movement along the edge of the forest as the legionaries slung their axes and swords and bows, and took up instead the slavers’ wooden clubs.
Huy and Lannon hurried to the command position at the centre of the line, shrugging off their cloaks and flexing cold muscles.
Huy looked out across the sleeping town and the smell of it was wood smoke and cooking food and human excrement, a great sour smell of humanity that wrinkled his nostrils. The town was silent except for the lonely barking of a cur, and the petulant wail of a sleepless baby.
Huy said softly, ‘The time is now.’ And Lannon nodded. Huy turned and gave the order to one of his centurions and the man stooped over a clay fire pot and blew flame to life on the bunch of pitch-dipped rags that tipped the signal arrow. When the flame had caught and blossomed he notched the arrow and loosed it in a high arching parabola against the dark sky. From along the line the signal was repeated, orange flame soaring briefly in the darkness, but the silence was unbroken and the town slept on.
‘They have set no guards, no picket, nothing,’ Lannon remarked scornfully.
‘They are barbarians,’ Huy pointed out mildly.
‘They deserve slavery,’ Lannon said.
‘They will fare better as slaves than free men,’ Huy agreed.
‘We will dress them and feed them and show them the true gods.’
Lannon nodded. ‘We have come to lead them out of the darkness and into the sun.’ And he shifted the heavy slaving club into his right hand.
From the east, appearing suddenly out of the edge of the forest, stampeded a mass of bellowing, maddened cattle. On their horns burned torches of pitch and grass, behind them they dragged flaming dry branches and they were driven by their own terror and by a line of yelling whooping warriors. The whole scene was hellish with dust and smoke and flame. The line of cattle crashed into the town, knocking down the flimsy grass huts, leaving fire to bloom and spread in their wake, trampling the sleep-drugged naked Vendi that stumbled into their path. Behind them ran the warriors, clubbing down the survivors and leaving them lying in the hoof-churned dust.
Huy heard a steady climbing wail from the town, the sound of thousands of terrified voices. He heard the drumming of running hooves and saw the explosions of yellow flame and sparks mount into the night sky as the tinder-dry huts burned.
‘Hold your line,’ he called to the men in the darkness around him. ‘Leave no gaps in the net for the fish to slip through.’
The night was filled with movement and sound and flame. The flames spread quickly lighting the scene with a great flickering orange light, and the Vendi darted and milled and screamed as the grim line of marauders moved down upon them. The clubs rose and fell and the sound of the blows against bone was that of woodsmen working in a forest. They fell black and naked, and lay in the glaring firelight, or crawled and wriggled and wailed.
One woman with her infant clutched to her breast saw the relentless line bearing down on her, and she whirled like a doe startled from covert and ran into the tall bellowing flames of burning thatch. She burned like a torch, her hair exploding, and she screamed once and then fell scorched and unrecognizable into the flames. Huy saw it, and his blood madness cooled, congealing into revulsion and disgust.
‘Hold!’ he shouted. ‘Lighten your blows!’ And slowly out of this terrible confusion order emerged. The slave- masters were there ordering the captives into squatting lines, the infantry swept the town clear, and the flames burned themselves out, leaving only black mounds of smoking ash.
The dawn came up, a red and angry dawn - across which drifted banks of dark smoke. When Huy led the praise chant to Baal, the cries and wailing of the captives rose with the voice of the legion.
Huy hurried through the devastation ordering and organizing the retreat. Already two cohorts under the young Bakmor had started back towards the great river driving an uncounted herd of captured cattle before them. Huy guessed there might be as many as 20,000 head of the scrubby little beasts. Bakmor had Huy’s orders to swim the cattle across the river and return immediately to cover the retreat.
Now his concern was to get the slow unwieldy columns of slaves moving. The approach march that his legion had made in half a day and night would surely take two or three days on the return. The newly captured slaves must be chained, and unaccustomed to their bonds they would move but slowly, retarding the march. Every hour’s delay was dangerous, and would make the heavily encumbered legion more vulnerable to attack or reprisal.
One of his centurions accosted him, his tunic blackened with smoke and his beard singed. ‘My lord!’
‘What is it?’
‘The slaves. There are few young men amongst them.’
Huy turned to examine one of the masses of squatting black humanity. They were festooned with the light marching chains, shackled at the neck like hunting dogs in leash.
‘Yes.’ He saw it now, they were mostly women and immature youths. The slave-masters had weeded out the old and infirm, but there were very few men of warrior age and status. Huy picked a bright-looking youngster from the squatting ranks and spoke to him in the vernacular.
‘Where are the warriors?’ The youth looked startled at being addressed in his own language, but he dropped his eyes sullenly and would not answer. The centurion half drew his sword, and at the scrape of steel in the scabbard the boy glanced up fearfully.
‘A drop more blood will mean nothing,’ Huy warned him, and the boy hesitated before replying.
‘They have gone to the north to hunt the buffalo.’
‘When will they return?’ Huy demanded.
‘I do not know,’ the slave shrugged expressively, and Huy now had a more telling reason for haste. The fighting regiments of the Vendi were intact, and this towering beacon of smoke would draw them as meat draws the vultures.
‘Get them up, and moving,’ he ordered the centurion and hurried away. Lannon came out of the smoke followed by his armour-bearers and men-at-arms. One glance at his face was enough to warn Huy, for it was flushed and
