(In the meantime: yelling for her men to come to her and be equipped Mikki at her Gottschalk cabinet, stocked with old and new weapons any of which might safely be used on Madison-the story tomorrow about the intrusive kneeblank, invited as a show of goodwill towards other races, turning nasty and betraying the primitive savagery which meant they must be shut away in Blackbury and Bantustan, dangerous to invite home like lions kept on the back porch hating their chains.)
But for Lyla a kaleidoscope, a sequence of instant frames cut out of time itself, not pictures only but a total set of sensory data-limb-weariness, apprehension marked by heart battering at the ribs to be let out, hun. and repletion, sickness and sobriety, hope and ter. Blink the scarred wet green of a jousting-ground after a fall of rain, the grass slashed to reveal the brown earth underneath, a pavilion gay with long pennants, a dying horse screaming and unbelievable weight dragging down every limb and the world narrowed to a slit across the eyes and there a splintered lance of ashwood and coming down a morningstar, cruel spiked ball on chain on gleefully wielded pole. Blink the chill of snow and awkward encumbering furs hated but essential, the skin side chewed supple by teeth now worn to stubs and one of them aching so much it nearly blinded the right eye, hands respectively clutching a tree-branch club and hanging limp from a tendon-slashing bite gone septic under a plaster of bruised leaves; some menace out there in the whirling whiteness not clearly defined and one should be grateful. Blink under light rain with the awareof painted designs on face and chest, not felt so much as visualized on identically painted companions, veiled hills framing a pass with a rutted track at the bottom and reaching out from this right shoulder here a crude worn tube on a wooden stock bound with rawthongs to halt a crack and cushion the impact of imminent explosion. Blink high vacancy and detachirritability, waiting for time over target in an itchy airtight suit with the world remote, glimpsed at third-hand by lights and dials, vague awareness diligently repressed of a man clothed in flame.
(Meantime: Lyla saying over and over with childish wonder at her own insight, “I met a man with seven brains, I met a man with seven brains!” First to be equipped, furious, the one labeled Pat grabbing blindly at what he found at hand and getting of all things a pike-when they had a customer capable of buying up everything from the expensive ranges the Gottschalks stopped at nothing, especially not at pleading the cause of a weapon which never needed to be re-loaded or re)
The swirling of images ceased and one steadied: a patch of level ground across which was marching with even tread a spear-carrying giant.
(Alerted by the fearful Hughie strangers from other rooms of the apt crowded into the doorway-there was no door-some giddy with sykes, some drunk, some just curious and greedy for sensation.)
The muscle-tensions of a calm body. The careful rollin inexhaustible time of a long strip of cloth. Overconfusingly, the sensation of a horse between the knees and the bellowing of cattle in stampede. Memory signaled and Lyla realized: sling. The Balearic slingers boasted of being able to turn a running bull by bouncing a stone off one or other horn!
So what was that doing tangled up with the image of. of Goliath?
Fsst. The stone and its target. Crack at the side of the jaw with such force the head leapt back and in a sad yawn descended along with its body to the floor.
(And now a Blazer, the weapon recommended over Dan’s warm corpse, with its wide fanned beam making it almost impossible to miss under a twenty-meter range.)
Blink so fast she could not follow, like riffling cards and trying to inspect the pictures of the kings, an arquepropped on its forked stand and the stink of the slowmatch, chest down and hands clawed in wet ground waiting for the eardrum-shattering slam of a grenade, cool waiting at the handles of a Vickers gun for the foolmarching lines of enemy to leave their trenches and be harvested by the scythe of death, cautious slow-motion maneuvering under water to stick a fatal meson a hull looming storm-cloud dark between here and the sun, the tweak on the plume of a cocked hat which signified it had been shortened by a musket-ball, the sun-gleam on the spokes of a chariot-wheel and the mane of the spirited horse drawing the chariot, three red drops from the tip of a barbed arrow cut loose by a surgeon keen edge hot fire musical twang pressure of fingertip on plastic stud agony of mending bone world fading under mask of blood.