Merlin and the rest had reached the beech woods, and a trampled track through the long grass showed the way they had gone. Fulk was not concerned with the possible odds. He was the male robbed of his mate, ready to rush at death, take wounds and not feel them. His sword felt like metal at white heat. It was thirsty. His face was not pleasant to behold, the grim white face of a man whose eyes see blood. The track through the grass went into the beech wood where the trees stood at a little distance from each other with chequered stretches of brown leaves and short, sweet turf. Fulk glimpsed something ahead down one of the woodland ways. His nostrils expanded; his lips were nothing but a thin, hard line. He ran on between the great smooth boles of the beeches and under boughs that swept within a bow’s length of the ground, his feet making the dead leaves crackle, or going noiselessly over the patches of grass. He could see figures moving ahead of him, a grey shape, pausing ever and again, a white face looking back, a man half hidden by some tree-trunk and handling a bow. Once he heard a half-smothered cry, and something leapt in him, a fury of tenderness that stung him like fire. A sudden glade opened in the beech wood, and he saw all that he desired to see, someone to be rescued, someone to be spoken to with the sword. They had thrown an old red cloak about Isoult, and two men were holding her, one with a brown fist half hidden in her hair. Three more fellows were waiting like dogs at Merlin’s heel—Merlin who had faced about and was pointing towards Fulk with the knife that he had drawn from his girdle. One man put a horn to his lips and blew a blast that whimpered into the distant woodlands. The others were handling their bows. Fulk gave them no leisure to shoot at him as they pleased. He ran in to give them cold steel. Two arrows went past him. He saw Merlin leap aside, shouting to his men. “Kill—kill!” Fulk had an arrow through his sleeve before he marked out his first man. Maybe he had the mastery of these fellows before a blow was struck, for he came at them like a white-faced devil out of hell, and his eyes were as terrible as his sword. He slashed at one man’s bow, and the hand fell with it, the wretch staring stupidly at a bleeding stump. A little fat rascal with a poleaxe had the point under his ribs. A tall, raw-boned horse-thief stabbed at Fulk with a short sword, but not getting home with the blow, had his throat slashed as a judgment. One of the men who guarded Isoult had run forward to join in the tussle, but thought better of it and hung back. Fulk heard Isoult utter a warning cry. “Your back—guard your back!” As he struck the fourth man down he had a vision of Isoult struggling and breaking free. She ran towards him. “Behind you, behind you!”