The Coming of the Horseclans

5

Most of the east-bound cavalry eventually made it to safety, but the west-bound unfortunates rode directly into Chief Bili Esmith and his blood-hungry kindred. A viciously fought, running battle swept back to lap around the western foot of the hill. Mara emerged into it and, before she was aware that a battle was hi progress, she found herself engaged in a horseback saber duel with a big mercenary.

Her saber-skill matched her bow-mastery. Lacking the strength needed for a hacking attack, she had become a point-fighter—a skill entirely absent from the repertoires of many opponents she had faced—and, adroitly parrying, she soon saw an opening and spitted the cavalryman’s hairy throat. As the man plunged off his horse, something crashed against the backplate of her cuirass and hurled her, too, down amid the stamping hoofs. While Mara struggled to rise, a horse thundered past and a blade rang on her helmet. She dropped back, her head filled with a star-shot red-blackness. At the edge of consciousness, she screamed as a horse stepped on her right hand; then, oblivion took her.

As the darkness cleared from her mind and she opened her eyes, she thought that she saw dead Milo’s face swimming before her. Sure that she was hallucinating, she closed her lids again, softly moaning. Then a man’s strong arm was around her shoulders, lifting and supporting them, and she felt the run of a horncup on her lips and her nostrils registered the odor of the raw alcohol. She looked again. The hallucination was still there; then it spoke.

“Drink this, Mara. Do you hear me, woman? Drink it!” Not waiting for compliance, Milo forced open her jaws and poured a measure of the fiery liquid into her mouth. With a gasp she became fully conscious, Milo squatted on his heels beside her, smiling at her reaction to his “restorative.”

Her eyes wide, she just stared for a long moment. “But … but you’re dead! I saw you slain! You… .”

Still smiling, Milo shook his head. “You thought you saw me killed, Mara, but the tip of the dirk only tore my shirt and scratched my side—not deeply at that—and… .”

“No, no!” She shook her head violently. “It … it went into you, to the hilt! There were airbubbles in the blood you bled! Your … your shirt is still blood-wet. You must be dead!”

Instead of replying again, Milo shifted his position and opened his soggy, reddened shirt. While streaks of blood were drying on his smooth, sun-darkened skin, the wound from which they had come was all but closed. Mara’s eyes looked upon it and a tingling, prickling chill coursed through her and she knew. Then, she knew!

But her carefully trained features did not .reveal her knowledge. It was not the time or the place for that. Flexing the fingers of her right hand, she said, “It… it all happened so dreadfully fast, Master, that … And then that stroke I took on my helmet, too. I’m sorry. I had no intention of death-wishing you.”

The full moon had all but set before the victorious nomads started their return to the tribe-camp. Tons of armor and weapons and clothing were lashed to the backs of the hundreds of captured horses, who traveled westward, having been reassured by mindspeak that if they were unhappy with the tribe, they would be quickly freed. They were eastern-bred horses and, having always considered themselves and been treated as beasts of burden, being spoken to as an equal by a two-leg was a fascinating novelty and imbued them with a happy, heady feeling of being where they belonged.

Her many travels had put Mara in occasional contact with Horseclans, but she had never before been in a camp of this size. Round about the sacked town, clustered in clan-groups, were well over a thousand wagon-lodges and tents. South of the encampment, watched over by adolescent cats, grazed many thousands of horses. To the north, the cattle and sheep—neither of which species had the intelligence to realize that the Prairie Cats would not harm them—were guarded by mounted striplings of the various clans, armed with bows and wolf-spears.

Between cattle and camp, half a hundred pubescent boys and girls took turns loosing arrows at a straw-packed manikin, under the one good eye of a white-haired but tough-looking old man. Older boys and girls, afoot and mounted, practiced with saber and ax and spear and javelin, learning or polishing their skills under the direction of old or maimed warriors.

In the camp, itself, warriors and unmarried girls lazed hi the sun, gaming and laughing and talking, caring for their gear or sharpening their weapons, ignoring both the incredible din of camp life and the swarms of flies. Naked children ran screaming among the tents while married women gossiped and slaves bustled about their chores. The arrival of the caravan excited but little notice; returning raiders were too common a sight among these people.

