by Robert Adams
Bili grinned and beamed, “I never knew of a prairiecat who could make me think he was a fifty-foot lizard when I looked at him; or any man, either, although it has been my honor to know and call friend both the Undying High Lord Milo and the Undying High Lady Aldora.”
Elmuh replied, “Nor, lord champion, have I ever met a true man who could project such illusions, nor can a single Kleesahk do it with a believable reality of appearance. Depending on the number of man-minds we wish to cozen, it takes at least two of my kind to cause men to see that which we wish them to see, and, as you witnessed this day, if even one of those Kleesahk participating is forcefully distracted, the illusion vanishes completely. Far easier is it to cause men to not see that which truly exists before them.”
“Not to see, Master Elmub?” Bili beamed his bewilderment.
All at once, Bili’s unusually keen sixth sense told him that something beyond the pale of normality was being woven. Then, with a smile, Elmuh beamed, “Look about you, please, lord champion.”
Bili did . . . and gasped and started, despite himself, In his very real amazement. Not only had the prince and Rahksahnah and the two prairiecats suddenly disappeared, but the fire, the rude shelter, the piles of gear, everything! He sat alone, save for only the gigantic Elmuh, in a tiny forest glade. Yet a questing hand to either side told him indisputably that both Rahksahnah and Whitetip still sat beside him, and the heat beating on his face told him that the deep bed of coals still glowed in the shallow pit before him. But only for a bare second was it thus; then, as if a gust of wind had dispersed a blinding mist, all was again normal and as before.
“That, lord champion,” attested Elmuh blandly, “is not seeing that which exists. It is both simple and easy . . . for Kleesahk and hybrids of our kind. Right often our young do it self-taught, with no formal training of any degree or description. But I have not yet been able to teach any true man to do it. That Kleesahk talent is how, over the millennia beyond reckoning, Kleesahk have concealed themselves from those of you savage, aggressive, murderous true men who penetrated the mountains and forests and wastes we have inhabited.
“You see, lord champion, we, unlike you true men, do not take enjoyment from causing hurt and pain and death; we kill beasts only for food and men only as a last resort, to save our own lives or those of our kin and loved ones.
“Observe.” The half-Kleesajtk gestured. “I wear no armor, nor do I carry sword or axe or even dirk. And even my simple hunters knife is wrought of bronze, rather than of iron or steel.”
“Yes, I noticed that when your hunters went out, earlier,” Bin remarked silently. “Such of their hunting gear as was not of bronze was shod with bone or even with chipped stone. Why?”
Elmuh shook his massive, bone-crested head. “Not from any dearth of those metals, lord champion, but because for some reason that not I nor any one has ever been able to fathom — we Kleesahk experience but scant success in performing our illusions when in close proximity to aught of steel or iron, even a single knifeblade.”
“Yet,” Bili stated baldly, “that huge man — your son — whom I slew back on that plateau, just before the earthquake and the fires, rode in a full steel-plate panoply and swung the biggest steel sword I’ve ever seen.”
Elmuh sighed and beamed in a mindspeak much overlaid with grief, “Yes, poor little Buhbuh could wear and bear steel, for there was but little of the Kleesahk in him, save only for his size and certain other purely physiological features. The blood of the pure Kleesahk is become thinned. In most respects, poor Bubbub was a man, but a truly mad man. He led that huge band of pitiless outlaw raiders for scores of years — as I have previously informed you, Kleesahk live longer lives than do you true men, and in this trait too, Buhbuh was more like to me and my father than to his true-man antecedents — and, but for him and his savage marauders long since would there have been real peace, rather than an armed and very uneasy truce, between my lord prince and the folk to the eastward — Ahrmehnee and Moon Maidens.”
