The ships were drawing nearer, down the coast of the island.
"I shall be," said the woman of abomination, "in the city, lord, when you take it." She smiled again her wry smile, as if something grimly amused her.
"No!" said he. "Wait here or in the wood north of the Land Gate. I will come for you. You must not put yourself in danger."
"I shall be in the city, lord," she said again, "but not in danger. Oh, I pray God to keep you safe!"
"I must go," said he, looking over his shoulder at the three high galleys. "I must go, but oh, my dear, never doubt me! I shall come to you if I have to crawl on hands and knees!" He took her into his arms and kissed her mouth. It was the first time. Then he caught up his mantle and stood, sharply outlined on the brink of the cliff, waving it about his head, until through the still morning air he heard cries from the men of the nearest ship and saw that he had attracted their attention.
Near where he stood a fissure rent the wall of rock—a watercourse half filled with earth and shale and grown up with low shrubs. Down this he made his way, plunging recklessly among bowlders, and so reached the tiny strip of beach at the cliff's foot. The first galley was already hove to, and from it a skiff put out to take him aboard. In ten minutes more the three ships bore away again southward, and Zuan Gradenigo was in command.
And, after all, they had very little fighting for their pains—too little to please them. For it seems that an hour before the three ships came into sight of the city the Venetians and Arbesani of the garrison, too carelessly guarded by their barbarian captors, rose, in street and market-place and improvised prison—rose at a preconcerted signal—and fell upon the Huns tooth and nail. Some of them had weapons, some sticks or stones, one—an Arbesan called Spalatini, and his name deserves to go down in history along with Messer Samson's—the thigh-bone of an ox which the Huns had killed and roasted whole in the Via Venezia.
When, therefore, the three galleys under Zuan Gradenigo drew into the harbor and hurriedly made fast to the landing-place, a running hand-to-hand fight was in progress from one end of the city to the other. It was not a battle, for it had no organization whatever. It was a disgraceful mêlée. Naturally enough the Venetian reinforcements incontinently decided the day. Something over three hundred of the ban's barbarians—Huns, Slavs, and Croats—gave themselves up. Nearly two hundred killed themselves by leaping over the high westward sea-wall, and a hundred more were killed in fight or escaped by water. It was an inglorious ending to a matter which had promised so fine a struggle.