Protection

Harold Lamb

Black Odo’s road was stopped. And he grunted with satisfaction, because this meant a fight, and nothing warmed the blood in his veins like a fight.

Big he was and bold--he could swing his four-foot sword with either hand--and cunning, being Norman born. Besides, he was Duke of Bari with the rents of a countryside to squander and eight hundred good spears to follow him. Black Odo his men called him, because he would draw back neither from peril nor sin. They said of him that he feared not the powers of darkness. Some said more--that for every horse in his stables, he had a woman to his will. They whispered that the tale of his sins was blacker than a pit in the hours of night. But now, in the year of our Lord one thousand and ninety-nine, he was Jerusalem bound, a cross upon his shoulder.

"God's life!" breathed Duke Odo, "'Tis no land flowing with milk and honey as the shave-pates swore."

He could see nothing around him but the barren, dry lands covered with tangles of thorn and nests of boulders. The driving dust was worse than the sun, in this long valley between low hills where it was a torment to wear the chain mail that they dared not take off. It was mid-afternoon and the fleshy Norman sat under his pavilion flap nursing his long chin in his hand and gulping warm wine. On his jutting shoulder gleamed a scarlet cross, the edges sewn with rubies, for Odo did nothing in niggardwise, and he had seen to it that the crusaders' cross was an emblem of price.

His eye roved over the camp, on the boulder-strewn ridge. His banner with its rearing lion swelled and drooped in the wind gusts. Wherever the rocks gave any shade, his men-at-arms were clustered. The faded tents of his knights topped the horse lines, and between them a few women moved wearily, toward the uplifted arms of a barefoot friar who prayed for water.

Odo wondered why these daughters and sisters of his liegemen had taken the road to Palestine. They hungered for Jerusalem, and the salvation of their souls, and they would not turn back, although they were dying by the way. Odo had not seen a shapely throat or a sparkling eye among them. He himself looked forward to his fill of fighting and the despoiling of the pagan castles. The prospect was fair enough.

Ahead of him, only half a league away, some three thousand Arabs were encamped. And his Armenian guides told him that the Moslems were in possession of the only well in this stretch of the Stone Desert. The Normans were out of water--they had a little wine still--and unless they turned back at once to the coast, they must reach the well. Odo meant to reach the well, after dawn before the heat should weaken his men. And he counted the black tents of the Arabs grimly, for they were the first foemen to come into his way.

"Think ye, Sir Guy," he asked, looking up suddenly, "they will stand?"

A sallow Norman, his eyes dark with the fever that lurked in his veins, came forward. Unlike the giant duke, he wore faded blue linen, the cross sewn upon the back of his surcoat. He had been with the host that had captured Jerusalem the summer before, and the desert had left its mark upon him. Moreover, to Odo's thinking, he kept too much to himself, with his half dozen scarred followers and a girl who wore a veil like a Moslem--Sir Guy of the Mount they called him. He had joined Odo's company, with some Genoese merchants, for protection during the short journey from the sea to the city.

"He will do more than that, my lord," he answered.

"What, then?"

"They are a fighting clan. Having seen the bright armor and shining gear of thy men, and the merchants' caravan, they know thee for a newcomer in this land, and they will loot thy camp, if so be they may."

"By my faith," swore Odo, "they will not do that, for I shall break them, and gladden the foul Fiend by their death."

"Then guard thee, my lord, against one peril," the knight of the Mount advised. "These Moslems will come against thee, where thy standard is lifted. At first they will give way, then come in from all sides, assailing thy horse with arrows, and putting thee afoot. Long is thy sword's reach, but they will venture their lives fearlessly to ride thee down, and slay thee. 'Tis their way thus to make an end of the leader of a Christian host, knowing that his men will lose heart if he dies."

"Out upon thee, for a faint heart!” Odo grinned at the Crusader. "Put some wine in thy belly.”

A flush tinged the gray cheeks of the man from Jerusalem, and he turned on his heel with only a silent salutation. It was not good to bandy words with Black Odo.

But the Norman pondered what Sir Guy had said. He glanced over his shoulder at the couch where his helm stood--the polished steel crest of which was a rearing lion, nicely gilded. Few men of his day had such crests, but Odo liked to be known wherever he went. He liked to see foemen shrink away from him. As for arrows, he made mock of them--fit weapons for Genoese churls and Arab pagans who could not strike a good blow with steel. Still, he was too shrewd to make light of Sir Guy's warning. The man from Jerusalem had faced the Moslems too often, not to know their ways.

