Fulviac had his plan matured. Fifty men-at-arms in red and green, the Gambrevault colours, were to advance with a forged pennon upon the place, as though sent as a reinforcement from Gambrevault. The main body would follow at a distance and lie ambushed in the woods. If the ruse answered, and it was an old trick enough, the barbican and gate could be held till Fulviac came up and made matters sure. Thus Avalon would fall, proto-martyr on the side of feudalism. Nor were Fulviac’s prognostications at fault. There were not sixty men in Avalon, and Fulviac’s fifty gained footing in the place and held their ground till the rest came up. The affair was over, save for some desultory slaughter on the turrets, when Fulviac galloped forward over the meadows with Yeoland and her guard. The man kept the girl on the further side of the moat, and did not suffer her to stumble too suddenly on the realities of war. He feared wisely her woman’s nature, and did not desire to overshock her senses. The butchery was over when they neared the walls. They heard certain promiscuous yelpings, and saw half a dozen men-at-arms, who had made a last stand on a tower, tumbled headlong over the battlements into the moat below. Fulviac did not suffer the girl to cross the bridge. What passed within was hidden by the impenetrable massiveness of the sullen walls. Thus Avalon, fair castle of the woods and waters, sent out her wistful prophecy to the land. In her towers and galleries men lay dead, bleak and stiff, contorted into fantastic attitudes, with pike or sword sucking their vitals. Blood crept down the stairs; dead men cumbered the beds and jammed the doors. There had been much screaming among the women; even Fulviac’s orders could not cool the passions of the mob; it was well indeed that he kept Yeoland innocent in the meadows. Fanaticism, ignorance, lust were loose in Avalon like evil beasts. All its fairness was defamed in one short hour. Hangings were torn down, furniture wrecked and shattered, chests and cupboards spoiled of all their store. In the chapel, where refugees had fled to the altar, there had been slaughter, merciless and brutal. Bertrand, the old knight and seneschal, lay dead on the altar steps, with a broken sword and fifty rents in his carcase. Men were breaking the images, defacing the frescoes, strewing all the place with blood and riot. Nord of the Hammer stood over the cellar door with his great mace over his shoulder, and kept the men from the wine. Elsewhere the mob rooted like a herd of swine in the rich chambers, and worked to the uttermost its swinish will.