The Death Of A Legend

by Robert Adams

  “He struck us only one other time in force, when, a few days after that ambush, his entire strength first arrow-rained a camp we were departing, then charged the rear guards and camp strikers, heavily armed and ahorse. Again, our losses were great — both in men and in material — but so many men did the rebels lose that morning that they never again could mount the strength for raids in force against us. And so, after we had reorganized and resupplied, we marched on to Vawnpolis virtually unopposed.”

  “For all your probably justified hatred and loathing of this Baronet Drehkos, Cousin Bili,” remarked the prince, “he strikes me as a rare and precious breed of great captain. In his salad days, he must have been a renowned warrior. He’d served as a professional, perhaps?”

  Bili shook his shaven head vehemently. “On the contrary, lord prince, aside from the usual arms training received by the sound sons of any nobleman, he had never gone armed for any purpose other than the hunt until this hell-spawned rebellion. He had been a city lordling, held title to no land save his city home, and had been a sort of gentle joke to and among the other nobility of the duchy — known only for drinking, feasting and spending vast sums of his wealthy wife’s inheritance on hare-brained schemes of one sort or other.”

  “Hmmph,” the prince remarked again. “Then the man must’ve been of that even rarer breed — the born military genius, whose mighty talents never surface until and if the need for them arises. King Buk I — known as the Headsplitter — the first king of the Old Dynasty of Pitzburk, was said to have been one such unheralded genius of defensive warfare, if you’ll recall.”

  Bili grimaced. “Yes, I do recall, and King Buk Headsplitter was one of the defenders we had to fight at the siege of Vawnpolis.”

  One side of Byruhn’s bushy eyebrow went up. “Young cousin, have you had too much of the drink? King Buk died a good three hundred years agone.”

  Bili smiled grimly. “No, lord prince, I’m not befuddled with wine or spirits. One of the accomplishments of the traitorous Baronet Drehkos was the ability to read Old Mehrikan, both Old and Modem Ehleeneekos and even those strange curlicues that the Zahrtohgahns call writing. In the Vawnpolis citadel, he chanced across some collection of ancient books on various aspects of warfare, assembled and stored there by a long-dead Thoheeks Vawn. One of them was supposedly penned or at least dictated by old King Buk I of Pitzburk, and the back-stabbing baronet used that book and the others well, very well indeed.

  “At the outset, Vawnpolis had been little stronger and no more able to withstand serious attack or prolonged siege than my own capital city, Morguhnpolis, especially since it held no real professional soldiers and relatively few men trained to arms. When we arrived under the walls of Vawnpolis, we numbered nearly forty thousand men, the largest numbers of them Confederation Regulars, and equipped with a complete and modem siege train. We had with us old Sir Ehd Gahthwahlt, a justly famous expert at the reduction of cities and burks, and so we all expected a quick and relatively painless victory.

  “What we got, however, was very different from what we had anticipated at the start. We reduced a pair of salients with the intent of using them as forward emplacements for engines, only to find to our cost and consternation that both were but devilishly conceived and constructed traps.

  “Although our engines bombarded the works and walls and the city within them almost continuously, still each well-planned and well-executed assault bought us nothing save more hundreds of casualties. Finally, the High Lady Aldora and Sir Ehd and I, who then were sharing the overall command in the High Lord’s absence, set ourselves to starving the city out, swallowing our frustration as best we could.”

  “This High Lady Aldora willingly shared her authority over the warriors with both you and another man?” asked Rahksahnah. “She must be a very powerful and self-assured woman, and of a most generous and forbearing nature, Bili.”

  “She is, all those things, and more, Rahksahnah,” Bili quickly agreed. But he thought it just as well not to mention that he and Aldora had, before and during and after the times which he was discussing, been most passionate lovers. He added, “The High Lady Aldora is a fine strategist and a very gifted cavalry tactician; she it was who wrote one of those books that Baronet Drehkos found and used so disastrously against us.

