Robert Adams - Trumpets of War

“Not that it’s any of youraffair ,” blurted out Gil, a bit peeved that the man still had made no move to help him unharness Sunshine, “but I prefer a saddle, and she doesn’t mind. Why should you? Who the hell are you, anyway, and what are you doing here? You obviously are not come to work, to care for my elephants.”

A fleeting smile creased the stranger’s thin lips. “Oh, but you are wrong in that assumption, Captain of Elephants Gil Djohnz. I am come here for precisely that purpose and, I am given to understand, at your expressed request. I am Rikos Laskos, summoned from Iron Mountain by my patron, Thoheeks Sitheeros. I arrived while still you were out on campaign.

“This is your personal elephant, then, the cow called Sunshine? Yes. Well then, will she allow others to do for her? Fine. Then let us go to a place wherein we can converse privately, eh?”

In the cluttered tack room where Gil maintained a sometime office, Laskos seated himself upon a folded barding, such as was draped over war-elephants before mail and plate armor was attached. He flexed a leg, clasped his hands on the knee and leaned back. “Now, tell me the complete truth—what is this business about you being able to talk to elephants and horses, man?” All at once, he mindspoke, very powerfully, “Are you a telepath, then?”

“Yes,” beamed Gil, “and so are you. So why cannot you mindspeak elephants and horses, too?”

“I can mentally communicate with equines, mules, dogs and, to some extent, camels and a number of other animals. But, for some reason, I have never been able to reset my telepathic patterns to those of elephants . . . and I have been trying for more years than you could imagine,” replied Laskos. “How did you learn, Gil Djohnz? Did someone teach you?”

Gil frowned. “Well, not exactly. On the day that Sunshine came out of the river, God Milo approached her and mindspoke her. I and a fellow clansman were with him and helped him and her to take off the armor that was hurting her. I don’t clearly remember just when I started mindspeaking her, but I did. Then, God Milo had me ride her back to our great camp and feed her all of the hay and other foods that she could eat, and after that day, he had my chief free me from all other tasks to allow me to devote all of my time to feeding and otherwise caring for her.

“But I have taught several other Horseclans mindspeakers how to mindspeak elephants, so I can easily show you how, if that is what you and Thoheeks Sitheeros want of me. But what I want of you, in return, is to teach me and the elephants and the other men how to do the things it is necessary for elephants to do in war. Newgrass, the cow that the thoheeks brought down from Iron Mountain, has imparted to us all of her own war training, but she says that there is more that she was never taught or that she now does not recall.

“For instance, she has told us of elephants she has seen hurl spear-sized darts and boulders the size of a man’s head, and wield swords with six-foot blades.”

Laskos flitted another smile, shrugging. “It’s true, some few elephants can be taught to throw oversized darts and big rocks with a fair degree of consistent accuracy, but most cannot, and it is an utter waste of time—yours and theirs—to try to teach them the knack. As for the massive sword business, I suppose that it would work in battle, for a while, though as you’ve no doubt noted, it is the natural inclination of elephants to roll up and safeguard their precious and sensitive and vulnerable trunks in any time of danger.

“Gil Djohnz, there are two major purposes for elephants in warfare, if we disregard their frequent and most sensible roles as draught animals. One use of the two is to armor them heavily and use them to smash through formations of pikemen, spearmen or shield-walls; the other is to use them as moving platforms for dartmen or archers or slingers—fast-walk them along the enemy’s front that the missile-men may bleed the enemy a bit and so soften them up just prior to one’s own lines moving forward in the attack. All other maneuvers of elephants on the field of battle are but variants of these two basics.

“I’ll willingly teach you and the others elephant warfare, but you must understand from the very onset that these beasts have some very definite limitations and a host of weaknesses and vulnerable points; in some ways, indeed, they’re more delicate than horses.

“But first”—he abruptly stood up—“let us go outside and talk to your elephants, you and I.”

The Mehseepolis to which Thoheeks Grahvos returned from his brief campaign was a crowded, bustling swirl of activity. More than merely adequate in size to have for long and long been the capital and the principal city of a double duchy, the ancient city was proving to be simply too small to house and to office the needs of a Council of noblemen ruling a vast, sprawling land which was becoming known as the Consolidated Duchies of Southern Ehleenoee. Everything and every place within the grim circuit of walls was become or becoming overcrowded, packed to the bursting seams, with the heterogeneous host necessary to administrate and to serve.

So heavy was the traffic wending up into and down out of the city become that the tall, thick gates seldom were closed anymore and the repairs and restrengthenings of the drawbridge that spanned the deep gorge that had for so long so protected the principal approach to the ancient city had rendered it too weighty to anymore be raised by the chains and windlasses, so it was now permanently lowered.

That gorge, which had received the drainage of the hilly city’s sewers and drains since first the present city had been built where once, in ancient times, had stood only a stronghold, had with the present overpopulation been metamorphosed into a stinking mess, an ever-constant affront to eyes and nose, wherein vermin of every sort fed and bred among the faeces, garbage and slimy pools of wastewater and above which clouds of noxious insects as thick as the nauseating miasma rose up to greet everyone who crossed the bridge or walked the walltops. Grahvos longed for the spring cloudbursts that would flush the foetid cesspit down into the plain and river.

The hordes of workmen—carpenters, joiners, stonemasons and the like—added to the overcrowding but were every bit as necessary as the thoheeksee themselves. The palace complex had been quickly outgrown, and now the workmen were hard at work converting and connecting onetime private homes and other nearby buildings into a spreading, mazelike complex. In order to render the space of the old citadel free of other pressing uses, all activities and offices of a military nature had been transferred out onto the lower plain and into tents and thrown-together temporary buildings making up an enclave between the spreading camps of the army and the foot of the steep road that led up to the city.

Of a day when the plants and shrubs of the palace garden were showing off their first green leaf and flower buds, in Nature’s eons-old announcement of the new growing season, called by men the spring, two men sought an audience with the Council of Thoheeksee. There was a vast disparity between these two—one being a graybeard and the other a far younger man, almost a stripling—but at one and the same time, it was obvious to any who saw them that they were very closely related by blood. The old man was the tallest of the pair—about six feet from soles to pate; his physique was big-boned and still looked very powerful, with the scars indicative of a proven, veteran warrior. A few of these scars looked to be fairly new.

Lord Eraldos of Elsahpolis, one of the assistant chamberlains and harried to distraction that day, knew that he had seen the old man or someone very much like him before, but he could not just then place the who or the where or the when, and the petitioner flatly refused to state his name or his rank, only stating that he was a nobleman who had been most unjustly treated and he was, therefore, seeking redress of this new government, the Council of Thoheeksee. The only other words he deigned to send in to Council were exceedingly cryptic, to Eraldos’ way of thinking.