Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1986 Read Online Free PDF Page B

now was recognizable
as a lance, with a streamer of cloth upon it. Again Wulf slowed his retreat.
    The Moslem had churned more than two hundred yards
ahead of his party. He screamed some sort of shrill war cry. Wulf reined to
leftward, circled, and came around to face him.
    He saw the chestnut strive close, saw the rider,
wiry and active as a monkey, poise the spear. That rider wore a white turban
wound on a steel cap with a spike at the top. Wulf drew his sword to poise it
on his thigh. He’d have to do this man’s business quickly. They came at each
other. Wulf saw the staring eyes, the tossing black beard beneath the turbaned
headpiece. The spear lifted. Wulf nudged his horse’s flank to slip to the side.
The spear darted. He nudged his horse’s flank to send it to the side. He struck
the spear out of line, shot past, and whirled to come up on the man’s left.
    The Moslem, too, spun his mount, so swiftly that
it turned on its rear legs. Wulf rode close and slashed off the lance’s head
with a sweep of his sword. He clamped his knees to his saddle and slid his
point straight into the middle of the black beard.
    As the Moslem tumbled in a flutter of garments,
Wulf cleared his point. He heard a quavering cry. His comrades came racing
back. Another whoop, almost like an echo, from the oncoming
Moslems. An arrow sang past Wulf’s head. He swiveled his horse to meet
the onslaught.
    At that moment the Djerwa launched their javelins
in a single flight. Loud they yelled as two of the Moslems bounced from their
saddles, transfixed. The others did not wait to meet Bhakrann’s charge. They
rode away, as swiftly as they had come.
    Bhakrann pulled up and sprang to earth to drag his
javelin free from a fallen body. The other Djerwa chased after the horses from
which three enemies had been struck, heading them off and catching them. Wulf,
too, dismounted to look at the man he had stabbed. That man was stone dead, his
teeth clenched on a lock of his beard. A great gout of
blood soaked his yellow tunic. The fleeing Moslems made speed for the high
ground to eastward.
    “Hai,
they run from us!” exulted Tifan, an, bringing back one of the captured horses.
    “We ran from them as long as they outnumbered us,”
said Bhakrann. “We’d have kept on running if Wulf here hadn’t stopped to fight.
Now they’ll hurry back and report to their friends. Here,” — he beckoned to
Cham and Zeoui, who led the other two captured horses — “come here where I can
talk to you. You three take these horses of theirs, they’re faster than yours. Their swords, too, and their food and water bottles. Cham’s
your chief, he’ll give the orders. Head back yonder and see how many of them
are coming.”
    “More than those we chased away?” asked Cham.
    “You don’t think that just seven were invading all
by themselves,” Bhakrann answered, withering him. “Those were the fastest and
most daring scouts, out of a force that probably thinks it’s big enough to wipe
out anything this far from Carthage and beyond. See what’s to be seen. Wulf and I will head
through the pass, and you can catch up and report when there’s something worth
reporting.”
    Cham and Zeoui and Tifan plundered the bodies of
the Moslems for weapons and steel caps and mounted the horses they had taken.
Bhakrann and Wulf held the bridles of the animals they had left and watched
them ride away.
    “I haven’t had time to say you reaped that fellow
like a tag of barley,” Bhakrann remarked. He gazed down at the body. “That’s a
good mail shirt under his tunic. You might like it.”
    “None of these three wore armor big enough for
me,” said Wulf. “Maybe some of your friends would like them.”
    “Help me get them off these carcasses.”
    They draped the shirts over the saddle of the
horse Cham had left. Then they mounted, Bhakrann leading one spare horse, Wulf
two, and rode away toward the pass.
    They reached it well before noon . It was a good travelway through