“You want peace, then, you Kleesahk and the Muhkohee . . . ahh, these Ganiks, was it, Master Elmuh?” This mindspoken query came from Rahksahnah
“I crave real peace with all my being, my lady,” Elmuh beamed forcefully and with much emotion. “So, too, does my dear lord and his royal father, King Kahl the Third. Brutish, bloodthirsty tribes press us all from north and west, you see. Within our unhappy land are renegades and large families of maneaters — Ganiks who are become so interbred that most are half mad and some are wholly mad — more fierce and feral and deadly than the beasts whose skins they wear. The very last thing that my lord prince or any of the rest of us needs is additional enemies. Too, the Last Battle looms ever nearer and, even with you now among us, lord champion, we will need every aid we can raise up or borrow.”
Rahksahnah beamed, half-questioningly. “Then, my Bili, perhaps we should send for the Ahrmehnee headmen now with us, Soormehlyuhn and . . .”
“No,” Bili interrupted with his own, powerful mindspeak. “There is enough time for that. There is still much that I would know.
“Master Elmuh, when first we met, this morning, you spoke certain cryptic words of my having come into these mountains as the fulfillment of some ancient prophecy. You spoke then, also, of a Last Battle, and you have just done so yet again. You continue to address me as champion. Champion of what, good master? What of this prophecy and this Last Battle?” He paused, then remembered the other thing he wanted answered.
“And, too, back there at the main camp, you said something as I recall of an ‘Eyeless Wise One.’ Is he one of your kind? The chief of you Kleesahks, perhaps?”
“No, my lord champion, the Eyeless Wise One was no Teenéhdjook — which is the proper name for my father’s kind in their own, seldom-used, spoken language, ‘Kleesahk’ being their word for us hybrids. No, he was a man, a true, pure man, but very old, for a full man, perhaps ten scores of years old.
“He came into the mountains wherein my kin then dwelt some fifty years before I was born — nearly two hundred years ago, that is. He rode a small horse, with a score of other horses following him, and with him too were some dozen, of those great, long-fanged cats, such as that one by your side.
“His horse had lost its footing on a narrow ledge and had slipped, falling down a steep, shaly slope and pinning beneath its weight the leg of the Eyeless Wise One. Although not really injured, the beast was terrified, and had his mind not been continually soothed by the mindspeak of the gathered cats, he would surely have struggled so violently that both he and his aged rider would have slid over the nearby edge and plunged to their deaths on the rocks far below.
“The cats did what little they could — soothing the horse and keeping the other horses back away from the dangerous area. But with only fangs and claws, neither of which could find purchase on smooth, hard stone, there was no way that any of them could get to or succor the old man. That was when my father and his two brothers chanced upon that site of impending tragedy.
“At once and instinctively, my father and uncles made to cloud the mind of the Eyeless Wise One, bid him see them not, for this is how the Teenéhdjook had traditionally protected themselves from true men; but the Eyeless Wise One, lacking eyes of his own, had learned to so mesh his mind with those of the great cats that he could see out of their eyes, and, as you are become aware, lord champion, our illusions are ineffective on the minds of beasts.
“Then did the Eyeless Wise One’s powerful mind enter into that of my father. He sensed my father’s inborn fear of him as a representative of a different, a savage and bloodthirsty species, and he bid my father not fear and asked, graciously, the help of the three Teenéhdjook to free him and the horse from out of their predicament.
“Now, my father and his kin had never before been mind-spoken by a true man. Indeed, they had always thought that only the Teenéhdjook and certain of the other beasts could so communicate and so he was truly fascinated that a man would so bespeak him. He sent his
two brothers back to their cave to fetch strong ropes of braided strips of hide, and whilst they were gone he and the Wise Old One reassured the disturbed, protective cats that the Teenéhdjook meant not harm but rather salvation to the trapped man.
“Upon the return of my uncles with many coils of sturdy rope and three other Teenéhdjook, my father and another slid down the treacherous slope and secured the horse, then held it steady whilst my father lifted it enough that he might free the Eyeless Wise One and get him up onto the ledge from which he and the horse had plunged.
“That feat accomplished, my uncles drew the small horse back up as well, but so nervous were all the horses that no amount of mental soothing by the cats, the Teenéhdjook or the Eyeless Wise One could assure him a safe and uneventful ride if he should be placed upon one of the neat-hysterical creatures. With his much-damaged leg, the Eyeless Wise One could not walk, so my father bore the eyeless man in his arms back to the commodious cavern which had for generations been the home of the Teenéhdjook.
