The Iron Arrow Head or The Buckler Maiden Part 8

CHAPTER VII.

KOEMPE!

The monk and the two soldiers had barely stretched the Buckler Maiden upon the slab-stones of the crypt, when an icy terror ran through their frames. A noise, at first heard indistinctly, now smote their ears with all its formidable meaning. It was the war-cry of the Northman pirates.

"_Koempe!" "Koempe!_" resounded from the court-yard of the abbey. The cry grew louder; it invaded the church; it presently reached clear, powerful, distinct into the underground recess of the crypt.

"Malediction upon us!" exclaimed the monk listening. "It is the war-cry of the Northmans! They have invaded the abbey!"

"Where could they have entered by?" asked one of the soldiers with chattering teeth. "The demons must have leaped out of h.e.l.l!"

"To me, my virgins!" the warrior maid now cried with renewed vigor, although still held pinioned to the ground under the knees of the monk and the soldiers. "To me, my sisters! _Skoldmoe! Skoldmoe!_"

The last words of s.h.i.+gne were answered by the sonorous voice of Gaelo:

"s.h.i.+gne, here I am!" and almost immediately the young pirate appeared at the entrance of the crypt, followed by Simon Large-Ears, Robin Jaws and Savinien, the serf who had driven the two wagons loaded with hay into the abbey. All three shouted at the top of their voices: "_Koempe!_ To death and to the sack! Pillage! Pillage!"

At the sight of the unexpected reinforcement that rushed to the aid of their fair prisoner, Fultrade and his accomplices quitted their intended victim. s.h.i.+gne leaped to her feet, seized the sword of one of the soldiers, plunged it into the breast of the monk, who dropped stone dead, and, still trembling with rage and shame, rushed sword in hand upon the young pirate.

"Either I shall kill you, or you will kill me, Gaelo! You shall not be allowed to say that you saw me exposed to extreme outrage!"

Stupefied at the sudden attack of a young woman to whose aid he had hastened to come, Gaelo at first contented himself with parrying s.h.i.+gne's blows, but wounded in the face by her weapon, he precipitated himself upon her crying:

"Your will be done! Either you shall kill me, or I shall kill you!"

The combat between Gaelo and s.h.i.+gne was furious. Simon Large-Ears and Robin Jaws, who had turned their first attention to the two soldiers hidden in the remotest corner of the crypt under Clovis' mausoleum, killed them both. As they stepped out, Simon Large-Ears said:

"These nuns who came whining to the gate of the abbey while we were concealed under the hay of Savinien's wagons, turned to strategem like ourselves in order to get in. Theirs was a feminine ruse!"

"Oh, Simon," answered Robin pointing to the Buckler Maiden and Gaelo, who were engaged in a deadly duel; "what a pity! To think of such a magnificent lad and so beautiful a girl seeking to kill each other, instead of making love!"

"And if they survive they will love each other but hobblingly. It is clear that in their rage both will lose some member. Just watch the blows that they deal to each other!"

Never had Gaelo met more redoubtable an adversary than s.h.i.+gne. To inordinary strength she coupled skill, coolness and intrepidity. Carried away by the ardor of the struggle, the pirate forgot his pa.s.sionate love. If he at all kept in mind that he was fighting with a woman, he only felt all the more nettled at finding in her such indomitable powers of resistance. After a long exchange of parried thrusts, Gaelo succeeded in dealing so violent a blow with his sword upon the virgin's skull that neither her hair-net of linked iron, nor her thick head of hair, through both of which the pirate's sword cut its way, could save her from a severe scalp wound. The blood poured down s.h.i.+gne's face, her weapon slipped from her grasp, and she dropped down first upon both her knees and then on her side.

"Unhappy me!" cried Gaelo in despair. "I have killed her!" and kneeling down beside the young woman, he raised her beautiful head, now pale, bleeding and with eyes half closed.

"Gaelo," murmured the Buckler Maiden in a fainting voice, "you were able to vanquish me; I love you!" and her eyes closed.

