Robert Adams: Madman's Army

The slighter man nodded, stiffly, cautiously, but still the movement set his nose to bleeding once more.

Captain Thoheeks Ptimnos frowned and rubbed absently at the patch covering the empty socket that once had held his right eye. “We may well have more than merely a little trouble with his lover, you know. He announced some time back that he was going to make the young man his legal heir.”

“Utterly ridiculous on the face of it!” snorted Captain Thoheeks Portos, derisively. “He may be pretty as a girl and he may or may not be pleasant in bed, but he still is only the third son of a vahrohnos and in no way suitable to rule lands and regard the welfare of peoples. It’s but another evidence of senility … if he even meant it at all, of course. In their cups or in the throes of pleasure, men are apt to make promises they would not otherwise make. When I get back to camp, I’ll seek out young Ilios and have some words with him. As I recall, he intimidates easily. With Pahvlos dead, now, he just may decide that he’s had enough of army life and hie himself home and out of our hair.”

On a lighter note, Thoheeks Sitheeros said, with a wide grin, “Why don’t you take him on yourself, Portos? Couldn’t you use a bedwarmer?”

“Don’t tempt me,” the saturnine officer grinned back. “As I said, he’s pretty as a girl. But unfortunately, he can’t give me increase, and I don’t want my house to die with me. Why don’t you find me a fair, well-dowered little wife like you found for Tomos, eh?”

“You, a kath’ahrohs of pure Ehleen heritage, would marry a mere barbarian?” said Sitheeros, mockingly.

Portos chuckled. “For a large enough dowry, my friend, I’d marry one of your cow elephants.”

Everyone save Vikos laughed; he was afraid to do so lest his nose again begin to drip blood, but he did venture a smile. Mahvros, holding his breath against his pain, still uttered no rebukes for the time being wasted in frivolous chatter, for he would far rather hear the Council jesting and laughing than snarling and hurling insults and edged weapons at each other.

Far and far to the northeast of the city wherein the thoheeksee sat in council, a mounted column crossed the shallow Kuzawahtchee River that served as border between the Kingdom of Karaleenos and the onetime kingdom to the south. Once across the river, they began to make camp, unloading felt yurts from off high-wheeled carts.

They were mostly men of slight, wiry, flat-muscled build, having hair of various shades of blond or red and eyes that were mostly blue or grey or green. They wore baggy trousers tucked into the tops of felt-and-leather boots, embroidered shirts that were full in the body but tight in the sleeves, plus armor that was mostly mixtures of cour boulli, mail, scale and plate, much of it gaudily painted or enameled. Their helmets bore plumes, feathers, horsehair crests or whatever else suited individual fancies, and the saddles of their horses were works of art—heavy tooled and dyed leather, inset and fitted with hooks, rings, buckles, decorations and plates of steel, brass, silver, gold and pewter.

Their weapons, however, were almost uniform in character, at least. Every man bore a cased hornbow— short, recurved and reflex, handmade of orangewood or elm, cowhorn and sinew, with arm-tips of antler or bone and bowstrings of waxed silk—and two dozens of arrows for it. Each also was armed with a saber, a target of leather-covered lindenwood, a spear or lance six to eight feet long, a war-axe, a heavy dirk and one or more other knives and daggers of varying sizes and purposes.

Someone unfamiliar with them might well have thought them a military unit, possibly mercenary cavalry, but they were not, not strictly. They were of the race called Horseclansmen. For hundreds of years, the forebears of these men had, with their herds and their families, roved the prairies and plains far to the west called the Sea of Grasses. Then, less than a hundred years before, above ten thousand of them—men, women and children, with all they possessed—had crossed some thousand or more miles of territory—fighting where they had to fight, moving peaceably elsewhere—and at least one range of mountains to invade and conquer that Ehleen land called Kehnooryos Ehlahs. They all would have been happy with that land alone, but with that land they also had inherited enemies on every border who would not let the new overlords live in peace, and therefore the past seventy years had been a time of almost constant border wars for the Horseclansmen, their new vassals and the mercenaries they had had to hire on, even as had the native ruling dynasty which had preceded them and been paramount in the land before their victorious incursion.

First, it had been war on the northern and northwestern borders. The upshot of their victory over these enemies had been acquisition of them first as allies, then as vassals. The next war had been all along the southern border, with the Kingdom of Karaleenos. After driving the invading Karaleenohee back, twice, only to see them invade again each following year, the army of Kehnooryos Ehlahs and its dependent states had followed the beaten-off invaders back across the border and taken the fight into Karaleenos itself, driving the king out of his own capital and slowly conquering chunk after chunk of his kingdom, trouncing every Karaleenos army they could bring to battle and killing no less than two succeeding kings in two of those battles.

Meanwhile, along the western border of Kehnooryos Ehlahs, warfare against the mountain tribes had never really ceased for all of the four hundred plus years since the Ehleenohee had invaded the land from the Eastern Sea, once called Atlantic, nor did it cease with the change of overlords from Ehleenohee to Horse-clansmen. It was not, had never been, the formal warfare of the northern or southerly borders, but it was no less bloody, vicious and brutal, for all its informality.

Another drive against the battered army of Karaleenos, fighting now under a new-crowned young king, Zenos XII, had come to grips with him and it just south of the Lumbuh River bridge and so badly mauled it that another immediate battle would have been out of the question. However, Demetrios, one of the High Lords of Kehnooryos Ehlahs, had been knocked from off the bridge and drowned in the battle’s prologue; therefore, a truce had been struck and the other High Lord—Milo Morai, a Horseclans chief—had been summoned by gallopers. He had brought with him reinforcements and the High Lady Aldora Pahpahs of Linsee, widow of Demetrios, who had cordially hated her husband for his homosexuality.

Milo had treated his beaten foemen with magnanimity, and it was as well that he had, for he shortly had received word from his capital that the Lord of the Pirate Isles—one Alexandras, himself a kath’-ahrohs or Ehleen purebred of the old stock—had sailed in with word that the new-crowned High King Zastros of the Kingdom of Southern Ehleenohee was even then preparing to lead a host of upwards of a half million warriors across Karaleenos’ southern border, with the avowed purpose of bringing all of the eastern coast under his sway.

When Milo had convinced his sometime enemy King Zenos of the mutual threat and joined the two armies, he had sent messengers far and wide to sound the tocsin, even while striking shaky alliances with hill chiefs and swamp-dwellers to attempt to slow the advance of the huge army of Zastros and interdict its lines of supply insofar as possible.

Help had, indeed, come. Not only from his own lands and those of King Zenos, either, but from far to the north—the Kingdom of Harzburk, the Kingdom of Pitzburk, the Aristocratic Republic of Eeree on the shore of the Great Inland Sea, all had sent noble knights and a horde of mercenaries. Upon learning just why units of the army of Kehnooryos Ehlahs were being withdrawn, warband after warband of mountain tribes had descended from their fastnesses to try selling their services to their ancient enemies.