“War!” I cried, and gestured downward, toward the plaza of training. The sky was ours, the ground was not.
With a laugh Torgus then, with a declination of his lance, followed by that of his bannerman, followed by the twenty, in its four prides, in its ranks, that twenty which was his personal guard, swooped downward to join the fray below.
Oddly, some of the invaders about the camp seemed unaware of the catastrophies that had overcome so many of their fellows.
This sort of thing, however, is not unknown in combat. Often one thinks a battle is won because one is successful in one’s own narrow corridor, on one’s own plot of ground, while a few hectares away it has been overwhelmingly lost. It is often difficult to know what is happening anywhere but where one is at the moment. A skirmish can be won and a battle lost, and a battle can be won while a war is lost. The weathers of war are not only difficult to predict, but are often, and sometimes for days, difficult to ascertain. The tale of the past is often told only in the future.
Looking downward I saw a swooping, riderless tarn seize a fellow in its talons and beat its way upward. Commonly the tarn strike breaks the back of the verr or tabuk, and then it begins to feed, while the animal is still alive. Sometimes it seizes the animal, carries it to a height, and then releases it, and then descends to feed. To one side I heard a long, wailing cry and saw a fellow dropped from some two or three hundred feet to the ground below, the riderless tarn, reverted without its rider, then descending to feed. Elsewhere another riderless tarn was pinning a fellow to the earth with one taloned foot, and striking at him with its beak. Then it had an arm loose and the ground about, to thrashing and screaming, was muddied with blood. Some of our tarns, most perhaps, had been captured in the wild. Lord Nishida, in his attempts to conceal his project, or to at least reduce a cognition of its extent, had wished to avoid any unusually large purchase of domestic tarns. There were many free now, however, on the plaza of training. Some of my men, dismounted, apparently oblivious of the fact that elsewhere fighting might still be raging, were gathering them in.