And that morning. Odo had had a sign. A raven, a grave bird, had croaked at his ear. He rubbed his chin reflectively. It would take more than the croaking of a grave bird and the maundering of a sick man to make the Duke of Bari discard his crested helm and gilt mail and wear the plain steel casque and mail that his weapon man, Arnulf, carried in his sack----

Odo sat up abruptly, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. Down below his pavilion Sir Guy was walking away, slowly. And, hastening through the idle men-at-arms, that veiled girl came to meet him. She moved gracefully, and Odo thought that she must be strong, and not old. But others had noticed her, and a bearded Norman swordsman reached out an arm and tore the veil from her head. The girl was thrown to her knees and cried out involuntarily.

The Norman stood over her, roaring out something about the veil being Moslem and accursed. Another man stepped to her side, a man great of bone who overtopped the Norman by half a head. Long hair fell from the edge of his steel cap to his shoulders, covered with a bright crimson cloak, heavy bands of gold shone against the brown skin of his arms, and Odo saw that his only armor was a corselet of square steel plates rudely fastened together.

The stranger stepped forward and thrust out his left arm, the heel of his open hand thudding against the Norman's forehead. To Odo’s muttered surprise, the bearded swordsman fell with limp limbs, and did not rise. There were shouts and other men hastened up, surrounding the tall stranger. Steel rasped against leather, and more than one weapon flashed in the sun. Wine, in that heat, was not soothing to the blood.

Above the head of the stranger an ax was upflung--a broad-ax, as long as a man's forearm, with a curving, blue blade, the weight of the blade balanced by a heavy spike at the back. And at sight of this weapon in the warrior's hand, the Normans fell back.

"'Ware ye, the Viking!"

Meanwhile Sir Guy had made his way into the group, and at sight of him the Norman men-at-arms turned their backs. For a moment Odo had a clear view of the girl's face, as she caught the knight's arm and smiled up at him. An elfin face, with its pointed chin and fresh young lips. The girl had the fair skin of a child, and her dark eyes were more angry than afraid--the eyes of one who had never known harm. And a glimpse of her stirred Odo like hot wine. Then Sir Guy drew her away with him, leaning on her shoulder.

Odo had encountered no woman of her like for many weary months, and he followed the sick man and the girl with his eyes until they disappeared in Sir Guy’s tent.

“In God’s name-—ho, Arnulf, what brat is that?” he exclaimed.

A slender man in a black tunic hastened forward and knelt by the duke’s side. He had been polishing the silver plates of his master’s sword belt in the back of the pavilion, but Odo often said that Arnulf, his arminger--weapon-bearer--could see out of the back of his skull, and could hear all the better for his ears being cropped.

"Eh-ch! That one was the daughter of the Sieur Guy."

Odo grunted. "Her name?"

"Ilga." Arnulf considered. "He keeps her veiled, like a jewel in his tent. I have heard her singing." And, with a swift upward glance at his master, "Yet the Jerusalem knight is sick."

"The Fiend will not want a gossip, when thou diest. Nay, this sunrise I heard a grave bird call."

The henchman crossed himself hastily, and Odo frowned at a new thought. "Who is the churl in velvet and gold? My men gave back at his ax, as if a mad bull fronted them."

The stranger, after knocking down the Norman, had seated himself on a stone, his weapon between his knees. He said nothing, but the men-at-arms took care to keep out of his way.

Arnulf shook his bead. "May it please my lord, he is not a liegeman of Bari. And I know not--"

"Go, and learn, and return apace."

It puzzled Odo that his men should have taken a blow from the stranger, who was clearly no fellow of Sir Guy's. Within an hour Arnulf enlightened him.

"Eh--that one is a Viking, a sea king of the north. Body of an angel, he has no land to his name--only a galley that they call a dragon ship. Eric the Landless they called him at Constantinople, where he served the great Emperor as Captain."

