by Robert Adams
Depending upon many factors of terrain and weather and happenstance, the van—those who immediately followed the great cats—rode anywhere from a half to a full mile behind. These were young men and women armed with bows or darts, riatas or bolas or slings, spears or lances strung across their backs, their belts all abristle with the hilts of sheathed knives, a few of them bearing hooded hawks on their padded arms. Although they all joked and joshed in a lighthearted manner, their purposes were deadly grim.
Any frontal attack of the column would hit them first, which was why they all rode in at least partial armor, helmets on their heads and with sabers and targes hung from the horse housings, while axes depended from saddle pommels. But their main purpose was to down any game across which they chanced, for if such offerings were not enough to fill the stewpots of the clans this night, cattle or goats or sheep might have to be slaughtered, and kine were wealth, something that both clans held little enough of, as it was.
But the hunting, thank Sun and Wind, was good, so far, this day.
Younger boys and girls shuttled back and forth between the line of hunters and the main column leading packhorses or pack mules laden with bloody carcasses, their destinations being some open carts, wherein slaves’ flashing knives cleaned and flayed and dressed those carcasses, carefully saving every scrap and drop of blood, working always in a thick, metallic-hued, droning cloud of flies. The carts each were trailed closely by a pack of puppies and younger dogs, which licked at any spilled blood and frequently fought briefly over anything dropped through mischance by the laboring slaves.
Mature dogs, well trained and generally obedient, accompanied the arc of hunters or aided the drovers in handling the herds of cattle, sheep and goats. The horses needed no such canine or human urgings. Most of them were telepathic to at least some degree, and the laggards quickly responded to a sharp nip of the teeth of the king stallion or one of his subordinates. Prairiecat kittens were borne in a cage cart, driven by a human slave of the cat septs.
Behind the arc of hunters, but always within sight of them, rode the blooded warriors of both clans. These men all rode in full armor—most of this being of hardened leather; metal was so scarce and so hideously expensive that it was saved for the fashioning of weapons and tools only, and among the poorer clans even the heads of arrows were often of knapped stone, fire-hardened bone or sharpened horn to conserve metal supplies—their short, recurved, horsemen’s bows ail strung but cased, weapons and targes slung within quick, easy reach, minds open to receive any communication from the cats or the hunters ahead of them, the flankers to either side or the rearguard who trailed a half-mile behind the tail of the column.
At variable distances behind the warriors came the wagons and carts, wagons drawn by three or four span of brawny oxen, carts by oxen or mules or horses, many of them trailing on tethers milk cows and nanny goats. The herd of sheep and goats were driven on the flanks and fairly close to the carts and wagons, sometimes even among the fringes of them. But the cattle were kept back as much as possible, at least a half-mile back, usually. Where the drovers of the smaller herd animals went mostly afoot, those driving the cattle were all mounted not on hunting horses or warhorses, but on quick-footed, fast, and highly intelligent horses long accustomed to dealing with the big, dangerous, stupid and ever-unpredictable cattle; over the years, more Horseclansmen and Horseclanswomen, boys, girls, horses, dogs and slaves had been killed or injured by cattle than by any other single cause—war, accident, hunting, anything.
Dangerous or not, however, the herds were very necessary to the nomadic clans, for no meaningful number of folk could live well or for long through hunting and wild-plant gathering alone. Cattle and sheep and goats were necessary for more than simply their milk and meat. The vast majority of the leather goods of the Horseclans was made of cowhide, the hair of the cattle made felt, horn became many utensils and armor and backing for hornbows, sinew had hundreds of uses, hooves were rendered into jelly and glue, internal organs became liners for skin water carriers and pouches to carry items such as tobacco and other herbs that must be constantly kept from dampness, bones became tools and weapons, fat was rendered into tallow for the lighting of yurts. And because the possession of them was so necessary, the wealth of a clan had come to be reckoned by the number of cattle in its herds. Sheep and goats were important in their own rights to the continued survival and well-being of their owners, but they still were not afforded the same degrees of importance as were the vile-tempered, stubborn, powerful and incipiently deadly cattle, not among the free-roaming clans of nomads of the south, did they chance to be Kindred or no.
