‘Spur, spur!’ cried Des Barres, and the line went rattling down.  They were not in time.  The white runner was too quick for the killer of his mate:  he did, indeed, look round; but the other was upon him before he could rise.  There was a short tussle; the two rolled over and over.  Then the white-clad man got up, raised his fallen comrade, shouldered him, and sped away into the smoke of Chaluz.  When Des Barres and his friends were within bowshot of the tower one man only was below it; and he lay where he had been stabbed.  The white-robed murderers, the living and the dead, were lost in smoke.  The King and his party were gone.  Out of the tower came Saint-Pol with his men, unarmed, bareheaded, and waited silently in rank for Des Barres.

This one came up at a gallop.  ‘My prisoner, Count of Saint-Pol,’ he called out as he came; then halted his line by throwing up his hand.

‘The King has been shot, Sir Guilhem,’ Saint-Pol said gravely; ’not by me.  I am the King’s prisoner.  Take me to him, lest he die before I see his eyes.’

‘Who is that dead man of yours over there?’ asked Des Barres.

’His name is Sieur Gilles de Gurdun, a knight of Normandy and enemy of the King’s, but dead (if dead he be) on the King’s account.  He killed the assassin.’

‘I know that very well,’ says Des Barres, ’for I saw the deed, which was a good one.  I must hunt for those white-gowns.  Who might they be?’

’I know nothing of them.  They are no men of mine.  Their robes were all white, their faces all dark, and they ran like Turks.  But what can Turks do here?’

‘They must be found,’ said Des Barres, and sent out Savaric with half of his men.

They picked up Gilles, quite dead of two wounds, one in the back of the neck, another below the heart.  Des Barres put him over his saddlebow; then took his prisoners into camp.

King Richard had been carried to his pavilion and put to bed.  His physicians were with him, and the Abbot Milo, quite unmanned.  Gaston of Bearn was crying like a girl at the door.  The Earl of Leicester had ridden off for the Queen, Yvo Tibetot for the Count of Mortain.  Des Barres learned that they had pulled out the arrow, a common one of Genoese make, but feared poison.  King Richard had been shot in the right lung.

CHAPTER XVII

THE KEENING

In the wan hours left to him came three women, one after another, and spoke the truth so far as they knew it each.

The first was Alois of France in the habit of a grey lady of Fontevrault, with a face more dead than her cowl, and hair like wet weed, but in her hollow eyes the fire of her mystery; who said to the watchers by the door:  ‘Let me in.  I am the voice of old sorrow.’  So they held back the curtains of the tent, and she came shuffling forward to the long body on the bed.  At the sound of her skirts the King turned his altered face her way, then rolled his head back to the dark.