“I never think of death.”
“It seems so near us now that I can hardly breathe. Do you think we are tortured in the other world, if there be one?”
“How should I know, simple one?”
“I wish the mere were a league broad. I should feel further from the pit.”
“Is your conscience so unkind?”
“Conscience, sister? It is self-love, not conscience. I only want to live. Look!—the heathen are coming down to the mere. How their axes shine. Holy Mother!—I wish I could pray.”
Igraine, catching the girl’s pinched face, with lips drawn and twitching, pitied her from her very heart.
“Come then, I will pray with you,” she said.
“No, no, my prayers would blacken heaven. I cannot, I cannot.”
The wild company had swept down between the great trees in disorderly array. Their weapons shone in the sunlight, their round bucklers blickered. They were soon at the place where Pelleas had slain his men in fair and open field. Dismounting, they gathered about their dead fellows, and sent up, after their custom, a vicious, dismal ululation, a sound like the howling of wolves, drear enough to make the flesh tingle under the stoutest steel. Lining the bank among the willows, they shook buckler and axe, gesticulating, threatening, their long hair blowing wild, their skin-clad bodies giving them a wolfin look not pleasant to behold. Round the margin they paddled—searching—casting about for a boat. They seemed like beasts behind the gates of some Roman amphitheatre—caged from the slaughter. The girl Morgan looked at them, screamed, and hid her face in her tunic. Igraine found the girl’s quaking hand, and held it fast in hers.