Struck with sympathy, Simon and Robin approached Gaelo to offer him their services, when a new cry arose from the distance, and again dominated the lingering clash of arms between the Northman pirates and the small remnant of the rapidly diminis.h.i.+ng garrison of the abbey. It was the cry of "Berserk!" "Berserk!" warningly uttered by the pirates themselves.

"Lodbrog the Giant is again in a fit of fury!" cried Simon Large-Ears in terror. "The berserker is as terrible to his friends as to his enemies.

Gaelo, the fray may roll this way; your sweetheart is perhaps not dead; let us carry her into the crypt; she will be there safer than here."

Gaelo hastened to follow Simon's advice. Raising the insensible warrior maid in his arms, he laid her down gently in a remote corner of the sepulchral recess.

A prodigious spectacle, a giant battle, was elsewhere taking place at that moment. The Frankish soldiers posted on the ramparts had left their posts to run to the a.s.sistance of their companions, first engaged by the Buckler Maidens and subsequently attacked by the band under Gaelo that emerged out of Savinien's hay wagons. Until then, Lodbrog the berserker had fought valiantly without his intellect being clouded. But the intoxication of the battle, the odor of carnage, the sight of the Frankish reinforcement that poured down from the ramparts and rushed toward the main door of the basilica crying: "Death! Death! Kill the Northmans!"--all this combined threw the giant into a new attack of frenzy. Brandis.h.i.+ng a spiked iron mace, the Northman, leaped forward with a roar and dashed upon the compact group of Franks. Ten blacksmiths' hammers beating upon ten anvils could not produce the deafening sound produced by Lodbrog's mace falling, falling again, rising only to fall again and again upon the casques and the armors of the soldiers. Some sink to the earth, crushed under the thundering blows, without uttering a sound: their skulls are ground into pulp within their casques like nuts in their sh.e.l.ls; others roll to the ground emitting shrieks of pain and rage. The corpses are heaped up high at the feet of Lodbrog. He mounts the heap. He mounts it as on a pedestal, and his size a.s.sumes still more gigantic proportions. The tops of the casques of the soldiers who still dare sustain the contest with him, barely reach his belt. Gaelo, who rushed out of the basilica, thinking his aid needed in the general battle that he imagined was in progress, arrived at the moment when the surviving soldiers were surrounding the berserker, then at the climax of his fury. The spectacle presented looked like a.s.sailants trying to scale a tower. Twenty arms holding twenty swords rose at once to smite the giant. But towering above those arms and swords appeared the cuira.s.sed bust of the colossus, and his iron mace rose and descended, splintering swords, cracking heads, crus.h.i.+ng limbs, pulverizing arms! Gaelo, the others of his band and the surviving Buckler Maidens precipitated themselves upon the rear of the soldiers who besieged Lodbrog. Suddenly the berserker was heard to emit a fresh roar, throw his mace into the air, stoop down and immediately rise again holding a soldier by the hair and belt. Vainly did the luckless Frank struggle to escape from the giant's clutch. He was hurled wrathfully from on high against the handful of soldiers who still a.s.sailed the Northman. Several of them rolled over the ground.

Lodbrog despatched them by trampling over their prostrate bodies with his colossal feet like an enraged elephant that tramples upon and pounds his victims to death. Thereupon, seeing no more enemies to fight, all his opponents having been killed or wounded by himself or the other pirates, but still a prey to his own vertigo of destruction, riddled with wounds that he did not feel, but the gus.h.i.+ng blood of which reddened his armor that was broken through in twenty places, Lodbrog's eyes fell upon a large black mausoleum just within the basilica. It was the tomb of Fredegonde.[4] The giant rushed in headlong; he seized with both his mighty hands one of the pillars that supported the entablature; shook it; loosened it with an effort of superhuman strength; the pillar yielded and carried down with it a portion of the architecture of the mausoleum, which thereupon crumbled to the ground. The loud crash of the ruin added fuel to the rage of the berserker. His eyes encountered the sepulchral light that escaped from the crypt where the Beautiful s.h.i.+gne lay. The berserker rushed thither with the roar of a goaded bull, and vanished from sight.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE RESCUE.

