an old horse to stable, and
after we had crossed the beach, without a sound my companion fell
against me, and when I held him from me and held him up, and saw the
goose-shaft through his neck, I dropped him on the sands, and, cursing
as I hobbled, broke into a shambling trot, using my sword as I ran. The
arrows struck against my back-plate as I bent over, but I had no time to
look above, and the cross-bow bolts whizzed and volleyed past my ears,
and sang, but I came to the ship at last and was lifted in, for I could
not climb myself, and there I fell down between two of the rowers'
benches and hid my face in my hands, while the arrows sang over us from
the cliffs and the men looked up wondering as they crouched inside the
bulwarks.

But soon they came and whispered to me for news of the expedition, and
when I told them that of our lord and his forty men I only would stand
before them, they groaned as men who have no to-morrow and who know not
what to do. This could not go on. The bow of the ship was feathered with
arrows and they began to strike into the benches and the after-deck.

"Can we not shove off?" I asked.

"Look at the sea," answered the oar-captain pointing; and as he pointed,
his hand was broken by a cross-bow bolt. "I shall never hold oar again,"
he said. No more.

While they were binding his hand, I crept to the bulwark, and raising a
shield between my head and the cliffs, looked past the stern of the ship
at the white waters that reached for us, and the brown arms that opened
to us, and I thought of the suffocation of the sea and of its
indifference in its anger, and of its beautiful white carelessness, as I
went down--down--down--to the bottom-most seaweeds, where the eyeless cold
things crawl.

I was very weak; now they brought me meat and strong, flame-coloured
water to drink; and the meat did me much good, but the flame-coloured
water sent me to sleep under one of the forward benches, out of the
arrows' flight. And when I waked a new dawn was breaking, and I heard
the shouting of men outside the ship, the shouting of men in the
language of those countries; and I lifted my sick head and gazed at
them, but they curved and numbered and unnumbered themselves, till at
last I heard in my brain a twanging of bows, and looking upward to the
fore-deck, I saw our few men gathered there, crouching, and sending
their arrows fast. The sea had not gone down, but the wind did not
whistle, and in the west the c