  “And this final strategy into which we had found ourselves forced might have succeeded in the end, for the city had never been well or even adequately supplied and was in pitiable condition but then the decision was taken out of our hands.

  “The High Lord Milo had, while still fighting the rebellion in my duchy, captured two supposed kooreeoee — leaders of the Ehleen Church for the duchies of Morguhn and of Vawn — who were in actuality witchmen, agents of the Witch Kingdom, far to the south; he had earlier captured another of these human monsters who bad headed an earlier, similar rebellion in a duchy farther south, and the answers wrung out of the first had helped him to partially head off affairs in Morguhn.

  “Leaving the army at Vawnpolis, he had personally escorted these two new captives up to the Confederation capital at Kehnooryos Atheenahs and had them put to the same severe degrees of question as the fist. The answers they two were at long last persuaded to reveal so alarmed the High Lord that he returned posthaste to the camps under the still-embattled walls of Vawnpolis and insisted — over the vehement objections of Aldora, me, Sir Ehd and every other commander — that the city be granted terms of honorable surrender, despite their many and hideous crimes and treacheries and their long and costly resistance to rightful authority. He is, after all, the Undying High Lord, and so his will was done.

  “What he had leaned that had so agitated him was that other agents of the Witch Kingdom were, even then, in the Ahrmehnee Stahn, persuading the Ahrmehnee tribes and the Moon Maidens to arise and set aflame the entire border shared with the Confederation. Most of the tribes had already sent their warriors to camp around the village of their nahkhahrah and the time was worn exceedingly thin, was widespread warfare to be kept out of the duchies of the western borders.

  “While the High Lord with all his infantry and quite a few rearmed former rebels, marched directly up the trade road, through the Frainyuhn lands, clearly bound for the main gathering of Ahrmehnee at the largest village of the Taishyuhns, operations against the virtually defenseless Ahrmehnee tribal lands to north and south were also commenced.

  “The High Lady Aldora, with most of the Regular cavalry, a few Kindred noblemen and their retainers and Baronet Drehkos commanding what remained of his mobile force of rebels, circled around to strike from the north. I, along with all of the mounted Freefighters and most of the Kindred nobles, circled to strike upward from the south. The High Lord correctly thought that, did enough Ahrmehnee refugees — dispossessed, terrified, wounded and maimed, and starving — pour into the war camps with blood-curdling tales of burnings, butcheries, rapes and pillagings, the warriors would decide that they were needed in their home lands, and so would delay or forget the projected invasion of the Confederation.

  “I trust that the High Lady’s force did a thorough job, for as I have said, she is a master tactician of cavalry operations. For my own part, the Freefighters and I soon taught the Kindred among us the proper way to put the fear of Steel into peasants — we looted, we drove off livestock and slew where we could not capture. Rapine was encouraged, but we only killed folk when they forced us to it. We burned every structure that would take fire and tried to knock down the few that wouldn’t, and the fanned-out squadrons pushed on steadily toward the north, driving the surviving villagers before us.”

  Prince Byruhn noted that the expressions of both of the Ahrmehnee headmen — Vahrtahn Panosyuhn and Vahk Soormehlyuhn — and of the lovely Rahksahnah had become hard and grim and flushed with a degree of anger as Bili recounted the planned and executed depredations of the Ahrmehnee lands.

  “Assuming that, sooner or later, a sufficiently large number of Ahrmehnee warriors would come down from the north to offe
r serious opposition, I had been following a day or so behind the front-line squadrons with a reserve force and the trains. Then, when we were about halfway through our assigned territory, the High Lord farspoke me, ordering a cessation of hostile acts against the Ahrmehnee and a general withdrawal of most of my forces to the south, and thence back into Confederation lands.

  “He went on to inform me that the nahkhahrah Kokh Taishyuhn had indicated to him a desire to merge the Ahrmehnee Stahn with the Confederation, and that Aldora, too, was being recalled.