A night and almost a whole day had pa.s.sed since Anne the Sweet, taken into one of the underground cells of the abbey of St. Denis by Father Fultrade, had escaped the outrageous purposes of the monk.

Deepest darkness reigned in the dungeon in which Anne the Sweet was confined. The feelings of terror and despair that at first seized her at being separated from her mother, had been followed by mental and physical prostration. Her tears had run dry. Seated on the stone slabs of the cell with her back to the wall, the young girl dropped into a feverish slumber agitated by sinister dreams. One time, it was the monk Fultrade who appeared before her, and then she awoke shuddering with horror--a horror that was intensified by the brooding darkness around her. At other times Anne dreamed that she had been forgotten in the underground chamber, and felt herself a prey to the agonies of hunger while her torture was rendered still more excruciating by the heart-rending cries of her mother, likewise a prey to the torments of famine. Suddenly the young girl was awakened from her cruel dreams by a loud noise of voices and steps that tumultuously drew near. She leaped up, listened, and recognizing the voices of Eidiol and of Guyrion the Plunger, she bounded towards the door which she struck with all her strength, crying:

"Father! Brother! Deliver me! Come, come to my help!"

"Step back from the door, my child!" answered the skipper. "We shall break it in."

Beside herself with joy, the young girl fell back a few steps. Shaken from its hinges by the blows of the iron bars that Eidiol and Guyrion and Rustic the Gay wielded with energy, the door soon fell over and Anne rushed into the arms of her father and brother; but looking around as if missing someone she had expected to see, she asked with fear:

"And my mother? Where is my dear mother?"

"You will see her in an instant, my child. It is from her I just learned about the treason of the infamous monk," answered the dean of the Skippers' Guild, who could not bestow sufficient caresses upon the daughter whom he feared to have lost. "When she saw me," continued the happy father, "poor Martha felt such a pang that she lost consciousness.

Fortunately she returned to her senses, but her weakness is such that she could not walk out of the cell in which she also was confined. It is near by."

"But you here, father, in this abbey?" the young girl inquired, as soon as her first emotions were calmed. "And you, too, brother? And you, Rustic? Am I dreaming? Is it yourselves I see in this dungeon?"

"The Count of Paris posted some archers along the banks of the Seine in order to stop all the vessels that ascended the river," the old man explained. "Two of his soldiers took me to Rothbert. I had an altercation with him, and he ordered me locked up here."

"And the traitor thereupon sent us one of his men to say that my father wanted to see us immediately," added Guyrion; "we came without suspecting any harm--"

"And we had hardly set foot inside the abbey," broke in Rustic the Gay, "when the count's soldiers fell upon us unexpectedly and took us also prisoners."

"But you are now free," replied Anne. "Who set you free?"

"The Northman pirates, my dear child."

"Great G.o.d!" cried the young girl affrighted and clasping her hands.

"Oh! father! were those pagans merciful to you?"

"Pagans who set us free are better than Christians who imprison us.

Moreover, these brave and wily folks entered the abbey by strategem, and have slaughtered about a hundred Frankish soldiers, without counting the monks whom they despatched."

"After which, sister," proceeded Guyrion, "they started to pillage the basilica and the abbey. There is a heap of booty, as high as the portal of the cloister, piled up in the court-yard."

"And then," said Rustic, "the Northmans descended into the cellar to stave in the heads of the casks of wine that the abbot kept there. In this way they landed at the entrance of the gallery that leads to these underground dungeons. Expecting to find large treasures locked up there, they broke in the door. They found us huddled together in the gallery.

Their chief, a magnificent young warrior whom they call Gaelo, ordered them to treat us well and to a.s.sist us in setting the rest of the prisoners free. That is the history of our own deliverance."

"Thus, my child, we reached the cell in which your mother was confined,"