Ettook did not hear. Fury was trying to burst his face open and reach me.
I quieted myself further and said, “I ask your pardon, my chief. It is I who am drunk; I talked rashly. I came in haste to warn the krarls.”
Another chief had risen; he bawled, and men trampled between the fires.
Then it was a voice spoke that silenced us all. The sky overhead seemed to split along a white metallic seam; at the end of this sawing, squealing rent a thunderbolt fell, parting the earth.
The ground shook. There was a smell of burning trees. Everything was altered by a black smoke that twisted and frayed, leaving behind broken red confusion. Out of this red confusion emerged stumbling men without arms or faces. A dog dashed briefly in a circle, shrieking, with half its belly tangled around its feet.
As the bloody wave collapsed, the supernatural ripping of the sky came again. Men flung themselves flat as if before a god. This bolt struck farther off, more to the north. And from that section, a second bloody wave of screaming and horror crashed upward and fell back, spent.
I had known nothing before of city cannon, or the great iron shot that was expelled from them. This initial lesson was thorough. It was the first occasion true terror laid hold on me. Terror, for me, was explicit in this sense of utter helplessness before an engine without laws and without vulnerability.
We lay on the valley floor, awaiting death. Twice more death raked the valley. Finally there was a time it did not come.
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A sort of lull, not silence, a kind of stifling of sounds and cries, and through this stew of smoke and smothering, an avalanche rattled on the western slope. No wailing, no whooping of braves in battle. Just hoofbeats, the singing of jeweled harness.
Something made me stir, and start to thrust up blindly, with my teeth bared like an animal.
I became aware I was lying on a mattress of cinders and twigs and blood, others’ or my own. At this instant, a beast ridden by a man came flying through the thorn.
It was a burnished horse, oil-black as sharkskin, its serpent-long neck stretched out and mouth flaring wide. The man astride it was a lightning of bright ornaments and gaping ragged furs. He had a golden face, the face of a golden hawk, and behind the hawk-crest a banner of white-saffron hair.
He did not glance aside at me. He judged me dead, probably.
The tangle of thorns splintered. They were gone.
After that, it became quiet. I kicked a corpse off my legs, and got up, gazing about in a stupid state of remembering where I was and who I had been. Presently I pushed through the wreck of the trees. The roasting carcass, fallen in the fire, was augmented by a dead man fallen on top of it. Both now roasted together.
Along the valley you could see the path they had smashed for themselves, the riders, like a trail cut through brush. They had fired their hell-bolts, then ridden the periphery of the confusion, sweeping men before them as clever wolves will do with cattle, next herding them at a pitched run up the far ridges and away. There had been a small fight; not much. None with gold and silver faces had remained to feed the crows, but had raced clear, the devil horses leaping the rocks as if wings were strapped on their feet, into the ruby twilight.
It was a savage madman’s raid. Indiscriminate, wasteful, irresistible. They had captured around thirty men, and fifty more would be dead from their wounds by moonrise.
The Dagkta warriors floundered formlessly, as if returning to themselves after a fit. None of us made to chase the enemy. Only an aimless shouting blew through the valley, anger and fear venting themselves. Certain chiefs, Ettook with
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them, were bellowing and shaking spears in the reeking, darkening air.
There are two clever tricks men know. One is to make much of nothing. The second is to make nothing of much.
The hurt and dying warriors were put together to be fended by the seers. The rest banked up the fire, poured out beer in bowls, and so held a war council. The substance of which was this: You could not fight a mask-faced city man; particularly you could not fight iron tubes that coughed out death. Therefore let him be. True, they grumbled about dogs or horses that had perished in the explosions, and some were silent, thinking of dead friends or kin, while gossips told legends of earlier raids, and a good many curses were minted in the firelight. It was well known that the mask-faces whipped and starved their slaves, no doubt the hard winter had finished them, and this was why their masters had come hunting so early.
Eventually, those who had lost sons, brothers, or fathers took up mementos of the corpses, or whole bodies where they were to be found, and rode silently homeward to their camping valleys. Others, whose comrades had been driven westward by the raiders, scowled and stamped and invoked their gods and totems for vengeance. The dismembered dead were left in a pile with their weapons to be burned like the rubbish in the morning.
This was the sum total of their action.
I was like a man getting back complete use of his limbs after a paralysis. Then all my sinews burning and eager for work, I discovered there was none.
Having been afraid, nonplussed by the raiders’ alien weaponry, now I was impatient to redeem myself. It would not be enough to rant and rave and make up oaths. I was dishonored in my own eyes, for what that was worth, for abruptly I had choked down the awareness that the enemy were only men. They were not invincible after all, merely carried some dangerous invention on wheels, which they had created. I had lain on my face in the spring mud, and they had ridden over me, as if they had some right to confiscate free men, and barely a hand had lifted against them, and even that hand had not been mine.
Presently, roaming the pines where the wounded shrilled
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and sobbed and expired, I had got myself in a white-hot rage, and went among the fires with it.
I went where Ettook was cursing and eating and drinking with his warriors.
“My father,” I said, “they took five of your people for slaves. Give me ten, and I will go after them.”
He chewed his meat, his beard gleaming with fat. His eyes gleamed too. They told me I should have known better than to beg of him after what I had said to him before.
“Listen to the puppy bark. He wet his drawers at sunset and cried for his mother. Even so brave a warrior as Tuvek swoons like a maid at city men.”
The warriors grunted. A couple laughed, then saw my face and shut their mouths. I was so angry I could not get a word out.
Ettook said, “No, Tuvek. You haven’t earned the right to lead my krarl to battle. But wipe your eyes. Never fear, we will not tell your wives how you ran to hide in the mud.”
Suddenly my anger seemed to burst and was dissipated like a poisoned swelling.
Surprised by my own coolness, I smiled confidently back at him.
“It is good of you, my father, to tell no one. I am grateful. I shall never forget your own bravery. The priests should make a song of it.”
It was too delicate for him, but he labored at the problem and shortly he had puzzled it out. He had himself been hidden somewhere; his gear was muddier than mine, and his knives neither bloody nor newly cleaned.
His face writhed itself into a congestion, and I said, “Your pardon, my father. I am embarrassed by the presence of your valor.”
And I walked away before he could recover himself, straight to the horse pens. Here, judging my roan would have run off, I stole a mount.
A small piece of an hour later, I was out of the valley and riding west, on the trail of the slave-takers.
They left a fine trail, the city raiders. Horse dung caked the rocks, and hooves pocked in the soft soils of spring, and the footmarks of men, and in places a bluish dust-powder spilled from their wheeled cannon. In one spot even a golden
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bead on a ring, from harness or rider, dazzled like a firefly in a bush-as if they had intended me to follow and meant to leave me spoor.
A whole night and day I sought them, and part of a second night.
After twenty miles or so of finicky, careful riding, I saw the mountains begin to level and sink down toward high rocky plateaus. The going was better for horses, theirs and mine. By midnight of the first dark, I was confident enough of the quarry that I took a few hours’ sleep, lying in a shallow cave. Their trail ran northward, which was not the way to the old burned city, Eshkir, so I deduced, which lay more west and south of us.