The Witch Goddess

by Robert Adams

  Only the old count and his officers and sergeants who had been sending out patrols of dozens or, at most, a few score against bands and bunches numbering in the hundreds seemed unimpressed by the odds they would soon face. The Freefighters, Ahrmehnee and Maidens exchanged looks, and Bili could sense the many mindspeak communications passing silently about the room.

  The young thoheeks went on, "Now, everyone knows that a force attacking a fortified position like this one must be at least somewhat stronger than the force which is defending that position. But, unfortunately, this is not and cannot be the case with us and these Ganiks.

  "Had I even a number of troops equal to the numbers of the Ganiks, I would await a dark night, range my archers along that track and use fire arrows to fire as much of that plain as I could—there's been little rain, of late, so that grass should go up like fine tinder—and then I'd feint a frontal assault somewhere down here near the southwestern corner and, as soon as enough Ganik force was committed at the site of that feint, I'd lead the bulk of my force up the eastern flank, here, and then sweep from one end to the other."

  He sighed. "But if wishes were horses… Therefore, the only plan that I can devise which does not smack of suicide is the one I now shall detail to you."

  Chapter Ten

  Although fairly shallow and sun-warmed along its shores, the long, narrow lake between the upper reaches of the shelf and the lower, grassy plain was apparently quite deep and of an icy coldness toward its center. After Lee-Roy followed her out too far one day and nearly drowned, Erica had taught her two senior bullies to swim, and, observing the three of them cavorting in the water on hot, stifling days, numerous others of the bullies had pled for similar instruction by their new leader.

  Of course, a few of the more religious and/or superstitious had remained too fearful of the terrible demon Plooshuhn to take part in these frolics, but there were not many of these among the ranks of the bullies. So soon, though it was still a gagging experience to be near or even downwind of a mob of the unwashed lesser Ganiks, Erica found her constant entourage of bullies to be at least bearable.

  As Erica continued to share out with them the treasured loot that Buhbuh the Kleesahk had hoarded for himself for so many years—especially the barrels and kegs of assorted spirits—the bullies made a practice of gathering several evenings each week in the foyer of the caves to drink and converse with their goddess and each other. And as she slowly came to know them better, the woman found many things about them to truly admire.

  For all their basic savagery, their nasty brutishness, their universal and sadistic delight in witnessing or inflicting human suffering and death, and the grim travesty of a religion that a few of them still practiced, even so could she" find things to admire about her lieutenants.

  She realized and admitted to herself that these men were, of course, the natural leaders and, as such, superior in every way to the howling, gibbering horde of cannibals that followed them. In order simply to retain their places in their primitive hierarchy, they had to be stronger, more intelligent and of greater mental flexibility than the unwashed throngs they led. Like attracts like, and that was why she made it a point to fill the occasional vacancies in the ranks of the bullies with choices recommended by the existing ones.

  For all their announced status as "senior bullies," Lee-Roy and Abner really only functioned as her personal staff. The real senior bully, Merle Bowley, was a highly intelligent, quick-minded and innovative man. He was not the largest— Horseface Charley held that record; Erica was certain that the man towered two meters, or very close to it, and could not have weighed much less than ninety kilos—but he was without doubt the most dangerous of them all. Even when he was smiling and outwardly jovial, that aura of deadly danger radiated outward from him, easily recognizable to those properly attuned.

  Bowley was not short by any means, compared to most of the Ganiks—who all seemed too have been subjected to malnutrition and serious protein deficiency almost from birth. He was a sizable man, though some thirty centimeters shorter than the towering Horseface and correspondingly lighter. Erica reckoned his age to be mid-thirtyish, and there was as yet no trace of gray in his dark reddish-brown hair and full beard. When she had first come among them, his speech patterns had been identical to the slurred, vulgar, much-debased dialect spoken by all of the Ganiks, but soon thereafter, she had noted that he was beginning to ape her own speech. Now, after her months with the main bunch, Bowley was much more easily comprehensible to her than even the faithful—but not really too bright—brothers, Lee-Roy and Abner.

