The vultures circled lower as I stumbled over rocks as hot as newly baked bread. Both of us were scavengers in the merciless oven of the desert. Finally I saw what the birds had seen before me: a family of refugees, stretched out dead on the dusty soil; an overturned ox-cart a few yards away, with a vulture perched on the rim of its useless wheel and eying its prospective meal. The other birds were swooping in low, spreading their angel-shaped wings as they landed, making obscene sounds as they waddled slowly toward the corpses.

I picked up a fist-sized rock, despite its searing heat, and pegged it at the vulture on the wheel. It hit him on the head like a rifle bullet, killing him instantly. The other birds hardly seemed to notice, until I threw three more rocks at them, hitting two more of their number and finally alarming the rest enough to make them flap angrily into the air, stirring up the dust as they departed.

The birds of death hovered above me, waiting with the patience of certainty, as I staggered toward the bodies. They had not died of thirst. The man was riddled with wounds, most of them in his back. The blood had barely congealed. It looked as if he had been shot with arrows, which his killers had then pulled out so that they could be used again. His wife and two children all had their throats sliced open. The woman, who could not have been much more than twenty years old, was stripped almost naked.

Whatever they had been carrying in the cart had been taken away; it was completely empty. The oxen were gone too. I could see the tracks of the animals in the dusty soil. Whoever had overtaken this pitiful little family placed more value on the beasts of burden than the human beings. There was no water, no possession of any kind among the four corpses. And I found that, despite my earlier certainty, I could not assault their wretched bodies any further to drink their blood, even though my life depended on it.

I squinted up at the glaring sky and saw the vultures still circling, watching silently. I wished I had the tools and the strength to bury these strangers. But I had neither. The vultures won. I turned back toward the pillar of smoke, stumbling across the stony desert, and left the filthy birds to their feast. The day seemed to go on interminably, each moment hotter than the one before it. I walked for many hours, and still the smoke seemed no closer than it had been when I had first noticed it. Something deep inside my mind found the situation ludicrous enough to be almost funny. Certainly Ormazd had sent me here. Certainly something was going to happen at this time and place that could alter the entire history of the universe; Ahriman was going to make another attempt at tearing space-time apart and destroying the continuum. And just as certainly, it seemed, I was doomed to die ignominiously of thirst before I ever got close to the task that Ormazd had sent me here to perform.

And then I saw them.

Five — no, six — horsemen moving slowly across the scrubland ahead of me. Their ponies were lean and haggard, the riders themselves seemed equally wiry. They wore pointed metal helmets and carried long slim lances. Each of them also had a small, double-curved bow and a curved sword clinking at his side.

They saw me at almost the instant I spotted them, stopped their ponies for a moment, then nosed them in my direction. They approached slowly, not out of wariness, but because they knew that a half-naked, unarmed man on foot was not going to escape them.

As they approached, I saw that they were oriental, with the high cheekbones and flattened face of the true Asian. Their skin, what little of it showed outside their leather and metal armor, was a light brownish tone, almost like the color of cured tobacco. Their eyes were narrow, but not particularly slanted. Mongol warriors, I thought, or perhaps some of the earliest Turks to invade the Middle East from their original homeland in high Asia, near Lake Baykal.

The six of them reined up about twenty yards in front of me and eyed me as curiously as I inspected them. Their leader, the second rider from the left, spoke to the others and I found, with a slight shock, that I could understand their language.

“He doesn’t look like the others.”

“Perhaps he was one of their slaves, taken from a different tribe.”

“I’ve never seen anyone like that before. Look at the size of him! And his skin is pink… like a pig’s, almost.”

The rider on the leader’s right gave a harsh laugh. “Maybe we should take him back to the Orkhon. He might reward us for finding such an unusual thing.”

“Such a freak, you mean.”

“He looks human enough, except for the strange color of him.”

“His blood is red, I’ll bet.”

And with that, the rider who said it, the one just to the right of the leader, kicked his skinny pony’s flanks and sprang into a gallop aimed right at me, swinging his lance down to aim it at my heart. The other horsemen sat calmly in their saddles to watch the sport, grinning.

My skin color might remind them of a pig’s, but I had no intention of being spitted like one. I stood stock-still as the horse and lance-wielding rider dashed toward me, drawing up the little strength left in me. I could feel adrenaline surging through my body, making every sense hyper-alert. The horse and rider seemed to slow down, and I had time to notice the pony’s wide eye staring fearfully at me, see its nostrils flaring as it sucked air. The tip of the rider’s lance rode without a waver straight toward my heart, the barbarian horseman hunched forward in his saddle, holding the reins with his left hand, his mouth half-open in which might have been a grimace or a grin of anticipation.

At the right instant I made a toreador’s sidestep, let the lance point slide harmlessly past me, grabbed the haft of the lance and jerked the astounded rider clean out of his saddle. He landed painfully on his shoulder as the horse, its head suddenly twisted around by the jerking of its reins, stumbled and thudded to the ground, raising a thick cloud of dust. The lance splintered, leaving me holding about three feet of its business end.

For a moment or two there was not a sound out of any of us. The dust drifted away and the horse scrambled to its feet and trotted a few yards away, its reins dragging in the dust. The other riders, I noticed, looked at the horse first, and only after they were satisfied that it was unhurt, did they return their attention to their companion, who got to his feet much more slowly than the pony did.

His left arm hung limply from the shoulder, but with a snarl he drew his curved saber and rushed at me before I could say anything to him. I parried his overhand cut with the shaft of the lance I still held, although his surprisingly powerful swing almost slashed all the way through the wood. As he raised his arm for another stroke, I kicked him in the midsection, doubling him over. Dropping the useless shaft of the lance, I wrested the sword from his hand and let him collapse to the ground, gasping for breath.

The leader of the little band wasted no words. He unslung his bow and notched an arrow to it. Pulling the string back to his chest, he let the arrow fly at me. I saw it all as if in slow-motion and used the sword to parry the steel-headed arrow in mid-air.

That stunned them. But not for long. They were hardened warriors, and they were not going to let an enemy escape them, no matter how well he fought. They simply began to edge their ponies around to form a circle around me. They knew as well as I did that I would not be able to parry arrows shot at me from five different directions.

“Wait!” I said. “I am not your enemy. I have come from a far place to see your Khan.”

The warrior at my feet had gotten his wind back somewhat by then, and lifted himself to his knees, still sucking air through his wide-open mouth.