The enclosures were empty now. The fences of wood and woven brush broken and falling

down into the tall grass. So were the houses clustered on the mound overlooking the pastures.

Their thatched roofs collapsing downward. The waddle and dog walls falling apart. The

dry stone walls surrounding the settlement on top of the artificial hill still stood,

but the people had long sense left. The horses idly nibbled at the grass. Teeth

chopping and heads down, the horses leather reigned, dragged against the ground as they ate,

brushing aside half-broken jugs with rounded handles and spherical pots decorated with

regular patterns, impressed by the potter's fingers. Their hooves occasionally crunched

on bits of pottery scattered through the old pasture. Cratching down, his hand moving the

hilt of his leaf-plated dagger aside so it wouldn't hook his leg when he bent over.

The man picked up a palm-sized shirt of pottery and examined it. He turned it over and

over in his hands. He remembered what the vessel had looked like when it had been intact

years before. He remembered trading for a similar palm, a souvenir of his first visit to the

Danube Valley from his homeland on the step many days right to the east. He also remembered

his second visit here. Sneaking up to the pasture under the cover of night with his warbank,

slitting the snoring herders throat and making off at their cattle before the first rays

of sunlight had come over the Carpathian Mountains to the east. He remembered returning again,

climbing the stone wall in the darkness of a moonless night, cracking the villagers'

skulls with his mace and riding away with fame and glory and wealth.

That had been many years ago when he was a young man. He wasn't young anymore. He was

still tall, but the sun had turned his fair skin, leathery and wrinkled. Gray streaks

wound themselves through his brown hair and beard. The hand that gripped the half of a

...