The wind whistling down from the great mountain laughed at his musings, promised a gift of dark secrets before the night ended.
Erin fought the surge of weakness. Fought the urge to just lie back down and let death take him. He froze his thoughts: he simply had to make it home. His people needed him.
When the pain and the fear began to dissipate, he realized that his stomach was utterly empty. Hunger, anesthetized by adrenaline and pain, roared awake. Feeling a bit ghoulish, he scavenged the pouches and belts of the men around him, managed to find some beef jerky. He hunched there, watching and chewing. There was nothing moving, nothing making a sound.
He tore a waterpouch from a dead man’s grasp, sloshed it and found it half full. He drank deeply, splashed some on his face and then lashed the pouch to his belt. He ripped belts from two of the corpses and wrapped them around his left leg, below and above the knee. It was torn, but he thought that he could walk on it—he had to walk on it. He had to make it home, to the north, through miles of marshy ground.
He had a spear, a ten-inch knife and a pouch of water. It was enough or he wasn’t a Crow.
He hobbled, walked through the battlefield through mounds of dead horses and dead men. He stumbled clumsily through them, sleepwalking through a crimson dream. The marsh stank of blood. Old blood, new blood, future blood.
Erin staggered on, the night flies buzzing around his mouth and nose.
“Help . . . help me ...” The sound wafted from the west, over toward the bluff overlooking Killsister, and he hobbled over to it, hoping that it was one of his comrades.
Lying partially hidden beneath a bush lay a boy of the Horseclans. The lad was his own age, but thinner and taller. The boy’s leg was shattered, his throat was slashed, but he was still alive. Blood pumped from the wound sluggishly, through a bandage made of a knotted scarf.
Erin hunkered down, uncertain what to do. He could not kill a wounded foe. In fact, he couldn’t understand the slashed throats. The Crow performed no such mutilations of wounded foes. Would the Horseclansmen kill their own wounded? His head spun. Monsters!
The moonlight leeched the remaining blood from the boy’s pale face. His mouth moved, lips trembled as he struggled to whisper. Fear lived in the pale eyes, but not fear of Erin, or the knife at Erin’s side. These eyes had seen something that drove terror of the Crows from consciousness.
Erin hunkered close. He wet his hand and smeared it across the forehead of the dying boy. His body was burning up. The boy thrashed in fever. Finally a weak sound emerged from parched lips. “Kill . . . kill . . .” the clansman whispered.
What? A threat? A plea? Erin pulled back, alert for a trick.
The boy began to tremble. His eyes were fixed, staring out across that bloodsoaked marsh, toward the towering mountain to the west.
“Killsister,” the boy said, and then the eyes were fixed and still, still directed at the mountains that stood wreathed in silence and mist, the peaks that had witnessed so much death and tragedy without judgment or mercy. Mountains that yielded no life and dealt no death. That had stood before Crow or clansmen had come a-hunting to this land, and would tower still when both had gone to dust.
Erin shuddered. He closed the boy’s eyes with his fingertips. He had never touched a Horseclansman with gentleness before. The boy’s skin had just been skin. Smooth and warm, like anyone’s skin. He wiped his hand on his jerkin, wondering what it was that he had expected. Of course it was skin.
Just skin.
He continued on, suddenly weary to his very bones.
A few animal sounds broke the silence of the night. Erin heard the sound of night birds, a keening wind, fluttering the marsh reeds, the distant whisper of the river. Then he heard something else: a sound almost like laughter.
Erin stopped, listening. “I could have sworn . . .” he whispered. He had heard of animals, scavengers, that laughed while they ate. He had never seen one, nor had anyone he knew of. But they were supposed to be real.
On the other hand, there were his mother’s stories. There’s things such as a madman never dreams. . . .
Erin stood very still, peering out into the night.
Ahead, something moved, and he dove behind a bush, lungs frozen without breath.
He heard before he saw, heard a single guttural syllable.
“Meat,” someone, or something, said in a voice like nothing he’d ever heard. There was another, more horrible laugh. A shadow detached itself from the surrounding terrain and humped toward one of the nearby bodies, hunkered over it.
Then a second shadow, hulking, brutelike, making that same horrendous giggling sound, joined the first. Something slender rose into the air, flashed like a sliver of sunlight, then fell with the horrible squashing sound of rending flesh.
Other'shadows joined the first, giggling and tittering, and other axes sprouted against the clouds—
And rose and fell, and rose again, and then there was a long, long sound of tearing, ripping . . .
Erin shrank into the shadow as completely as he could, fighting to control the bile that rose in his throat.
They were butchering the bodies, tearing them into sections, like a man butchering a cow. There was no mistaking the actions, no mistaking the motion of those axes. Terror gripped him. This was something that he couldn’t comprehend. Something beyond his own experience. Combat, death on the field of battle, he understood. But men eating other men!
An unknown wave of fear ran through him. More of the shadowy figures were coming now. From the darkness he watched the creatures come hulking in from east, from south and north, drawing a cordon around the entire battlefield.
Of course! Of course! The Maneaters had done this many, many times, lurking in the shadow of Killsister, rubbing their hands and licking their chops as the Crow and the men of the Horseclans fought. Waiting, knowing at the beginning of the day who the true victors would be at the end.
Only because his body had been hidden beneath a dead horse had he missed the initial kill, the hours when the advance guard prowled the field, slitting the throats of the wounded.
His limbs felt as if they had been immersed in freezing water. He had to move, and move quickly. To be found would be to die, and die more horribly than any clean death in battle. Hell would be a relief to one caught by these creatures.
For an insane moment he thought of lifting a corpse, hiding under it, playing dead again . . . but only for a moment. That idea would lead him to the stewpot.
The only answer was to sneak past, to make it through the line of ghouls.
Move lively.
The hooting, giggling laughter echoed around the battlefield—not just an expression of insane delight, but signals, greetings from one man-eater to another.
The river. The rushing waters would help to hide his own sound, might well be his best chance. On his belly, moving between breaths, Erin worked his way down to the river, the smell of the lush mud in his nose, the taste in his mouth. He paused when he reached a particularly wet patch and rolled slowly, smearing his body until he was completely covered, and then continued on.
Every ten feet he stopped and waited, listening to the thunder of his heart, fighting to keep from soiling himself.
Light flared suddenly to the east: a campfire. It was carefully shielded from wind and prying eyes; he could see it only dimly. But he didn’t need to see to know that over it, on a wooden spit perhaps, turned a sizzling human haunch.
He froze as a heavy form walked flat-footed through the bushes. The cannibal stopped, sniffing the air. Erin gave thanks that the wind was with him. The man was a brute, squat and thick-bodied, like something prehuman, inhuman, more akin to ape than man. His muscles were thick and ropy, almost apelike, and there was little body fat between muscle and skin—too little. It was vile the way the man’s cabled thews rolled under a layer of loose skin, like a writhing bag of pythons. His skin was unnaturally pale, his eyes almost glaringly white. He carried a heavy, two-headed axe, which he used to stir in the bushes, and he sniffed, the thick nose twitching slowly in the moonlight.