He saw nothing but Isoult, naked and afraid, struggling in the hands of those two men.
And Merlin! The devil in Fulk was a silent devil, with hard eyes and a cruel mouth.
The group over the water was making away towards the beech woods. Fulk unchained the boat, sprang in, and laying his sword on one of the seats, took the pole and sent the boat surging over. The prow ran well up the bank, and stuck fast among the flags and sedges. He had scarcely set foot on the grass when two men dashed at him out of the thicket.
That sword of his looked a slim thing to tackle a brown bill and stout oak cudgel, but Fulk was as cool as the steel, though a devil’s temper raged in him. He was too quick and too fierce for these clumsy slashers. One had the point in his throat, the other was cut to the left ear. Fulk left them lying, and ran on.
Merlin and the rest had reached the beech woods, and a trampled track through the long grass showed the way they had gone. Fulk was not concerned with the possible odds. He was the male robbed of his mate, ready to rush at death, take wounds and not feel them. His sword felt like metal at white heat. It was thirsty. His face was not pleasant to behold, the grim white face of a man whose eyes see blood.
The track through the grass went into the beech wood where the trees stood at a little distance from each other with chequered stretches of brown leaves and short, sweet turf. Fulk glimpsed something ahead down one of the woodland ways. His nostrils expanded; his lips were nothing but a thin, hard line.
He ran on between the great smooth boles of the beeches and under boughs that swept within a bow’s length of the ground, his feet making the dead leaves crackle, or going noiselessly over the patches of grass. He could see figures moving ahead of him, a grey shape, pausing ever and again, a white face looking back, a man half hidden by some tree-trunk and handling a bow. Once he heard a half-smothered cry, and something leapt in him, a fury of tenderness that stung him like fire.
A sudden glade opened in the beech wood, and he saw all that he desired to see, someone to be rescued, someone to be spoken to with the sword. They had thrown an old red cloak about Isoult, and two men were holding her, one with a brown fist half hidden in her hair. Three more fellows were waiting like dogs at Merlin’s heel—Merlin who had faced about and was pointing towards Fulk with the knife that he had drawn from his girdle.
One man put a horn to his lips and blew a blast that whimpered into the distant woodlands. The others were handling their bows. Fulk gave them no leisure to shoot at him as they pleased. He ran in to give them cold steel.
Two arrows went past him. He saw Merlin leap aside, shouting to his men.