Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/381

Rh And rising from his knees he advanced, bent down double, toward Danveld, as if wishing to embrace his knees; his eye was gleaming with something like genuine madness, and his voice was breaking with pain, fear, desperation, and menace. Danveld, reproached in the presence of all with treachery and trickery, began to snort; at last anger broke forth on his face like a flame, so, wishing to trample the ill-fated prisoner to the lowest, he pushed up to him, and bending to his ear hissed through set teeth,—

"If I give her to thee, it will be with my bastard!"

That instant Yurand roared like a wild bull; he seized Danveld with both hands and raised him above his head. In the hall was heard one piercing cry: "Spare!!" then the body of the comtur struck the stone floor with such terrible impetus that the brains of his broken skull were spattered on Siegfried and Rotgier who were standing right there.

Yurand sprang to the side wall on which were weapons, and, seizing a great double-handed sword, rushed like a storm at the Germans, who were petrified with terror.

Those men were accustomed to battles, blood, and slaughter, still their hearts sank to that degree that even when their stupor had passed they began to withdraw and flee as sheep from a wolf which kills with one snap of his teeth. The hall was filled with screams of terror, with trampling of feet, with the crash of overturned vessels, with cries of attendants, with despairing calls for weapons, shields, swords, and crossbows, and with the howls of the bear which broke away from the jester and climbed to a lofty window. At last weapons gleamed, and the points of some tens of them were directed at Yurand, but he heeded nothing; half insane he sprang toward them himself, and a wild, unheard-of battle began,—a battle more like a slaughter than a conflict with weapons. The youthful and passionate Brother Gottfried was the first to bar the way to Yurand; but Yurand with the lightning swiftness of his sword edge hurled off his head, and with it an arm and shoulder; after him fell the captain of the archers and the steward of the castle, Von Bracht, and an Englishman who, though he did not understand well what the question was, took pity on Yurand and his suffering and drew his sword only after the slaying of Danveld. Others, beholding the terrible strength and rage of the man, gathered into a crowd to resist in company; but that method brought still more deplorable defeat, for Yurand, with his hair on end, with wild eye, bespattered