CHAPTER XXI

Godwin the gorilla bethought himself of the four men remaining under the sail. He turned about and saw the fire, which was now licking up fiercely.

"God defend the right!" he gasped. "Here's a rare hazard!"

Two men had succeeded in freeing themselves from the smothering confines of the sail. They came at him warily, side-stepping the flames, their curved Damascus blades at the ready.

"Beast or Satan," shouted one, "prepare to perish!"

"Ho ho," said Godwin throatily in Arabic, "you'll have to back that threat with action, little man!"

The fellow halted, turned a sickly green hue, and buckling at all his joints pitched over in a dead faint.

The other was affected in quite another fashion, and leaped toward Godwin, scimitar flashing.

Godwin yanked out his long sword and batted down the first attack. The Saracen was a swift and elusive fencer. His point darted through Godwin's guard and slashed a long wound down the biceps of his left arm, laying bare the dark flesh for a moment before red gore covered it and trickled out through the fur.

Godwin yelled and swung his weapon in an arc, knocking off the other's helmet and inflicting a nasty gash across his scalp.

The Saracen stabbed straight. Godwin twisted his body sidewise, and the keen blade cut through all but a thread or two of the belt that held his scabbard.

Before the enemy could recover from his lunge, Godwin brought his wounded left arm over and down in a hammer blow. The doubled paw caught the man exactly on the center of his skull, and he fell like an arrow-pierced hare, kicked a time or two, and lay still.

Two foemen remained beneath the sail. One of these had been knocked unconscious and now lay smothering to death. The other, crippled by the falling mast, was slowly dragging his broken body along in search of the open air when the fire burst into crimson bloom about him. He wailed like a tormented soul on a spit, broke his nails on the deck in a mad endeavor to crawl to safety, and at last struck his forehead on the coaming of a hatchway.

Forgetting the rats below, he threw all his waning vitality into a heave that sent the hatch cover up and flat on the deck. Then he pushed himself over the edge and fell, to escape the flames among the ravenous horde of great gray rodents.

* * * * *

In the frightful din of crackling flames, gibbering rats, and lapping sea, Godwin never heard him scream at all.

He stared narrowly around him now, scratching absent-mindedly for an annoying flea in the small of his back, and saw that no one moved on the deck of the plague ship. By good fortune, by the grace of God, and by his own skill and brute force, he had obliterated the crew. Even the men who had fainted had inhaled flame and died. Godwin stood alone on the deck, while beneath him sounded the perpetual vociferant clamor of the rats.

The flames spreading dangerously close to his bare flat feet, he skipped along the bulwarks and up to the poop, which was as yet untouched by fire. Here he watched it eat out across the deck, devouring sail and broken mast and at last portions of the deck itself.

The heat in the hold became unbearable for the rats then, and they began to fight savagely to get at the open hatchway, the sail above which had burnt away. Their bodies piled up beneath its square of smoky light, and the pile grew and grew....

Godwin in his gorilla body stared glumly at the flames. "What a way to die," he growled aloud. "What an end for Godwin, who was once king of all broad England! Look at the damned water; probably a million hogsheads of it within spitting distance. Look at the damned fire. Look at the two of them, and here am I, who can't begin to bring the one to the other until the ship sinks under me! What a finish!"

For the first time in his life he felt total despair. He had saved his home country, aye, but it was not likely that his deed would go down in song and story, for El Sareuk and Ramizail and the others were in all probability dying at this very moment under the swords of Mufaddal's three hundred scum. If only, he thought, one small ballad might be written about this geste!

He stiffened the gorilla's backbone and put such selfish wishes behind him. He _had_ saved England, whether anyone ever heard of it or not. That was worth dying for! That was even, God save the mark, worth Ramizail's death or enslavement as a concubine! Much as he loved the wench, the population of England outweighed her in the end.

If there were but some chance at survival. If only there were a small cockleshell of a boat he could put off in, even the material for a makeshift raft. But there was nothing, nothing but the sea and the sky and the ship in flames, and the raging rats below him.

The sky! What now, if stout old Mihrjan the djinni were to come swooping down out of that clear hot sky!

But no, Godwin must needs relegate Mihrjan to other parts, must forbid him by the Seal to follow them, because of stubborn pride and petty resentment against Ramizail's harmless tricks!

His wound hurt him. He felt the gorilla's body yearning to tend it, to lick it clean and start the healing processes. For a moment he was disgusted at the idea, and then hopeless, for what did it matter if the wound began to heal, when he was doomed to a terrible death by fire or water? But the instincts of his body would not be denied.

With a long sigh, Godwin of England sat down on the rough planks of the poop and began to lick his torn biceps with a rasping tongue.

Simultaneously with his seating himself, the first rat clambered up the pile of torn corpses and launched itself out of the hatchway and onto the deck.