She rolled the map, and put it carefully away in the case. "Then what stops men from escaping over it?" she asked.
Ware gave her a sardonic stare. "Really," he said, finally, as his horse stirred restively beneath him. "Xylina, can you in your wildest imaginings picture very many men who had the strength, resources and fortitude to cross the territory we have over the past two days? Alone? With no provisions? And with more of the same awaiting him on the other side? And why would such a man want to endure such privations?"
"But I had thought that there were men waiting beyond the borders for the runaways-" she began.
Ware laughed, softly. "Oh, there are those waiting for runaways here. Tiny tribes of nomadic horse-warriors, who are only too pleased to capture these strays and add them to their own slave-strings. No, Xylina, men who escape this way soon find themselves wishing that they had stayed at home, for if they experienced hardship at the hands of their mistresses, what they find at the hands of these Pacha horse-warriors is near to torture."
Nomadic horse-warriors. No one had warned her about those. She looked back at her little train, and wondered how formidable it would look to barbarian raiders. Were twenty-four men enough? Did they look like hardened fighters? And they were afoot; they could not escape mounted men by running. For a moment, she wavered, and fear crept into her heart.
Ware was continuing to eye her, with a wry smile on his lips. "They will find you just as tempting a prize, my dear," he said softly. "Any of the Pacha chieftains would be pleased to have you in his tent-properly leg-shackled, of course. Your beauty is rare among the Mazonites; among the Pacha you would shine like a moon-flower among chickweed. A chieftain would claim you as his pleasure-slave immediately."
Her head jerked up, and she looked down her nose at him indignantly. "And you would do well to remember who is the mistress here, demon," she snapped. "No unwashed barbarian is going to touch me and live to tell his nomadic kin!"
With that, she gave the signal to Faro to move out, and urged her mule to the head of the column, ignoring Ware's rich chuckle as he guided his horse in behind hers.
She was in the process of conjuring the camp defenses when the first of the Pacha appeared over the horizon.
She had taken into consideration the fact that they were horse-fighters when she built the defenses. The first defense was a tangle of razor-sharp wire all around the camp, waist-high, and too wide (she hoped) for a horse to jump. Immediately behind it was a stretch of pointed metal stakes, slanted outward, no more than a hands-breadth apart. No horse was going to care to approach that! And if for some reason their attackers passed both those barriers successfully, there was an inner defense, a shallow ditch filled with oil, that could be lit to create a final barricade of smoke and flame. Ware assured her gravely that no horse could be persuaded to jump into fire.
For the camp itself, she had conjured silk and very long, flexible poles, which could be bent over to form a dome-shape, the silk stretched over all and pegged to the ground with stakes. The men had already obtained water from a nearby creek, and she had conjured water for washing, fuel for the fire, and oil for lamps and torches. As the sun neared the horizon, the men had been divided into work-parties; some to set up the tents, some to help the cook with the dinner and fire, some to light lanterns and torches, the rest with other camp-chores.
She looked up from her conjurations, alerted, perhaps, by a hint of movement where none had been the moment before, and saw the Pacha watching her. They were lined up on a low ridge, sitting easily on their horses, as if they were on couches.
She had never seen anything like them before; even the attempts by entertainers to ape "barbarians" paled before these men in their wild magnificence. She wondered what kind of magic they had, or if they had any at all.
They rode small, rangy horses, hardly bigger than ponies, but whose manes and tails streamed nearly to the ground. The horses' manes and tails were braided with beads, strips of wildly-colored cloth and ribbons, and feathers. The beasts themselves were painted with markings in red, yellow, black, and white-spots, circles about the eyes, arrows, and lightning zig-zags. They had nothing on their backs in the way of saddles, only bright red and blue blankets, and a simple loop of rawhide rope around the nose seemed to serve their riders for reins and bridle both.
Their riders were naked to the waist, wearing only the simplest of breechcloths of red and blue cloth, their bodies and faces painted with the same symbols as their horses. Around their necks they wore a tangle of myriad necklaces made of bright beads, bones, teeth, and claws. Their hair was as long and wild as their horses', worked into hundreds of tiny braids, each one ending in a bead or a bone. Xylina wondered how they had come up upon her so silently, for they should have rattled like an entertainer’s sistrum. They boasted long, braided moustaches as well. Hair and skin was the same brick-red as the raw red earth of this place. Without the breechcloths, or with one of plainer stuff, one of these warriors would blend into the landscape so well that he could creep right up to the boundary of the camp without being seen.
In their hands they bore long lances, topped with wicked points of black, shiny serrated flint that gleamed with reflected sunlight. She could well imagine the kind of damage those lances could do, for the many "teeth" on each lance-head were made to break off in a wound. These lances were cruel weapons, designed to mutilate if they did not kill. There were quivers of smaller, obsidian-tipped throwing-spears at each rider's knee, and on their backs they bore bows and quivers bristling with white-fletched arrows.
Determined not to show that she had been unnerved by their sudden appearance, Xylina completed her conjurations, and then stood with arms crossed, waiting for them to make a move.
At length, after a long period of exchanged impassive stares, during which the entire camp became aware of the Pacha’s presence, some imperceptible signal passed among them, and they nudged their horses with their bare heels and moved toward the barricade as one.
The men of the camp dropped whatever they had been doing, and moved to stand behind Xylina at the ready. Ware came up beside her on her right and Faro on her left, and they watched with her, as the entire cavalcade made its leisurely way toward her first barrier. They did not move their ponies out of an ambling walk.
Then again, why should they? The Mazonite party obviously wasn't going anywhere.
"I don't suppose they speak Mazonite," she said, doubtfully. "Do they?"
"Hardly," Ware replied dryly. "These are warriors. It is beneath them to speak your language, for their own is so clearly superior. However, I speak theirs."
"As do I," Faro interjected, with a glance that was not quite a glare at the demon. "It was part of my training as a scribe to learn the languages of the nations around Mazonia. I have not had the benefit of speaking with a native, but I would imagine I can at least understand them, and make myself understood."
Ware said nothing, although this was clearly a warning from Faro that if the demon intended any trickery, he had best give the notion up for the present. Xylina almost smiled, for if the situation had not been so tense, it would have been funny. Faro was determined to protect her from Ware's treachery.
As the riders neared, she saw something that astonished her. Some of the riders had small, but well-rounded breasts, the nipples painted with concentric rings! There was no doubt of it, and this was not the kind of deformity that came when a man was neutered. Unless the men were terribly deformed at birth, or were some kind of hermaphrodite, there were women riding as warriors among them!
"Are those women?" she whispered to Ware. "These warriors-do they have women among them?"