"Will we win?" Chaya said quietly.
"Oh, we'll win, all right," Hammer-of-God said.
The Seven stood on a low hill, surrounded by messengers. Hammer-of-God had a few more complex items of equipment: a tripod-mounted pair of binoculars the length of a man's leg, a heliograph and a map table. He was uneasily aware that those meant less than they might have. With a Bandari force he would have had a fully articulated chain of command from regiments down to squads, trained officers, and the whole force would be well-disciplined and literate. With only about fifteen hundred of the People here, nine-tenths of the force were hotnots. Of those, only some of the Mongols and a few others had any idea of discipline; the rest were brave, hardy, mobile and about as cohesive as a bar brawl. Fighting by clans and tribes . . .
So are most of the enemy, he reminded himself. The sixty Saurons were a different matter, but he had a plan for them. A plan that depends on their doing what I want them to.
Out on the plain, a dust cloud was moving. High-plumed dust, pink against the ruddy sky. Horsemen, beyond the furthest limits of the Seven's forces.
"Kemal," he said. "The White Sheep are moving to our flank. Get around them. Barak, you—"
"Get ready for it," Barak called from the ridge ahead, to the west. "Mount up."
"Get ready for what?" Shulamit whispered, as they swung into the saddle with a long rattling clatter of gear.
Some of the Bandari troopers on either side of her laughed at that; Tameetha turned and glared at her. A hundred and fifty of them were strung out in a line three deep, well back from the ridge. From here what they saw was what they had seen all day: columns of dust across the rocky landscape, too far away to make out the men and horses beneath as anything but bug figures. Blocks of them moving back and forth, sometimes meeting, sometimes disappearing behind a hill. A glint of weapons, faint shouts far-off mixed with the discordant harp music of bowstrings and the occasional scrap-metal sound of combat.
Once they heard the phutphutphutphut sound an older fighter said was Sauron assault rifles, different from the close-range banging she had heard in the valley where Sigrid fought. They had all gone tense at that, but nothing happened. Sometimes a message came for them to move, and they trotted off across the rocky steppe to a place not visibly different from the one before. Passing others moving, or dead men and horses, or wounded ones, which was worse. Karl bar Edgar had gone by once with wagonloads of bloody figures who shrieked at the bumping of the wheels, his face fixed and pale.
It was trueday, too bright for stars and well above freezing; Byers' Sun overhead, and Cat's Eye's lidless orb squatting in the west in banded dull-red majesty. Four of the sister moons were in the sky as well, as if the heavens crowded to look at what humans did. Shulamit remembered her fears and hopes; if this was a battle, it seemed like neither, only a vast chaotic bewilderment where nobody seemed to know what was going on. She twisted slightly in the saddle to look behind her; Sapper and his crew had their dozens of modified wagons there, fronted with planks and covered in greasy-green drillbit gut, fresh and stinking vilely of decay and metallic salts. There were loopholes in the planks, and riflemen crouched behind with the long-barreled weapons of the Pale. Behind them came a wooden frame on wheels, assembled from local timber and metal parts brought from Eisenstaadt, the Gimbutas town in Eden Valley. A long wooden lever with a cup on one end, the other thrust through a huge knot of cured muskylope sinews, and windlasses to bend it back. Sapper was whistling cheerfully as he worked about it; he had a small barrel inside a larger one, and was pouring sacks of lead balls into the gap between.
Karl bar Yigal grinned ingratiatingly as he trotted back from over the ridge and took a place in the ranks a little down from her; the horses jostled a bit as the line readjusted, stirrup irons clanking together. This was no clan regiment, with its ancient traditions and blood ties, but they all had the training and they'd been together for weeks now, long enough for drill to shake them down into a unit.
"Lot of hotnots over there, but I didn't see any Saurons," Karl said.
"Apart from your girlfriend?" Shulamit snapped back.
"She's not my—she's not a Sauron!" Karl half-yelled, standing in the saddle to gesture over the shoulder of the man next to him.
"She had a Sauron rifle," Shulamit said, stabbing a finger at him. "She looks like a bloody Sauron, she talked like one when we met her—who else but a Sauron wanders around the steppes alone and lives to tell about it?"
"Does she waddle and quack like a Sauron, too?" someone asked, with amusement in his voice.
"Hell, does she fuck like a Sauron, eh, man, Karl, hey?" another laughed.
"Shut up or it's the gauntlet," Tameetha rasped.
That brought real silence; running between a line of your comrades while they lashed you with their belts was no joke. Ahead of them Barak raised his hand to shade his eyes; augmented eyes, Shulamit remembered with a chill. His hearing would be sorting out whatever-it-was across there as well. Then he turned and cantered down toward them.
"All right," he said, drawing up near the center of the formation; he gave her a slight distracted smile when she waved. "Over there"—he pointed behind him—"our hotnots are fighting theirs, and falling back toward us by Hammer's plan. When they retreat, the enemy will push forward. We come over the hill and get them moving back sharp. Don't shove in among them or scatter them; keep them grouped and moving back. The Saurons are behind them. We want a big screen of enemy between us and them. When the Saurons pitch in, which they will, you'll hear the retreat sounded. Retreat quick; in good order, but quick. I've seen what their weapons can do. The range is about a thousand meters; that's where you'll rally, while Sapper and his merry band play their tricks."
