by Robert Adams
The Coming
Of the Horseclans
Horseclans Saga
Book I
Robert Adams
Futura
Macdonald & Co
London & Sydney
An Orbit Book
Copyright © 1975, 1982 by Robert Adams
This edition published in 1984 by Futura Publications
ISBN 0 7088 8123 8
Content
Synopsis
Excerpt
Dedication
Author’s Introduction
Prologue I
Prologue II
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Epilogue
About The Author
Synopsis
THE COMING OF THE HORSECLANS
Now, after two hundred years of searching for other immortals, the Undying High Lord Milo Morai has returned to the Horseclans to fulfill an ancient prophecy and lead them to their destined homeland by the sea. But in their path stands an enemy strong in power and steeped in treachery . . .
First in the fantastic saga of the Horseclans.
Excerpt
THE JUDGMENT OF THE SWORD . . .
Milo snapped into wakefulness as a dagger point pricked the flesh just below the right comet of his jaw. Though Mara was weeping, her dagger hand was rock-steady. “Forgive me, Milo, but I must know!” she whispered intensely, then pushed the sharp, needle-tipped weapon two inches into his throat and slashed downward.
The initial gush of blood rapidly dwindled to a slow trickle, and what should have been a death wound began to close. Milo’s eyes, too, closed and he clenched his teeth, saying between them, “I should have slain you, Mara. Well, now you know! What are you going to do with that knowledge — the knowledge that Milo, the War Chief, bears what your people call the Curse of the Undying?”
Dedication
To Christopher Stasheff and Graham Diamond, respected colleagues and good friends.
To Robert and Verna Boos, alte Kameraden.
To John Estren.
To the late, lamented Harvey Shild; and to Pamela Crippen, who is made of sugar and spice and everything nice.
Author’s Introduction
The following tale is a fantasy, pure and simple. It is a flight of sheer imagination. It contains no hidden meanings and none should be read into it; none of the sociological, economic, political, religious, or racial “messages,” with which far too many modem novels abound, are herein contained. The Coming of the Horseclans is rather, intended for the enjoyment of any man or woman who has ever felt a twinge of that atavistic urge to draw a yard of sharp, flashing steel and with a wild war cry recklessly spur a vicious stallion against impossible odds.
If I must further categorize, I suppose this effort falls among the sci-fi/fantasy stories which are woven about a post-cataclysmic age, far in our future. In this case, the story is set in the twenty-seventh century. The world with which we are dealing is one still submerged in the barbarism into which it was plunged some six hundred years prior to the detailed events, following a succession of man-made and natural disasters which extirpated whole nations and races of mankind.
For the scholars and just plain curious: Yes, the language of the Blackhairs or Ehleenee is Greek. I have, indeed, indulged in a bit of literary license with regard to spelling, both in that language and in Mehrikan or English. I tender no apologies.
—Robert Adams
Prologue I
“And, in His time, the God shall come again,
From the south, upon a horse of gold,
To meet the Kindred camped upon the plain,
Or so our Sacred Ancestors were told . . .”
—From “The Prophecy of the Return”
The big man came ashore at the ancient port of Mazatlán, from off a merchantman out of the equally ancient port of Callao, far to the south. The men of the ship professed little sure knowledge of their former passenger, save that he was a proven and deadly warrior, certainly noble-born, though none seemed quite certain of the country of his origin.
This man, who gave his name as Maylo de Morré, stood a head and a handsbreadth above even the tallest of the men of the mountains who, themselves, towered over the men of the lowlands and coast. His hair was strippled with gray, but most of it was as black as their own, though not so coarse, and his hair, spadebeard and moustachios were cut and fashioned in the style of noblemen of the far-southern lands.
Silver he possessed, and gold, as well, but no man thought of taking it from him by force, not after they saw his smooth, effortless movements or looked but once into those brooding, dark-brown eyes. At his trim waist were shortsword, dirk and knife, another knife was tucked into the top of his right boot and the wire-wound leather hilt of a well-kept, antique saber jutted up over his left shoulder.
After he had secured lodgings in the best inn of the upper town, his first stop was at the forge of Mazatlán’s only armor-smith, where he stripped for measurements and ordered a thigh-length shirt of double-link chainmail, paying half the quoted cost in advance in strange, foreign, but pure, gold coins. And that night the smith told all the tavern of his customer’s hard, spare, flat-muscled body, covered from head to foot by a veritable network of crosshatched lines denoting old scars — battle wounds, for certain, the smith opined.
The next morning, Morré sought out the town agent for old Don Humberto del Valle de Castillo y de las Vegas and shortly the two were seen to ride out toward the local nobleman’s estancia. When they returned the next day, the Don himself rode with them, trailed by ten of his lancers, and Morré was astride one of the fine war-stallions which it was the Don’s business and pleasure to breed and train. This stallion was of a chestnut hue that shone like fine gold, with mane and tail that seemed silvery ripples in the brisk breeze blowing in from the sea.
