The forth rider made good his escape, descending through the clouds, disappearing.
I swung the tarn about, for a moment, over the clouds, and then entered them, several hundred feet from where the fow had disappeared.
An escape trajectory, if one is dealing with a wily foe, can pove to be a tunnel of ambush.
I took the tarn below the clouds and there again made visual contact with the foe. He was racing down to join his fellows.
This pleased me. I hoped that he would spread alarms among them.
I was less pleased by what else I saw and yet I knew I could have expected little that was different.
Our bold tarnsmen from Council Rock fought amidst circling Kinyanpi.
They were outnumbered easily by ten to one. The outcome of such an arrangement was surely a foregone conclusion unless some new ingredient might intervene, something unexpected or different, which might drastically alter the balances of battle.
That our men had lasted this long was a function of several factors, factors on which I had desperately relied. As nearly as I could determine, few tribes in the Barrens had mastered the tarn. That there were Kinyanpi had almost been taken as a matter of myth by the Kaiila until their dramatic appearance at the summer camp. This suggested that such groups were rare. Teh Kinyanpi, I conjectured, occupied a position rather analogous to that of Earth tribes who might have been among the first, in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, to master the horse. Due to lack of competition their battle skills, originally developed in connection with the kaiila, would presumably have declined. Similarly, due also to a lack of competition, and the merciless selections of war, they had not yet become to the tarn as the normal warrior in the Barrens is to his kaiila, namely, a member of a matched fighting unit. On the other hand, the shield and lance skills of the Kaiila were fresh, and our men were tried warriors. Secondly, I had had the men and their tarns train as fighting units, not only the man and his mount, but the men and their mounts, in pairs and prides, as well. Signals were conveyed not by tarn drums, however, but, in one of the manners of the Barrens, by Herlit-bone whistles.
In one of my calculations I had been disappointed. I had hoped that the mere appearance of the great black tarn would inspire terror in the Kinyanpi and that they would withdraw.
Five riders had done so, when it had appeared suddenly, unexpectedly, behind me, in the vicinity of a Yellow-Knife camp in which they had been sojourning, where we had captured the fifteen tarns.
The riders below, however, perhaps because of their numbers, or perhaps their leadership, or their confidence in their medicine, had not done so.
Discomfitted they might have been. Frightened they might have been. But they had not withdrawn.
'Down, Ubar of the Skies!' I cried.
Perhaps they had feared less than might have Yellow Knives, Fleer or Kaiila, because they were more familiar with tarns than such tribes. Perhaps they feared less because it was daylight. Perhaps they had feared less beause the tarn bore reins, a girth rope, a rider, and had approached them from Council Rock.
Their apprehensions must be restored.
I had formed a plan.
Down we pummeted into the midst of the Kinyanpi. Screaming, men scattered on thier tarns. We struck none. I had slung my weapons about me. My shield was at my hip.
The tarn hung, hovering, in the air, as the Kinyanpi regrouped.
I pointed to three of them, one after the other, and then, my arms folded, spoke a command to Ubar of the Skies. 'One-strap.' The bird began to ascend.
I had seen the surprise of the Kinyanpi when I had released the reins. Their eyes had widened when they had seen my arms were folded. Let it dawn on them that the tarn had obeyed my mere word. I did not look back, for fear of spoiling the effect. I hoped, of couse, that the three men would be following me.
As soon as I had entered the clouds I whipped out my small bow and put an arrow to the string, and held two in the bow hand, and, reseizing the reins, brought the tarn about, and yet it seemed it needed not guidance. Dark and silent in the fog it veered about. One by one the Kinyanpi, consecutively, as I had hoped, entered the cloud. This was the tunnel of ambush, as it is called. A trained tarnsman is taght to avoid it. Three tarns, riderless, returned to the formation below.
I replaced the bow. Again, allowing a suitable interval, I plummeted the tarn downward, again into the midst of the Kinyanpi.
Interestingly, as nearly as I could determine, no fighting had taken place in my absence.
My tarn braked in the air, spreading and beating its wings. Again my arms were folded. I pointed dramatically at a fellow. He shook his head wildly and pulled his tarn away. I pointed at another fellow. He, too, declined my invitation. One of the Kinyanpi struck his painted chest, crying out. I pointed to him. Then I pointed to two others. They looked at one another, uneasily. Then, regally. I looked away. 'One-strap,' I said to Ubar of the Skies.
We ascended again to the clouds.
I listened carefully, every sense alert. The fellow who had struck himself on the chest was eager. I barely had time to enter the cloud, with apparent leisure, than I had turned and he was upon me. I had no time to draw the bow. The lance thrust at me and I clutched at it, and then caught it. Tarn to tarn we grappled for the lance. I let him think he was wrenching it away from me. This freed my right hand for the knife. He took it, to the hilt, in his left side, under the ribs. I cut the girth rope on his tarn and drew him across to the back of my own tarn. I killed him there. I then took the tarn to a place in the clouds which I judged to be above the Kinyanpi formation. There I released the body. It would fall through the formation.
'Hunt,' I said to Ubar of the Skies. We moved quietly, a stroke at a time, through the sunlit vapor of the cloud.
Then, too, within the cloud, I saw the other riders below me. They had kept together. They were wiser than he others. Then I could not see them in the cloud.
'Hunt,' I whispered to Ubar of the Skies.
Ubar of the Skies, given his rein, began to circle, every sense in the great body tense and alert. I fitted an arrow to the string of my bow.
Sometimes it seemed almost as though we were motionless, floating, or arrested in time and space, and that it was the moist, nebulous substance of the cloud that flowed past us, almost as though we were immersed in a river of fog.
Then I saw shapes before us. Ubar of the Skies was approaching from behnd and on the right. Most men are righthanded. It is more difficult, thustly, for them to turn and fire over their right shoulder. Ubar of the Skies was a trained tarn of war.
The arrow, fired from not more than fifteen feet away, entered the body of the rider on the right below the left shoulder blade and almost at the same instant Ubar of the Skies, screaming, with those hooklike, terrible talons tore the body of the rider on the left from the girth rope. I seized the reins of the tarn whose rider I had struck with the arrow. I lowered my head, avoiding the wing. Then the wing, for a moment, was arrested, caught against the Ubar of the Skies, I jerked free, from the front, where it protruded, the arrow, drawing it through the body. I did not want visible evidence of how the rider had met his end. The tarn freed its wing and I was almost struck from the back of Ubar of the Skies. The other rider was screaming, locked in talons below me. I returned the bloody arrow to the quiver. As I could I drew the tarn whos reins I held beside us, leaning forward on the back of Ubar of the Skies. Such reins are not made for leading and the stroke of the wings, so close to my bird, was irregualr, uneven and fantic. Then I cut the girth rope on the tarn, when we were over the Kinyanpi below, and let the body slide from its back. With little regret I released the tarn. It sped away.
The body would seem to have fallen from the sky, from the clouds, myseriously, inexplicably, like a meteor amonst them, penetrating their formation, thence descending to its encounter with the grasslands below.
I hovered high in the clouds, over where the Kinyanpi circled below.
I waited a suitable interval.
The man was screaming beneath me.
I recalled a child, slain and mutilated in a summer camp. 'Teach me to kill,' had said Cuwignaka.
'Release,' I said to Ubar of the Skies.
The man, gesticulating, flailing, screaming, the sound rapidly fading, sank away from me, drawn by gravity, through the air.
