So the Saxon turned quickly and smote him between the
eyes with his fist, and it was an hour before the Greek came to himself
and crawled away, for nobody would lift him. But Alric laughed often as
he sucked the trickling blood from his knuckles, and though he was a
little man and young, the soldiers looked at him with respect, and many
more of them asked him to drink.
So on that afternoon Gilbert's reputation grew suddenly, as a bright
lily that has been long in bud under a wet sky breaks out like a flame
in the first sunshine; and the days were over when he must trudge along
unnoticed in the vast throng of nobles, with his two men and his modest
baggage.
Meanwhile the council was held in the King's tent of state, within
which three hundred nobles sat at ease after the King himself had taken
his place on the throne, with the Queen on his right hand. There the
red-bearded Frederick of Suabia, nephew to Conrad and famous afterward
as the Emperor Barbarossa, stood up and told his tale: how the wild
German knights had truly forced their leaders to take the mountain road
and fight the Seljuks at a disadvantage; how the Seljuks appeared and
disappeared again from hour to hour, falling upon their prey at every
turn, reddening every pass with blood, and leaving half-killed men
among the slain to wonder whence the swift smiters had come and whither
they were gone. He himself had wounds not healed, and he told how, day
by day, the mad bravery of the Germans, and the fury of his Black
Forest men-at-arms, had risen again and again to very desperation, to
sink before evening in a new defeat; until, at last, as the Seljuk
swords still killed and killed, a terror had fallen upon the host in
the passes, and men had thrown away their armour and fled like rats
from a burning granary, so that their leaders could not hold them.
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