"Lost? And why lost, my lord?" said Richard, with a dreadful calmness.
"Hist! Look on the ground before; it slopes downward to the moat. The engineers have blundered. When the tower is tilted its crest will be below the battlement; we cannot mount upon the wall."
Richard stared upward through the smoke.
"We can beat down the battlement; it is yielding."
"Are you St. George?" cried the Duke; "every mangonel burns."
Longsword pointed to the left. "All burning save one!" his answer. There was one mangonel so close under the walls that when all its crew were shot dead no others had ventured to man it.
"As Christ died," came from Godfrey, "put that at the foot of the walls; find a breach in ten credos or the fire triumphs."
The men of St. Julien followed their seigneur. At last they knew they should fulfil their vow. The garrison, when it saw them, turned on their company all manner of fire and death. But the Auvergners who lived never counted their dead. By main force they tugged the mangonel up beside the beffroi, trampled out the flame for an instant. A flying stone shivered Longsword's shield; Herbert thrust his own on Richard's arm, a plain shield with only the red cross of the Crusade. De Carnac fell while they set the rock of half a mule's weight in place; their seigneur pressed up the huge counterpoise; drew the rope. The long arm swept creaking into the air; every war-cry died while the huge missile sped. The rock smote the battlement where the first attacks had weakened it. The upper face of the curtain wall crumbled inward. Out of the wreck a murk of dust was rising. For fifty feet the battlement had been beaten down far lower than was the summit of the tower.
"Forward again! For the love of Christ! Forward!" Godfrey's voice; and it swelled into the sound of ocean waves as ten thousand throats reëchoed it. The Moslems were uplifting a howl of wild despair. Did they fight men or sheytans, whose home was flame? But Richard saw the champion of the gilded mail still on the ramparts. The tower was now springing toward the wall as if a spirit of life had entered, so many were the eager hands. The infidel fires were spent. The Christian bowmen were shooting so pitilessly, not an Egyptian catapult was working. Up the dizzy ladder on the rear face of the tower Longsword clambered in spite of armor. The drawbridge at the crest the stones had long since dashed to flinders; what matter? For Heaven suffered two long beams from one of the defenders' engines to fall outward. The Crusaders caught them, laid them side by side,—a bridge with width of half an ell,—a dizzy height below, but beyond, Jerusalem!