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The Captain, on watch and expectant, heard the signal. "To the Emperor at Blacherne," he bade; "and say the storm is about to break. Make haste." Then to his men: "Light the matches, and be ready to throw the stones down." The hordesmen reached the edge of the ditch; that moment the guns were unmasked, and the Genoese leader shouted: "Fire, my men! Christ and Holy Church!"
Not a Christian survived the combat. Greek, Genoese, Italian lay in ghastly composite with hordesmen and mailed Moslems around the Emperor. In dying they had made good their battle-cry For Christ and Holy Church! Let us believe they will yet have their guerdon.
Arrows and javelins pierce them; stones crush them; the culverins spout fire in their faces, and, lifting them off their uncertain footing, hurl them bodily back upon the heads and shields of their comrades. Along the brow of the rocky hill a mound of bodies arises wondrous quick, an obstacle to the warders of the pass who would shoot, and to the hordesmen a barrier.
Theirs to hold the ground, and they held it. They laid the hordesmen out over it in scattered heaps which grew, and presently became one long heap the width of the alley; and they too fell, but, as we are willing to believe, unconscious of pain because lapped in the delirium of battle-fever.
More than once he dashed by groups of them hurrying along the streets in search of houses most likely to repay plundering. There were instances when he overtook hordesmen already happy in the possession of "strings of slaves;" that is to say, of Greeks, mostly women and children, tied by their hands to ropes, and driven mercilessly on.
This advantage encouraged the idea of pouring the hordesmen en masse over the hill composed of the ruins of what had been the towers of the gate. There was an impulsive dash under incitement of a mighty drumming and trumpeting a race, every man of the thousands engaged in it making for the causeway a jam a mob paralyzed by its numbers.
Then from the Christian works it was bullet, bolt, stone, and shaft, making light of flimsy shield and surcoat of hide; still the hordesmen pushed on, a river breasting an obstruction. Now they were on the causeway. Useless facing about behind them an advancing wall on both sides the ditch. Useless lying down that was to be smothered in bloody mire. Forward, forward, or die.
They had not all gained the ground, however, when there arose a clamor in their front, and the hordesmen appeared, and blocking up the passage, opened upon them with arrows and stones, while such as had javelins and swords attacked them hand to hand. The Christians behaved well, but none better than Constantine.
All that we may do is fire upon the hordesmen"; and as he spoke he stepped to one of the guns and deflected its muzzle toward the green warriors at the ship's side. At the first shot from the Thuria those upon the vessel below evidently discovered her for the first time. Immediately a device fluttered from the bow of the warship on the ground.
Then with horrid war-cries they leaped forward to meet these strange, new foemen. A volley of arrows stopped them in their tracks. In a moment the only green warriors upon the deck of the Thuria were dead warriors, and the bowmen of Kar Komak were leaping over the vessel's sides to charge the hordesmen upon the ground.
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