Why the Viking had left his mist-filled fiords in the north, Arnulf did not know. There were many northern warriors in the Emperor's guard. They followed the wars, and served faithfully the men who paid them--otherwise they were dull of wit and drowsy, fit only to wield their weapons and fall in their own blood. So said Arnulf. But with those heavy weapons they were deadly as mad giants, when aroused. Arnulf himself had seen this same Eric the Landless hew a man through the body, from shoulder to hip, in a brawl at sea.

That Eric meant to go to Jerusalem was evident. He had joined the Normans at the coast. He had offered to stand shield to shield with them if they were attacked, provided they guided him to the city.

"He wears no cross," Arnulf shrugged. “He eats his own bread, serves himself--ay, he carries a bundle wrapped in fur on his shoulder when we march."

“A Viking," Odo mused. "Stands he to my height?"

"Ay, that doth he my lord."

The duke smashed down his hand upon his mailed thigh. "Then, by God's life, is he my man!" He lowered his voice.

"Harken--thy chopped ears heard Sir Guy's warning? 'Who leads the Christians doth court death,'" said he.

"Ay, lord, and true it is. The Moslems will seek thee with their swords."

"On the morrow," Odo said thoughtfully, "one in my armor, wearing the crested helm and mounted on my charger, will lead the men of Bari. But I shall remain here."

"Eh--" the armiger laughed silently-"A mock duke!"

It was often done, he knew. Another man would wear the garments and carry the shield of Duke Odo; the heavy helm, being of the basket type, would hide his face. And the Norman leader, from the safety of the pavilion, watch the battle unharmed—-could join his men in case of need. And the trick would succeed. Moslems would naturally mark the man in the crested helm, beneath the standard, riding the duke's caparisoned charger. They would assail the mock duke. But who would take Odo's place?

"The Viking," said Odo. "Fetch me him, after candle lighting."

***

That evening the Normans ate dry bread, and shivered in the chill air that stirred out of the gullies. The breath of the desert, it seemed, was not always hot, and they had no wood for fires. When candles were lighted in the tents, Eric the Landless strode through the camp at Arnulf's heels. He thrust up the entrance flap of the duke's pavilion and looked within before he entered, to find the Norman leader seated alone by a flagon on the table.

"Who gives the welcome?" the deep voice of the Viking boomed.

"I, Odo, lord of Bari, greet thee, Eric the Landless. Sit, and sup." He signed to Arnulf to fill a goblet for the stranger, by the leather platter of broken bread.

Eric flung himself into a chair that creaked under the weight of his long body. Limb for limb, the two were a match, but the dark, lined face of the Norman resembled in nothing the fair head of the Viking, whose soft mustache hid his lips, whose blue eyes above the high cheek bones were as quiet as still water. Odo thought he might be twenty years in age. And he held the shaft of the great ax, dark with oil and usage, in one broad hand. Sipping his wine, the duke considered his guest.

"Men say thou art a mighty giver of blows," he observed.

Eric emptied his goblet with a ringing "Skoal!" Then after a moment's thought he responded, "That is not to be denied."

"'Tis said thou wert a captain of the Emperor's Varangian guard, and hast faced the paynim before now."

The Viking nodded.

"On the morrow," explained the Norman, "my men go against the Moslems who hold the well." And when Eric made no response except another nod, he added, "Thine armor is not proof against arrows. I have a mind to offer thee this chain haburgeon, and the shield and the helm. Look!"

Eric’s eyes gleamed when Arnulf held the heavy mail up to the light--a mesh of fine steel chain-work that would cover a man from chin to toe. The arminger pointed to the helm, surmounted by the rearing lion, and the long shield bearing the same lion painted upon it in gilt. His own iron plates fastened together by leather thongs and girdled by his broad leather belt were poor stuff beside this armor of a prince.

"The gear is good," he said frankly, "and I like it well."

"I will lend thee likewise a good horse for the battle."

"That may not be," Eric shook his head. "I will stay at the camp on the morrow."

"God's life! With the merchants and churls?"

"Ay, so.”

Black Odo threw himself back in his chair frowning.

Here was the stout fellow he wanted to take his place, a man whose life was spent in handling his weapons, and as accustomed to take blows as the iron thewed Spartans or the trained gladiators of Rome. And he did not intend to fight. The duke knew of no one else, his very twin in size and bearing, fit to wear his armor. If he ordered one of his own men to take his place, the rogue would talk. Behind his chair, Arnulf whispered, “Offer him gold."

