by Robert Adams
“She is well and safe, brave one. I left her on the near slope of the next hill. The Horse-King and his fighters should be there by now. Does Mole-Fur’s hero wish to kill this two-leg, or shall she?”
“Neither,” he told her. “The ironshirt can’t get away. Let him live. There are clansmen coming. It will be interesting to see what Chief Hwahlis of Linszee performs upon the flesh of this would-be female-stealer.”
Walking over to Morning-Mist, he employed his left fang-spur to sever the thongs which held Beti on the mare’s back and, carefully, he reared up until he could grasp the waist-rope of her trousers and pull her from horseback to ground. After he deposited the blond woman’s limp form on the sward, he slashed wrist and ankle lashings, then turned her over and began to clean the blood and dust from her face.
When he had done all of which he was capable, he left Mole-Fur to look after Beti and loped over the hill to see to Aldora.
* * *
Djo-Sahl had not ridden far when, to his right, he saw a mounted nomad and one of the great, fearsome cats bearing down on a course which would cross his path. Sobbing with fear, he further lightened his mount’s load by throwing off shield and ax and, digging spurs deeper, pulled the horse’s head around and fled southward. As his hard-driven steed galloped across the face of a slope, he was all but deafened by the thunder of thousands of hoofs on the opposite slope, beyond the crest to his right.
Then, immediately in front of him, an unmounted nomad female suddenly rose from the grass. His lips skinned back from his teeth and, drawing his sword, he charged down on her.
* * *
Aldora had heard the horses coming and had mind-informed Ax-Hoof that she was well and safe. He had advised her to stand where the leaders of the thousand or so horses could plainly see her. But she had only just come erect, when a horse passed behind her, a bright object flashed in the periphery of her vision and, with paralyzing force an agonizing something sliced into the angle of her neck and right shoulder. As the grass rushed upward at her face, she felt the hot gush of her blood, then, nothing.
* * *
Just as the first horses came over the crest of the hill, they saw an ironshirt saber a female of the Kindred. Carefully avoiding Aldora, the herd swept down the hill, bowling over both horse and rider. When the herd had passed, they left only a pulpy, red paste behind them.
* * *
Milo and the chiefs reined up around Mole-Fur who sat beside the still unconscious Beti and snarled at the whimpering Pawl, straining to pull his leg from under his feebly twitching, almost-dead horse.
“Beti?” Hwahlis mind-questioned.
“She lives, Cat-brother,” Mole-Fur reassured. “One of these ironshirts must have stunned her before they tried to carry her away. But she is uninjured. She will bear you many more fine kittens.”
“What of the younger one, the black-haired female, Sister-cat?” queried Milo.
Mole-Fur began to lick Beti’s face again while she answered. “The new cat — that handsome, older one, who came in from the Battle of the Black Horses — has gone to see to her. She is two hills west and was well when Mole-Fur left her, before she met these two ironshirts.” Raising her head, she bared her teeth and rippled a low snarl at Pawl, who shuddered and moaned.
Hwahlis dismounted and strode over to the soft-gray cat. Resting his hand on her head, he said, “Sister-cat, are you cat-oathed?”
“Oh, no, Cat-brother. Mole-Fur is only twenty-four moons and has not yet been battle-trained,” she replied. “No clan would want so worthless a female.”
Slipping his hand under her chin, between the sharp tips of her projecting fangs, Hwahlis raised her head and looked deeply into her eyes. “Trained or not, my clan will oath so fierce and brave a female, and will be honored to go to battle with her! So courageous an . . .”
Without warning, Mole-Fur interrupted, “God Milo, the black-haired two-leg female, she is where I left her, but Old-Cat says that another ironshirt has sabered her, and . . .”
Hwahlis heard no more. Spinning, he sprinted to and leaped astride his horse and, before Milo could shout the rest of the message to him, was over the crest of the hill. So disturbed was the chief, neither Milo nor Mole-Fur could contact him mentally.
* * *
Mara had just finished binding a strip torn from her shirt over Aldora’s rapidly closing wound (mostly, to keep the flies off), when Hwahlis pounded up, leaped, running, from his lathered horse and raced to the side of his “daughter.” Tears and sweat had mingled to plow shiny furrows through the thick dust covering his features. Mara tried mindspeak but the begrieved chieftain’s mind was closed, so she spoke.
