So she rode directly toward them; rode so that she crossed their front, and placed herself in their path, standing quite still, with the cloth torn from the lantern, so that its light fell full about her, as she held it above her head.  In an instant they knew her.  They were the remnant who had escaped from the carnage of Zaraila; they knew her with all the rapid, unerring surety of hate.  They gave the shrill, wild war-shout of their tribe, and the whole mass of gaunt, dark, mounted figures with their weapons whirling round their heads inclosed her; a cloud of kites settled down with their black wings and cruel beaks upon one young silvery-plumed falcon.

She sat unmoved, and looked up at the naked blades that flashed above her; there was no fear upon her face, only a calm, resolute, proud beauty—­very pale, very still in the light that gleamed on it from the lantern rays.

“I surrender,” she said briefly; she had never thought to say these words of submission to her scorned foes; she would not have been brought to utter them to spare her own existence.  Their answer was a yell of furious delight, and their bare blades smote each other with a clash of brutal joy.  They had her, the Frankish child who had brought shame and destruction on them at Zaraila, and they longed to draw their steel across the fair young throat, to plunge their lances into the bright, bare bosom, to twine her hair round their spear handles, to rend her delicate limbs apart, as a tiger rends the antelope, to torture, to outrage, to wreak their vengeance on her.  Their chief, only, motioned their violence back from her, and bade them leave her untouched.  At him she looked still with the same fixed, serene, scornful resolve; she had encountered these men so often in battle, she knew so well how rich a prize she was to him.  But she had one thought alone with her; and for it she subdued contempt, and hate, and pride, and every passion in her.

“I surrender,” she said, with the same tranquillity.  “I have heard that you have sworn by your God and your Prophet to tear me limb from limb because that I—­a child, and a woman-child—­brought you to shame and to grief on the day of Zaraila.  Well, I am here; do it.  You can slake your will on me.  But that you are brave men, and that I have ever met you in fair fight, let me speak one word with you first.”

Through the menaces and the rage around her, fierce as the yelling of starving wolves around a frozen corpse, her clear, brave tones reached the ear of the chief in the lingua sabir that she used.  He was a young man, and his ear was caught by that tuneful voice, his eyes by that youthful face.  He signed upward the swords of his followers, and motioned them back as their arms were stretched to seize her, and their shouts clamored for her slaughter.

“Speak on,” he said briefly to her.