Robert Adams - Bili the Axe

Some century and more before, when the ancestors of the folk of New Kuhmbuhluhn had first ridden down from the northeast, the vast stretch of mountains, glens and valleys had been the sole preserve of scattered families of Ganiks and a single extended family of the hybrid Kleesahks. The newcome northerners had, however, proved to be most acquisitive and incredibly land-hungry, nor had they been at all tolerant of the customs and ancient religion of the Ganiks. Moreover, all of the male Kuhmbuhluhners were well armed and most were well versed in the use of said arms, and so their intolerance most often took the unpleasant form of armed harassment or open aggression.

Not that any of this was new or novel to the Ganik farmers, for almost from the beginning, their singular ways and outre” practices had brought down upon the heads of their ancestors the scorn and downright enmity of all the neighbors they had ever had, wherever they had lived. So most of them—those who chose to continue to cleave to their ages-old behavior and values—had emulated all of their progenitors and moved on into still-untenanted lands to the south and west.

Some few dozen families, however, in the northeast of what had by then become New Kuhmbuhluhn, chose to forsake many aspects of both ingrained religion and traditional customs, becoming more akin to the Kuhmbuhluhners with every succeeding generation. But not all of these turncoat Ganiks had adapted as fully or as fast as had others to the new, sinful, sacrilegious siren song of the pagan northerners. Even down to the present day, there still were a few families of Ganiks of this northern group who were—or so Merle Bowley and the other surviviors were convinced—secret adherents to the old-time religion and therefore covert enemies of the Crown and the alien folk of Kuhmbuhluhn. Perhaps they would prove hospitable and willing to help these few remaining members of the main bunch of the once large and powerful force of Ganik outlaw-raiders.

If such atavistic Ganiks really existed in the northwest quadrant of the Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn—and Bowley and the rest maintained to the very death that they did—they were exceedingly well hidden, for the small band of survivors never managed to locate a single one of them; the only way that they ever secured any food, supplies or the like from these northerly descendants of Ganiks was to take it either by stealth or by raw force. And immediately on the heels of their one and only raid, it seemed to the harried group that the entire countryside arose and mounted and rode against them under arms.

Relentlessly pursued by the vengeful farmers, tracked like wild game by packs of vicious hunting dogs, Erica and Bowley and the rest fled far and fast and by the easiest route available, which was how they had come to winter in a low-ceilinged cave in the side of a hill above a brook which, when it was not frozen, rushed down to join the large river some miles to the north. Erica thought that the river was ” probably the Ohio.

Hard as the winter had been, with the rifles and the uncanny marksmanship of Horseface Charley there had been precious few occasions when any of them had gone to bed hungry. And although the bodily filth and accompanying infestation of parasitic vermin still was distressing to Erica, she had learned to almost ignore the gagging stenches of the uncured hides and pelts, for at least they helped to alleviate the cold on the long nights in the cave.

She knew not what the spring would bring, only that there was patently no safety for her group here, in the north; she surmised that only the onset of the long, hard winter had prevented stronger forces from Kuhmbuhluhn hunting this last tiny bunch of outlaw Ganiks to death, an oversight that would most likely be rectified with the oncoming warmer weather.

Erica now realized that she had erred in so readily assenting to Bowley’s suggestion that they ride northwest from the site of the landslide. They should have gone south, in the general direction of the Center. Not that she publicly disagreed with him, but she privately doubted that there were any of the old-fashioned Ganik lunatics still resident in any part of the Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn—north, west, south or east. And now, thanks to her misjudgment, they were deep in hostile territory, with an aroused and pugnacious people between them and the direction of possible safety.

Had there been but herself and the three senior bullies, they would probably have been able to get through and out of the more densely populated northerly portions of New Kuhmbuhluhn fairly easily—going to ground in forests or wastes by day and riding hard along seldom-traveled ways by night. But such a solution to her dilemma would, were they to try it with their present numbers, most likely end in discovery by the New Kuhmbuhluhners and either a running harassment or pitched battles against forces so vastly outnumbering them that the possession of the firearms would, in the end, count for naught.

Nor, on the few occasions she had dared to broach the matter, would Bowley hear a single word in regard to deserting the lesser bullies and thereby reaching safety in the south.

“Ehrkah, these here boys is done stuck by us th’ough thick ‘r thin, awl alowng. An’ I aims fer to stick by them, naow, evun if it comes fer to mean dyin with ‘em.”

So, as she lay wakeful in the low, smoky cave, under the stinking bearskin, with the bloodsucking insects acrawl up and down the length of her unwashed body, Dr. Erica Arenstein was anything but optimistic. She thought, as she endeavored once more to find sleep, that the discovery of the cave was most likely the last piece of good fortune that she and her present companions would have. Actually, she mused glumly, it might have been better had they not found the cave; for had they tried to winter in the open, they would all most probably have frozen to death, which was, she had been told, one of the easier ways to die, if die one must.

Somewhere, far off in the forested hills and vales, she heard the bass bellow of some large animal. Possibly, she guessed, a shaggy-bull; they now had come far enough north to expect to begin meeting specimens of the outsize bovines. She wondered yet again as she had wondered for centuries just where and why and how these and certain other improbably fauna had first developed.

These shaggy-bulls, for instance, bore a slight resemblance to bison—the general shape of the skull, the huge hump of muscle set atop the shoulders, the long, shaggy coats of hair from which their name derived—but that resemblance was no more than slight. When mature, both bulls and cows bore great spreads of horn—thick at the bases and tapering out to a murderous needle tip sometimes more than a meter from those bases—and the shaggy-bulls were much larger than bison, tall at the shoulder as a moose, though thicker of leg and heavier of body than that far-northern ruminant.

They differed from bison in other ways, too. Where most of the bisoti—which once almost-extinct species had increased vastly in many parts of the North American continent during the centuries since the near extirpation of the races of mart— were herd animals of plain and prairie, their huge, shaggy cousins seemed to prefer forests and mountainous areas and often were found as solitary male specimens. When they did form groups, there was never more than one mature bull with one to three mature cows, possibly a calf or two, maybe one or two heifers not yet of breeding age and, rarely, an immature young bull, not yet driven off by his sire.

Because they were far more common west of the Mississippi River, Erica assumed that that most likely was where they had originated, but over the centuries, they had slowly spread until now they ranged as far east as that part of Kehnooryos Mahkedohnya which once had been known as Maine. And for all that they bred and matured slowly, their natural enemies were few. Despite their size and bulk, the monstrous bovines were incredibly fast and agile and, consequently, such deadly opponents that only the huge packs of winter wolves ever attacked adult specimens, and then only if starving and desperate.