After that was only waiting; once Shulamit put on her helmet and buckled the chinstrap, even the sounds were muffled. She shifted in the saddle, conscious of thirst and a humiliating need to piss, and the ache of Karl's presence only five meters away. It made her angry, and she was tired of being angry, but she couldn't stop. He should say he was sorry, or at least believe her . . . and she was frightened, too. Sigrid was a Sauron, but sixty more of the real article were only a kilometer away, and coming closer. She wiped her hand down the cold nappy surface of her wool pants, below the armor. Judge Chaya and Hammer-of-God knew what they were doing; but the Judge had been acting very strange lately, and Hammer was always strange. Even for an Edenite.
Saurons killed Da. She had been eight when they brought back his body. So strong and alive, and then lying there in the box, and the hands that used to lift her up toward the ceiling still and wasted looking. I promised, Da. Thirty lives to pay for the years he missed. Treason to be afraid because she had yet to see her third Haven year.
It was almost a relief when a pair of hotnots came over the ridge; Mongols, Yek clansmen in embroidered jackets. They galloped down and past the waiting Bandari, waving to Barak as they slowed their mounts and cantered off. Barak shouted: "Bows ready!" More noise sounded from beyond the ridge, an angry insistent buzzing.
Beside her a man she hardly knew murmured, but not to her: "Lord God of Hosts, Who stayed the sun in its course, You know I must be busy now. I will have no time to think of You; but may You think well of me."
Shulamit slapped on the gloves tucked through her belt and pulled the bare out of the case at her left knee, as sweat turned dank under her harness. Her hands tingled as she unfastened the cap on the quiver, to the right of the saddlehorn. Forty arrows in there, five in the clip attached to her bow. She pulled out a red-feather broadhead and slotted it through the cutout of the handgrip. There was a gentle click as the horn spring caught the shaft and held it there, a crisp sound as the bone nock rested on the horsehair of the string. She pulled the shaft to half-draw, testing the tension and the smoothness of the pulley wheels. Then she looped her reins around the pommel of the saddle. It took both hands to handle a bow from horseback, and hence a well-trained mount. The chestnut was her best, and first-rate apart from a neurotic hatred of camels. Shulamit sympathized with the mare: camels stank.
"Left wheel." The formation turned, changing from a line to a column. "Advance, at the walk."
They rode north, then the formation bent like an L as the head of it turned west and over the ridge. Ahead of her riders rose like a living wave, manes and helmet crests and the points of slung lances. The iron ting of horseshoes on rock echoed, and the thudding sound of four hundred hooves on dirt. Then the chestnut's muscles were bunching between her knees as they rose, and the view ahead hit at her like an invisible blow to the face. The Mongols were racing off to north and south, except for the dead who stayed, and a few caught among the Cossack host in circles of thrashing sabers. There were half again a thousand of the gayam, a vast dun mass shaped like a C with the blunt end toward her. They recoiled at the sight of the Bandari, then edged forward again when it became clear how few the People were; and at the menacing stutter of an assault rifle at their heels.
They had no order, but they rocked forward almost as one creature, a vast shaggy mass flowing across the plain to meet her, bright with bristling banners and teeth that were metal swordblades and spearheads. And they screamed as they charged: "Na Umor! Umor!" To the death! Death!
The Bandari stretched out, racing at a pounding gallop across the front of the enemy line; their three-deep formation was staggered, and she could see through the two to her left. Enemy closing fast, three hundred meters, two. Broad-cheeked shouting faces, red coats daubed with tar, shaven heads with scalp locks and long moustaches, here and there a helmet or a leather breastplate. Aram's horn snarled and dunted from somewhere along the Bandari line: Draw.
She threw arms and shoulders and gut muscle against the draw of her bow, holding it as the base of her thumb rested in the angle of her jaw. The string creased her nose; she raised the lowest sighting pin until it rested in air above the nearest Cossack rank. Another blatting call.
Loose. The string rasped over the thumb-ring of her gauntlet and whacked against the leather of her arm-guard. For a second the whistling of a hundred and fifty arrows drowned shouts and hoofbeats. The shafts rose in a blurred cloud, seemed to pause an instant at the height of their trajectory with a wink of sunlight on steel, then swooped downward. The Kossacki checked briefly—that was long range for their unaided bows, middling for the People, but they had no experience of the Bandari bare. Then their formation shattered like crockery under a sledgehammer as the long arrows sleeted down. Men fell, dead or screaming and plucking at the iron in their flesh; horses reared, tumbled; others too close and fast to stop plowed into them and fell in turn, multi-ton pileups of kicking, shrieking meat taller than a man. Shulamit felt a complex shudder at the thought of being caught like that, unavoidable for a lifelong rider.
Her hands stripped another arrow from the ready clip with automatic skill. By the time the clip was empty the Bandari had ridden the full length of the Cossack formation, and the gayam were advancing much more slowly, in clots and dribbles rather than a solid mass. The next horn-call was more complex; it was called the Parthian retreat, for some reason. Shulamit recognized it easily enough: the trumpet codes were learned as early as writing in the Pale. Most of the horses knew it too; slowed of their own accord before the riders drew them up and wheeled right, spurring back into a gallop in extended order toward the western ridge. They turned in the saddle to shoot behind them as they rode; the Kossacki seemed to recover some of their spirit to see their foes retreat, and came on again against the slower rain of arrows.
