The first charge was a furious one, and the onset was deadly and disastrous. The Danes plied the poleaxe, their national weapon, with savage fury; the Scots charged with their long pikes and two-handed swords, while swift and surely shot the archers on both sides from the rear ranks of the closing columns. Steel helmets and byrnes of shining rings, bucklers of tempered iron, and targets of thick bull-hide were cut by the sword, cloven by the axe, or pierced by the barbed arrow, or by the spear that was launched from afar; and unhappily in the early part of the battle, Kenneth of the Isles, Græme of Strathearn, and Dunbar of Lothian, fell from their horses, each struck by a mortal wound; for the first had the axe of Enotus the Dane driven through the brass umbo of his shield and the iron cone of his helmet, sheer down to his teeth; the second had his heart pierced through, byrne and buff, by a leaf-shaped javelin; and the third had a double-edged seax driven repeatedly through his body.
Valiantly fought the venerable king, and as fast as men fell, their places were supplied; but disheartened by the sudden loss of the three greatest chiefs in the land, his soldiers began to give way, and with a triumphant yell the heavily-armed Danes pressed on them—their eyes sparkling with rage and the lust of blood, while the horse-hair of their helmets mingled with their long and tangled locks and the wild volume of their shaggy beards.
Enotus, the Danish general, a powerful and gigantic warrior mounted on a white charger, and clad in a hauberk of burnished rings, with the skin of a bear floating from his shoulders on which the claws rested while the skull of the monster grinned above his basinet, soon singled out the King of Scotland, whom he knew by his venerable aspect, his silver beard, and the diadem of golden trefoils that encircled his helmet, which had three upright feathers of the iolar—for the Scottish king is the chief of all the Scottish chiefs;—and (though around him fought Gillemichael, Earl of Fife, Alan, Thane of Sutherland, who defeated the Danes on the nmir of Drumilea, Hugo of the Rutherford, whose ancestor twelve hundred years before had conducted King Reuther through the Tweed against the Britons, Crinian, Thane of Dunbar, and others, the very flower of the land), with his tremendous mace the Dane by one blow dashed out the brains of the royal charger, and by a second would assuredly have slain the king had not a sturdy warrior of the Murrayland, clad in striped breacan and wearing the long Celtic lurich to his bare knees, at that moment cloven the mighty Scandinavian almost in two by one stroke of his tuagh, or Scottish battle-axe.
"Well fare thee, my stalwart soldier," cried Malcolm; "for thou hast saved thy king!"
His protector re-mounted him on the white steed of the slaughtered Dane, and blowing his bugle to collect the scattered Scots, plunged into the thickest of the conflict, parting the foes before him like a field of corn.
"By the stone of Fate," cried the King, shortening his reins and grasping his sword, "yonder blast never came from other horn than the bugle of Mac Ian Rua!"
So said all who heard it.
"And if yonder fellow proved to be Mac Ian?" said the king's Secretary, wiping his bloody sword in the mane of his horse, "what then, sire?"
"Then he should have the best earldom in the north, were it but for the sake of her he loved and lost," said the brave old King, as he spurred once more to battle; but alas! disheartened by the loss of three of their greatest leaders, despite the bravery of Malcolm, and the fiery example of this warrior of the Murrayland, the Scots began to give way and retreat, but with their faces and weapons to the foe, until they gained an old rampart formed of turf, trees, and stones, the relic of former wars.
There the king's preserver encountered Enrique, the second Danish leader, and, under Malcolm's eye, cut off his head, and holding it aloft with one hand and his dagger with the other, cried, in Gaelic,—