There were interesting possibilities here, he mused. Teela, the tanner’s daughter, had drowned last month while bathing. If he could find her amid the flaming pits he might satisfy a curiosity which had grown increasingly hungry these last three years. . . .
A distant sound, like night birds rustling in the bushes, came to him.
Erin managed to shake his head, focusing on that remarkable sky overhead. The dull eye of a full moon stared down at him without comment.
A moon in hell? Wait, now. For a few moments, he muzzily fought with the possibility that he wasn’t dead. Impossible. He had to be dead.
There was death all about him. He could smell it.
Wait. He could feel, and hear, and see . . .
I’m alive!
He gathered his strength, and pushed against the thing on his chest. It was flesh, dead flesh, and as his senses continued to return, he realized that it was horse flesh. In fact it was the very horse he had brought down, now dead and stinking, and lying partially atop him.
With returning awareness came a pulsating, engulfing tide of pain. He was alive, but injured, perhaps badly. Fear rose up to clutch at him, and at the peak of its grasp he felt younger than his sixteen summers. Then he remembered that he was Erin! Erin the Warrior! Brother of Steel Tooth, the champion of his tribe! He had to survive.
He stared into the filmed eye of that dead horse, the one good eye glaring at him accusingly as he struggled from beneath its awful weight. He wrestled with that dead thing for an eternity. Time and again he thought that he had reached the end of his strength. Then with a wrench and a lunge, he wriggled out a few more inches, and lay there panting, gazing up into that cold, uncaring sky.
“Damn you! I thought I was dead! Didn’t have to—uh\ Go through this . . . uhhl Any damned more! Wretched Horseclans can’t even . . . damn! . . . kill a boy!”
Finally—wonder of wonders! He kicked himself free and rolled panting onto his side, weak and sick and spent.
He flailed one arm out to the left, and it struck a corpse. He snatched it back, hissing, then took a closer look.
It was a Crow warrior—what was his name? Sky! That was it. Sky of the ready laughter and pretty wit. That wit was silenced forever now. He lay cold beneath the stars, his slashed throat slit into a ghastly pair of rubbery wet red lips that grinned as if whispering a final, dreadful jest.
Erin pried a spear away from Sky’s stiff dead fingers and used it as a makeshift crutch, levering himself to a sitting position.
His legs ached horribly, the stabbing pain of returning circulation almost more than he could bear. Erin clamped his mind down on the pain and began rubbing his calves, gritting his teeth as new blood brought pain from the abused muscles. The knee was wrenched, damaged, and Erin cursed fluidly.
Erin the Warrior would endure! Survive! And return in triumph! He couldn’t let the pain or fatigue or anything else stop him.
The world swam. He was very weak, but feeling finally returned to his legs. He rolled over, each bump of his leg against the ground a source of new pain. The haft of the spear was wet in his hands, clammy with his own sweat. It slipped in his hands as he levered himself erect. He blinked hard, praying for his wavering vision to clear.
He stood in the middle of the marshes, the recent battlefield, the middle of the disputed land between the Crow and the Horseclans. Killsister, the river that brought life to this desolate land, ran sluggishly here. It soaked into the ground to create the marsh, the richest hunting ground for a hundred miles. On the marsh lived wild ponies, a hundred species of fowl and the terrible moor boars—night scavengers, fighters, and Crow delicacy.
It was a place of life and death, flesh and fantasy. “Don’t wander onto the marsh at night,” his mother had warned, long, long ago. “There’s things such as a madman never dreams, shadow things, evil things that come down from the mountain at night, looking for them that walk alone. ...”
Killsister Mountain, mist-shrouded and impenetrable, loomed over the battlefield like a dark god, laughing at his pain and fatigue. Miles north lay the camp of his people, the Crow.
Somehow, he had to reach them.
His face was cut and torn, his left knee flamed, his ribs were bruised and cracked, but he was alive. The wonder was that Hezros’ steed had not damaged him more! It was easy to believe that his kinsmen had thought him one of the dead.
His mind was clearing, and the memories fell more clearly into place, arranging themselves like fragments of a child’s puzzle.
Yes . . .
They had been two days fighting, without sleep, without rest, and it had finally come to the final charge. Erin stood, prepared for that moment, anticipating a glorious death. To be slain on the battlefield, sur-
rounded by the bodies of your comrades! To die dealing death to the enemy chieftain! He would live forever in the sacred songs of his people.
And that day, death had come to countless hundreds. Crow warriors, whipped into a frenzy, threw themselves at their foes with berzerker frenzy. Horse-clansmen pierced by Crow pikes had been driven screaming to their knees, blood flowing freely from their mouths.
And the greatest of them had been the one they called Hezros, the giant warrior from the south. What a demon! It was Crow custom to acknowledge the greatness of an enemy, even one as treacherous as the Horseclansman Hezros, who had called for parley and then slaughtered all who advanced under the white flag.
It seemed strange, alien, that foes who fought so well, died so bravely on the battlefield could act so cravenly in the dead of night. But so it was, and so it had been since before Erin had been whelped. The feud had burned, and would continue to burn until one clan or the other was no more. There would never be peace between Crow and clansmen as long as Killsister connected their lands, as long as the Horseclans ambushed Crows in the Killsister marsh.
Erin investigated a couple of the nearest bodies, trying to determine whether either of them retained life. One, a Horseclansman, stared back at him, face already puffy and blackening with death.
There were insects in the eyes, picking, eating. And beneath the eyes, beneath the chin, was a slashed throat that mirrored Sky’s wound. Erin shook his head in disgust.
As far as he could see, he was the only living human being for miles. Hundreds of bodies stretched out: twisted, broken, limbs splayed in every direction. They lay in heaps and stacks and small sad bundles. Bodies crushed, bones splintered through the flesh, staring eyes that could not, would not ever see again.
The wind whistling down from the great mountain laughed at his musings, promised a gift of dark secrets before the night ended.
Erin fought the surge of weakness. Fought the urge to just lie back down and let death take him. He froze his thoughts: he simply had to make it home. His people needed him.
When the pain and the fear began to dissipate, he realized that his stomach was utterly empty. Hunger, anesthetized by adrenaline and pain, roared awake. Feeling a bit ghoulish, he scavenged the pouches and belts of the men around him, managed to find some beef jerky. He hunched there, watching and chewing. There was nothing moving, nothing making a sound.
He tore a waterpouch from a dead man’s grasp, sloshed it and found it half full. He drank deeply, splashed some on his face and then lashed the pouch to his belt. He ripped belts from two of the corpses and wrapped them around his left leg, below and above the knee. It was torn, but he thought that he could walk on it—he had to walk on it. He had to make it home, to the north, through miles of marshy ground.