Free Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1986 by Cahena (v3.1) Page B

touch of a smile. Her face was tawny golden in the
sun.
    “Did I do well to order that, Wulf?” she asked.
    She looked at him, almost like a child waiting for
praise.
    “You did well,” he said. “We handled about a
thousand out here and killed and wounded a lot of them, but there are maybe
twice as many in the pass or on the far side. Let their wounded hamper them.
They won’t come prodding after us.
    “What next?” she asked.
    “You’ve already said that. Stop to water the
horses at that little stream, then on to where we left the baggage under guard.
Leave scouts here to observe, though I doubt we’ll be followed.”
    “You’re confident,” Ketriazar half accused.
“You’ve been confident all along.”
    “Only fools are confident all along,” said Wulf.
    “Will they have mercy on their wounded?” asked
Yaunis. “They seem like a merciless breed to me.”
    “Only to their enemies,” said Wulf. “They’ll carry
the wounded all the way back to Carthage .”
    “We came out of it very well,” Yaunis spoke up.
“Their losses were heavy. They’ll plan a long time before they try us again.”
    “Exactly,” said the Cahena. “Let’s start back.”
    The chiefs rode away to do as
she said. The Cahena smiled.
    “I wonder if I’ll ever get used to you,” she said.
    He met her gaze.
    “Just because I killed that man who rode at
you —”
    With that, she walked away to where two men were
bandaging a prone wounded comrade. She knelt there, she seemed to shimmer for a moment. She leaned above the wounded man, put her
hands on him, spoke something. Then she rose, and the
man rose, too. He smiled.
    Tifan came, leading a spotted horse. “You should
have this extra one,” he said. “I saw you kill the man off of it.”
    “Thanks,” said Wulf. He remembered the man and the
horse. “Tell me, does the Cahena heal wounds?”
    “Yes, she does.”
    On all sides, a happy chatter rose. Warriors
beamed at their spoils of swords or cloaks or helmets. Ketriazar bore the
enemy’s green battle flag. The wounded were helped astride captured horses, and
those who were most badly hurt were lashed to their saddles. Other horses
carried captured foodstuffs and water containers. The column moved westward at
a walk, the Cahena at the head.
    “Ride with me, Wulf,” she called, and he joined
her.
    “You must realize that you’ve done a great thing,”
she said. “Your head is as strong as your hand.”
    “I killed a few,” he said again. “Maybe wounded
others.” He rode in silence for a moment. “We’ll have a bigger battle than this
one. They’ll come with ten times as many.”
    “Then we’ll muster ten times as many ourselves,”
she said.
    “And arm and feed them?”
    “You think, four javelins
each. We’ll do it, if those invaders give us a little time. We make our own
javelins, make them well. But food — that’s a problem. It wasn’t easy to ration
this three thousand or so, even among good farms and orchards.”
    The sun rose hot and high when they reached the
narrow stream and stopped to fill their water bottles and let the horses drink.
The captured food was shared out. The Cahena ate a scrap of white Moslem bread
and some dates.
    “You don’t eat,” she said to Wulf. “You’re not
hungry.”
    “Not so hungry that I can’t give my share to
someone hungrier, Lady Cahena.”
    “Spoken like a chief,” she said. “Mallul, carry
the word that anyone who wishes to bathe may do so.”
    Everybody, it seemed, wanted to bathe. Wulf staked
out his two horses, stripped, and waded in. The water was no deeper than his
waist. He wished for the soap he had known in Constantinople and Carthage , and made shift with grating handfuls of wet sand.
Bhakrann, also bathing, stared at Wulf’s great body.
    “Very few of us your size,” he said. “You’re
muscled like a bull.”
    Out of the water and dressed, the men mounted
again. They rode over land where they saw the hoofmarks of their