Robert Adams - Bili the Axe

Although the shaggy-bull hides were the basis for a fine and exceptionally tough type of leather, most humans tried to avoid the vicious, short-tempered brutes, which could outrun a full-size horse for short distances and absorb an appalling amount of punishment. Only the plains nomads and the gentry of portions of the Middle Kingdoms hunted shaggy-bulls with any regularity—the nomads for hides and meat, the burkers mostly for highly dangerous sport.

The distant bull bellowed yet again, but Erica did not hear him. Sleep had finally claimed her.

With the skill and rapidity of long experience, Gy Ynstyr the “Furface” or bugler of the squadron as well as the senior orderly of Duke Bili of Morguhn—packed his spare clothing and meager personal effects into his saddlebags and blanket roll. While doing so, he tried to pretend that he did not see the glowering scowls cast in his direction by the other occupant of the small tower chamber, who sat on a stool and clumsily attempted to hone an even keener edge on her already knife-sharp, crescent-bladed light axe.

The last storm of the long, hard winter was now but a memory and its final, remaining traces were fast melting to swell the icy streams cascading down the flanks of the mountains. The season of war was nearing; therefore, most of Duke Bili’s lowland squadron was preparing to take road toward the north of the Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn, where Prince Byruhn and the Skohshuns—the foemen of this new season’s war—awaited them.

Earlier, Gy and his two assistant-orderlies had packed the chests of the duke and his lady, snapped the locks in place, then borne them belowstairs to the point at which the train of pack ponies would be assembled. Now there remained only his own gear to quickly pack or don, that he might speed to the commander’s side and be readily available to bugle orders or changes to orders as the occasion might demand.

He had known full well for the two weeks since the announcements of assignments that his war companion—the sometime Moon Maiden, Meeree—had taken hard this matter of being left behind in the Glen of Sandee while the bulk of the squadron marched north to war. But he knew that she knew why as surely as did he and the officers who had made the decision, so he was hurt that she seemed to be blaming him—who had had no slightest choice or voice in the matter— and thus was making his leavetaking even more unpleasant.

Those being left behind fell into several categories: the farmer-stockmen of the glen, those under sixteen or over fifty, at least; the women and children of the glen; a skeleton force of sound warriors to help the young or old or crippled to adequately man the almost invulnerable defenses of the glen; those of the former Moon Maidens who chanced to be too far along in their pregnancies to be safely aborted by the skills of the Kleesahks, Pah-Elmuh and Ahszkuh; the handful of crippled warriors; and two of the Kleesahks.

There was one other category: some two dozen of the once Maidens of the Moon had given birth during the winter months, and those infants, each of them now fostered with a wet nurse from one of the resident farm families, were all being left in this, the safest spot in all of embattled New Kuhmbuhluhn, until the invading Skohshuns were defeated and their parents could return for them.

Meeree—former lover of the hereditary leader of the Moon Maidens, the Lady Rahksahnah, who now was Duke Bill’s consort—had seldom lain with Gy and never conceived of him. That was not the reason she was to stay behind. Nor was she listed amongst the thin ranks of the warriors to man the formidable defenses of the glen; had that been the case, she might, just might, have been a bit less disagreeable. No, Meeree was on the short list of cripples, and she had alternately raged and sulked since first that list was published, for most of two full weeks, now. —

“But, dammit, she is crippled!” Gy said under his breath, while securing his rolled blanket with lengths of thong, his frustration causing him to jerk so hard on one length that the tough rawhide snapped like rotten twine. “She has been for almost as long as we’ve been here, has been since that night that she first forced Lieutenant Kahndoot into a death-match duel, then attacked Duke Bili when he brought the duel to a halt.”

The bearded man sighed, thinking, “She must have been mad, that night, to attack Duke Bili—and him in full armor and armed with his big axe. He could easily have killed her then. All of us expected him to do it… though I hoped against hope that he wouldn’t, of course. But it might have been better for poor Meeree if he had. Her arm has never been sound since the side of his great axe shattered it through the thicknesses of her target and armor, both. Nor has Pah-Elmuh’s healing art been successful for Meeree, much as he has helped others.

“He claims that there is some something deep in her mind that negates his instructions to the other parts of her mind to properly heal the arm. That sort of thing is beyond my poor powers of understanding, of course, but I do know that as she is now become, it were suicide for her to attempt to ride into battle. Her left hand no longer seems to have strength; too weak and unsure it is to handle the reins or even to grasp the handle of a target.

“But she cannot or will not recognize this as the reason she is being left here. She insists that it is because Duke Bili distrusts her and Lieutenant Kahndoot hates her, and I know for fact that neither accusation is true. But she, she hates the two of them so fiercely that she will hear nothing good of them from me or anyone else, not even the Lady Rahksahnah.”

Gy remembered he had borne Meeree’s furious sulks and towering, screaming rages for more than a week before he had, in frustration that his efforts had been completely unavailing, humbly beseeched the aid of the Lady Rahksahnah. But if he had thought that her close relationship to Meeree in times now past would help, he had been wrong.

Almost immediately, taking time from her own many and most pressing duties, the hereditary war leader of the Moon Maidens had come to the lakeside tower keep, climbed the nine flights of winding, stone stairs, and called upon Meeree in friendship. But all had been for naught.

Every soul on that level and many on those levels above and below had heard the crippled woman’s shrieking tirade— the verbal filth, abuse, insults and baseless accusations, the blasphemies of the Silver Goddess Herself. In the end, her movements stiff with the tight control of her grief and her anger, Rahksahnah had departed room and level and tower, speaking to no one. Back at Sandee’s Cot—the palatial lodgelike residence of Count Sandee, wherein the lowlander nobles were lodged—she had taken Gy apart and spoken to him gently, quietly, in her still-accented but more fluent Mehrikan.

“Man-Gy, know you that with you I, too, grieve, grieve for the Meeree that once was, not so very long ago. But I fear me that that Meeree who so loved and was loved by me inhabits no longer the fleshly husk that we still call by her name. Face that fact, we must, and also the harder one, that never again will she—the old Meeree—return to us who love her.

“I have mindspoken Ahszkuh the Kleesahk and opened my mind and recent memory to him. It is his opinion that this needless, pointless hate she has harbored has poisoned and infected her poor mind as bad, dirty blood will poison and infect a wound. He has promised me that while we all are gone on this season’s campaign, he will spend as much time as he can by her, try to reach and cleanse of the infection those portions of her mind wherein it festers. But he also warns that he may be no more successful in the healing of her poor mind them was Pah-Elmuh in healing her arm.”