Robert Adams - A Woman of the Horseclans

The furnishings were spartan—a wooden frame strung with strips of hide which supported a canvas bag stuffed full of dried, crackly cornshucks, an empty but foul-smelling wooden bucket and another bucket, this one half full of tepid water. Tim cautiously sniffed the water, gingerly tasted it, then drank down half of it avidly. His raging thirst slaked for the nonce, he wetted the baggy sleeve of his shirt, laved most of the clotted blood from off his face and, working more carefully, from off his head. His fingers told the tale of a long split in his scalp just above his right ear, of that and of a hard, very painful and quite large bump.

After taking stock of his clothing and possessions still remaining, Tim decided that whoever had disarmed him had either been hurried or inexperienced at such a task or both together. Not only had he been left a bone-headed iron pin in his right braid, the small dagger—flat-hilted and guardless but with three inches of razor-sharp steel blade—was still sheathed in place between the layers of felt that made up the leg of his boot.

Squatting against the back wall of his prison, Tim was thinking of how best to make use of his available weapons to the detriment of his captors when the door was opened to admit a blinding burst of sunlight. Then a big man with a loud voice began to yell at him.

Stepping aside, so that his bulk did not block out the daylight, Micah Claxton peered into the tiny windowless cell. The captive child was not on the cot, but was rather squatting or crouching back next to the rear wall, head sunk on his chest, arms hung at his sides. He looked to be smaller than Micah had remembered and utterly helpless, and so, emboldened, he strode in and roughly shook the boy’s shoulder.

“Don’t you hear me. you piece of filth? Get up and come with me.”

And Tim uncoiled like a steel spring! The bone-headed pin was driven its full two inches of length into Micah’s belly even as the edge of the boot dagger laid open from temple to chin the handsome face in which Micah had taken such inordinate pride. Screaming like a woman in labor, Micah Claxton stumbled backward out of the cell to slump against the guardrail of the porch, staring stupidly at the blood running from his chin onto the palms of his big hands.

Tim made to follow his victim out the door, but his way was obstructed by two more Dirtmen, who crowded into the cell. One made a grab for the boy’s knife hand, but his hand closed around the knife instead, and Tim’s reflexive jerk sliced through palm and fingers to grate upon living bone. With a breathless gasp, the farmer backed away cradling his hurt, bloody hand with the other.

His comrade stamped forward, arms wide, meaning to enfold the little captive in their crushing grasp. But Tim ducked under the sweep of those arms and jammed the blood-tacky dagger up between the man’s meaty thighs with all his might.

The second man’s deep roars abruptly metamorphosed into a piercing shriek, and he rose onto his very toetips in his vain attempt to raise his suffering body up off the punishing steel. Tim indulged himself, giving the imbedded blade a vicious twist and withdrawing it in a savage drawcut. As the grunting, groaning man slid down the wall, Tim Krooguh once more made for the door and freedom.

Captain-of-dragoons Roger Gorman was a good nine hundred crowflight miles from the country that had given him birth, which—all things duly weighed and considered—could have been deemed a definite plus factor in his continued life and health. He had left his homeland most precipitately and had never returned, for all that his half brother (Roger was the illegitimate outcome of a nobleman’s drunken night of dalliance with a taverner’s daughter), the Count of Rehdzburk, had offered repeatedly to pay quite handsomely for a sight of Rogers head … with or without the body.

Roger Gorman was not a basically evil man, despite the fact that he was rightfully charged with brigandage, highway robbery, maintenance of an illegal armed band, horse theft, cattle rustling, sheep stealing, poaching, arson, extortion, kidnapping, maiming, rape and a goodly number of murders. These were only the major charges. The lesser ones filled two large pages and spilled over onto a third. They included the unlawful display of the arms and devices of the Most Noble House of the Counts of Rehdzburk (Roger always and hotly contended that he had as much inherent right to display those arms as did his half brother, the present Count of Rehdzburk), aiding and abetting a jailbreak, and flight to avoid prosecution. To these latter charges Roger answered that it was a poor sort of a man who would simply ride away and leave good comrades to a harsh and merciless fate, adding that any man who would willingly linger to make the short, sharp acquaintance of a headsman’s axe had not the brains of a privy-worm.

Immediately he left the environs of Rehdzburk, he had taken a nom de guerre which resembled his real name not even faintly. Under this nom , he had served as a Freefughter for a few years, first in the army of the Duke of Eeree when he revolted against the king. When the duke made peace with his sovereign at Harzburk and agreed to honor the warrants of other principalities, Roger thought that a change of scenery might be beneficial to his health and fled to the Duchy of Pitzburk, where another rebellion was arming against Harzburk and the king.

But following a trivial dispute wherein he was forced to slay a minor nobleman in a fair fight. Roger found the general atmosphere of the ancient City of Steel oppressive and somewhat less than salubrious, and so he rode out into the western mountains to first join, then soon command a jolly group of kindred souls and continue with them in the greenwood the life he had learned to love so in Rehdzburk.

As the long-drawn-out war between Pitzburk and the king wound slowly down, more and more former Freefighters found their way into the ranks of Rogers band, until he was leading a force of over half a thousand seasoned, veteran soldiers. A century earlier, he might have hacked himself out a holding and a patent of nobility with so many good swords to do his bidding, but instead he lost seventy percent of them when his stronghold was surprised and overrun by the strong force sent to crush him by the king and his dukes. Roger and the couple hundred of his men who managed to fight their way out rode west as fast as honest horseflesh could bear them.

They served the Archduke of Kluhmbuhzburk for a while, then his overlord, the King of Ohyoh. But the king proved to be slow in paying due monies and he fought too few wars to deliver any meaningful amounts of loot into his Freefighters’ slim purses, so the condotta rode on west again.

In slow, erratic stages, halting here to fight for hire and there to fight for plunder until driven on by armed might, the hundred or so survivors eventually found themselves on the very uttermost fringe of civilization, with the hue and cry raised for them a stretch of a good hundred leagues behind and only the Sea of Grass before them.

Roger and his hard-pressed lieutenants had been on the verge of trying to trade a few of their precious warhorses for the condotta’s passage down the Great River to one of the score of little independent kingdoms that lined its eastern bank when they were approached by Dick Gruenberger, a plains trader. In better times or another location, Roger would have spit upon the paltry sum offered per armed and mounted man to ride along with and guard the wagon caravans on the Sea of Grass, but after a brief conference with his starving officers and men, he had accepted.

And so, for five long years, sometime Captain-of-dragoons Roger Gorman and his aging, shrinking force had ridden out from Tradertown each spring beside the huge, high-wheeled wagons, each drawn by as many as a dozen and a half big mules or twelve span of oxen and creaking with their loads. They carried vastly diverse cargoes—bar iron, sheet steel and brass and copper, ingots of copper and alloys of silver, semiprecious gemstones, bolts of various cloths, spools of threads and fine wires, hanks of dyed yams, steel and brass needles, nails and tacks and other small items of hardware, whiskeys and wines and female slaves, anything and everything that might tickle the fancies of the scattered bands of nomads or the few, isolated communities of farmers.