Blood Brothers of Gor (44 page)

Certain psychological factors, also, in this type of situation, tend to favor the attacker. As a target's attention tends to be absorbed in avoiding one attack it is less prepared to react efficiently to another. This is a moment within which the target may find itself within the lance range of the next rider. This type of formations is generally not useful against an enemy which is protected by breastworks, pits or stakes, or a settled infantry, its long pikes set, fixed butt down in the turf, the weapons oriented diagonally; the points trained on the breasts of the approaching mounts. It is also generally ineffective against other cavalry for its permits a shattering and penetraition of its own lines. It tends to be effective, however, against an untrained infantry or almost any enemy afoot. The archer, struck by the rider, spun to the side, the lance blade passing through his neck.

"White men!" I herd.

"Turn about!" cried Mahpiyasapa. "Fight! Defend the camp!"

The lines spun about and the men of Mahpiyasapa, whooping and crying out, dust scattering, sped back under the ropes and between the lodges to engage this new enemy. I held my position.

The white men were undoubtedly the mercenary soldiers of Alfred, the mercenary captain of Port Olni. With something like a thousand men he had entered the Barrens, with seventeen Kurii, an execution squad from the steel worlds, searching for Half-Ear, Zarendargar, the Kur war genderal who had been in command of the supply complex, and staging area, in the Gorean arctic, that which was being readied to support the projected Kur invasion of Gor. This complex had been destroyed. Evidence had suggested that Zarendargar had escaped, and was to be found in the Barrens. Once Zarendargar

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and I, in the north, as soldiers, had shared paga. I had come to the Barrens to warn him of his danger. Then I has fallen salve to the Kaiila. A wagon train of settlers, with which Alfred had joined forces, had been attacked. A massacre had taken place. Alfred, however, with some three to four hundred mounted men, leaving most of his command to perish, had escaped to the southeast. From the southeast, I remembered, the kailiauk had come early. From the southeast, too, had come the Kinyanpi.

Earlier I had conjectured that Alfred and his men had returned to civilization. I now realized that was false. Somehow they had come into league with the Kinyanpi and perhaps through them, and in virtue of some special considerations, the nature of which I suspected I knew, been able to make contact with, and enlist the aid of, Yellow Knives. A fearful pattern had suddenly emerged. The discipline of the Yellow Knives now became more meaningful. So, too, did their apparent willingness to fight in the half darkness of dusk. Suddenly, too starkly plausible, became such untypical anomalies of the Barrens as the meretricious proposal of a false peace, the spurious pretext of a council in order to gather together and decimate the high men of the Kaiila, and even the unprecedented sacrilege of attacking a people at the time of its great dances and festivals. These things spoke not of the generalship of the Barrens but of a generalship alien to the Barrens, a generalship of a very different sort of mind. Even so small a detail as the earlier, small-scale attack of the Kinyanpi now became clear. It must have been indeed, as I had earlier conjectured, an excursionary probe to determine the test defenses, before the main force, held in reserve, was committed. The generalship again suggested that of the cities, not of the Barrens, that of white soldiers, not red savages.

I looked wildly back toward the Yellow Knives. As I had expected they were now advancing. Their feathered lances were dropping into the attack position. Their kaiila were moving forward, and gradually increasing their speed. By the time they reached the camp the kaiila, not spent, would be at full charge. The Yellow Knife lines were now sweeting past the creature which had emerged earlier from their rank. It stood in the grass, the warriors sweeting about it. It was some eight feet tall. It lifted its shaggy arms. It was a Kur. We would be taken on two fronts.

Behind me there was fighting. I turned about, I saw soldiers cutting down portions of the ropes and cloths.

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"Kinyanpi!" I heard. "They are coming again!"

"It is the end," I thought. "The Kurii had won." The Kurii, now, allied with the Yellow Knives, and supported by the Flighted Ones, the Kinyanpi, could systematically serch the Barrens, unimpeded in their serch for Zarendargar, and if an entire people, the nation of the Kaiila, should stand in their way, then what was it to them, if this nation should be destroyed?

I heard the whooping of the Yellow Knives growing closer.

I then turned my kaiila and rode toward the back of the camp.

Chapter 29

HOW IT CAME ABOUT THAT GRUNT SURVIVED

A slave girl screamed, buffeted to the side by a forequarters of my kaiila. She turned, struck, from the animal, her hands tied behind her back, lost her footing and fell. I saw the frightened eyes of another girl, her wrists lifted, bound together with hair, thrown before her face. The hair that bound them hung free before the wrists, dangling from them, in jagged strands, marking where it had been hastily cut free from the hair of the girl before her in a holding coffle. Her own hair, similarly, had been cut short, closely, at the back of her neck, where the girl behind her, with swift strokes of a blade, had been freed.

"Run," a free woman was screaming. "Run! Seek you safety!"

I saw another free woman cutting at the hair of other kneeling beauties, freeing them from the cruel hair coffles, that they might flee as best they might.

Another woman was cutting the bonds at the ankles of another lovely slave. That slave's ankles had been bound more conventionally, with tight thongs of rawhide. Wen the thongs sprang apart, leaping from the knife, I saw deep red circles in the girl's ankles I doubted that she would even be able to rise to her feet for a few Ehn.

I pressed my kaiila forward, through the crowd.

I saw Oiputake to one side.

"Where is Cotanka?" a girl was crying out. "I am the slave

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of Cotanka! Where is Cotanka!" It was she who earlier, in effect, had functioned as a lure girl. I had captured her. As Cotanka had accepted her as a slave, she had been spared, at least for a time.

I heard a girl beneath me scream as the paws of my kaiila passed over her. I could see another girl, too, ahead of me, to my right, lying on the ground, trembling. There was the mark of a kaiila paw on her back. Other riders, earlier, had passed this way.

