The Horse Barbarians tds-3

by Harry Harrison

  There was no need to call Temuchin. He had been awakened by the shout and the sound of impact. He turned away after a single glance at the bloody, deformed corpse of the beast.

  “Tie four moropes to the harness. I want it dragged away from here, along with that rope.” While his lieutenants jumped to obey him, he turned to Jason. “This is why I sent a man first, then a inorope. Two of the men will have to ride double.. The stoats wanied me that the rope broke after use, and that there was no possible way to tell when this would be. It usually breaks under a heavy load.”

  “But has been known to snap when letting a man down. I can see why you went first. You’d make a good gambler, warlord,” Jason said.

  “I am a good gambler,” Temuchin told him calmly, running a scrap of oiled leather over his rusting sword. “There is just one rope in reserve, so I left orders to halt the drop if this one should break. A new rope will be in place by the time we return and a guard will be lowered and waiting for us. Now, we ride.”

  10

  “Is it permitted to ask where we are going?” Jason said as the war party moved slowly down the grassy hillside. They were spread out in a wide crescent with Temuchin and Jason at the center, with the inoropes dragging the carcass of their fellow close by.

  “No,” Temuchin said, which pretty well took care of that.

  It was a smooth descent, as though the plains below were rising up to meet the escarpment, now invisible in the rain behind them. Grass and small shrubs covered the hill, cut through by streams and freshets. As they went lower, these joined to form good-sized brooks. The moropes splashed through them, snorting at the presence of such prodigious amounts of water. And the temperature rose. Jason and the others opened the ties that sealed their clothing, and he was happy to tilt his helm back so the fine drizzle fell onto his overheated face. He wiped away the layer of grease that had covered his skin and began to think about the possibilities of bathing again.

  The hill ended suddenly in a ragged cliff above a foam-flecked river. Temuchin ordered the corpse of the fallen animal and the festoons of rope dragged forward to the brink, where a squad of soldiers heaved and tipped it over the edge. It hit the water with a showering splash and, with a last, almost flippant wave of one claw-studded paw, it was whirled away and vanished from sight. Without hesitation Temuchin turned their course southwest along the river’s bank. It was obvious that he had been forewarned of this obstacle, and the march continued at its kilometer-eating pace.

  By late afternoon the rain had stopped and the character of the country had completely changed. Patches of brush and wood dotted the plain and, not far ahead, an extensive forest was visible under the lowering sky. As soon as Temuchin saw it, he halted the march.

  “Sleep,” he ordered. “We move again at nightfall.”

  Jason did not have to be ordered twice. He was off his mount while the others were still stopping; he curled up on the grass and closed his eyes. The morope’s reins were tied about his ankle. After the skullbanging, the grazing, drinking and galloping, the creature was happy to rest, too. It stretched full length on the ground, its chin extended in the rich grass, from which it pulled a clump to hold in its mouth while it slept.

  The sky was dark, but to Jason it felt as though he had just closed his eyes when the steel fingers sank into his leg and shook him awake.

  “We ride,” Ahankk said. Jason sat up, his stiff muscles creaking with the effort, and rubbed the granules of sleep from his eyes. He had washed out the dregs of achadh from his drinking skin earlier in the day and filled it with fresh stream water. He drank his fill and then sprayed a goodly quantity over his face and head. There was no water shortage in this land.

  They rode out in a single file, Temuchin leading and Jason one but last from the rear. Ahankk rode as rearguard, and it was obvious from his hot gaze and ready sword that Jason was what he was guarding. The exploring party was now a war party and the nomads needed no aid and expected only interference from a wandering jongleur. He was safe in the rear, where he could not cause any trouble. If he did, he would be killed instantly. Jason rode quietly, trying to generate an aura of innocent compliance with the set of his shoulders.

