The darkness increased. Fulk went down into the hall, lit a torch, and set three more ready in the brackets. Then he joined Isoult at her window in the passage leading to the solar. “We shall have Merlin knocking at the door before midnight.” “Listen!” They heard an occasional shout, the crackling of brushwood, and then a confused sound as of men labouring to draw some heavy thing over the grass. “Hurry, moon, hurry.” They waited, standing close together, Isoult’s hair touching Fulk’s helmet as they watched the eastern sky. “Look. It is rising.” A faint, silvery radiance showed above the trees, spread, and brightened till the yellow rim of the moon shone like the top of a great dome. They watched it rise, solemn and huge and tawny, making the blackness of the woods seem more black. Shouts came from the edge of the mere. Isoult gripped Fulk’s hands. “They are there.” Dim shapes were moving over yonder; ropes creaked and strained. They heard men splashing in the shallows where the shadows of the woods still lay upon the water. Ripples appeared, breaking the still surface of the mere where the moon shone upon it. There was more splashing, and the sound of some heavy thing slithering down the bank. Fulk took his bow. “We may get a shot at them as they ferry over.” “See, there—over the willows!” A rough raft made of young tree-trunks lashed together with withes was moving out into the moonlight. The figures of men were dotted over it, men who paddled with paddles made of oak boughs. All about this clumsy ferry-boat the water broke into gobbets and spurts of silver. Fulk aimed and let fly, stepping aside for Isoult to take her shot. A shrill yell went up. They heard men cursing. Then the raft moved behind the willows and was screened from view. Fulk caught Isoult to him. “Isoult!” She threw her arms about him. “Dear heart, I shall go down and make a first fight of it in the hall. Bide here. If they press me too hard I shall take to the stairs.” A sudden solemnity seized them, a sense of peril, and of the nearness of desperate ends. They had laughed while they had shot their arrows across the mere, but now this scum of outlaws and broken men had floated over, and both Fulk and Isoult knew that Merlin would show no mercy. She pressed her body against his harness. “Man, man, whatever befalls we face it together.” “They shall come at you only over my body.” “Ah, ah—if death takes you shall I tarry behind? I carry a knife.” “By God, it shall not be so. Stand here with your bow and succour me if the chance offers. I go to light the torches.” He hastened down the stairs, and taking a torch that had half burned itself out, he kindled three other torches that were ready in the brackets. Merlin’s men were in the porch. He could hear a scuffling sound like the sound of a pack of dogs sniffing and pawing at a door. A harsh voice shouted a summons. “Fulk Ferrers, Fulk Ferrers, the badger is to be drawn out of his earth!”