The Witch Goddess

by Robert Adams

  The Teenehdjooks were hunter-gatherers, according to Merle Bowley's description of their preferred life-style, dwelling by choice in caves in the higher elevations of the mountains or deep within the thicker stretches of forest in oval or circular shelters made of hides stretched over wooden frames and placed atop pits dug in the ground. Also according to Bowley, the TeeneMjooks had not progressed beyond the Stone Age, for while some of their tools and hunting weapons had been beautifully fashioned, all had been of stone, bone, wood or antler and they had had no knowledge of the bow—wooden darts with fire-hardened tips and what Erica recognized from the description as a bola being their only missile weapons, aside from flung stones.

  Despite their clearly manlike traits, the Ganiks had decided that the Teendhdjooks and Kleesahks came under the protection of Ndaindjuhd and, as the pelts were not to Ganik liking, they had lived in relative harmony with the hominids.

  Then, in what Erica supposed was a response to repeated incursions or raids by the Ganik bunches, the warriors of the Ahrmehnee stahn had invaded in force, aided by a large group of Moon Maidens. In a great battle, early in the invasion, the fierce Ahrmehnee had virtually exterminated the then main bunch of the Ganiks, then had pushed on westward.

  The Teendhdjooks—such few of them as still remained— and the Kleesahks, who considered pure man to be incurably and incredibly savage in nature and who always tried to avoid any part in his constant squabblings and slaughterings, would most likely have retreated to their wilderness fastnesses, leaving the Ganiks and the Ahrmehnee to fight it out between themselves to the bitter and bloody end, had not some group of Ahrmehnee point riders captured and then coldly murdered two Kleesahk youngsters.

  After that, with the priceless aid of the uncanny abilities of Teenehdjooks and Kleesahks, the Ganiks were enabled to hound and harry the largest proportion of the huge invasion force to their richly deserved deaths, to capture and the Ganik torture frames and, eventually, to the Ganik stewpots. It was thought that some few of the invaders had escaped back whence they had come… but not many.

  As Erica understood it, the "magic" of the manlike beings was an ability to cloud men's minds so that they either could not see things and beings which lay within clear sight or saw things which did not, in fact, exist. As if those abilities were not enough, they were possessed of incredible strength, could see in light far too dim for even the sharpest-eyed humans, had much keener senses of smell and of hearing and could communicate with their own kind and with a few humans by what she would have called telepathy.

  On exactly how the Ganiks and their hominid allies had drifted apart, Bowley seemed less than sure, saying only that the Kuhmbuhluhners had "won the Kleesahks over" soon after they had entered Ganik territory. Then, when the Kuhmbuhluhners turned against and began to persecute the "raht-livin', land-lovin' Ganiks," the fickle Kleesahks chose to side with the newcomers against their own co-religionists, it seemed, for Bowley often spoke of the turncoats most disparagingly, calling them "phony Kuhmbuhluhners" and "rat finks"—which last was a term Erica had not heard used in hundreds of years.

  Some years after the hominids had gone over to the Kuhmbuhluhners, Bowley had continued, an extended family unit of pure-blooded Teenehdjooks had wandered down from the mountains to the north. They had possessed even more remarkable mental powers than had their predecessor hominids, and their arrival had thus vastly strengthened the Kuhmbuhluhners, who had responded to this strengthening by increasing their holdings at the expense of the Ganiks.

  As more and still more farmer Ganiks had been dispossessed, had been offered the bitter choice of giving up their old-time religion, customs and time-hallowed practices or quitting the fertile valleys and glens to try to scratch out a meager existence on stony hillside farms, the bunches had mushroomed in size and aggressiveness. They had quickly learned, however, the utter folly of trying to meet the Kuhmbuhluhners—with their vastly superior weapons, long years of training, discipline and big, predatory horses, all too often aided and abetted by the wiles of the Teenehdjooks and Kleesahks—in open, man-to-man battle.