“The Eyeless Wise One, perforce, wintered with my father, while his old bones slowly knitted, for we — my father and his kin — did not yet own the healing skills we now possess, which were, indeed, the generous guesting-gift of this highly uncommon true man.
“For vast knowledge of the mind had he, of men and of beasts, far and away more than even the wisest and most venerable of the Teenéhdjook then owned. Even though his man’s mind was very different from those of my father and his kin, he soon proved able to explore Teenéhdjook minds, especially that of my father. He plumbed every depth of his host’s mind, he rooted out hidden abilities and latent talents, and then did he show my father and the others how to do things they none of them had ever before done or even thought of doing.
“The healing of flesh and of bone was but one such new thing; he could not do it himself, for his mind did not own that potential but he taught my father to do it when he discovered that blessed potential in his very different mind. Then, armed with his new and wonderful abilities, was my father able to help his guest in certain ways.
“They two became fast friends — the first such friendship between a true man and a Teenéhdjook as was ever before known to have existed, for as I have said the Teenéhdjook then both feared men with good cause and carefully avoided any contact with them. But before he departed westward in the spring with his horses and his cats, this man gifted my father, also, with glimpses he had in some way had of the future of him and his get and of the Teenéhdjook. Then he rode on toward the setting sun, bound, he said, for a place he called the Sea of Grass, where he had been born so many long years before. And that was the last that any Teenéhdjook ever saw of the Eyeless Wise One, who called himself Blind Hari of Krooguh and who had given them so very much.”
Bili shivered all over, felt the hairs at the nape of his thick neck all aprickle. He had often heard of Blind Hari of Krooguh, as had all Kindred-born and bred. The name and the story of this hundred-and-fifty-year-old tribal bard who, with the Undying High Lord Milo of Morai, had led the first forty-odd clans on their twenty-year-long trek from the Sea of Grass to Kehnooryos Ehlas was a much-recounted part of any bard’s repertoire — be that bard a clan bard or a traveling professional. But Bili, like most of the last few generations of Kindred, had always considered it to be mere legend.
But now, in the light of what Master Elmuh had just related, he recalled the last few verses of the Saga of Blind Hari, recalled how it was recounted that this ancient man had tired of the new and hateful life of the settled clansmen and, longing for the Sea of Grass and the life-style of the nomad, had returned west some decades after the conquest of the east.
Bili bad often meant to ask Milo and the Undying High Lady Aldora — whose lover he had been for some months — if Blind Hari of Krooguh had ever actually existed, but he had always forgotten to do so in the press of events. Now, from the mind of this alien creature, he had at long last learned the truth.
“But what of this prophecy, Master Elmuh? What of this so-called Last Battle?”
However, Prince Byruhn chose that moment to speak. “Young cousin, I would hope that you have learned all that you could from our Elmuh. But, if not, your queries must be continued at another time, I fear me. We cannot march fast, what with my infantry and your wounded, so we must leave within the hour, are we to be certain of reaching the Safe Glen, ere nightfall.”
The prince tucked his cold pipe into his belt purse and arose; so too did Bili. Boldly facing the older, bigger man across the firepit, he demanded, “Why should I and my force quit this vale? That still has not been explained to my satisfaction, Prince Byruhn. Furthermore, why — if leave we do — should we follow your banner? Why should we not simply ride eastward, back to the Ahrmehnee lands?”
The prince sighed gustily, “No, you did not learn much of present value from Elmuh, it seems. Very well, then I’ll try to explain. Those raiders you fought and routed before the earthquake were but a scant third part of the outlaw horde who haunt these hills and vales all along the eastern border — which is why there are no villages and but few farms hereabouts, since the outlaws prey upon their own kin as relentlessly as upon the Ahrmehnee.