  Bowley's aide, Owl-eyes Hewlitt, was a younger version of his senior. His sinister killer aura was there, if not yet as pronounced as Bowley's, and his mind was easily the equal of Bowley's. He was a bit taller, though not as broad and big-boned, and his hair and beard—once he'd taken to swimming frequently, he and Bowley having been the first two to request instruction in the esoteric rite—were of a glossy blue-black, although his eyes were a piercing dark blue. Like Bowley, whom he clearly much admired and aped in many ways, Hewlitt had taken to copying certain of Erica's speech patterns and pronunciations.

  Another bully who really stood out in Erica's mind was Counter Trimain, short, broad, incredibly powerful, but always jolly. There was never a time when Counter was not laughing and joking… even while he was engaged in his specialty, protracted and bestially insensitive torture. He had impressed Erica with his deep knowledge of anatomy; this knowledge enabled him to keep the spark of life in his most unfortunate victims even while maintaining them in indescribable agony. Counter was also the closest thing to a surgeon or physician the bullies had had, prior to the coming of Erica.

  The common run of Ganiks received no medical help or treatment of any nature. If they became seriously ill, badly wounded or incapacitated with age, their fellows quickly killed and butchered them for the ever-ready stew pots.

  Bullies sometimes went that same merciless route, but the ones valued for some reason by the senior bully or the leader could usually depend upon at least a modicum of treatment at the skilled—if bloody—hands of Counter. In the two or three procedures Erica had undertaken since arriving in the main camp, Counter Trimain had proved himself to be an exceptional, if very unorthodox, assistant.

  One early evening, as Erica and some score of the most important bullies sat or hunkered in the torch-lit foyer with their drinking vessels and yet another barrel of the late Buhbuh's tipple—this a sweet honey wine of amazing potency—Erica said, "Merle, where did your people, the Ganiks, come from? As I recall, Horseface said that you had been in this area for only a short while before the folk of Kuhmbuhluhn arrived from the north."

  "Wai, Ehrkah," he replied, "I'll tell you jest whut-all wuz tole to me, back whin I 'uz a younker, afore I jined up with a bunch, atall. You's free to b'lieve whut of it you wawnts to, heahnh? It's a whole lot of it I don' b'lieve, no way! But enyhaow…

  "Away, way, waaay back, it wuz folks a-livin' awl ovuh, could do thangs cain' nobody do no more. They awl had waguns what din't need no oxes or ponies fer to pull 'em, and they had waguns whut could fly, if you kin b'lieve it, fly like birds. Whole passels of them folks lived close to each othuh, all ovuh the place, and they dirtied up the rivuhs and lakes and all so much all the fish come to die out'n ' em, and a man'd git real sick or die wuz he to take nary a sip.

  "And evul demons had put them folks awl up to puttin' pizens in the dirt they growed their corn and beans and awl in, then a-pourin' more, diffrunt pizens awn 'em, too. Thet's whin the firstest Ganik farmers come along, Ehrkah, they wouldn' use no pizens in the dirt, nor none enyplacet elst And thet flat pisted them pizen folks awf! They commincted a-persuhcutin' them pore, raht-thinkin' Ganik farmers sumthin awful, a-robbin' 'em of their land or a-tryin' to make 'em a-pizen too, lahk the rest wuz a-doin'.

  "So them ole Ganik farmers, they tuk awl their wifes and their younkers and they lef and went to places din't none of the pizen fanners wawnt fer to live in.
And thet be why, whin the pizen folks started a-fightin' and a-killin' eacht othuh, wan't none of the Ganik farmers wher they could be easy got at.

  "Fer a whole lowng tahm aftuh them pizen folks had done mostly kilt each othuh awf, the ole Ganiks farmed raht and lived raht and done raht by the land and the gods. But then the get of the get of them pizen folks whut had lived th'ough the killin' and awl started a-movin' in awn the ole Ganik farmers, and they din't see nuthin' wrawng with it.

  "'Cept, them new folks, they wouldn' live raht. They awl dirtied water, won' no kinda animal they wouldn' kill and eat, they evun was a-tearin' up the land, a-diggin' up some kinda black rock whut they say will burn, lahk wood. And whin them ole Ganik farmers they tried to tell 'em whut-awl they wuz a-doin' wrowng by the land, the demons got 'em so riled up they commincted a-beatin and evun a-killin' them pore ole Ganiks. And sinct it wuz more demon-lovuhs then it was Ganiks, it won't nuthin fer to do but fer to move awn to find new lands whut din't have no get of pizen folks awn 'em.

