Then something happened that was utterly alien to Uther's experience, and the strangeness chilled him to the heart as a kind of fear he had seldom known swept through him, whirling him instantly back into childhood and the gruesome tales of goblins and night terrors that had sometimes terrified him as a boy, the grim tales told by men purely to frighten and horrify their listeners. Everything faded to silence around him; the screams and cheers of his men and the advancing enemy dying away to be replaced by a silent, hissing emptiness. The surrounding distractions between him and his view of the enemy leader shrank and dwindled until he felt as though he were seeing him at the end of a long, dark tunnel, but clearly, brilliantly, as though framed and featured by a beam of sunlight. Fascinated and strangely frightened, Uther watched as his opponent's huge horse walked slowly forward to the edge of the riverbank and stepped out among the stones, moving with excruciating, patient slowness, placing each hoof slowly and deliberately, testing its purchase inexorably until it was clearly settled, and then moving forward relentlessly, one more step, time after time until all four of its feet were in the water. And as the horse progressed, inevitable as some phantom, inescapable dream, Uther was appalled by the dread that unexpectedly swept over him and threatened to consume his reason.
The approaching figure reeked of death, its emanations making the very air about it waver as air did over a blazing fire, and Uther's throat closed, watching it, so that he forgot to breathe. Death, with his reaping hook, he thought, incapable of resisting the notion of the ancient image that had sprung into his mind. He could see nothing of the face beneath the heavy, rusted helmet, obscured by darkness and shadow, but his mind supplied a sudden vision of a fleshless skull, grinning teeth and empty, eyeless sockets hidden beneath the battered dome. The King felt his entire skin rise up in horror and revulsion.
"Uther!" The urgency of the roar from behind him was slow to penetrate his daze, but its repetition brought him back, jarring him into reality again. The voice was Garreth Whistler's. "Uther! Fall back and mount up. There's more of them on this side!"
Stunned and still enthralled by the vision that had transfixed him, Uther shook his head as though trying to dislodge his own thoughts. But then full awareness returned and he realized that they were being threatened anew, and from behind. He spun around again, almost losing his balance, all thoughts of the enemy across the river abandoned for the time being.
"Back, lads," he roared. "Back to the horses now!"
He found mass confusion in the woods behind him, with troopers running everywhere, struggling to mount their beasts. His own horse was ready for him, held tightly in control by one of his Dragons, and nearby, Garreth Whistler was struggling to subdue his own rearing, prancing horse, curbing it tightly and pulling its head down as he danced it in tight circles until it lost its panicked fear and settled again to his restraint.
"What's happening?" Uther roared at Garreth as he pulled himself up into the saddle and fought down his own struggling horse.
"Damned if I know," he shouted back, "but there's scores of the whoresons over here coming in from the west, where we were camped last night. I don't know where they came from or who they are, but they're here, and they almost took us from behind."
"Damnation! Then let's root them out. Lead on. To me! To me, Pendragon!" He unsheathed his long sword again and swung it above his head, hearing the whistling sound of the keen-edged blade slicing through air as his troopers surged forward to surround him.
Thereafter, all was confusion: clashing weapons, spraying blood, screams of fear and rage and pain, and the heavy thudding of hooves as the Camulodian horses pounded the soft, needle-strewn earth beneath the soaring trees, plunging and kicking as they had been trained to do against the swarming bodies that surrounded them. Someone leaped up at Uther from his left, grasping him frantically and trying to pull him down from his horse, but he slashed downward viciously across his body, his sword held close, and the assailant screamed and fell away. As he fell, however, his grasping fingers closed on the shallow arrow wound in Uther's thigh, and a bolt of agony shot through the King's body. He reeled in the saddle, close to losing consciousness. Then someone below him shouted in triumph, the flat of a blade clanged harmlessly against Uther's chest, and he pulled his horse around to the right, hard, using its weight and impetus to smash down the men about him. Three men he saw, all glaring up at him, and he killed two of them with a double swing of his heavy sword, cleaving their skulls. The third man flung himself away, and for a moment Uther was free to look about him.
He was surprised to find himself close to the riverbank again, for he had been far to the west only moments earlier in the thick of the attacking throng of newcomers. Now he had a glimpse of the big rider from the other bank, who was still crossing the river, stark and silent and slow, but now waving his weapon high above his head. He had no more time to look than that and swung himself about immediately to face whatever dangers might be coming at his back. It crossed his mind that he would have to kill the man crossing the river, but the thought was a brief one, soon forgotten in the urgency of fighting for his life.
Then he saw Garreth Whistler fall.
The Champion had been hard beset, fighting with his usual invincible perfection, whirling his horse around with absolute mastery as he Hailed about him with a crushing axe at the men surrounding him on the ground. But as he pulled his warhorse up in one mighty turn, freeing its front hooves to do the damage it was trained to do, one man leaped in beneath the flailing hooves and plunged a spear into the magnificent animal's chest, killing it almost instantly. Uther saw Garreth leap immediately, catlike, to the ground, kicking his feet free of the stirrups. But as he landed, his dying horse, whirling in its death throes, caught him with a lashing hoof high in the shoulder, and the Whistler spun away, tossed like an infant's toy, to crash face forward into the trunk of a nearby tree and then bounce back, his body twisting awkwardly to fall heavily, face down. His five remaining attackers were on him in a moment, swarming to destroy an enemy whose feet they were not fit to touch.
Black rage swelled up in Uther and he spurred his horse forward, digging bloody gouges in its side so that it crashed headlong into the press surrounding his fallen friend, hurling bodies in all directions. He had his feet free of the stirrups before the impact, and pushed himself from the saddle effortlessly, landing astride Garreth Whistler as lightly as a butterfly, his sword gripped in both hands. He killed one sprawling man before the fellow even knew Uther had come, striking his head cleanly off his shoulders with one solid, hissing slice, and then in quick succession he dispatched the other four, his whirling, slashing blade invincible and inescapable.
Finally, Uther was alone above his friend. He whirled to kneel and search for a pulse beneath Garreth's jaw, ignoring the tugging pain of the wound that still bled on his thigh. But there was no pulse. The King's Champion was dead, and Uther felt his heart swell up and break as hot, scalding tears flooded his eyes. Then, screaming aloud in his black and violent need for blood and vengeance, he grasped his sword hilt tightly in both fists and swung up and around again, looking for someone to kill. And there, less than ten paces distant, watching him from the back of a high horse and hefting his long, strange reaping-hook weapon in his hand, sat the giant in rusted armour who had come so slowly across the stream: the leader of this doom-laden band of alien horsemen.
As soon as he set eyes on the big man, Uther's frustrated rage flared up even higher and then immediately narrowed and condensed into a hard, cold, incandescent blade of tightly focused fury. A lifetime of avoiding fighting in anger fell away from him and left him with nothing but the all-consuming need to destroy this enigmatic interloper who had brought destruction to his friends and companions. He had no thoughts now that this might be Death himself. This was a man, dirty and travel-stained and fit to die for what he had brought to this cursed place. And yet Uther restrained himself from charging blindly forward to attack.