  There was no sound, even when they entered the woods. The padded feet of each morope fell in easy rhythm in the tracks of the preceding beast. Leather did not creak and metal did not rattle. They were spectral forms moving through rain-sodden silence. The trees opened up and Jason was aware that they had entered a clearing. A dim light was visible in the near distance and, by glancing out of the corners of his eyes at it, Jason could make out the dark form of a building.

  Still silent, the soldiers had made a smooth right turn and were moving on the building in a single line. They were no more than a few meters from the structure when a rectangle of light suddenly appeared as a door was opened. A man, silhouetted sharply against the light, stood in the opening.

  “Save him, kill the rest!” Temuchin shouted, and the attackers leaped forward before the words were out of his mouth.

  Chance put Jason near the man in the open doorway, yet everyone else seemed to get there first. The man leaped back with a hoarse cry, trying to close the door, but three men hit it at once, driving it open and sending him back. All three of them remained flat on the floor where they had fallen, and Jason, who had just slid from his tnorope’s back, saw why. Five more of the men, two kneeling and three standing, had stopped at the open doorway with drawn bows. Two, three times they fired and the air hissed and thrummed from their bowstrings and the arrows’ flight. Jason reached them as they stopped the firing and charged into the building. He was right behind them, but the fight was over.

  The bamlike room, lit by a single spluttering candle, was filled to overflowing with death. Toppled tables and chairs made a ragged jumble into which were mixed the dead and dying. A gray-haired man with an arrow in his chest moaned and stirred; a soldier bent over and severed his throat with a chop of his ax. There were crashes as the building was broken into from the rear by the rest of the nomads, who had surrounded it. Escape was impossible.

  One man was still alive, still fighting, the man who had stood in the doorway. He was tall and shock-headed, dressed in rough homespun, and he laid about him with an immense quarterstaff. It would have been simple enough to kill him, an arrow would have done it, but the nomads wanted to capture him and had never encountered this simple weapon before. One already sat on the floor, clutching his leg, and a second was disarmed even as Jason watched, his sword clanging into a corner. The lowlander had his back to the wall and was unapproachable from the front.

  Jason could do something about this. He looked around swiftly and saw a rack of simple farm implements against the wall. One of these was a long-handled shovel that looked as if it would do. He grabbed it in both hands and banged the center down hard against his knee. It bent but did not break. Well, seasoned wood.

  “I’ll take him!” Jason shouted, running to the fight. He was an instaul late because the quarterstaff landed square on the swordsman’s arm, snapping the bones and sending the man’s weapon flying. Jason took his place and swung the shovel at the lowlander’s ankles.

  The man quickly spun the end of his staff down to counter the blow, and when the weapons crashed together, Jason used the force of impact to reverse his direction of motion, bringing the handle end of the shovel around toward the lowlander’s neck. The man parried this blow in time as well, but in doing so he had to step aside, away from the wall, and this was all that was needed.

  Ahankk, who had come in with Jason, swung the flat of his ax against the man’s skull and he dropped, unconscious, to the floor. Jason threw away the shovel and picked up the fallen quarterstaff. It was a good two meters long, made of tough and flexible wood bound about with iron rings.

  “What is that?” Temuchin asked. He had watched the end of the brief battle.

  “A quarterstaff. A simple but effective weapon.”

  “And you know how to use it? You
told me you knew nothing about the lowlands.” His face was expressionless as he talked, but there was a glow like an inner Fire in his eyes. Jason realized that he had better make the explanation good or he would join the rest of the corpses.

  “I still know nothing about the lowlands. But I learned to handle this weapon when I was a child. Everyone in my… tribe uses them.” He did not bother to add that the tribe he was talking about was not the Pyrrans, but the agrarian community on Porgorstorsaand, far across the galaxy, where he had grown up. With rigid class and social distinctions, the only real weapons were borne by the soldiers and the aristocracy. But you can’t deny a man a stick when he lives in a forest, so quarterstaffs were in common use, and at one time Jason had been proficient in the use of this uncomplicated yet decisive weapon.