They stopped when the other two companies of haBandari surged up over the ridge on either side, and the original one halted and turned about. They stopped and wavered and turned back; then the Sauron rifles sounded behind them in earnest. Shulamit set her teeth at the sound; the soldati were giving their "allies" no choice but to attack the People or be slaughtered.
That's the friendship of Saurons, she thought Fury ground her teeth together, memory of long arms and legs wrapped around Karl. Friendship of stobor. Thickheaded yellow-thatched Litvak fool. Pack-muskylopes lumbered up to the Bandari, and their handlers tossed bundles of spare arrows to the waiting fighters. Shulamit grabbed two, filled her quiver and clip, took a moment to rinse out her mouth and spit. One long swallow of tepid leathery water from her canteen was like a taste of heaven.
"Ready," Tameetha said, a few paces ahead. "Remember, listen for the calls; don't get caught up." More softly, looking down to where the Kossacki milled and began to advance again: "Gayams naktness," she whispered. Barbarian madness.
Everyone cased bows. The front rank unslung their lances and brought them down; Shulamit drew her saber and smoothed a hand down the chestnut's neck before she took up her shield by its central handgrip. The horn blatted.
"HA-BANDAR!"
The deep guttural shout launched the fighters of the Pale into the charge. Shulamit shouted too, as much to clear the tightness from her throat as anything else. The Kossacki howled like files on rock and spurred their horses, not enthusiastic but too experienced at steppe warfare to receive a charge at the stand. Their formation stretched and scattered as it advanced, trying to lap around the tighter Bandari lines. Few arrows came from it; the enemy had shot their quivers empty earlier in the day, and had no organization to refill them.
They struck.
Shulamit could never remember exactly what happened next; it was as if a flash of white light seared her memories. Flickering images remained. Tameetha spearing a Cossack out of the saddle and pivoting her lance at the grip to let it drag free. The chestnut shouldered into an enemy mount, and the lighter gayam horse going down, her own legs gripping convulsively as the Pale warhorse staggered then half-jumped, half-walked across the fallen beast and its rider. Well-trained, the chestnut stepped on the human. Hard.
The wind of a blade's passage across her face; full awareness snapped back. She brought the shield around and up and cut to her left, then the man was past her. Another coming up on her right; the momentum of the charge was stalling, and the chestnut slowed automatically. This one was a bareheaded man, young, with a cut on his cheek. Wild blue eyes above a button nose, a chain around his neck strung with crosses and odd-looking little portraits. He rode hunched over like a jockey, his stirrups short, a curved sword rising for a cut as their mounts brought them into range.
"Umor!" he screeched at her; the voice broke in comical surprise as he saw that the face below the crested helmet belonged to a girl younger than he. There was nothing chivalrous about the cut he tried, a simple overarm swing aimed at her shoulder. That would bisect her to the navel, or break bone through the armor.
Reaction was automatic, from ten thousand hours of training starting the month she learned to walk. Lean forward, twist the wrist to set the sword horizontal to the ground. Muscles in line from point to arm to braced feet. Buckler around and up, over her head.
The young Cossack ran right on to the point. It wasn't like skewering a muskylope carcass; there was a soft, heavy feeling as the saber punched in beside his navel. His slash weakened and banged feebly off her shield, scarcely even driving her hand down on the stiff horsehair of her helmet crest. Something seemed to travel up the blade to her hand and into her arm; their eyes met, blue to blue. His went round, and his mouth did too, like a cartoon drawing of a surprised face done in charcoal on the side of a barn. The follow-through was as automatic as the thrust: twist sharply (crisp poppings resounded through the blade), wrench the hilt back as the horses passed. The eyes, the eyes stayed locked on hers, rolling up into the fair brows, Shulamit turning in the saddle and watching as the body toppled over the high cantle and the front of it was all blood, a sheet more crimson than Cat's Eye—
"Look alive!" Tameetha's voice screamed at her.
She snapped around to the front, fear tightening the loose feeling in stomach and throat and drying her mouth of the rush of gummy saliva. A Cossack was staring at her, eyelids drooping as if he was sleepy; then the aluf freed her lancepoint from his back with a wrenching effort. Nobody seemed to be near them. Beyond her Shulamit could see Karl fighting, his forged-steel war-hammer blurring in a circle as if it were a spoke on a spinning wheel. It snapped a sword and struck a skull that spattered away from it, and Earl's face was locked in a grimace that seemed half terror and half disbelief.
Tameetha whacked the dead Cossack's horse across the rump with the shaft of her lance. There was a rough sympathy to her voice as she jerked her head to Shulamit, motioning her back. "You only have to lose that cherry once, too," she said. Then shouted: "Pull back, pull back! Rally!"
Shulamit wheezed out a shuddering breath as the Bandari fighters dressed their ranks; the enemy were milling a hundred meters away, caught between two fires and unwilling to face either. The flexible armor seemed to be squeezing at her ribs as she panted.