  “Then he gave me another mission. I was to take the best of each of the then existing squadrons — the best units, men, horses and weapons — combine them into a single squadron and head them due west, collecting support as I passed the areas of the various squadrons. I was warned to be on the lookout for several troops of Moon Maidens and was advised to render them any needed assistance in tracking down and eliminating a column of witchfolk and pack mules, headed south.

  “As matters turned out, we none of us ever saw hide nor hair of that column, but we did find the Moon Maidens and a force of Ahrmehnee warriors, to boot. They were on that plateau, backed at bay against the wall of a cliff and hopelessly battling two to three thousand shaggies — your small Ganiks — who were being led by Elmuh’s son, Buhbuh.

  “I detached my bowmasters and sent them to range along the top of that cliff, and when next the shaggies charged, they quilled as many as they could to soften them up for the kill. It was a steep slope from my position down to the shaggies, but not too steep, it developed; I led the rest of the squadron down it and full into the shaggies, taking them on the flank.

  “Precious few of those shaggies were astride full horses, and those little mountain ponies are no match at all for an ordinary horse of decent size, much less war-trained destriers, so the initial impact was less fighting than striving to keep one’s seat and helping one’s mount to stay on its feet while bowling over ponies like ninepins.

  “But real fighting came soon enough. For all that few of the shaggies had decent weapons and fewer still had any form of armor, they still outnumbered us by at least six to one, and that crashing charge gradually lost its impetus. I fought my way clear on the other side of the press and was shortly joined by a young knight of rare bravery, Sir Geros Lahvoheetos of Morguhn, who had been riding guard on my Red Eagle Banner and had himself taken it when the banner-man was slain.

  “With me lifting and waving the banner while his incredibly clear tenor voice rose even above the stupefying din of the battle, we rallied a good two thirds of the squadron around me and were just set to compound the damage to the shaggies with another full charge, when the bowmasters came riding down out of a steep gap to our left, shortly followed by Rahksahnah and her Moon Maidens and these two brave Ahrmehnee here at the head of some scores of their warriors.

  “That second charge broke the shaggies, thoroughly routed the stinking bastards, and we pursued them all the way to the far-western edge of that plateau. It was while we were all coming back from the pursuit that the earthquake struck. Just before that happened, I had an exceedingly strong presentiment of terrible danger, though I knew not of what kind the danger was. But when I saw a vast assortment of wild beasts — large and small, predators and prey, all together — racing to get off that plateau as fast as they could run, hop or scuttle, I began to understand, and when the first tremor struck, I knew that were we to survive, we had better follow the game off the plateau.

  “I never again want to undertake another such ride, putting terrified horses down a steep track hardly wide enough for a small deer, but most of us made it safely down before the entire plateau rippled like roiled water and poured down upon itself. And then, huge rocks started to pour down out of the skies, each of them so hot that they set fires almost everywhere they struck; it was in attempts to evade those fires that my force became split and separated. I can only hope, and pray Sun, Wind and Steel that those now missing — my two brothers, Count Hari, Sir Geros, and the rest — are safely to the east, in Ahrmehnee lands.”

  The prince leaned forward to look down the board at the two Ahrmehnee men. “Your Ahrmehnee are good warriors and not easily cozened, so how did you allow yourselves to be trapped by so large a body of the outlaws?” Then be glanced, smiling, at Rahksahnah. “And how was it that my lady and her Moon Maidens came to be fighting alongside males?”

  As Vahrtahn Panosyuhn began to speak, Bili listened attentively. He, too, had wondered just how the situation on the plateau had come about, but in the press of so many events and wearing the weighty mantle of overall leadership, he had simply had no time to inquire into the matter.

  “When the terrible tidings were brought up to the village of the nahkhahrah that not only were the lands and villages of the five northern tribes being put to fire and sword but the portions of the stahn owned by the six southern and western tribes seemed destined to endure like savageries, armed we did, and all our men, and rode for home.