  So, generation after generation, the way of the bunches had been one of total outlawry, of raiding anyone and everyone—Kuhmbuhluhners, Ahrmehnee and even their fellow Ganiks—of sometimes dodging and sometimes ambushing Kuhmbuhluhner patrols, of a mean and nasty and brutish and often short existence that still seemed to most of them a better life than they would have had amid the never-ending drudgery of the farms whereon they all had been born and reared.

  Then had come a few years of glory for the bunches. With the arrival of a renegade Kteesahk, Buhbuh, and his bloody ascendancy to leadership of the main bunch, the tide had seemed to turn… briefly.

  Apart from his size and his longevity, Buhbuh had had, it seemed, few of the rare talents of his ilk, being far more manlike and, to judge by many of his actions over the years, more than a little deranged. A son of one of the leading Kleesahks, he had arrived among the Ganik bunch in his mid-teens, already seven feet tall, riding a stolen Northorse—the oversize draft-type horses used mostly by traders to draw their wains and wagons—and wielding a Kuhmbuhluhner greatsword easily with but one hand.

  Within a month or so, he had hacked his way to the overall leadership with that sword, a leadership he was to retain until his death in the course of the great rout of the Ganik main bunch on the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn, a total of between sixty and seventy years.

  One of his earliest acts had been the leading of the massed Ganik bunches in the taking of the area where the present main camp was situated. This area had been held by a vassal of the King of Kuhmbuhluhn and his retainers, who had been for some years engaged in stripping the rearmost caves of many hundred-weights of steel, iron, copper and sundry other metals. Pressed back and back by the swarming horde of the Ganiks, the defenders had finally taken refuge in the areas of the caves from which had come the metals. Yet when Buhbuh had at length pepped up his bunches to go in after the Kuhmbuhluhners, no living defenders were to be found, and none had ever known how they had escaped the Ganiks.

  Erica thought that she knew the answer to that particular question, however. For large as the complex of man-made caves had been, one airshaft would not have been sufficient; two or possibly three would have been needed. Clearly, no one had used the one she had found, else there would have been rungs already in place within it, but that still left others.

  And so Buhbuh had established himself in the caves, using them for home, stables, storehouse and treasury. He had personally led one or two big raids each year, sometimes on the Kuhmbuhluhners, but more often against the Ahrmehnee. In addition, he had demanded and received first choice of all loot taken by any of the bunches. Most of the inanimate loot had disappeared into the recesses of his caves. Women had always been turned over to his bullies, for the huge part-human had been apparently of an asexual nature, never having been known to have shared his caves and his monstrous bed with either woman or man in all of the long years he reigned.

  Not contented with the Ganik men and boys who straggled in from time to time to join the bunches, Buhbuh and his bullies had taken to riding among the hill farms of the Ganiks and persuading—which word Erica read as "impressing"—any likely-looking men and boys to ride away with them, also using these forays upon their own folk to acquire anything that appealed to them or that seemed to be of value, as well as to kidnap or lightheartedly gang-rape any likely female they chanced across.

  When Buhbuh took over, the total of all of the bunches— main and satellite—had been between two and three thousand. At the moment of his death, however, that total had swelled to more than six thousand outlaw Ganiks. So many had there been that in order to minimize interecine warfare, existing bunch territories had had to be strictly assigned and the borders clearly marked. Then, too, more and new territories to the south and the southwest had had to be opened and new-made bunches assigned to them. The bunch that had captured Erica had been one of these.

 
With such overwhelming numbers at his beck and call, Buhbuh had kept the Ahrmehnee borders in a state of almost constant turmoil, nor had he ignored the hated Kuhmbuhluhners. Many of the fertile valleys and glens seized by these non-Ganiks had been rendered untenable due to the constant raids and incursions from year to year. The few that remained in Kuhmbuhluhner hands were those that had been massively fortified and garrisoned with seasoned warriors. Bowley noted that the base of the current persecutors of the bunches, Sandeeskaht, was one of the strongest such places.

