by Robert Adams
“It’s really my fault, though. I should’ve foreseen something like this happening under the circumstances. I knew that that damned Potter was displeased with the aligmnents, and I knew he is a cousin of the earl, and I knew that the earl — unlike his old father, God rest his soul — does dote on playing at war captain, when he finds or makes himself the opportunity.
“So, it’s going to be entirely up to me to gingerly chew our esteemed leader out for his tragic folly, this time. Sir Djaimz here obviously wouldn’t dare do so; he has too much to lose to chance incurring the earl’s disfavor, At least my place is secure.
“But I’ll put that particular chore off until I can speak clearly and precisely — there must be no misunderstanding of aught I say to him.
“Well, I suppose that the next, logical step is going to be to march on New Kuhmbuhluhnburk itself, and call on it to surrender . . . not that I think the fiesty bastards will, mind you. No, I’d wager we end up besieging them there . . . unless the place is weak enough to fall by storm, which I doubt on general principles. Odd, that no scout of ours has ever been able to get an actual sight of that city and come back to us with the tale. Even our herald was not allowed close enough to give us any idea of the defenses of the place. But I must plan to act on the assumption that New Kuhmbuhluhnburk is at the very least defensible and well garrisoned and, being a mountain city, probably has sources of unpollutable water inside the walls, as well.
“And so, Ahrthur Maklarin, that leaves two options: entrench and throw zigzags close enough to tunnel and undermine a likely stretch of wall, or simply hunker down on the spot and try to starve the buggers out, if we can’t find a traitor or two to open a stray gate to us of a dark night.
“From last year’s crop of prisoners and from those we captured when we took our glen, I get an impression that out from the foot of the capital there spreads a long, wide and exceptionally rich plain. Conceivably, we could live well off their own lands while besieging their city. But as we’ve here learned to our sorrow, not all of these New Kuhmbuhluhners think or act alike. There’s a wide streak of shrewd canniness runs through some of the leaders, so no doubt but our folk up in the north will be on short rations, are our men on the siege lines to be fed for however long it takes to achieve a capitulation. But it can and must be done. Our folk are tough, accustomed to privation, and they and their forefathers before them have done the like before to support a field army. They will not conceivably stick at doing it all again, not to gain a prize so rich as these lands, this Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn.”
* * *
The Skohshun army stayed in place, remained in the camps they had come to call Twin Hills for long and long after the disastrous battle. The seriously wounded, if they lived through it, were wagoned back to what they called Skohshun Glen and the wagons returned with foodstuffs, beer and other necessities of field life.
Long before he could even sit up straight without blinding pain, the brigadier had reassumed his command. The young Earl Devernee had taken his oral birching with far better grace than Sir Ahrthur had foreseen. Apparently he had been shaken to his innermost core of being by the sanguineous results of his intemperate decisions of that morning before the battle. This fact cheered the battered old man mightily, for he had much yet to do and he had not relished the thought of an ongoing feud with his nominal superior whilst he went about his necessary tasks with the army.
Of the three, lonely prisoners — all wounded — taken in the aftermath of the battle, two were New Kuhmbuhluhn nobles, and they gave him precious little information he had not had ere this. The third, once stripped of armor, proved to be a dark and lovely woman; but she could not or, more likely thought the brigadier, would not speak any comprehensible tongue. Her racial similarity to the woman prisoner up in the glen struck him early on, so he suddenly decided to have all of the prisoners brought down to the camps, thinking that he might well find a use for them between here and New Kuhmbuhluhnburk.
As regarded the army, there was no rebuilding of Colonel Farr’s regiment possible, not without stripping the last reserve pikeman from the glen, nor could all the vacant places in the ranks of the other two regiments be filled in. Therefore he had Farr’s regimental banner sent back in the same wagon that bore the wounded officer himself; it and he would become a part of the reserve establishment until/when/if there were enough trained bodies to again fill that unit out.
