Swords from the West by Harold Lamb

Author:Harold Lamb [Harold Lamb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Fantasy
ISBN: 9780803220355
Publisher: UNP - Bison Original
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Black Road

When he saw the first stars over mountains, Mark pulled in his racing horse and laughed. It was dark and he was safe. “Faith,” he said to the roan mare, “we are still alive in our skins.” But he spoke between his teeth; he made little sound.

Even though he now felt himself to be safe from the danger that followed his heels, he kept moving along the path. Mark, late Sieur de Kerak, believed in taking no chances. He reined his horse to the side of the roadway where he could not be seen under the pines. His long body was covered with mesh, darkened so that it did not gleam and oiled so that it did not grate when he moved. Over this he pulled the black mantle that he had picked up when he began his long ride, months before. No ponderous helm of steel showed the outline of his head; he wore only a round steel cap. No long unwieldy sword clanked at his hip. Mark had left the family swords behind him.

Instead he carried, loosely thrust into his belt, the most deadly and efficient of weapons, a morning star. This morning star had a two-foot shaft of wood, strengthened by iron, with three slender chains hanging from it and, at the ends of the chains, three spiked metal balls. A swinging blow from this morning star — as Mark’s arm swung it — could crush in the armor or the head of a man.

Mark knew weapons as well as he knew war. His hard body had scars in it that ached when he felt the night’s cold. Only a sure instinct had kept him alive, and Mark trusted his instinct more than any talisman or prayer.

Now that instinct told him to keep on going. Behind him, witless people were dying each day by the thousand under the hoofs of that strange horde emerging from the steppes of Asia. It was like a whirlwind, that tide of horsemen.

Mark listened, as he rode, to the heaving breaths of his horse and the stir of the wind in the forest mesh. He put his hand into the small sack of barley tied carefully to the saddle horn. Beneath the barley, his fingers touched objects like sharp stones; only these were precious stones, carefully selected — pigeonblood rubies, emeralds of Ind, and glorious amethysts, a treasure of them, enough to ransom a king.

His father, the first lord of Kerak, had voyaged out of England with the heedless Richard the Lionheart, and his father had left his bones in Kerak overlooking the barren ridges beyond the Dead Sea. Mark, born in that waste borderland, had wrested wealth from it and he meant to return to England with that wealth; to make the acquaintance of the homeland he had never seen. He had grown very tired of his castle above the greenish-blue of the Dead Sea, and its sour wine and olive trees.

“The crusades,” he told himself, “are running out, like the sands of an hourglass. Aye, they are done!”

Suddenly he checked his horse.

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