'The Kaiila must hold against them,' I said.
'Soldiers,' called a man, running along the escarpment, 'roped together, are beginning to climb the back face of the mountain!'
'It is to be a coordinated attack,' said Cuwignaka.
'Then,' I said, looking upward, 'I think we may soon expect the Kinyanpi.'
'It is the end for you!' cried Iwoso. 'You are finished!'
'Look!' cried Hci, suddenly, pointing upward.
We heard the drums on the trail, beten by medicne men, dancing about the beasts. They Yellow Knives, in lines behind them, advanced.
'Look!' insisted Hci.
In the sky there was a tarn.
My heart leapt.
'We are doomed!' cried Hci.
Men about us screamed, and threw their arms before their faces.
We crouched down, dust and rocks flying past us, that we not be forced from the edge of the escarpment by the turbulent blasts of those mighty, beating wings. Then the monster had alit amongst us.
'It is Wakanglisapa!' cried Hci. 'It is Wkanglisapa, the Medicine Tarn!'
I approached the beast slowly. Then I put out my hand and touched its beak. I then, as it loweed its head, took its head in my hands and wept. 'Greetings, Ubar of the Skies,' I said. 'We are together again.'
'There is a cloud in the east,' said a man, 'small, swiftly moving.'
'It will be Kinyanpi,' I said. 'My friend has preceded them.'
Men looked at one another.
'Bring a girth rope, and reins,' I said. 'And trow back the lodge covers and poles which conceal our tarns. We must greet our visitors.'
Men hurried away.
Yesterday night the great beacon of brush had been lit on the summit of Council Rock. It had been lit the first in a line of ten such beacons. Each, in turn, as soon as the light of the preceding beacon had been visible, had been lit. Before morning, some singly, some in groups of two or three, under the cover of darkness, our tarns had been brought to Council Rock, there to be concealed within specially prepared lodges. There were eighteen of these beasts, that which had been a Kinyanpi mount which had come to us on the prairie, the two wild tarns we had captured by means of the tarn pits, and the fifteen tarns we had managed to secure in our subsequent raid. These tarns we had brought from Two Feathers to the Waniyanpi compound commanded by Seibar. There, concealed by day and trained by night, and housed withing striking distance of Council Rock, they had waited for our signal.
I put the girl rope on the great black tarn. I fixed the reins upon it.
I heard the approach of the drums on the trail ascending to the summit.
'The soldiers on the back face near the top,' said a man.
'Repel them as you can,' I said.
Lodges were thrown back, and te poles and skins. Tarns were revealed.
I leaped to the back of Ubar of the Skies. My weapons were handed to me.
Canka, Hci and Cuwignaka hurried to mouth their tarns.
Eagerly, awaiting no command or signal, his neck outstreched, Ubar of the Skies looked to the air.
'Ko-ro-ba!' I cried, the name of the city to which I had first been brought on Gor, Ko-ro-ba, the Towers of the Morning.
The tarn screamed.
Blasts of air tore though my hair. The feathers on my tem-wood lance lashed backwards, like flags snapping in the wind.
I heard other tarns, too, screaming behind me, and heard the beatings of wings.
Council Rock fell away beneath me.
Like a dark streak, vengeful and fearful, the great black tarn clove the skies.
Suddenly bodies and tarns seemed to be exploding about me as we entered, penetrating, the startled formations of the Kinyanpi. No resistance in the air had they expected, nor none this soon. I saw eyes, wild, about me.
My lance took a rider from his mount, tearinghim back out of the girth rope, and then he was spinning, wildly flailing, screaming and turning, growing smaller, journeying with terrilbe, accelerative force, seemingly eccentrically, to the turf below, it seeming to rock and shift with my movements, like liquid in a bowl.
Ubar of the skies reared back, talons raking, screaming. I saw tangles of intestines torn from the body of a tarn. I turned the stroke of a lance with my small shield.I heard a man scream, his arm gone. The disemboweled tarn fell away from us, fluttering, spining downward. With a shake of its mighty head my tarn flung the shield from its beak, a hundred feet away, the arm still inserted in the shield straps. Then the tarn was climbing, climbing. Tarns swirled about us, below us. Some struck one another. I gave the tarn his rein. Four tarns began to follow us. Still did my tarn climb. Through clouds, such bright, lofty fogs, did we ascend. Below us, like birds springing wonderously from the snow, tarns and their riders emerged from the clouds, following us.
'Will you seek the sun?' I laughed.
Could it be that, after all these years, the tactics of combat on tarnback remained so fresh, so vivid, in the eager, dark brain of my mighty mount? Could they be retained so perfectly, with such exactness, seemingly as terrible and sharp as in the days when they were first imprinted, high above grassy fields, the walls of Ko-ro-ba in the distance?
I fought for breath.
The mighty lungs of the tarn expanded. I could feel their motion betwen my knees. It drew the thin air deeply into those moist, widened cavities. Still we climbed.
Then we turned, the sun at our back.
The other tarns, strung out now, struggling, wings beating painfully, sporadically, against the thin air, hung below us. They were exhausted. Tehy could climb no further. They began to turn back.
Out of the sun struck the great tarn. As I had been trained to do I drew as deep a breath as possible before the dive began. It is not impossible to breathe during such a descent, particularly after the first moments, even in the rushing wind, but it is generally recommended that one do not do so. It is thought that breathing my effect the concentration, perhaps altering or complicating the relationship with the target. The bird and the rider, in effect, are the projectile. The tarn itself, it might be noted, does not draw another breath until the impact or the vicinity of the impact, if the strike fails to find its mark. Teh descent velocities in strike of this sort are incredible, and have never been precisely calculated. They are estimated, however, at something in the neighborhood of four hundred pasangs per Ahn.*
There were snappings, as of wood breaking, but it was not wood. The first tarn, that highest, was struck full in the back, the man broken between the two bodies. Its back was broken and perhaps the neck of the man in the same blow. As a hurricane can imbed a strw in a post so, too, are compounded the forces involved by the speed of the stroke.
Again the tarn aligned itself, smote downward, then lifted its wings, almost folded on either side of me, its talons, like great hooks, lowered.
It caught the second tarn about the neck, as it swerved madly, by the grasping talons of its left foot, and I was thrown about, upside down, the ground seeming to be over my head, and the two birds spun in the air and then my tarn disengaged itself, the neck of the other bird flopping to the side, blood caught in the wind, like red rain.
*No terrestrial conversion is supplied in the Cabot ms. for this figure. Equivalences supplied elsewhere in the Cabot mss. suggest a figure of a little over two hundred miles per hour. -J.N.
Its rider's scream alerted the third rider, but, in a moment, the talons had locked upon him, his bird exhausted, struggling in the air, and he was torn upward from the girth rope. He was released, falling through the clouds below us, disappearing. He would fall, I conjectured, through the Kinyanpi formation below, that formation being by now, I supposed, arrested by the other tarnsmen, those from Council Rock. Beneath those placid, fleecy clouds I had litte doubt there was bloody war in the air.
