by Robert Adams
After much wandering, Whitetip's farspeak had finally contacted Bili's familiar mind and the cats had reached his emergency camp just before Prince Byruhn and his force arrived.
Although the female cat was in unabashed awe of her huge companion and constantly deferred to him, he despised her small size, lack of endurance and stunted dentition; nor did he try in any way to disguise his belief that she was a sorry specimen of retarded, misbred cat. Why, she did not even bear a real name, only the designation of her regimental assignment in the Army of the Confederation—37th Regiment, Scout-cat #Q19.
Bili had quickly rectified this last deficiency, calling the friendly, biddable feline "Stealth." Then he had set about attempting to change the big male's attitude toward her, soon discovering, however, that Whitetip was almost as stubborn as was Bili's big black stallion, Mahvros.
"Brother-chief," the big cat had sulked in mindspeak, "how can Whitetip be expected to treat as an equal so runty, stupid and stunted a creature? Whitetip has seen wild spotted cats of more intelligence and basic ability than this nameless number-cat. Had she been in any way distinguished, her previous two-leg brothers would surely have given her a name."
Bili had sighed in exasperation. "Cat-brother, you have seen, have experienced in this last year, how prone are the men of the Confederation Army to slap numbers rather than real names on everything and everyone. It is a sickness of the two-legs, and the cat, Stealth, should not be blamed for their folly; a truly wise cat-chief would not be so narrow in his outlook.
"Nor can she in any way help being smaller, finer-boned and lighter than you. Not very many prairiecats that came east with God Milo and the forty-two Kindred clans stayed for long; most journeyed back toward the Sea of Grass, singly or in groups. With so few remaining and those few widely scattered, they could not always find mates of true, pure prairiecat stock, so most of them eventually interbred with tame or even wild treecats, and, as you know, treecats are mostly even smaller than Stealth. But her prairiecat strain is very distinguished, Whitetip. I have it of the Undying High Lady Aldora, herself, that both Steelclaws, the mighty cat-chief Horsekiller—he who led the Clan of the Cats for the forty-two Kindred clans—and the redoubtable, justly famous cat Dirktooth are all in this small cat's pedigree."
"Little credit she is to her forebears, then," Whitetip had declared flatly. "Her mother should have not wasted good milk on such as she, she should have pushed her away to go to Wind—that, or eaten her. Why, brother-chief, that useless female creature cannot even run a full mile without having to be given a horse or a pony to ride upon, lest her heart fail. Please cease to bespeak Chief Whitetip on such meaningless topics, brother. This thing you choose to call Stealth has never been, can never be anything more than she is—retarded of both body and mind, almost useless. And Whitetip treats as his equals only those creatures that truly are his equals."
Then the huge cat had stalked away in all of his lordly, feline disdain, leaving Bili to grind his teeth in anger and frustration. But the chief of Morguhn was stubborn, too; he had kept trying and, gradually, he had begun to win over the monstrous prairiecat. Not that any of it had been easy; in fact, sometimes, he had been upon the verge of clubbing the head of the arrogantly obtuse cat with the flat of his great axe. But, as time passed, Whitetip had slowly come around.
Dr. Erica Arenstein knew the full meaning of utter frustration. Not only could she not persuade a requisite-size group of Ganiks to journey east with her and shift enough of the tumbled cuff line for her to reclaim the transceiver that would allow her to summon rescue units, but she found her own movements increasingly restricted; only within the warren of caves was she ever allowed to be by herself.
She soon discovered that leaders of the main bunch did not exercise much real power over the bunch. She gave her "orders" to her bullies, but it was their sole option when, how and even whether to carry them out or see them carried out by the lesser Ganiks. She had soon discovered that she had worried needlessly about acceptance by the full bunch of Ganiks; her acceptance by the most of the bullies had ensured this, for very few of the Ganiks who ever expressed opposition to the promulgations of the ruling bullies lived long afterward.
