There he saw fire-bales being hurled down from the walls--these, the comet-like apparitions he had seen from a distance--hurled, blazing, right into the brown of the mob.
Beyond, a party had scaled the wall, and there the fight was hand to hand--with gruntings, thrustings of spears, slashings of long knives that dripped red and cut again and rose and fell with hideous regularity!
He jacked his pistol full of shells once more and thrust it into the girl's hand--for she, excited beyond all control, was snapping the hammer of her weapon on empty steel.
“Give it to 'em! Shoot! Kill!” he yelled. “Our only chance now! If they--get in--we're dead!”
He snatched her weapon, reloaded, and again rained the steel-jacketed bolts of death against the attackers.
In the tumult and wild maelstrom of the fight the revolvers' crackling seemed to produce little effect. If Stern expected that this unknown weapon would at once bring panic and quick victory he reckoned without the berserker madness and the stern mettle of this horde of raging Lanskaarn.
White men, like himself, they yielded not; but with strange cries and frightful yells, pressed on and on, up to the walls, and up the ladders ever; and now came flights of spears, hissing through the dark air--and now smooth black rocks from the beach, flung with terrible strength and skill by the slingers below, mowed down the defenders.
Here, there, men of the Folk were falling, pierced by the iron spears, shattered by the swift and heavy rocks.
The place was becoming a shambles where the blood of attackers and attacked mingled horribly in the gloom.
One ladder, pushed outward, dragged half a dozen of the Merucaans with it; and at the bottom of the wall a circling eddy of the Lanskaarn despatched the fighting Folkmen who had been hauled to their destruction by the grappling besiegers.
Blows, howls and screams, hurtling fire-bales and great rocks flung from above--the rocks he had already noted laid along the inside of the wall--these, and the smell of blood and fire, the horrid, sweaty contact of struggling bodies, the press and jam of the battle that surged round them, all gave Stern a kaleidoscopic picture of war--war as it once was, in the long ago--war, naked and terrible, such as he had never even dreamed!
But, mad with the lust of the kill, he heeded nothing now.
“Shoot! Shoot!” he kept howling, beside himself; and, tearing open the bandoliers where lay his cartridges, he crammed them with feverish fingers into the girl's weapon and his own--weapons now burning hot with the quick, long-continued firing.
The battle seemed to dance, to waver there before his eyes, in the haze of mist and smoke and stifling air. The dark scene, blue-lit by the guttering torches, grew ever more sanguinary, more incredibly hideous. And still the attackers swarmed along the walls and up them, in front and on both sides, till the swirling mists hid them and the defenders from view.
He heard Beatrice cry out with pain. He saw her stagger and fall back.
To her he leaped.
“Wounded?” he gasped.
She answered nothing, but fell limp.
“God of Battles!” he howled. “Revenge!”
He snatched her automatic from beneath the trampling, crowding feet; he bore her back, away from the thick press. And in the shelter of a massive hut he laid her down.
Then, stark-mad, he turned and leaped into the battle-line that swayed and screamed along the wall.
Critical now the moment. In half a dozen places the besiegers had got their ladders planted. And, while dense masses of the Lanskaarn--unminding fire-balls and boulders rained down upon them--held these ladders firm, up the attackers came with a rush.
Stern saw the swing and crushing impact of the maces and iron clubs; he saw the stabbing of the spears on both sides.
Slippery and red the parapet became.
Men, killed there, crawled and struggled and fell both outward and inside, and were trampled in indiscriminate heaps, besieged and besiegers alike, still clawing, tearing, howling even in their death agony.
Now one of the ladders was down--another fell, with horrid tumult--a third!
An automatic in each hand, Stern scrambled to the glairy summit of the fortification.
A mace swung at him. He leaped sidewise, firing as he sprang. With a scream the ax-man doubled up and fell, and vanished in the gloom below the wall.
Raking the parapet with a hail of lead, he mowed down the attackers on top of the fourth ladder. With a mighty shout, those inside staved it away with iron grapples. It, too, swayed drunkenly, held below, pushed madly above. It reeled--then fell with a horrible, grinding crash!
“Hurray, boys! One more down! Give 'em Hell!” he screamed. “One more!”
He turned. Subconsciously he felt that his right hand was wet, and hot, and dripping, but he felt no pain.
“One more! Now for another!”
And in the opposite direction along the wall he emptied his other revolver.
Before the stinging swarm of the steel-jacketed wasps of death the Lanskaarn writhed and melted down with screams such as Dante in his wildest vision never even dreamed.
Stern heard a great howl of triumph break from the mass of defenders fighting to overthrow the fifth ladder.
“Hold 'em! Hold 'em!” he bellowed. “Wait till I load up again--I'll--”
A swift and crashing impact dashed sheaves of radiant fire through his brain.
Everything leaped and whirled.
He flung up both hands.
Clutching at empty air, then suddenly at the slippery parapet which seemed to have leaped up and struck him in the face, he fell.
Came a strange numbness, then a stabbing pain.
And darkness quenched all knowledge and all consciousness.
CHAPTER XXIX. SHADOWS OF WAR
A blue and flickering gleam of light, dim, yet persistent, seemed to enhalo a woman's face; and as Stern's weary eyes opened under languid lids, closed, then opened again, the wounded engineer smiled in his weakness.
“Beatrice!” he whispered, and tried to stretch a hand to her, as she sat beside his bed of seaweed covered with the coarse brown fabric. “Oh, Beatrice! Is this--is this another--hallucination?”
She took the hand and kissed it, then bent above him and kissed him again, this time fair upon the lips.
“No, boy,” she answered. “No hallucination, but reality! You're all right now--and I'm all right! You've had a little fever and--and--well, don't ask any questions, that's all. Here, drink this now and go to sleep!”
She set a massive golden bowl to his mouth, and very gently raised his head.
Unquestioningly he drank, as though he had been a child and she his mother. The liquid, warm and somewhat sweet, had just a tang of some new taste that he had never known. Singularly vitalizing it seemed, soothing yet full of life. With a sigh of contentment, despite the numb ache in his right temple, he lay back and once more closed his eyes. Never had he felt such utter weakness. All his forces seemed drained and spent; even to breathe was very difficult.
Feebly he raised his hand to his head.
“Bandaged?” he whispered. “What does that mean?”
“It means you're to go to sleep now!” she commanded. “That's all--just go to sleep!”
He lay quiet a moment, but sleep would not come. A score, a hundred thoughts confusedly crowded his brain.
And once more looking up at her in the dim blue gloom of the hut where they were, he breathed a question:
“Were you badly hurt, dear, in--in the battle?”
“No, Allan. Just stunned, that's all. Not even wounded. Be quiet now or I'll scold!”
He raised his arms to her and, weak though he was, took her to his breast and held her tight, tight.
“Thank God!” he whispered. “Oh, I love you! I love you so! If you'd been killed--”