Vengt's Tale
Part I: Media Res
"Hold!" The sergeant's bellow drowned in the thunder of approaching hoofbeats. Pounding, Vengt's heart raced faster still.
"Hold!" Vengt wanted to run, every fiber of his being urged him too, but something held him back. He squinted and forced himself to look to the horizon, icy terror gripping his bowels.
In two's and threes the saracen riders crested the dune with the sun at their backs. "Perhaps they want to trade?" he mused hopefully. As if in answer the lances of the foremost horsemen dipped level, couched, serpents of sand hissing in their wake. The earth shook. Vengt swallowed.
"Hold!" A hail of tatar arrows began to beat a jolting, metallic rhythm on their shields. Vengt heard a pained shriek behind him as one found its mark.
A fellow pilgrim to the left suddenly broke ranks and fled.
"Keep your formation!"
The command went unheeded. He was no soldier. The coward made it ten paces before dying in a cloud of arrows. "I musn't be like him." Vengt said to himself. "I will die with honor."
They were almost upon them.
As one the grim-faced caravan guards drew their scimitars, sunbursts glimmering on naked steel to meet the onrushing danger. Vengt reached for his own blade, but was dismayed to find that the scabbard was empty. "Bloody upkeep!" In a foreign land, unarmed and outnumbered, the wayward knight cursed his sad fate.
The frenzied horde descended upon all of them, and Vengt was afraid.
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