Where did all the bodies come from? she wondered, dazed. The open ground between the forces was littered with them, almost all enemy. Where was the fight? All I saw was—
Assault rifles snarled again, much closer this time; the Cossack screams turned hysterical, and she thought she could see figures on foot through their thinning ranks, figures in gray. The ram's horn sounded, quick and hard: retreat, retreat. The Bandari turned once more and spurred their horses, the weary beasts taking a little longer to reach a gallop, their masters more urgent. More firing from behind her; she risked a look. The enemy was scattering every which way, crying their panic, more of them going down with each instant as invisible death combed them from behind. Four hundred meters. Lightning had said that the danger zone was a thousand. Then there were figures in field-gray dodging among the last Kossacki, running fast as horses themselves, jinking and turning with unhuman agility.
Fear jerked at her, but the moan turned into a snarl as hatred overpowered it. Hate was strong, like the salt taste of blood on her lips.
Seven hundred yards. Just beside her a trooper grunted as something smacked between his shoulder blades. He crumpled off his mount, down even as she grabbed at him. Beyond him a horse reared and screamed and collapsed, throwing his rider; the Bandari on either side swooped down and came up with an armpit grip, carrying the unconscious woman with both her feet off the ground. A sound like a giant insect buzzing, and the chestnut pig-jumped under her, squealing. Her heart lurched again as she turned. A red line across his haunch, not too deep but bleeding freely; she had to slug back on the reins to keep him from bolting. More of the People down, but they were nearly out of range.
Ahead, Sapper's wagons rumbled over the ridge and down toward them, running along propelled by gravity and enthusiastic hands. Wagons and riders passed in a flash of combined speed and the riders pulled up at the ridge. Shulamit reined in once they were safely down slope, invisible from the enemy side. Then she slid from the saddle and dropped the reins on the ground; that meant halt in place to the chestnut. It shuddered and twisted to sniff at its injury; she got out some ointment and treated the wound, soothed the animal with soft words and careful stroking. Then she cleaned the bloody saber and walked back to the ridge and crouched to look over it, drawing the sword through a balled-up rag without glancing down until she was sure it was clean. Nobody objected, although only officers were supposed to dismount.
There was a grim fascination in what happened below. The Saurons had halted for an instant when the wagons appeared, puzzled by the unfamiliar sight. Then the long flintlocks began to crackle from behind the timber shields, firing bullets the size of a small woman's thumb. One tall figure in field-gray dropped, then two more. The others went to ground and fired from behind what scanty cover the open plain offered. Single shots, but so close together that they might have been automatic, and the shields of the wagons rippled with the impacts. Triple layers of drillbit gut—drillbits ate rock—and inch-thick steelwood planks turned them; the rifles behind spoke with metronomic regularity at six rounds a minute. The folk using them might not have enhanced genes, but the weapons were as accurate as the Citadel-made copies of the ancient AK, and the marksmen keen-eyed and well trained. Ammunition was ferociously expensive and the People thrifty, but they didn't begrudge practice rounds.
It looked to be a curiously bloodless and remote way of war, compared to what she had just experienced. Shulamit winced at the memory of those blue eyes, so surprised. He was trying to kill me, it's only fair, she thought. Barak laughed beside her; she started. He was even quieter than Karl, when he wanted to be.
"Look," he said. "Behind them."
A line of dark figures; she squinted. Men on foot, loping along with bundles of javelins and short, massive recurved chopping knives.
"Gurkhas," she said. They were the only infantry in the Seven's host, and came from the Atlas Mountains not far from here. Very friendly to the People; haBandari merchants had helped their villages in a famine a generation ago, and often hired their young men as caravan guards.
"Bloody clever of Hammer," Barak said respectfully. "Even if the Saurons did go at it like a bull muskylope charging a gate in springtime."
"Won't . . . won't they just turn and finish off the Gurkhas?"
"No," Barak said, shaking his head. His eyes looked a little odd, shining redly with Cat's Eye light, as a cat's might. "They want us, Shuli."
Even the diminutive gave her a little pleasure; he was the Judge's son . . . well, sort of. And handsome. And smarter than Karl, even if he wouldn't believe her about Sigrid either. At nineteen T-years, Karl was such a boy sometimes.
"Because of Judge Chaya," Shulamit said, nodding wisely. The Seven would fall apart without her; Aisha's preaching had rallied the tribes, but it was the Judge they trusted.
"And because we're us," Barak said grimly. "That feud's as old as the Citadel. Right about now they're going to decide that it's worth the casualties to storm those wagons, and—"
Perhaps the Saurons had some ancient technology of communication still, or perhaps their senses let them call to each other without humans hearing it. Just then the whole line of Soldiers rose and charged, faster than galloping horses. Behind the wagons Sapper's hand whipped down, and the catapult cut loose with a whitbang of sound. The rear wheels jumped into the air—that had earned the device its name of jackass—and a barrel flew up into the sky, trailing a line of blue smoke from its fuse. The slowmatch ended just as the tumbling wood was halfway down from its apogee, about twenty meters up. The Saurons had seen it, had even thrown themselves flat again with supernal speed. It did them no good. The explosion was a massive crack in midair, black smoke with a winking eye of red in its center. The malignant wasp-whine of a thousand lead musket balls was louder. Din and dust spurted up from a broad circle as the metal shrapnel flayed the ground and everything on it
Half the Saurons rose again, some staggering with wounds that would have killed ordinary men; they met a crashing volley from the concealed riflemen, and another keg-bomb went lofting skyward, then a flurry of pottery hand grenades when the range closed. Barak was grinning like a cliff lion with its paws on a kill.