Clans Staiklee and Gahdfree had camped and trekked together for long years, and generations of intermarriage had rendered the two practically a single clan, a clan with two chiefs. Big Djahn Staiklee and Djim-Booee Gahdfree complemented each other, Staiklee being a superlative war chief and Gahdfree being equally good at planning the pursuits of peace, diplomatic dealings with those too strong or of too close a degree of Kindred to fight overtly or raid covertly and at bargaining with plains traders.
Staiklee and his father before him had the well-earned reputation of being extremely warlike; within two bare generations they and their clansmen had managed to wipe out or drive off most of the non-Kindred nomads and settlements of Dirtmen from end to end of their accustomed range, leaving only Clans Gahdfree, Ohlsuhn, Morguhn, Reevehrah and a very few other Kindred clans anywhere near. And even these Kindred tried to not stray too close to the stamping grounds of Big Djahn Staiklee for the good and sufficient reason that his nature was incurably acquisitive when it came to cattle and that a good portion of his herd consisted of “previously owned” beasts. The free-roving Horseclans did not engage in the practices of ear-notching or branding their cattle, so theft was a difficult charge to ever prove, and the various chiefs all felt it to be more circumspect to stay out of easy cattle-lifting distance of the otherwise quite amiable Chief Djahn of Staiklee than to risk a bloodfeud over a few steers and heifers and a bull or two.
But despite, and really because of, its wealth in cattle, Clan Staiklee (and, consequently, Clan Gahdfree, as well) was poor in metal. All of the ruins within the range had been long since combed over for metals, and Chief Djahn was most loath to sell or trade cattle for iron. His sire, Sam Hoostuhn Staiklee, had been of equal mind, and therefore most of the metal they did own had been taken in raiding or warring.
Of more recent years, Chief Djahn’s most frequent sparring partners had been the minions of Jorge, El Rey del Norte, northernmost of the five kings of Mexico. Chief Djahn had never met the man, of course, but he figured him to be a leader much like himself, considering the instant response that occurred whenever the Staiklees and Gahdfrees rode down into his kingdom after cattle, horses, women and loot.
Not that King Jorge’s warriors were all that good at warring; of course, few other clans’ and peoples’ warriors were anywhere nearly as good as those of Clan Staiklee, to Chief Djahn’s way of thinking. But the black-eyed soldados of King Jorge, though usually well armed and mounted, and frequently possessed of a marked degree of individual courage, were mostly poorly led and invariably did the same things over and over through defeat after bloody defeat, at the capable hands of Chief Djahn and his crafty nomad warriors.
In his way, he was honest, and so Chief Djahn admitted to himself that this sudden move to the northeast was unquestionably a good one; for, of late, King Jorge’s soldados had come north in increasing numbers, often not even prompted by a Staiklee-Gahdfree raid. The numbers of soldados available to King Jorge seemed to be infinite, and although the clansmen always managed to finally defeat or outma-neuver their southern opponents, their numbers were relatively small at the outset and their losses in dead and maimed were adding up faster than young men were coming of an age to replace them.
So it was not simply avarice for wealth and metal-hunger that impelled Chief Djahn and his followers at so fast a pace along the route to t
he ancient, unlooted town, although he never would have openly admitted it to any other living person, even Chief Djim-Booee Gahdfree.
Far and far to the south, Don Jorge, El Rey del Norte, breathed a long sigh of relief and a prayer of thanksgiving when a parched and dusty squadron returned intact to inform him that the barbarians who had for so long menaced the more northerly reaches of his lands had at last departed with their herds and wagons and all else that they owned, headed in a direction that they never before had taken and apparently pausing only for night camps in their trek.
Obviously, the costly war of attrition conceived by the royal personage had succeeded. Now the ranchers and farmers could perhaps move safely northward onto the prairies.