  When the news had reached Buhbuh that the vast majority of the fearsome Ahrmehnee warriors had been summoned to assemble in the far northeast and that even the grim Maidens of the Moon had ridden to join with them, he had speedily gathered thousands of his own men and mounted a larger raid than had ever before been launched against the ancient enemy.

  There had been but little resistance during the first few weeks of the incursion. The bunches had merrily murdered and raped and pillaged and tortured and burned, filling their bellies with stolen grain and Ahrmehnee flesh, while sending back to the main camp long pony trains of assorted loot.

  But then the first disaster struck. A contingent of the Ganik raiders, over a thousand strong, had unexpectedly met in the course of a swing far to the east some hundreds of heavily armed non-Ahrmehnee warriors and had been almost annihilated by them—would have been, had not another Ganik bunch about equal in size to the first chanced upon the battle and swung the victory in the Ganik favor.

  Then Buhbuh and his personal force had discovered that they were being tracked, pursued, by a force of Ahrmehnee warriors. He had deliberately led them and the Moon Maidens who had subsequently joined them out onto the plateau known as the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn. There he had ambushed them and driven them to bay against the face of a low cliff, gradually whittling them away with attack after attack of his thousands. There had been but few of them remaining, and many of those were wounded, when Buhbuh led the Ganiks in another full-scale charge that would surely have ended the affair.

  But then the second disaster struck the unsuspecting Ganiks. A line of bowmen who looked nothing like Ahrmehnee, but somewhat like Kuhmbuhluhners, appeared atop the cliff against which the Ganiks' prey were ranged. These proved to be master bowmen, and very soon their black-shafted arrows were slaying Ganik after Ganik, knocking them off their ponies' backs to be trampled to death.

  Then, down a steep and shaly slope to the right of the charging Ganik thousands, came rank upon rank of steel-clad men on big, armored horses and armed with lances, axes, longswords, sabers and iron maces. When they reached level ground, they so maneuvered that they struck the Ganik mob—poorly armed by any standards and pony-mounted— from both the right flank and the rear.

  Most of these strangers fought and rode their way completely through the horde of Ganiks, then formed up on the left flank of the now-halted and milling bunches and struck them yet again. From Bowley's description, Erica could be confident that the Ganik losses had been appalling, to say the least. When Buhbuh had reined about and set his Northorse at its fastest pace—a lumbering trot—toward the southwest, the battered Ganiks had quickly streamed in his wake.

  Bowley himself had not seen Buhbuh die, but he had had the account from several who had. The Northorse had been seriously hurt in the first onslaught of the strangers and had at length fallen, sending Buhbuh tumbling. The Kleesahk had then doffed his barrel helm, dropped his quiver of darts and even his huge sword and set off at a run almost as fast as a pony's. But a big armored man on a large black stallion had spurred up behind the fleeing leader and split his head to the eyes and beyond with an oversized battleaxe.

  The survivors of the battle had fled at their fastest speed— ahorse, afoot, on hands and knees, any possible way to escape their blood-mad pursuers. Erica thought that that must have been the very gang of barbarians that she and Jay Corbett and the Broomtown men had watched coming off that plateau as if the hounds of hell were hot on their trail.

  The fearsome strangers and the Ahrmehnee and Moon Maidens had broken off the pursuit at the edge of the plateau, and the battered and bemused and by then leaderless Ganiks were just beginning to stop and think and gather and try to organize the tattered remnants when the third disaster struck.

  Chapter Eleven

  Along with the written rendition of the strategy he had outlined to his force, Bili of Morguhn sent to the prince a request for the loan of as many more of the Kleesahks as that portion of the kingdom could spare. Prince Byruhn sent him an even dozen, along with a wholehearted endorsement of his plan.

  The usual week-long rest period lengthened into two, then three weeks; it took that long for the blacksmiths to finish fashioning the massive hardware items that Bili had ordered to specifications drawn up by Lieutenant Frehd Brakit and Pah-Elmuh.