Very shortly, she was aware that the leader of the main bunch was little more than a slightly deified figurehead, not even expected to go on raids unless on personal whim. It was the leader's unquestioned right to choose bullies to perform the actual governing of the main and the satellite bunches, and leaders were expected to be accomplished killers, but it ended there. She was hailed as "Goddess," just as her predecessor had been hailed as "God," but that term only signified that holders of the title were the personified "luck" of the Ganik bunch, not that they were expected or imagined to possess godlike attributes.
At last, as the months passed, Erica had to resign herself to the facts, She was as much a prisoner here as ever she had been in the cabin of Long Willy Kilgore, the two significant differences being that no one raped her now, and her prison was larger.
When she had first arrived at the main camp and the bullies had ridden out with their escorts to spread the word to the far-flung bunch camps and bring back the leaders of those smaller bunches to meet with their new paramount leader, one of the units had returned quite early and bearing shocking tidings—an entire camp had been found by them to have been burned to the ground, with all of the folk of that bunch slain and the ponies wandering aimlessly in and around the carnage.
Hoofprints of big horses and large ponies had been found all over the clearing, and this had meant but one thing to the Ganiks; Kuhmbuhluhners. The thousand or so then living in the main camp had almost all ridden immediately out to track down and wreak hideous vengeance upon the perpetrators of the foul murders (although, from what she had learned of the Ganik bunches and their methods, Erica thought it likely they had simply been paid back in kind by folk tired of their constant depredations).
The avengers had come back a few days later, and a draggle-tailed, thoroughly frustrated lot they had been. They had found a trail and followed it, reckoning that the party of Kuhmbuhluhners numbered no more than a hundred or so, but then that trail had joined with the trail of another party of equal size and then, farther on, with still another. Still the blood-mad Ganiks had followed the Kuhmbuhluhner marauders… until it became apparent to them that the force was headed straight for a place they called Sandeeskaht. From their descriptions, Erica assumed this Sandeeskaht to be an impregnable Kuhmbuhluhner fortress, before the defenses of which many Ganiks had fallen over the years and which was, consequently, held to be a place of very bad luck.
So the mob of resident Ganiks at the main camp had fumed and fretted and erupted several times into huge, vicious brawls which had ended in several dozen dead or fatally injured Ganiks. After two of her bullies had been slain while trying to break up the last one of these unhallowed melees, Erica had felt constrained to ride down onto the plain and blow the shaggy heads off five of the brawlers—which maneuver had brought the fight to a screeching halt. The main camp enjoyed a couple of weeks of comparative peace and quiet in the wake of that episode, but then the survivors—many of them wounded and/or afoot—started to trickle in from bunches now exterminated or from bands of roving raiders ambushed and slaughtered by the inordinate numbers of armored Kuhmbuhluhners on their big horses, aided and abetted, if the tales of the fugitives were to be believed, by bearded Ahrmehnee warriors and even Moon Maidens.
In conference with most of her bullies in the spacious foyer of her cave-home-cum-palace, with a twenty-gallon barrel of an old and potent fruit wine broached in the center of their circle and battered cups, goblets or flagons in each Ganik's right hand, Erica posed a question.
"Why are you all so flustered at the thought of Ahrmehnee and Moon Maidens joining with Kuhmbuhluhners to make war on the bunches? Since you have always raided both Ahrmehnee lands and Kuhmbuhluhn territories, it seems only logical that the two would eventually join to combat you. I can but wonde
r that they waited so many years to do it"
Senior bully Abner just shook his head. "But don' no Ahrmnees never come wes' their stompin' groun's, not never."
Observing her look of puzzlement, Horseface Charley, who had been first appointed a bully by Buhbuh the Kleesahk, then elucidated.
"Lowng, lowng, time agone, afore the Kuhmbuhluhners come down fum the nawth an' not evun us Ganiks had done been here fer lowng, a whole dang passel of them Ahrmnees an' Moon Maidens, they come a-ridin' in fum the eas' and looked like they's a-fixin' fer to kill ever pore Ganik whut wuz. But the Kleesahks, they wuz owuh frins then and betwixt usuns and them, we kilt and et so dang miny them fuckin' murdrin' bastids thet they all done been plumb, flat-out scairt fer to come back."
