The Coming of the Horseclans

1

The farmers were big men. They outnumbered the small contingent of nomad raiders by more than two-to-one and they fought with desperation, but it was the desperation of hopelessness and this counted against them. Also against them were the facts that their opponents had been born in the saddle and had cut their teeth on their sabers and axes. Their cuirasses of boiled leather turned aside the agriculturists’ hastily snatched weapons. Besides, most of the farmers were drunk.

The arrow-volley which preceded the first charge had dropped more than a dozen of the olive-skinned dancers. Most of the remainder fell, as had the ripe grain whose harvest they had been celebrating, beneath the keen edges of the riders’ steel or the churning hoofs and ravening teeth of their mounts.

Cut off and alone, a flashily dressed, beefy man swung a poleax with such force that it severed the foreleg of a passing horse. But he dropped his well-used weapon and staggered back, clutching at the coils of his intestines which spilled through the abdominal slash dealt him by the crippled horse’s wiry, towheaded rider. Another second found the nomad kneeling by his victim, choking on his own blood, an arrow transfixing his throat.

As Milo Morai jerked his saber free from the body of his latest opponent, a hunting arrow caromed off the side of his spiked helmet. Glancing in the direction whence the shaft had come, he saw the archer shoot the tow-headed man. He urged his palomino stallion, Steeltooth, toward the gangling teen-ager, who loosed one more shaft at Milo, dropped his longbow, and turned to run. Milo leaned from his saddlelike kak and, with a single slash of his heavy saber, sent the boy’s wide-eyed head spinning from his body. The headless trunk, spouting twin cataracts of blood, ran several more yards before it fell, twitching and jerking, to the firelit dust of the village square.

After the riders’ third sweep across the village, nearly all the Dirtmen lay dead or dying in the bloody, hoof-churned mud of the dancing ground. Only one point of resistance remained: A knot of six or eight fanners, plus two men whose garb, armor, and fighting skill attested them professional soldiers, had formed a semi-circle, their backs to the front wall of the headman’s house. They were holding their own; in the space before them lay the bodies of four nomads and one horse.

The riders were drawing up to charge yet again, but Milo pulled a shinbone whistle from within his cuirass and blew the signal to halt, then nudged Steeltooth over to the bunched raiders.

“Arrows,” he said shortly. “No honor to be gained by allowing scum like this to send more of you to Wind’s Home. Drop all but the money-fighters.”

Grinning, three of the horsemen uncased their short hornbows. When the last of the farmers had been felled, Milo toed Steeltooth to a point midway between his riders and the two armored soldiers, each armed with a three-foot broadsword and a long, wide-bladed dirk.

“Meelahteh Ehleeneekos?” Milo inquired. “Or can you speak Merikan?”

The bigger of the two, a man a couple of inches taller than Milo, couched his answer in a drawled, very slurred dialect of the second tongue. “I talk ’em both, you murderin’ son of a bitch, you!”

Milo’s white teeth flashed startlingly against the background of his weathered face as he smiled his approval of the defiant words.

“You’re a brave man, soldier. Are you free-fighters? If so, I’ve always employment for men with guts.”

Raising his head, snorting his scorn, the big man stated, “Yes, I’m a free-fighter, but I’d fight for the Witch King - first. Besides, we are sworn bodyguards to the Lady Mara of Pohtahmohs.”

“So be it,” Milo declared, turning the stalh’on and riding back to his nomads. As he approached, two of the archers raised their bows, but he waved them down. He mind-spoke Steeltooth and the big horse sank onto his muscular haunches. Milo stepped from his mount and unslung his iron-rimmed shield, then he stalked toward the soldiers.

When he was closer, he waved his blood-smeared saber at the arrow-quilled bodies of the farmers, saying, “They were treacherous Dirtmen and deserved no better than they received. You two, I’ll grant a soldier’s death. Singly or both together against me, you choose.”

Side by side, the two swordsmen attacked. While fending off the larger with his shield, Milo first feinted at the smaller’s exposed face, then brought the back edge of bis saber up into the unarmored crotch, recovering with a vicious drawcut. The smaller man let go both sword and dirk and dropped, screaming and clutching at his mutilated masculinity.

The larger man was an excellent swordsman, but Milo had had superiority when the soldier’s grandfather’s grandfather’s great-grandfather had been but a whining babe. After a brief flurry of stroke and counterstroke, he found an opening and rammed the center spike of his shield through the mercenary’s eye into his brain. Then a quick signal brought a mercy-arrow to end the sufferings of the smaller man.

After they had fired the emptied stables, Milo galloped ahead of the procession of captured animals—horses, mules, and a huge, twenty-five-band Northorse gelding. House by house, the larger element of the raiding party had rooted out the surviving villagers and herded them into the body-littered, blood-splotched square. As he approached, Milo could hear the women keening over their dead.

