But now came the cavalry of the first battalion returning up the hill roaring calamity, crashing first against the green band around the color guard and smashing it like a splintered wheel. The flag danced and moved up the rise. Then Moha’s foot-soldiers — recovered, eager, their panic overcome by a simpler lust. My mind could hear their steel cuting through air and crushing flesh — for a minute or two I think I was shivering myself with my own insanity of pride. This was the accomplishment of my golden horn.
I watched a man in dark green flee for the forest cover with three Moha soldiers after him. One pursuer had lost his loin-rag and most of his shirt; distance made the naked man an insect — weedy, prancing high-kneed. A javelin caught the fugitive in the back. The naked jo and his companions slowly shoved steel into him as he lay motionless.
Since that day I have fought without disgracing myself in two wars, against the pirates in 327 and in the rebellion of this year, when we fought to defend Dion’s reforms and were compelled to learn that the people will not and cannot benefit from any reforms unless they come gradually; I have never again taken my golden horn near the scene of war…
All Katskil men were now in retreat, and the flag of Moha already throbbed in beauty at the top of the rise. I saw no banner of black and scarlet; it must have gone with the retreat back into the woods. I saw no more sunlight. The fresh cavalry unit joined the broken one and their captains conferred under a gray sky. Only foot-soldiers were chasing the Katskil men into the woods. One cavalry captain was jerking his arms as if talking in wrath, or self-justification maybe. The other must have managed to strike flint and get a light to his pipe in spite of the dancing uneasiness of his horse, for I saw a tiny spook of gray float above his head.
A trumpet presently recalled the infantry — they could hardly have done much in the woods, where the Katskil men might regroup and make them sorry for it — and the Moha battalions were again in motion. Hardly more than twenty minutes could have passed since I saw that first scout. A skirmish, engaging less than a thousand Moha men, on the Katskil side perhaps four hundred.
The cause of the war was a dreary boundary dispute that had been kept alive one way or another for fifty years. So far as I can see, nations exist because of boundaries and not the other way around; the boundaries are drawn by people more or less like you and me and your Aunt Cassandra, and we like to think that as human beings we know enough not to sit down in wet paint bare-ass, or lift a porcupine by the tail, or hack the baby’s head off to cure a teething pain. It’s a curious thing; I can probably give you a perfect solution to any contradictions involved, next Wednesday, if I don’t oversleep.
Words floated up to me from the road: “Did y’ see the Katty I got, tall sumbitch with a beard? My God ’n’ Abraham, don’t look like they teach ’em to cover the gut aytall.” Another voice was crying and petulant — the wounded were being carried by. A man wanted to see his daughter. They could bring her, he said — it was safe here, no stinking soldiers around — she was nine, she’d be wearing a brown smock her Ma made her — that voice faded out and another said: “My head hurts.” Over and over, that also growing fainter, obscured by a shuffle of footsteps, clash of gear, other voices: “My head hurts — my head hurts…” They were gone, leaving the morning peaceful if there is such a thing as peace.
I had heard no noise of dogs behind me; now I was released from that and other fears. Skoar would be soon celebrating the entry of a glorious army, and never mind fugitive yard-boys. There’d be crowds, bonfires with kids dancing naked and shrieking, churches adrone with hymns of thanksgiving, taverns and whorehouses squaring off for a long night’s work, policers busy with brawls and drunks and the quackpots who bounce out of their holes at the first whiff of excitement, and public speakers being trotted out of their stables — you know, with a rope at each side of the bit and a third handler in case the speaker should fumble at the happy task of ramming the splendid mahooha into the quivering public mind.
I studied the countryside, wishing the rain would arrive and lighten the air. Black dots were growing large like separated shreds of cloud. The crows were already on the scene; they would have been cynically watching from nearby. Other creatures would join them before long, the rats and wild yellow dogs and carrion ants.
A soldier who should have been dead reached upward and let his arm fall over his eyes. The motion, small to me as the stir of a fly’s leg, caused a crow to flap away. I saw a snap of brilliance as light touched something on the moving hand, a ring or bracelet. He was like a sleeper who covers his eyes to preserve a dream. I thought: Man, turn over, why don’t you? Turn away from the light if it hurts your eyes!
In the talk of the Moha men who passed below me I had heard no one speak of the horn call. Maybe each man supposed the music was for him alone.
It seemed to me I must go to that man whose arm had moved, or I would dream of him. I climbed down from my oak and walked boldly to the road. No danger. A red squirrel was already on a branch beside the road, watching me without scolding. I stepped out from the bushes and turned left, toward the battlefield, and reached it in a few minutes after only a few turnings of the road. The crow sentinels squawked word of me. I saw the lurching run and climb of one of the larger birds, red-necked and hideous, who circled so closely above me that I caught his stench and was almost fouled by a spatter of his muck
The first man I passed wore dark green. He lay in the roadside ditch, face upturned and no-way angry. His bow was shorter and heavier than mine; it would be hard to bend but easy to carry in thick woods. I might have taken it but for a superstitious feeling that to do so would put me on a level with the vultures. I felt absurdly that all the dead were delaying me, as if they could wish to speak. A wart-nosed Moha veteran, for one, his gashed neck so twisted that although he lay belly-down his spiritless eyes appeared to watch me — why, alive he’d have had nothing to say to me, more than a snarl to get off the sidewalk if he noticed my gray loin-rag.
The man whose arm had moved lay as before, but he was dead. Maybe he had been all the time, the motion only one of those aimless things that occur after death. That sparkle on his hand was a ring, ruby-colored glass. Knowing him dead, I was free to be afraid again. The Katskil soldiers might not have fled far; slave gangs would come from Skoar to carry in the Moha dead. I crossed the rise and started down the other side intending to get back under the forest cover.
There had been some fighting on this side of the ridge; not much. I was halted by the sight of a small sandycolored beast crouched at the edge of the road. A scavenger dog, large for his breed. They are said to be clever enough to follow an army on the march, as sometimes they follow brown tiger, and for the same reason. The dog, unaware of me, was watching something beyond a patch of bushes at my right. I had come quietly; his nose would have been already charged with the smell of human beings and their blood.
A little stream flowed from the woods into the ditch along the road. Toward this, from the thick bushes, a Katskil soldier was crawling, his bronze helmet slung over his arm. A thin gray-eyed boy, maybe seventeen. He was attempting to pull himself along by his arms, one leg helping. The other leg was gashed from hip to knee, and an arrow-shaft protruded from his left side.