"Now we attack," he said. "A feint, a feint, a diversion—and then the real thing." They turned and slid down towards the waiting horses and their comrades." Up and at 'em!"
The first part of the battle had not been too bad, Temujin thought. The Saurons had stayed well back—the role of the Turks and Kossacki was to fix the enemy in place, after all. Dust clouds maneuvered across the western horizon, and Atanamir sent messengers to direct his tributary allies. After a while Hetman Oleg Cherninsky came riding up with a thousand or so of his men, horses blowing, many clutching wounds or reeling in the saddle. The Cossack chief might have a fat belly—covered right now with a chain-mail shirt—but he was a good rider. There was blood on the guardless saber in his right hand, and the small nail-studded shield in his left was hacked and battered.
"Slava bogdu!" he said, crossing himself as he halted in front of the Saurons. "They press us back; they are too many, and they fight like men possessed by wind demons. We just took a charge from those Jew devils—"
"HaBandari?" Anatamir said. "How many rifles?"
"No long guns, a few pistols, but their bows are fearsome. And they are all in full harness, while most of my men have only their tulups, their coats."
Atanamir nodded, then looked past the Kossacki. "Deploy there," he said. "We will support you."
Temujin had thought he knew battle. He'd fought before; he was used to the bang of muzzle-loading muskets, the arrows' whistle and hiss, groans from wounded men and shrieks from wounded beasts. But this—
He shuddered. The chaos that ravened around him might have been spawned by the thirteen terrible ayungghui-yin tngri, the tngri of the thunder. Mongols were trained to fear neither man nor beast (the training, in Temujin's case, had proved incomplete), but even the almost mythical Chingiz Khan of Terra, nearly a tngri himself, was said to have dreaded thunder. And why not? What man could contend against the heavens?
The steady, deadly chatter of the Saurons' assault rifles had been bad enough—one of them spat as much lead as a dozen of the longarms he was used to, maybe more.
But the Bandari had rifles, too, lots of them. Their black-powder blasts were deeper, more prolonged, less harsh than those of the Saurons' weapons. That in itself might have been comfortingly familiar—had he not been both unarmed himself and on the wrong end of the Bandari rifles, and had they not put out a volume of fire far greater than that of any black-powder weapons he'd known. Amazing clouds of smoke rose from the Bandari wagon-barricade. The sulfur stink of it drifted down the wind toward him, and the long reddish blades of the muzzle-flashes stabbed through it.
They also threw bullets worse than the round balls he was familiar with. A Sauron only a few meters from him went down with a groan, clutching his shin. Another bent to check him. "Shattered that bone to shit," he reported.
"Tell me something I don't know," the wounded Soldier answered, his face paler than Caucasoid genes alone could account for. "I'm not going anywhere any more. Have to do what I can from here."
What Temujin would have done from there was go into shock. But the Sauron rolled onto his belly and began banging away at the nomads and Bandari ahead. However much he had reason to hate them, Temujin had to admit the men of the Citadel died hard. They were stalled now, though; gone to ground to fire back, with one very unwilling Mongol to their rear. The Kossacki had scattered off to either side, wavering as the Bandari lancers struck and retreated, covered by their horse-archers. Beyond them, the White Sheep Turks were in a death grapple with the main body of the nomad horde . . . . Temujin rose to his knees, to see better, and to see if there was a way out of this hell.
A swag-bellied cylinder spun through the air from behind the Bandari riflemen. Blam! The blast from the powder-filled barrel knocked Temujin sprawling. Another one flew, and another. Blam! Blam! More reports sounded from farther away, where the White Sheep fought. Not only were the blasts deadly in themselves, they also spread panic through the ranks of the Saurons' hastily patched-together army. Men who would have stood against the most galling gunfire wheeled their horses and muskylopes and galloped for the rear. Some animals, maddened with fear, spun and bolted that way regardless of their masters' wishes in the matter. He writhed backward on his belly.
"Mewlip!" Anatamir called. "Gaurhoth! Now."
The two Saurons whom the leader had designated to bring word of possible defeat worked their way backward, out of the killing zone where their comrades were trapped between Bandari firepower and their own pride. He saw their faces as they passed, set and blank, concealing the pain it took to leave the field of battle—leave in defeat, to flee. Sauron discipline held them to it, and at a little distance they rose to run. Mewlip sped directly east, his comrade south by east, making for the Cossack village and the documents and samples cached there. They ran faster than horses, their field-gray uniforms almost invisible against the dark steppe. Byers' Sun was sinking, and Cat's Eye balanced the horizon like a giant red ball; wisps of high cloud surrounded it, like rays.
Before they were out of sight, a band of horsemen came charging in from the south, the left; Kossacki, and in full flight, boiling up heedlessly out of a long declivity in the steppe. Behind them and among them rode warriors unlike any Temujin had seen. Their horses were taller than most: they wore armor of overlapping mottled brown leather plates, rimmed with metal, and steel helmets. Their swords were less curved than was usual on the plains, their lances longer, and their odd chunky-looking bows seemed to have tiny wheels on the tips. They shot and hacked and stabbed among the fleeing enemy with a disciplined, methodical ferocity.
