Robert Adams: The Coming of the Horseclans

Sometime within the last twenty years, the original forward face of the south slope had slid down toward the new road, leaving the area on which Milo’s nomads were making their stand. Before them was a sheer drop of twenty-odd feet. The soldiers would be able to scale it, but with difficulty. From the foot of this scarp was a thirty-degree, pebble-strewn slope, culminating in a jumble of rocks and smashed and uprooted trees. There was no cover worthy of the name on the pebbly slope, so Milo and his men saved their dwindling supply of arrows until the first line had reached this ready-made deathtrap.

A few of the men in the first line reached the foot of the scarp where they crouched helplessly, safe from the arrow-hail but too few in number to mount a frontal attack against who knew how many Western barbarians. Most of the first wave lay twitching or dead between their line-of-departure and their objective. A few had made it back to the questionable safety of their original position, where they awaited the reinforcement of the second wave. Atop the scarp, most of the arrowcases were empty and—as the cavalry archers had ceased fire for fear of felling their own—the nomads were scrabbling among the rocks, searching for undamaged shafts to supplement then- own meager supply. Then came the second wave and, though they broke it, too, Milo knew with certainty that they’d not break the third. He had one arrow, Mara had two, and the others had less than a dozen among them. To save time later, he drew his saber and buried its point in the leaf-mold within easy reach. Then he turned to Mara.

“You have fought well, Mara. It is not right you should die a slave. Move your leg so I may reach your ankle.”

“Wait, Master.” She laid her hand on his arm. “Horse-killer is coming. He and many, many of his kind and … and there is a … another very near, but… but different.” Her brow wrinkled.

Milo started. “Do you wish, woman, or do you … ?” Then, faint with distance, “I come, Friend Milo. The female’s mind is even easier to range than yours. I come with many cats. Swimmer is with Friend Bill, while the young ones and the pregnant or nursing ones guard the camp. The rest are with me. I come.”

Milo closed his eyes and devoted every ounce of concentration to the beaming of one word. “Hurry!”

Then, his mind relaxed and receptive, he caught the vague shadow of a thought. Slowly, it gained strength. “The female … and the one called Milo . . , you are truly the friends of cats?” The mindspeaker was close.

When Milo affirmed his friendship with the Cat Clans, the mindspeaker went on. “Then, I shall try to aid you. I, too, hate Blackhairs. They killed my kin. I am the last. It is good to mindspeak again. It has been long and I was beginning to become an animal. I am old now, and not so fast as once I was, but what I can do, I will do. Wait.”

Only there was no more time for waiting. The third wave had formed and, leaping the bodies of their predecessors, were pouring up the hazardous slope. Sure of reinforcement, the handful of men at the scarp-foot were already beginning to seek handholds and pull themselves up toward their quarry. Milo loosed his last arrow, dropped the now-useless bow and picked up his heavy saber.

An arrow hissed by his ear and he instinctively ducked. The archers had advanced to the moraine and were once more bringing them under fire. Further down, at the very lip of the scarp, two of the nomads stood and began to heave at the huge, jagged rock which had been sheltering them. It gave a little, then abruptly slipped from its centuries-old niche, to drop straight down the scarp-face, hurling a couple of climbing soldiers to their deaths and crushing another as it bounced toward the moraine. When it struck the base of the rock wall, two hundred cubic yards of earth and stone dissolved and began to pour after it with frightening speed, taking three nomads and an undeterminable number of soldiers with it. The entire scarp quivered and Milo started to call his surviving men to quit it, but at that moment, the first cavalryman pulled himself over the rim, almost directly before Milo and Mara.

She struck first and, as the bearded trooper parried her blow, Milo severed the man’s right arm, just below the elbow. Holding the bloody stump and screaming, the soldier turned and stepped into space. When he struck the ground, his screams ceased. Then it was a maelstrom of hack and slash and thrust, of kicking the faces which came into view and stamping the hands, feeling the bones crunch under the boot heels.

For a moment, there was respite, even from arrows, for the archers had run out and had to send back to the horselines for more. While Milo and Mara and the four surviving nomads watched helplessly, their attackers reformed behind the moraine and a troop-strength contingent separated from the distant squadron to trot toward the scene of conflict. Meantime, the unemployed archers occupied themselves by dragging or carrying the wounded that lay on the slope back beyond the moraine.

After a brief pause to get their breath, Milo and the others hastily scrounged for arrows, being rewarded with a score of relatively undamaged shafts. The nomads thought to save them for the coming attack, until Milo pointed out that, except for those lost in the landslide, all their companions had been slain by those same archers, who were presently busy on the slope and well within range of Horseclan bows. When the archers had fled—leaving fourteen of their number dead or dying on the blood-slimed avenue of attack—Mara sped a shaft which spitted both cheeks of a junior noncom, who had been shouting instructions to the massing survivors of the earlier assaults. At this, they elected to form farther down the embankment, nearer to the horselines, which their reinforcements were quickly approaching.

All at once, the riderless horses commenced to mill and stir, nervously tossing their heads and stamping, their eyes rolling in fear. Then, with a blood-chilling snarl, two hundred pounds of grizzled feline fury launched itself from the lower reaches of the forest and landed atop the nearest cavalry mount. Though the cat attacked the animal viciously, it made no attempt to kill. The screams of the stricken horse panicked the others and, jerking their reins from the grasps of the horse-holders who were trying to remain on their own bucking mounts, they sped to the four winds. Some half-dozen bore through the formation of dismounted men, bowling them over and stamping out lives beneath heedless hoofs. Most of the frantic herd, however, careened into the ordered ranks of the advancing troop. The cat was still riding the leader of this herd and the sight and smell of him was enough to plunge most of the troop’s horses into a state of equal panic. Beyond the disordered troop, the cat adroitly turned his gashed and bleeding “mount” and “rode” through them a second time, now headed back toward the road. At the road’s edge, a dismounted archer loosed a hurriedly aimed shaft at the cat. It took the horse at the base of the throat and, as the stricken beast stumbled, the cat launched himself onto the stupidly-staring archer, slamming him onto his back as the long, cruel teeth crunched out his face. Bounding from his kill amid a hail of arrows, the cat sailed twenty feet to disappear into the woods from which he had emerged.

“I have done what I could, Cat-friend-called-Milo.”

“And well was it done!” replied Milo. “I will care for your kittens and females and vouchsafe you a clean death, when your teeth have dulled and age rests upon you.” Milo recited the ancient cat-human alliance formula.