for Strongsea who bellowed, 'The beggar's given me fleas!'
A chorus of laughs resounded, but was interrupted by?
'Look there! One's getting away!'
A thrum of unshod hooves shook the air. From a bend down the gully there exploded up a sandy slope a brown horse with a gray orc astride. A piebald pony, riderless, squealed and pelted alongside. The orc, clinging desperately, whipped the horse with a club, topped the slope, and bolted into the grass. Barbarians yelled and grabbed for bows. Strongsea flicked up his, shot, hit the riderless horse, and dropped it, but, whipped by the frantic orc, the other horse was gone.
'Bastards!' grumbled Kindbloom. 'No one told us they rode horses!' Sunbright agreed it was news to him. He'd thought horses shied from orcs, if only from their stink.
A sniffling arrested Sunbright, and quickly he dodged to the children. Crabbranch already hugged the little boy close, and Sunbright wrapped his arm around the girl's shoulders. 'You're safe,' he cooed, 'you're safe.'
'I know,' the girl sniffed, trying to rub her eyes without showing it. 'I wanted to kill them too!'
'Then we'll get you a real sword, not a wooden one,' said Sunbright. The child's smeared face lit up, terror forgotten. Patting her head, the shaman walked for the stream to swish blood off his blade — then stopped cold. He walked to a dead orc, and flipped it over with a boot toe. Slope-skulled and gray, hairy and knobby, the orc was clad in a faded smock gray with filth and campfire smoke. But the breast sported a bright sigil, a large red hand with fingers splayed. Freshly painted.
'Ugly as a rat's rump,' spat Knucklebones, then noticed his face. 'What?'
'This sigil,' Sunbright mused, 'brings back memories. The red hand is-or was-the blazon of the One King. A messiah king from the east, they said, who'd bring peace and prosperity, promote goodwill among the speaking races. We once met a party of orcs who invited us to tea! Their starry-eyed leader rambled all night of how wonderful the world would be once the One King ruled it. But when I was hauled before the king I, uh, lost my temper and tried to swipe his head off. I only dented his skin. He was a lich in disguise, an undead lord with big plans.'
'And?' Knucklebones said. 'Did you kill him, for Mystryl's sake?'
'Hunh? Oh, no. A red dragon tore down the wall and crisped him. Weren't even ashes left. I thought the king's crusade would die out, but later I met fools flocking to his banner. They wouldn't believe he was dead. And here's an orc with the symbol fresh-painted. And they carry steel weapons, and ride ahorse. Odd behavior for orcs…' The shaman shook his head and squeezed Knucklebones's shoulder. 'Good fighting.'
The part-elf beat her knuckledusters as if testing them. 'I must be getting soft,' she complained. 'I had to hit him twice.'
The war party picked up the steel tools, left the orcs for the wolves and foxes, boosted one another up the sandy bank, and swished through tall grass, the rescued children in their midst. Someone ragged Magichunger about the two slipping past the guards to swim. 'Pick guards who aren't blind this time!'
The war chief gestured obscenely, but grinned back, 'Barbarian brats can slide under snakes! But we'll put you on point, Blackblossom.' Laughter answered.
The tribe cheered the rescued and rescuers. The war party hooted back. Sunbright turned from the group to descend a defile. 'They can have the glory. We'll take the dirty work.'
Scrambling up the opposite bank, they helped Strongsea and Crabbranch skin the dead horse. It was a brown and white piebald growing a thick winter coat. Sunbright plied his belt knife to slice the mask from the long skull.
Knucklebones felt the coarse mane, clucked, 'I'm glad for the meat, but this seems such a waste. You can ride horses, you know. I've never done it, but it would make more sense to work these beasts than just chop them up. From horseback, you could round up wild cattle and deer, even attack a mammoth, I should think.'
'Naw,' Strongsea said as he sliced raw liver, offered everyone a piece, and chewed bloodily. 'Riding's a soft southern custom, for sissies. Barbarians walk. We only harness reindeer, and we ain't got none.'
'We kayak,' put in Crabbranch. 'This hide would make a fine boat.'
Sunbright agreed. 'I've been ahorse a few times body-guarding pack trains. I bumped like a gutted deer and walked like a duck for days.'
