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ridden off, singing the wild boisterous clan songs. Any interference
on my part might well result in an ax-blade through my thick skull,
and would certainly destroy this too short sweet period of growing
friendship between Delia and myself.
 Look, Dray Prescot, said Delia from where she lay at my
side, peering down through the bushes.  Powder blue! Eward a
caravan of the Noble House of Eward.
 I can see, I grunted.
The clansmen were from a clan I did not recognize. When I
rode the Great Plains as a clansman, had we met, there would have
been bloodshed between us, perhaps; if we lived, the giving and
taking of obi. They meant no more to me than the men of Eward.
But Delia compressed her lips, and looked at me, and her eyes
sparkled dangerously at least, that is how they appeared to me,
for whom, in two worlds, there was no other woman fit to hold the
hem of her dress.
 Very well, I said. Lately I had been speaking a very great
deal. Naturally taciturn except when a subject excites me, with
Delia lately I had, as a newer time would have it, been shooting my
mouth off. Having decided, I wasted no time. I stood up, hefted
my hunk of timber, and charged down into the fracas.
Men in powder blue were riding their half-voves in furious
combat with zorca-mounted clansmen. That gave the men from
the city some chance. Rapiers sliced past clumsy guards and
pierced brawny chests; axes whirled high and descended to split
skulls and spill brains. It was a small raiding party of
clansmen the zorcas told me that and they must have stumbled
on the caravan unexpectedly. I was down and among them before
anyone realized a new force had been added to the conflict. I did
not utter a sound.
In an instant I had dismounted two clansmen, seized an ax,
swung violently against a group of three who sought to rip the
hangings from a sumptuouslyappointed palanquin. I had discarded
the notion of making a noise as though I were the forerunner of an
army. I was not dressed as a clansman, nor as a city man I was
dressed as a hunter of Aphrasöe and both sides would
immediately have seen through the ruse and all surprise would
have been lost.
The ax parted a neck from its trunk, sliced back to sever a
cheek and knock the man from the saddle. The third man reined up
his zorca, its hooves flashing, ready to swipe down on me, fully
extended. I convulsed back and his blow swept through empty air.
The hangings parted and a head crowned in a wide flat cap poked
unsteadily out. Beyond the man about to attack me again I saw a
man in powder blue sink his rapier into the throat of a clansman,
the blade caught, and he jerked for a moment unavailingly. To his
side a clansman lifted a bow string drawn to his ear. The next
instant would see that iron bird buried in the man of Eward s back.
I hurled the ax high and hard, in the old clansman s cunning,
and the daggered six inches of bladed steel sank into the zorca
rider s breast. He looked down stupidly and then fell off.
Then the man facing me was spurring forward and bringing
his ax down. I went in under the sweep of the blow, avoided the
zorca s mouth with a vove I would have been already a dead
man and sprang upward and took him about the waist. We both
toppled to the ground. When I arose and looked alertly about my
dagger was brightly-stained.
 Well done, Jikai! I heard a croaking voice call.
The zorca riders had had enough. What should have been a
nice leisurely killing and plundering had turned into a bloodbath.
With wild and baffled shrieks they rode off. We avoided their last
Parthian discharges as the bolts thunked into the ground. If they
stood off, we had bows enough to give them a spirited return to
their shooting.
Often these days I am forced to smile when reading the
ill-informed and ignorant usage of words when Earthmen speak of
barbaric weapons. How often one reads that arrows are  fired in
combat. I have used flint and steel to fire a musket, and a
percussion cap to fire a pistol, and have fired a high-velocity rifle
many and many a time I have even used a lighted match wound
around a linstock to fire a thirty-two pounder in the pitching
gundeck of a three-decker but in all this smoke and flame I have
never  fired an arrow. One does not  fire bow and arrows.
Except, perhaps, if you allow that term to those occasions when we
clansmen set blazing rags to our shafts and used them to set fire to
the wagons and the roofs of our foemen, as we did that wild day in
the Pass of Trampled Leaves.
The half-vove rider had freed his rapier. He looked at me with
curiosity all over his bronzed, keen face, with the black eyes and the
cropped hair beneath the steel cap, and he sized me up as I sized
him up. Lithe and strong, he rode well, and I had seen his
swordplay with the last exception of those neck-bones, and they
can be lubbers at letting a blade free and he handled himself
superbly well.
He rode over.
He passed me with an intent, anxious look on his face, bent to
the palanquin.
 Great-Aunt Shusha! Are you all right?
The old head in its wide flat hat poked out again. This time
more of the old woman appeared, I saw she carried a dinky little
dagger in her gloved right hand. Her face was old old and lined
and pouched with the record of her years; but her eyes were lively
enough, bright and malicious on her nephew. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]