Two lancers fetched the stranger’s effects from the inn and, for the next month, he resided at Don Humberto’s townhouse as a clearly honored guest. He no longer visited the shops; rather, uniformed lancers summoned and escorted the various artisans to the mansion — the saddler, the bootmaker, the best of the tailors, a merchant who was ordered to bring with him several of the rare and hideously expensive but immensely powerful hornbows made by horse-nomads far and far to the north and east, and the armorer.
Julio, the saddler, had to confer with the goldsmith, Pedro, since some of the decorations the foreign nobleman wanted on his saddle and harness were beyond the skills of a provincial worker of leather. And the bootmaker, José, had to have words with Diego, the armorer, if the boots he was to construct were to be properly fitted with thin sheets of steel and panels of light mail.
The tailor, Gustavo, was nearly ecstatic, seeing great future profits from the new and unique designs of clothing this great nobleman had brought from oversea. His only outside need was to haggle with the tanner, Anselmo, for the extra-fine grade of leather to line the esteemed gentleman’s riding breeches.
Sergio Gomez — who was a bastard half-brother of the Don and had, himself, done a bit of soldiering before bringing several years’ worth of loot back to the town of his birth and setting himself up as a merchant — could talk of nothing save Don Maylo’s horsemanship, bowmanship and skill with lance and sab
er.
Sitting in the smoky tavern with his pint-cup of milk-white pulque before him on the knife-scarred board and eager ears hanging upon his words, old Sergio puffed at a thin, black cigarro and opined, “Muchachos, I certify, el Senor Maylo de Morré is un hombre formidable. With either lance or saber, he is more than a match for any caballero I have ever seen fight . . . and I have seen many, in my day.
“But with the bow, now,” he whistled softly, “I tell you, it smacks of wizardry. Within minutes after he had selected the bow of his choice and strung it to his satisfaction, he was plunking arrows into a bale of straw with such speed and accuracy as to make my poor old head to spin.
“Then that splendid palamino stallion came trotting over, though no one had called him and the Señor had not even looked in that direction. The Señor hooked a full arrowcase to his belt and was up on the stallion with bow in hand in the blinking of an eye, without either saddle or reins or even a bare halter.
“He rode far out, then came back at a hard gallop, guiding the stallion Señor Dios alone knows how, since both hands were busy with the bow. Muchachos, he started loosing shafts at a hundred meters or better from that bale of straw, and here to tell you is this one that not one of the dozen shafts he loosed was outside a space I could cover with my palm and fingers.
“That would be good shooting from a firm stand at fifty meters. But from a galloping, barebacked horse at a hundred? Angel Gonzales, Don Humberto’s sergeant, is himself a bow-master and has, as we all know, won many, many gold pesos in competition, and he told me that there can be no man in all the Four Kingdoms of Mexico with such skill.”
The merchant took a long draught of his pulque, puffed his cigarro back to life, then lowered his voice conspiratorily. “Don Humberto avows that the Senor Malyo de Morré is but a noble traveler from somewhere in the Associated Duchies of Chile, who is passing through on a leisurely trip; but Angel opines that he is none other than one of the famous Defensores Argentinos, on loan to our Emperor from the Emperor of the Argentinas and traveling secretly, incognito and in a most roundabout route to meet with his new master.”
Of course, all of them were wrong. Maylo de Morré was much less than they thought, but far more than they could imagine.
The long, difficult and dangerous journey across the Sierra Madre Occidentalis to the Grand Duchy of Chihuahua was accomplished — through the good offices of Don Humberto, who seemed to have highly placed friends and/or relatives at the courts of all four kings and of the Emperor, as well — in company with a heavily guarded caravan which had wound down from the Emperor’s alternate capital at Guadalajara and was proceeding slowly up the coast roads, making frequent stops so that the merchants might offer their wares and the attached imperial officers could collect the yearly taxes from the various local officers, such as Don Humberto.
Despite the numerous and well-armed guards, Don Humberto would not hear of his guest departing with less than a full squad of his own lancer-bodyguards, a quartet of servants, and a fully equipped and provided pack-train to afford the estimable Conde Maylo de Morré security and civilized comforts on the long trek over the mountains. Don Humberto had never been able to obliquely wheedle — for of course gentlemen did not demand or even inquire about un-offered personal information from other gentlemen; it would have been most impolite — any particulars of el Señor’s true origin, nationality, family or rank from him. But he had proclaimed him a count so that his “rank” would match that of the commander of the caravan, who then would treat el Señor as an equal. The old Don felt that it was the least he could do to repay his guest for the many hours of pleasure his tales of the lands and peoples and their singular customs and mores had brought him here in his isolated and provincial little backwater of empire.
For his own part, Don Ramón, Conde-Imperial de Guanajuato and Colonel-General of the Imperial Tax Service, had not needed old Don Humberto’s assurances. He knew a well-bred man when he saw one — the air of relaxed self-assurance, the strict observance of the courtesies and proprieties, the matchless seat which made a single creature of him and his fine destrier, the easy and natural assumption of command, like a hand slipping into an old and well-worn glove. Indeed, Don Ramón suspected that this foreign “Conde” had deliberately misled the aged Humberto, that his true rank was likely several notches higher, and throughout the first two legs of the journey, he deferred to his guest as he would have to his own overlord, el Principe de los Numeros. High nobles were often wont to travel incognito — this Don Ramón knew well from his years in and around the imperial court — and while he diligently played the game and always addressed the foreigner by his nombre de guerra and his assumed title, he never failed to treat him and see that he was treated like a prince of the imperial house.
