the daylight. All the boot-kissers and hangers-on that swarm after a rich and degenerate lord trooped with their master – scum of both races. The luxury of the East had worked quick ruin on Baron von Gonler.
“Well,” shouted the baron, “who is it wishes to interrupt my drinking?”
“Any but a drunkard would know Cormac FitzGeoffrey,” snarled the horseman, his lip writhing back from his strong teeth in contempt. “We have an account to settle.”
That name and Cormac’s tone had been enough to sober any drunken knight of the Outremer. But von Gonler was not only drunk; he was a degenerate fool. The baron took a long drink while his drunken crew stared curiously at the savage figure on the other side of the dry moat, whispering to one another.
“Once you were a man, von Gonler,” said Cormac, in a tone of concentrated venom; “now you have become a groveling debauchee. Well, that’s your own affair. The matter I have in mind is another – why did you refuse aid to the Sieur de Gissclin?”
The German’s puffy, arrogant face took on new hauteur. He pursed his thick lips haughtily, while his bleared eyes blinked over his bulbous nose like an owl. He was an image of pompous stupidity that made Cormac grind his teeth.
“What was the Frenchman to me?” the baron retorted brutally. “It was his own fault – out of a thousand girls he might have taken, the young fool tried to steal one a sheik wanted himself. He, the purity of honor! Bah!”
He added a coarse jest and the creatures with him screamed with mirth, leaping and flinging themselves into obscene postures. Cormac’s sudden and lion-like roar of fury gave them pause.
“Conrad von Gonler!” thundered the maddened Gael, “I name you liar, traitor and coward – dastard, poltroon and villain! Arm yourself and ride out here on the plain. And haste – I can not waste much time on you – I must kill you quick and ride on lest another vermin escape me.”
The baron laughed cynically. “Why should I fight you? You are not even a knight. You wear no knightly emblem on your shield.”
“Evasions of a coward,” raged FitzGeoffrey. “I am a chief in Ireland and I have cleft the skulls of men whose boots you are not worthy to touch. Will you arm yourself and ride out, or are you become the swinish coward I deem you?”
Von Gonler laughed in scornful anger.
“I need not risk my hide fighting you. I will not fight you, but I will have my men-at-arms fill your hide with crossbow bolts if you tarry longer.”
“Von Gonler,” Cormac’s voice was deep and terrible in its brooding menace, “will you fight, or die in cold blood?”
The German burst into a sudden brainless shout of laughter.
“Listen to him!” he roared. “He threatens me – he on the other side of the moat, with the drawbridge lifted – I here in the midst of my henchmen!”
He smote his fat thigh and roared with his fool’s laughter, while the debased men and women who served his pleasures laughed with him and insulted the grim Irish warrior with shrill anathema and indecent gestures. And suddenly Cormac, with a bitter curse, rose in his stirrups, snatched his battle-ax from his saddle-bow and hurled it with all his mighty strength.
The men-at-arms on the towers cried out and the dancing girls screamed. Von Gonler had thought himself to be out of reach – but there is no such thing as being out of reach of Norman-Irish vengeance. The heavy ax hissed as it clove the air and dashed out Baron Conrad’s brains.
The fat, gross body buckled to the earth like a mass of melted tallow, one fat, white hand still gripping the empty wine goblet. The gay silks and cloth-of-gold were dabbled in a deeper red than ever was sold in the bazaar, and the jesters and dancers scattered like birds, screaming at the sight of that blasted head and the crimson ruin that had been a human face.
Cormac FitzGeoffrey made a fierce, triumphant gesture and voiced a deep-chested yell of such ferocious exultation that men blenched to hear. Then wheeling his black steed suddenly, he raced away before the dazed soldiers could get their wits together to send a shower of arrows after him.
He did not gallop far. The great steed was weary from a hard night’s travel. Cormac soon swung in behind a jutting crag, and reining his horse up a steep incline, halted and looked back the way he had come. He was out of sight of the keep, but he heard no sounds of pursuit. A wait of some half-hour convinced him that no attempt had been made to follow him. It was dangerous and foolhardy to ride out of a safe castle into these hills. Cormac might well have been one of an ambushing force.
At any rate, whatever his enemies’ thoughts were on the subject, it was evident that he need expect no present attempt at retaliation, and he grunted with angry satisfaction. He never shunned a fight, but just now he had other business on hand.
Cormac rode eastward.
III THE ROAD TO EL GHOR
The way to El Ghor was rough indeed. Cormac wound his way between huge jagged boulders, across deep ravines and up treacherous steeps. The sun slowly climbed toward the zenith and the heat waves began to dance and shimmer. The sun beat fiercely on Cormac’s helmed head, and glancing back from the bare rocks, dazzled his narrowed eyes. But the big warrior gave no heed; in his own land he learned to defy sleet and snow and bitter cold; following the standard of Coeur de Lion, before the shimmering walls of Acre, on the dusty plains of Azotus, and before Joppa, he had become inured to the blaze of the Oriental sun, to the glare of naked sands, to the slashing dust winds.
At noon he halted long enough to allow the black stallion an hour’s rest in the shade of a giant boulder. A tiny spring bubbled there, known to him of old, and it slaked the thirst of the man and the horse. The stallion cropped eagerly at the scrawny fringe of grass about the spring and Cormac ate of the dried meats he carried in a small pouch. Here he had watered his steed in the old days, when he rode with Gerard. Ali-El-Yar lay to the west; in the night he had swung around it in a wide circle as he rode to the castle of von Gonler. He had had no wish to gaze on the moldering ruins. The nearest Moslem chief of any importance was Nureddin El Ghor, who with his brother-at- arms, Kosru Malik, the Seljuk, held the castle of El Ghor, in the hills to the east.
Cormac rode on stolidly through the savage heat. As midafternoon neared he rode up out of a deep, wide defile and came onto the higher levels of the hills. Up this defile he had ridden aforetime to raid the wild tribes to the east, and on the small plateau at the head of the defile stood a gibbet where Sieur Gerard de Gissclin had once hanged a red-handed Turkoman chief as a warning to those tribes.
Now, as FitzGeoffrey rode up on the plateau, he saw the old tree again bore fruit. His keen eyes made out a human form suspended in midair, apparently by the wrists. A tall warrior in the peaked helmet and light mail shirt of a Moslem stood beneath, tentatively prodding at the victim with a spear, making the body sway and spin on the rope. A bay Turkoman horse stood near. Cormac’s cold eyes narrowed. The man on the rope – his naked body glistened too white in the sun for a Turk. The Norman-Gael touched spurs to the black stallion and swept across the plateau at a headlong run.
At the sudden thunder of hoofs the Muhammadan started and whirled. Dropping the spear with which he had been tormenting the captive, he mounted swiftly, stringing a short heavy bow as he did so. This done, and his left forearm thrust through the straps of a small round buckler, he trotted out to meet the onset of the Frank.
Cormac was approaching at a thundering charge, eyes glaring over the edge of his grim shield. He knew that this Turk would never meet him as a Frankish knight would have met him – breast to breast. The Moslem would avoid his ponderous rushes, and circling him on his nimbler steed, drive in shaft after shaft until one found its mark. But he rushed on as recklessly as if he had never before encountered Saracen tactics.
Now the Turk bent his bow and the arrow glanced from Cormac’s shield. They were barely within javelin cast of each other, but even as the Moslem laid another shaft to string, doom smote him. Cormac, without checking his headlong gait, suddenly rose in his stirrups and gripping his long lance in the middle, cast it like a javelin. The