“Hark ye, Eric the Landless," said Odo grimly. "I seek one to lead the charge to draw the onset of the Moslems-—for they will come against the leader. If I should be unhorsed, the battle would go badly, for my men are new to this land and the Saracen. The peril is great, yet this armor is good, and I will give thee a score of stout lads to shield thy back--and a score of gold byzants to fill thy purse."

The mild blue eyes of the Viking dwelt on the Norman curiously.

“The risk is yours," he responded. "And I have a duty at the camp. I am thinking that the Arabs may reach to the camp seeking loot, for that is their way.”

The thin lips of the Norman curled. Only a victor in battle, he thought, could gain and plunder a hostile encampment. “Thirty pieces--of Venetian weight,” he offered.

Something troubled the Viking. For a moment he brooded.

“I am thinking all this is not good. Perhaps there is a sign between us. But to wear the garments of another man is not good. Hark ye, Duke Odo! Do you hear a whetting of sword edges, and a rushing of ravens' wings? There will be a breaking of shields and a snarling of wolves and sorrow after the next sunset.”

Arnulf crossed himself, but Odo smote his hand upon the table. "'Tis someone without!" Steps sounded on the ground and a woman's voice cried out. The Norman commanded, "Enter!"

The entrance flap was lifted by a man-at-arms and Ilga stepped into the candlelight. Throwing back the hood of her robe, she hastened to the table and held out a slender arm to the Viking.

“Messire, thy pardon," she whispered, courtesying to the duke. "O come back to the tent, Eric. My father cannot rise from his bed, and he cries for water, the fever being upon him."

Her eyes were bright with anxiety. A child, Arnulf thought, frightened at the sign of death. He had watched her on the road, listening to Eric's droning talk of northern trolls and elves. Surely she loved the yellow-haired giant, as she loved the great horse that carried her and the hound that ran by her. And because she was frightened, she had come to find him here.

Duke Odo spoke before the Viking. “Nay, little Ilga, water we have not, yet here is Cyprian wine, and cool." Motioning Arnulf aside, he handed her the flagon on the table.

"I thank thee, my lord," she cried softly. “My father said thou wert an ill man to meet with, but surely thou art of heart, to give this to him."

A ghost of a smile touched the Norman's lips. "I give to the daughter, not the father.”

Silent, she looked at the two men. Eric, hands clasped on his ax shaft, did nothing, and she bowed again, slipping from the pavilion while Odo watched still smiling.

And Arnuld—-who knew his master's whims--said to himself that the lord of Bari desired this brat of the Jerusalemite; and what Odo desired, he took. Ilga being gentle born, and Sir Guy still living, Arnulf felt that Odo might venture too far, unless the disorder of the march and fighting should place Ilga in his hands.

"Now I see Eric the Landless," murmured Duke Odo, "that thou art no man of thy word."

As at the sight of the fine mail, the Viking's eyes quickened. "That is ill said. Nay, it has not been said before," he responded in his deep voice. “And how is it true?"

"Upon joining my company, thou madest pledge to stand shield to shield with my men, at need. Now when the battle is near, thou art a coward and foresworn—-bound to the tents by a woman's girdle.”

Swiftly Arnuld moved behind the Viking, his fingers on the dagger at his hip. Eric's blue eyes had clouded, and his face was bleak. Odo's thrust had touched him.

What Arnulf did not know was that Eric all his life had been a leader of men--in the voyages over the gray waters of the north, and in the great palaces of Constantinople where he had ruled the warriors who fought the wars of an Emperor for pay. A Viking must hold to his service, and his sword.

"That will not be said of me,” Eric answered grimly. "I will wear your gear”--with his ax head he pointed at the gleaming helm--"on the morrow, and sit in your saddle. And twill say nothing of that to any man. But there is this to be done. Before darkness, there will be weapons drawn between us, and the death of one of us.”

"Granted," Black Odo nodded.

"But when I take your place,” Eric went on, "by your own hand safeguard the girl Ilga from danger. For I pledged her father I would ward and shield her from harm, while he lies sick."

"I swear," assented the Norman quietly, “that no Moslem living shall lay hand upon Ilga of the Mount while I live.”

"Swear upon the cross."

Odo picked up his sheathed sword, holding the hilt high, and laying his hand upon the crosspiece. And suddenly Arnulf laughed.

