The horse was to the figure in the snow almost instantly. The figure, trying to evade the charge, lost its footing in the snow, staggering, stumbling. It struggled to keep its balance. The lance thrust down. The Herul cried out in frustration. The figure in the snow, lurching, had managed, but barely, to turn the thrust with the flat of the blade. The horse wheeled. The figure in the snow felt the heat of its body, fiercely, its oily pelt, the fur-clad boot of the rider. The figure, buffeted, was struck to the snow. The sword was gone. The figure rolled from beneath the descending, clawed feet, the claws tearing in the snow. The rider wheeled the horse away, and then, again, aligned it, bringing it back once more to the attack line. The figure was now, again, on its feet, wary, hands out, the snow to its thighs, the sword somewhere to the side, somewhere inches beneath a dark cleft in the snow, not within reach, not before the horse, and the lance, could reach it. The horse, sped forward by the spurs, its flanks bleeding, charged, frenziedly. The figure evaded the thrust, forcing it up with a movement of his right forearm. At the next wheeling, and thrust, the figure, again buffeted, caught the lance behind the blade. The rider, startled, thought briefly to contest the possession of the implement, to struggle for it, to cling to it, but the shaft might as well have been rooted in the ground as be in whose grasp it was, and the rider suddenly found himself, as his horse shied to the left, unbalanced to the right, and he released the weapon, and grasped for the pommel of the saddle, and, in a flurry of snow, kicked up by the mount, half slid from the horse. As the horse turned, again, confused, wheeling in the snow, a hand on the Herul’s jacket tore him from the mount and flung him on his back in the snow. The Herul, down in the snow, perhaps a foot or more deep, doubtless half blinded by snow, may not have seen the lance lifted over him. Its point splintered away, stopped only by the icy ground. The startled mount, which had now veered away, its flanks bleeding from spur wounds, was gathered in by the formerly dismounted Herul. In an instant, he was in its saddle, bending over, seizing a lance from the snow where he had thrust it a moment before. The figure from the sledge stood for an instant near the downed Herul. The formerly dismounted Herul, now again mounted, was now back with the leader of the Heruls, and the other Herul. There were, then, three Heruls, all mounted. In the chest of the downed Herul, the lance shaft stood upright. It was like a marker, distinct against the snow. The figure hurried to the depression, or slit, or cleft in the snow and felt downward for the sword, and, in a moment, lifting it, cold, had it in his two hands.
The three would charge, in a coordinated fashion. He could see the leader, some yards away, with gestures, and quick words, organizing the attack. He had, perhaps, three or four seconds in which to act. He had no realistic expectation, afoot, armed as he was, of successfully resisting the coordinated attack of three such horsemen. These creatures were Heruls. Many learned to ride, clinging to a neck strap or harness, before they learned to walk. Peoples such as Heruls had given rise, long ago, on diverse worlds to tales of centaurs, and such creatures, creatures which were at one time man and horse, so much one with the mount they were. Imperial cavalry, if similarly armed, would not meet them in the field.
Four horses lay in the bloodied snow, one headless; one dying, disemboweled; one hobbled, with a broken leg, it snapped, broken against the hobble, in its earlier alarm; and one wounded, that whose body had been partially shielded by the leg of its rider, he dying in the snow to one side, the leg lost at the thigh, and the girth strap.
The figure in the snow tore his way to the wounded horse, seized its bridle near the jaws, cried out, kicked the animal, jerked its head upward, twice, and the horse, squealing, got its legs under itself and staggered up to its feet, turning, unsteady, eyes rolling, its paws, wet, crusted with ice, trampling its own blood down into the snow.
Almost at the same time the first Herul made his passage, but the horse was now between them.
The same-line attack is often used against an enemy afoot. Two riders, or more, are required for its prosecution. It is supposed that the first passage may fail of its mark, and particularly against an agile, ready foe. But the first rider, if he is evaded, in effect sets the target for the second rider. For example, if the target, seeking to avoid the first lance, moves to, or is moved to, a given position then that, of course, determines the line of the second rider, following closely on the heels of the first. With three riders, of course, the probabilities of a hit are considerably increased.
The second rider, too, plunged past, he, too, following as closely as he did, unable to move to the opposite side of the horse.
The leader of the Heruls, pulled his horse up, and it reared, squealing, scratching at the air.
The first two riders turned their mounts, the animals struggling in the snow.
The figure who had been in the snow was then on the back of the wounded horse.
At a call from the leader the two Heruls, urging their horses through the snow, rejoined him.
There was no saddle on the newly mounted fellow’s horse as it had been lost in the earlier stroke.
The weight on its back, and the activity of movement, freshened the blood on the horse’s right side.
Its rider, the newly mounted fellow, unfamiliar, strange to the horse, surely not a Herul, had learned something of horsemanship on a distant world, Vellmer, an imperial world, at the villa, or holding, of a citizen of Telnaria, one Julian, of the Aurelianii, a patrician, even of the senatorial class. He had even practiced riding bareback, for one might not always have time to saddle one’s horse, and had, in the saddle and bareback, familiarized himself with the lance, light and shock, and the scimitar and saber. But it is one thing to approach targets, and practice the address, the parry and thrust with the lance, the wielding of blades, of diverse weights, lengths, and curvatures, such things, from horseback, against wands and garlands, and quite another against men, and yet another, surely, against creatures such as Heruls. His lessons had not been, at that time, learned in the school of battle, the most pitiless of houses of instruction. He was not at that time a horsemen, not in the sense that worlds, and even Heruls, would know him, and fear him, later. He was at that time young, a very young man really, though with a terrible maturity for his age. He was, at that time, no more than a creature of dreadful, awesome promise. Too, the animal was unfamiliar, and wounded. Yet, even so, the Heruls drew back.
“It is an Otung horseman,” said one of the Heruls. He had met Otung horsemen long ago, in the spring and summer of 1103, in the chronology of the imperial claiming stone, set up in Venitzia, when Venitzia had been no more than a small military camp.
The new rider retained the long sword. Its flat was across the back of the animal.
The leader of the Heruls, too, remembered the Otung horsemen, those of the Otung Vandals.
“Do you remember them?” asked the Herul who had first spoken.
“Yes,” said the leader of the Heruls.
“They fought well,” said the Herul who had first spoken.
“Yes,” said the leader of the Heruls.
“They were very brave,” said the Herul.
“Yes,” said the leader of the Heruls, holding in his mount. Then he drew a circle in the air.
“Yes!” said the third Herul, elatedly.
The Otung horsemen, though valiant, had been, with their massive horses, dense formations and shock tactics, no match for the illusive, swarming, lighter-armed, more mobile Heruls, appearing, disappearing, attacking, drawing back, striking from behind, shifting the point of attack, hanging on the flanks, choosing the time and place of war, engaging only when it was to their advantage.