Uphill from the camp, they passed through the charred ruins of the outer town and entered the smashed and sagging gates of the inner town. The cats had deserted them in the camp, loping off to have two-leg Mends remove their uncomfortable armor and fang-spurs. In the courtyard of the citadel, Chief Bill entrusted the bootytrain to the care of one of his sub-chiefs, then he dismounted and needlessly stood at Steeltooth’s head while Milo slipped from his kak—it was but a way of rendering homage to the tribe’s War Chief. He started to precede his superior into the building, but halted when Milo did.

Mara was still mounted and Milo looked up at her. “Mara, you fought for the tribe and have earned your freedom. Come, I wish the chiefs to hear of your valor, so that the honors and booty you have won will be unquestioned among the clans.” Raising his arms, he grasped her slim waist and lifted her down from her mount.

The citadel complex, through which they threaded their way, had been begun shortly after the Great Quake had leveled what had remained of the ancient city (said to have been a temple of learning in the days when gods had walked the earth). Most of the present structure and the town walls had been fashioned of a lovely gray-green stone, cut from an ancient quarry miles away, and transported here to construct the westernmost outpost of the principality known to Ehleenoee as Kehnooryohs Ehlahs and to most other eastern peoples as Vuhdjinyah. In ancient times, the town had been called Charlottesville; to the Ehleenoee, it was Theesispolis; but to the nomads, it was simply the Place-of-Green-Walls.

Green-Walls had been a rich city, a city of commerce with trade routes from the mountains and beyond converging on it. Its garrison had consisted of a squadron of Kahtahphraktoee to ride the frontier and guard and police the road; there hundred spearmen to man the gates and the citadel; three hundred more to perform the function of civil police. In addition, there was the six-hundred-man town levy—every male between the ages of sixteen and sixty had to provide his own equipage and weapons; the quality of the force ran the gamut from fair to worse than useless. When word reached them that an entire tribe of nomads were just the other side of the nearest range of mountains, every man was alerted and a dispatch was posted to the High Lord at Kehnooryohs Atheenahs seventy miles southeast.

The High Lord was young and had ascended to power only five years before, but he knew what to do and, as he was already deep in debt, was pleased at the prospect. At irregular intervals over the course of the centuries that the Ehleenoee had held this land, Horseclans—one or two at the time—had drifted across the mountains and into his domain. They had always been dealt with in the same way since they were an excellent source of horses, cattle, and slaves—the fair-skinned, generally blond or red-haired girls and women and young boys bringing especially high prices from private citizen and brothel-keeper, alike.

High Lord Demetrios had been delighted, an entire tribe of them! Since all slaves were automatically the property of the High Lord, if captured by his troops, he quickly dispatched an army under command of his cousin, Manos, Lord of the West. (After all, being the nominal capital of the Western Lord’s lands, Theesispolis was Manos’ responsibility, though Demetrios privately doubted that the man had visited the primitive little place more than a dozen times in his entire life; and why should he when everything which made life worth the living lie in the city of the High Lord?)

So Lord Manos marched west at the head of some eight thousand men, and High Lord Demetrios sat back and waited for the thousands of slaves whose prices would lift all his financial burdens. “But I’ll not glut the market,” he thought. “I’ll pen them here and only dribble them out a few at the tune. That way, I should be able to have a new boy every day for a long, long while, break the little dears in for the brothel-keepers.” Closing his bloodshot eyes, he sat back and began to fantasize, smacking his thick lips. Already his hairy hands seemed to be gripping the smooth-skinned body of an untried darling of a blond boy, who screamed and struggled, deliriously… . The High Lord shuddered in anticipation.

Lord Manos’ army was light on cavalry, so when he marched past Theesispolis, he dragooned the entire Kahtahphraktoee squadron. Thirty-two of the wealthier citizens, who could afford to maintain chariots and a full panoply, drove out to his column and requested they be allowed a place in his array and a consequent share in the sure rewards of his venture. As all were his theoretical equals—pure Ehleenoee of noble lineage—he graciously consented (though he could not, for the life of him, understand why any civilized man would deliberately seek the all but unbearable discomfort of a war-camp without direct orders). So he marched on west. The Trade Gap was the only feasible route for the large wagons, so Manos camped his army at its eastern mouth and waited, appropriating the Gap-fort for his headquarters and residence and adding its small garrison to his army.