by Robert Adams
Mahvros' forehooves were already booming the bridge timbers when a hard-flung throwing axe caromed off Bili's helm, nearly deafening him and filling his head with a tight-spiraling red-blackness, shot with dazzling-white stars. Only instinct kept him in the saddle while Mahvros, well-trained, battlewise and intelligent animal that he was, continued on to the proper place, then wheeled about just ahead of Ahndee and Klairuhnz.
Reaching forward, Ahndee grabbed Bili's arm—limp under its sheathing of steel and leather—and shook him. "Are you all right, Bili? Are you injured?" he shouted anxiously.
Then he let go the arm and turned to Bard Klairuhnz, saying, "Your help, please, my lord. He's barely conscious, if that. We must get him behind us ere those bastards cut him down."
Bili could hear all and could sense movements on either side of him, but neither his lips nor his limbs would obey his dictates. Fuzzily, he pondered why Vahrohneeskos Ahndee, a nobleman of this duchy, would have addressed a mere roving bard as his "lord."
In his great bed in the dimly lit room already smelling of death, old Bili smiled to himself. "That was the first fight I fought beside the Undying High Lord, though I knew not that that same Bard Klairuhnz was my sovran until much later in the rebellion."
Against so many attackers, holding at the bridge, where a flank attack was impossible, had been a good idea. The blades of Ahndee and Klairuhnz wove a deadly pattern, effectively barring their foemen access to the dazed and helpless Bili, now drooping in the saddle. Because of the narrowness of the span—it being but just wide enough to easily accommodate passage of a single hay wagon or ox-wain— only two men at a time could attack the defenders, thus doing much to nullify their numerical superiority. And on a man-to-man basis, the ill-armed, ill-trained crew were just no match for well-equipped and seasoned warriors. The length of the Forest Bridge, from the far side to the center, was very soon gore-slimed, littered with dropped weapons and hacked, hoof-marked corpses.
But the repeated assaults had taken toll of the two stout defenders, as well, for flesh and blood can bear only so much. Ahndee sat his horse in dire agony, his left arm dangling uselessly at his side. He had used its armored surface to ward off a direct blow from a huge and weighty club, while he slashed the clubman's unprotected throat, and he now sat in certainty that the concussion of that buffet had broken the arm beneath the plates.
Klairuhnz's horse now lay dead and the bard stood astride the body. Hopefully, he had mindspoken Mahvros, but the black stallion's refusal had been unequivocal. Moreover, he had promised dire and fatal consequences should any two legs attempt either to unseat Mahvros' hurt brother or to take said brother's place in the warkak.
Bili regained his senses just in time to see Klairuhnz sustain a vicious cut on the side of his neck and be hurled down, blood spurting over his shoulderplates. Roaring, "Up Harzburk!" through force of habit, Bili kneed Mahvros forward and plugged the gap, admonishing the horse by mindspeak not to step on the man.
A swing of his axe crushed both the helmet and the skull of Klairuhnz's killer. As the man pitched from the saddle,
Bili belatedly recognized the twisted features—it was the face of Hofos, Komees Hari's majordomo.
Then there were two more enemy horsemen on the bridge before him. But this time it was Ahndee who was reeling in his kak, kept in it only by the high, flaring cantle and pommel, and unable to do more than offer a rapidly weakening defense.
Bili disliked attacking a horse, but the circumstances afforded him no option. He rammed his axe spike into the rolling eye of his opponent's mount, and in the brief respite allotted him while the death-agonized beast proceeded to buck its rider over the low railing and into the cold creek, he swung his axeblade into the unarmored chest of Ahndee's adversary. Deep went that heavy, knife-sharp blade, biting through hide jerkin, shirt, flesh and bone and into the quivering heart, itself.
Someone in the decimated group between the bridge and the forest cast a javelin, and Mahvros took it in the thick muscles of his off shoulder; he screamed his shock and pain and made to rear, being restrained only by Bili's mindspeak. Grimly, the young man dismounted and gently withdrew the steel head—blessedly, unbarbed.
Then he backed the big warhorse and turned him, beaming, "Go back to the hall of Komees Hari, Mahvros."
