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But had he paused and turned at the first angle he would have seen the shadow which lay stretched in the deeper shadows of the doorway stir itself, and Hugues' white face, a blur upon the darkness, watching him. Beyond that door slept the Dauphin, and Villon was right when he said that the guards of Amboise were not pikes or cross-bows, but eyes that saw and hearts that loved.
The enemy on this occasion were armed in the manner already mentioned respecting the weapons of the inhabitants of Calicut, and the Christians in the harness and with the weapons then used by us in Europe . And besides matchlocks, their offensive arms were pikes, swords, and cross-bows.
In the meanwhile, Godfrey charged Bertha with a message for the Count of Paris, in which, slightly censuring him for not observing more caution in his intercourse with the Greeks, he informed him that he had sent a detachment of fifty lances, with the corresponding squires, pages, men-at-arms, and cross-bows, five hundred in number, commanded by the valiant Tancred, to his assistance.
On this he advanced his legions, protecting his flanks with continuous trenches and earthworks, on which were placed heavy cross-bows, the ancient predecessors of cannon. Between these lines, if he attacked the enemy and failed, he had a secure retreat. A marsh lay between the armies; and each waited for the other to cross.
It is separated from the fells, or rugged hills, which form the northern boundary of the wide vale of Hayde, by a space of about two or three hundred yards; sufficiently wide to place it, in the days of cross-bows and ballistas, pretty well beyond the reach of insult, but by far too narrow to be of the slightest avail against cannon, and even musketry.
The English soldiers now rose steadily from the grass, and stood in fair and martial order on the hillside, with the standard of the Black Prince in their front. The sky had by this time become clouded; a thunder-storm came on, and torrents of rain soon fell slackening the strings of the cross-bows of the Genoese archers, who had advanced to break the firm front of the English bowmen.
Pray allow me to go to their ship and choose out what I like. The king thought and thought, frowned hard and rubbed his ear. At last he gave consent, and ordered out his royal yacht, with 100 cross-bows, 100 knights, and 1,000 soldiers, to escort the Princess Helena. Off sailed the yacht with the princess and her escort.
Likewise the shopkeepers and merchants and their assistants of all kinds were there. After these came the shooters with guns, bows, and cross-bows, and the horsemen and foot-soldiers also. Then followed the watch of the Lords Magistrates. Then came a fine troop all in red, nobly and splendidly clad.
In each corner of this second wall, and in the middle of each side, there are very large and magnificent buildings, eight in all, which are appropriated as storehouses or arsenals for keeping the warlike weapons and furniture belonging to the khan: as horse trappings of all kinds in one; bows and arrows and cross-bows in a second; helmets, cuirasses, and leather armour in a third; and so on in the rest.
"Because, Dick, it is written that the rain falls on the just and the unjust; and the unjust, that is the French, or rather the Italians whom they hire, use these new-fangled cross-bows which as you know cannot be cased like ours, and therefore stretch their strings in wet."
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