He held her a moment longer.
“Isoult, bide here, but come to me if I call. It will mean that I have won the fight. If I do not call, you will know how things have sped. Unbuckle these greaves and thigh-pieces; they are too heavy for such a game as hide-and-seek.”
She knelt down and plucked at the buckles, and her fingers trembled a little.
“Fulk, fight through, fight through.”
He touched her hair with his hand.
“There is life for us yet.”
Fulk climbed over the oak chest and went step by step down the stairs, stooping with one hand stretched out to feel what lay before him. He had laid aside his gauntlets, and stuck his dagger into its sheath, meaning to trust solely to his sword and to quick wits and quick feet. Six steps from the bottom his hand touched the faggots, and feeling about him cautiously he found that he could step down on to the daïs table. As he crouched there, faggot after faggot was carried in and thrown upon the pile. Moving along the daïs table to the end wall of the hall, he came upon a gap that had been left, and through it he was able to slip to the ground.
Fulk groped his way round by the wall till he came to the wooden screen across the far end of the hall and was able to see the outline of the great doorway filled with pale moonlight. A man appeared in it, carrying a faggot, but he vanished directly he gained the inside of the hall.
Fulk saw his chance and took it. He could not tell how many men were in the hall, but he judged that he would have to deal with no more than two or three at a time, since they were strung out in their coming and going between the woodstack and the door of the hall. Holding his sword pointed ready, he moved along the screen and reached the borderland where darkness and moonlight met just as another figure appeared in the porch with a couple of faggots on its back.
Fulk struck so hard and so swiftly that the man went down without a cry, the faggots falling on top of him. Fulk kept in the shadow as running footsteps came down the hall. A second figure appeared, bending over the fallen man, not grasping what had happened. Fulk laid him beside his comrade, only to be struck in turn by some invisible enemy. A blow on his helmet made his ears ring.