“Maggur,” I whispered.
“Nearly dawn,” he said. “Darak’s men will be riding soon, to the River Road.”
He didn’t seem perturbed by my nakedness. He held out a piece of shimmery stuff-green and purple and red.
“I came earlier,” he said, “after he went away.” He grinned at the torn shirt. “I got a new one-off a woman, an Imma like you.”
Darak had not come for me. Had he expected me to recall on my own, or had he wanted to leave me behind at last? I dressed, and Maggur dismantled the tent. Outside, a little way off, Giltt and Kel were waiting with ponies and my little black horse, all saddlebags packed and ready. They had arranged I should go to Darak with my own state it seemed.
I rode ahead, Maggur a pace behind me, the other two paired behind him.
I heard other harness jinking soon. A clearing, faintly greening in the first hint of day, spangled with dew. A few heads turned around to look at us.
“Darak’s woman and her men,” they said.
Maggur grinned.
Darak looked up from what he was doing, and nodded to me. That was all. A man came and handed me a long-knife, which I stuck through my belt. The other horses were being
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stripped of their bells and jingling medallions. Kel saw to ours, and Maggur put them away in one of the saddle pouches.
I could smell the dawn.
Darak was on his pony. He held up one arm, and the silence deepened.
“Now listen. We’ll reach the ford at noon. The caravan will go by anything from an hour to three hours later, depending on the time they’re making. The signal to take them is a wolfs howl. Don’t move before it; when it comes, move fast. Remember the others across the water. Head runaways back toward them. Kill every man, starting with their guard, but not a scratch on the horses.”
He turned the pony and began to ride off into the woods.
We followed.
There seemed nothing wrong in it then, that we should be riding to kill men, knowingly. They were hardened and unthinking, and I was so contemptuous of human life. And there was hurt and anger in me, too.
The sun came up, blotching the leaves acid green. We rode downward all the time, the trees thinning in places, leaving lower slopes visible that faded away into the flatter ground. The river seemed to move with us, sometimes on show, flaring with sunlight; always in our ears.
We reached the ford, crossing a little before noon.
The river bent like a bow in front of us, narrowing at a point to the left. Through the screens of foliage and thick fern, I made out the broad track-the route the caravans took, which led toward the great South Road. The track halted on the far bank, continued on the near bank. In between, stakes stood up in the shallow water, indicating, with blackened notches, how high the river would run in flood. It was about twenty feet across.
I had gathered from snatches of talk around the wood camp that this was to be a new place of attack. The merchants were accustomed to trouble farther out, where the track met the South Road. They would be fairly easy as yet, and surprise was a great thing. But they had a strong and vicious guard-Maggur had told me as much.
“Those ones,” Maggur said, “they train them in the northern towns from childhood. A man can boast forty scars on his body at fifteen years. Teach them to steal from street markets and beat ’em when they’re caught. They bring them up on cruelty like a mean dog, and like mean dogs they
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grow. They bite, so watch their teeth, the ones in their belts, that is. And any blow, make sure you kill with it. Pain only makes “em mad, they’re so used to it-inspires them, you could say.”
We settled down to wait. Bread and salt meat and beer in leather bottles went around, but Barak’s men hardly made a sound. Even going off to urinate, they moved as stealthily as snakes. I began to see why most of them had been picked from the wood camp, where the bandits learned tree-craft as a matter of course, stalking deer or other prey.
It grew very hot. Sunlight boiled its green bubbles in the branches, and a bluish mist rose from the fallen leaves underfoot. The river was a cataract of polished opals.
Suddenly a woodhawk screeched. I glanced at Maggur. He nodded. It was a signal, and thev were coming, the fat stupid merchant men, and their terrible outriding guard.
A rustle, crushing of ferns, tramp of horses hooves, big horses these, roll of wagon wheels through undergrowth.
The first two riders appeared. Guard. I felt Maggur tense a little, but he made no sound. They were black, too, but it was black cloth and hardened leather, not skin. Every inch of them was covered and armored, even their hands in black gauntlets, even their faces-like mine-masked. But these masks were different, for thev were made in the likeness of black bone skulls, from which grew black, coarse plaited manes of horsehair. Their horses were enormous and black also. Cold ran down my spine, and my hand clenched on my long-knife. There was something about them-something. I felt the need to shiver, and spit the taste of their nearness out of my mouth.
They rode into the mid of the river, looked about them; then one shouted something in a high clear voice. At once others appeared, and then the swaying canopied wagons drawn bv ponies. The procession began to cross the river.
A wolf howled nearby, hoarse and urgent.
I had a glimpse of the black skull faces turning in surprise, and then we had moved.
There was one sound and one movement only, or so it seemed in the first seconds. The merchants’ cries of panic, neighing splashing horses, the shouts of Darak’s men bursting free from tension at last, the rushing forward with no chance to draw aside and have no part in it, were all one imperative thing.
The iron long-knife was in my right hand. There was no
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time to think. “Make sure you kill,” Maggur had said. The knife swung in an arc. The great black body toppled slowly over and away from me, not entirely black now, but red as well.
The horse under me was level and good. It danced forward and a black guard leaned down at me, and his own knifevery long and hooked at the end-slashed out. I caught the hook on my own weapon, and pulled at him. It seemed easy. He too fell slowly, and the spiked knife in my other hand dug into him, twisted, and came free. Blood and other stuff splattered up to my elbow. I saw it, but it did not seem to be my arm on which it spilled.
There was a little lull around me then. On every side there was the mess and uncertainty of fighting. The horses were staggering in the stream, and merchants and boys were running into each other in the water, shrieking. It was almost comic, but there was too much terror for that. One man was wriggling and straining on the driver’s box, trying to get his team around. I recalled that the merchants must be killed too. I rode at him, and the knife went in and out and he rolled sideways into the frothy pink water, his eyes full of reproach.
Maggur charged past, grinning, a black-maned mask in one hand, dripping knife in the other.
Across the river the others of Darak’s ambush were milling in to close the gap.
I felt sick abruptly. Evil was on me and I knew it. A kind of scream came whirling up from my belly and out of my mouth. I clamped the horse between my thighs, and kicked the spurs into it. I lifted the long-knife in a double grasp, over my head, letting the other one go. I plunged back into the chaos, and my arms swung left and right, and the knife spun at the end of them like a wheel of silver pain. I do not know how many I killed, but I killed many. There was a ringing in my head, and an anger in me, and a blood-red roaring triumph. I did not see much of what I did until I was in the river, and flung backward from my little horse, which in its turn lolled forward and went under. The cold, the taste of blood and river bitterness brought me out of the deathdream. I staggered to my feet, stumbling on stones and bodies under the froth. At that moment three of the skull guard came leaping in at me. The horses’ bodies, on the great black stretch of that leap, seemed to stop still in the air. Their hooves were buzzing iron hammers falling on me. I struggled, and thought I was going down hi quicksand; I