Charley upended his jack of old, cracked leather and, Erica thought, poured as much of the wine into his already sopping beard as he did down his working throat Then he went on.
"Sincet we knows ain' no livin' Ahrmnees and Moon Maidens a-gonna come this far wes', us bullies is done figgert them whut has been seed mus' be ghosties of them whut owub granfolks kilt, away back whin. See, them Kleesahks, they kin raise up ghosties and awl kinda bad critters fer to kill folks with. And them Ahrmnees and Moon Maidens whut wuz kilt, back then, they wouldn' hev them no cawse fer to hate eny them Kuhmbuhluhners, naow, but you kin bet they shore hates awl o' us Ganiks; and b'sides, bein' ghosties and awl, they'd hev to do whut the Kleesahks whut brung 'em back tolt 'em to do."
Erica listened in silence. She had learned that trying to talk even these somewhat superior Ganiks into rationality was on a par with trying to persuade her horse that it could fly. How or when or why these Ahrmehnee and Moon Maidens had decided to join their swords to those of the Kuhmbuhluhners in scourging the Ganiks into death or flight, she did not know, but they obviously had done so.
"And perhaps," she thought, listening with half an ear while the increasingly drunken group of savages talked on in their slurred, vulgar dialect, "this is the only way I'll ever be able to escape these despicable swine. If they ever assault this camp, too, maybe, in the certain confusion, I'll be able to get away. Because if I have to spend the life span of this body here, I know I shall become as insane as any other of these congenital lunatics."
It was a few days after that "conference" that, while on her continuous exploration of the cave complex, she found a possible means of escaping her captivity, with or without any help from the Ganik-slayers of Kuhmbuhluhn.
As she gazed up the height of the narrow airshaft, she could see the regularly spaced round holes drilled in the living rock, with rings and streaks telling the tale of iron or steel rungs removed some time in the long ago. Again, judging by the mute testimony of rust-stained bolt holes, a fan or some other sort of air-sucking device had been mounted at this lower end of the shaft, but it too had disappeared, where or when no one could say.
More days were required for her to locate the materials needed—short lengths of strong hardwood of near to the proper diameter. These she found in a cache of spare shafts for the wicked Ganik darts, which, she had learned were but crude copies of those used by the southern Ahrmehnee tribes.
Additional days she spent at painfully trimming the dense, well-seasoned wooden dowels to the exact diameter of the rung holes. She needed twenty-three of these rungs. She also took the time to drag several of the bulky, unwieldy hide mattresses along the hallways and up the sloping ramps to stack them at the foot of the shaft, for should she chance to fall, she wanted something much softer than stone to land on.
Then one day, she made her way back and up to the higher levels of the man-made portions of the caves, with dowels, trimming knives and a short-handled sledge hammer wrapped in a hide and slung, pack like, over her shoulders with thongs.
By standing on the matresses, she could stand in the shaft with its lower edge at about the level of her hips, which fortunate fact made installations of the first few rungs easy enough. But the higher ones were correspondingly more difficult, for the shaft was very narrow—she doubted if the late Buhbuh could even have gotten his head up it, even if he had chanced upon it—and gave her little room in which to work.
Twice she dropped the little sledge hammer and had to go back down to retrieve it before she thought—and silently cursed herself for not thinking earlier—of winding a length of thong about the haft, then looping it to her wrist. Once a flawed rung cracked cleanly in half under her weight and only her firm grip on a higher one prevented a fall.
She was bathed in salt sweat by the time she got close enough to the top to perceive that the way was blocked by two rusted screens. But so far gone in oxidation did these prove to be that she had only momentary difficulty in smashing her way through them with the little sledge hammer, though she clotted her hair and festooned her clothing with centuries worth of debris in the process.
But with the bursting of the last screen, she was able to thrust her head, shoulders and upper torso into the clean-smelling, wondrously cool mountain air. She was facing, she decided, almost due north and could see very little save trees and rocks. To either side, her view was equally scant, so she worked her body around in the shaft, that she might look uphill… her heart jumped into her throat!
