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a dozen, perhaps a dozen and a half, bearing down on them out of the darkness to the east, loosing shafts as they came.
    They were lean compact men of some Oriental stock in crimson leather jerkins, riding like fiends. Their mounts were little flat-headed fiery-eyed gray demon-horses that moved as if their short, fiercely pistoning legs could carry them to the far boundaries of the nether world without the need of a moment’s rest.
    Chanting, howling, the yellow-skinned warriors seemed to be in a frenzy of rage. Mongols? Turks? Whoever they were, they were pounding toward the Land Rover like the emissaries of Death himself. Some brandished long, wickedly curvedblades, but most wielded curious-looking small bows from which they showered one arrow after another with phenomenal rapidity.
    Crouching behind the Land Rover with Lovecraft beside him, Howard gaped at the attackers in a paralysis of astonishment. How often had he written of scenes like this? Waving plumes, bristling lances, a whistling cloud of clothyard shafts! Thundering hooves, wild war-cries, the thunk of barbarian arrowheads against Aquilonian shields! Horses rearing and throwing their riders. … Knights in bloodied armor tumbling to the ground. … Steel-clad forms littering the slopes of the battlefield. …
    But this was no swashbuckling tale of Hyborean derring-do that was unfolding now. Those were real horsemen – as real as anything was, in this place – rampaging across this chilly wind-swept plain in the outer reaches of the Afterworld. Those were real arrows; and they would rip their way into his flesh with real impact and inflict real agony of the most frightful kind.
    He looked across the way at Gilgamesh. The giant Sumerian was hunkered down behind the overturned bulk of the animal he had slain. His mighty bow was in his hand. As Howard watched in awe, Gilgamesh aimed and let fly. The shaft struck the nearest horseman, traveling through jerkin and rib-cage and all and emerging from the man’s back. But still the onrushing warrior managed to release one last arrow before he fell. It traveled on an erratic trajectory, humming quickly toward Gilgamesh on a wild wobbly arc and skewering him through the flesh of his left forearm.
    Coolly the Sumerian glanced down at the arrow jutting from his arm. He scowled and shook his head, the way he might if he had been stung by a hornet. Then – as Conan might have done; how very much like Conan! – Gilgamesh inclined his head toward his shoulder and
bit
the arrow in half just below the fletching. Bright blood spouted from the wound as he pulled the two pieces of the arrow from his arm.
    As though nothing very significant had happened, Gilgamesh lifted his bow and reached for a second shaft. Blood was streaming in rivulets down his arm, but he seemed not even to be aware of it.
    Howard watched as if in a stupor. He could not move, hebarely had the will to draw breath. A haze of nausea threatened to overwhelm him. It had been nothing at all for him to heap up great bloody mounds of severed heads and arms and legs with cheerful abandon in his stories; but in fact real bloodshed and violence of any sort had horrified him whenever he had even a glimpse of it.
    “The gun, Bob!” said Lovecraft urgently beside him. “Use the
gun
!”
    “What?”
    “There.
There.
”
    Howard looked down. Thrust through his belt was the pistol he had taken from the Land Rover when he had come out to investigate that little beast in the road. He drew it now and stared at it, glassy-eyed, as though it were a basilisk’s egg that rested on the palm of his hand.
    “What are you doing?” Lovecraft asked. “Ah. Ah. Give it to me.” He snatched the gun impatiently from Howard’s frozen fingers and studied it a moment as though he had never held a weapon before. Perhaps he never had. But then, grasping the pistol with both his hands, he rose warily above the hood of the Land Rover and squeezed off a shot.
    The