A Cossack wheeled his horse. "Na Umor!"
"HABANDAAAR!" A rider speared him out of the saddle with a lance. The lighter steppe pony went down at the impact of the big horse.
Then the whole mass dissolved as the Saurons opened up indiscriminately; the Kossacki crumpled, and the enemy—the Bandari, he realized—those who lived, turned and fled at the blatting call of a trumpet.
And some beasts were riderless. A shaggy pony paused near Temujin for a momentary blow. Two arrows stood up from the high-cantled saddle, which was wet with blood—rider's blood, by the looks of it. He looked at the pony. He looked at the Saurons. They were busy getting killed. Oh, they were doing a fine job of slaughter on their own, too, but the only way any of them would get out alive was to run away. The Bandari rifles came too close to matching their own, and there were too many of them. But running away wasn't how Saurons did things.
So . . . Very smooth, as if he weren't anybody in particular at all, surely no one a Sauron would be the least bit interested in, Temujin crawled over to the steppe pony. It rolled an eye at him and started to move away, but stepped on its own reins instead. A moment later, he was in the saddle. The pony didn't like him, but Temujin was used to that—steppe ponies didn't like anybody. Maybe they got it from being around camels too much. He hauled down on the reins. After a moment of snorting and trying to turn in circles, it obeyed him. Its likes didn't matter now. In another moment he was trotting east, away from flying pieces of metal that were trying to kill him.
"Thank you, Atagha Tngri, supreme over all, protector of horses, my tngri who gives me a mount to ride with my thighs," Temujin intoned. In just a few seconds now, he'd be away from the Saurons forever.
Off to one side, one of the men of the Citadel saw him, recognized him, swung toward him. A keg of gunpowder landed right beside him before he could squeeze the trigger of his assault rifle. When the smoke cleared, nothing was left, not even a corpse. The rest of the Saurons were leaping up for their death-charge; he saw a small figure he thought was Atanamir take three paces and fall, jerking time and again as he was struck by the flying lead.
"Thank you, ayungghui tngri," Temujin choked out. Maybe the thirteen thunder gods weren't so terrible after all. He kicked his heels into the horse's sides. Tired as it was, it was ready to gallop as long as he wanted to get away from the terrifying noises and smells of the battle.
Then he was in the middle of the rout, and no one cared about him any more: just one more fugitive among thousands. He couldn't have been a Cossack; they wore wool, not leather, and their fur caps were shaped like the top fifteen centimeters of a drum, whereas his looked more like a cowflop. But he could have passed for a White Sheep Turk unless someone noticed on which side his tunic closed. He was also wearing Sauron boots, a pair he'd been given at the Citadel in case he needed to guide the Soldiers on foot, something his high-heeled native footwear was very unsuitable for. He didn't think people would be taking note of such details right this minute.
"Now I need a weapon," he said. A gun, a sword, a toothpick—anything would have been an improvement on his present declawed state. The pony's saddle had a quiver and bowcase, but both were empty. Many of the fleeing men around him were weaponless, too.
The retreat washed back through the Cossack village and the thicket of encampments around it. Women ran shrieking among the huts and tents, some looking for their men, others cursing them for joining the Saurons and bringing this disaster down on the clan. Canvas and felt and thatch fell onto cooking fires, and the first tongues of flame licked up. A few men paused to swing women up behind them; most did not. The first bands of pursuers were thrusting recklessly among the fugitives, slashing men out of the saddle and dismounting to rummage among the yurts and buildings—less foolhardy than it seemed, when your foemen thought only of flight. Horses trampled wicker chicken coops. Squawking, screeching, fluttering birds and flying feathers only added to the insanity.
Out the other side of the village, blowing fluff off his nose. He wished he could have grabbed a hen. Even raw, he would have eaten it.
A hundred meters ahead of him, a Turk with a bloody wound in his back slid off his horse and crashed to the ground. He had a short musket slung over one shoulder and a saber on his belt. Temujin grinned. He brought his own mount to a halt, got down, and hurried over to appropriate the weapons. He thrust the scabbard through his own belt, checked the priming of the musket—it was loaded—and thoughtfully transferred a full pouch of Citadel-minted silver coins to his own coat pockets.
When he looked up fifteen seconds later, the steppe pony was trotting off with the rest of the rout, at a better clip than it had shown with him aboard it.
"Fuck you, Atagha Tngri!" he shouted to the uncaring sky.
Maybe the horse god would blast him for such blasphemy? . . . No, no such luck. Wearily, he started east on foot.
"Halt, dog!" the voice commanded in rough Turkic.
The Sauron boots were much more comfortable for running in; unfortunately, they conferred nothing of a Sauron's speed. Temujin dodged right, then left, arms and legs pumping. The lariat that settled over his shoulders jerked him off his feet and dragged him a dozen meters before the owner dropped it. Temujin spat dirt and struggled to a sitting position.
There were twenty or so in the party that overtook him; all hard-looking warriors, all on horses—itself a mark of status. Lean hawk-faced men with loose pugaree turbans around their heads and long beards, except for their leader with his iron helmet and nail-studded coat. Several of them rode off a little to one side to cover him with their bows. The chief pulled a pistol out of his sash and gestured with it.