There, crouched on a rocky ledge no more than ten meters from the shaft opening, was the largest puma that Erica had ever seen. The huge cat's long, thick tail was lapped about its forepaws, and it was regarding her steadily, its yellow-orange eyes never blinking, its red-pink tongue tip protruding slightly from between winking-white incisors too long to be housed completely within its mouth.
Breathlessly, Erica clasped the haft of her hammer—her only weapon, up here—the tighter and felt with her feet for the next-lower rung, although she well knew that the cat could easily be on her before she could retreat into the relative safety of the shaft.
The cat, however, made no move to attack, but neither did it seem to fear her; so slowly, very carefully, never taking her eyes off of the huge predator until her head was fully within the stone walls of the shaft, Erica retraced her way back into her mountain prison. Next time she climbed up, she would have her rifle.
The barely willing "goddess" of the Ganiks had anticipated great difficulty in finding or making enough time alone to bear back up to the foot of the old ventilation shaft the items she would need was she to go who knew how far afoot through the mountains until she could chance across one of the roaming herds of semidomesticated ponies and then strike one of the tracks leading southwards. But she was immediately gifted almost two .full days, while the bullies were gleefully occupied down by the lake, torturing to death several of the lesser bullies who had led out patrols on the very day that Erica had ascended the shaft. Patrols on the following day had found clear traces that Kuhmbuhluhners had spent a measure of time on the brushy crest of a hill less than a half mile from the foot of the shelf and the camp thereon. Furthermore, there was equally clear evidence that no less than three of the crisscrossing patrols had ridden almost over the spot, yet not one of those patrols had reported aught amiss.
Even had she not had work to do, Erica would have retreated deep into the caves, for the earsplitting shrieks and animal-like howls of the tormented men set her teeth on edge and her nape hairs aprickle. But as it was, by the time that the expert sadists finally allowed their viciously maimed victims to die and set about butchering their tattered cadavers for the feast, their "goddess" had transported all that she thought needful, save only her rifle and her dwindling stock of ammo, to the inner opening of the shaft that led upward onto the northern face of the mountain.
Now all she needed was a major diversion which would serve to occupy all of the bullies—for the lesser Ganiks never set foot in the cave—for long enough to let her get out and a fair distance from the camp on the other side of the mountain.
That particular wish was soon to be fulfilled.
Immediately they returned to Sandes's Cot from their reconnaissance, Bili and his companions set ab
out forming a replica of their recollections of the Ganiks' main camp on a huge sand table erected within the largest room of the tower keep—the main armory, wherein Kahndoot and Meeree had dueled. When once the model was complete and as exact as their combined memories could render it, Bili summoned Count Steev, all of the officers and sergeants of the composite force, the two cats and the Kleesahks, wishing all to be familiar with his plans for finally exterminating the bunch Ganiks.
Once all were gathered about the big table, Bili said, "If our lord Prince Byruhn was correct in nothing else, he was at least correct in this instance; the main Ganik camp is assuredly going to be a tough nut to crack.
"At no point along the edges here"—he indicated the low line of cliffs that fronted three of the sides of the shelf—"is the level of the plain less than forty feet above the track that meanders along below it, and in some places it rises as high as sixty feet. At no point is that slope gradual enough to put horses or ponies up it, although dismounted troops could likely climb it easily enough, did they leave most of their armor behind.
"At only one place, here on the eastern face, is there an ascent for horsemen. It's only wide enough for about two abreast, though, and above its full length, the Ganiks have raised some twelve feet of wall—a rather rude wall, being of naught save fieldstone and rough timber, but as effective as any better would be at that point. Too, there are several stone-wrought buildings at the top of that ramp; they may be simply the large huts that they look like from a distance, but I would wager they are fortified, some of them at least.
"As you can see"—he moved the tip of the sword he was using as a pointer from place to place—"there are other clusters of huts and cabins scattered on the plain; too, there are some aggregations of what look like rude tents and lean-tos, these probably providing housing for those Ganiks we drove up there. Estimates vary, of course, but I feel safe in saying that we will be opposing no less than two thousand, five hundred of the bastards and…" He paused until the comments ceased, then added, "Possibly, as many as three thousand."