  “But when still we were in Kehrkohryuhn lands, crossed we did the track of ten hundred or more of Muhkohee, so we our force did split — half riding southeast to oppose and slow the lowlanders, half on the track of the Muhkohee setting out. And not hard was that sorry track to follow, Der Byruhn, for the smoke of burning farms and villages marked it well for us — from Kehrkohryuhn, through the full width of Panosyuhn and into Soormehlyuhn it led.

  “By the time we near the western verge of Soormehlyuhn were got, however, the satanic raiders had learned that on their bloody trail we were and, rightly fearing us in our righteous rage, increased they their progress, not bothering to fire the last three or four villages where they butchered or even to steal much except fresh ponies and weapons and food.

  “Just before onto the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn — that which Dook Bili a ‘plateau’ calls — we found a place where those we pursued joined had with another force almost as large, so most glad we all were to shortly overtaken be by the brahbehrnuh and her Maidens, for not ten hundreds we were without them.

  “When to the very last village we came, close to the dirty Muhkohee we knew we were, for steam still from their ponies’ dung did rise up and from the pitiful bodies of the women and old folk and little children the barbaric pigs had slain and mutilated, blood still ran.

  “The honored Vahk of a secret way spoke he then, a steep but shorter pass and also a cave that might place our fighters where the Muhkohee stand and fight us must on our own grounds. To trap them, we sought, you see, Der Byruhn. But trapped were we!

  “Those of us who led through the caverns by the honored Vahk were had to dismount and our horses and ponies lead, for the way was low-ceilinged, so they who through the pass went earlier reached the plain before the cliff where was the cave mouth. Those few of that force surviving said that as the Muhkohee seemed to be fleeing down the Tongue, assuredly bound for their own lands, decided did they all to attack at once, not waiting for us coming through the cave, as had been planned and agreed, earlier.

  But no sooner had they charged out of hiding in the pass and engaged the raiders than did near twice as many more of the Muhkohee, led by the huge one on the Northorse, come from the little forest and from folds of ground and rock that had hidden them. That battle still raging was when we from out the caves mouth did come.

  “Although there tens of hundreds appeared to be, allow them to butcher those of our ancient race we could not, not without our own swords adding to the balance. Into that fight would every Ahrmehnee have ridden as soon as he saw it and his pony could mount upon, but the brahbehrnuh insisted that we not go piecemeal but rather wait until all together were and so spur out as one body. And this we did.

  “But just too many of the thrice-damned Muhkohee there were, Der Byruhn. Mighty and matchless warriors are our men of the Ahrmehnee Stahn, fearsome are the Maidens of the Silver Lady, and scores of Muhkohee did we all slay, but seemed it that for every savage we hacked down, three rose up to take his place, and human flesh and b
one can but so much endure.

  “Surrounded we all were, but to keep us all together did this serve, and together did we hew our way out of the press of our enemies and back to the cave mouth withdraw, fighting every step of the way. Then, for one whole day and the part of another did we defend that cave mouth, attack after attack by the savages beating off. Three messengers to alert the stahn sent we out — not for aid sent we them, for we knew that our last battle were we all fighting, help from the nahkhahrah never in time to save our lives could have reached us there. One, my nephew, Moorahd, was a brave lad. I know not if any of them even off the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn safely rode.”

  “One of them, at least, was a Moon Maiden,” said Bili; it was statement, not question.

  “Yes,” answered Rahksahnah, Zehlahna was our best rider and on our fastest, strongest mare. But how knew you, Bili?”

  “She reached the vanguard of my column when still I was some distance from the plateau, my dear. The horse was full spent, the best it could manage was a stumbling walk, but the woman was making the best time that she could, for all that she was herself near death from a terrible wound in her throat. She had great difficulty in speaking, so I entered her mind and received your message just before she breathed her last. Then we backtracked her to the plateau.”