“Chief Hwahlis, Aldora will soon be . . .” But then she was aware that he didn’t hear her voice either. He could only hear the voice of his own self-recriminations and his eyes only registered Aldora’s closed eyes and pale face and blood-soaked shirt and the bandage only partially concealing the still-gaping wound.
Dropping to his knees, he gathered her, whom he thought dying, into his arms and covered her face with kisses, tears and dust. Then, sobbing, rocking back and forth, he raised a keening wail.
Aldora, who had simply been following Mara’s instructions to lie quietly until the bleeding had entirely ceased and the wound closed, opened her eyes then and gazed up into Hwahlis’ sorrow-twisted face.
“Mara, what . . . why . . . ?” She mindspoke.
“That doleful noise is his clan’s death chant, child,” Mara answered. “He thinks you are dying and grieves for you, I told you that he was a good man. This barbarian loves you, Aldora; not as a man loves a woman, but as a parent loves a daughter.”
“So accept the spirit of her we love, oh Wind,” Hwahlis sang, his eyes screwed shut, tears bathing his cheeks. “For she is of your people. Bear her smoke to Your home. . . .” He broke off at the sound of Aldora’s voice, the touch of her hand.
She wiped ineffectually at his face. “Why do you weep, Father? I am not bad hurt. Lady Mara say soon well I will be. True father, who I love, weep no more. Please?”
16
Milo would not have allowed the tribe to tarry so long at Green-Walls had he been aware of the exact depth of High Lord Demetrios’ dilemma. That unhappy man’s father, the late Basil III, had left richly productive lands, a generally wealthy nobility and a well-stuffed treasury. But his son had squandered his patrimony as if gold and silver were about to become valueless. He had robbed his nobles, his people, the priests and everyone else within his grasp. What could not be immediately spent or converted to cash was mortgaged to the hilt — usually several times over. As the saying went, “He robbed Petros to pay Pavlos,” and when Petros was stripped, the High Lord had hounding creditors quietly murdered, then seized their books and possessions to be held “in trust” until someone appeared to claim them. But the first few persons rash enough to register claims all either disappeared under mysterious circumstances or met with invariably fatal accidents; word traveled fast and no more claimants appeared.
Throughout most of his long reign, Basil III had conducted wars against the host of small barbarian principalities to his north and west and against his southern neighbor, Zenos VII, High Lord of Karaleenos. Therefore, a part of Demetrios’ inheritance had been several thousands of seasoned, hard-bitten, veteran mercenaries and many times that number of experienced, disciplined Ehleenee spearmen. Many of these troops had worn the azure-and-silver and the crest of Kehnooryos Ehlas for half-a-lifetime. In addition, his estate included some few dozens of really effective Ehleenee staff and field officers, these latter being men who, over the years, had not been too pompously stiff-necked to learn from the professional soldiers with whom they had served. Within half-a-year of Demetrios’ ascendency, these atavistic Ehleenee were to a man giving serious consideration to the elimination of their dangerously inept ruler and then sending back to Pahl’yos Ehlas for a warlike man of noble lineage who might help to restore them to their ancient glory. However, in his s
py-ridden court, Demetrios soon became aware of these sentiments and moved first and quickly. Four and a half years later, the few atavars still alive were in exile or in hiding.
With the barbarian horde camped upon and about the shell of Theesispolis, the High Lord had but few of his father’s powerful army remaining. Early in his reign, Demetrios had dissolved all save a tiny fraction of the spear-levies, sending them back to the mortgaged land to produce already sold crops. Despairing of ever collecting their back wages, many of the mercenaries had left to seek employment from a lord who payed in something more substantial than promises. The lives of others had been frittered away in ill-planned “campaigns,” conceived and commanded by the High Lord’s totally inexperienced but suicidally self-confident sycophants and favorites. Of the ten full squadrons remaining, seven had been lost with Lord Manos’ ill-fated expedition and another virtually wiped out at what the nomads called the Black Horse Battle.