"Lay down the weapons, pork-eating whey-faced son of a Turk," he said. His men were talking among themselves in another language. Farsi, Temujin thought. He hoped they wouldn't realize he was Mongol. The only Farsi speakers he knew well were the Tadjik tribes around Ashkabad, near his home . . . and they did not love their Mongol neighbors.
Moving slowly and carefully, Temujin put the musket down at his feet, then dropped his captured saber by it.
"The knife too," the chief said, a snag-toothed grin splitting his hairy face. "And the little knife in your boot; and if you have any others, when we find them we will use them on you, Sauron-lover."
"Why couldn't you be a pretty girl?" one of the others asked, leering, as he frisked Temujin. "Bhisti-sawad! Silver—look, brothers, good silver of the accursed spawn of Shaitan from the Citadel. They paid a high price for this whore's son's worthless sword arm." He backhanded Temujin across the face. "I'd still rather he was a girl."
The other Tadjiks hooted and laughed as the chief appropriated the purse and shared it out. One looked over at Temujin. "He'll do as well," he said. "Woman for duty, boy for pleasure, melon for ecstasy—and this one has a bottom like a peach." He made a grab for the area in question.
Temujin's hand snapped down to the wrist, twisted, wrenched. The Tadjik screamed in pain and staggered backwards; Temujin jumped clear and dropped into a fighting crouch, eyeing a leap toward his weapons—the Tadjiks had sheathed theirs. Most of them were laughing at their friend's discomfiture; one popped the dislocated limb back into its socket with a nerve-grating snap. The injured man reached for his saber.
Then the chief's words drove even that worry from Temujin's mind.
"Look at the son-of-ten-father's feet!" he snapped. "Those are Sauron boots." He spurred close, looking down at Temujin closely. "This swine's get is no Turk," he said. "Look at his tunic—he's a Mongol, or my name isn't Bakhtiar."
The Tadjiks' faces changed. "By Allah and the spirits," one said softly. "Didn't the spy say a Mongol rode with the Sauron dogs? At their heel, speaking often with their leader. A young man . . ."
Seat broke out on Temujin's face. Another noose settled over his shoulders, and the Tadjiks remounted.
"The khan must know of this," one said.
"The Seven?"
"If the khan orders."
Their leader smiled unpleasantly as he snubbed the braided-leather cord to his saddle. "You can wrestle, Sauron-lover," he said. "Can you run?"
The chestnut started, flicked her ears, snorted and danced a half-step sideways, bringing her head around with more energy than Shulamit thought was in her after the long day's pursuit. They were near the gateway of Cherninsky, the Cossack town. Not much of a town, earth wall and rammed-earth huts, in a little hollow that hardly deserved the name of valley, less than a thousand meters below the steppe. Flame belched skyward from within the shattered gates, along with screams and howls; men were staggering out of the gates, the wounded from the last fighting or looters with a good bit. Shulamit turned her head away from them, toward the heap of dead the chestnut shied from; poor pony, she'd had a hard day. The dead were Gurkhas, mostly, and a few Kossacki. They must have been good ones, to take that many with them; the little men with the knives were tough, even by haBandari standards.
Then the dead moved.
Fear brought her hackles up; it also raised her bow. The figure that struggled erect was nearly naked, except for a head-to-foot coating of blood. Gut slid free through his torn belly and broken bone showed in half a dozen places, but the face held a sculptured calm. He drove toward her at a quick hobbling run, pale eyes intent. Shulamit drew and loosed without aiming, snap-shot. It cracked his breastbone, sinking to the feathers on the right side; she could hear the wet popping sound of bone parting. He turned half away at the impact and a spray of blood came out of his mouth and nose, then stopped. He turned toward her again and came on, the same brisk lurch. Fumbling, she stripped another shaft from the clip and drew, loosed, again and again, the horse backing and rolling its eyes in panic. It squealed and reared in protest, then quieted in obedience to her legs and voice.
At the fifth arrow, he fell. His outstretched hand was almost to her stirrup. It opened and closed, clawing at the packed earth. The body twitched for minutes, for longer than it took to soothe her trembling horse into control. She dismounted and leaned against the chestnut, hugging the saddle and her warm horse smell, shaking a little until the velvety nose came around and prodded against her ear, and the thick lips nibbled at her hair.
"Ja, I'm all right," she husked, unslinging her water bottle and taking a drink.
It came right back up, with what little was left of her breakfast. She turned aside and bent over with hands on her knees, coughing and retching until the last of the bile was gone, then washed her mouth out again and took a swallow, cold on her raw throat. Then she set her mouth and walked back to the man. No, a Sauron. A soldati. No doubt of that, not when it took five arrows to kill him after he should have been dead for hours. No doubt from the face, either, all slabs and angles. like Sigrid's. Eyes the same silver color. She hesitated for a moment, then used her foot to turn the head away so she didn't have to look in his eyes while she did it. The saber came out heavy in her hand, painful where the calluses were worn with harder work than she'd ever done in training. She knew what she had to do.
Shulamit took the hilt in both hands for the first cut at the neckbone.