“Moreover you may be dead certain that they know you are here and also know about how many you number, young cousin. That they have not already attacked you I can only attribute to the turmoil of the tremors and the fires, added to the great losses you and yours inflicted upon those in this area.
“But attack they will, eventually, and probably sooner than late; and in vast, overwhelming numbers. This position is untenable — surely you with your obvious war sense can see that. Your force is simply not large enough to adequately man the hills roundabout, and, even if it were, the slopes of those hills are a much steeper pitch within than without the vale. Nor could you hold here for any long time, in any case, with no supplies, scant graze and a near dearth of large game.
“As for riding back eastward, it would be sheer suicide! You’ll be ambushed and bushwhacked and sniped at by bowmen and dartmen and slingers until your party is weak and sufficiently demoralized for an all-out attack. If you so choose to die, I’ll regret your needless deaths, young cousin, but I’ll not try to physically impede you.
“I’ll say but one thing more, ere we two part, Do not allow the outlaws to take any one of you alive. Any kind of an honorable death, even by your own dirk, is preferable to the suffering of what those animals will do to your body.”
“And if I, we, do follow your banner today,” demanded Bili, “what is to be our status? Will my force and I be free to leave, to go back east, when we wish? Or must we, soon or late, fight our way from under your sway? What is to be the price you will exact for your aid to us today, Prince Byruhn?”
The tall prince smiled thinly. “Spoken bluntly and openly, young cousin. Yes, I guessed rightly, you surely are my kind of a man. In answer no less blunt and honest, I would hope that when once you have been imparted all this night, you and yours would freely choose to enter my employ for some brief time. But, if not, if you choose otherwise, I shall do my utmost to see you all safely across the Ahrmehnee border. On that you have my Sword Oath.” He gripped both his big hands about the wire-wound hilt of his battle sword, sincerity shining from his steady blue-green eyes.
Chapter X
The column did move slowly, it moved very slowly indeed, and over tracks and trails full many of which were but ill-suited to the easy passage of horse litters; but the prince drove them all hard, his face and manner a study in anxious concern. His obvious worry for his and their own safety served to take the bite out of his often harsh words. Thanks in no small part to the ceaseless prodding of that high-ranking nobleman, however, they did reach their goal — the so-called Safe Glen — with the slanting rays of the setting sun.
Price Byruhn’s face and manner became more relaxed, though still wary, as craggy hills reared up to closely flank the winding track — which track showed man-made improvements h
ere and there along its length. Farther along the track, shrewdly placed and built into the living rock, small but strong-looking stone towers reared up; armed men stood upon the parapets, the westering sun glinting on the polished steel of their weapons. From tall staffs set in the apex of each tower, large banners rippled in the wind, and upon them Bili could clearly note and recognize the Rampant Green Stallion of Kuhmbuhluhn. On shorter staffs, two smaller banners snapped — one bearing what at the distance looked like a red-brown dog or wolf on a blue-green field, the other being a black boar upon a field of silver-gray.
As the long column passed between these grim strong-points, spears and bared blades were raised in salute and the voices from above lustily cheered their overlord. Prince Byruhn raised his sword hand in gracious greeting and acknowledgement of the homage.
Then the track began to wind through truly tortuous twists and turns, doubling back here and there and several times crossing rushing streams over well-built bridges wrought of squared timbers. Small but sturdy-looking squad keeps overlooked each bridge, others dotted the steep slopes between, and the visible portions of the hill crests were all fortified as well, natural saddles and low points being filled in with dressed stone and capped by expanses of crenellated defenses.
Bili thought, as he, Rhahksahnah and other nobles followed the prince over yet another oil-soaked and pitch-smeared wooden bridge, that he would surely hate to have the task of leading a force of attackers against these multiple and most formidable fortifications. Surprise would be a true impossibility, for those atop the outer towers could see for long miles in all directions in daylight, and the terrain leading toward this narrow gap was so treacherous that a night march would be out of the question. Nor could he envisage manhandling siege engines to within range even of the outer works. It would all have to be done by unmounted men, and losses would be stupendous.
