On the mound, the horseman turned his head a little, and seemed to stare fixedly towards the old warrior. Chanat couldn’t see his expression. His eyes were old and weak. But the horseman bristled with a fierce, still energy, waiting to be unleashed. The wind ruffled his horse’s cropped mane, and the horseman’s dark hair whipped back and forth across his face. There was energy even in the way his fist held his rope reins bunched. Even in the way he gripped his horse’s flanks between his thighs. There was something in it of stone and iron, and nothing so soft as flesh.

The stone horseman raised his right arm and flicked his hand, just once, in a gesture of unmistakable command. He let his arm drop again and looked away, waiting. The old warrior could do no other but the stranger’s bidding. He who had obeyed no man’s word but King Ruga’s for thirty years or more, heeled his pony and rode towards the mound.

The stone horseman turned back as he approached and looked down at him evenly. The warrior came to a halt before him. He looked up into the horseman’s face a little while, fighting against belief. But no! It could not be!

The horseman was perhaps in his middle forties. He wore a short fur cloak knotted at his throat with a knot of rawhide. The cloak must once have been as glossy and dark as a mink’s pelt, but was now grey and dusty with the dust of the plains. On his head a pointed felt kalpak, a cap in the Hunnish style, was drawn down low over his wide brow. His hair fell thick and dark and streaked with grey over shoulders ridged with muscle. His dark eyes glittered beneath his brows, but any humour there was of the fiercest and most sardonic kind. His nose was strong and bony, and told of beatings and batterings received over many long years. His mouth was set extraordinarily hard, and his chin was covered in thin wisps of greying beard. He wore bright gold rings in his ears. His copper-skinned arms appeared beneath his cloak, bare to the shoulder but for two bands of silver, high round his biceps. His muscles were large and as hard as stone. His forearms were corded with thick veins and bunched with more sinew, as strongly shaped as a blacksmith’s but a good deal more scarred. His right arm, especially, was as lined and crosshatched as a butcher’s chopping board.