"Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses
with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in
their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks
in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel
hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of
the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then
rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their
breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping
from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar
bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the
clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about
the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and
hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange
white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so
slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon
the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows."