"Aii!" Fire kissed the edge of Abivard's right leg. He looked down and saw he was bleeding. The shaft wasn't stuck in his leg; it had sliced his outer calf and flown on. Had he been wearing the lamellar armor the smiths were just now finishing, he might have escaped unwounded. No such luck, though.
Seeing he was about to be ridden down, the Khamorth drew his shamshir and slashed at Abivard's lance in the hope of chopping off its head. That did the nomad no good; the lancehead was joined to the shaft by a long iron ferrule. Abivard felt the blow in his shoulder but pressed on regardless.
At the last moment, the plainsman hacked at the lancehead again. He turned it enough to keep it from his own flesh, but it drove deep into the barrel of his horse. Appalled, Abivard yanked it back. The horse screamed louder and more piercingly-and with better reason-than Ardini ever had.
The Khamorth snarled a curse. His face, twisted in a grimace of hate, would stay in Abivard's memory forever: unkempt beard with threads of gray running through it, wide mouth shouting something perhaps a quarter comprehensible-two front teeth missing, a third black-beaky nose with a scar on the bridge, red-tracked eyes, lines on the forehead accented by ground-in smoke. The two men were close enough together that Abivard found himself trapped in the reek of ancient stale sweat and sour milk that hovered round the plainsman like a stinking cloud.
The steppe pony galloped wildly for perhaps a hundred yards, blood splashing the dry, dusty ground from the wound Abivard had made. Then, like a waterlogged ship at last slipping beneath the waves, it went down, slowly and gently enough for its rider to slip off and try to run.
The plainsman was slow and clumsy-his boots were not made for hard use on the ground. He had hung onto his bow; he had just wheeled around and was reaching for an arrow when Abivard's lance took him in the middle of the chest. The nomad grunted. The cry his horse let out had been much worse. A new stench joined the rest as the fellow folded up on himself.
Abivard jerked the lance free. He had to twist the head to clear it; it grated against the Khamorth's ribs as it came out. On the shaft, the plainsman's blood mingled with that of his horse. The new stains almost completely covered the older marks, now browned, where Abivard had first blooded the lance a few weeks before.
As in that first clash, he found that when he was engaged he could pay no attention to how the fight as a whole was going. When he looked around to get his bearings, he saw that most of the Khamorth had broken away and were galloping north for all they were worth.
Abivard and his men pounded after the nomads. The steppe ponies' hooves drummed on the timbers of the new bridge that spanned the Vek Rud. Three or four nomads reined in on the far side of the river and waited with nocked arrows for the Makuraners to try to force a passage.
"Hold!" Abivard flung up his hand. Shooting down the bridge at men and horses who had to come straight toward them, the Khamorth could have taken a fearful toll, maybe even turned defeat into triumph.
"But they were running away," Frada protested.
"They're not running now," Abivard said. "Take a good look at them, brother. What do they want us to do? If you were a Khamorth chieftain on the other side of that river, what would you hope those stupid Makuraners on your tail would do?"
Frada was also Godarz's son: Confront him with an idea and he would worry it like a dog shaking a rat. "I expect I'd hope they threw themselves at me," he said.
"I expect the same thing," Abivard answered. "That's why we're going to stay right here until the plainsmen ride away. Then-" He scowled, but saw no help for it. "Then I'm going to burn that bridge."
Frada stared at him. "But it's stood since our great-grandfather's day, maybe longer."
"I know. Losing it will cost us commerce, too. But with the Khamorth loose in the realm, if I leave it whole I might as well paint 'ROB ME' in big letters on the outside of the stronghold wall." Abivard's laugh rang bitter. "See how the great tribute Smerdis King of Kings paid to the Khamorth is keeping them on their own side of the Degird."
"Aye, that thought had already crossed my mind. How much did the famous Murghab squeeze from us?"
"Eighty-five hundred mortal arkets," Abivard answered. "Years of patient saving gone in a day. And for what? For the nomads to fatten their coffers at the same time as they batten on our lands."
Frada pointed back to the downed ponies and plainsmen dotting the plain to the south. "They paid a price, too."
"They should," Abivard said. "They were trying to take what's ours. But we paid our heavy price at Smerdis' command and got nothing in return for it. Smerdis' messenger said Sharbaraz renounced the throne because he didn't have the experience he needed to rule. If this is what experience bought us, then I wouldn't mind a raw hand on the reins, by the God."
The farther he went there, the softer his voice got: he realized he was speaking treason, or at least lese majesty. But Frada nodded vigorously. "How could we do worse?"
Instead of cheering Abivard, that made him thoughtful. "The hurtful part is, we likely could do worse: every tribe on the steppe swarming down over the Degird, for instance, to try to take this land out of the realm forever. That was everyone's worst nightmare after Peroz King of Kings fell." The proud lion banner crashing into the trench-that dreadful image would stay with Abivard if he lived to be a hundred.
"Maybe we could at that," Frada said. "But the way things are is plenty bad enough. These little fights will drain us of men, too."
"Yes," Abivard said. Along with the plainsmen, three of his own followers were down, one lying still, the other two thrashing and crying their pain to the unheeding sky. Maybe they'll heal, he thought, and then, Yes, but maybe they won't. He made a fist and brought it down on his thigh. "You know, brother of mine, I wonder how bad things are elsewhere in the realm. What would Okhos say, for instance, if I wrote him and asked?"
"Does he have his letters?" Frada said.
"I don't know," Abivard admitted. He brightened. "Roshnani can tell me. Come to that, she's been after me to teach her to read and write. I think my getting letters from Denak showed her I didn't mind women learning such things."
"Are you teaching her?" Frada sounded as if Abivard had been talking not about letters but of some exotic, not quite reputable vice.
Abivard nodded anyhow. "Yes, and she seems to have the head for it. Father would have done the same, I'm certain; he let Denak learn, after all."
"So he did," Frada said thoughtfully. He, too, nodded. Even more than was true for Abivard, he used what Godarz would have done as a touchstone for right behavior.
Seeing that their foes would not obligingly impale themselves, the Khamorth rode north. The Makuraners moved over the field, finishing off wounded Khamorth, capturing steppe ponies, and doing their best to round up the scattered flock. That done and the wounded men hastily bandaged and splinted and tied onto horses, they headed back toward the stronghold. The skirmish with the plainsmen was, by every conventional sense of the word, a victory. But it had cost Abivard at least one man and maybe as many as three, and he doubted it had done anything to keep the Khamorth from raiding his lands again. He let his men cheer, but he didn't feel victorious.
"Aye, my brother has his letters, or he learned them, at any rate," Roshnani said. "How much use he has given them since the tutor left the stronghold, I could not say."
"Only one way to find out," Abivard said. "I'll write him and see what sort of answer I get. Just to be on the safe side, though, I'll have my rider memorize the message, too, to make sure it's understood. And I'll write to Pradtak, as well. I know he reads, for Denak remarked he was surprised to find out she could do likewise."