yours. This is not to say that there is nothing to choose between life worlds; it is only to say that we do not all share the same life world.
'Why are they not going away?' asked a man.
'It will soon be dark,' said another.
'They must have very strong medicine,' said another.
'Perhaps,' said another, uneasily.
I saw Hci struggle for a moment to again control his shield. Then, again, he had steadied it.
'What are they waiting for?' asked a man.
'Thier ranks are opening,' said a man.
'Something is coming through them,' said another man.
'It is a sleen,' said one man.
'No,' said another.
'It is on all fours,' said another man.
'Surely it is a sleen,' said another.
'It is too large to be a sleen,' said another.
'Aiii!' cried a man. 'It is rising to its feet. It is walking on two feet!'
'It is a thing from the medicine world!' cried a man.
'It is a medicine helper of the Yellow Knives!' cried another.
Almost at the same time, from behind us, thee were cries of consternation. 'Riders!' we heard. 'Riders!'
We wheeled our kaiila about. At the back of the camp, thee were screaming and the sounds of numberous kaiila, squealing and snorting, their clawed feet tearing at the grass. At full speed, pennons flying, lances lowered, bucklers set, in sweeping, measured, staggered attack lines, waves of riders struck the camp.
'They are white men!' cried a man near me.
I saw a woman, running, caught in the back with a lance, between the shoulder blades, flung to the dust, the lance then withdrawn. It had been professionally done.
'White men!' cried another man near me.
I saw another man toward the rear, an archer, discharge an arrow, and leap to the side, to avoid a rider. He was hit by the next rider, one of those in the succeeding wave, its riders staggered with those of the first. In this type of formation, given the speed of the charging kaiila, the distance between successive waves is about forty to fifty feet. This is supposed to provide the next rider with a suitable response interval. If the first rider misses the traget the second, thus, has time to adjust for its change of position. From the point of view of the target, of course, which may even be off balance, it is difficult, in the interval involved, to set itself for a second evasive action. Its probles are further complicated, also, of course, by the imminent arrival of even further attack wavs. The primary purpose of the staggering of the attack-wave riders is to bring a target which may have escaped from the attack lane of one rider almost immediately into the attack lane of another.
Certain psychological factors, also, in this type of situation, tend to favor the attacker. As a target's attention tends to be absorbed in avoiding one attack it is less prepared to react efficiently to another. This is a moment within which the target may find itself within the lance range of the next rider. This type of formations is generally not useful against an enemy which is protected by breastworks, pits or stakes, or a settled infantry, its long pikes set, fixed butt down in the turf, the weapons oriented diagonally; the points trained on the breasts of the approaching mounts. It is also generally ineffective against other cavalry for its permits a shattering and penetraition of its own lines. It tends to be effective, however, against an untrained infantry or almost any enemy afoot. The archer, struck by the rider, spun to the side, the lance blade passing through his neck.
'White men!' I herd.
'Turn about!' cried Mahpiyasapa. 'Fight! Defend the camp!'
The lines spun about and the men of Mahpiyasapa, whooping and crying out, dust scattering, sped back under the ropes and between the lodges to engage this new enemy. I held my position.
The white men were undoubtedly the mercenary soldiers of Alfred, the mercenary captain of Port Olni. With something like a thousand men he had entered the Barrens, with seventeen Kurii, an execution squad from the steel worlds, searching for Half-Ear, Zarendargar, the Kur war genderal who had been in command of the supply complex, and staging area, in the Gorean arctic, that which was being readied to support the projected Kur invasion of Gor. This complex had been destroyed. Evidence had suggested that Zarendargar had escaped, and was to be found in the Barrens. Once Zarendargar and I, in the north, as soldiers, had shared paga. I had come to the Barrens to warn him of his danger. Then I has fallen salve to the Kaiila. A wagon train of settlers, with which Alfred had joined forces, had been attacked. A massacre had taken place. Alfred, however, with some three to four hundred mounted men, leaving most of his command to perish, had escaped to the southeast. From the southeast, I remembered, the kailiauk had come early. From the southeast, too, had come the Kinyanpi.
Earlier I had conjectured that Alfred and his men had returned to civilization. I now realized that was false. Somehow they had come into league with the Kinyanpi and perhaps through them, and in virtue of some special considerations, the nature of which I suspected I knew, been able to make contact with, and enlist the aid of, Yellow Knives. A fearful pattern had suddenly emerged. The discipline of the Yellow Knives now became more meaningful. So, too, did their apparent willingness to fight in the half darkness of dusk. Suddenly, too starkly plausible, became such untypical anomalies of the Barrens as the meretricious proposal of a false peace, the spurious pretext of a council in order to gather together and decimate the high men of the Kaiila, and even the unprecedented sacrilege of attacking a people at the time of its great dances and festivals. These things spoke not of the generalship of the Barrens but of a generalship alien to the Barrens, a generalship of a very different sort of mind. Even so small a detail as the earlier, small-scale attack of the Kinyanpi now became clear. It must have been indeed, as I had earlier conjectured, an excursionary probe to determine the test defenses, before the main force, held in reserve, was committed. The generalship again suggested that of the cities, not of the Barrens, that of white soldiers, not red savages.
I looked wildly back toward the Yellow Knives. As I had expected they were now advancing. Their feathered lances were dropping into the attack position. Their kaiila were moving forward, and gradually increasing their speed. By the time they reached the camp the kaiila, not spent, would be at full charge. The Yellow Knife lines were now sweeting past the creature which had emerged earlier from their rank. It stood in the grass, the warriors sweeting about it. It was some eight feet tall. It lifted its shaggy arms. It was a Kur. We would be taken on two fronts.
Behind me there was fighting. I turned about, I saw soldiers cutting down portions of the ropes and cloths.
'Kinyanpi!' I heard. 'They are coming again!'
'It is the end,' I thought. 'The Kurii had won.' The Kurii, now, allied with the Yellow Knives, and supported by the Flighted Ones, the Kinyanpi, could systematically serch the Barrens, unimpeded in their serch for Zarendargar, and if an entire people, the nation of the Kaiila, should stand in their way, then what was it to them, if this nation should be destroyed?
I heard the whooping of the Yellow Knives growing closer.
I then turned my kaiila and rode toward the back of the camp.
Chapter 29
HOW IT CAME ABOUT THAT GRUNT SURVIVED
A slave girl screamed, buffeted to the side by a forequarters of my kaiila. She turned, struck, from the animal, her hands tied behind her back, lost her footing and fell. I saw the frightened eyes of another girl, her wrists lifted, bound together with hair, thrown before her face. The hair that bound them hung free before the wrists, dangling from them, in jagged strands, marking where it had been hastily cut free from the hair of the girl before her in a holding coffle. Her own hair, similarly, had been cut short, closely, at the back of her neck, where the girl behind her, with swift strokes of a blade, had been freed.
'Run,' a free woman was screaming. 'Run! Seek you safety!'
