Robert Adams: Madman's Army

Even while she emitted an almost-constant contrabasso rumble of contentment, Sunshine was conversing silently with her “brother,” Gil Djohnz, who was engaged in washing her in the shallows of the small river that flowed through the verdant croplands of the Duchy of Mehsees. Whenever Gil looked up and to the east, he could see the dirty smoke of the countless cooking-fires rising up from the city of Mehseepolis and the sprawl of the army camp that surrounded it.

A few yards away, three other elephants were being scrubbed by their own “brothers.” The nearest of these called herself Tulip. She was a bit taller and a few years older than Sunshine; her “brother” was a half brother of Gil—though Gil, being the son of his father’s premier wife, received Bili Djohnz’s deference, for Bill’s mother had been but a concubine when he was born. Just beyond Tulip lay a much smaller elephant, a young bull, only a little over four years old; this one called himself Dragonfly for some reason no man or beast had ever yet fathomed, and his “brother” was a nineteen-year-old cousin of Gil. On the bank, drying off from her own bath in the fitful wind and the hot sun, stood the largest of all four elephants, a tusked cow who had named herself Newgrass.

Although in traditional Ehleen armies only bulls were used as war-elephants, the smaller and mostly tuskless cows being relegated to heavy draught purposes, all three of these cows had served in numerous campaigns of the army of the Consolidated Thoheekseeahnee in armor and in the very thick of battle in the time before real, war-trained bulls had finally been sent from the Land of Elephants, the far-western duchies near the shores of the Upper Gulf.

Consequently, the tender grey skins of all three of the cows now bore honorable war scars—marks left them by the bite of sharp steel blades, the stabbing of spear-, dart- and arrow-points, the friction and pinching of harness and armor. Gil’s sensitive soul mourned once again whenever he saw and felt these scars, recalling as he then did the suffering of his huge but basically gentle “sister.”

For the umpteenth time, Sunshine beamed the question to Gil, “Brother-mine, is it really true, then? We really will leave for the land wherein Sunshine was calved, soon? We will really set out next week?”

“Yes, my sister,” he beamed back patiently, smiling to himself at the cow’s enthusiasm. “We will set out for the far-western duchies on next Monday … hopefully, but by Tuesday, at the latest, Sun and Wind willing. A way was found for us to circumvent the machinations of the Grand Strahteegos , who would have—had he been allowed his way—kept us here in virtual military slavery until I had a long beard as white as snow; kept us for no reason of which I can think, for now there are a full dozen huge, long-tusked bulls in the elephant-lines, along with men I have taught to mindspeak them, so the only uses that you and our sisters have been recently put to on campaign have been those of oversized draught-oxen—pulling siege-engines and wagons and the like—and I am of the mind that your war service earned you better than that.

“But now they tell me that that old man is finally dead, slain by one of his own officers when he went mad and attacked the leader of Council—him with a sword and a dirk and his chief unarmed. So now we are completely free to leave this dishonorable service to which he saw fit to relegate us and make our way to the land of your birth, with no longer any worry that armed horsemen might be sent galloping after to bring us back into odious and shameful bondage.”

He ceased to beam then as he concentrated on removing an embedded tick from deep within a fold of her right ear. He still was at it when an unexpected gush of cold river water struck his head and shoulders with enough force to rock him where he squatted, his consequent imbalance causing Sunshine a jab of pain. When he looked around, he quickly spied out the culprit, who already was refilling his trunk. “Dragonfly!” he beamed sternly. “Did you know that you just caused me to hurt your Auntie Sunshine?”

The dripping young bull shook his head and, while looking about for another, unaware target for his trunkful of water, beamed in a petulant manner, “Well, two-leg, if you don’t want to get wet, then hurry up, My mother and the rest won’t leave here until you’re done, and I want to go back to the elephant-lines, now !”

Knowing of old the futility of trying to either argue or reason with the stubborn, selfish young bull, Gil beamed to his cousin, “For the sake of Sacred Sun, Bert, come take this little beast in hand before I’m tempted to render him into army beef.”

But another reached the culprit before the young man; she bore him to the ground and belabored him with her trunk until he squealed shrilly, beaming pleas for mercy. But no sooner had his mother, Tulip, allowed him to rearise than he sidled swiftly out of her reach and taunted, “You don’t really hurt me. You don’t ever really hurt me, I just fool you into thinking you’re hurting me. But when I’m all grown up and as big as Brohntos, then I’ll hurt you, I’ll crush your bones and stab my tusks into you until you’re very sorry you ever tried to hurt me when I was smaller than you are. You’ll see, Mother! You …”

At that point, the beastlet was again hurled flat on one side and Newgrass, who had had a few calves of her own, over the years, belabored him until there could be no question but that his shrieks and squeals were those of true and intense pain. When Bert Djohnz came over, the little bull was more than willing to get up and leave the vicinity of his grim Auntie Newgrass with his two-leg brother.

Worriedly, Gil beamed to Sunshine, “Dragonfly disturbs me, sister-mine; he is stubborn, willful, selfish and vindictive. Now, while he’s only four feet or so at the withers and has not more weight than four or five men, he’s not really very dangerous, but as he grows, I fear he’ll become so deadly he’ll have to be either run off or killed, and I love my sister’s kind, Sunshine, I don’t want to see any of them hurt.”

The recumbent elephant raised her trunk to tenderly caress the man kneeling on her side with its sensitive, fingerlike tip. “Yes, man-Gil, Sunshine knows how much you love her and her sisters. She loves you deeply and so, too, do Tulip and Newgrass … and even that little bull, Dragonfly, he loves Gil Djohnz, brother-of-elephants.

“The way that Dragonfly behaves and misbehaves and threatens, none of it is really his fault, brother-mine; rather it is because he is growing up with only mature elephants, not naturally, in a herd environment, with others of his own age with whom he can prank and play and fight and slowly establish just what will be his place when at last he is himself mature. When we reach my place of birth, he will have a herd and you will see a great change in him, brother.”

As he mounted Sunshine after she had dried and was ready to return to the Elephant-Lines in camp, Gil saw on the distant road a galloper raising a plume of dust as he spurred hard toward the city, a string of remounts racing after him. From this distance, Gil could not be certain, but he thought that that many remounts would only be brought along by a Horseclans galloper.

Even while Gil and his elephants were wending their slow, unhurried way back to camp, Sub-chief Djaimz Baikuh, drooping in his saddle with weariness, approached the city gate, identified himself, and was granted entry and given a guide to conduct him to the one-time ducal palace, now become a labyrinthine complex of old and new buildings and housing the Council of Thoheeksee and their staffs, plus all of the bureaucrats and functionaries necessary to the newly established government.