  Temuchin turned away, satisfied for the moment, while Jason spun the staff experimentally. It was nicely weighted.

  The nomads were efficiently looting the building, which appeared to be a farm of some kind. The livestock were kept under the same roof and all of the animals had been butchered when the soldiers had broken in. When Temuchin said kill, he meant kill. Jason looked at the carnage but would permit himself no change of expression, even when one of the men, looking for booty, turned over a wooden chest. There was a baby behind it, perhaps thrust there at the last minute by one of the women now dead upon the floor, and the soldier skewered it unemotionally with a quick stab of his sword.

  “Bind that one and bring him,” Temuchin ordered, brushing the dirt from a piece of cooked meat that had been knocked to the floor in the attack, then taking a bite from it.

  Swift, tight turns of leather secured his wrists behind his back; then the prisoner was propped against the wall. When three buckets of water dashed into his face had failed to bring him around, Temuchin heated the tip of his dagger blade in a burning candle and pressed it into the soft flesh of the man’s arm. He moaned and triecL to pull away, then opened his eyes, which swam blearily with the aftereffects of the blow.

  “Do you speak the in-between tongue?” Temuchin asked. When the man answered something incomprehensible, the warlord struck him, carefully, on the purple and enflamed wound made by the earlier blow. The farmer screamed and tried to get away, but still answered in the same unknown language.

  “The fool cannot speak,” Temuchin said.

  “Let me,” one of his officers said, stepping forward. “What he talks is not unlike the tongue of the hill-serpent clan in the far east near the sea.”

  Communication was established. With laborious rephrasings and repeatings, the message was communicated to the farmer that he would be killed if he did not help them. No promises were made for what would happen if he did, but the lowlander was not in the best of bargaining positions. He quickly agreed.

  “Tell him we wish to go to the place of the soldiers,” Temuchin said, and their prisoner bobbed his head in quick agreement. Understandable. A peasant in a primitive economy has little love for the taxcollecting, oppressing soldiers. He babbled in his hurry to convey information. The translator interpreted his words.

  “He says that there are many soldiers there, two hands, perhaps five hands of them. They are armed and the place is strong. They have something else, some kind of weapons, but I cannot make out what the creature is talking about.”

  “Five hands of men,” Temuchin said, smiling and looking out of the corners of his eyes. “I am frightened.”

  The nomads nearby hooted with laughter and struck each other on the back, then hurried to tell the others. Jason did not think it a great witticism, but he could find no fault with the men’s morale.

  A sudden silence passed over them as two of the soldiers slowly approached, supporting and half dragging one of their comrades. The man hopped on one leg, fighting to keep the other foot clear of the ground, and when he raised his pain-twisted face to Temuchin, Jason recognized him as the one injured in the battle with the quarterstaffwielding peasant.

  “What has happened?” Temuchin asked, all traces of laughter gone from his voice.

  “My leg…” the man, a minor chieftain, answered hoarsely.

  “Let me see,” the warlord ordered, and the soldier’s boot was quickly cut open.

  The man’s knee had been shattered brutally, the kneecap fractured so badly that pieces of white bone had penetrated the skin. Slow trickles of blood seeped from the wound. The soldier must be suffering incredible pain, yet he made no outcry. Jason knew that it would take skilled surgery and bone replacement to enable the man to walk again, and wondered what his fate would be on this barbarian world. He found out quickly.

  “You cannot walk, you cannot ride, you cannot be a soldier,” Ternuchin said.

  “I know that,” the man said, straightening and throwing off the hands of the men who helped him. “But if I am to die, I wish to die in combat and be buried with my thumbs. I cannot hold a sword to fight the demons in the underworld if I have no thumbs.”

  “That is the way it will be,” Temuchin said, drawing his sword. “You have been a good soldier and a good friend and I wish you success in your battles to come. I will fight you myself for it is an honor to be sent below by a warlord.”

