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dumped it on the ground between them, a cascade of gimcrackery on the damp earth. There fell out rings and bracelets and necklaces, tumbling and bouncing with love-charms of anonymous plaited hair, with amulets of carven wood and bone. Most of the objects were scribbled or shallowly inscribed with unreadable markings, meaningless signs meant to impress the credulous.
    The sergeant idly stirred the mess with his toe while Mewick, blinking and hand-wringing, waited silently before him.
    The young soldier stuck his own foot into the scattered pile and teased out a muddied love-charm, which he then bent to pick up. With his fingers he cleaned mud from the knot of long hair, and then held it up, looking at it thoughtfully. “Why is it,” he asked of no one in particular, “we never catch a young girl out here?”
    At that moment the mounted man had his head turned away, looking back over his shoulder. Rolf, without an instant’s foreknowledge of what he was going to do, moving in a madness that was like calm, bent down and picked from the roadbed a rock of killing size, and threw it with all his strength at the head of the young dismounted soldier.
    The young man was very quick, and managed somehow to twist himself out of the way of the missile. It flashed in a grazing blur past the astonishment of his fishwide eyes and mouth. With a sensation of deep but calm regret at having missed, Rolf bent to pick up another stone. Without time for surprise, he saw from the corner of his eye that the stocky sergeant was slumping folded to the ground, and that Mewick’s arm was drawn back, about to hurl a small bright thing at the man who was still mounted.
    The young soldier who had dodged Rolf’s first rock had drawn his short sword now, and was charging at Rolf. Rolf had another rock ready to throw, and the tactics he employed with it came from children’s play-battles with clods of mud. A faked throw first, a motion of the arm to make the adversary duck and doge, then the real throw at the instant of the foe’s straightening up. This way Rolf could not get full power behind it, but still the rock stopped the soldier, crunching into the lower part of his face. The soldier paused in his attack for just a moment, standing as if in thought, one hand raised toward his bloodied jaw, the other still holding out his short sword. And in that instant Mewick was on him from the side. A looping kick came in an unlikely-looking horizontal blur to smash into the soldier’s unprotected groin; and as he doubled, helmet falling free, Mewick’s elbow descended at close range upon his neck, with what seemed the impact of an ax.
    Two riderless beasts plunged and reared in the little road, and now there were three of them as the last of the troopers finally dismounted, in a delayed slumping fall, clutching at a short knife-handle fastened redly to his throat. In another moment the three freed animals were galloping back along the road to the northeast, in the direction from which they had come.
    Rolf was aware of the sudden strident calling of a reptile in alarm, high overhead. Still he could do nothing but stand watching stupidly while Mewick, his short cloak flying, hopped back and forth across the road, cutting one throat after another with the practiced careful motions of a skillful butcher. The last of the three soldiers to die was the one who had been first to fall, the stocky sergeant; he seemed to have been ripped from groin to navel in the first moment of the fight.
    Rolf watched Mewick’s knife make its last necessary stroke, be wiped clean on the sergeant’s sleeve, and then vanish back into some concealed sheath under Mewick’s cloak. His mind beginning to function again, Rolf looked about him, noted how one black lance lay useless and unblooded at the side of the road, then bent at last to pick up the young soldier’s short sword.
    With this weapon in his grip Rolf followed Mewick at a run,