Гарри Тертлдав - The First Heroes

"Too soft," Hylaeus said. He carried a fine old sword, leaf-shaped, as green with patina as growing wheat save for the cutting edge, which gleamed a little darker than Oreus's axe blade. "Bronze is better, and the sphinxes, gods curse them, are bound to have a great plenty of it."

Oreus brandished the axe once more. "Just have to hit harder, then," he said cheerfully. "Hit hard enough, and anything will fall over." With a snort, Hylaeus turned to me. "Will you listen to him, Cheiron? Will you just listen? All balls and no sense."

If this does not describe half our folk—oh, far more than half, by the Cloud-Mother from whom we are sprung—then never have I heard a phrase that does. "Hylaeus is right," I told Oreus. "With tin to harden their weapons properly, the sphinxes will cause us more trouble than they usually do." And Oreus turned his back on me and made as if to lash out with his hinder hooves. All balls and no brains, sure enough, as Hylaeus had said. I snatched up my own spear—a new one, worse luck, with a head of copper unalloyed—and would have skewered him as he deserved had he provoked me even a little more. He must have realized as much, for he flinched away and said, "We'll give the sphinxes some of this, too." Then he did kick, but not right in my direction.

In worried tones, Hylaeus said, "I wonder if what they say about the Tin Isle is true."

"Well, to the crows with me if I believe it's been overrun by monsters," I replied. "Some things are natural, and some just aren't. But something's gone wrong, or we wouldn't have had to do without tin shipments for so long."

Looking back on it, thinking about the Tin Isle while we were camped out not far from the sphinxes' stronghold, in the debatable land north and east of their river-valley homeland, seems strange. This is a country of broiling sun, and one that will never match or even approach the river valley in wealth, for it is as dry as baked straw. Only a few paltry folk dwell therein, and they pay tribute to the sphinxes who hold the land as a shield for their better country. Those folk would pay tribute to us, too, if only we could drive away the sphinxes.

They found us the next morning. Keeping our camp secret from them for as long as we had struck me as something of a miracle. With their eagle-feathered wings, they can soar high over a battlefield, looking for a fight. And so this one did. Hideous, screeching laughter came from it as it spied us. They have faces that put me in mind of our own shes, but lengthened and twisted into a foxlike muzzle, and full of hatred—to say nothing of fangs.

"Now we're for it," I said, watching the accursed thing wing off southward, listening to its wails fade in the distance. "They'll come by land and air, bedeviling us till we're like to go mad."

Nessus strung his great bow. When he thrummed the bowstring, he got a note like the ones a he draws from a harp with a sound box made from the shell of a tortoise. "Some of them will be sorry they tried," he said. Nessus can send an arrow farther than any male I know.

"Some of us will be sorry they tried, too," I answered. I had not liked this expedition from the beginning and never would have consented to it had I not hoped we might get on the scent of a new source of tin. That seemed more unlikely with each league farther south we traveled. Wherever the sphinxes got the metal to harden their bronze, it was not there.

But we were there, and we were about to pay the price for it. I had put out sentries, though our folk are far from fond of being so forethoughtful. One of them cried, "The sphinxes! The sphinxes come!"

We had enough time to snatch up our weapons and form the roughest sort of line before they swarmed upon us like so many lions. They are smaller and swifter than we. We are stronger. Who is fiercer . . . Well, that is why they have battles: to find out who is fiercer.

Sometimes the sphinxes will not close with us at all, but content themselves with shooting arrows and dropping stones and screeching curses from afar. That day, though, they proved eager enough to fight. Our warbands seldom penetrate so far into their land. I suppose they thought to punish us for our arrogance—as if they have none of their own.

The riddle of the sphinxes is why, with their wings and fangs and talons, they do not rule far more of the land around the Inner Sea than in fact they hold. The answer to the riddle is simplicity itself: they are sphinxes, and so savage and vile and hateful they can seldom decide what to do next or make any other folk obey them save through force and fear. On the one hand, they hold the richest river valley the gods ever made. On the other, they could be so much more than they are. As well they do not see it themselves, I suppose.

But whether they see it or not, they had enough and to spare that day to send us home with our plumed tails hanging down in dismay. Along with their ferocity and their wings, their bronze weapons won the fight for them. Oreus practiced his philosophy, if you care to dignify it with such a word, when he hit one of the sphinxes' shields as hard as he could with his copper-headed axe. The metal that faced the shield was well laced with tin, and so much harder than the blade that smote it that the axe head bent to uselessness from the blow. Hit something hard enough and . . . This possibility had not entered into Oreus's calculations. Of course, Oreus is not one who can count above fourteen without polluting himself.

Which is not to say I was sorry he was part of our warband. On the contrary. The axe failing of the purpose for which it was intended, he hurled it in the startled sphinx's face. The sphinx yowled in pain and rage. Before it could do more than yowl, Oreus stood high on his hinder pair of legs and lashed out with his forehooves. Blood flew. The sphinx, screaming now rather than yammering, tried to take wing. He snatched it out of the air with his hands, threw it down, and trampled it in the dirt with all four feet.

"Who's next?" he cried, and none of the sphinxes had the nerve to challenge him.

Elsewhere in the field, though, we did not do so well. I would it were otherwise, but no. Before the day was even half done, we streamed north in full retreat, our hopes as dead as that lake of wildly salty water lying not far inland from where we were. The sphinxes pursued, jeering us on. I posted three hes beneath an overhanging rock, so they might not be easily seen from the air. They ambushed the sphinxes leading the chase as prettily as you might want. That, unfortunately, was a trick we could play only once, and one that salved the sore of our defeat without curing it.

When evening came, I took Oreus aside and said, "Now do you see why we need tin for our weapons?"

He nodded, his great chest heaving with the exertion of the fight and the long gallop afterward and the shame he knew that that gallop had been away from the foe. "Aye, by the gods who made us, I do," he replied. "It is because I am too strong for copper alone."

I laughed. Despite the sting of a battle lost, I could not help laughing. "So you are, my dear," I said. "And what do you propose to do about that?"

He frowned. Thought never came easy for him. At length, he said, "We need tin, Cheiron, as you say. If I'm going to smash the sphinxes, we need tin." His thought might not have come easy, but it came straight.

I nodded. "You're right. We do. And where do you propose to get it?"

Again, he had to think. Again, he made heavy going of it. Again, he managed. "Well, we will not get it from the sphinxes. That's all too plain. They've got their supply, whatever it is, and they aren't about to give it up. Only one other place I can think of that has it."

"The Tin Isle?" I said. Now he nodded. "The Tin Isle. I wonder what's become of it. We paid the folk there a pretty price for their miserable metal. Why don't their traders come down to us any more?" "I don't know the answer to that, either," I said. "If we go there— and if the gods are kind—we'll find out, and bring home word along with the tin."