***

When the curtain had fallen behind the Viking, the henchman stared curiously at his master. Odo rubbed his chin reflectively. He had got the Viking to serve him, but if Eric lived Odo would have a duel on his hands. Ordinarily the Norman would not shun that--he trusted his arm and his sword edge. Yet Eric was Ilga's watchdog, and Odo lacked not cunning.

"By the mother that bore thee, if so be thou knowest her," he observed pleasantly to Arnulf, "mark well what I say. Choose thee some ten bold rogues, and follow this landless wight in his onset. Follow and keep his back, until he is hard pressed--then draw away and let him go down. But if he is not slain, put thy knife behind his ear. If he lives, thou wilt not. Am I clear?"

Arnulf grinned, and touched the dagger hilt at his hip. He knew well where to find the ear hole in his masters' helm.

"And then," Odo mused, “stand thou guard over his body, saying that Duke Odo is stunned. Bear back the carcass--unhelm it not--to this pavilion, after sunset. I will await thee here in other guise, and speak with thee then."

And Arnulf's bow was deep with respect. What a brain! Odo had arranged everything to his will. He would be in his pavilion, watching the battle, yet no man would know this. He might even play with the daughter of the sick Jerusalemite while everyone thought him in the saddle pursuing the Moslems, and afterward, in the pavilion--Arnulf's ready mind played with still finer fancies--Odo might change places with the dead Viking--might say, if he chose, that Eric had been slain for an affront to the girl Ilga. He, Arnulf would be witness.

Still amused at the baiting of the Viking, Arnulf went in the half-light before sunrise, to call Eric to be armed. He found the warrior in Sir Guy's tent--the sick knight awake upon his cloak, haggard and breathing swiftly. A guttered candle flared and smoked upon the ground and beside it the girl curled up on her pallet asleep. In both hands she held the Viking's fist. He nodded to Arnulf, drawing free his cramped arm slowly, so that Ilga only stirred and sighed and, slept on.

But Sir Guy propped himself on an elbow and whispered:

"Remember thy pledge, Eric--my daughter will be shielded?"

"On the honor of Duke Odo," said the Viking, "she will be."

***

When the glare of sunrise struck into the valley, the hills took shape, the mists thinned away, and the Normans moved forward as Duke Odo had commanded, before the morning heat should be upon them.

They kept no order, being only to come to grips with the bands of Moslem horse already in motion toward them from the rocks of the distant well. The men watched in silence, being sore with hunger and wracked with thirst. Only when their leader trotted up to them did they shout hoarsely.

They had no slightest reason to suspect that this leader was not Odo--some of them indeed noticed that he carried upon his saddle horn a heavy ax instead of his sword, and that he did not speak to his knights as usual. Instead he sent Arnulf to bid them halt and form in a half circle, with the archers in front.

It surprised Arnulf that Eric should sit the gray charger almost as easily as his lord the duke. From foot to head he was now encased in loose chain mail, and over his head had been thrust the steel helm with only an opening as large as his finger for him to see through. On his left arm--looped by a leather band over his shoulder--was braced the long painted shield of Duke Odo.

When Arnulf urged him to form the mailed horsemen for a charge he laughed inside his steel dome:

"Arrow fight before sword stroke. Watch ye, little man.”

Amid drifting dust clouds three thousand desert men swarmed about the seven hundred Normans. They dashed forward in groups, round shields upraised, cloaks flying about them. And the long arrows of the Normans dropped them from the saddle.

The back-curving ends of the Christian arc were still too close to the ridge and Odo’s camp for the Moslems to cut in behind them, and the darting charges of the excited Arabs failed to break the Christian line. The short Moslem bow was not effective at that distance, and the Norman archers began to enjoy good sport. As the Arabs rode over their dead, their fury grew, and their shouting became a pulsing roar--

"Allah 'l allah!"

The Norman horsemen, standing beside their stirrups, chafed and grumbled. They dared not ride to their leader to protest, although they were ill content to be out of the affray. "'Tis not our lord's way, to hang upon the leash.”

It was not, indeed, Odo's way, and a rider galloped down from the closed pavilion--a man of Arnulf's who sought the armiger beneath the upraised standard. And Arnulf shouted against Eric's helm, holding up a gleaming signet ring. "The token of my lord the duke. He bids thee cease this play and go forward before the heat comes."

