannot bring them off, blow up the bridge of the Elbe, and retire to Lauenburg or Glückstadt."
"'Tis too late, baron—these orders have come too late to save us," replied Dunbar, as hand to hand we met the Imperialists, hewing them from their ladders with swords and halberts, thrusting them down at push of pike into the fosse, where many of them, by falling head foremost, perished miserably among the mud and sap below.
Right in the gorge of our embrasure stood the Count of Carlstein, fighting with sword and buckler against Ian, whose powerful form, overtopped the foe, though he could not stand erect while swaying his two-handed sword. Their soldiers pressed on behind them, and deadly was strife at that point; for against it the enemy were pouring all their strength and fury. Save an occasional pistol shot, the din was occasioned alone by the cries of the combatants, and the clash of their weapons, steel sparkling on steel; and nothing could surpass the bravery of Count Carlstein and his Spaniards, but that of Ian Dhu and his company.
Hurled over each other in whole sections by our levelled pikes, we rolled them into the ditch; but other sections came up in their places, and their cries rent the air.