at first for long endurance—by the north shore of Van. Michael had steadied them to a slow trot and had taken pains to pass through such rocky ravines as offered, in order to wipe out traces of their passage. They had seen no pursuers, even after leaving the lake.
“Nay,” growled a Genoese. “Par Dex, our bones ache and our feet bleed. We must sleep.”
“Sleep!” cried Michael. “With Mamelukes riding in our tracks who have orders not to return alive without us. I’m thinking that Bayezid made short work of the Janissary guard whose life we spared. Will his horsemen yearn for a like fate?”
He himself was near the point of exhaustion, for his arm was scarcely knit and fever had weakened him. But the men would not move from the spot where they had been watching the lights of the Kurd village and talking among themselves.
Realizing that they must rest, Michael sat down against a tree for a brief sleep. The half-light of dawn was flooding the thicket and the sky over the black hills to the east was crimson when he woke at the sound of approaching footsteps.
It was his own band and they were coming up from the village. Some of them were reeling, though not from fatigue, and their breath was heavy with olives and wine. They looked back over their shoulders and grinned uneasily when they met his eye.
“We’ve taken the Moors’ food,” boasted one fellow. “It’s their own law, methinks. An eye for an eye. They’ll remember us.”
Michael glared. These were common men, very different from the belted knights who had sometimes visited his mother’s home in Brittany. She had hoped that he would be a knight. Instead, he had led a rough life and had toiled against hardships until—this.
“——, what fools! That was a Kurdish village, and the men have good eyes and horseflesh. Well, I must bide with you, for you have named me leader. Come.”
They ran sturdily through the dawn. Months of trotting beside the nobles of the Osmanli had schooled them to this. By midday they were above the fields in a place of gray rocks and red clay. In front of them a half-dozen bowshots away a great gully between mountain-shoulders showed the blue of the sky.
“The Gate of Shadows,” they cried.
And with the words riders came out of the woods behind them.
Michael measured the distance to the gully, glanced back at the shouting Mamelukes, and shook his head. He pointed to a mound of rocks nearby and led his five men there.
“ ’Tis the gate of heaven you will see,” he grunted. “No other, and not that, if you can not die like Christians.”
And the five, to give them their due, fought desperately, using the few weapons they had carried from the Turkish camp, and eking these out with stones.
The Mamelukes, reinforced by Kurds from the hill village, tried at first to make them yield themselves prisoners. But the captives knew what manner of death awaited them at Bayezid’s tent and hurled their stones. The big Portuguese went down with an arrow in his throat. The Genoese leaped among the horses, knife in hand, and struggled weakly even when his skull was split with a mace.
The rearing horses stirred up a cloud of dust that covered the mound. Into this cloud Michael strode, swinging his half-ax. The first rider that met him was dragged from saddle and slain. Michael went down with a Mameluke on top of him and neither rose, for Michael’s left hand had sought and found the other’s dagger in his girdle.
When the last Christian had been shot down with arrows, the Turks dismounted and proceeded to pound the skulls and vital parts of the bodies of their victims with rocks. If any of the men of El-Arjuk had been in the party Michael would have suffered the fate of his comrades.
But the Mamelukes had neglected to give him the coup de grace owing to the body of their warrior that lay upon his. When they lifted up their dead they saw only a prostrate Frank besmeared with blood—not his own—and with a swollen, bruised right arm that looked as if it had been crushed with a stone.
The senses had been battered out of Michael by the mace of the dead Mameluke and it was a fortunate thing for him. Because by the time he crawled to his feet there were no Turks within view.
Instead, black-winged birds casting a foul scent in the air hovered over his head. The vultures had been descending on the bodies of the five men when Michael Bearn stood up.
Now they circled slowly in the air or perched on the rocks nearby patiently. Michael looked at them long, and then at the bodies of his comrades.
The five had not been brave men, but they had died bravely.
Michael walked slowly away from the knoll toward a rivulet issuing between rocks in the mountainside that rose mightily above him. He knelt and drank deeply. Then he dipped his head in the stream, wiping away the dried blood. The flapping wings of the vultures impelled him to look up.
His glance penetrated straight down the ravine that was called the Gate of Shadows and he studied thoughtfully the vista of brown plain that lay beyond. Once within the pass he knew that he would see no more of the Turks. The evening before he had been told when he visited the Kurd village that the rock plateau in front of the pass had been the scene of a massacre by the Turks.
The skeletons of the dead were in the pass and a superstition had arisen that the souls of the slain had not left the place. The voices of ghils had been heard in the darkness. So the Moslems considered the place not only unclean but accursed.
“ ’Fore God,” he sighed, “we were at the Gate, the very Gate. Well, here must they wait for me—my five mates that were.”
So saying, he went back to the knoll, driving away the birds, and dug with his battle-ax a broad shallow grave in the loose sand. Dragging the bodies into this with his one useful arm, he covered them up first with sand, then with large rocks that he rolled down with his bare feet from the knoll.
FROM A wisp-like tamarisk thicket clinging between the boulders of the plateau, he cut two stout staffs with his ax. These he bound roughly together at the middle with a strip of leather cut from his jerkin. The longer staff of the two he imbedded in the sand at the head of the grave.
He had fashioned a cross.
“Rest ye,” he said gravely and extended his left arm over his head. “Vindica eos, Domine.”
Now as he said this he glanced again at the ravine and the plain beyond where he could find food and a tent among the Tatar villages. Then he turned to the northwest where beyond the hills lay the Mormaior, or Black Sea, and beyond there the great cities of Europe.
To the northwest, if he could penetrate thither, were his countrymen, and theirs, he thought, was the power that might some day strike at the Thunderbolt.
It was to the northwest that he began to walk, away from the grave and the Gate of Shadows. Greater than the will to live was the will to seek again the man who had crippled him.
When darkness came and covered his movements he pressed forward more rapidly, swinging his short ax in his left hand. As he went he munched dates and olives that he had plucked from trees near the mountain villages. He found no men to accost him in these orchards, for the fields were scarred by hoofs of many horses and the huts were charred walls of clay.
Bayezid’s riders had been pillaging the villages
