There she saw what her quick intelligence told her must be the object of her attack. Outside the village stood a tiny knot of dwarfs garbed in armor more glittering, more ornate, than that of those who made the attack.
These, Meg recognized, were the leaders. The commander-in-chief must be that overripe, ochre plum in golden greaves and casque; he who stood impatiently fingering the handle of his light-stick as he watched his warriors' progress.
To think was to act. It never occurred to Meg that her solo foray was suicidal. Hurdling the bodies of those before her, she leaped through the broken wall; raced, bobbing and weaving, shifting her course to make herself an impossible target, down upon the commander's party.
As she ran, her hair broke loose from its handknit snood; lithe muscles snapped the sinews that held her cloak. She was like some magnificent golden panther as, hair flowing behind her in a liquid honey stream, high, firm breasts rising with the quickening of her breath, she charged down on her tribe's enemies.
Thoughts flashed dizzily through her mind. A great burst of exultation; she was too near, now, for them to stop her! Then a soul-shaking disappointment. She had been seen! One of the officers' eyes bugged; he raised a light-stick—
Then most incredible thing of all—the commander-in-chief had seen her, and his porcine eyes, slanted and deep-sunk in rolls of saffron flesh, were glittering with delight. His left hand was beating down the cherry-flame of the lieutenant as his right was pointing at her breast his own stick. Light flashed—pale green. Something within Meg seemed to snap; suddenly she was suffused with a sense of coolness, a bewildering drainage of the fever that had coursed through her veins.
So funny. So funny to have thought this battle important. It wasn't, really. It was all a mistake. And the sword in her hand? Meg glanced at it idly, her charge slowing to a walk. She cast the sword away.
The din of conflict was a thin and distant sound. The world about her was sweet and green ... the clouds billowed on an endless blue like boat-sails scudding before the wind. There was something she should remember. There was a dancing haze before her eyes ... flowers about her feet. Were she to wander gently, now, to that farthest field—what was it she could not remember?—there would be golden buttercups and the prim, starch cornflower ripe for plucking.
Her body was numbed and drowsy with a sense of comfort. Only—there was a Man; a Man named Daiv—only she could not be happy here. Not unless she forgot her troubles, forgot the man named Daiv, forgot the world was spinning and reeling and swirling before her eyes like a gigantic wheel going faster and faster and faster....
Then there was blackness.