Those who stood without the wall of Roche-de-Frêne looked from their narrow footing forth and down upon the fields of night and the flickering tokens of the dragon their foe. The men who had handled the rope-ladder at the moat now knelt at the edge of this shelf, made fast a like stair but a longer, weighted the free end with a stone, and swung it over the cliff side. It fell: the whole straightened itself, hung a passable road to the foot of the rock. That attained, there would rest the rough and broken hillside that fell to the wood, the wood that fell to the plain where the dragon had dominion. The night was still, the waning moon pushing up from the east. That one who alone had used the phrase “Saint Martin’s summer” spoke to Garin: “Go you first,” and then to Stephen the Marshal: “Now we say farewell, Lord Stephen!” Garin, at the cliff edge, heard behind him the marshal’s low and fervent commendations to the Mother of God and every Saint. He himself set his feet upon the rope-stair, went down the rock-side, touched the stony earth at the base, stood aside. That other, that strange companion of this night, came lightly after—not hurriedly, with a light deliberateness—and stood beside him on the moon-silvered hill. The moon showed a woman, slender and lithe, with a peasant’s bodice and ragged, shortened kirtle and great mantle of frieze. At her word he loosened the weighting stone, drew at the rope three times. Those at the top of the rock receiving the signal, the ladder was drawn slowly up, vanished. Above the two soared the clean rock, and loftier yet, the bare, the inaccessible wall of Roche-de-Frêne. Black Tower and Eagle Tower seemed among the stars. There was a gulf between them and those small, hidden, defended entrances. The strained gaze could see naught but some low, out-cropping bushes and a trailing vine. Up there the men who had brought them to that side of the gulf might yet be gazing outward, listening with bated breath for any token that that dragon was awake and aware; but they could not tell if it were so. Up there was the friendly world, down here the hostile. Up there might be troubadour-knight and princess, down here stood jongleur and peasant.