To my left and forward, a great section of the overhead netting had been cut down. Some slaves were there, standing or kneeling in the fallen mesh. It was not a capture net, of course, but a mesh designed, in effect, to provide a camouflage against, or a distracton for, overhead archers. The slaves, thus, were not entrapped. I thought it might be a reasonably safe place for them to be. Teh Kinyanpi, presumably, would not be likely to fire on a nude white slave any more than on an unmounted kaiila. Both would fit not inot the category of enemy but rather into the category of booty. It would be a greater danger, presumably, for a girl to hide in a lodge where, perhaps being mistaken for a free person, she might be struck by arrows, the skins of the lodge cover perhaps being riddled from abofe by the swift, flighted riders. I thrust with my lance upward, through the netting, driving it through the body of a soldier, cutting at it. He fell across the netting, then tumbled through it. Then I was beyond the area of the slaves.

The battle, I saw, at an instant's glance, was hopeless.

I heard the heavy vibration of a cable of a crossbow. A Kaiila warrior pitched backwards off his kaiila.

I heard screaming of a free woman.

"Run!" cried a man riding past. "Run!"

I looked back. The Yellow Knives would have to make it through the confusion of slaves.

"Yellow Knives are coming!" I cried out, pointing back. "Yellow Knives, to the west!"

Mahpiyasapa looked about, wildly. Then he fended himself from a lance attack.

A dark shadow hurtled past. My shield lifted, I deflected an arrow from above.

A child ran past.

"Form lines," cried Mahpiyasapa. "To the east! To the west! Women and children between the lines!"

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I saw Hci, with an expert thrust, past the buckler of a soldier, drop the fellow from his saddle.

The whooping of Yellow Knives was then upon us. We were cut into small groups, our lines shattered. The battle became a tangled, bloddy melee.

I saw Cuwignaka rolling in the dust, his kaiila gone. I turned my kaiila against the forequarters of a riderless mount, pressing it toward Cuwignaka. Cuwignaka was on his feet, blood about his head. A Yellow Knife, afoot, rushed upon him, knife raised. The gappled. Tehn the Yellow Knife fell backward, blood at his throat. Cuwignaka, a knife ran with blood in his hand, blood on his hand and wrist, too, stood in the dust. I lost sight of him as two warriors passed between us. Then I had my hand on the jaw rope of the riderless kaiila and dragged it, snorting and squealing, to Cuwignaka. He yanked free a lance from the body of a fallen Yellow Knife. He was then in an instant, on the back of te animal I had brought him, and in command of it.

I saw Mahpiyasapa fell a Yellow Knife with his lance. "Shields overhead!" I cried. A hail of arrows fell amongst us. Then great wings smote the air above us, the air tearing at our cloths, rasing dust in affrigted clouds on the field.

"I am here!" called Cuwignaka.

"I am going to find Grunt!" I cried, through the dust. To my left I saw a child run through with a soldier's lance. I saw two women running wildy through the dust.

I struck aside a lance and urged my kaiila toward where Grunt had been tending the wounded.

The area here was like a charnel house. The grounds were covered with the twisted bodies of the slain and mutilated. I wondered if any had escaped. Lodges, even, though not all of them, had been thrown down and burned.

"Aiii!" I heard. I lifted my shield but the Yellow Knife, his eyes wild with fright, rode past, his braids flying behind him.

"Something over there," said Cuwignaka, half a kaiila length behind me, pointing.

We urged our mounts up a small rise, and then down, partly, over it. Here, too, we found the bodies of men who had been wounded. Too, hee, among them, were even bodies of one or two of the woman who had been, with Grunt, tending to them.

"Grunt is alive!" I said.

Grunt, bodies about his feet, stood on a small rise.

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"Away!" Grunt was crying, waiving his arm aversively, at two Yellow Knives, mounted, looking at him. "Away!"

In the slaughter it seemed that only Grunt, and Wasnapohdi, too, protected by him, crouching behind him, her head down, the jaw rope of a kaiila clutched in her two hands, had not been killed.

The two Yellow Knives, suddenly, turned about and sped from Grunt.

I choked back a wave of repulsion.

I recalled that long ago, even before I had come to Kailiuk, near the Ihanke, or Perimerter, I had questioned a young man, a tharlarion teamster, as to how it was that Grunt, of all white men, at that time, was permitted to travel so far and with such impunity in the Barrens. "Perhaps the savages feel they have nothing further to gain from Grunt," the young man had laughed. "I do not understand," I had said. "You will," he had said. But I had never understood that remark, until now.

"You see why he is still alive," said Cuwignaka. "It has to do with beliefs about the medicine world."

"I think so," I said.

I moved the kaiila down the rest of the shallow slope, toward the small rise on which Grunt, WAsnapohdi behind him, stood. When Grunt had come into the Barrens he had had with him, among his other trade goods, a coffle of slaves. Although these women had been lovely he had not make use as far as I knew, of any one of them. He had, on the other hand, invited me to content and relieve myself with them as I would, expecting little of me in return other than that I would handle them as what they were, slaves, and prepare them, to some extent, for they were new slaves, for their furture tasks, those of providing a master with exquisite, uncomproised pleasure and service. He had had me teach even the virgins their first submissions. One such had been the former Miss Millicent Aubrey-Welles, the debutante from Pensylvania, who was now Winyela, the slave of Canka, of the Isbu Kaiila. At tht time I had never dreamed we would one day be owned by the same man. It was now clearer to me, as it had not been before, why Grunt had not performed these tasks himself.

"Greetings," said Grunt.

"Greetings," I said.

"Now you see me as I am," said Grunt. "Do not attempt to conseal your repulsion."