  "But seemed lahk everwher us Ganiks settles us, 'long comes mo' demon-lovers, lahk them Kuhmbuhluhn fuckuhs, afore lowng. And naow them Kuhmbuhluhners has done took to a-diggin' up them black rocks, up nawth, I hear tell, too."

  "But, Merle," asked Erica, "what is wrong with digging and burning coal? That's what these black rocks of yours are properly called, you know."

  Soberly, Bowley replied, "First, Ehrkah, it be a crime 'ginst the great god, Kahlohdjee, to dig enythang 'ceptin' food and wawtuh outn' the land. And secun', the black rocks wuz one of the pizens of the ole demon folks; burnin' them rocks pizens the air and, then, folkses innards and they dies."

  Having within her ancient mind clear recollections of the various fringe-element movements—organic farming, ecology, the pollution fanatics, vegetarians, back-to-nature types—Erica dug more deeply into the singular practices, beliefs, customs of the Ganiks on subsequent evenings and soon came to the conclusion that the Kuhmbuhluhners were doing the only thing that any halfway sane and reasonable group of normal humans could do with the Ganik ilk—drive them out or kill every one of them.

  Though she had decided on the ride north that rather than starve or seriously endanger her health she would partake of human flesh, she had quickly found that such a drastic step was unnecessary in the main camp. Not only was the lake full of fish and large frogs, with abundant crayfish in the feeder streams, but the bullies were always hunting, bringing back their kills by night, so as not to cause conflicts with the religious fanatics.

  In any single week, Erica and the bullies might feast on venison, wild pig, the flesh of feral cattle and sheep and goats, hare, raccoon, opossum and a variety of fowl. The quantities and selection of plant foods—fruits, berries, roots, tubers, leaves, sprouts and seeds—was to her impressive. The Ganiks apparently knew every edible thing that grew in these mountains, and utilized most of them in their diet. Grain and beans for both man and beast came from raids upon the farmer Ganiks, and there were vast stores of these in the caves, the presence of which kept the resident stoat colony busy and well fed on marauding rodents.

  The lunatic strictures of the Ganiks' perverted religion denied them consumption of the flesh of any warm-blooded beast, all of which were supposedly under the personal protection of the god Ndaindjuhd, who did seem to mind the animals' being killed by Ganiks and others—for such things as hides, furs, horn and sinew—just so long as the flesh was not eaten but, rather, reverently buried with a prayer of apology to the dead beast and to Ndaindjuhd. This restriction applied to wild and domestic beasts alike; the only things a farmer Ganik was allowed to take of his livestock were milk, eggs, wool or hair, dung and labor.

  Most disgusting to Erica of the promulgations of Ndaindjuhd was that one decreeing that Ganik hunters should all either copulate with the dead bodies of their quarry or, if that prey was small game, at least ejaculate semen on its carcass before burial, supposedly in order to indicate to the god that they recognized and respected their own kinship to the beasts.

  Moreover, she was freely informed, on the Ganik farms bestiality was performed often and openly by both men and women with the various species of livestock for the same holy purposes. That non-Ganik folk not only did not perform these rites but were horrified by and murderous toward those who did had always been one of the principal reasons that the Ganiks had never found themselves able to coexist with non-Ganik populations. Even the bullies, who mostly had strayed quite far from the tenets of the Ganik faith, always expressed anger at the patent intolerance of non-Ganiks for Ganik religious practices and reverence for the land.

  The warped and exceedingly peculiar faith of the Ganiks did, however, allow them to eat human beings—which species did not fall under the protection of Ndaindjuhd—all matter of a vegetable nature and any non-warmblooded creature, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, worms and insects. And the protein-starved Ganiks ate every one of the latter category they could catch, and they ate them all—heads, skins, bones, organs, guts and even the contents of those guts.

  But they were not allowed fish or frogs or anything else out of the main camp's lake or feeder streams. At sometime in the past, someone—either Buhbuh or one of his senior bullies—had astutely recognized the fact that the large numbers of lesser Ganiks would quickly exterminate the populations of the waters, were their hungry depredations allowed to go on. So the lake and streams were now and had for long years been the sole bailiwick of the bullies and the leader, lesser Ganiks being permitted to use it only for drinking water and for watering animals.