It was truedark before the celebration really got under way. They needed time to care for the wounded and sort the loot and clear up the worst of the damage here near Cherninsky, and to rest a little. The Cossack women and children were inside, allowed to surrender—there had been a screaming fight between Hammer and Judge Chaya about that—and were guarded by the Bandari presence. Not many outsiders were in this part of the camp, most of them feasting with their kin; a few at a time came to watch from the shadows outside the circle of bonfires, or to stare at the fifty-six Sauron heads that looked down blindly from poles. There had been many more spectators, khans and princes and warriors, a few hours ago. When Hammer-of-God Jackson stood beneath the heads on a wagon draped in the banner that carried the lidless Eye. Others of the Seven beside him; everyone had made speeches, and got endless cheers. Shulamit had liked Hammer-of-God's best
He'd pointed up at the heads fairly often as he loomed like an iron idol over the crowd. Shulamit had caught snatches of words: bear them before us . . . messengers to the tribes . . . lie of Sauron invincibility . . . headless in Hell . . .—and they had cheered him, crying hail to him and Judge Chaya and Aisha, and death to the soldati. Shulamit had been more interested in the kvass and clownfruit brandy going the rounds, easing her head and taking away the taste in her mouth. Now her head was spinning as she broke away from the dance circle, a little away from the great fires. She looked up into the sky, into the bright stars and three of the sister moons, watching sparks drifting across them like the spaceships of legend.
The assault rifle across her back hardly seemed real, but it was hers by right, now. Back at the fires they were singing as they stamped in concentric rings, not the happy songs but something older. Something from before the Empire of Man and even the CoDominium, from Earth the lost and lovely. A song of wars and terrors and hates a thousand years dead, and still living; perhaps that was why few of the gayam were here, they remembered too:
"Turn around and go back down
Back the way you came—
Can't you see that flash of fire
Ten times brighter than the day?
and—
Oh, Lord, the pride of man, broken in the dust again!"
A hand tugged at her sleeve. It was a girl, a Kurd—they wore no veils and were friendlier to the People than most—with a tray of muskylope ribs grilled in honey.
"You killed a Sauron, young ghazi?" she said in an awe-filled voice, looking at the rifle. Such a thing was worth a hundred fine horses. And it was fame more precious than that, to take a Sauron's weapon in battle.
"I finished him," Shulamit replied, taking the meat in both hands and ripping off a mouthful. This time it stayed down. "I brought Barak his head." It was beginning to seem real. One down, twenty-nine to go.
The Kurd peered closer, her jaw going slack. "You're a girl, too!"
"He's just as dead for all that," Shulamit said, grinning at the slight note of disappointment in the other's voice. "Run along and you'll find another ghazi to give you the kind of kiss you're looking for."
The Kurd grinned back at her. "A ghazi girl—good for us!" she said, and swayed off.
Off by the fires the circles had melted into two, one of women and a larger one of men; they moved clockwise and counterclockwise. Someone beat out the rhythm on a captured kettledrum. The women's high sweet voices soared like descant hawks about the harsh male chorus:
"Turn around and go back down,
Back the way you came—
Terror is on every side,
And your leaders are dismayed.
The mighty men we've beaten down,
Your kings we scatter in the waste:
and-
Oh, Lord, the pride of man, broken in the dust again!"
Shulamit listened, tearing at the flavorful meat with strong white teeth. An old song, but not often heard; Ivrit originally, and it woke memories some thought better forgotten. The Sauron heads looked down on it, desiccation already peeling their lips back from their teeth, making them grin at some private joke. She unhooked a flask from her belt and drank, eyes watering at the bite. The savage music suited her heart tonight.
"Turn around and go back down,
Back the way you came—
Take a warning to your peoples
That the Sword of God is raised!
and—
Oh, Lord, the pride of man, broken in the dust again!"
Another figure watched the celebration from the shadow of an overturned wagon, wrapped in a dark blanket. No mistaking the ash-pale hair as she stared up at the poles and the captured banner. Two hounds sat at her feet, their eyes glinting red in the firelight, like their mistress'.
"Turn around and go back down
Back the way you came—
See Babylon, that mighty city
Rich in treasure, wide in fame
We have brought her towers down,
Made of her a pyre of flame.
and—
Oh, Lord, the pride of man, broken in the dust again!"
Red in the firelight, Sigrid's eyes turned toward Shulamit. Moving away from the light and falling into shadow. The Bandari girl tossed the bone in her hand toward the dogs; they ignored it, growling, as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and rested it on the butt of the Citadel-made assault rifle.
"One down, twenty-nine to go," Shulamit said again, baring her teeth. It was as unconscious as the dogs' gesture, and as sincere. Silence answered her, and she jerked her head toward the fires and the singers, as their voices united for the last verse. "You should listen: Babylon is fallen. And so is Old Sauron, and there's a curse on her seed. Where are our enemies, Pharaoh, Romans, Germans, Philistine, time out of mind? Ashes on the wind—as the Citadel will be."
For answer she had only silence, still, and the gleam of Sauron eyes.
Living Sauron eyes.
Living—for now.
She turned on her heel and walked off; Barak stood apart from the fires as well, brooding with his own rifle in his hands. Brooding on his heritage, perhaps . . . . He looked up and smiled as she approached. Behind her the sound swelled as the rings halted and raised their linked hands:
"Thy holy mountain be restored—
Thy favor on Thy People, Lord!"