Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/382

358 with gore and breathing blood, enraged, out of his mind, broke, tore, and slashed that dense crowd with dreadful blows of his broadsword, hurling men to the floor with his reeking blade, as a tempest hurls limbs and trees to the earth. And again came a moment of ghastly terror, in which it seemed that the awful Mazovian would cut down and slay every one, and that they, like a pack of howling dogs, could not finish the maddened wild boar unless men with muskets assisted them; and in such degree were those armed Germans inferior in strength and rage to Yurand that a battle with him was simply death and destruction.

"Scatter! Surround him! Strike from behind!" cried old Siegfried.

So they scattered through the hall like a flock of starlings in a field when a crooked-beaked falcon swoops down from the sky on them; but those men could not surround him, for in his rage of battle, instead of seeking a place from which to defend himself, he hunted them around the walls, and the man whom he reached died as by a lightning stroke. Humiliation, despair, deceived hope turned into the single desire for blood seemed to intensify his savage strength tenfold. That sword, for which the strongest warriors of the Order needed both hands, he wielded like a feather with one. He was not seeking freedom or victory, he was not seeking to save his life; he was seeking vengeance; and like a conflagration, or like a river which has swept away obstructions and is destroying blindly everything that stands before its current, he, the awful, the blinded destroyer, rends, smashes, tramples, murders, extinguishes.

They could not strike him from behind, for they could not overtake him; besides, common warriors feared to approach the man, even from behind, knowing that if he turned no human power could save them. Others were seized by perfect terror at the thought that no unaided mortal could have made such slaughter, and that they had to do with one to whom superhuman power gives assistance. But Siegfried and Rotgier rushed to a gallery which projected above the great windows of the hall, and called on others to follow and save themselves. They did so in haste, so that men crowded one another on the narrow staircase, wishing to be there at the earliest, and thence strike the giant with whom every hand-to-hand struggle had proved impossible. Finally the last man slammed the door leading to the gallery, and Yurand was alone on the ground floor.