Again Eric laughed in his dark dome. "Truly said I there was a sign between us. Let us try the sword strokes. Sound thy horns."

At the blare of the horns the Norman mounted, and walked their horses between the archers who moved after them. Before the standard bearer rode Eric, holding back until the mailed riders had closed in and formed a double rank. Suddenly his eyes swept from flank to flank and he urged on the gray charger. Behind him massive hoofs drummed the hard clay, and roared into a gallop.

The uplifted spears came down, the long shields were raised, and a war shout went up.

"Forward, with God!"

The Arabs had launched a counter charge, to strike the leading rank before it gained full headway. A thousand or more of the wild horsemen came on, their scimitars swinging by their knees, their horses maddened by blood.

But the first wave broke against the long Norman spears, and the lighter horses of the Moslems swerved or went down at the impact. A swirl and check--a brief clanging of steel--and the gray Norman line went on gathering pace. Again the spears were lowered as the Arabs closed in from all sides.

Eric, his ax-head resting on his shield arm, drove between two cloaked riders, took the lash of a scimitar on his shield and struck to the right. The curving edge of the ax sliced upward, beneath an Arab's jaw, and Eric freed the weapon by a jerk of his wrist that laid open one side of the rider's head.

A scimitar bruised the muscles of Eric's right shoulder, and again the ax slashed out, catching the new assailant beneath the arm. And the part of the arm and shoulder flew off.

The Viking was little excited. The clash of weapons left him calm, and he struck out instinctively, knowing what the result would be, and always freeing his weapon swiftly. While the Normans lashed about them, shouting their exultation, he rode silently-—a fighter plying his trade, a weapon man, killing where he willed.

Never before had he been so protected by steel. He felt an arrow jar in his left thigh, and reached down his left hand to break off the shaft. Twice something crashed against his solid helm, and he shook his head and went on.

So the hard-riding Normans broke the Arabs and followed up, until dark faces whirled past Eric again, and his ax rose and fell, scattering blood from its edge. And then his horse went down with a stagger and lurch--the length of a sword blade in its belly.

The Viking freed his feet from his stirrups and fell clear. He raised the shield over his head and shortened his grip on the ax. Dodging, hitting out as he ran, he fought for a way out of the press of rearing and circling horses.

Hands caught at his ax arm, but the Viking heaved back, and an Arab tumbled to earth before him, and lay motionless a second later with his skull crushed in and his brains scattered over the ground. Eric strode over him, ran for a moment beside his horse-glimpsed a rocky knoll through his eye-slit and swung himself to the top of a four foot boulder.

Arrows flicked past him and he swung his shield against the gleam of javelins. Arabs scrambled from their saddles to climb to the ground beside him, and shield and ax he battered them down.

They reached up to catch his legs, but that giant body in its chain mail was firm rooted. Never, thought the Norman men-at-arms, straining to reach his side, had Odo fought with the sword as he now fought with the ax.

“Aid for good Duke Odo!"

He heard their shout, saw their long blades sweeping nearer.

"Good blows, ye men of the Cross! Good blows!" his deep voice boomed.

And then he saw no Moslems before him. Norman men-at-arms were sitting in the saddle beneath him, panting, resting their bloodied sword arms. They were looking at him silently. Many of them had hated, and almost all had feared Duke Odo. But this leader of theirs in the dull and dented helm, the chain mesh banging in shreds from his right arm, and blood bubbling through the links on his chest and thigh--this man had led them through four onsets of the Moslem masses, and they were ready to follow him hereafter to Jerusalem or to purgatory. The valley was theirs.

Eric blinked at his men through sweat-tormented eyes, steam rising from his body, the lust of conflict like hot wine within him. The steel helm, heated by the sun’s glare, irked him and he pulled with unfamiliar fingers, to tear it off. But it had been laced to his shoulder links by an expert hand, and he croaked for Arnulf to rid him of it.

A tall swordsman, black with dust, gripped his arm and pointed: "My lord, yonder is thy weapon bearer, and he is sped this life."

Eric looked down, seeing the carcass of his own horse and, a space in back of it, Arnulf's body outstretched. The Italian's head lay to the rear, face down, an arrow fairly through his throat. So Arnulf must have turned back, when Moslems surrounded the Viking, a moment before the charger was slain.

