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Authors: Karl Edward Wagner
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who brought him his head--with or without the Prophet's shoulders attached. Throughout the battle there had been no report of the Prophet's whereabouts.
Ridaze eventually furnished the answer. Bored with the slaughter, he paused to interrogate a few captives. Presumably they used their last breaths of life to speak truly.
"Not here," he explained to Jarvo. "He didn't even come. The Prophet ordered his generals to lead his Dark Crusade into Sandotneri--and stayed home, snug in his palace in Ingoldi while his followers took the measure of our cavalry."
Jarvo spat out a mouthful of dust. "At least then, the stories of Orted's cunning weren't exaggerated."
The Sataki mass was broken--the survivors fleeing across the veldt in a thousand directions, pursued by mounted slayers. Jarvo decided it would be too much effort to hunt them after nightfall.
It was midafternoon.
VII: Nexus of the Crisis
Rising from the treeless horizon, the full moon burned over the trampled savannah like a white-hot coal above a troubled sea of blood. Against the horizon, beneath the white orb of the moon, a horse and rider rose from the distant veldt.
The tableau was one of eerie silence. Replete and torpid, carrion birds that had assembled before twilight croaked somnolently to one another, as they roosted beside their unfinished banquet. Silent save for quarrelsome snarls and yelps, dingoes and jackals prowled through the field of carnage. Now and again a ripple of ghoulish laughter or the explosive crack of a bone marked the presence of a feasting hyena.
The tens of thousands of dead made no sound at all.
With the approaching drum of hoofbeats, those who feasted turned their eyes toward the interloper. Vultures stretched their wings nervously. Lips drew back over gory fangs in jealous greeting. Curious wallabies and other small nocturnal creatures halted, then slipped shyly away from the oncoming rider.
The tens of thousands of dead made no move at all.
Slowly--for in the clear night air distances across the savannah seemed dreamlike and unreal--the rider approached the silent battlefield. Dark against the moon and the horizon, he might have been Death in black mail astride a black stallion. A faint breeze rustled through the high grass where the fury of battle had not torn apart the sod, carrying the scent of butchered flesh and spilled blood and violent death,
The rider slowed to study the sea of blood, then urged his snorting stallion to wade along its shores. The black stallion's heavy tread sounded like muffled drumbeats on the torn and spattered sod.
Here and there the carcass of a horse, stripped of saddle and harness. The victors had taken their own dead and wounded--there could not have been many by the signs of it--and left the field to the vanquished. A plain of the dead--men, women, children by the thousands and thousands. Peasants and gutter trash for the most part, scarcely a one of them with the aspect of a veteran fighting man. Just meat to dull cavalry blades. Crude homemade weapons and rags and tatters in place of decent blades and mail. The dead had not been despoiled, nor were there spoils here worth taking. It was a field of dead meat, and of interest only to the thousands of scavengers who would glut themselves until only bare bones remained. Then the grass would grow again, richer and greener for the nourishment, and the bones would vanish beneath the verdant sea.
Beyond the great mass of the slain, a less dense moraine of dead marked where the battle turned to retreat, and the retreat broken into rout. Away across the savannah the flood of war had washed, leaving its drift of broken bodies, cut down from behind as they fled in panic from mounted steel. The trail of death littered a swath that stretched across the far horizon, disappearing toward the shadowy forestland many miles distant. Until the pursuers tired of butchery, that trail of bodies would extend unbroken to the forest--unless there were no more to be
Ridaze eventually furnished the answer. Bored with the slaughter, he paused to interrogate a few captives. Presumably they used their last breaths of life to speak truly.
"Not here," he explained to Jarvo. "He didn't even come. The Prophet ordered his generals to lead his Dark Crusade into Sandotneri--and stayed home, snug in his palace in Ingoldi while his followers took the measure of our cavalry."
Jarvo spat out a mouthful of dust. "At least then, the stories of Orted's cunning weren't exaggerated."
The Sataki mass was broken--the survivors fleeing across the veldt in a thousand directions, pursued by mounted slayers. Jarvo decided it would be too much effort to hunt them after nightfall.
It was midafternoon.
VII: Nexus of the Crisis
Rising from the treeless horizon, the full moon burned over the trampled savannah like a white-hot coal above a troubled sea of blood. Against the horizon, beneath the white orb of the moon, a horse and rider rose from the distant veldt.
The tableau was one of eerie silence. Replete and torpid, carrion birds that had assembled before twilight croaked somnolently to one another, as they roosted beside their unfinished banquet. Silent save for quarrelsome snarls and yelps, dingoes and jackals prowled through the field of carnage. Now and again a ripple of ghoulish laughter or the explosive crack of a bone marked the presence of a feasting hyena.
The tens of thousands of dead made no sound at all.
With the approaching drum of hoofbeats, those who feasted turned their eyes toward the interloper. Vultures stretched their wings nervously. Lips drew back over gory fangs in jealous greeting. Curious wallabies and other small nocturnal creatures halted, then slipped shyly away from the oncoming rider.
The tens of thousands of dead made no move at all.
Slowly--for in the clear night air distances across the savannah seemed dreamlike and unreal--the rider approached the silent battlefield. Dark against the moon and the horizon, he might have been Death in black mail astride a black stallion. A faint breeze rustled through the high grass where the fury of battle had not torn apart the sod, carrying the scent of butchered flesh and spilled blood and violent death,
The rider slowed to study the sea of blood, then urged his snorting stallion to wade along its shores. The black stallion's heavy tread sounded like muffled drumbeats on the torn and spattered sod.
Here and there the carcass of a horse, stripped of saddle and harness. The victors had taken their own dead and wounded--there could not have been many by the signs of it--and left the field to the vanquished. A plain of the dead--men, women, children by the thousands and thousands. Peasants and gutter trash for the most part, scarcely a one of them with the aspect of a veteran fighting man. Just meat to dull cavalry blades. Crude homemade weapons and rags and tatters in place of decent blades and mail. The dead had not been despoiled, nor were there spoils here worth taking. It was a field of dead meat, and of interest only to the thousands of scavengers who would glut themselves until only bare bones remained. Then the grass would grow again, richer and greener for the nourishment, and the bones would vanish beneath the verdant sea.
Beyond the great mass of the slain, a less dense moraine of dead marked where the battle turned to retreat, and the retreat broken into rout. Away across the savannah the flood of war had washed, leaving its drift of broken bodies, cut down from behind as they fled in panic from mounted steel. The trail of death littered a swath that stretched across the far horizon, disappearing toward the shadowy forestland many miles distant. Until the pursuers tired of butchery, that trail of bodies would extend unbroken to the forest--unless there were no more to be
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