Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

Sergeant Gumpner rode on south heedless of who saw the tears coursing down his lined, stubbled cheeks. Like generations of his forebears, he and the other Broomtowners had loved the gentle, patient, but infinitely knowledgeable man who had made soldiers of them, loved and respected him for the father he was to them. Now Gumpner knew that that ageless man was fighting his last battle in order to give a few of his military children a bare chance at survival.

“One of us will get back to Broomtown, too.” The middle-aged soldier half-sobbed to himself. “I’ll see to it. The major’s last order will be carried out, come hell or high water!”

Farther back, in the twisting, turning, rock-walled defile, Erica found her well-bred, clean-limbed horse overtaking Braun’s big mule. “Dammitall, Harry,” she panted, “can’t you get any more speed out of that animal? You’d better, because Gumpner’s not going to wait for you or anybody else!”

Closer, she noted that his face was pale and twisted in what she took to be a combination of pain and pure terror.

“You… got to help me, Erica,” he finally mouthed. “Got to… girth or something… saddle loosening, with me strapped into it…”

“Oh, all right, Harry. But after this, you’re on your own, remember that.” She glanced back along the track, waved a couple of troopers past her, slung the rifle she had been carrying diagonally across her back, then dismounted.

After a brief examination of the mule’s gear, she looked up and angrily began, “You poor fool, there’s nothing wrong with…” She trailed off when she found herself staring into the gaping black bore of Braun’s pistol.

The face above that pistol was still twisted, but she could belatedly define that expression correctly. It was hate—pure, unadulterated hatred of her, with a gleam of triumph from the cunning, bloodshot eyes.

“You bitch!” he hissed. “You’ve robbed me and hurt me and humiliated me and even tried to kill me, but this is the end of it. I loved you, once, but you deliberately killed that love, giving yourself to anyone, everyone, except me, for centuries. Now I hate you, and I’m going to kill you as you almost killed me, back at the Center.”

She knew precisely when he was about to pull the trigger—his lips thinned, his jaws tightened, and his eyes narrowed—but in the narrow passage, with her horse and his mule blocking her in, there was no way that she could have dodged, so she reached up and grasped his gun hand, forcing it and the gun muzzle upward. The booming explosion almost deafened her so that she hardly heard her own scream as burning flecks of gunpowder struck her scalp and arms.

Braun freed his good leg from the stirrup and savagely kicked her in one breast with the toe of his boot. Only then was he able to shake loose her grip on his wrist and once more level the big pistol.

But when he pulled the trigger this time, no buck and roar was forthcoming, only the click of the falling hammer. Furiously, he gripped the slide knurls and tried to draw it back, but it was immovable. So, in frustrated fury, he slammed the side of the heavy steel weapon with all his might across the back of Erica’s bowed head, and as she crumpled bonelessly onto the rock-strewn track, he urged his big mule southward, shouldering aside her horse, thinking that a vengeance long, long delayed was the sweeter to savor and that he had served the treacherous, promiscuous bitch no less than she deserved.

He was to live to regret depriving his and Gumpner’s party of the only qualified physician and surgeon.

The deadly-accurate fire of the picked sharpshooters lying or squatting on the high ledges served to keep the milling, noisy broil of Ganiks at a good, safe distance for more time than Corbett had originally figured. When those few of the cannibals brave enough or stupid enough to try to ride over the Broomtowners had all been spilled from their primitive saddles to flop onto the rocky ground with their life blood fast-flowing from the fearsome wounds inflicted by the explosive bullets, the others seemed wisely resolved to keep a goodly distance. But Corbett knew full well that it was only a matter of time before some leader arose to head up a full-scale charge against his flimsy defenses and/or flank his position.

To give at least a warning of any such flanking maneuver, Corbett sent two riflemen to climb to the top of the gap on either side and position themselves behind boulders at the verges. A single, booming pistol report from far up the defile brought all the men facing about for a moment, but when it was not followed by any others, all turned back to the work at hand—rolling and manhandling larger boulders up to both block the defile and form a breastwork from behind which the men might more safely fire whenever push came to shove.

A fortuitous find atop one side of the gap was a huge old tree. Recently uprooted, possibly by the earthquakes a few days past, it lay close enough to the verge that a squad was able, with ropes and cracking muscles, to topple it into the gorge below. But Corbett and the men had to leave it where it landed, just forward of the rude breastworks, for there simply were not enough men to manhandle it athwart the gap.

“But,” thought the officer, eying the maze of cracked and shattered branches spreading from wall to wall and extending almost to the entrance of the defile, “any frontal assault is going to have to come in afoot, for no pony is going to allow itself to be ridden through that mess.”

Then one of the sharpshooters called down from his high ledge. “Major Corbett, sir, some more of them just rode in from the north. Looks like fifty or sixty. Three or four are on real horses, and they and some others have helmets and breastplates and swords. Do I try to pick a few off, sir?”

“No, Pomroy,” Corbett ordered, “wait until they’re closer.”

Slinging his rifle, the officer scrambled atop the huge mass of tree roots now resting upon and towering high over the breastwork boulders. Finding finally a precarious footing at the apex, he brought up and adjusted his big binoculars, fixing the field of the optics on the party of newcomers now splashing through the brook.

Aside from the few full-size horses, bits and pieces of steel armor and a scattering of swords, sabers and steel-shod pole arms, these Ganiks looked no whit different from the closer group. Their visible skin was just as grimy, their long hair and beards just as matted and their faces no less brutish; such cloth clothing as they wore was uniformly ragged and filthy; the animal skins and furs and cross-gartered rawhide boots were worn and shiny with grease.

But despite the nondescript appearance, the arrival of these reinforcements sent the mob of Ganiks milling just out of easy rifle range into a veritable frenzy of welcome. While uttering every sound of which human vocal apparatus is capable—along with some that, if asked earlier, Corbett would have said were impossible—they waved their primitive weapons with such wild exuberance as to knock a dozen or more of their fellows off their ponies, and Corbett noted that two or three of these remained where they fell.

“Christ,” the officer thought, “Erica was right, these Ganiks must be lunatics; they’re as dangerous to each other as they are to strangers.”

After perhaps a quarter hour, when the Ganiks had quieted to some extent, one of the armored men on a real horse began to move his mouth and wave his long sword, but the distance and the slurred dialect made it impossible for Corbett to tell what he was saying. Shortly, however, two contingents—each of some thirty or forty Ganiks and each led by another of the armored horsemen—left the main body and set off to east and west.