The stranger was about five feet seven inches tall and was stockily, even massively, built. Like an old red ram, Sam thought, though the stranger looked, of course, as if he were twenty-five years old. His curly auburn hair hung down his back to his waist. His black eyebrows were as thick as Sam’s. His eyes were large, dark brown with chips of pale green. His face was aquiline and jutting-chinned. His ears were large and stood out at almost right angles from his head.
The body of an old red ram, Sam thought, with the head of a great horned owl.
His bow was made of a material that Sam had seen before, though it was rare. It was made from two of the curved horns that ring a Riverdragon-fish’s mouth. The two were joined together to make one double recurved bow. This type was by far the most powerful and durable bow in the valley but had one disadvantage. It took extremely powerful arms to bend it,
The stranger’s leather quiver held twenty arrows, flinttipped, the shafts carved laboriously from the fin bones of the Riverdragon and feathered with carved pieces of bone so thin that the sun shone through them.
He spoke in a German with a thick, non-Germanic, unidentifiable accent. “You look like Sam Clemens.”
“I am,” Clemens replied. “What’s left of me. But how did you. . . ?”
“You were described to me by—” the stranger paused—”one of Them.”
Sam did not understand for a moment. The partdeafness caused by the explosion, the yells of men killing each other only twenty yards away, other, more distant rocket explosions, and the sudden appearance of this man gave everything an unreal quality.
He said, “He sent … the Mysterious Stranger … he sent you! You’re one of the twelve!” “He? Not he! She sent me!”
Sam did not have time to question him about this. He checked the impulse to ask the man if he was any good with the bow. He looked as if he could wrest from the bow the last atom of potentiality. Instead, Sam climbed to the top of the pile of dirt by the hole and pointed at the nearest enemy ship, its prow against the bank. A man standing on its poopdeck was bellowing orders.
“Von Radowitz, the leader of the enemy,” Sam said, “He’s out of range of our feeble bows.”
Smoothly, swiftly, pausing only to aim briefly, not bothering to gauge the wind which blew always at this time of day at a steady six miles an hour, the bowman loosed his black arrow. Its trajectory ended in the solar plexus of von Radowitz. The German staggered backward under the impact, whirled to reveal the bloody tip sticking from his back, and fell backward over the railing and into the waters between boat and bank.
The second-in-command rallied his men, and the bowman drove a shaft through him. Joe Miller, clad in Riverdragon-leather armor, swinging his huge oaken club, ravaged among the Germans in the center of the line of battle. He was like an 800-pound lion with a human brain. Death and panic went with him. He smashed twenty skulls by the minute and occasionally picked up a man with his free hand and threw him to knock down a half dozen or so.
At different times, five men managed to slip behind Joe, but the black bone arrows of the newcomer always intercepted them.
The invaders broke and tried to get back to their boats. Von Richthofen, naked, bloody, grinning, danced before Sam. “We’ve won! We’ve won!”
“You’ll get your flying machine yet,” Sam said. He turned to the archer. “What is your name?”
“I have had many names, but when my grandfather first held me in his arms he called me Odysseus.”
All Sam could think of to say was, “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
Could this be the man of whom Homer sang? The real Ulysses, that is, the historical Ulysses, who did fight before the walls of Troy and about whom legends and fairy tales were later collected? Why not? The shadowy man who had talked in Sam’s hut had said he had picked twelve men out of the billions available. What his means were for choosing, Sam did not know, but he presumed the reasons were good. And the Mysterious Stranger had told him of one choice: Richard Francis Burton. Was there some kind of aura about the twelve that enabled the renegade to know the man who could do the job? Some tiger color of the soul?