I saw another free woman cutting at the hair of other kneeling beauties, freeing them from the cruel hair coffles, that they might flee as best they might.
Another woman was cutting the bonds at the ankles of another lovely slave. That slave's ankles had been bound more conventionally, with tight thongs of rawhide. Wen the thongs sprang apart, leaping from the knife, I saw deep red circles in the girl's ankles I doubted that she would even be able to rise to her feet for a few Ehn.
I pressed my kaiila forward, through the crowd.
I saw Oiputake to one side.
'Where is Cotanka?' a girl was crying out. 'I am the slave of Cotanka! Where is Cotanka!' It was she who earlier, in effect, had functioned as a lure girl. I had captured her. As Cotanka had accepted her as a slave, she had been spared, at least for a time.
I heard a girl beneath me scream as the paws of my kaiila passed over her. I could see another girl, too, ahead of me, to my right, lying on the ground, trembling. There was the mark of a kaiila paw on her back. Other riders, earlier, had passed this way.
To my left and forward, a great section of the overhead netting had been cut down. Some slaves were there, standing or kneeling in the fallen mesh. It was not a capture net, of course, but a mesh designed, in effect, to provide a camouflage against, or a distracton for, overhead archers. The slaves, thus, were not entrapped. I thought it might be a reasonably safe place for them to be. Teh Kinyanpi, presumably, would not be likely to fire on a nude white slave any more than on an unmounted kaiila. Both would fit not inot the category of enemy but rather into the category of booty. It would be a greater danger, presumably, for a girl to hide in a lodge where, perhaps being mistaken for a free person, she might be struck by arrows, the skins of the lodge cover perhaps being riddled from abofe by the swift, flighted riders. I thrust with my lance upward, through the netting, driving it through the body of a soldier, cutting at it. He fell across the netting, then tumbled through it. Then I was beyond the area of the slaves.
The battle, I saw, at an instant's glance, was hopeless.
I heard the heavy vibration of a cable of a crossbow. A Kaiila warrior pitched backwards off his kaiila.
I heard screaming of a free woman.
'Run!' cried a man riding past. 'Run!'
I looked back. The Yellow Knives would have to make it through the confusion of slaves.
'Yellow Knives are coming!' I cried out, pointing back. 'Yellow Knives, to the west!'
Mahpiyasapa looked about, wildly. Then he fended himself from a lance attack.
A dark shadow hurtled past. My shield lifted, I deflected an arrow from above.
A child ran past.
'Form lines,' cried Mahpiyasapa. 'To the east! To the west! Women and children between the lines!'
I saw Hci, with an expert thrust, past the buckler of a soldier, drop the fellow from his saddle.
The whooping of Yellow Knives was then upon us. We were cut into small groups, our lines shattered. The battle became a tangled, bloddy melee.
I saw Cuwignaka rolling in the dust, his kaiila gone. I turned my kaiila against the forequarters of a riderless mount, pressing it toward Cuwignaka. Cuwignaka was on his feet, blood about his head. A Yellow Knife, afoot, rushed upon him, knife raised. The gappled. Tehn the Yellow Knife fell backward, blood at his throat. Cuwignaka, a knife ran with blood in his hand, blood on his hand and wrist, too, stood in the dust. I lost sight of him as two warriors passed between us. Then I had my hand on the jaw rope of the riderless kaiila and dragged it, snorting and squealing, to Cuwignaka. He yanked free a lance from the body of a fallen Yellow Knife. He was then in an instant, on the back of te animal I had brought him, and in command of it.
I saw Mahpiyasapa fell a Yellow Knife with his lance. 'Shields overhead!' I cried. A hail of arrows fell amongst us. Then great wings smote the air above us, the air tearing at our cloths, rasing dust in affrigted clouds on the field.
'I am here!' called Cuwignaka.
'I am going to find Grunt!' I cried, through the dust. To my left I saw a child run through with a soldier's lance. I saw two women running wildy through the dust.
I struck aside a lance and urged my kaiila toward where Grunt had been tending the wounded.
The area here was like a charnel house. The grounds were covered with the twisted bodies of the slain and mutilated. I wondered if any had escaped. Lodges, even, though not all of them, had been thrown down and burned.
'Aiii!' I heard. I lifted my shield but the Yellow Knife, his eyes wild with fright, rode past, his braids flying behind him.
'Something over there,' said Cuwignaka, half a kaiila length behind me, pointing.
We urged our mounts up a small rise, and then down, partly, over it. Here, too, we found the bodies of men who had been wounded. Too, hee, among them, were even bodies of one or two of the woman who had been, with Grunt, tending to them.
'Grunt is alive!' I said.
Grunt, bodies about his feet, stood on a small rise.
'Away!' Grunt was crying, waiving his arm aversively, at two Yellow Knives, mounted, looking at him. 'Away!'
In the slaughter it seemed that only Grunt, and Wasnapohdi, too, protected by him, crouching behind him, her head down, the jaw rope of a kaiila clutched in her two hands, had not been killed.
The two Yellow Knives, suddenly, turned about and sped from Grunt.
I choked back a wave of repulsion.
I recalled that long ago, even before I had come to Kailiuk, near the Ihanke, or Perimerter, I had questioned a young man, a tharlarion teamster, as to how it was that Grunt, of all white men, at that time, was permitted to travel so far and with such impunity in the Barrens. 'Perhaps the savages feel they have nothing further to gain from Grunt,' the young man had laughed. 'I do not understand,' I had said. 'You will,' he had said. But I had never understood that remark, until now.
'You see why he is still alive,' said Cuwignaka. 'It has to do with beliefs about the medicine world.'
'I think so,' I said.
I moved the kaiila down the rest of the shallow slope, toward the small rise on which Grunt, WAsnapohdi behind him, stood. When Grunt had come into the Barrens he had had with him, among his other trade goods, a coffle of slaves. Although these women had been lovely he had not make use as far as I knew, of any one of them. He had, on the other hand, invited me to content and relieve myself with them as I would, expecting little of me in return other than that I would handle them as what they were, slaves, and prepare them, to some extent, for they were new slaves, for their furture tasks, those of providing a master with exquisite, uncomproised pleasure and service. He had had me teach even the virgins their first submissions. One such had been the former Miss Millicent Aubrey-Welles, the debutante from Pensylvania, who was now Winyela, the slave of Canka, of the Isbu Kaiila. At tht time I had never dreamed we would one day be owned by the same man. It was now clearer to me, as it had not been before, why Grunt had not performed these tasks himself.
'Greetings,' said Grunt.
'Greetings,' I said.
'Now you see me as I am,' said Grunt. 'Do not attempt to conseal your repulsion.'
I shrugged.
'It has already been done to him,' said Cuwignaka. 'It is like one cannot be killed or who, killed, has come back from the dead. It is like something from the medicine world.'
'Yes,' I said.
'Occasionally it proves useful,' said Grunt.
It was the first time that I had ever seen Grunt without the familiar, broad-rimmed hat.
'It was done to me five years ago,' he said, 'by Yellow Knives. I had been struck unconscious. They thought me dead. I awakened later. I lived.'
'I have heard of such cases,' I said.
'It is hideous,' he said.
'Some of the skin has been restored,' I said. In other places I could see little but scar tissue. In places, too,
