“No, love, let be… let be, I say. You may need that plate ere this day be done. As I said this morning, killing shaggy bulls is less sport than warfare, and it’s every bit as dangerous. Steel be praised,” he touched fingertips to his lips, then to the polished ball-pommel of his broadsword, “that the hairy monsters usually stay in the west and the north and out of my domain. I’d be as happy if every shaggy bull alive were somewhere west of the Sea of Grass. But a small herd has chosen to come down out of the mountains, and, as protector of my lands and people, it’s my job to see that they’re killed before they do any more damage.
“I still wish you’d go back, Giliahna.** She opened her mouth, but he raised his hand for silence. “You won’t, however, love, I know that Therefore, you are going to stay in that armor… and you had better know that!”
By noon, the party had left the western fringes of the flat country and ascended into the foothills. The farms here had smaller fields, most of them on hillsides; there were few cattle, but many goats and a few small herds of blatting sheep. Far west, Giliahna could see the hazy bluish rounded humps of the range that separated Kuhmbuhluhn from the Mahrk of Tuhsee—years agone, a bitter enemy of Kuhmbuhluhn, but now a fellow member of the Confederation.
A little after the noon, keener-eyed members of the party could see a host of black dots moving in slow, lazy circles in the clear sky some distance ahead. Shortly thereafter, they rounded a bend in the road to find three hunters squatting under a roadside tree and munching on cold bacon and corn-bread.
The three were clad almost identically in sweat-stained green shirts, soft leather breeches and low-topped boots. All three were bowmen—as attested by the leather sleeve each wore laced to his left arm from wrist to elbow and by the big horn ring on each man’s right thumb—and they all also bore an assortment of knives of various sizes, as well as slings and pouches of stones.
The trio of hunters were tall and slender, two of them with reddish-tinged brown hair, the third almost bald, but with a thick, dark-red mustache. There was distinct similarity in the casts of all three weather-browned faces and in the crinkle-cornered hazel eyes, big, jutting noses and high cheekbones.
The mustachioed hunter arose as the mounted party came into view, slapped a cloud of dust from his trousers, pulled off a billed leather cap, on the forepeak of which was emblazoned the princely arms, and trotted over to stand beside Prince Djylz’s sorrel stallion, his coordination, speed and ease of movement belying his thin, graying hair and host of wrinkles.
Smiling warmly, Djylz shucked a mailed gauntlet and leaned to clasp the hunter’s hand. “Roy, old friend, it’s good to clap eyes on you again; I trow, you look younger every time I see you. Are you sure you’re not an Undying?”
The hunter pumped the prince’s hand enthusiastically twice, then bore it to his lips and kissed it, before replying, “Not as I knows, Lord Djylz. Thet be a fine, tall horse y’ be a-forkin’; he has more the stamp o’ a warhorse than a hunter though. Wher be yer good old piebald hunter, Stagfleet?”
The prince sighed. “Aye, Stagfleet is good, but he is getting old, too, and I thought this day’s work might be better done with a younger, faster horse.” He absently patted the quilt-armored neck of his sorrel. “Man-lover, here, I bought from the Duke of York-Getzburk, last year at the Harzburk Fair; he was bred for a destrier and has had a good bit of war training, too, but while hell savage another horse or any other animal quick enough, he shies from attacking men, so Duke Randee had him retrained for a hunter.
“Now, to business, Roy. How many of the beasts have you seen? How far away are they?”
“The herd bull, o’course.” The hunter ticked off his bow-thumb. “An’ he be the bigges’ I ever seed, too—eighteen han’s at the withers, mebbe more. One young bull he ain’t drove off, yet, but he’s got his full horns. Three old cows, two of em with calves follerin’ and a couple of heifers. One o’ them calfs is a bull calf, an’ he be pure white, my lord Djylz.”
The prince grunted in appreciation. Not only would a white shaggy-bull be a rare specimen for his menagerie, but if taken young enough, shaggy-bulls could often be gentled to the tractability of domestic cattle and, when bred to beef breeds, invariably sired or threw bigger, meatier animals with thicker, stronger, more long-wearing hides.
He turned in the saddle and addressed his nobles and the retainers. “Roy here, says there’re a brace of nursing calves and one of the little buggers is even a white. You, Persee,” he spoke directly to Count Parkzburk, whose wealth lay principally in his fine herds of cattle, “know what that means. I want both those calves alive and unharmed.”
At length, the party came to a narrow track, leading off to the right between fields of thigh-high cornstalks. As the van entered a small, dusty farmyard, the old hunter kneed his big-headed pony forward and banged scarred knuckles on the thick, plank door of the small, log-walled house.
“Djaimos!” he yelled. “Djaimos Poorahbos! It be me, Roy Danyulz. C’mon out, heah. His lordship done come fer to kill them critters.”
Following scraping noises that told of the removal of at least two bars, the door of the windowless house swung open and a short, squat, thick-limbed man strode forth with a noticeable limp. His close-cropped black hair was shot through with white, but his black eyes were clear and alert; his forehead bore the permanent dent which told of years of bearing a helmet, all his front teeth were missing, his nose was mashed and canted far left, one ear was missing entirely and the other lacked a lobe, his olive-skinned face was a mass of old scars and so was every inch of visible body skin.
At sight of the prince, the oldster drew himself up into military posture and marched to within an accurately gauged five paces of the nobleman, then rendered a military salute, snapping, “Poorahbos, Djaimos, my lord. Retired epeelokeeas of heavy infantry of the Army of the Confederation. Would it please my lord that Poorahbos and his sons accompany the hunt?”
Prince Djylz smiled. “Aye, sergeant, get your spear and your lads, you look to have the strength to push a pike clear through a shaggy-bull, lengthwise. But first, tell me, have you seen them?”
The former senior sergeant had not, but reported that he had heard much bellowing and what had sounded like screams from the direction of a neighboring farmstead. So, as soon as he and his sons were laced into homemade cuirasses of boiled leather and he had donned his old helmet and buckled on his shortsword and dirk, he and his twin sons took the lead. There were no mounts for them but they proved to need none, moving easily and as fast as the duke cared to extend the horses in the mile-eating jog-trot of Con-federation infantrymen, spears properly sloped over right shoulders.
“That old bastard’s trained his lads well,” remarked Djylz to Giliahna. “They’ll be first-class recruits, given another year of growth.”
Up one grassy hillock and down another, then through a low saddle between two more hills the party wound along a trail through a small bit of forest, then debouched into another stretch of cornfields, with another cabin in sight ahead.
But this farmyard was not deserted as had been Djaimos Poorahbos’, it was alive with movement and sound—the flopping and flapping and pecking and raucous noises of crow and raven and buzzard. That on which they gorged had not been pretty when they arrived and their razor beaks and tearing talons had done nought to improve appearances, but once the carrion birds had been driven off, a tale could still be read in the hoof-trampled, blood-soaked dust of the yard and the gory, horn-mangled and stamped lifeless bodies—six of them, five human and one big hound.
What was left of a man still clenched a hand around the shaft of a wolfspear, the weapon sticky brown to the crossbar with blood; near the body of a youth was a horseman’s saber, gory for half its length. Another lad, younger, looked to have fought his last battle with a hewing axe. There was a burned-out torch near one hand of the dead woman. The corpse of what looked to have once been a slender, pretty girl was sprawled atop the roof of the cabin, dark-tressed head at an impossible angle and guts trailing from the belly torn open by the hooking horn which probably had thrown her there.