The few pikemen and shorts left of the “disbanded” unit were parceled out as replacement fillers where needed. As for the remnants of the regiment of the late Colonel Gambel, the brigadier retired that banner, too, and merged the survivors with the regiment of Colonel Taylor. It seemed to him the quickest and simplest answer to the problem, and he was itchy to get the army reorganized and on the march toward New Kuhmbuhluhnburk before the foemen had the time and the leisure to concoct any unpleasant surprises for him and his.
His mounted messengers kept the roads and trails dusty between Twin Hills Camps and the captured glen, while his messages kept the glen and a large number of its inhabitants as busy as so many ants. But the Skohshuns were familiar with this kind of activity. Almost every war season within living memory it had been the same drudgery of preparing their men for war and providing for them whilst they campaigned; the only activities held of more worth were those of agriculture and animal husbandry, and even these were closely related, of course, to the welfare of the troops in the field.
Unsatisfied with reports from various of his subordinates, the brigadier himself took the time to interview, to debrief first the commander, then several of the officers and other ranks of the dragoons who had trailed the defeated army of New Kuhmbuhluhn all the way to the capital. But to a man their observations of the city and its environs made no sense, had little similarity one to the other, yet these men all were trained, experienced scouts.
The brigadier found the whole business to be most unsettling, but he moved on to other affairs, rationalizing that he and all the rest would be there to see the city and countryside soon enough,
* * *
When Dr. Schiepficker had completed his oral report and surrendered the microphone to Corbett, the officer said, “If you’re not sitting down, David, I strongly advise that you do so, now,”
“Erica . . . ?” came the hoarse, hesitant whisper. “She . . . she’s . . . you’ve found her . . . her . . . ?”
“It would seem, from what a Ganik that Johnny Skinhead brought in had to say, that up to about a month ago, she was alive and the captive of some group or tribe calling themselves Skohshuns. Their lands are well up to the north and the west of here, somewhere close to the south bank of the Ohio River, I’d say, on the basis of current information. Apparently, they are newcomers to these mountains, invading — migrating, really — from north of the river. Instead of relying on cavalry as do most groups hereabouts, they seem to have developed truly effective infantry, along the general lines of the Swiss or German Landesknechten and —”
“Dammit, Jay,” fumed Sternheimer impatiently. “the very last thing I want to hear right now is your assessment of their culture, military or otherwise. The one, the only thing I want you to tell me is when you are going to move to rescue poor Erica.”
Corbett sighed. “David, which is the most important thing to you, to us, to the Center, just now — salvaging our loot from the Hold of the Moon Maidens or marching off God alone knows how far into completely unknown country on a mission which already may be pointless? If it’s the former, which of my Broomtown officers should I leave in charge of the salvage operation while I take a reinforced company north? If it’s the latter, what would you suggest be the provisions made for Dr. Schiepficker and the other civilians while the rest of us go charging to the supposed rescue with the entire battalion?”
“Oh, God damn you, Jay Corbett!” Sternheimer snarled with intense feeling. “Of all people, you know how I feel about Erica. You also know how important, how very vital that salvage mission is to us at
the Center and —
“Wait! I’ve got the solution, Why not leave Dr. Schiepficker in charge?”
Corbett sighed once more. “David, David, Mike Schiepficker is a gifted zoologist, he’s even a decent rifle shot, but I doubt if he could easily tell the difference between a blasting cap and an increment charge. Whoever remains in charge, in my place up here, must have a good grounding in explosives and blasting, along with a military background and the ability to command. And, David, I can think of but one man down there who meets the explosives qualifications.
“If you want me to go north after Erica, put Dr. Braun’s mind into a decent body and get him and Colonel MacBride from Broomtown up here to me, yesterday. The sooner they are here with us, the sooner I can leave with a special force. You’d better lay on the biggest copter for the job, too, as I’m going to be wanting MacBride to bring along some additional weapons and equipment.”