"This horse still can fight, brother!" the black balked, stubbornly.
"I know that my brother still can fight," Bili mindspoke with as much patience as he could muster up. "But that wound is deep. If I stay upon your back, you might be permanently crippled… and that would mean no more war for you, ever again, brother." Thinking quickly, he added, "Besides, the other man can fight no longer and must be borne back to the hall. A horse of your intelligence is needed to keep this stupid gelding moving, yet see that it does not move so fast that the man falls off."
Bili was not exaggerating. Ahndee had dropped his reins and his sword dangled by its knot from his wrist. Though his booted feet still filled the stirrups, his body was now slumped over the pommel and his two arms weakly encircled the neck of his mount.
The young thoheeks grasped the gray's bridle, faced him about, slapped his rump sharply and shouted. Even so, the gelding made to stop at the end of the bridge until a sharp nip of Mahvros's big teeth changed his mind.
Laying aside both axe and javelin, Bili took Klairuhnz under the arms and dragged him back from the windrow of dead men and horses, propping his armored body in a sitting posture against the bridge rail. Odd, he thought vaguely, I think he's still alive, and he should be well dead by now, considering where the sword caught him…
Striding back, he picked up the short, heavy dart that had wounded Mahvros, drew back his brawny arm, chose a target and then made a running cast.
One of the ruffians with only a breastplate was adjusting his stirrup leathers when the hard-flung missile took him in the small of the back. The sharp steel head tore through rough clothing, then skin, kidney, guts and fat, standing far enough out from the man's belly to prick the horse when he stumbled against its flank. Scream of horse almost drowned out scream of man. And as the still-screaming man fell to kick and writhe his life away in the dust, most of his fellow rebels made to follow the riderless horse up the road and into the forest.
But a big, spike-bearded man—he who wore a full, matching panoply and sat a large, fully trained destrier— headed off the fleeing men and beat them back with the flat of his sword. Driving them back to their former places, he began to harangue them. Bili, leaning on his gory axe among the dead men whom he expected to soon join, could pick out words and phrases of the angrily shouted monologue, for all that he had not heard Old Ehleeneekos spoken in ten years.
"… cowards… to fear but one, dismounted man… and he a God-cursed heathen… creatures of filth… gotten on diseased sows by spineless curdogs… gain your freedom?… lead all men to the True Faith?… treasure and land and women?… Salvation… killing heathens for the one, true God?"
Bili shook his head, vainly trying to clear it of the residue of dizziness. A true product of his race and upbringing, he had no fear of death, of "going to Wind." He was a bit sorry that he was to go so early in his life, but then every warrior faced his last battle soon or late. He would have liked to have seen his ill father and his sweet mothers just one time more, but he knew that they would rejoice when they learned that he had fallen in honor, the blood of his foes clotting his axe from spikepoint to haftbutt. And his brother Djef, six months his junior, would surely make a good chief and Thoheeks of Morguhn… maybe even a better one than he, Bili, would have made.
"Dirtmen!" he shouted derisively at the band of ruffians. "Rapists of ewes and she-goats! Your fellow bastards here are lonely. Are you coming to join them, or are you all going to run home like the curs you are to bugger your own infant sons? That's an old Ehleen custom, isn't it, you priest-ridden pigs? An old Ehleen custom, like the eating of dung?"
He carried on in the same vein, each succeeding insult more repu
gnant and offensive than its predecessor. The spike-bearded leader wisely held his own tongue, hoping that Bili's sneering contumely and racial insults would raise an aggressive spark in his battered, demoralized band, where his own oration had so clearly failed.
At length, one of the tatterdemalions was stung to the very quick. Shrieking maniacally, waving his aged saber, he spurred his horse straight at that lone figure in the center of the bridge.
Bili just stood his ground. To the watching rebels it appeared that he was certain to be ridden down, but Bili had positioned himself cunningly and he correctly judged the oncoming rider to be something less than an accomplished horseman.
The rebel's horse had to jump in order to clear the bodies of the two dead horses lying almost atop each other and thoroughly blocking his route to the axeman. Before the rider could recover enough of his balance to even think of using his sword, Bili had let go his axe to dangle by its thong, grabbed a sandaled foot and a thick, hairy leg and heaved the rebel over the other side of his mount.
