to catch a sword from one who needed it no longer; and heard the
soft clashing of links of mail beside him and felt the breath of a great
horse that stirred his hair. Above him the voice of Ceawlin cried:

"Thou tale-teller, thee I seek! This is thy work--that dead-eyed toad is
gone, but it is thou shalt pay the price for him!"

He straightened up, the sword in hand, a laugh upon his lips; and a bolt
of red fire entered into his side and seared him to the vitals. He fell;
and the horse's tread jarred him and shook the world as it passed,
spurred by its mail-clad rider with the blood-tinged spear.

At first he fought to keep his hold on consciousness; knew that the
fight surged over and around him, but with those who fought he seemed
suddenly to have no part nor lot. They faded into spectres, beings
somehow set apart from him, in whose affairs he no longer had concern.
He lay quiet, his eyes closed, the red flower behind his ear, the red
flower of his life staining the trampled sands on which he lay. Quite
suddenly he drifted into a gray empty world of twilight, in which he
wandered seeking for what he did not know. He became aware, presently,
that on the other side of this world, at the end of the road of Time,
there was a little narrow door which would lead him into his Garden of
Lost Dreams, and he thought that if he might reach it, all would be very
well with him. But across the world, from out the twilight, there
appeared a tiny point of light, ever growing, ever brighter. It came
upon him as a rolling ball of fire, and he turned and would have fled
from it; but it enveloped him in rose-red light that burned and
blinded, and he knew that it was Pain. It lapped over him like water; it
shrivelled him, soul and body; it entered into the marrow of his bones
and twisted him in every joint and sinew. And suddenly he found his soul
following the fight into the streets of Thorney; he was plunged amid the
slaughter, in the smoke of burning houses. Yet through it all he knew,
with strange inner knowledge drawn from the deeps below consciousness,
that his soul was in his body, lying quiet on the sands in the dark and
moonlight, and that the fight had passed him by.

Out of the flame-shot darkness of his oblivion a sound came to him; and
the devil-lights that danced before his eyes ceased their wheeling to
listen--a bell, deep-throated, majestic, that tolled once, and out of
its sonorous, slow throbbing that lingered in the