“No,” Sternheimer began petulantly. “I don’t think Harry Braun should —”
Corbett cut him off brusquely. “David, I don’t think you understood me. Those are my terms; they am nonnegotiable. This is not a mission I really want to undertake, you see. I’m doing it for you, as a personal — a very, very personal — favor. I’d much rather complete this project, here, before undertaking anything else, and unless you immediately meet my conditions, I’ll do just that.” He paused, then added, “Do I make myself clear, this time around, David?”
Now it was Center Director Sternheimer who sighed. “Yes, Jay, your meaning is quite clear. I’ll set things in motion, down here. You can make arrangements with Broomtown Base. Out.”
Chapter VI
After the good laugh they all had had at thoughts of the probable effects on their besiegers of Sir Yoo Folsom’s explosively cathartic beer, thoheeks Bili, his officers and their entourages left the palace portion of the citadel complex to stroll the full circuit of the walls of the besieged mountain city of New Kuhmbuhluhnburk of which he was become de facto ruler, king in all save name.
The existing situation failed to please Bili in the least. He entertained no scintilla of desire for suzerainty over this isolated mountain pocket kingdom, his overriding ambition being to get himself, his wife and child, and those lowlanders who had followed his banner so valiantly and so long back east into first the Ahrmehnee stahn, then the lands of the Confederation.
But he was become what he was become simply through unavoidable circumstances. Because his father, then-Thoheeks Morguhn, lay ill and hovering near to death, he had been called to return to his patrimonial lands from the court and army of the King of Harzburk, whereat he had dwelt and trained and served from his eighth through his eighteenth years. That he had ridden back to Morguhn a proven warrior, a Knight of the Order of the Blue Bear of Harzburk, was a most fortunate happenstance, for he had ridden his telepathic warhorse into the very epicenter of a social earthquake. His homeland was being ravaged by a blood-soaked rebellion ostensibly organized around and for the purposes of a long-suppressed religion practiced by the previous owners of the lands, the Ehleenee, but actually plotted and orchestrated by Witchmen, agents of an ancient evil far to the south.
After the rebellion had been bloodily put down in Morguhn, the surviving rebels all fled west into the neighboring duchy, where they completely wiped out the Thoheeks of Vawn and all the loyal Kindred through assassinations, treachery and, finally, blatant atrocities. Aroused noblemen and their retainers from all over the vast Confederation had then marched into Vawn with a large segment of the regular army of the Confederation and quashed the rebels there as well.
But barely was the one war over and done than yet another was of direst necessity begun. This one, too, was caused by the Witchmen. At their scarcely needed instigation, the Ahrmehnee tribes — whose ancestors had once held the lands now comprising the western duchies and had been driven out of them and into their present mountains by the Army of the Confederation — and the Maidens of the Moon Goddess — fierce Amazon warriors who were distantly related to the Ahrmehnee — were massing in previously unheard-of numbers, assembling about the village of their chief of chiefs, the nahkhahrah, for a raid in force against the already devastated western lands of the Confederation.
The Undying High Lord Milo Moral — one of the group of near-immortal mutants who had first formed the Confederation and now ruled it — had opted to strike the Ahrmehnee before they could strike him and his lands. He had launched the forces at his disposal — Confederation regulars, both horsemen and infantry, Confederation noblemen, their retainers and the numerous Freefighters or mercenaries many of them had hired to flesh out the followings behind their various banners.
Bili, a natural commander and leader of men, as well as the owner of rare and infinitely precious extrasensory gifts, had impressed the High Lord early on in the Morguhn rebellion, and so, despite his youth, the Thoheeks and Chief of Morguhn had been entrusted the leadership of the southern tine of the fork on which the High Lord meant to impale the always troublesome Ahrmehnee for good and all.
Bili’s force had been all cavalry, including most of the Freefighters — all of whom practically worshiped him because, having fostered for so long in Harzburk, he seemed more like one of them, more like what they all innately expected a fighting nobleman to be than did the pampered, effete-seeming, luxury-loving Confederation nobles.