'I know it's an art,' Knucklebones insisted, 'and takes time to learn, but in Karsus we had parades with cavalry brought up from the ground, and those men and women rode like centaurs. The horses obeyed their every whim. Their helmets shone like the sun, and the horses wore blue coats with bells around the hem. They're such pretty animals.' She sliced the tail intact from the rear of the hide, stroked it absently. 'You'd never seen an orc ahorse before. Why not a barbarian?'
Strongsea and Crabbranch exchanged glances at this heresy, a break with tradition. Sunbright offered, 'We get along fine walking.' But inwardly, a germ of an idea took root. Something he'd have to think about…
Returning to the war party with meat bundled in the piebald hide, Sunbright squeezed Knucklebones and steered for his mother's travois. Monkberry sat on their bundle like a round lump, smiled crinkly at her son and his tiny, exotic lover, but winced as she rose. 'How much further must we go, son?' she asked.
The shaman stared at the western horizon, calculating, then said, 'I'm not sure. The distance is almost double that from the Horn at the Channel Mountains to Oxbow Lake along the tundra. We've been out, uh, thirty- two days. Perhaps another twenty? Why ask, mother?'
'Oh,' she puffed, 'walking the world over is fine for young folks, but my poor feet are worn to the knee. It'll be good to find a rock to sit on.'
Sunbright laughed, 'You'll have rocks, mother, if I have to trudge to Northreach to fetch one.'
'If we had horses,' Knucklebones cooed, 'we could build a bigger travois and you could ride.'
Monkberry shook her head, and stated, 'Barbarians walk. It's always been that way. I'm good for a few more leagues yet.'
Shouldering the harness, now piled with thirty pounds of raw horse meat and hide, Sunbright leaned far forward to get started. 'Come on, then. The sooner we walk, the sooner we arrive. I need to find my mother a rock.'
The band passed deeper into the prairie, which now began to rise steadily, several feet in every mile. They saw no more ancient animals, mammoths or saber-tooths, and twice passed stands of poplar trees. Several times the tribe skirted ridges too steep to scale with leather soles. The mountains and forest were not far off.
With the good news came bad. Orc raids came more frequently. A woman gathering water was shot in the back by a crude arrow. The Rengarth beat the brush but never found the killer. One night three southmen, half- starved, bearing swords and scraps of armor, were caught rifling the food and were immediately cut down. Hunters found game clumsily butchered, so they paired up for protection. Once, at dawn, a pack of thirty or more orcs howled a battle challenge, hoping to stampede the tribe. When near two hundred fighters screamed back, the orcs melted into gullies. Two hunters were bushwhacked later, with only their heads recovered.
'I've never heard of orcs on the prairie, and suddenly they're thick as fleas,' Sunbright mused. 'Iceborn and Tulipgrace only recall it once, ages ago, when drought burned the highlands. What's got them on the prod?'
'The One King?' asked Knucklebones. 'You saw the red hand on that big war party.'
'The king's dead, and not coming back. I saw him blasted by dragon fire. Flagstones under his feet melted. Still…' Guessing got them nowhere, and they had to continue at any cost.
Then one afternoon a hunter pelted through the grass. From her empty hands, they concluded she'd routed an enemy. Magichunger hollered, 'To arms! To arms!'
But this news was good. Panting, Firstfortune pointed wildly northwest, and gasped, 'I–I've seen it! F-From a ridge top! Sanguine Mountain! Red as blood down a black cleft! Two days' walk. We're almost there-'
Cheering drowned out the rest. Sunbright grabbed Knucklebones and his creaky mother, and spun them both till they gasped. The tribe pushed on till dusk, threw up a hasty camp, then convened to discuss plans. Sunbright had little to say, instead listened to notions both fantastic and practical, glad his people had new ideas to share.
The next afternoon, the peak of Sanguine Mountain topped the grass. Two days later, they saw the whole mountain, and others beyond it, gray and solemn marching to the sky, while a counterpane of green shot with orange and gold and red cloaked their stony feet.
In the last mile, someone hollered and streaked forward. A child ran after, soon outstripped by two more