Dropping his weapon and squalling his terror, the Ehleen clawed frantically for a grip on the smooth-worn bridge rail; but he missed, and commenced a despairing howl which was abruptly terminated when his hurtling body struck the swift-flowing water thirty feet below. He had been one of the "lucky" ones—attired in an almost-complete set of three-quarter plate—and, since he could not swim anyway, he sank like a stone.
But Bili had not watched the watery doom of his would-be attacker. No sooner was the man out of the saddle then he who had unseated him was in it, trying to turn the unsettled and unfamiliar animal in time to meet the fresh wave of ruffians he could feel pounding up.
Feel, hear, but not see! For, once again, the sick, tight dizziness was claiming his senses. When, at last, he had gotten the skittish horse to face the forest, it was to dimly perceive the backs of the motley pack of murderous skulkers pounding toward that forest, a small shower of arrows falling amongst them, the shafts glinting as they crossed a vagrant beam of moonlight.
Bili's brain told his arm to lift the axe, his legs to urge the new horse on in pursuit of the fleeing Ehleen rebels… vainly. His legs might have ceased to exist, might have been severed from his trunk, while his axe now seemed to weigh an impossible ton or more. The weight became just too much to even hold, and he let it go, then pitched out of the low-cut hunting saddle to land precariously balanced on the narrow railing above the deep, icy stream.
"I was later told old Djeen and Hari grabbed me just in time to keep me from being just another armored corpse on the bed of that creek," ruminated old Bili. "For all of the troubles I had with Count Djeen shortly after that night, he was still a doughty old fighter, especially for his age—he was older than my sire—and lacking an eye and a hand. But, if memory properly serves me, it seems now that all men and some women were harder, tougher and more concerned with the really important aspects of life then than are most folk today; even my own kin—my grandsons and their get—seem addicted to frivolities and luxuries, sneering behind their soft hands at those few who still adhere to the old, good ways. The bulk of the Kindred are become as dissipated as Ehleenee."
"But the Ahrmehnee, now, ha, they're as stark and fierce and hardy as ever they were; they've become the backbone of the Confederation armies, and I hear tell that one of them— well, he's not pure-blood Ahrmehnee, since his grandsire was Kindred, Hahfos Djohnz, the first Warden of the Ahrmehnee Marches, but I recall that old Hahfos became outwardly more an Ahrmehnee than his wife or any of her kin. Anyhow, they say that his grandson, Moorahd Djohnz, will be the next senior strahteegos."
He chuckled to himself, a bit evilly, thinking of the cold rage of his eldest son, Senior Strahteegos Thoheeks Djef Morguhn of Djahreht, now retired from active soldiering, when he told his father, Prince Bili, of the High Lord's plans to make a "wild Ahrmehnee" foremost military officer of the Confederation.
Bili had simply grinned in the face of his son's towering anger, saying, "Well, Djef, you were Senior Strahteegos, as I recall, and your dear mother was pure Ahrmehnee… or did you conveniently misremember that fact, Lord Thoheeks?
Old Bili chuckled again, thinking of how his aging son had stamped out, livid in his rage, snorting and shouting and cursing in several dialects of Mehrikan, Ehleeneekos and— Ahrmehnee.
"I always was good," thought old Bili, "at roiling already troubled waters and at spreading oil on smoldering fires."
Then, he mentally sobered. "But the boy… I guess I'll always think of him as a boy, for all that he's pushing seventy-five winters, now… no, more than that, he's only a bit more than nineteen years my junior, after all.
"But he's wrong, nonetheless, and he should know better, he above many another, for not only is he half Ahrmehnee himself, but he commanded Ahrmehnee troops for years and they won many a victory for him and our Confederation. I know this and the other princes know this and the High Lords, too, so Djef's petulant objections to Moorahd's well-earned elevation will get all the consideration—or, rather, lack of consideration—that they and he deserve in this instance from the powers that be."