Now — in addition to the eight hundred ax-men of the city guard, who had originally been mercenaries, but who now were resident civil servants, having acquired wives and families in Kehnooryos Atheenahs over the years; and his personal guard of two hundred and fifty black-skinned spearmen — Demetrios had but two one-thousand-man squadrons to his name! The White Horse Squadron’s lot was irrevocably cast with that of Demetrios, like it or not. They had treacherously deserted Zenos of Karaleenos at the crucial point of the battle some ten years before, having been bribed to do so by the present High Lord’s father, and now they knew better than to seek employment elsewhere. They had not been paid in years and were, in effect, military slaves, who cursed the day that ever their greed had brought them into the clutches of the foresworn and dissolute House of Treeah-Pohtohmas.
Though the Whites were trapped, the Grey Horse Squadron was more fortunate. When what was left of their Black Horse compatriots came straggling back to the capital, Demetrios — in the grip of one of the screaming, tooth-gnashing fits, which had possessed him since childhood whenever he was thwarted or disappointed — ordered the common troopers killed and the surviving noncoms thrown into his dungeon to await his pleasure. At that point, Sergeant-Major Djeen Mai, the actual commander of the Greys, once more presented a request for the back pay due for his men’s services for six months, some eighty thousand ounces of silver. When two more weeks went by without even a token payment, the entire squadron packed, armed, mounted, and after freeing the Black Horse noncoms, rode out of Kehnooryos Atheenahs unopposed.
Demetrios raged insanely for three days after the desertion of the Greys and the aided escapes of the men he had been looking forward to having slowly tortured to death. Then, swallowing his overweening pride, he dispatched pleas for assistance to the other three Ehleenee High Lords of the mainland principalities.
If nothing else, the answers he received were prompt. Hamos, High Lord of the Northern Ehleenee, profusely and abjectly apologized for being unable to send either monies or troops, reminding Demetrios how closely pressed was the northern realm by the warlike Black Kingdom to its south and west. Ulysses, High Lord of the huge and fabulously wealthy land of the Southern Ehleenee, pled poverty. Zenos of Karaleenos did not deign to reply to his ancient enemy; he merely sent troops to seize and occupy all Demetrios’ south and southwestern border themes — from the mountains to the Great Swamp — and tentatively probed farther north.
Even with the harvest in, the spear-levy was responding very sluggishly to their summons and, as for the supposedly loyal nobility, many were selfishly husbanding both resources and personal forces to defend their own cities. It was at that juncture that the harried High Lord realized that he had no option. He sent a message of appeal to the one remaining Ehleenee who might render him aid — the pirate, Pardos, Lord of the Sea Islands.
Portions of the domain of Pardos were said to have existed in the time of the gods, and the presence of certain ruins on the three southern islands tended to substantiate this supposition. However, when first the Ehleenee set foot on the Sea Islands — lying over one hundred sixty leagues due east of the Principality of Karaleenos — the only indigenous creatures were sea birds, seals, a few wild swine and goats, several varieties of lizards and some rats and mice. It was obvious to all that the central island and seven of the ten major outer islands had not been long out of the sea, most being still but bare rock, splotched with the lime of the birds; and the archipelago-to-be was still rising, each year the winter tides’ point of furthest advance was a little lower on the beaches and the central, twenty by thirty-two mile lagoon now averaged nearly three feet shallower than it had in the time of Pardos’ great-grandfather.
Demetrios’ messenger had returned from the Sea Islands to say that Lord Pardos was willing to discuss the rendering of aid to Kehnooryos Ehlas; but that, since it was Demetrios’ plea Pardos thought it meet that the High Lord come to him. Demetrios raged! He screamed, swore, foamed, slew three slave-boys and seriously injured a member of his court; he had the messenger sought out, savagely and purposelessly tortured and then crucified with an iron pot of starving mice bound to his abdomen. Shouting, he laid curses on all of Pardos’ ancestors and the man himself, gradually broadening his sphere to include the whole of the world and every living thing in it. Toward the end, he commenced to tear at himself with teeth and nails, roll on the floor, pulling out handfuls of beard and hair, beating fists and head upon floors and walls.
At the same time High Lord Demetrios was raging, a meeting was taking place in the haunted ruins of another of the god-cities, Lintchburk.
