#43- A dawning realization … – THE LEGEND OF THE GREAT HORSE trilogy

Something is wrong.

The horses were small and wiry, and of every color and shade of bay, tan or white. Crowning each horse’s head was a patchwork of gold and leather supporting a fantastic headdress of golden antlers or curved horns of mountain sheep. Everywhere gold trinkets moved and flashed. Those must be the movie extras, Meagan reasoned, noting their authenticity.

The riders could have seen Meagan exposed on the hill, but they passed at an angle, eyes glazed and mouths open. A thousand tinkling gold pieces played in time with the horses’ gaits. Fractured sunlight from the metal-encrusted mob showered the ground. It was clearly a big-budget film.

A rumble started low and rose to shake the air. Meagan turned and saw that the “burning trees” had grown to a blackness swallowing the horizon. Instead of smoke, what she had actually seen was the wall of dust rising behind an approaching mass of galloping horses. Now visible were men standing on flimsy carts, their whips flashing through air filling with screeching metal and pounding hooves.

Chariots.

The golden mob shouted to each other for courage and flailed their horses into erratic gallops to meet the charge. Meagan blinked as her “movie extras” were dispersed like scraps of colored paper as the chariots ran pell-mell into them. Flashes of sunlight swirled from ornaments as the riders were annihilated in convulsions of horses, wheels and breaking leather. As the wave of chariots hurled into the fight, it was clear each unit was unstoppable even by its pilot—perhaps especially by its pilot—for chariots do not stop destroying in death but come apart in deadly pieces, releasing with each horse a new force of chaos.

A rider stopped on the ground below. Until that moment Meagan had been too stunned for fear, but she looked into the man’s slitted eyes and backed away from the edge. He saw her. The rider’s thin arm motioned and an object whistled past her. Two yards away a spear jabbed into the bare ground. Its end rocked. Another spear shot up.

Meagan scuttled for the center pit as the new missile streaked overhead. She caught the edge of the pit and lowered herself, kicking for a peg. Another spear arced up, but she did not wait to see where it fell.