The Golden Steed

Too simple a solution, unfortunately. The man's own people might be many hundreds of miles away. He and his horse both looked as if they had been on the road for a long time. And there were those unknown attackers. They had not appeared during the night, but that did not prove they were not lurking in the next grove of trees along the river bank.

So as Blade rode down the valley, he kept in the open, well away from the river bank and hopefully out of accurate bowshot from the trees. He rode slowly, with his eyes sca

It was about seven miles to the foot of the valley, downhill all the way. At a slow cautious walk, it took him nearly two hour's. Several times he spotted signs of the trail the golden horse and its rider must have made coming up, the valley the night before. But there was never any sign of any other men or horses, and no sign of any fight. Not even so much as an arrow stuck into a tree.

As Blade descended into the valley, the air grew unmistakably warmer. The trees were taller here, less gnarled by a constant struggle against drought and wind. The underbrush was also thicker. Blade did not particularly like this. The thicker the vegetation, the more opportunities, for men to lie in ambush. Several times he dismounted and scouted ahead on foot, sword drawn and ready. Once his scouting turned up a small spring flowing out from a crack in the rocks. He refilled his water bags there, and let the horse drink as much as it wanted.

The sun was rising higher, and so were the walls of the valley. They now rose almost vertically for a thousand feet, seamed and rugged blue-gray rock with a thin fringe of vegetation high above. The valley floor was in shadow so deep it was almost twilight. The course of the valley kept twisting and winding like a snake's trail.

Eventually the cliffs on either side began to shrink. Looking ahead, Blade could see level country not far ahead. The trees grew not merely in groves but in small forests. He thought he could even see the blue flash of a river ru

Now a new danger was coming up. Perhaps the dead man's pursuers had not dared enter the valley. But that didn't prove they had gone off. As Blade reached the last point where the valley walls provided concealment, he dismounted, tethered the horse, and made a scouting trip on foot.

Compared with the grim valley he was leaving, this new land was teeming with life. Snakes wriggled and small animals scurried out from his path as he stalked through the bushes. Birds chattered and screamed in the treetops, and he mentally cursed them. They could easily give the alarm to anyone waiting for him. In places, thick creepers and vines had wound themselves around the trunks of several trees, knitting the whole grove into an impenetrable mass.

There was indeed a river flowing down through this new valley. Blade scouted nearly a mile to its bank, and looked down through the berry-hung bushes growing along the edge into the water. It was a sluggish stream, so shallow that it would hardly have floated more than a child's toy boat. But it was a guide he could follow. Small riverbeds led to larger ones, and larger ones to great ones. And in this type of country, there would be men along the rivers if they were anyplace.

Blade was begi

Then as he made his way back to the golden horse, he caught sight of a cluster of small birds perched on the lower branches of a bush. They were twittering and squabbling over something, and Blade saw that that something was a pile of horse droppings-a pile much too neat to be natural. Somebody had been very careful to clean it up and slip it under the bush, hopefully out of sight. Somebody who had passed this way not much earlier than last night. The droppings were drying, but still fresh.

There was no sign of a trail around the bush, but Blade didn't expect any. The ground here was hard enough to resist footprints in most places. And whoever had passed through here would have been careful to avoid any of the softer patches. He returned to his horse and rode out again.

The sun was now high and burning hotly down from a clear sky. Once again Blade kept out in the open as much as possible, eyes ceaselessly probing the landscape on all sides, ready to urge his horse to a gallop. He tried to keep the river in sight as much as possible, but before long the vegetation became so thick that the faint blue glimmer vanished. He reined in his horse, considering whether to risk getting closer to the trees in order to keep the river in sight. The birds seemed to have gone to sleep in the heat of the day, and there was silence all over the land. It was broken only by the gentle breathing of the golden horse.

Suddenly it was broken by a horse's neighing.

Blade froze in the saddle, and his right arm snaked down and jerked the sword free. His head swiveled from side to side, eyes raking the countryside more intently than before. His ears aided his eyes. If that neigh would only come again!

It came again, twice, three times. Other horses echoed the first one, forming a chorus. Blade heard human voices raised in unmistakable anger, cutting into the horses' noise. He could place the sounds now. They were coming from his left, toward the river.

Blade dug his heels into the golden horse's flanks. It leaped forward, working up from a walk to a trot to canter in seconds. As it hit a full gallop, Blade risked a look behind him. There was a continuous boil of motion inside the greenery, and sunlight flashing off metal. Then the bushes parted, and men on horseback started pouring out, some of them still only half in the saddle. For the moment, Blade didn't spend any more time looking at them. He bent low in the saddle and urged the golden horse along.

The wind whistled in his ears and the pounding of the horse's hooves on the hard earth jarred up through his body. He still kept to the open spaces. The horse could move faster there, and he saw no point in trying to lose the men pursuing him. This would be their country. They would know it better than he did. It would be a question of outru

After a time he risked another look behind him. There were at least twenty horsemen in the group after him. They were all riding at a gallop, but the first half-dozen or so were slowly pulling out in front of their comrades. And they were closing the gap on Blade.

As they came closer, he saw that these horsemen were of a different people than the dead rider of the golden horse. They were clean-shaven and apparently bald under flat wool hats, square-bodied and short-limbed. They carried no bows at all, but swords and lances like Blade's. One man in the lead group was whirling a sling around his head. Blade ducked as it sent a stone whistling past him, much too close for comfort. Their clothes were clearly those of horsemen-baggy trousers, loose tunics, riding boots with spurs.

Blade urged his own horse on to a greater speed. The gap between him. and the leading pursuers widened, but they were still close. And then the first half-dozen horsemen began to drop back. Four more pulled out of the mass and began moving up into the lead. They were going to wolfpack him, Blade realized. They could keep rotating the lead, with only a few of their horses having to go flat out at any one time. But they could force the golden horse to keep moving at full speed without a break. No matter how great its endurance, Blade knew it couldn't stand that.