Four men were seated in a small stone chamber. Outside, it appeared but a tiny hillock grown with grass and trees. Within, it was presently lit by odiferous, smoky fat-lamps and their wavering luminescence flung huge, distorted shadows upon the ancient walls. Imperfect as was the light, nonetheless, it was enough to have driven out the small, scuttling creatures of darkness who were this chamber’s usual inhabitants, and who now crouched in crevices, voicing bitter complaints at this unwonted invasion of their territory.
Three of the chamber’s occupants were barbarian mercenaries: Sergeant-Major Djeen Mai, captain of what had formerly been the High Lord’s Grey Horse Squadron; his second-in-command, Normun Hwebstah; and a man that Milo and the other survivors of the hill fight would have recognized as he who had retrieved the standard of the Black Horse Squadron, former Sergeant-Major Sam Tchahrtuhz. Though they bore a racial similarity to the nomads, these men were bigger and heavier, and Hwebstah’s dark beard and hair proclaimed more than a tinge of Ehleenee heritage.
Though the fourth man’s hair and beard were snow white, his features and his black eyes proclaimed him pure Ehleenee stock. Aside from these and his dress, however, he bore as little resemblance to the mincing effetes of Demetrios’ court as would a boar-hound to a lap dog. His arms had not been depilated in all his life and they and every other visible portion of his body were crisscrossed with old scars. His gaze was piercing, his bearing dignified and his voice firm.
“I am that touched, gentlemen. So you — all of you — knew precisely where to find me all these years, and you breathed no word of it. When last I’d word, Demetrios had placed a bounty of one hundred thousand ounces of silver on my head. Didn’t that even tempt you?”
Sam spoke for them. “We swore Sword Oaths and Blood Oaths and God Oaths to you, Lord Alexandros. Though I have lived and fought more than twenty years among the Ehleenee, I have picked up precious few of their habits and customs. I have not the ability to swear falsely, to violate a trust, nor has Djeen or Normun. We are but crude, uncultured barbarians and, in our ignorance, were unable to acquire such sophisticated traits.”
The old Ehleen hung his head. “Would that I could throw the lie at you, my dear friend. But all you say is true. The old values are dead and their memory is mocked, as memories of childish stupidities, among my race. Our ancestors would never recognize us, what we have become.
“Four hundred years ago, when my race came to these shores, t
he Hellenoi were a strong, fierce, hard, resolute people. Though all of a definite type, we did not then consider ourselves a race, being, as we were, Greek and Turk and Albanian and Italian and Sicilian and French and Moor and Spaniard. We landed in successive waves and, though our numbers were small, our courage and perseverance enabled us either to slay your ancestors or drive them into the swamps and mountains, even though their far greater numbers were augmented by the fact that they had horses and we did not. Despite repeated and savage counter-attacks by your ancestors — whose reckless courage very nearly equaled our own — despite earthquake and tidal wave and famine and plague, we retained our hard-won lands, because we were one and one in our purpose.
“Then, in the time of my father’s grandfather, it all began to change. We had been too successful and, with success, had come decadence. War had been the delight and avocation of our people, now our young men found it beneath their dignity, unnecessarily dangerous folly and, above all, too uncomfortable for their pampered bodies to endure. The old religion, which had endured for thousands of years and had been brought here by our fighting priests, began to die, to be replaced by polytheism and the unnatural worship of monsters. As the pursuit of money took precedence over the pursuit of honor, our free-farmers were tricked and deluded into their present state — ruthlessly ground peasants, virtual slaves of the land, no longer decent material for soldiers as they have nothing for which to fight anymore.
“In our days of glory, Sam, the spine and body of our arms were the spear-levy, the head and limbs, the swords and axes of my class. Now, alas, three-quarters of the body has forgotten how to fight and nine-tenths of my class have become too soft and craven to risk life or limbs or pretty looks in the forefront of a battle. What was once an honorable relationship of brotherhood and love of warrior for strong warrior, has become a sick rapine of small slave-boys. The sacred quality of marriage has evaporated, and I would wager much that fully half of our women who bear children are unsure of those children’s true paternity.
