"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!"