CHAPTER XXXVI
Then began as mad a fight as any fire-eater could have desired.
The stairway was not more than three feet broad; there was no handrail to it, and it went up steeply, yet Merlin’s men tried to rush it in a body, only to cumber each other and help the man with the sword. Isoult had passed Fulk his shield, and he held it slantwise before him, and used the sword-point under it, knowing that such thrusts were more deadly than any slashing.
One fellow fell full length, run through the body, and those who were crowded together behind him tried to thrust at Fulk with their pikes or hack at him with axe or sword. There was no room for so many weapons at once, and Fulk’s shield was a pent-house that was not to be beaten down. He stabbed at the men from under it, giving swift, fierce thrusts that they could not parry. Two more went down, one rolling over the edge of the stairs; those in front, pressed by Fulk’s sword, fell back on those behind, till the crowd upon the stairs lost its foothold and went tumbling down in confusion.
But these footpads, horse-thieves, and deer-stealers were no sheep; their blood was up, and the devil roused in them. The dead men were taken by the heels, and dragged down the stairs out of the way. They hurled stools at Fulk, benches, fire-irons, the halves of the broken door, even crockery, and iron pots that they brought from the kitchen. It was as though all the cooks and scullions in a king’s castle had gone mad. Three of them seized the daïs table and dragged it up beside the stairway, and so made a kind of fighting platform to take Fulk in the flank. The first who climbed it had an arrow through his throat, for Isoult was ready with her bow. Fulk stabbed the second as he reached up and tried to seize his ankle. The third fellow jumped down again, and two more dead men were lying amid the pile of wreckage on the stairs.
Merlin’s men held back. Two had been slain at the door, three on the stairs; two more were wounded; in all there were but nine of them left standing. They had drawn away to the far end of the hall, where Merlin gnashed his teeth at them and cursed them for cowards.
One of them bethought him of his bow and of the last of the arrows that he had left in the porch. He ran for it, pushed to the front, but was slain by Isoult as he bent his bow. The arrow shot up into the roof of the hall, struck a beam, turned, and dropped back upon the floor.
Fulk glanced anxiously at the torches, for they were burning low. The fools had not thought to put out the lights and to attack in the dark, but Merlin thought of it at that moment.
“Out with the torches.”
Then Fulk did a rash thing. He leapt on to the daïs table, and from it to the floor, and charged the men at the end of the hall. They stared at him stupidly, and then, turning like sheep before a sheep-dog, tumbled out of the great doorway with Merlin at their heels.