The ambuscade was sprung in a rock-walled pass, high in the sierras. While rocks crashed about them, throwing off knife-sharp splinters, and arrows hummed their deadly song, while horses and mules and men screamed, whips cracked and the confusion of those in authority was reflected in their torrent of often contradictory orders, Don Ramón caught a glimpse of Conde Maylo.
Despite his evident fear — his rolling eyes and distended nostrils — the palomino stallion stood still as a statue, while his noble rider calmly uncased and strung his hornbow. Behind him, his ten lances tried hard to emulate him, their efforts frustrated partially by less biddable mounts. Only the short, scarfaced sergeant managed to get his mount under sufficient control to allow him to ready his own bow and follow his lord when that worthy moved at an easy walk up into the pass.
When he was where he wished to be, the Conde once more brought his horse to a rigid halt. With rocks bouncing about them and arrows occasionally caroming off their helmets, the sergeant and his lord commenced — before Ramón’s half-disbelieving eyes — such a demonstration of superior archery as not even the ancient rocks could ever before have witnessed.
Soon, the falling rocks had been completely replaced by falling, screaming bodies, and after a good dozen of the bandit archers had hurtled, dead or dying, to the floor of the pass or had dropped their bows to sink back against the rock walls, shrieking in agony and clutching at the feathered shafts which had skewered various portions of their anatomies, their so-far living and whole comrades faded back among the boulders.
So it was that, when the heavily-armed and mounted element of bushwhackers struck the head of the column, they found not a shattered, disorganized and demoralized party to slaughter and plunder at leisure, but rather a rock-hard line of disciplined troops.
Even before they came into physical contact with the waiting soldiery and gentry — almost all of whom should have been down, crushed by rocks or stuck full of arrows — volley on well-aimed volley of shafts rose up in a hissing cloud from the rear ranks to wreak havoc and death amongst the attackers.
Those who had set and activated the ambuscade were not soldiers but hit-and-run banditti, so they could not have been faulted for breaking and running immediately they saw their leaders hacked by sabers and broadswords, lifted writhing from their saddles on dripping lancepoints or hurled to death amid the stamping hooves by blow of ax or mace. Run, the survivors did and pursued they were. Very few escaped alive, nor were any prisoners taken, though several dozen heads were.
Few of the captured horses were of much account, so they were simply stripped of their ratty gear and turned loose. Those which looked as if they might bring a price or a reward were added to the packtrain, loaded with bags of bandit-heads and bundles of captured weapons, valuable for the worked metal.
For the rest, a few pieces of jewelry were taken from the corpses and a scant handful of gold and silver coin were garnered, as well as two battered, antique helmets and an assortment of armrings of brass, copper and iron. None of the robbers had possessed boots or armor of any description or even decent clothing, only rags, rope sandals and jackets of stiff, smelly, ill-cured hide sewn with strips and discs of horn and bone.
Ramón
had noted, despite the confusion of the melee, that Morré’s skill with his exotic saber was superior to that of most swordsmen if not quite the equal of his astounding talent with the hornbow; on the lance he could render no judgment, since his guest’s shaft had splintered on the first shock. But he was satisfied that this Don Maylo de Morré was a most competent warrior, by any standards, as well as a natural and accomplished field commander.
And all of this simply deepened the mystery, in the Conde-Imperial’s mind.
While men were sent to climb the crags to detach the heads of those ambushers who had not fallen from their perches — for each bandit head would bring half a peso in silver upon delivery to the proper authority — Ramón circulated, taking stock of his own casualties. That was when he saw Morré, leading his golden chestnut down the rocky defile, with young Don Gaspar de Garrigo reeling in the saddle and the stocky archer-sergeant with the scarred, pocked face straddling the animal’s broad rump and gripping the high cantle. From both men, steady trickles of blood dripped down to streak the stallion’s glossy hide.
After his aides and other hurriedly summoned men had lifted down the swooning hidalgo and the agonized and creatively cursing sergeant, Ramon offered his own, sweat-soaked scarf to “Conde” Maylo, who was dabbing at the blood streaks on his destrier’s flanks.
“No, thank you, Count Ramón,” croaked Morre from a dry throat. “The only thing that will really help El Dorado, here, is a good wash. I’d settle for a pint of cool wine . . . or even a bare mouthful of stale water, right now.”
Ramón proffered the miraculously unbroken saddle-bottle. “Brandy-water, my lord, the best I fear I can do until we get on about a mile and set up camp.”
After a long, long pull at the flask, Morre said, “A mile, in those wagons, over these rocks? The young knight will likely be dead when we get there. Why not camp here? That riffraff, what’s left of them, won’t be back.”