The woman caught Milo’s eye the moment he reined in beside the men who were guarding the huddle of prisoners. Although obviously of the same race as the people around her, she constituted a distillation of their good physical qualities, unpolluted by any of the bad. Her features were fine-boned and her light-olive skin, flawless. Her eyes were black and slightly almond-shaped; black, too, was her long, thick hair, so black that the flaring torches gave it bluish tints. Her hands were narrow and long-fingered, her body slim-hipped and graceful. She was quite small for an adult woman of her race, standing but a bare finger over fifteen hands, but the proud upthrusting of her well-formed breasts made it clear that she was no child.

Holding Steeltooth’s head high (the war horse would bite any human he could get his teeth to unless that human looked and smelled like a nomad), Milo rode over to the small, dark woman. Lounging in his kak, he studied her for a long moment. She met his gaze, no fear in her eyes or her bearing, only hate and ill-suppressed anger.

Suddenly Milo grinned, commenting in Old Merikan, “Mad as hops, aren’t you, you little vixen? You’d be highly dangerous to bed, probably claw my eyes out, if you couldn’t lay hand to a knife. But for all of it, I think you’ll be worth the effort.”

He mindspoke the horse and, once more, the golden animal sank onto his haunches. Standing astride the glossy steed, Milo curtly beckoned her. “Ehlahteh thoh!” he commanded, then repeated himself in Old Merikan, “Come here, woman!”

By way of answer, she quickly stooped, her right hand going to the top of one of her felt traveling boots. When she straightened, the torchlight glinted on the steel blade of a small dagger. Still unspeaking, she launched herself directly at Milo. But she had reckoned without Steeltooth. As she came within range, the killer’s big, yellow teeth clacked, missing her by but half a fingerbreadth. Shocked, she swerved, planted her foot in a slimy puddle of congealing blood. The foot shot from under her, and she fell heavily … directly under the head of the palomino stallion!

Steeltooth felt well served. His head darted down with the speed of a stooping falcon and it required all of Milo’s strength to halt that deadly lunge.

In falling, the little woman had lost her knife. She lay, supported on hip and elbow, immediately in front of Steeltooth’s huge, chisellike incisors. Her wide eyes had become even wider. She, who had shown no fear of Milo or the other nomads, was quite obviously terrified of the blood-hungry horse.

Milo spoke in a low, calm voice. “Do not attempt to rise, woman, that would put you in range of him, despite the reins. It’s only my strength against his, for he has no bit. Do exactly as I say and you have a chance. If you understand me, blink three tunes, rapidly.”

Her long, sooty lashes flicked once, twice, thrice, and he went on, “Now roll onto your belly, very slowly … Good. Keep your head and your rump down, use your arms to drag yourself to me. If you try to go the other way, he’ll think you’re fleeing from him, and I’ll not be able to hold him; so come here, but do it slowly, very slowly.”

She followed his instructions and, at length, lay at his right, her fine clothing filthy with dust and grime and well smeared with the blood through which she had had to crawl. Wordlessly, she obeyed his gesture and, when she was mounted before him, he eased up on the reins and signaled the horse to rise. Once erect, the palomino looked about for the small two-leg he had almost had, but it was nowhere to be seen, although its scent was still present. He shook his head and stamped, snorting his disgust.

Milo had one of his raiders bind the captive and place her in the cargo-pannier of the Northorse, while he saw to the systematic looting of the village. Custom required that a slave be returned for each man killed or seriously wounded, so he selected seven of the strongest-looking girls, then two more for Clan Kahrtr. When these had been bound and lashed to kak or packsaddle, when the Northorse and mules had been loaded with loot and the weapons and armor of the dead, when the corpses of the slain kindred had been placed beside Djimi Kahrtr’s mutilated body, Milo allowed shifts of raiders to “test” the remaining Dirtwomen and thus decide which of them they wished to take with them.

While the shrill pleas and sobbing screams of outrage and pain attested to the strenuous activity of the first shift, Milo and the others herded the laden animals to the outskirts of the village. When the third shift had chosen and its well-raped choices were tied across packsaddle or crupper, the remaining villagers—old men, children, and old or ugly or crippled women—were chased far into the stubbled fields. Then, beginning with the headman’s house where lay their late comrades and the two dead soldiers, they fired every structure in the village—sparing not even the privies.

The cross was the only thing of wood left standing, that same cross on which they had found the body of their scout. Onto the bloodstreaked timbers, they bound the cadaver of the village headman. Standing on his kak, Milo gripped a handful of the stripped body’s hair and held its head erect. One of the archers then drove an arrow through eye and brain and skull, pinning the head to the upright.

Milo hung a weatherproof case on the jutting arrow. It contained a roll of parchment on which he had printed a message in three languages—Ehleeneekos, Horseclan Mer-ikan, and the trade language, Old Merikan: This Dirtman and his pack took a man of the Kahrtr Clan by guile and murdered him by torture. Dirtman, behold and be warned! The cost of the life of one Horseclansman is a village and every man in it! By the hand of Milo Morai, War Chief of the Tribe-that-will-return-to-the-Sacred-Sea.