ing for the days to be. And
for the Romans, they had had no mercy, and now looked for none: and they
remembered their dealings with the Goths, and saw before them, as it
were, once more, yea, as in a picture, their slayings and quellings, and
lashings, and cold mockings which they had dealt out to the conquered
foemen without mercy, and now they longed sore for the quiet of the dark,
when their hard lives should be over, and all these deeds forgotten, and
they and their bitter foes should be at rest for ever.

Most valiantly they fought; but the fury of their despair could not deal
with the fearless hope of the Goths, and as rank after rank of them took
the place of those who were hewn down by Thiodolf and the Kindred, they
fell in their turn, and slowly the Goths cleared a space within the
gates, and then began to spread along the wall within, and grew thicker
and thicker. Nor did they fight only at the gates; but made them bridges
of those tree-trunks, and fell to swarming over the rampart, till they
had cleared it of the bowmen and slingers, and then they leaped down and
fell upon the flanks of the Romans; and the host of the dead grew, and
the host of the living lessened.

Moreover the stay-at-homes round about the Speech-Hill, and that band of
the warriors of Up-mark who were with them, beheld the Great Roof and saw
the smoke come gushing out of the windows, and at last saw the red flames
creep out amidst it and waver round the window jambs like little banners
of scarlet cloth. Then they could no longer refrain themselves, but ran
down from the Speech-Hill and the slope about it with great and fierce
cries, and clomb the wall where it was unmanned, helping each other with
hand and back, both stark warriors, and old men and lads and women: and
thus they gat them into the garth and fell upon the lessening band of the
Romans, who now began to give way hither and thither about the garth, as
they best might.

Thus it befell at the West-gate, but at the other gates it was no worser,
for there was no diversity of valour between the Houses; nay, whereas the
more part and the best part of the Romans faced the onset of Thiodolf,
which seemed to them the main onset, they were somewhat easier to deal
with elsewhere than at the West gate; and at the East gate was the place
first won, so that Valtyr and his folk were the first to clear a space
within the gate, and to tell the tale shortly (for can this that and the
other sw