  Once completed, the order was loaded onto a two-ox wain, which took its place in line behind other wains loaded down with scores of wood axes of various types, saws, crowbars, sledges, wooden mallets, chain and cordage of differing sizes and strengths, adzes, planes and assorted other tools of the carpenter's trade. In addition, there were spare weapons, tents, buckets, supplies for man and horse, all the impedimenta necessary for the establishment of an encampment intended to house in excess of three hundred warriors for an indefinite period of time.

  The distance between Sandee's Cot and the Ganiks' main camp, which Bili and his reconnaissance party had traveled in only two days, required more than six days for the column. Once, long ago, there had been a true wagon road between the present location of the Ganik stronghold and a spot just east of Sandee's Cot, where it had intersected with the Royal Road

  . But that had been more than fifty years past, before the late and unlamented Buhbuh and his horde had driven out the small Kuhmbuhluhn garrison and themselves occupied the shelf.

  All of the logs of that road had long since rotted away.

  Brush and even trees had grown up to narrow it to little more than a pony track, so long hours of hard labor had been required to widen sections of it sufficiently for the wains to pass along it.

  Finally, however, almost a full week after leaving Sandee's Cot, the huge, patient oxen drew the huge, creaking wains into the area chosen for the campsite. That was about noon. Only three hours later, Brakit and Pah-Elmuh already were choosing and marking trees for the woodcutters, then selecting and marking the routes along which the felled and trimmed trees were to be snaked to the points where the artisans would take over. Since there were two of these points, fairly widely separated, it was decided to do most of the felling at a place an equal distance from both, or as nearly so as possible.

  Work began at all three sites the next morning, even while two more teams of warriors-cum-laborers hewed and hacked and sweated and cursed and slowly cleared the paths for the logs and the oxen that would drag them into place. There were two Kleesahks with each working party, not including Pah-Elmuh, who stayed close to Brakit at all times. The huge hybrids quickly proved their worth when a mob of several hundred Ganiks came down from the shelf, armed to the teeth, riding fast, clearly bound for the woodcutters, who perforce working atop a ridge, were clearly visible from the Ganik camp.

  But at a mindspoken signal from Pah-Elmuh, all of the Kleesahks dropped whatever metal tools they were using and stood in silence, unmoving as so many massive statues. Then the screams and warcries of the oncoming mob of Ganiks suddenly became cries of consternation, shouted questions and scarce-believing curses. The shaggy, smelly multitude passed within bare yards of the woodcutting party, looked directly at some of them, yet saw them not.

  And almost the same thing occurred as the baffled Ganiks swung around and headed back for their camp. Their chosen path took them directly across one of the lanes being cleared for snaking the logs, and they rode their little ponies between two groups of the warrior-workers, yet obviously could not see the men who could have easily reached out and touched them.

  In the days that
followed, these occurrences became almost commonplace and the workers quickly became accustomed to freezing in place, doing nothing that would make a noise, as larger or smaller contingents of Ganiks searched for them in vain. Of course, this invariably slowed down the work, but Bili and the other officers were well content to lose hours or even days of work time rather than find themselves in combat against the vastly overwhelming numbers of the enemy at a place and a time not of their choosing.

  But Bili also knew that the Ganiks were going to have to be nibbled at to put them in the proper mood so that when the time was ripe his plans might work smoothly, with full Ganik participation, if not willing cooperation. But he had already formulated schemes to that end, nor was he much longer in putting those schemes into operation.

  "Them damn Kleesahks and Kuhmbuhluhn bastids is flat a-scarin' the shit outen the fellers down ther, Ehrkah," Merle Bowley informed Erica the Goddess one night, adding, "Ain' hardly none of "em too lowng awn brains, nohow, so they's allus a-scairt of enythin they don' unnerstan'… and it's a whole lots they don' unnerstan."

  It had been bad enough, thought Erica, when Horseface and his hundreds had been unable to find a fairly large group of foemen that watchers on the shelf could clearly see. That had even shaken the placid Horseface for a while, until Bowley and a couple of the older bullies had patiently explained to their bemused comrade that it was simply a case of hominid magic, such as had confounded to death the Ahrmehnee invaders of long years ago.