Tag: Eclipsed by Shadow

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.

She climbed up the face of the hill until she could peer over the top. The open hilltop had been scraped flat. Its only feature was a circular pit dug in the hill’s center.

Oh, how funny this will be.

Meagan crossed the hilltop. The pit was a shaft bored into the mound, its narrow walls defined in flickering orange light from below. She leaned closer. Another set of pegs led into the murky depths. Warm, ripe scents of decay rose from the pit.

“Hello,” she called nervously. “Is anyone down there?” Her words made a dull echo. “Hello?”

A tinkling swept over the hilltop, a musical sound that vanished with the breeze. Another round of chimes played in the gusts of wind, and Meagan caught a flash in the corner of her eye. A stream of movement emerged from a dip in the landscape. She stared in astonishment as horses and riders rose from the dip as if bubbling from dry ground.

Meagan crouched on the hilltop as the disorganized procession jogged and bobbed closer. Perhaps a hundred strong, the field of riders was a carpet of color and glinting reflections. The horses were unruly and barely contained. Hopping sideways, they battered against each other. Their riders sat atop their mounts’ croups—far back—holding twined leather straps as reins.

Those must be the movie extras, Meagan reasoned, noting their authenticity.