  This practice meant that the trail side bank area was almost always roiled and muddy, so Erica and the bullies did all of their swimming and fishing from the less-troubled other side, which was, in any case, nearer to the cave. So, on a sunshiny morning in August (at least, Erica thought it August; there was no way she could be certain of dates), she, Lee-Roy and Abner, having sun-dried their bodies after swimming, had dressed and were just casting their lines into the water when they heard it.

  From afar it came. The distant tock-tock of hard-swung axes biting into wood, with another sound that Erica thought was the sound of one or more saws, these noises interspersed from time to time with the resounding crash of falling trees, the lowings of oxen, creaks of ropes and of harness and occasional sharp reports like the crack of whips.

  Looking questioningly at her companions, Erica was somewhat reassured when Abner shrugging, said, "Soun's is hawd fer to place, Ehrkah—they comes down the hollers awn the wind, raht awftun. Them could be summa them Kuhmbuhluhn bug-tit bastids thirty, forty miles away."

  But when Merle Bowley rode his long-legged horse in from the central area of the shelf-plain some hours later, Erica could tell at once from his expression that something was dreadfully amiss. Nor did he keep her long in the dark, only taking time to dismount, hitch the horse and throw himself flat to dip his sweaty face in the lake before relating his news and his hunches.

  "I thanks we 'uz wrowng whin we hurtid them boys to death, naow, Ehrkah, and I had me a hunch we wuz whin we done 'er, too. Reason is, it be a whole passel of Kuhmbuhluhners is a-hewin' and a-fellin' great big ole trees, 'bout three ridges out f'um the camp, then they's a-snakin' them timbuhs closuh to us, towards us, like.

  "Naow, a body kin see 'em, see 'em clear, f'um lotsa places awn the edges ovuh the track, but whin ole Horseface he taked a bunch and rode out fer to kill 'em, he couldn' find the damn fuckuhs, nowhers!

  "I tell you, Ehrkah, I watchted him my ownsef; him and his bunch rode almos' ovuhtop of the bigges' bunch of them Kuhmbuhluhn bastids, they did, no more'n three, fo' yard fu'm 'em, lookted like fu'm heanh, but they plumb couldn' see 'em. So it cain' be but the one thang—them damn Kuhmbuhluhn Kleesahks is a-workin' Teenelidjook magic out thar. Mos' likely, they wuz a-doin' the same thing back whin them pore boys we all hurtid to death din't see nobody neither."

  "But why," asked, Erica, "would the Kuhmbuhluhners be felling trees so close to us, here? Surely they knew we
'd see and hear them."

  Merle's thick shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. "Lawdsy, Ehrkah, I don' know why, they jest a-doin' it. But you can bet the reason they a-doin' it don't bode no good fer us Ganiks."

  She asked another question. "Merle, what is this Teeneh… Teenehd… this magic you say the Kleesahks are working?"

  The story that she got then was an exceedingly strange one, one that she did not know whether to believe or not. But she listened, making no comments, withholding judgment until she had heard all of it.

  As Merle Bowley told it, when first the Ganiks had fled into this area of the mountains from the last place out of which they had been driven, willy-nilly, by intolerant non-Ganiks, there had been no real men resident, only a small number of huge, hairy human-shaped beasts called Teenehdjooks. Though they varied in size and coloration, according to age, sex and individual differences, most of them were two or more times the height of a full-grown man and proportionately heavy. Nonetheless, they were able to keep their presence in the land unknown to the Ganiks—who were, even then, no mean woodsmen—for many years, up until some type of disease carried off most of their females of breeding age.

  Among the Ganiks, in those long-ago days, were a few families of vastly outsized humans, and to one of these the Teenehdjooks first showed themselves, seeking friendship and females. This family's surname was McCoy, and from the matings of their women with the Teenehdjook came the first Kleesahks— which term denoted a hybrid of Teenehdjook and human, an often sterile hybrid.

  These huge, hairy hominids, these Teendhdjooks, unless prematurely killed by accident or disease, lived much longer than humans—three or four hundred years not being uncommon among them. Although the hybrids they generated did not live that long, still they lived longer than men, some of them reaching an age of two hundred or more years, which fortunately served to keep their population fairly stable despite their low birthrate and the frequent sterility of the Kleesahks.