"Roland Green - Conan at the Demon's Gate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Roland)

The men obeyed him readily enough, however, when the Picts struck. This was just

after we had picked our next campsite, a stretch of open ground at the foot of a

frowning rocky hill.

They came out of the woods howling fit to waken the dead and put the living in

their tombs, behind a shower of arrows and throwing-spears. Knowing that our

bows had the range of theirs, they waited until the lay of the ground and the

pattern of the trees let them slip close, all in that silence that none except

cats and Picts on the hunt can maintain.

Our archers had time for but one flight before five times their number of Picts

let loose. The Picts still favor flint for their arrowheads, but try telling a

man struck deep by one that it is a child's weapon. That we suffered little was
due more to the stoutness of our armor than the weakness of the Picts' weapons.

The Picts were of two different clans, and as is often the case, one attacked a

trifle before the other. So we had warning and escaped being surrounded,

although by the margin of the thinnest hair in the mane of a newborn foal. We

turned and ran for the best place at hand for defense, that open ground at the

foot of the outcrop.

Our archery took some of the heart out of the first clan, not to mention leaving

two-score warriors kicking or still among the ferns and rotted logs. We covered

some hundreds of paces through tangled second growth with only one man dead, his

comrades able to carry him, and no one else hurt past fighting.

Then the second clan attacked, without the warning of an arrow shower but

instead charging from cover to reach close quarters almost at once. As with most

Picts, they wore feathers and tattoos, breechclouts and war paint, and precious

little else. But more of them than I cared to see had swords and knives of