Nelson had leaped on Hatha's back. Riding beside Kree back through the red-lit forest toward the river-edge, he sensed the wild relief of the Clans pouring to the fight around him.
Fire they hated, inaction they hated, but now at last their chance to come to grips with the destroyers had come. Beasts and mounted men, they crashed through brush and trees to the edge of the red-lit river just as the first of a score of long crude rafts, loaded with warriors, was poled ashore. Nelson saw that some of the Humanites carried webbing sacks of grenades.
He shouted, "Charge them! Rush them in the shallows! You Hoofed Ones — ride them down!"
Hatha laid his ears back and ran straight for the water. Nelson clung to his mane, his gun out, firing. Behind him, in a terrible resistless rush, the Clans swept into battle and even the red thundering flowers of the grenades could not stop them.
In the brush of the banks, on the rocky shore, in the water, men and beasts crashed together, screamed and died, and the river was the color of blood under the flame-lit sky.
Squealing, kicking, plunging, Hatha raged through the thick of the fight and took Nelson with him. Nelson caught a glimpse of Sloan and Van Voss, on rafts out in the river, willing to let Shan Kar's men bear the brunt of the fight. They fondled submachine-guns but could not use them, the two forces were so entangled.
The men of Vruun rode up and down the beaches, their swords flashing, and where their horses were killed under them they fought on foot, locked breast to breast with their erstwhile brothers of Anshan.
Great striped bodies leaped and rolled and clawed, and everywhere the gray wolves ran, slashing, slaying. Eagles swooped and struck their talons home. Bodies fell on the stones and lay heaped in the shallows and the clans and the men of Anshan fought on over them, the horses' hoofs ringing on the mail of the fallen men.
"Hai-ooo!" came the blood-chilling killing-cry of Tark, a gray demon gone mad with battle.
Nelson, clinging to Hatha's back as the stallion crashed and whirled in the crazy fight, glimpsed a white-faced Humanite warrior stabbing upward with his sword.