By the time it became necessary to begin raising the water from the shrinking creek in buckets, old Mosix’s once-butter-soft hands were become hard and calloused enough to be equal to the tasks required. The old man now lived alone in his home; it was simply too far a walk for the younger sometime-priests to commute between there and the farms upon which they now labored for their sustenance, and so they all dined with the families of their employers and slept in lofts and attics and sheds and stables, leaving Mosix to do for himself, rattling around in the large house adjoining the old Council Chamber and the former library.
The ancient council table and all the chairs had been moved to the ground floor of the armory and the entire contents of the library—shelves, books, tables, everything—to the second floor. The fine, spacious, high-eeilinged chambers thus emptied had almost immediately been filled with bags and baskets of grains—wheat, barley, oats and shelled corn—the beams all festooned with strings of dried squashes, gourds, garlic, peppers, onions and herbs. A brace of young ferrets had been installed to keep out rats and mice, and Mosix had been charged with feeding the beasts.
The old man also was given permission to take limited quantities of whichever grain suited his fancy from the common stores, and one of the farm wives showed him how to quern grain into flour, then make it into dough and bread, but he usually was far too tired to go through so lengthy a process at the end of a day’s work, so he most often merely cracked the grain, then boiled it to porridge along with a bit of his steadily shrinking larder of smoked or dried or salted meats.
Twice each week, the deposed priest could ride his ass to the vicinity of the armory and there be allotted fresh meat, generally wild game—squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, wild pig, venison of various sorts, greasy opossum.
Then, of a day, he rode into the cleared area to see one very large and two smaller bearskins stretched on racks before the armory; the two smaller ones were both black, but the larger was of a striking shade of honey-brown.
As he sliced off a couple of pounds of meat from a ham of the fly-crawling larger carcass—both of the smaller having long since become only bare bones— the stripling in charge of apportioning the biweekly flesh willingly told Mosix of the source of so much rich provender.
“It ‘uz the cap’n. Him and a bunch of the men trailed back a bear what had kilt a nanny goat out to Fraley’s place. Trailed right back into the town, too, she did. They follered and kilt her and both her near-growed cubs. Kilt ‘em right smack dab in the town!” The stripling then stood grinning, obviously expecting an angry denunciation of the captain’s sacrilegious actions.
But he was disappointed. Mosix only accepted his bloody meat, remounted his ass and began the ride back, kept quiet not by self-control but by absolute shock. True, Wahrn Mehrdok had said that he intended to lead hunters into the Sacred Precincts in pursuit of the two different cats and the bear that had been preying upon stock, but in his heart of hearts, Mosix had never really believed that die man would truly do it. No good would come of such terrible sin, he knew, but no one listened to him anymore, so there was nothing that he could do.
In the new council room on the ground floor of the armory, a dozen Guardians sat ranged about the old, old table, their captain at his accustomed place. They were passing around and scrutinizing an alien something found by the party of hunters that had earlier bagged the three bears. The something was a black-shafted arrow, fletched with what appeared to be owl feathers, nocked with antler horn, wound with very fine sinew and shod with a wickedly barbed, razor-edged, needle-pointed head of bright brass. It had been found in a marshy area just north of the place where the bears had been found and slain, half its length buried at a very shallow angle in the peat.
“This ain’t a crossbow bolt,” stated the first sergeant, adding, “But it’s way too short to be a arrer from a straight bow, lest it was a youngun’s bow. And who’d give a youngun arrers with brand-spankin’-new brass heads?”
The captain nodded. “I’ve seen arrows very much like this one a long time ago, way up north, when I was a hired sword for a caravan of eastern traders. Those were shod with iron or steel, but the heads had similar shape and barbing to this one. Those who carried them and the short, very powerful bows that sped them were mercenaries, like me, all come of different clans of a far-flung confederation of nomads and the finest horsemen I’ve ever seen, bar none, not to mention their splendid archery and other warlike skills. If a clan of that stripe has drifted down here, we had best make friends with them, and that quickly, too, for such as they could likely butcher the lot of us before breakfast.”