He silently pondered, then thought, "Djef must have gotten this strain of racial intolerance in the army, probably from some of those stiff-necked, overproud Ehleenee officers, the boy-buggering bastards. No, no, now I'm getting as bad as him or them. Not all the Ehleenee are overweening degenerates, there were quite a few with me in the mountains who were fine, stark warriors, men of normal tastes and preferences, who despised the Ehleen perverts as much as I did and do.
"Ah, those, too, were good days. Those days when we had scotched the Great Rebellion, then ridden into the western mountains to bring the Ahrmehnee to heel. That was true, old-fashioned warfare, and I was a young man, full of strength and juice and vigor, able to ride or hike from before dawn to dusk or after and then fight a battle before bedtime.
"In those days, I would hardly have noted these few bear-bites and scratches that will shortly be the death of me. But, of course, not even that brave bruin would've gotten a chance at my flesh, back then, before age had slowed my reflexes and stiffened my joints enough to let him charge in under my spear. True, it's not as good a death as my brothers, Djef and Tcharlee, died—full-armed, facing their foes in battle to the last breath—but it's a far better death for a warrior than the one our poor father died.
"Even my dear, ever dear, Rahksahnah—Wind keep her— for all the tragedy of her death, she had a cleaner, quicker death than this one I will presently die. Although I have ever thought that a part of me died long ago with her; had it not been for the children and my people's need for me, I'd have followed her to Wind before her husk had become cold."
As he lay with eyes closed, thinking of the long-dead, irreplaceable love of his youth, his mind again returned to those happy days of near eighty years before.
Subsequent to the surrender of the last stronghold of the Ehleen rebellion, Vawnpolis, the great army, reinforced by the addition of some hundreds of former rebels, had been split into uneven thirds for a three-prong invasion of the mountain lands of the Ahrmehnee tribes.
Thoheeks Bill of Morguhn, commanding some thousands of Freefighters and Confederation nobility, had been assigned the task of bringing fire and sword to the southerly reaches of the Ahrmehnee stahn, with the ultimate goal of so savaging the villages, croplands, kine and inhabitants that the warriors—all then gathered in the north and making ready to invade the westernmost thoheekahtohn of the Confederation—would feel impelled to break off their planned aggression and return to their own lands to defend their families.
Then, of a night, Bili received an urgent farspeak from the High Lord, Milo Morai, ordering him and his forces to immediately cease their depredations, break off contact with the Ahrmehnee and withdraw back into Confederation lands.
Bili was to proceed north and west with a picked force of squadron strength. His basic mission was to intercept a large pack train, slaughtering the Witchfolk who led it and destroyi
ng all of the ancient machines or devices the animals bore. The Witchfolk, said Milo, had looted these antique devices and machines—along with a vast store of treasures—from the Hold of the Moon Maidens, after having slain or incapacitated all the inhabitants of that hold, then destroyed the tunnel leading into the fastness.
The High Lord also cautioned Bili to be on the lookout for a party of Moon Maidens, with whom he was to attempt to effect an alliance. The last warning was to be cautious, as it was said that bands of savage cannibals called Muhkohee were possibly raiding into the western Ahrmehnee lands in the absence of the native warriors.
So Bili had ridden west and north, with a nucleus from his reserve squadrons. He had given the High Lord's orders to each of the western squadrons as he met them, then fleshed out his own ranks with the very best of their various forces. Loud had been the outraged howls of Confederation noblemen when he had forced them to trade their fine, expensive armor and armament and big, well-trained destriers for the less fine equipage and lighter mounts of Bili's mercenary burkers. The only way that a country nobleman kept his suit of Pitzburk and his charger was by dint of convincing Bili that he himself would be a valuable addition to the squadron.
The result of these forced "loans" was that the force that the High Lord's young deputy finally led far, far to the west, off any existing maps, was compounded of the best available warriors on the best available horseflesh and with the best armor and weapons obtainable. And, considering all that was to befall him and them, it was well that he had so equipped them.
Chapter One
Erica Arenstein lay on her belly on the rocky earth, drops of sweat cutting rivulets through the dust that layered her face and dripping from her nosetip and chin. Just to her right lay Jay Corbett and, to either side of the pair, lay or crouched some dozen Broomtown men, all of them armed—as were she and Jay—with powerful, scoped, autoloading rifles.