He had split his available forces into squadrons balancing as far as possible the numbers of well-equipped and -mounted but often less than war-wise Confederation nobles with an equal quantity of the hard, lean, scarred Middle Kingdoms mercenaries whose profession was war. Then he had sent these squadrons to reave and despoil their way north and east, through the very heart of the richest, most densely populated of all of the Ahrmehnee tribal areas.
And those squadrons had gone through the hills and dales and vales and villages like the proverbial dose of salts! With few adult males about to oppose them — most of the hale men of fighting age being assembled in the north, ready to invade the Confederation — the squadrons had burned and killed, raped and robbed, butchered livestock and ruined those foodstores they had not the pack animals to steal and bear away. They had despoiled their gory paths about halfway to their northern goal — The village of the nahkhahrah — when Bili was recipient of a telepathic order from the High Lord which halted the depredations and sent most of the force back whence they had come.
Bili had felt the long-familiar tingling and had automatically relaxed his mind to enable easier reception of the farspeak.
“Bili, our war with the Ahrmehnee is ended,” the High Lord had beamed. “Get word to all your columns immediately to retire back on the Trade Road
and return to Vawnpolis through the thoheekahtohn of Baikuh. You are to take a squadron and ride northwest. You are seeking a largish mule train which is led by three of the Witchmen . . . well, one of them is a woman. And, speaking of females, if you intercept a force of armored, horse-mounted Ahrmehnee women, do not be surprised — they are after the same quarry as are you.
“While I’d like to have at least one of the Witchfolk alive, don’t you take unnecessary chances; remember all I’ve told you of them and their wiles and their exceedingly deadly weapons, weapons which can punch right through even the best grades of plate armor from a thousand or more yards away.
“Now the treasures they carry on their pack beasts are rightfully the property of the Ahrmehnee female warriors of whom I just told you. I understand that they are all virgins, but forgiving them that, the man who’s seeking a rich wife could scarcely do better, to my way of thinking.
“And by the bye, Bili, the brahbehrnuh, their hereditary leader, is reputed to be a proud, handsome, long-legged creature named Rahksahnah. She is of a long-lived, vastly gifted race, and she should throw good colts and fillies, many of them. Think you on that matter, my boy.
“As for the machines and unfamiliar, long-range weapons the Witchfolk carry, I would prefer that they all be smashed, then du
mped in a river or a deep lake.
“You’ll be far, far west, Bili, so it’s possible that you’ll chance across Mehrikan-speaking barbarians called the Muhkohee. They are reputed to be sly, treacherous, savage eaters of human flesh. Even these wild Ahrmehnee fear them, lad, so beware.
“Sun and Wind keep you all, Bili, Come back first to the nahkhahrahs village when you are done.”
Since mindspeak — telepathy — was a rather common talent among the Kindred nobles, Bili had had scant difficulty in reining in and turning about his packs of wardogs, all save one, an all-Freefighter squadron containing no mindspeakers; to this one he sent gallopers.
Choosing only the very best of his reserve squadron — the warriors, the best horses, the best armor and weapons for them, with a very abbreviated pack train — Bili set off in the indicated direction but on a course designed deliberately to intercept a maximum number of the retiring squadrons. From these, as he met them, he chose again the best of the best, frequently intimidating Confederation noblemen into “loaning” their better-quality harness and weapons, their finely bred, extensively trained and highly intelligent warhorses to less well equipped and mounted Freefighter officers and troopers. These actions in no way endeared him to said noblemen, but then, they would not be riding west with him, either.
They moved as fast as the limitations of horseflesh would allow and they were many days’ march into the unknown far western mountains when one of the advance-scouting prairiecats found a mortally wounded Moon Maiden and the message she imparted in the few moments before she finally died of her grievous wounds alerted Bili that his allies-to-be stood hard pressed by the barbarians called Muhkohee not far ahead.
They had increased their pace, backtracking the dead Maidens course, and had finally ascended onto that plateau that the Ahrmehnee called the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn. There they found a few hundreds of Moon Maidens and Ahrmehnee warriors standing at bay and beset by a horde of thousands of the shaggy, stinking, ill-armed, pony-mounted Muhkohee.