He raised a horny hand to quell the rising rumble and said, “Now just hold on, all of you. How many of you have ever fought another man to the death? I have and so has the first sergeant, but we two are all, the rest of you are farmers and hunters, nothing more. Most of you are pretty good with your hunting crossbows and prods, a few of you indicate promise of developing into reasonably fair swordsmen, granted time and intensive practice, but none of those two paltry skills would be enough were you faced with men who had virtually cut their teeth on their swords and axes and lances, had learned the tricky art of loosing a bow accurately from the back of a galloping horse before they’d seen twelve winters.
“Gentlemen, I learned a long time ago that if a man is too strong to be fought with any chance of winning, best to make him your friend, and the sooner the better. Besides, we’ve been talking for the last few years about eventually leaving here, becoming nomad herdsmen and hunters ourselves. Who better to teach us all the things we’ll need to know, eh?
“First Sergeant and I are going to ride out tomorrow and see if we can find the camp of these nomads. Sergeant Djahnstuhn will be in command until we return. Questions?”
Chapter VIII
But finding the nomad camp did not prove to be either quick or easy. Because the alien arrow had been found in the northeastern sector of the ruins, Captain Mehrdok led his companion first to the area north and east of the shrinking lake, vainly, not getting back to the armory until well after moonrise.
At around noon of the second day, at a spot well north of the lake, Mehrdok reined up, saying, “They wouldn’t be this far from water, Kahl, so they must be on the west side of the lake, either that or somewhere down along the creek. Let’s turn around and go back home today and search the west bank tomorrow.”
They had ridden along, retracing their path toward the southeast, for some miles, and the shimmer of the lake was once more in sight when Mehrdok spoke again. Quickly, tensely, in a low tone, he cautioned his companion, “Kahl, listen tight! Keep both your hands on your reins and in full view. Whatever you do, do not make any move in the directions of your crossbow, your spear or your knives. There’re riders close behind us, on both sides of us and probably in front of us, as well. Don’t speed up the pace, either.”
First Sergeant Rehnee gulped once, then asked in a half-whisper, “Then what do we do, Wahrn?”
“Nothing except keep riding at a steady clip, Kahl,” was the reply. “This is their barn dance, whoever they are—they’ll call the steps.”
Rehnee could see only a little way into the thick stands of tall grasses through which they were riding and could not imagine how his captain
had been able to see farther, but there could be no mistaking the intensity of Mehrdok’s voice. Somehow, the man had truly sensed danger … deadly danger.
Little Djahn Staiklee and his hunt had once again spent the morning and the early part of the afternoon in the rich hunting and fishing area of the swampy onetime suburbs of the ruined town. On their return to camp, they swung for no particular reason a little to the east of their usual route. It was for that reason that they cut across the clear trail of two shod horses, headed north. Curious and more than a little suspicious of possible designs against the camp on the other side of the lake, Little Djahn had Djim-Bahb Gahdfree, most accomplished tracker of them all, distribute his load of game, to two others, then set off on the trail at a fast pace, while the rest of the party followed more slowly.
However, the hunt had only been at it for some half-hour when Djim-Bahb returned at the gallop to report that two riders, clearly Dirtmen, were tracing the trail down from the north. The hunt had but just come through a stand of ten-foot-tall grasses, and Little Djahn led them all back into that stand, placing them well back from the trail and on either side of it, with orders to stay out of sight of the Dirtmen, but to close up behind them once they were within the grasses, then flank and trail them until they came out into the open area beyond, where the young leader sat his horse with drawn bow and his saber loose in its sheath.
Just beyond the higher, thicker grasses, First Sergeant Kahl Rehnee saw a single rider, his smallish
horse standing side-on, his bow drawn and its metal-shod arrow pointed squarely at Captain Mehrdok’s chest. Spare and a slender build, the horseman wore baggy trousers and shirt of some homespun fabric— the trousers about the hue of unbleached wool, the shirt obviously once dyed a green color but now much faded, the sleeves and much of the torso heavily embroidered in designs depicting animals, weapons, flowers and geometrical designs. Atop his blond head, the rider wore a helmet of boiled leather further armored with strips of horn and antler. His masterfully tooled leather boots were high-heeled and pointed-toed and rose to just below the knee, and to them were laced wide single strips of horn to protect the top of the instep, ankle and shin.
