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"You are rigt," I said. There were three such chiefs. On had perished in the first attack.
Mahpiyasapa did not give the order to fire on the man. It was not merely that he respected his bravery. It was also that he was permitting the man to scout the position. A certain form of assault, it might seem, would be effective.
The man haulted his kaiila only yards from the barricade, with its terrible, bloody points.
Then he turned his kaiila about, not hurring.
"He is truly brave," said Cuwignaka, admiringly.
"He is a war chief," said Hci.
The man stopped his kaiila beneath us. He ceased singing his medicine and looked upward. He saw the two stakes, some twenty to twenty-five feet above him, and the naked, roped beauties who graced them.
"Do not speak," said Hci to Iwoso, "or you will be slain."
Iwoso was absolutely silent. Warriors of the Kaiila do not make idle threats.
The warrior, looking upward, scarcely noticed Bloketu. He did, however, for a time, regard Iwoso. His face was absolutely expressionless. Then, slowly, he resumed his descent, once more singing his medicine song.
"He is furious," said Hci. "Superb!" Then he turned to Iwoso. "They will fight fiercely to rescue you," he said.
Iwoso looked at him, frightened.
"But they will not be successful," he said.
Iwoso fought the ropes, futilely.
"You may speak now," said Hci, watching the retreat of the Yellow Knife.
Iwoso's lovely, curved body squirmed inside the confining ropes.
"Peraps you should speak now, whild you have the opportunity," said hci, "for later perhaps you would have to request permission to speak, and if men did not please to give it to you, then you might not speak."
Iwoso looked at Hci in anger. Her lips trembled. But she did not speak. She pressed her body once again, futilitly, against the ropes. Then she stood desdainfully at the post, roped helplessly to it.
"They are coming again," said Cuwignaka, "this time single file. They will not crowd themselves on the trail."
"They are still on kaiilaback," I said. "They learn their leassons hard."
"Kahintokapa will count fifty," said Hci. "He will then give the signal."
My count and that of Kahintokapa, near the trail summit, near the barricade, tallied exactly. When the first fifty riders had passed the chosen point on the trail the second barricade, bristling, too, with stakes, on ropes, was lowered to the trail, shutting off the upper segment of the trail as effectively as a gate. The first fifty riders, not realizing they were cut off, continued upward. The later riders stormed against the barricade, the successive riders piling up behind them, forced the first riders forward, onto the stakes, and several riders, as the file behind them doubled and then bulged, were forced from the trail. The second barricade was defended by a fusilade of arrows sped from the small bows of Kaiila warriors suddenly appering at the upper edge of the escarpment. Meanwhile, Kaiila bowmen, firing from behind the first barricade, and crawling over and through it, loosened war arrows inot the enemy. Disadvantaged were the Yellow Knives to be on kaiilaback in such close quarters. And as they lowered their shields to defend themselves against the almost point-blank fire of the Kaiila other Kaiila archers, from above, over the edge of the escarpment, fired down upon them. Some of the men afoot, with thier weight, throwing it against the beasts, even forced the beasts and their riders from the trail. Survivors, turning their kaiila about, fled back down the trail, there to encounter the second barricade. One man, with the downward momentum of the slope, managed to leap his kaiila over the lower barricade. Two others, on foot, crawling through the barricade, managed to escape. He who had lept his kaiila over the lower barricade was the second war chief of the Yellow Knives, he who had ascended the trail only Ehn earlier. It was a fine, agile beast.
"I do not think they will come again on kaiilaback," said Cuwignaka.
"I would think not," I said.
Cuwignaka's speculation, as it turned out, was sound.
In about an Ahn, in the vicinity of noon, we saw some three or four hundred Yellow Knives ascending the trail, on foot, slowly, conserving their energy.
"You are finished now!" said Iwoso. "You are finished!"
In the way of defenders we had only some two hundred men, what we had been able to gather of the remnants of the Kaiila bands after the battle of the summer camp. Stones would not be likely to be too effective against men on foot. The barricades, too, to men on foot, though they would surely constitue impediments to their advance, would scarcely constitue insuperable obstacles. Further, the Yellow Knives, like other red savages honed to warlike perfection over generations of intertribal conflict, were fine warriors. I did not doubt but what, man for man, they might be equvalent of the Kaiila. The delicat balances of tribal power would not have been sustained for generations, in my opinion, had radically disparate disributions of martial skills been involved.
"Already they are moving over and through your lower barricade!" cried Iwoso.
"Yes," said Hci. we had not chosen to defend it.
"In their numbers," cried Iwoso, elatedly, "they will storm your upper barricade, overwhelm the defenders and then be amongst you!"
"It is unlikely that one of them will reach the upper barricade," said Hci.
"What do you mean?" cried Iwoso. "What are you doing?" She struggled to see behind her but, because of the post and her neck bonds, could not do so but very imperfectly.
From the lodges near the edge of the escarpment men again drew forth travois. On these were great bundles of arrows, hundreds of arrows in a bundle. Many of these arrows were not fine arrows. Many lacked even points and were little more than featherless, sharpened sticks. Yet, impelled with force from the small,fierce bows of red savages at short range, they, too, would be dangerous. For days warriors, and women and children, had been making them.
"You must think not only in terms of numbers, Iwoso," I said, "but fire power, as well."
She looked, startled, at one of the huge sheafs of arrows being spilled near her.
"Sometimes," I said, "there is little to choose from between ten men, each with one arrow, and one man with ten arrows."
Hci and Cuwignaka fitted arrows to the strings of their bows.
"This strategy was once used," I said, "by a people named the Parhians, against a general named Crassus."
Iwoso looked at me, puzzled.
"It was long ago," I said, "and it was not even in the Barrens."
"Fire!" called Mahpiyasapa.
Torrents of arrows sped from the height of the escarpment. In moments the shields of the Yellow Knives bristled with arrows. Return fire, in the face of such unrelenting sheets of flighted wood, was almost unthinkable. The small shields of the Yellow Knives, too, provided them with little protection. They were not the large, oval shields of Turia, or the large rounded shields common to Gorean infantry in the north, behind which a warrior might crouch, hoping for a swift surcease to the storm of missiles. It did not take long for the assalted Yellow Knives to realize tht they were exposed to no ordinary rain of arrows, a shower soon finished, but something u
"See the Yellow Knives?" Hci asked Iwoso. "They flee like urts."
She looked away from him.
He then began to look at her.