  The battle was no ritual, and the wounded man did well despite his injured leg. But Temuchin fought so that the other had to turn toward his wounded side, but he could not, so a quick thrust caught him under the ribs and he died.

  “There was another wounded man,” Temuchin said, still holding his bloody sword. The soldier with the broken arm stepped forward, the arm in a sling.

  “The arm will get better,” he said. “The skin did not break. I can fight and ride, though I cannot shoot a bow.”

  Temuchin hesitated a moment before he answered. ‘We need every man that we have. Do those things and you will return with us to the camp. We will ride as soon as this man is buried.” He turned to Jason.

  “Ride in front with me,” he ordered, “and do not make any stupid noise.” He apparently did not think much of Jason’s soldiering ability, and Jason did not feel like correcting him. “This place of the soldiers is what we are looking for. The stoat clan has raided this country in the past, but with no more than two or three men at a time as to send more moropes down is dangerous. They avoid the soldiers and attack these farms. But they have fought the soldiers and it is from them that I learned of the gunpowder. They killed one soldier and took his gunpowder, but when I put fire to it, it merely burned. Yet the stoats swear that it blew up, and others have said the same and I do not doubt them. We will capture the gunpowder and you will make it blow up.”

  “Take me to it,” Jason said, “and I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  They blundered through the forest until well after midnight before their prisoner tearfully admitted that he had lost his way in the darkness. Temuchin beat him until he’howled with pain then, reluctantly, ordered the men to rest until morning. The rain had begun again and they sought what comfort they could find under the dripping trees.

  Jason had a bad taste in his mouth. It wasn’t the dung-cooked food this time or the filthy acha4lz, but the massacre at the farm. Get close to the trees and you don’t see the forest. He had been living with the nomads, living like a nomad, and had become part of their culture. They were interesting people and, since moving to Temuchin’s camp, he had found them a warm, if not exactly the galaxy’s most humorous, people, and at least it was possible to get along with them. They were honest in their own way and respected their own code of laws. They were also cold-blooded murderers and killers. It did not matter that they killed according to their own sets of values. This did not change the situation. Jason could still see the sword thrusting into the infant and he moved uncomfortably on the sodden leaves.

  He had been among the trees and forgotten the forest. He had forgotten that these people had slaughtered the first mining expedition and would relish nothing better than doing the same to any other offwonders that they met. He was a spy in their midst a
nd he was working for their complete downfall.

  That was more like it. He could live with himself as long as it was constantly clear that he was just playing a role, not enjoying himself, and that all this masquerading had some purpose. He had to wreck the social structure of these nomads and see to it that the Pyrrans opened their mines in safety.

  Alone in the wet night, chilled and depressed, it looked like a very dim possibility. The hell with that. He twisted and attempted to get comfortable and go to sleep but the images of the massacre kept interfering.

  In your own way, Temuchin, you are a great man, he thought. But I am going to have to destroy you. The rain fell remorselessly.

  At first light they moved out again, a silent column through the fogshrouded forest. The captive peasant chattered his teeth in fear until he recognized a clearing and a path. Smiling and happy now, he showed them the correct way. A wad of his clothing was stuffed into his mouth so that he could not give any alarm.

  A crackling of broken twigs sounded ahead and there was the sound of voices.

  The column stopped with instant silence and a sword was pressed against the prisoner’s neck. Nothing moved. The voices ahead grew louder and two men came around a turning of the trail. They walked two, three paces before they were aware of the motionless, silent forms so close to them in the fog. Before they could act, a half dozen arrows had snuffed out their lives.

  “What are those stick things they carry?” Temuchin said to Jason.

  Jason slid to the ground and turned the nearest corpse over with his boot. The man wore a lightweight steel breastplate and a steel helm; other than that, he was unarmored, dressed in coarse cloth and leather. He had a short sword in his belt and still clutched in his hand what could only have been a primitive musket.