Oh My God

They've seen us.
How many riders do you make it?
A dozen maybe.
The captain tapped the instrument in his gloved hand. They dont seem
concerned, do they?
No sir. They dont.
The captain smiled grimly. We may see a little sport here before the day is
out.
The first of the herd began to swing past them in a pall of yellow dust,
rangy slatribbed cattle with horns that grew agoggle and no two alike and small
thin mules coalblack that shouldered one another and reared their
malletshaped heads above the backs of the others and then more cattle and
finally the first of the herders riding up the outer side and keeping the stock
between themselves and the mounted company. Behind them came a herd of
several hundred ponies. The sergeant looked for Candelario. He kept backing
along the ranks but he could not find him. He nudged his horse through the
column and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers were now
coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The
ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their
way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already you could see
through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and
rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through
sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the
unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes niade from human bones, and
some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to
mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled
horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of
broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their
enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in
costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins
of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of
prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one
in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a
bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide
helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat
worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish
conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of
mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and
many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they
trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of
brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson
red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a
company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue
and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the
brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed
in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the
eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Oh my god, said the sergeant.