They came to a deep gorge lit on both sides by bonfires, where a lonely guard post secured a suspension bridge over a cascading stream. Three torch-bearing men in bronze armor stood at attention as Epone and Captal Waldemar crossed the swaying structure. Then the soldiers led small groups of prisoners over, bracketed by amphicyons.
When they resumed their march, Richard told Felice, “It’s after four. We been losing time fording the creeks.”
“We’ll have to wait until we get far enough away from that damn guard post. I hadn’t planned on that. There are more than three soldiers manning it, count on that. Epone will be able to send them a telepathic call for help and we’ve got to be sure they’ll get to us too late. I want to wait another half hour at least.”
“Don’t cut it too fine, sweets. What if there’s another post? And what about the scouts ahead who light the beacons?”
“Oh, shut up! I’m juggling factors until I’m dizzy trying to optimize this thing. Just be sure you’re ready… Did you lash it firmly to your lower arm?”
“Just like you said.”
Felice called out, “Basil.”
“Righto.”
“Would you play some lullaby tunes for a while?”
The notes of the woodwind rose softly, soothing the riders after the brief anxiety caused by the bridge-crossing. The double file of chalikos and their flanking bear-dogs now moved among titanic black conifer trunks. The trail was soft with millennia of needle duff, muffling their passage and sending even the most uncomfortable riders into a doze. The track rose gradually until it was more than a hundred meters above the Lac de Bresse, with occasional sheer drops to the water on the caravan’s right. Too soon, it seemed to Felice, the eastern sky began to lighten.
She sighed and pulled down her hoplite helmet, then leaned forward in the saddle. “Basil. Now.”
The Alpine climber played “All Through the Night.”
When he finished it and began again, four amphicyons went charging soundlessly to the head of the procession and hamstrung Epone’s chaliko with simultaneous slashes of their teeth. The exotic woman’s mount uttered a heart-stopping shriek as it went down in a welter of dark bodies. The bear-dogs, with barking roars, leaped upon Epone herself. Soldiers and the front ranks of prisoners gave shouts of horror, but the Tanu slave-mistress did not cry out.
Richard thumped his free feet against his mount’s neck and held tightly to the reins as the creature took off. He galloped into the midst of the quartet of soldiers trying to come to the assistance of Epone. Waldemar was shouting, “Use your lances, not the bows! Lift them off her, you stupid bastards!”
Richard’s chaliko reared and crashed down upon the captal, knocking him from the saddle. A figure in white robes and a black veil leapt down as if to help the fallen officer. In the moment that Waldemar took to gasp astonishment at seeing a mustache on a nun’s face, Richard slipped Felice’s little dirk from its golden scabbard and pressed the steel blade home twice below the two corners of Waldemar’s jaw, just above the gray metal necklet. His carotid arteries severed, the captal clutched at the false nun with a bubbling cry, gave a peculiar smile, and died.
Two riderless chalikos were thrashing together in the semi-darkness, inflicting ghastly wounds upon one another with-their huge claws. Replacing the dirk in its sheath on his forearm, Richard seized the dead officer’s bronze sword and backed off, cursing. There were confused shouts and a long scream of pain from the tangle of amphicyons and armed men. The two soldiers of the rear guard came pounding up to assist their comrades One of the men charged with lance couched, spitting a small bear-dog that dashed in from the side and hoisting it high into the air. Then another hulking form came darting among the mounted guards, snapping at the heels of the enraged, screeching chalikos.
Felice sat her beast, motionless, as though she were merely a spectator to the carnage. One of the ronin, heels drumming the shoulders of his mount, rushed into the free-for-all and hauled back on his reins. The chaliko reared and brought its scimitar claws down onto the rump of a soldier’s animal. The Japanese warrior, shouting an ancient battle cry, forced his own mount to ramp again and again with terrible driving blows that crushed the soldier and his chaliko into the tangled mass already on the ground. The second ronin came up on foot and grasped a lance from its scabbard on the fallen man’s saddle. “A bear-dog! Behind you, Tat!” Richard yelled.
The warrior whirled around and braced the spear on the ground as the amphicyon leaped. Transfixed through the neck, the animal body continued forward on momentum and crushed the ronin named Tat beneath its great bulk. Richard ran forward and stabbed the struggling monster in its near eye, then tried to haul it off the warrior. But someone shouted, “Here comes another one!” And Richard looked up to see a black shape with gleaming eyes not four meters away.
Felice gazed impassively at the fight, her face almost hidden within the T-shaped helmet opening.
The charging amphicyon swerved away from Richard and ran over the edge of the steep embankment, squalling in midair and striking the water with a tremendous splash. Basil and the knight Dougal rode their mounts impotently around the edge of the bedlam of noise, hesitating before the flailing bloody claws and struggling shapes. Ripping off the impeding veil and wimple, Richard picked up another lance and tossed it to Basil. Instead of stabbing with it, the climber hoisted the thing like a javelin, threw, and hit one of the soldiers high on the armor of his upper back. The point of the weapon skidded up beneath the man’s kettle-helmet, penetrating the base of his skull. He fell like a bag of sand.
Felice watched.
No more bear-dogs came from the shadowy perimeter. All that were left alive were busy worrying something lying next to the body of a dead white chaliko. A single soldier stood upright among them, hacking slowly at the snarling amphicyons like some freshly painted red automation.
“You must kill him,” Felice said.
They could not find any more lances. Richard ran to the mounted knight, handed up his bronze sword, and pointed. “Take him, Dougal!”
As if in a trance, the elegant medievalist grasped the weapon and waited for a suitable moment before riding into the mass of dead and dying animals and men. He decapitated the futile chopping figure with a single blow.
There were two bear-dogs left alive as the last soldier fell. Richard found another sword and prepared to stand his ground if they came after him; but the creatures seemed seized with a kind of fit. They backed away from their prey reluctantly, giving vent to agonized howls, then turned and went leaping to their doom over the edge of the lakeside cliff.
The sky was becoming rose-colored. There were gagging sounds and hysterical sobs as the stunned prisoners, who had been herded into a compact group by Claude and Amerie during the embroilment, now came slowly forward to look. Noises from dying chalikos were cut short as the surviving ronin went about with a dispatching sword. The first morning notes of song sparrows, simple and solemn as Gregorian chant, echoed among the lofty sequoia trunks.
Felice rose up in her saddle, arms wide, fingers grasping, head in its plumed helmet thrown back as she writhed, cried out, then slumped back inertly against the high cantle.
The Japanese bent over the gory carcass of the white chaliko. He grunted and beckoned to Richard. Numbed now, feeling only curiosity, the former starship captain went stumbling into the fleshly wreckage, hindered by his incongruous nun’s garb. On the ground amidst the bodies was a hideously gnawed limbless trunk swathed in bloody rags. The face was torn to the bone all along one side, but the other was still beautiful and untouched.