were rocks which rose up straight into the air. So, as I say, it came to
late in the afternoon. We were walking, each man in the other's
footsteps, and I, being the largest and having the largest feet, went
first. Suddenly I heard a sharp sound from one of the men in the line,
and turning, I saw that the last man of us was on his hands and knees in
the sand, with his head lowered. I ran to him. Sticking from the side of
his back was a great goose-shaft, the feather and some three inches of
the wood showing; and when I raised him till he came to his knees, I
saw the point coming out at his armpit, for he wore no back-plate. We
laid him on his side under the rocks and waited till he died. It was not
long; he rolled himself as I have seen an acrobat do, talking hastily of
small affairs of our old hall. So we left him on the sand and tramped on
under the rocks. We turned a point where the beach ran out a little and
the great waves reared themselves like angry clouds, on end, and then
another man fell with a sharp sound as of the bird who pecks on the side
of trees. It was a cross-bow bolt that had hit him in the side of the
head. Even as we were turning from him the man next to me gave a sharp
cry and put his hand on my shoulder, and pointing upwards to the heights
above, spoke in a trembling voice, "They have found us." He had a long
arrow shot through his right forearm just above the wrist, where there
was a space between his leather glove and the sleeve of his chain-shirt.
Then we went on, with him cursing and groaning and he pulled off his
glove and emptied the blood on the sand, and it dripped from his fingers
as he plodded along leaning on my shoulder. Then another man fell, this
time quite dead, shot between back and breastplate, for he had no
chain-shirt. Then the four of us, one behind the other hurried cursing
along the narrow beach, catching occasional glimpses as we glanced
upward, of brown and grey figures running, against the torn clouds of
the moving sky. Soon another man fell, shot through the leg and not able
to walk. There was no carrying him, and we could not leave him there,
for there is torture for the sacking of churches and burning of towns
and the razing of homesteads; so we told him this; and he asked us to
lift him and bring him and put him in the edge of the sea where the
white foam would break over him; and we did so and drew back and stood
in silence. In a moment he turned to us, and with a word--"