But Eric was not thinking of that. His eye had been caught by smoke and dust on the summit of the ridge where the duke's camp stood. Through the daze moved cloaked horsemen, and gaunt yellow camels. At times steel dashed in the sunlight. He could hear no uproar but it seemed to him that the large pavilions of the knights were down and burning--and surely Odo's pavilion had vanished from its stone summit.

The fleeting Arabs had turned aside to storm the camp. And Eric, who cared little for that, remembered the sleeping child who had held fast to his hand through the night's watching. He thought of her shot through by arrows, falling under the galloping horses, or bound to an Arab's saddle, and he leaped from his high ground.

He pulled the swordsman who had spoken to him out of the saddle, and he swung upon the Norman's charger, and lashed the horse to a gallop toward the ridge. The others made haste to follow.

But Eric was the first to climb the ridge. The Arabs had fled. Upon the knoll, the duke's pavilion lay in flames.

The Viking urged his horse toward Sir Guy's tent, and reined in.

"Here was fighting," he muttered.

The tent was down, and atop the wreckage lay the figure of a Norman man-at-arms, his chain mesh broken, his body slashed open below the ribs. His head, encased in a basket helm, was turned to the sky, and upon him and about him sprawled the bodies of eight Moslems, all cut and crushed by gigantic blows.

Others of the duke's men came up to stare and to say--what Eric's eyes had told him--that they knew naught of Sir Guy and his daughter, save that no captives had been carried off by the Arabs. But when they said that, the folds of the linen tent stirred upon the wreckage, and a faint voice cried, "God for Bari.”

The Normans started back and exclaimed, but Eric bade them cut through the tangle of cloth with their knives and this they did after making the sign of the cross--for it seemed to them that the dead had spoken.

They found the tent pole and table piled against the pallet, and upon the bed the girl Ilga, shielding the head of her sick father with her body. When Eric bent over them she stared back and looked around fearfully. The knight of the Mount raised himself upon his elbow.

"Forgive her, my lord,” he whispered. "She hath been sorely tried and all this day she looked for the tall Viking, who came not.”

"What befell here?" Eric’s voice was hoarse within the steel dome.

"Christ be my aid, a strange thing befell. Anon we watched thy charge and the main battle. Then there came to the tent a tall fellow, wearing a nobleman's helm such as thine, but without device of any kind. He spoke not, but took Ilga up in his arms. She cried aloud for Eric, the Viking, but this man laughed and heeded me not. He bore her to the entrance, then we heard the shouting of the Arabs.”

Sir Guy brushed the sweat from his white face "The man of the helm said nothing. He turned back and again he laughed, when he tossed Ilga down beside me. He laid the table--so—-and heaved up the center pole, letting it down upon us, with all the canopy about us. Then he pushed his way clear of the cloth and took his stand near us, for we heard his battle shout. Aye, he struck heavy blows, and it seemed to me that a score of swordsmen came against him. Yet he held his ground, and shielded us. He had great strength, being a madman, touched with the sun, or God's anger."

"Not so." The Viking thrust his fingers through the openings in his helm beneath his ears, and wrenched off the steel casque when the links and laces broke.

A hundred eyes stared at him mutely, until the maid Ilga left her father and caught the Viking's arm against her heart. "'Thou--thou didst leave me!"

Eric's blue eyes clouded, and he nodded slowly. "True--it must be said that I have that weakness. When steel is bared, I have nothing else in my head." And when she pressed her face against his torn shoulder he bent down, brushing his lips against the tangle of her hair.

A Norman strode up to him. "What then of my lord, the duke? Eric the Landless, it does appear to me thou hast stolen his gear, and helm."

But Sir Guy lifted his hand. "Ill said! This smells to me of Odo's trickery, and I doubt not that he will presently come out of his hole, like the fox he is."

Before anyone could answer, the Viking’s deep voice checked them. “Not so!"

He stepped to the body upon the wreckage, and with the edge of his ax cut the thongs of the helm. He drew it off and cast it away, and in the silence that followed his action, leaned on his ax to look down into the pallid features and the open eyes of the dead duke, Odo.

“I am thinking,” his voice rumbled on, “that this was a man of hard deeds, but he met his death well. And it must be said, that is a great thing in any man.”

END