Robert Adams - Horseclans' Odyssey

For all his intentness toward his victim, Nahseer heard the creak of the door and the pad of swift footsteps behind him, but before he could turn, his chest was filled with a white-hot, agonizing pressure. He tried to scream, but his lungs would take no air. However, even as a murky, steaming, spiraling red blackness seemed to infuse him, he took the last step forward and drove his dripping saber unerringly into the body of the screaming man trapped in the angle of walls.

The intruder jerked the broad blade of the spear out of the back of the naked warrior as he fell. But before he could take even a single step toward the down-spiraling stairs, his right thigh was struck hard, penetrated by something that felt to be as huge and hurtful as the gore-splotched wolf spear he had just used. Nor would the leg support him longer, but still he tried to crawl to the stairhead.

But it was too late for him. Soldiers of the guard—all armored and with bared blades—came stomping and clanking up the stairs, while from behind him, from the level above, came striding another naked men. This one was tall and deep-chested, and where the speared saberman’s skin had | been uniformly the dark brown of an old saddle, the skin of this one was pinkish-fair where not weathered darker by sun and wind. He bore in his big right hand a bared longsword, and a bedsheet had been hastily wound and wadded about his left hand and forearm.

Beside him was a small, fine-boned young woman—looking tiny beside his tall massiveness. Her long, red-blonde hair hung loose down her back, and she was as naked as her companion, save for a bracer of metal and leather on her left forearm. In her right hand was a short, thick hornbow and also a couple of black-shafted, steel-headed war arrows, mates to the one which the intruder now could see had so cruelly skewered his thigh.

All three of the soldiers closest to the intruder raised their swords to end his life, but the big, nude man spoke.

“No! Before this one dies, I’ll have at least one answer, though I think I know it already. Someone take that shaft out of him, bind his wound and his hands and take him below. I’ll be along presently to question him.”

Somehow, sometime, without his being aware of it, it had begun to rain. A soft rain, it was, but insistent. It made gurgling noises as it trickled down the creases in the felt roof of the yurt to splash gently onto the grass below.

Both he and Stehfahnah had turned in their sleep, so that they two now lay on their left sides, legs slightly flexed, nestled together like two spoons, the top of her head under his chin, so that his throat was sunk into the gossamer-soft wealth of her hair.

Carefully, so as not to disturb his sleeping wife, Martuhn placed his arm about her small body, just beneath the swell of her pointed breasts, and gently drew her body closer to his own. Then he relaxed, to let the sounds of the rain lull his senses and the waves of sleep wash over him. And just before that sleep at last reclaimed him, he thought, “It took me near forty years of my life, but I did finally find the happiness that good old Wolf always said would someday be mine. Here, in a felt tent, on a cowhide stuffed with grass, with this dear, sweet child-woman in my arms, I’m far happier than is any duke in his stone-walled palace or his silken bed. “I wonder if my… if our sons’ will ever appreciate the truly good life to which they’ll be born.”

Then Martuhn joined his Stehfahnah in sleep.