Suddenly a scream rose shrill above all the din around him. For a moment the birds hung hovering, and then Nod perceived one of the biggest of the eagles struggling in mid-air with something stretched and wrestling upon its back. It was a Man of the Mountains floating there in space, while the maddened eagle rose and fell, and poised itself, and shook and beat its wings, vainly striving to tear him off. And now many other of the eagles wheeled off from the Mulgars and swept in frenzy to and fro over this struggling horse and rider, darting upon them, beating the dying Mulgar with their wings, screaming their war-song, until at last, gradually, lower and lower they all sank out of the moonlight into the shadow of the valley, and were lost to sight. The few birds that remained were soon beaten off. Five lay dead in their beautiful feathers on the pass. And the breathless and bleeding Mulgars gathered together on this narrow shelf of the precipice to bind up their wounds and rest and eat. But three of them were nowhere to be found. They made no answer, though their friends called and called, again and again, in their shrill reedy voices. For one in fighting had stumbled and toppled over, torch in hand, from the path, one had been slit up by an eagle's claw, and one had been carried off by the eagles.
CHAPTER XVI
And now that the moon was near her setting, dark grew the air. The Men of the Mountains had at last ceased to call their lost companions, and on either side of the path were breaking up their faggots and building fires, leaving two wide spaces beneath the beetling rock for their encampment between the fires. Nod, sitting beside Thimble's litter, watched them for some time, and presently he fancied he heard a distant howling, not from the darkness below, but seemingly from the heights above the Mulgar-pass. He rose and limped along to Ghibba, who was busy about the fires. "Why are you heaping up such large fires?" he said, "and whose, Man of the Mountains, are those howlings I heard from the mountain-tops?"
Ghibba's face was scorched and bleeding; one of his long eyebrows was nearly torn off. "The fires and the howls are cousins, little Mulgar," he said. "The screams of the golden-folk have roused the wolves, and if we do not light big fires they will come down in packs along their secret paths to devour us. It is a good thing to fight bravely, but it's a better not to have to fight at all."
Nod came back and told this news to Thumb, who was sitting with a great strip of his jacket bound round his head like a Turk's turban. "It is good news, brother," he said—"it is good news. What stories we shall have to tell when we are old!"
"But two of the hairy ones are dead," said Nod, "and one is slipping, they say, from his second sleep."
"Then," said Thumb, looking softly over the valley, "they need fight no more."
Nod sat down again beside Thimble's litter and touched his hand. It was dry and burning hot. He heard him gabbling, gabbling on and on to himself, and every now and again he would start up and gaze fixedly into the night. "No, Thimble, no," Nod would say. "Lie back, my brother. It is neither the Harp-strings nor our father's Zevveras; it is only the little mountain-wolves barking at the icicles."